Masters in Public Administration - MPA / Small enterprises (SMME) have become central to South Africa's efforts to create jobs, alleviate poverty and develop the economy. SMMEs, however, face a wide range of problems, with "market access" one of the key bottlenecks. This centres (i.a.) around the ease of access to outsourcing markets of larger corporations and public-sector procurement opportunities. To address some of these specific challenges in the Western Cape, the Business Opportunity Network (Bon) was established in 1995 as an NOO. It was at that stage a path-breaking institution in the Western Cape, paralleled by only a few in the rest of the country. It is the purpose of this minithesis to assess the role, operation and evolution of the Bon. This study examines the background and particular factors that lead to the establishment of the Bon as a business-linkage organisation. Then critically assess the actual process of how the Bon attempted to facilitate SMME access to corporate and public-sector procurement in the Western Cape's metropolitan and platteland areas from 1994 to 2004. Thereafter moving toward the evaluation of the process, an assessment of the effectiveness of Bon's business-linkage efforts in the light of a continuously changing and evolving procurement environment. It is also the intention to reveal and assess how Bon's procurement support relates to BEE efforts unfolding in the Western Cape

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Medication non-adherence and non-compliance left unaddressed can compound into severe medical problems for patients. Identifying patients that are likely to become non-adherent can help reduce these problems. Despite these benefits, monitoring adherence at scale is cost-prohibitive. Social forums offer an easily accessible, affordable, and timely alternative to the traditional methods based on claims data. This study investigates the potential of medication adherence prediction based on social forum data for diabetes and fibromyalgia therapies by using transfer learning from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). Predictive adherence models are developed by using both survey and social forums data and different random forest (RF) techniques. The first of these implementations uses binned inputs from k-means clustering. The second technique is based on ternary trees instead of the widely used binary decision trees. These techniques are able to handle missing data, a prevalent characteristic of social forums data. The results of this study show that transfer learning between survey models and social forum models is possible. Using MEPS survey data and the techniques listed above to derive RF models, less than 5% difference in accuracy was observed between the MEPS test dataset and the social forum test dataset. Along with these RF techniques, another RF implementation with imputed means for the missing values was developed and shown to predict adherence for social forum patients with an accuracy >70%. This thesis shows that a model trained with verified survey data can be used to complement traditional medical adherence models by predicting adherence from unverified, self-reported data in a dynamic and timely manner. Furthermore, this model provides a method for discovering objective insights from subjective social reports. Additional investigation is needed to improve the prediction accuracy of the proposed model and to assess biases that may be inherent to self-reported adherence measures in social health networks.

Immigration has since long remained a contentious issue of debate. Researchers have illustratedconnections between standpoints opposed to immigration and certain views on welfare, which may beused to legitimize racism. Such perspectives on immigration and welfare have been shown to beprominent in certain contexts on the internet, like the Swedish web forum Flashback. The aim of thisthesis is to analyze discourses on Flashback about immigration, as well as discourses on Flashback regarding immigration‟s consequences for Swedish welfare. The intention is to contribute to an understanding of racist discourse on this platform specifically. The study is based on a discourse analytical approach and deals with a data set of Flashback posts to analyze constructions of immigration in relation to Swedish welfare. The findings suggest that racist discourse on Flashback islargely comprised of discursive constructions mutually reinforcing each other in a chain of feedback loops. This implies a form of circular reasoning in racist discourse on Flashback.

AbstractThe goal of the study was to conduct an in-depth investigation of how conflicts are resolved in schools, from a pupil- and a teacher perspective. Our intention was to view and compare pupils and teachers different opinions in the school environment. A major focus was put on different ways teacher handle conflicts and how they try to prevent them. The material was acquired by interviews with both teachers and pupils.The study is based on Jean Piagets and Lev Vygotskijs visions about the cognitive developmental stage for children. The result of the study shows the teachers need to be attentive and also that the pupils generally do not notice when the teacher works to prevent conflicts. Both pupils and teachers agreed where the conflict took place and what the conflicts generally revolved around. Both parties also agreed that the best solution is to talk about the situations and create a comfortable climate in the classroom.

Social applications on the Web have appeared as communication spaces for sharing knowledge and information. In particular, social applications can be considered valuable information sources because information in the applications is not only easily accessible but also revealing in that the information accrues via interactions between people. In this work, we address methods for finding relevant information in social media applications that use unique properties of these applications. In particular, we focus on three unique structures in social media: hierarchical structure, conversational structure, and social structure. Hierarchical structures are used to organize information according to certain rules. Conversational structures are formed by interactions within communities such as replies. Social structures represent social relationships among community members. These structures are designed to organize information and encourage people to participate in discussions in social applications. Accordingly, contexts extracted from these structures can be used to improve the effectiveness of search in social media relative to representations based solely on text content. To exploit these structures in retrieval frameworks, we need to address three challenges as follows. First, we should discover each structure because it is often obscure. Second, we need to extract relevant contexts from each structure because not all the contexts in a structure are relevant for retrieval. Last, we should represent each context or their combinations in a representation framework so that they can be encoded as retrieval components such as documents. In this work, we introduce an effective representation framework for multiple contexts. We then discuss how to discover or define each structure and how to extract relevant contexts from the structure. Using the representation framework, these relevant contexts are integrated into retrieval algorithms. To demonstrate that these structures can improve search in social media, the retrieval models and frameworks incorporating these structures are evaluated through experiments using data collections gathered from a variety of social media applications. In addition, we address two minor challenges related to social media search. First, it is not always easy to find relevant information from relevant objects if the objects are large. Accordingly, we address identification of relevant substructures in such objects. Second, text reuse structures are important since these structures have the potential to affect various retrieval tasks. In this thesis, we introduce text reuse structures and analyze text reuse patterns in real social applications.

The Forum, once the most central and sacred part of the ancient city of Rome, evolved over the course of centuries into a cluttered space at the threshold of the built-up city and its more rural periphery. Among the rubble of antique monuments--destroyed by earthquakes, flooding, or purposeful spoliation--livestock grazed at the site, giving it the appellation Campo Vaccino, or cow pasture, in the early modern period. Despite these obstacles, the Forum remained a vital part of the spiritual life of Romans after several of its structures were Christianized beginning in the sixth century. It became the province of the Catholic Church, and underwent a significant rehabilitation through papal patronage in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The seven churches ringing the Forum's periphery were restored or rebuilt over the course of about fifty years, allowing the patrons to harness the symbolism of the pagan and Christian past of the site to promote the glorious reviving Church. In this dissertation, I examine the Forum from a variety of vantage points, in order to reconstruct the antiquarian understanding of the site, its monuments, and history in the seventeenth century. The first chapter examines the historiography of the Forum and its churches, while outlining the issues at stake in the refashioning of this urban center. Chapter Two provides an overview of the Forum's history up to the sixteenth century. In Chapter Three, I consider the phenomenon of the Paleochristian Revival of the Counter-Reformation, and the ways in which it manifested itself at the Campo Vaccino. Chapter Four begins a series of case studies, organized by papacy, to elucidate the state of the Forum and its churches. Clement VIII Aldobrandini's direct patronage and other projects dating to his papacy initiated the wave of renovations that continued over the next several decades. The papacies of Paul V Borghese and Gregory XV Ludovisi are the subject of Chapter Five, when the urban environment at the edge of the Forum underwent new developments, in addition to works at the churches themselves. In Chapter Six, I focus on the two projects commissioned by Urban VIII Barberini: SS. Cosma e Damiano and SS. Luca e Martina, which demonstrate two very different approaches to ancient buildings. Finally, Chapter Seven considers works in the Campo Vaccino during the reign of Innocent X Pamphili, and the unification of these disparate renovations by the dramatic remaking of the central space by Alexander VII Chigi. These numerous projects carried out between 1592 and 1656 completely remade the Forum, renewing its historical importance in the city while highlighting its connection to Rome's dual history. The imperial and Early Christian past at the Forum now stood alongside the monuments of early modern Rome. The seventeenth century project added a new layer to the palimpsest of this eminently historical site. / Art History

Cette recherche explore le Théâtre-forum comme support méthodologie d’un espace délibératif pour discuter des tensions sociales liées à la coprésence au centre-ville de Montréal entre des personnes en situation de rue et leurs voisins domiciliés. L’argument au cœur de la problématique repose sur les taches aveugles de la délibération: dans les forums de quartier, les inégalités sociales se traduisent par des inégalités délibératives au désavantage des personnes sans adresse en défaut d’autorité épistémologique en raison de leur statut; ces inégalités délibératives reproduisent le déni de reconnaissance qui traverse l’expérience relationnelle de ces personnes. Le Théâtre-forum est issu du Théâtre de l’opprimé : une pratique d’intervention théâtrale conçue par Augusto Boal durant la dictature au Brésil comme dispositif émancipateur pour les groupes opprimés. Le Joker incite les membres de l’auditoire à devenir Spect-acteurs par les remplacements du protagoniste, et ce, afin de surmonter son oppression. Ainsi, cette projection dans les chaussures du protagoniste-itinérant facilite-t-elle ce passage de l’indignité à la reconnaissance pour les personnes en situation de rue? L’échange théâtral peut-il ouvrir la voie vers la reconstruction d’un lien intersubjectif entre personnes sans adresse et domiciliés, intersubjectivité qui au cœur-même des vertus délibératives et des principes fondateurs défendus par les théoriciens de la reconnaissance comme Honneth et Renault? / Inspired by the democratic virtues of public deliberation but preoccupied with its blind spots, this research explores Forum Theatre as a deliberative medium to initiate discussion about the social tensions which underscore copresence between the homeless and other dwellers of public space in downtown Montreal. Indeed, we argue that in neighborhood forums social inequalities lead to deliberative ones for the homeless who lack epistemological authority due to their status, thereby reproducing the denial of recognition they endure as pariahs of public space. Forum Theatre stems from Theatre of the Oppressed which was initiated by Augusto Boal during the Brazil dictatorial regime as a revolutionary practice for the oppressed. It is premised on active audience engagement whose members are encouraged by the Joker to become Spect-Actors by replacing the protagonist in order to overcome his oppression. As such, can stepping inside the shoes of the homeless protagonist thru character replacement facilitate a passage from indignity to recognition for the latter? In other words, can a theatrical exchange create a space of intersubjectivity between the homeless and their domiciled neighbours? After all, the virtues of deliberation, not to mention the principles defended by recognition theorists like Honneth and Renault, both rest on intersubjectivity.