The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the knowledge of student nurses regarding the cost concepts in health economics, specifically the efficient allocation of resources and determining the cost of interventions, in order to prepare them to deliver cost-effective yet quality nursing care. An explorative and descriptive quantitative design was used. A structured self-administered questionnaire was used for data collection. Respondents were student nurses studying towards becoming professional nurses in their final year of study (comprehensive programme). The results revealed an apparent lack of knowledge among student nurses regarding cost concepts in health economics, although respondents agreed that knowledge of health economics is essential for nursing practice. The results led the researcher to draw a strong conclusion that there is a need for the inclusion of a module regarding health economics in the nursing curriculum and in continuous professional development (CPD) workshops and in-service training. / Health Studies / M.A. (Health Studies)

This study investigated the attitudes and perceptions of nurse managers regarding cost containment issues in selected public hospitals in the Port Elizabeth metropole of the Eastern Cape. Four hospitals participated in the study, and 211 nurse managers completed questionnaires. The results obtained from the participants’ responses indicated that: ✦ Nurse managers are ill-prepared for many responsibilities regarding cost containment, and need appropriate orientation and preparation both during their initial formal, and during their nurse management and in service training in order to fulfil their “financial” or cost containment role more effectively. ✦ Nurse managers perceived the relationship between the productivity of staff and cost containment positively, but were reportedly unable to • prevent nurses from leaving their points of duty • curb the rate of absenteeism among nurses • reduce the number of resignations ✦ Nurse managers suggested that more effective hospital cost containment efforts should ensure that • effective security checks are performed to curb losses of stock and equipment • more public telephones are installed in hospitals • stricter controls regarding wheelchairs are implemented The rationalisation of staff and services, as well as specialised equipment among the four public hospitals could enhance these hospitals’ cost containment results. However, this would necessitate reorganising these hospitals’ services at provincial level. The nurse managers required more knowledge about hospitals’ financial management and cost containment issues. Guidelines for such a course were developed addressing: analysis of monthly variance reports; budgeting for manpower; balance statement; calculations for the supplies and expenses budget; income statements; the hospital’s budgetary cycle; break-even analysis; analysis of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis. / ADVANCED NURSING SCIENCES / D.Litt. et Phil.

Consulting to the RIDE from a systems psychodynamic stance is different from other group relations training events. Consultants found it difficult to take up their roles as consultants and containers. They were not prepared for the impact of the island on the event and especially on themselves as consultants. The consultants had to work harder to contain their own feelings and anxieties in order to take up their roles. The symbolically laden setting of the RIDE predetermined that the diversities of race and gender were worked with while other diversities were largely ignored. During the RIDE, the consultants felt more anxious, fearful and inhibited. The consultants had to provide containment for the event as a whole, for the group and their fellow consultants as well as for themselves. The consultants found that they had never experienced a more enriching experience than they did with the RIDE. / Industrial and Organisational Psychology / M.Com. (Industrial and Organisational Psychology)

During times of organisational change and restructuring, employees, are often placed in acting positions. Consciously, organisations frame their reasons for this practice as preparing the system for a new strategy, organisational structure, work distribution and leadership challenges. This implies that the conscious reasons for using acting as a human resources practice may not be sound, leading to a question about the possibility of unconscious collusions operating in the system. From an unconscious perspective, it can be hypothesised that this practice represents how organisations respond to its unprocessed unconscious anxieties inherent to change, transformation and adapting to new ways of thinking, operating and functioning. This research was done using systems psychodynamics as theoretical paradigm and theory, offering a depth-psychology organisational theory, OD consultancy and qualitative research stance which differentiate between conscious and unconscious. The unconscious contains anxiety against which the system defends, specifically, by using dependence, fight/flight, pairing, me-ness and we-ness. Role identity consists of the normative, existential and phenomenal roles. If the three role parts are similar, anxiety is contained and bearable. When there are splits between the three role parts, persecutory and paranoid anxiety exists. The acting professionals’ normative role was relatively clear. In their existential role they introjected confusion, uncertainty, splits about their competence, doubt in their own authority, shame, and conflict in their view of the other. In their phenomenal role they received projections from the organisation about incompetence and denigration. The findings indicated how acting professionals experienced different kinds and intensities of anxiety. They got confused about their primary task, and the differences between their normative, existential and phenomenal roles caused high levels of performance anxiety. They struggled to manage their personal and work boundaries and the system de-authorised them by withholding information and feedback about their contribution to the organisation and their acting tenure. Acting professionals experienced being seduced by the power of the organisation, their careers being placed on hold, and being bullied by the systemic illness and toxicity in the organisational. It was concluded that the organisational system unconsciously uses acting positions as a psychodynamic container of organisational change anxiety. / Industrial and Organisational Psychology / Ph.D. (Consulting Psychology)

[pt] Este estudo tem por finalidade mostrar que os Estados Unidos adotaram uma nova estratégia para orientar sua política externa no mundo pós-Guerra Fria. A Doutrina da Contenção guiou as relações internacionais dos Estados Unidos durante o período de confronto entre as duas superpotências. Com o fim do mundo bipolar, os Estados Unidos consolidaram-se como a única superpotência mundial. Na ordem do pós-Guerra Fria, o novo referencial da política externa dos Estados Unidos seria a estratégia da Primazia. Preservar o mundo unipolar tem sido o principal objetivo da diplomacia norte-americana desde a queda do muro de Berlim. / [en] This study intends to show that the United States adpoted a new strategy to guide its foreign policy in the post Cold War world. The Doctrine of Containment has oriented the American foreign affairs throughout the period of confrontation between the two superpowers. As a result of the end of the bipolar world, the United States has emerged as the world´s only superpower. In the post Cold War order, the new beacon of the United States foreign policy would be the strategy of Primacy. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the maintenance of the unipolar world has been the main objective of the American foreign policy.

L’étude des conséquences de la réaction sodium-eau (RSE) est un enjeu dans le cadre de la sûreté des futurs réacteurs à neutrons rapides à caloporteur sodium. Afin d'évaluer les conséquences de RSE dans des situations d'accident majeur, il est nécessaire de mieux comprendre la phénoménologie et notamment la quantité d'énergie libérée et la cinétique de libération. L'objectif est donc d’améliorer la compréhension de telles RSE pour prédire au mieux ses conséquences sur les équipements mécaniques alentours. Trois axes de travail ont été privilégiés, à savoir la recherche du déroulement des séquences accidentelles, un examen expérimental paramétrique, et une analyse de la phénoménologie avant le contact explosif. Dans un premier temps, une méthode arborescente d'analyse de risques a été croisée avec des méthodes de calcul d'effets. Cette analyse a permis d’imaginer comment le contact peut s'effectuer. Des études expérimentales démonstratives de l'influence du mode de mise en contact ont ensuite été effectuées afin d’approfondir certains aspects pratiques. L’analyse des nombreuses données recueillies conduit au développement d’un modèle d'interprétation phénoménologique, intégré dans une plateforme de simulation multi-physique. Bien que de nombreuses hypothèses simplificatrices soient réalisées, la prise en compte des transferts de chaleur transitoires permet de reproduire les observations expérimentales et notamment l'influence des conditions de mélange (masse de sodium et températures initiales) sur la phénoménologie. Ce travail d'étude de la phase de pré-mélange de l'explosion sodium-eau est pertinent au regard des méthodes de prédiction des chargements sur les structures. / Study of sodium-water reaction (SWR) consequences in open air represents a challenge in the frame of safety assessments of sodium fast reactors (SFR). In case of major accident and to predict consequences of SWR, it is necessary to better appreciate phenomena and especially quantity and rate of the energy releasement. The objective is thus to strengthen the understanding of such reactions in order to predict with lore accuracy its consequences on mechanical equipment in the surroundings. This work focuses on three areas : research of accidental sequences, experimental investigation, and phenomenological analysis before the explosive contact. At first, a tree structure risk analysis with calculations of dangerous phenomena permitted to suggest how the contact between reactants may happen. Then, demonstrative experimental studies were performed to deepen some practical aspects of the phenomenology, like the influence of the way the reactants get in contact. Data analysis conducted to the development of a phenomenological model, implemented into a software platform for numerical simulations. Although numerous hypothesis, transient heat transfer consideration enables to reproduce experimental observations, especially the influence of mixing conditions (sodium mass and initial temperatures) on the phenomenology. This study of the premixing step of sodium-water explosion is relevant in the frame of current prediction methods of mechanical loadings on structures.

This thesis mobilizes the concept of “colonial entanglement” to emphasize the deep complexity and unpredictability of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships within what is now known as the Banff-Bow Valley. Responding to various literatures—including Indigenous Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, Political Theory, and Canadian Politics—I posit that the concept of colonial entanglements offers a parallax view of contexts, such as the Banff-Bow Valley, and events like the Buffalo Reintroduction Project. Not only does such a concept reveal how Indigenous nations— both human and non-human—are targeted by the racializing and gendered entanglements of colonizing regimes that seek to break up and replace them, but it also shows how these nations continue to persist and resist despite colonizing efforts to achieve otherwise. In other words, colonial entanglements compel one to also consider how nations like the Ĩyãħé Nakoda also exert influence on other Indigenous and non-Indigenous life in the Banff-Bow Valley—albeit, in different ways and to different degrees. After unpacking the concept in the first chapter, I use colonial entanglement to show how colonizing regimes and their expansionist modes of relationship react to the Indigenous nations they become entangled with. Using the signing of Treaty 7 and the establishment of a national park in Banff, I reveal how the Canadian state seeks to erect colonizing regimes of property that cater to capital as they transit the Banff-Bow Valley by ‘breaking up’ and ‘breaking from’ Indigenous nations and their expansive modes of relationship. Next, I consider how such reactionary violence is continually justified and legitimated through the articulation and reiteration of state of nature fictions that rely on notions of wilderness and tropes of Indigeneity to delegitimize the enduring presence of Indigenous nations. Specifically, I look at the Indian Act, the prohibition of hunting in the Park, and the Banff Indian Days festival to show how state of nature fictions articulate a supposed transition from a “past state of nature” to a contemporary “state of (dis)possession” entangled with white supremacist and heteropatriarchal forms of power. In doing so, these fictions make and reproduce colonial subjects who buy into and support colonizing violence and breakage that disproportionately targets those Indigenous to place. In the final chapter, I turn to focus on the Buffalo Reintroduction Project. Here, I consider how the project presents contemporary opportunities for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to support and/or disrupt colonizing states of (dis)possession and the state of nature fictions they rely on, while also considering the project’s potential for a politics oriented towards expansive modes of relationship revolving around principles of decolonization and anti-colonial internationalism. / Graduate

Abandoned industrial-waste deposits (incl. fly ash or tailings ponds) represent very specific and mostly extreme habitat conditions. They offer unique opportunity to study primary succession in cultural landscape. Substrate of the material deposited here shows extreme properties, such as low pH, overheating of the open surface, salinization etc. The aim of this work is to map the colonization of different successional stages of vegetation by ants after years of abandonment of ore-waste deposits in Chvaletice (Eastern Bohemia, CR) and to compare the present state with analogous study made in 2001. Particular aims of both studies (Jarešová 2001, and present study, 2011-12) is to test the influence of ants on vegetation succession. During the years 2011-2012 several prospections were made to record species diversity of ants. On the surface plateau of the sedimentation basin two types of habitats were chosen - the areas with present ant nests and the other areas without them. Each of both types of habitats exhibits different plant species richness: separately the species-area curves were constructed and explained. Three dominant ant species of different size categories present on sedimentation basin were selected for experimental offering of plant seeds, Formica pratensis, Lasius niger, Tetramorium...

Among the states, the history of which was affected by the Cold War can undoubtedly be ranked both Greece and Turkey. Their geostrategic singularity, accentuated by the outcomes of the World War II, caused that the "struggle" between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence in those countries had considerably contributed to a shift in the course of U.S. foreign policy towards the Soviet Union and to adopting an entirely new strategic concept which was to be called as the "strategy of containment". A number of quality books have already been dealing with the general characteristics of this strategy; however, historians have not turned enough attention - which is rather surprising - to its implementation in particular countries and territories. Therefore, an analysis of particular impacts of the strategy of containment on Greece and Turkey, as well as an evaluation of how successfully this approach of the United States towards both the countries worked, have become primary aims of my dissertation. The U.S. strategy of containment, which can be regarded as an example of the so called "grand strategy", had become a key factor of the U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. The process of its coming into existence was complicated and cannot be marked off by one document or an event; its...

The problem of content management of multimedia data types (e.g., image, video, graphics) is becoming increasingly important with the development of advanced multimedia applications. Traditional database management systems are inadequate for the handling of such data types. They require new techniques for query formulation, retrieval, evaluation, and navigation. In this paper we develop a knowledge-based framework for modeling and retrieving image data by content. To represent the various aspects of an image object's characteristics, we propose a model which consists of three layers: (1) Feature and Content Layer, intended to contain image visual features such as contours, shapes,etc.; (2) Object Layer, which provides the (conceptual) content dimension of images; and (3) Schema Layer, which contains the structured abstractions of images, i.e., a general schema about the classes of objects represented in the object layer. We propose two abstract languages on the basis of description logics: one for describing knowledge of the object and schema layers, and the other, more expressive, for making queries. Queries can refer to the form dimension (i.e., information of the Feature and Content Layer) or to the content dimension (i.e., information of the Object Layer). These languages employ a variable free notation, and they are well suited for the design, verification and complexity analysis of algorithms. As the amount of information contained in the previous layers may be huge and operations performed at the Feature and Content Layer are time-consuming, resorting to the use of materialized views to process and optimize queries may be extremely useful. For that, we propose a formal framework for testing containment of a query in a view expressed in our query language. The algorithm we propose is sound and complete and relatively efficient. / This is an extended version of the article in: Eleventh International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems, Warsaw, Poland, 1999.