Thesis (Ph.D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-245).

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2005. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains xii, 184 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 165-176).

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Elizabeth Jakubowski, Florida State University, College of Education, Dept. of Middle and Secondary Education. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 06, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Ed. (Computer-Integrated Education)) -- University of Pretoria, 2005. / Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2006. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 49 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 46).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-02T11:16:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2014-04-16Bitstream added on 2014-12-02T11:21:00Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000797254.pdf: 1834457 bytes, checksum: 0a01abf785650ae6e3f2f051a90051bb (MD5) / Este estudo analisa a relevância da Internet para a inclusão digital dos cidadãos, na sociedade da informação, sobretudo a viabilidade como canal de retorno do Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital (SBTVD). Apresenta, também, uma revisão bibliográfica, no que se refere às tecnologias que, hoje, permitem a comunicação entre os usuários e os serviços interativos disponíveis pelas emissoras de TV Digital aberta, ou seja, o canal de retorno. o trabalho analisa a eficácia do Plano Nacional de Banda Larga brasileira, frente aos planos e estratégias nacionais de banda larga. Adotados por países como Argentina e Estados Unidos. Estas experiências relativas ao desenvolvimento da oferta e na garantia da universalização do acesso a essa tecnologia, serviram de base para a análise e ao final de forma sistematizada destaca-se suas características, objetivos e contribuições para a implementação no Brasil / This study analyzes the digital inclusion fo citizens in the information society, mainly its viability as a return channel of the Brazilian Digital TV System (SBTVD). It also presents a literature review, concerning the technologies which, today, enable communication between users and the interactive services available through the open Digital TV stations, in the other words, the return channel. The article also analyzes the effectiveness of the National Brazilian Broadband Plan heading the national broadband plans and strategies adopted by other countries like Argentina and the United States. Some international experience from different countries in the development of supply and in the guarantee of universal access to this technology, provided the basis for the analysis, and in the end, in a systematized way, it highlights its characteristics, objectives and its contributions to implementing it in Brazil

Orientador: Eduardo Martins Morgado / Banca: Vânia Cristina Pires Nogueira Valente / Banca: Sérgio Amadeu da Silveira / Resumo: Este estudo analisa a relevância da Internet para a inclusão digital dos cidadãos, na sociedade da informação, sobretudo a viabilidade como canal de retorno do Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital (SBTVD). Apresenta, também, uma revisão bibliográfica, no que se refere às tecnologias que, hoje, permitem a comunicação entre os usuários e os serviços interativos disponíveis pelas emissoras de TV Digital aberta, ou seja, o canal de retorno. o trabalho analisa a eficácia do Plano Nacional de Banda Larga brasileira, frente aos planos e estratégias nacionais de banda larga. Adotados por países como Argentina e Estados Unidos. Estas experiências relativas ao desenvolvimento da oferta e na garantia da universalização do acesso a essa tecnologia, serviram de base para a análise e ao final de forma sistematizada destaca-se suas características, objetivos e contribuições para a implementação no Brasil / Abstract: This study analyzes the digital inclusion fo citizens in the information society, mainly its viability as a return channel of the Brazilian Digital TV System (SBTVD). It also presents a literature review, concerning the technologies which, today, enable communication between users and the interactive services available through the open Digital TV stations, in the other words, the return channel. The article also analyzes the effectiveness of the National Brazilian Broadband Plan heading the national broadband plans and strategies adopted by other countries like Argentina and the United States. Some international experience from different countries in the development of supply and in the guarantee of universal access to this technology, provided the basis for the analysis, and in the end, in a systematized way, it highlights its characteristics, objectives and its contributions to implementing it in Brazil / Mestre

Magister Bibliothecologiae - MBibl / This research project looked at the role of public libraries in bridging the digital divide which is both a symptom and a cause of social exclusion. Public libraries offer free information services to ordinary citizens by means a wide range of media, including the Internet. But they offer more than just access as their information literacy programmes educate people in the use of the various media. Across the world there are many initiatives employed by public libraries to help bridge the digital divide. The purpose of the case study of one library district was to investigate if and how libraries in Cape Town were taking on this responsibility. The project had two parts: a survey of one district of the city’s libraries and a closer case study of one selected library in the district. The overall findings from both phases of the study were that Public libraries do help to narrow the Digital Divide by providing free internet access to the public. One of the initiatives the Public libraries that were surveyed including Masiphumelele library employed to help narrow the Digital Divide is SmartCape. Not only did Masiphumelele have SmartCape, but it also offered free computer literacy classes to its users.

Three key enhancements were made to a semiempirical molecular orbital program to develop a fast, accurate method of calculating chemical properties of large (> 1000 atom) molecular systems, through the use of quantum theory. In this thesis the key enhancements are presented which are: the implementation of a divide-and-conquer approach to a self-consistent field procedure, in an effort to improve capability; the use of the novel technology, GPU technology, to parallelize the divide-and-conquer self-consistent field procedure, in an effort to improve the speed; the implementation of a newly developed semiempirical model, the Polarized Molecular Orbital Model, in an effort to improve the accuracy. The development of a divide-and-conquer approach to the SCF (DC-SCF) procedure (enhancement 1) was carried out using saturated hydrocarbon chains whereby the saturated hydrocarbon chain is partitioned into small overlapping subsystems and the Roothaan equations solved for each subsystem. An investigation was carried out to find the optimal partitioning scheme for saturated hydrocarbon chains in order to minimize the loss of energy experienced from neglecting some of the interactions in the system whilst maintaining near linear scaling with system size. The DC-SCF procedure was shown to be accurate to 10-3 kcal mol-1 per atom whilst calculating the SCF-energy nearly 6 times faster than using the standard SCF procedure, for a 698-atom system. The development of a parallel DC-SCF procedure and Cartesian forces calculation for use on a GPU (enhancement 2), resulted in a hybrid CPU/GPU DC-SCF implementation that calculated the energy of a 1997-atom saturated hydrocarbon chain 21 times faster than the standard serial SCF implementation and a accelerated Cartesian forces calculation that performed 7 times faster for a saturated hydrocarbon chain of 1205-atoms, when accelerated using an NVidia Tesla C2050 GPU. The hybrid CPU/GPU algorithm made use of commercially accelerated linear algebra libraries, CULA and CUBLAS. A comparison was made between CULA’s accelerated eigensolver routine and the accelerated DC-eigensolver (developed in this research) and it was found that for saturated hydrocarbon chains of > 350 atoms, the accelerated DC-eigensolver performed around twice as fast as the accelerated CULA eigensolver. The implementation of the Polarized Molecular Orbital model (enhancement 3) was validated against published isomerization energies and benchmarked against the non-nitrogen containing complexes in the S66 database. The benchmark complexes were categorized according to dominant intermolecular interactions namely, hydrogen bonding, dispersion interactions and mixed interactions. After assessment it was found that the PMO model predicts interaction energies of complexes with a mixture of dispersive and electrostatic interactions to the highest accuracy (0.69 kcal mol-1 with respect to CCSD(T)/CBS). The dispersion correction within the PMO model was found to ‘overcorrect’ the dispersive contribution for most complexes tested. The outcome of this research is a semiempirical molecular orbital program that calculates the energy of a closed-shell saturated hydrocarbon chain of ~2000 atoms in under 4 minutes instead of 1.5 hours when using a PM3-Hamiltonian and can calculate interaction energies of systems exhibiting a mixture of electrostatic and dispersive interactions to an accuracy of within 1 kcal mol-1 (relative to high-level quantum methods). To demonstrate a suitable application for the enhanced SE-MO program, interaction energies of a series of PAHs with water, phenol and methanol have been investigated. The resultant program is suitable for use in calculating the energy and forces of large material and (in future) biological systems by a fast and accurate method that would be impractical or impossible to do without these enhancements.