The Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20) is as relevant to us today, as it was in the time of the early church. We, too, are sent by Jesus Christ to make disciples of every nation, and to teach them to obey everything the Lord has commanded us. ENM has taken this command very seriously, and in the past decades numerous missionaries were dispatched to nations across the globe. Twenty years ago ENM workers reached Africa, and have been working in many communities on the continent – also in South Africa. The time has come to study and evaluate the work that has been accomplished by the ENM missionaries in Africa. There is a second reason for undertaking the above mentioned research. It is a well-established fact that the Korean churches, in the latter half of the 20th century, have played a major role in evangelizing to the world. Korea has been hailed as the second largest mission sending country in the world. But, sadly, in recent times the missionary enthusiasm, in many churches, has waned (Park 2012: 62). Churches and para-church organizations - including ENM - are all battling with the problem in Korea. However, in Africa the need to hear the Gospel of Jesus and to make disciples of Him, for the establishing and equipping of young churches, is as urgent as ever. Korean missionaries have a great obligation to the continent, an obligation that ENM takes seriously. But in order to function at its best, ENM has to evaluate the work that has been accomplished to date. In order to learn from both the opportunities, and mistakes in a number of African settings over the past twenty years, African Christians and their Korean colleagues need to join hands, in order to face the challenges of the future. This will not only benefit the African churches, but the Korean churches as well. Ideally, African and Korean Christians needed to learn from one another. / Dissertation (MA Theol)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Science of Religion and Missiology / Unrestricted

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Metal-based engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) have potential to revolutionize diagnosis, drug delivery and manufactured products, leading to greater human ENM exposure. It is crucial to understand ENM pharmacokinetics and their association with biological barriers such as the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Physicochemical parameters such as size and surface modification of ENMs play an important role in ENM fate, including their brain association. Multifunctional ENMs showed advantages across the highly regulated BBB. There are limited reports on ENM distribution among the blood in the brain vasculature, the BBB, and brain parenchyma. In this study, ceria ENM was used to study the effect of size on its pharmacokinetics. Four sizes of ceria ENMs were studied. Five nm ceria showed a longer half-life in the blood and higher brain association compared with other sizes and 15 and 30 nm ceria had a higher blood cell association than 5 or 55 nm ceria. Because of the long circulation and high brain association of 5 nm ceria compared with other sizes, its distribution between the BBB and brain parenchyma was studied. The in situ brain perfusion technique showed 5 nm ceria (99%) on the luminal surface of the BBB rather than the brain parenchyma. For biomedical applications in the central nervous system (CNS), it is vital to develop stable and biocompatible ENMs and enhance their uptake by taking advantage of their unique properties. Cross-linked nanoassemblies entrapping iron oxide nanoparticles (CNA-IONPs) showed controlled particle size in biological conditions and less toxicity in comparison to Citrate-IONPs. CNA-IONPs considerably enhanced MRI T2 relaxivities and generated heat at mild hyperthermic temperatures (40 ~ 42°C) in the presence of alternating magnetic field (AMF). Numerous researchers showed mild whole body hyperthermia can increase BBB permeability for potential brain therapeutic application. Compared to conventional hyperthermia, AMF-induced hyperthermia increased BBB permeability with a shorter duration of hyperthermia and lower temperature, providing the potential to enhance IONP flux across the BBB with reduced toxicity. Overall, ENMs with optimized physicochemical properties can enhance their flux across the BBB into the brain with desirable pharmacokinetics, which provide great potential for diagnosis and therapy in the CNS.

Submitted by Cláudia Bueno (claudiamoura18@gmail.com) on 2016-05-19T19:46:17Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - André Felipe Alves de Andrade - 2016.pdf: 2007118 bytes, checksum: 69341ce5bc6c459857d1feff5d92366e (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2016-05-20T13:54:17Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - André Felipe Alves de Andrade - 2016.pdf: 2007118 bytes, checksum: 69341ce5bc6c459857d1feff5d92366e (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-05-20T13:54:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - André Felipe Alves de Andrade - 2016.pdf: 2007118 bytes, checksum: 69341ce5bc6c459857d1feff5d92366e (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-02-26 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / Coral reefs are of extreme importance to both nature and society, due to being responsible for several services and harbouring hundreds of species. Despite such critical importance, reef corals current suffered heavy losses since the Anthropocene, with 20% of world´s corals damaged beyond recovery due to human pressure and coastal development. This scenario is even worse, since corals are especially vulnerable to climate change and the entire ecosystem could go extinct by 2050. In this study we focus on comparing the already established impacts from human development and the yet happen losses from climate change on Brazilian corals, a unique fauna that still have gaps in knowledge. We created environmental suitability models for 24 species and quantified individual losses from both climate change and human activities. From the individual results we derived an overall pattern, in which we found out that future losses from climate alteration are equivalent to current losses from human activities. We then used the spatial distribution of those activities and key areas for conservation, determined with software Zonation, to select six areas in the Brazilian exclusive economic zone where proactive and reactive conservation strategies should be implanted, given its importance to biodiversity and concentrated anthropogenic impacts. Overall suitability losses were of approximately 30% for both sources and 60% of the areas will continue to be suitable in the future. Therefore, Brazilian corals will experience heavy losses from climate, especially the loss of highly suitable areas, which are compared to effects from human economic activities. Coral situation is likely to be even worse, if we were to consider bleaching, ocean acidification and diseases, events expected to increase with the rising temperature. / Ecological Niche Modelling (ENM) is widely used for conservation purposes, predicting species invasion, evolutionary aspects and a whole array of applications. However, for most cases, evaluating the efficiency of those models poses as problematic, as commonly used methods (i.e. random methods) do not assure the required independence between data used to create the model and data used to evaluate the model. We developed a new transferabilitybased framework that ensures the much-needed independence between subsets. We created an alternate approach that geographically splits occurrence datasets, while intrinsically controls issues related to previous transferability approaches, such as overfitting, extrapolation and sampling bias. We used 26 Atlantic coral species to perform three different geographical divisions quantifying the effect of different splits on model predictive efficiency. We demonstrate that transferability should be used as an effective method to evaluate ENMs. Geographical split of the area in deciles proved as a reliable evaluation method, assuring independence between datasets and being less prone to common transferability issues. Our odds-and-evens framework provides improvements to the ongoing debate of ENMs evaluating by its transferability. This new method corrects the issue of artificiality causing sampling bias and overfitting, common in previous methodologies, while also is less prone to extrapolation issues, a common problem in transferability approaches. Moreover, the framework appears as a feasible and useful alternative to the problematic and commonly used random partition of datasets evaluation.