Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Economics, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2008. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-78).

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 56-63).

No description available.

Thesis (M.S.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis(Ph.D. (Communication Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / Digital technologies are increasingly revolutionising music consumption patterns globally. Consequently, there is an emerging culture in which online tools have become primary platforms for music consumption. In this postmodern era, digital technologies make music easily accessed, consumed and shared, thereby providing a seemingly global recognition to artistes beyond their immediate geographical market. As a result, artistes sometimes distribute their music for free with the intention to reach potential consumers. Equally, these technologies also allow consumers to illegally access and share music freely without financial compensation to the artistes. At the same time artistes also sell their music through different online stores to generate revenue. Alongside these developments, there are challenges with access to the Internet in South Africa with older adults and those in rural areas being disadvantaged, and the cost of Internet curtailing what youths can afford to do online. This then prompts critical questions: How do older adults and youth listen to music? Where and how do they access music? How does the new digitalised music affect their music consumption? What are the implications of all these to the social capital and social lifestyles of youth and older South African adults? Also, how has the digitalisation of music impacted on the political economy of the music industry in South Africa? In what ways do the illegal and legal downloads of music benefit or disadvantage local artistes? From a critical theorisation of an emerging ‘download culture’ and a discussion of the postmodern technological turn, this study examined a case study of South African youth and older adults’ music consumption pattern. Through a survey of 202 university students in a rural South African university and 100 older adults from semi rural areas of Limpopo Province in South Africa, the study examined the ways youth and older adults access and consume music. It explored music sharing habits and opinions about piracy in a culture where music has become instantaneously shareable. Apart from findings from this study, new knowledge and a contribution to communication scholarship is presented here with a proposal of new theory of ‘download culture’. Fundamental to this study is the implications of download culture for the creative industry, predominantly, its impact on the South African music industry. The data show that this cohort of South African youth are not different from youths globally, where music is accessed through mobile cell phones. This study also reflects that many older adults do not access digitalised music due to socio economic conditions and challenges of technology access. Nevertheless, the social cultural impact of this has repercussions on the cultural well-being of this vital group in society. Although internet access challenges persist, a critical concern is the blurring distinctions about the legal and illegal download of music. / National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS), in collaboration with the South African Humanities Deans Association (SAHUDA)

The seamless retrieval of information distributed across networks has been one of the key goals of many systems. Early solutions involved the use of single static agents which would retrieve the unfiltered data and then process it. However, this was deemed costly and inefficient in terms of the bandwidth since complete files need to be downloaded when only a single value is often all that is required. As a result, mobile agents were developed to filter the data in situ before returning it to the user. However, mobile agents have their own associated problems, namely security and control. The Agent Trees Multi-Agent System (AT-MAS) has been developed to provide the remote processing and filtering capabilities but without the need for mobile code. It is implemented as a Peer to Peer (P2P) network of static intelligent cooperating agents, each of which control one or more data sources. This dissertation describes the two key technologies have directly influenced the design of ATMAS, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). P2P systems are conceptually simple, but limited in power, whereas MAS are significantly more complex but correspondingly more powerful. The resulting system exhibits the power of traditional MAS systems while retaining the simplicity of P2P systems. The dissertation describes the system in detail and analyses its performance.

published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

The work is concerned with preparing exercises for the teaching of bulk data processing in the environment of a spreadsheet program. The exercises can be used in the lessons of ICT in the upper stage of the elementary school and in secondary schools. Presently a lot of exercises exist. These exercises are based on obsolete or uninteresting data or directly on artificial data. On the contrary there are few exercises which are based on up to date data or on data which the students entered. In the work there is an emphasis on the importance of creating exercises which are based on up to date data which is freely accessible on the Internet. For example geographical, economic or meteorological data. A software application which can download this data and transfer it into a suited format for further use in a spreadsheet program is a part of the work. We can note the benefit of using exercises, where data has been entered by the students of the class. A part of the work is a software solution which makes a survey possible for the teacher. The students answer the questions in the survey via a form. These answers are worked up into a table for further use in the lessons. An important part of the work is a set of methodical sheets. These sheets contain topics for exercises, which are specialized in bulk data processing. They show acceptable elaboration of downloaded or measured data and possible interpretation of the results. The main objective of the work is to show how and where to get up to date and attractive data for the teaching of bulk data processing and how to use it. The software and the methodical sheets should contribute to this.