In the Canadian prairies, native grasslands have been largely replaced by an agricultural landscape with a mosaic of habitats now better described as aspen parkland. Although habitat requirements of true prairie Buteo species, Swainson's (Buteo swainsoni) and ferruginous hawks (B. regalis), are relatively well identified, little is known about habitat use by red-tailed hawks (B. jamaicensis ) in this ecoregion. This study, evaluating productivity and habitat selection of red-tailed hawks breeding in aspen parkland, was conducted on Prairie Habitat Joint Venture (PHJV) assessment sites in central Saskatchewan in 1997 and 1998. Red-tailed hawk nesting densities and productivity were determined at three sites. Home ranges were mapped. Macrohabitat use and availability data were generated from digitized aerial photographs of PHJV assessment sites using a Geographic Information system. Microhabitat variables were measured in 0.04 ha plots centered on nests and random locations. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

This study is an investigation into the implementation of the staff selection policy in three schools in Umlazi district, south of Durban. The concerns expressed by educators and / Thesis (M.Ed.) - University of KwaZulu Natal, 2006.

There has been a significant number of disputes being declared after every selection process each year since 1998 when School Governing Bodies were given the responsibility of selecting management staff at schools (Thurlow 2003). Also, anecdotal evidence is that there is suspicion amongst educators that unfairness and favoritism in the selection of management staff is rife. Hence, the researcher sought to develop better understanding of how the selection policy is perceived to be problematic in its implementation. With this in mind the researcher examined the perception of stakeholders, namely educators and School Governing Bodies, on the selection of management staff at public schools in a suburb in the Pinetown District. The research involved all eight schools in the Suburb which comprised two secondary schools and six primary schools. All the teachers and management staff and chairpersons of the Selection Committees of the School Governing Bodies in these schools were targeted for the study. The research instruments used for this study were questionnaires that were administered on educators and interviews conducted with the chairpersons of the Selection Committees of the Schools' Governing Bodies. The findings revealed that both the educators and School Governing Bodies were disillusioned with the current selection process. While the chairpersons of the Selection Committees expressed their dissatisfaction at the training proffered by the Department of Education, the educators indicated frustration at not being promoted and perceived the selection to be unfair and based on favoritism and nepotism. Educators also felt very ABSTRACT There has been a significant number of disputes being declared after every selection process each year since 1998 when School Governing Bodies were given the responsibility of selecting management staff at schools (Thurlow 2003). Also, anecdotal evidence is that there is suspicion amongst educators that unfairness and favoritism in the selection of management staff is rife. Hence, the researcher sought to develop better understanding of how the selection policy is perceived to be problematic in its implementation. With this in mind the researcher examined the perception of stakeholders, namely educators and School Governing Bodies, on the selection of management staff at public schools in a suburb in the Pinetown District. The research involved all eight schools in the Suburb which comprised two secondary schools and six primary schools. All the teachers and management staff and chairpersons of the Selection Committees of the School Governing Bodies in these schools were targeted for the study. The research instruments used for this study were questiormaires that were administered on educators and interviews conducted with the chairpersons of the Selection Committees of the Schools' Governing Bodies. The findings revealed that both the educators and School Governing Bodies were disillusioned with the current selection process. While the chairpersons of the Selection Committees expressed their dissatisfaction at the training proffered by the Department of Education, the educators indicated frustration at not being promoted and perceived the selection to be unfair and based on favoritism and nepotism. Educators also felt very strongly that the Selection Committees were not following procedures as legislated. The findings also revealed that both sets of stakeholders felt that the Department of Education _ should take sole responsibility for selecting management staff for schools if the perceived shortcomings are to be overcome. Recommendations emanating from the above include shifting the responsibility for the selection ofmanagement staff from that of School Governing Bodies to the Department ofEducation, co-opting department officials into the Selection Committees for their knowledge and expertise, enhancing training and capacity building programs for Selection Committees and the provisioning of counseling for unsuccessful applicants. 11 strongly that the Selection Committees were not following procedures as legislated. The findings also revealed that both sets of stakeholders felt that the Department of Education .. should take sole responsibility for selecting management staff for schools if the perceived shortcomings are to be overcome. Recommendations emanating from the above include shifting the responsibility for the selection of management staff from that of School Governing Bodies to the Department of Education, co-opting department officials into the Selection Committees for their knowledge and expertise, enhancing training and capacity building programs for Selection Committees and the provisioning of counseling for unsuccessful applicants. / Thesis (M.Ed.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

The study examined the challenges faced by the selection committees during the selection process and recommendation of the appointment of educators particularly to promotional posts in rural schools. Through my working experience in the rural schools for the past eighteen years, I have realised that rural communities are characterized by a cocktail of social ills, such as, poverty, poor hygiene, dreadful diseases and illiteracy. From the verbal discussions with my colleagues and members of the community, it has become evident that rural schools are faced with many challenges. I have also realized that some members of the School Governing Bodies (SGBs) encounter numerous problems in performing their tasks. A School Governing Body (SGB) was constituted in terms of the South African Schools Act (SASA) No.84 of 1996. According to SASA; the SGB has many functions to perform. One of these functions is to form a selection committee to interview candidates and make recommendations to the Department of Education for the appointment of the selected educators. However, existing literature and studies revealed that the selection and appointment process in some schools is fraught with many problems. Some of the problems emanate from the nature and the way the selection committee is composed. For instance, in certain rural schools there is a low level of education amongst some parents and some members do not have conception of what is required from educators in order to qualify for employment or promotion. Subsequently, their ability to interview and select educators is questionable. The findings of the study suggested that there are also underlying factors which affected the selection process. These factors ranged from favouritism, subjectivity and biasness, impact of the Post Provisional Norm/Model (PPN/M), selection and scoring criteria, lack of expertise to manipulation by members during the selection process. Recommendations were made on the basis of these findings, however, the results of this study may not be generalized to all the rural schools in South Africa because of a few number of participants who were involved. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2007.

The occurrence of three reproductive tactics in a population of American redstarts was estimated: extra-pair fertilization, egg-dumping, and male polyterritoriality. Using DNA fingerprinting we show that none of 108 nestlings samples were the result of egg dumping. In contrast, 40% of nestlings were the result of extra-pair fertilizations. Males sired a greater proportion of their broods as they aged. In addition, promiscuous females were never fertilized by males that were younger than their social mates. Whether the poor reproductive performance of younger males was caused by female preference for older males or by intra-sexual competition was not determined. In any case, females would have benefited by mating with older males, if the traits that allowed the survival of the father were inherited by the females' offspring. Only three of 80 males attracted two females through polyterritoriality. One male fledged two broods: he sired both nestlings from his first brood, but none of the four nestlings from his second brood. We concluded that male redstarts can improve their reproductive success by trying to obtain extra-pair copulations, but less so by establishing a second territory.

Conventional synthetic voices can synthesise neutral read aloud speech well. But, to make synthetic speech more suitable for a wider range of applications, the voices need to express more than just the word identity. We need to develop voices that can partake in a conversation and express, e.g. agreement, disagreement, hesitation, in a natural and believable manner. In speech synthesis there are currently two dominating frameworks: unit selection and HMM-based speech synthesis. Both frameworks utilise recordings of human speech to build synthetic voices. Despite the fact that the content of the recordings determines the segmental and prosodic phenomena that can be synthesised, surprisingly little research has been made on utilising the corpus to extend the limited behaviour of conventional synthetic voices. In this thesis we will show how natural sounding conversational characteristics can be added to both unit selection and HMM-based synthetic voices, by adding speech from a spontaneous conversation to the voices. We recorded a spontaneous conversation, and by manually transcribing and selecting utterances we obtained approximately two thousand utterances from it. These conversational utterances were rich in conversational speech phenomena, but they lacked the general coverage that allows unit selection and HMM-based synthesis techniques to synthesise high quality speech. Therefore we investigated a number of blending approaches in the synthetic voices, where the conversational utterances were augmented with conventional read aloud speech. The synthetic voices that contained conversational speech were contrasted with conventional voices without conversational speech. The perceptual evaluations showed that the conversational voices were generally perceived by listeners as having a more conversational style than the conventional voices. This conversational style was largely due to the conversational voices’ ability to synthesise utterances that contained conversational speech phenomena in a more natural manner than the conventional voices. Additionally, we conducted an experiment that showed that natural sounding conversational characteristics in synthetic speech can convey pragmatic information, in our case an impression of certainty or uncertainty, about a topic to a listener. The conclusion drawn is that the limited behaviour of conventional synthetic voices can be enriched by utilising conversational speech in both unit selection and HMM-based speech synthesis.

Nanoclusters have special importance in nanotechnology because of their low dimensionality, which provides electronic, chemical, and magnetic properties that differ from those of the equivalent bulk materials. Suitably controllable self-assembly methods are required in order to incorporate nanoclusters into useful devices. The self-assembly method used in this study employs V-grooves as a template element for nanocluster device fabrication. The V-grooves are fabricated by optical lithography on SiO2/Si wafers and KOH wet etching. Bi clusters deposited on a V-groove form a self-assembled conducting wire. The clusters are produced using an inert gas aggregation source inside an ultra high vacuum compatible system. In order to characterise the assembly process, Bi clusters with different average sizes and velocities are deposited on V-grooves with different widths. The cluster bouncing was found to be the main process in forming the cluster wires. The bouncing angles were smaller than the incident angle, and they are dependent on the cluster size and velocity. For a certain bouncing angle, the wire width reflects the V-groove width because of the fixed bouncing angle. Nanocluster devices were fabricated by depositing the clusters on V-grooves with pre-formed Au/NiCr electrical contacts. The amount of the deposited material required to form an electrically conducting wire was found to be a function of the V-groove width and the wire length. The two point I(V) measurements in the voltage range between -1 and +1V showed linear characteristics for low resistance wires (kΩ), and non-linear characteristics for the high resistance ones (MΩ). The silicon substrate was used as a back gate. Applying a voltage to the gate was found to modify the electrical conduction of the cluster wire. The temperature dependence of the resistance of the nanocluster wires was studied in the temperature range of 4.2-473K, and all of the measured wires showed a negative temperature coefficient of resistance. These measurements allowed a detailed study of the conduction mechanisms through the cluster wires. The study showed that Bi clusters can be used for device fabrication. To size select the clusters prior to using them for the device fabrication, a high transmission mass filter is required. This transmission can be obtained using the von Issendorff and Palmer mass filter if it is operated using the optimum operation conditions. The mass filter consists of two pairs of parallel plates with horizontal openings in Plates 1 and 2, and it operates on the time of flight principle. During this project, the operation conditions of this mass filter were studied using both experiment and simulation. The study showed that the beam deflection angle is a critical factor in optimising the mass filter transmission efficiency. This angle is dependent on the accelerating voltage, ion mass, and the horizontal velocity of the ions. The optimum operation conditions for the mass filter were found and used to study the mass distribution of Pd ions produced by a magnetron sputtering source with variable cluster aggregation length.

Sexual dimorphism in life history traits may influence the distribution of the sexes,population sex ratios, the maintenance of sex in populations, and the evolutionarypotential of a species. In bryophytes, sexual dimorphism in traits related to growth andreproduction may be responsible for female-biased population sex ratios and a lack ofsexual reproduction. I examined the roles of natural selection in maintaining sexualdimorphism in the context of impacts on bryophyte population sex ratios, usingMarchantia inflexa as a model system. My studies included an assessment of amongpopulationvariation in habitat use by the sexes, comparison of phenotypes betweensingle-sex and both-sex populations, a field study of natural selection, and a comparisonof the influence of selection on asexual and sexual fitness components.The sexes of M. inflexa were sexually dimorphic in investment in growth, asexualand sexual reproduction. The sexes were spatially separated in populations, but thesexes overlapped in habitat use. Populations differed in growth, asexual reproductionrates, degrees of sexual dimorphism, and strength of among-trait correlations. Plantsfrom single-sex and both-sex populations differed in investment in growth and asexualreproduction, but the two population types showed the same degree of sexualdimorphism. Thus, local environment may be more influential than the presence of theopposite sex in maintaining sexual dimorphism.Selection on sexually dimorphic traits was both sex-specific and environmentallydependent. Between-sex correlations were not significant in the greenhouse but weresignificant in the field thus, evolution and expression of sexual dimorphism in nature maybe constrained by among-trait and between-sex correlations. Additionally, femalesincurred a cost of plasticity that males did not. Because there was a negative trade-offbetween sexual and asexual fitness, overall lifetime selection may result in a differentpicture of how the sexes experience selection. The combination of sex-specific andenvironment-dependent selection, and sex-specific costs to plasticity may not onlymaintain sexually dimorphic traits but also ensure the persistence of both sexes in apopulation.

To ensure that the conservation regulations which govern fishing gears are effective, they must be based on an understanding of the process by which fish are selected. The region where most fish selection is considered to take place is the cod-end, the aftmost part of a trawl net and the region where the catch accumulates. In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that fish selection in the cod-end is dependent on a range of physical, environmental and fish behavioural parameters. Essential to a study of any of these parameters is a knowledge of the cod-end geometry which is determined by the interaction of the water flow, the catch size and the design and physical characteristics of the netting. In this thesis a continuum model of the deformation of a class of axisymmetric networks is developed where the mesh elements are reflection symmetric, the mesh bars are extensible and where arbitrary membrane forces act in the plane of the net, normal to the edges of the mesh elements. When applied to the fishing industry this provides a continuum model of the geometry of an axisymmetric trawl cod-end made from netting of a generalized mesh shape. It is shown how mesh shapes that are of interest to the fishing industry can be investigated, and the geometry of cod-ends made from diamond shaped mesh under the influence of various types of pressure loads is examined in detail. A qualitative description of the hydrodynamic forces that act on the cod-end catch is presented and it is shown that the predictions based on this description are consistent with experimental results from a series of wind tunnel trials. Using this description of the hydrodynamic forces the effect on cod-end geometry of mesh resistance to opening which arises as a result of twine flexural rigidity is examined.