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A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannesburg, October 2015. / Animals in captivity are often raised in suboptimal environments, which lead to abnormal behaviours, such as stereotypic behaviour. Environmental enrichment can reduce or eliminate these behaviours to some extent. However, enrichments are not always successful in their intended purpose, which may be attributed to differences among individuals (i.e. personality). The overarching aim of my study was to investigate how environmental enrichment affected the expression of stereotypic behaviour in my study model, the African striped mouse, Rhabdomys dilectus, and to ascertain whether personality modulated the responses to enrichment. I conducted four experiments to test these aims. Firstly, I tested whether personality was associated with the development and expression of stereotypic behaviours. Results indicated that stereotypic striped mice were bold and showed a proactive coping style, while non-stereotypic striped mice were less bold and showed a reactive coping style. Furthermore, having a proactive coping style did not predict the onset of stereotypic behaviours. Nevertheless, individual differences in personality were observed even within stereotypic and non-stereotypic striped mice so that each group was not homogeneous for personality. Secondly, I tested whether personality was associated with the responses of stereotypic striped mice to enrichment. While stereotypic behaviours were reduced in enriched cages, individuals were not consistent in their behaviour, indicating flexible behavioural responses to the different cage complexities. Interestingly, these responses occurred irrespective of personality differences. There were no treatment-related differences in the behavioural responses of non-stereotypic striped mice. Thirdly, I examined whether the age at which striped mice were introduced to the environmental enrichment influenced their behavioural responses. Age did not affect the behavioural responses of stereotypic or non-stereotypic mice to the cages of different complexity. Surprisingly, while stereotypic behaviours were reduced in the enriched treatments, not all stereotypic mice responded to enrichment in the same manner, implying flexible behavioural responses. Moreover, these behavioural responses also occurred regardless of the individual’s personality type. There were no age-related differences in the behavioural responses of non-stereotypic striped mice. Finally, I investigated the purpose of wheel running, either as an enrichment or as a re-directed stereotypic behaviour, in stereotypic striped mice, because there is much debate about its use as an enrichment. Due to individual differences in responses to the running wheel, wheel running appeared to be both an enrichment and a re-directed behaviour. In conclusion, my study provides the first empirical data for the theory that stereotypic animals have different personalities to non-stereotypic animals. Nonetheless, this dichotomy between stereotypic and non-stereotypic striped mice at the group level masked individual responses within groups, with individuals flexibly altering their behaviour, depending on the environment to which they were exposed, which in turn affected the efficacy of environmental enrichment. My study suggests that the welfare and well-being of animals requires an assessment of individual trajectories in the development of stereotypic behaviours.

Platanthera is one of the largest genera of temperate orchids and exemplifies a lineage that has adaptively radiated into diverse habitats within North America, Asia, Europe, North Africa, Borneo, and Sarawak. Major centers of diversity in this genus are western North America and eastern Asia. The diversity in floral morphological traits such as floral color, shape and the length of nectar spur is associated with numerous pollination syndromes, making Platanthera an ideal system to study the evolution of floral traits and pollination biology. Despite its diversity, a thorough phylogenetic hypothesis for the genus is lacking because no studies have yet sampled taxa exhaustively or developed a robust molecular toolkit. Nevertheless, in past phylogenetic studies some intrageneric groups of species appear to be monophyletic. One of these groups is subgenus Limnorchis, but the majority of taxa in this group have not been included in a phylogenetic analysis. In this study, I developed a new toolkit for Platanthera consisting of genomic information from 617 low-copy nuclear loci. Using a targeted enrichment approach, I collected high-throughput sequence data from these loci in 23 accessions, including nine of the 12 diploids of subgenus Limnorchis and nine outgroup Platanthera species. A maximum likelihood search was performed on a 570,818 nucleotide supermatrix to generate a phylogeny. This analysis resolved a strongly supported monophyletic clade for subgenus Limnorchis. This phylogeny was then used to test hypotheses of biogeographic diversification and floral trait evolution of subgenus Limnorchis. Ancestral biogeographic reconstruction indicated that subgenus Limnorchis originated in western North America ca. 3 – 4.5 Mya from an ancestor that was widespread in western North America and eastern Asia and subsequently diversified in western North America, followed by dispersal of some species to eastern North America. Floral macro and micro-morphological traits were characterized across the subgenus. Ancestral character reconstruction suggests convergent evolution of spur length, spur shape and viscidium shape, possibly in response to selection by similar pollinators. Understanding the biogeographic history and morphological diversification of subgenus Limnorchis within a phylogenetic context will contribute to an updated taxonomy for the subgenus.

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Welfare for captive animals in laboratory, farm, companion and zoo settings is difficult to assess and subject to interpretation. The perceived needs of animals change over time and according to budget, fashion and policy. The assessment of the value of environmental enrichment for captive animals is hampered by the lack of consistent, quantitative, objective and methodical research. Enrichment devices and other welfare improvement strategies lack long-term assessment or implementation. The concept of cognitive enrichment, or enabling captive animals to use their cognitive abilities to solve problems and meet challenges in their environment, is in the initial stages of development. Preliminary findings indicate that cognitive enrichment seems to be an effective method of improving captive animal welfare. In the research described in this thesis, several welfare measurement techniques including changes in activity budget, stereotypic behaviour and cognitive bias were compared and used to measure the effects of cognitive enrichment upon captive pigeons and dogs in order to obtain a useable cognitive enrichment paradigm that can be extrapolated to many types of captive animals. Key findings were that cognitive enrichment improved captive group-housed pigeon welfare and individually-kennelled dog welfare, indicated by significant changes in activity budget, increases in ‘optimism’, and reduction of stereotypic behaviour in subjects. Subjects used both low-tech and high-tech cognitive enrichments as intended and showed no sign of habituation. It is hoped that these findings will be used to improve captive animal welfare, and that the cognitive enrichment and cognitive bias paradigms developed will add to this field of research.

Václav Pilík. Unjustified Enrichment in the Czech Law. PhD thesis 1 Abstract This PhD thesis explores the legal institution of unjustified enrichment in the Czech private law. The subject is dealt in larger historical, theoretical and partly comparative relationships in order not to be reduced only to internal problems of the national regulation. A general view of unjustified enrichment (part one of this work), providing a systematic introduction to the problem, is hinder by different approaches, their overlapping and largely opened discourse on conceptual questions. Despite all that difficulties, found out by comparative legal studies of unjustified enrichment in the civil law and common law systems, it is necessary to undergo an attempt at expression of common features of the unjustified enrichment as a legal concept. Supposing that, we can describe three common features of unjustified enrichment: it is enrichment obtained at the expense of another and in a lawless way; the modern legal institute of unjustified enrichment rests on fragmentary historical basis, substantially completed by national factors of legal development (legislation, justice and doctrine); the enrichment is viewed as objective fact (at least in certain states of facts). Legal development of unjustified enrichment runs differently in...

Nous abordons dans cette thèse une étude sur la tâche de la désambiguïsation lexicale qui est une tâche centrale pour le traitement automatique des langues, et qui peut améliorer plusieurs applications telles que la traduction automatique ou l'extraction d'informations. Les recherches en désambiguïsation lexicale concernent principalement l'anglais, car la majorité des autres langues manque d'une référence lexicale standard pour l'annotation des corpus, et manque aussi de corpus annotés en sens pour l'évaluation, et plus important pour la construction des systèmes de désambiguïsation lexicale. En anglais, la base de données lexicale wordnet est une norme de-facto de longue date utilisée dans la plupart des corpus annotés et dans la plupart des campagnes d'évaluation.Notre contribution porte sur plusieurs axes: dans un premier temps, nous présentons une méthode pour la création automatique de corpus annotés en sens pour n'importe quelle langue, en tirant parti de la grande quantité de corpus anglais annotés en sens wordnet, et en utilisant un système de traduction automatique. Cette méthode est appliquée sur la langue arabe et est évaluée sur le seul corpus arabe, qui à notre connaissance, soit annoté manuellement en sens wordnet: l'OntoNotes 5.0 arabe que nous avons enrichi semi-automatiquement. Son évaluation est réalisée grâce à la mise en œuvre de deux systèmes supervisés (SVM, LSTM) qui sont entraînés sur les corpus produits avec notre méthode.Grâce ce travail, nous proposons ainsi une base de référence solide pour l'évaluation des futurs systèmes de désambiguïsation lexicale de l’arabe, en plus des corpus arabes annotés en sens que nous fournissons en tant que ressource librement disponible.Dans un second temps, nous proposons une évaluation in vivo de notre système de désambiguïsation de l’arabe en mesurant sa contribution à la performance de la tâche de traduction automatique. / This thesis concerns a study of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), which is a central task in natural language processing and that can improve applications such as machine translation or information extraction. Researches in word sense disambiguation predominantly concern the English language, because the majority of other languages lacks a standard lexical reference for the annotation of corpora, and also lacks sense annotated corpora for the evaluation, and more importantly for the construction of word sense disambiguation systems. In English, the lexical database wordnet is a long-standing de-facto standard used in most sense annotated corpora and in most WSD evaluation campaigns.Our contribution to this thesis focuses on several areas:first of all, we present a method for the automatic creation of sense annotated corpora for any language, by taking advantage of the large amount of wordnet sense annotated English corpora, and by using a machine translation system. This method is applied on Arabic and is evaluated, to our knowledge, on the only Arabic manually sense annotated corpus with wordnet: the Arabic OntoNotes 5.0, which we have semi-automatically enriched.Its evaluation is performed thanks to an implementation of two supervised word sense disambiguation systems that are trained on the corpora produced using our method. We hence propose a solid baseline for the evaluation of future Arabic word sense disambiguation systems, in addition to sense annotated Arabic corpora that we provide as a freely available resource.Secondly, we propose an in vivo evaluation of our Arabic word sense disambiguation system by measuring its contribution to the performance of the machine translation task.

As global demand for nuclear energy and threats to nuclear security increase, the need for verification of the peaceful application of nuclear materials and technology also rises. In accordance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the International Atomic Energy Agency is tasked with verification of the declared enrichment activities of member states. Due to the increased cost of inspection and verification of a globally growing nuclear energy industry, remote process monitoring has been proposed as part of a next-generation, information-driven safeguards program. To further enhance this safeguards approach, it is proposed that process monitoring data may be used to not only verify the past but to anticipate the future via prognostic analysis. While prognostic methods exist for health monitoring of physical processes, the literature is absent of methods to predict the outcome of decision-based events, such as the production of undeclared enriched uranium. This dissertation introduces a method to predict the time at which a significant quantity of unaccounted material is expected to be diverted during an enrichment process. This method utilizes a particle filter to model the data and provide a Type III (degradation-based) prognostic estimate of time to diversion of a significant quantity. Measurement noise for the particle filter is estimated using historical data and may be updated with Bayesian estimates from the analyzed data. Dynamic noise estimates are updated based on observed changes in process data. The reliability of the prognostic model for a given range of data is validated via information complexity scores and goodness of fit statistics. The developed prognostic method is tested using data produced from the Oak Ridge Mock Feed and Withdrawal Facility, a 1:100 scale test platform for developing gas centrifuge remote monitoring techniques. Four case studies are considered: no diversion, slow diversion, fast diversion, and intermittent diversion. All intervals of diversion and non-diversion were correctly identified and significant quantity diversion time was accurately estimated. A diversion of 0.8 kg over 85 minutes was detected after 10 minutes and predicted to be 84 minutes and 10 seconds after 46 minutes and 40 seconds with an uncertainty of 2 minutes and 52 seconds.