Academic writing is generally regarded as the most important communication medium through which people in the tertiary academic context choose to communicate their ideas. It is also well known that it is sometimes an arduous process for students to become accustomed to the requirements (the conventions and conditions) that hold for the production of appropriate written texts in this context. The initial impetus for the current study was provided by what appeared to be a significant problem that some supervisors at the University of Pretoria identified in terms of the academic writing ability of their postgraduate students. This study therefore investigates postgraduate academic writing with regard to a number of such issues, and does so within the broader confines of academic literacy. The ultimate purpose of this investigation is to discover how writing interventions may be designed that offer appropriate assistance to students who experience difficulty with their writing. The study commences with an attempt to find support for treating 'academic discourse' as a potentially productive area of academic enquiry. It therefore presents an account on the nature of a 'discourse community', and attempts to ascertain whether there are any grounds on which 'academic discourse' may be regarded as a unique type of discourse used for specific communicative functions in the tertiary academic environment. It further discusses critically some of the traditional features of academic texts. The research then proposes thirteen design principles that serve as injunctions that should be considered in the development of writing courses, and proceeds to a critical discussion of the most important approaches in the teaching and learning of writing. What is evident from this discussion is that none of the historical approaches will, on their own, enable one to design justifiable writing courses. As a result, an eclectic approach is required in order to integrate the strengths of these approaches into a strategy for writing course design that is theoretically and practically justifiable. Subsequently, the critical interpretation of the literature in the first part of the study is used in the design of a framework for writing course design in tertiary education. This framework consists of six focuses that stand in a relationship of dynamic interaction towards a description of the context in which tertiary students write. Thus, relevant aspects concerning the writer, text, reader, institutional context and one's approach to writing are all essential elements that should be carefully considered in terms of their potential influence on the eventual design of materials that will constitute a writing course. The rest of the study consists of an application of the proposed framework that addresses firstly, the perceptions of supervisors at the University about the academic literacy ability of their postgraduate students, as well as their requirements for academic writing. It then proceeds to an investigation of a specific group of students' (from the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences) perceptions about their own academic literacy ability and a determination of their perceptions and expectations of academic writing at university. Because the information that was collected (by means of questionnaires) in both cases mentioned above is mainly perceptual in nature, it was considered essential to determine the academic literacy ability of students in the study group by means of a reliable testing instrument. A written text that these same students produced was further analysed in order to establish possible writing difficulties they experienced. In addition, it was important to confirm certain findings from the supervisor questionnaire, and more specific information had to be collected on particular writing issues that could inform discipline specific writing course design (this was accomplished through focus group interviews with supervisors of the School of Agricultural and Food Sciences). A combination of all the prominent findings of the empirical work mentioned above, as well as insights gained in the literature survey, is then used to make justifiable suggestions for the design of writing course materials for students in the study group. Finally, a number of issues were identified that could not be addressed by this study and, therefore, suggestions are made for future research that may investigate these matters. / Thesis (DPhil ( Linguistics))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Unit for Academic Literacy / DPhil / Unrestricted

The aim of this thesis is to develop a wireless monitoring belt based on literature review. The belt will be capable of scanning heart rate, respiratory rate, body temperature, motion, position, and falling of the user. Another aim is to also design a software for data reception and analysis focusing on pulse, respiratory rate, and temperature alarms.

The topic of this thesis is the design and realization of a modular Data concentrator for various types of measurements in diverse conditions. The device conception, basic principles, design and functionality are described herein. Also, the lightweight protocol design for radio communication, standardized XML format for data storage and cloud usage are described. The electrical design of the device as well as the design of the printed circuit board was made using the Eagle Autodesk electronic design automation software (Eagle Autodesk EDA). The control software written in C/C++ for a target microcontroller (ESP32-WROOM-32) is based on a FreeRTOS platform and ESP-IDF framework. An IDE for managing this software is Visual Studio Code with PlatformIO extension. Selected and used Cloud Platform is ThingSpeak from Mathworks, which uses certain components from Matlab platform.

Cieľom tejto práce je navrhnúť, zhotoviť a implementovať vlastný systém pre zachytávanie pohybu založený na inerciálnych meracích jednotkách. V rámci budovania teoretického základu bolo preskúmaných viacero metód, avšak primárne bola pozornosť venovaná samotnému inerciálnemu snímanu - jeho kladom a nedostatkom, kľúčovým vlastnostiam a jednotlivým komponentom potrebným pre zostrojenie systému na jeho báze. Tento úvodný zber informácií je nasledovaný fázami návrhu, zhotovenia a zhodnotenia, ktoré sa zaoberajú procesom vývoja a testovania daného riešenia. Hlavným prínosom realizácie systému je zostrojenie zariadení pre snímanie pohybu - jedná sa o malé, ľahké, batériovo napájané zariadenia, ktoré sú kompletne bezdrôtové, či už z hľadiska komunikácie s okolitým svetom, alebo vďaka napájaniu kompatibilnému so štandardom Qi.

Optimized implementations of blocking and nonblocking collective operations are most important for scalable high-performance applications. Offloading such collective operations into the communication layer can improve performance and asynchronous progression of the operations. However, it is most important that such offloading schemes remain flexible in order to support user-defined (sparse neighbor) collective communications. In this work, we describe an operating system kernel-based architecture for implementing an interpreter for the flexible Group Operation Assembly Language (GOAL) framework to offload collective communications. We describe an optimized scheme to store the schedules that define the collective operations and show an extension to profile the performance of the kernel layer. Our microbenchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach and we show performance improvements over traditional progression in user-space. We also discuss complications with the design and offloading strategies in general.:1 Introduction 1.1 Related Work 2 The GOAL API 2.1 API Conventions 2.2 Basic GOAL Functionality 2.2.1 Initialization 2.2.2 Graph Creation 2.2.3 Adding Operations 2.2.4 Adding Dependencies 2.2.5 Scratchpad Buffer 2.2.6 Schedule Compilation 2.2.7 Schedule Execution 2.3 GOAL-Extensions 3 ESP Transport Layer 3.1 Receive Handling 3.2 Transfer Management 3.2.1 Known Problems 4 The Architecture of ESPGOAL 4.1 Control Flow 4.1.1 Loading the Kernel Module 4.1.2 Adding a Communicator 4.1.3 Starting a Schedule 4.1.4 Schedule Progression 4.1.5 Progression by ESP 4.1.6 Unloading the Kernel Module 4.2 Data Structures 4.2.1 Starting a Schedule 4.2.2 Transfer Management 4.2.3 Stack Overflow Avoidance 4.3 Interpreting a GOAL Schedule 5 Implementing Collectives in GOAL 5.1 Recursive Doubling 5.2 Bruck's Algorithm 5.3 Binomial Trees 5.4 MPI_Barrier 5.5 MPI_Gather 6 Benchmarks 6.1 Testbed 6.2 Interrupt coalescing parameters 6.3 Benchmarking Point to Point Latency 6.4 Benchmarking Local Operations 6.5 Benchmarking Collective Communication Latency 6.6 Benchmarking Collective Communication Host Overhead 6.7 Comparing Different Ways to use Ethernet NICs 7 Conclusions and Future Work 8 Acknowledgments

<p>   </p> <p>Motivated by the lack of research that has explored the rhetorical structure of research articles in the humanities, this dissertation analyzes professional philosophical discourse using move-analysis as an approach. A corpus of 60 research articles was compiled from some of the leading philosophy journals. The articles were selected from three sub-disciplinary areas: (a) metaphysics and epistemology, (b) the history of philosophy, and (c) ethics. To analyze the articles, a move analysis codebook was developed, which identified the rhetorical functions (i.e., moves and steps) that different text segments played. The codebook was then applied to the entire research article structure of the 60 research articles. Linguistic features of certain functional units were also identified via corpus analysis techniques. The results of the study show that rhetorical structure of philosophical writing is distinctive compared to other fields and disciplines. On one hand, at the macro level, philosophical writing uses a problem-solution structure rather than the IMRD (intro-methods-results-discussion) structure, common in the social and natural sciences. At the move and step level, philosophical writing heavily relies on evaluation to critically analyze solutions to philosophical problems. Finally, the dissertation found systemic rhetorical functions that permeated the entire research article. Most notably, philosophers heavily qualify and outline their arguments throughout the text. </p> <p>  </p>

Giardia intestinalis is a unicellular protozoan parasite responsible for 280 million gastrointestinal infections every year. When colonizing its host, Giardia interacts closely with the small intestine epithelium by attaching to enterocytes and releasing multiple proteins to the extracellular environment. Some of the released proteins have been shown to aid the parasite’s survival in the intestine by disrupting various host defense mechanisms. Here, we attempt to characterize the specific localization of five proteins after their secretion by Giardia. In parallel we aim to produce and identify parasite’s molecules potentially working as triggers of the immune response built during infection. To study the localization of specific secreted proteins during in vitro interactions with differentiated Caco-2 cells, we started by creating transgenic parasites expressing the ADI, EF1α and G3PD proteins with a downstream detectable tag. To identify candidate proteins from Giardia, thought by our lab to be involved in immune system activation, we established a mammalian expression system for the production of recombinant versions of the selected candidate giardial PAMPs. We achieved the expression of the VSP1267 protein, natively present on the parasite’s surface. However, we found that this protein was not secreted after expression, thus complicating its purification and later use in TLR-activation experiments. In the future, we aim to localize the tagged proteins, expressed by the produced transgenic trophozoites, and optimize the mammalian expression system in order to identify candidate immune triggers during giardiasis.

Over the past years, there has been a consistent call from Government and industry for South African tertiary institutions to deliver more graduates in the fields of science and technology. This, however, is no mean feat for universities, as the pool of prospective candidates delivers very few students with the necessary academic literacy abilities, and very few students who passed mathematics and science at the right levels to succeed in science higher education. This puts tertiary institutions under mounting pressure to accept students who are under-prepared and to support these students appropriately. The plight of Open and Distance Learning (ODL) institutions like the University of South Africa (UNISA) is even more desperate, as they are often left with those students who are either unable to gain entrance into, or to afford the study fees of, residential universities. These students are often in greater need for face-to-face interaction than are their counterparts at residential universities, yet they generally receive very little of this. The intervention examined and critiqued in this study is an attempt at raising the academic literacy levels of first-year students at UNISA in the fields of science and technology by means of a 60-hour face-to-face workshop programme. As its foundation, it uses the principles of collaborative learning and authentic material design. It also treats academic literacy abilities as interdependent and holistic. This study starts with a broad overview of the context. This is followed by a review of the literature. This review focuses on concepts such as collaborative learning, academic literacy, English for academic purposes, English for specific purposes and English for science and technology. Thereafter, a needs analysis is done in which students’ Test for Academic Literacy Levels (TALL) pre-test results, as well as a sample of their assignments, are examined. In addition, the workshops in this intervention programme are analysed individually. To determine the effectiveness of the academic literacy intervention, students’ pre- and post-TALL results are scrutinised, and a feedback questionnaire filled in at the end of the year is analysed. Subsequently, recommendations are made as to how the workshop programme could be improved. Findings show that the academic literacy intervention did improve students’ academic literacy levels significantly, though the improvement is not enough to elevate students from being considered at-risk. However, with fine-tuning the existing programme, the possibility exists that students’ academic literacy levels might be further improved. This calls for a careful examination of the areas in which students’ performance did not improve significantly. Student feedback indicated a positive attitude towards the entire intervention programme, as well as a marked preference for collaborative learning and face-to-face interaction. In the redevelopment of the current workshop programme, such preferences would have to receive attention, so as to integrate students’ wants, together with what they lack and what they need, in subsequent interventions. In conclusion, the limitations of this study are discussed, and recommendations are made for future research, as the current study must be seen as only the beginning of a process of action research that could lead to a sustainable intervention programme in future. Copyright / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Unit for Academic Literacy / Afrikaans / unrestricted

This project details the designing and implementation of an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Curriculum to prepare English learners to become Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA) at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center (UVRMC) in Provo, Utah. UVRMC, which is owned by Intermountain Health Care (IHC), employs a group of about 40 non-native speakers of English. They work as housekeepers and have interest in learning English and consequently acquiring new skills they could use in better jobs to improve the quality of their lives. UVRMC would like these employees to obtain additional education in order to provide them with better employment opportunities. UVRMC allowed two graduate students at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Brigham University to design and implement an ESP course to help UVRMC housekeepers improve their language skills in preparation to apply and participate in a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) course offered through IHC University. This report covers the linguistic needs analysis of the participants, situational analysis of UVRMC in terms of the support given to the curriculum, the designing of goals and objectives, the syllabus, the teaching of the syllabus, some material development, and the assessment of language learning. It also describes the instruments used to obtain information during each step of the designing of the curriculum and its implementation, analyzes that information, presents results, assesses the curriculum's efficacy, and explains the implications for other ESP curricula in the field of nursing and other scientific fields.

“Entity continuity” refers to recurrent transcendent experiences related to certain places (“hauntings”). The experiences are often interpreted to be due to discarnate spirits or folklore entities. Although the entity continuity experience can be regarded as religious experience, they have yet to be fully explored in science of religion. The purpose of this paper was to describe entity continuity experiences and map out the scientific discussion in order to provide a psychology of religion that provides an understanding of the phenomena. For this purpose a literature study of theories of jungian psychology, parapsychology, and described experiences was undertaken. The material was thereafter analyzed comparatively. The results show that entity continuity experiences can be understood as a form of animism and that the experiences are colored by culture, context, and visual impression. The material also shows that experiences at locations that have played host to entity continuity and poltergeist experiences are equivalent. An altered state of consciousness, a special type of personality, and distinctive environmental stimuli, the atmosphere or “feeling”, is necessary for the occurrence of these experiences. The “percipients” and/or “agents” psychic material is reflected in the atmosphere and becomes expressed as psychic manifestations in the form of entity experiences.