In South Africa, the high rate of violent deaths, the lack of proper identification documents, and internal migration within the country stemming from the previous socio-political dispensation of society, has led to a high incidence of unidentified human bodies being found, a large proportion of which are skeletal remains, mainly of indigent Black persons. The low incidence of dental records, especially in disadvantaged, rural populations adds to the failure of identification. Without positive identification of individuals, an inquest or criminal case cannot succeed. In routine post mortem practice, only broad groupings of identity are recorded before disposal of remains. The basic rights of these deceased individuals to be properly identified with regards to police investigations and other legal, religious and cultural requirements are disregarded. Further, a large number of persons are reported missing on a daily basis in the country, some never to be found. This study suggests that national legislation be developed to allow for the administration of affairs in respect of missing persons and unidentified bodies, with regulations under this to provide for the mandatory preservation and storage of all medical and radiological records, a national policy and a national plan of action be established to deal with the burden of missing persons and found bodies, and the establishment of a central database of records of unidentified bodies and missing persons. The study also reviews the strengths and weaknesses of available human identification techniques that can be used to facilitate the identification of bodies, and by use of a case report, proposes to demonstrate to the South African Courts that frontal sinus radiographic identification comprises a useful, rapid and inexpensive method as an application in forensic science that can be compared to the individuality of fingerprints, and serves as a reliable additional method in establishing human identity. / Thesis (LL.M.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2007.

No description available.

Members of Braconidae (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonoidea) are mostly parasitoids of other holometabolous insects. It is a large family with a little over 18,000 described species and many more to be described. Subfamily classification in this group has been unstable and resolution of phylogenetic history at the subfamily level has been problematic. Since 1993, no new keys to the subfamilies of Braconidae have been produced. Many taxonomic and phylogenetic changes have taken place since then, including a recent phylogeny proposing 47 subfamilies and representing the most robust and resolved analysis to date. A pressing need for new keys to the world subfamilies of Braconidae is evident. Using the free programs, DELTA and INTKEY, easy to use keys to the subfamilies of Braconidae, both dichotomous and interactive were produced that will be published and freely available on the Internet. These are constructed for use by professionals and amateurs alike.

No description available.

The purpose of this research was to develop a more convenient method to distinguish bacteria using Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy. The specular reflectance infrared spectra of bacterial colonies were obtained in-situ, without removing them from the agar growth media. The spectra of a variety of bacterial species were obtained by the infrared microscope and then were analyzed by factor analysis. Using this statistical method in conjunction with in-situ sampling we evaluated how well Grampositive species were sorted from Gram-negative species. Also, how the type of agar used and how the age of bacterial colonies affects the results of Gram stain predictions were evaluated; our experiments showed that the influence of those various conditions can be decreased. The suitability of various sets of standard spectra for predicting Gram stain, including sets constructed with and without Kramers-Kronig transformation and those constructed using partial regions verses the complete mid-infrared region, was evaluated.The effect that water on the surface of the colonies has been studied in distinguishing bacteria. Furthermore, the original method was improved and the method's suitability to differentiate a larger number of different bacterial species was examined. / Department of Chemistry

Eyewitnesses to crimes sometimes perform cognitively demanding tasks while simultaneously observing a perpetrator. This division of attentional resources can cause them to remember the perpetrator less accurately. Pickel et al. (in press) showed that judging a target individual’s veracity impairs subsequent memory for his or her appearance and message. They argued that this result occurred because judging veracity is an attention-demanding task that is difficult to perform while simultaneously encoding the target’s information. The previous study also demonstrated that suspicion exaggerated the memory impairment effect, apparently by inducing suspicious witnesses to scrutinize the target more closely than non-suspicious witnesses. The goal of the present study was to replicate the findings that judging veracity impairs witnesses’ memory for the target’s appearance and message using a different video (i.e., a different target, crime scenario, and message) and that induced suspicion exaggerates this effect. In addition, I hypothesized that judging veracity also impairs witnesses’ performance on a lineup task and inflates confidence and ratings on other testimony-relevant judgments by giving witnesses the false sense that they have attended closely to the suspect’s physical appearance and message. I hypothesize that suspicion will exaggerate this effect. Results were found to be consistent with Pickel et al.’s (in press) previous findings. Witnesses who judged veracity performed more poorly on the lineup task than those who were not informed they would need to judge veracity, and witnesses who were made suspicious performed worse than those who judged veracity. Differences were discovered across the groups in relation to certainty ratings and other testimony-relevant judgments about the eyewitness experience. / Department of Psychological Science

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace positions abjection in opposition to empathy. Both psychological phenomena derive from a relationship between two people, but abjection depends on a pushing away and empathy depends on a pulling toward. The experience of either phenomenon results in a blurring of interpersonal boundaries, but there is no intimacy in abjection. Instead, as made evident in the central family of Wallace’s novel, the result of abjection is that an individual retreats into the self, rejecting any attempt at intimacy that might be interpreted as an effort to breach autonomy. This alienation is best countered by empathy, as modeled in Infinite Jest in the practice of “Identification” in Alcoholics Anonymous. To identify with a person is to empathize with him or her: to share perspective and emotion. Empathy, unlike abjection, lasts only for a moment, allowing for the reinstatement of the boundaries of self.

Santrauka Visų ląstelės baltymų analizė – tai metodas teikiantis fenotipinės informacijos. Jis plačiai naudojamas grupuoti bakterijų kamienus, nustatyti jų pirminį identitetą. Rezultatų patikimumas daugeliu atvejų prilygsta DNR-DNR hibridizacijai – pagrindiniam genotipinės informacijos metodui. Tuo pačiu visų ląstelės baltymų analizės metodas yra greitai atliekamas ir pigus. Dėl šių priežasčių metodas plačiai naudojamas medicininės diagnostikos, o taip pat su maisto pramone susijusiose laboratorijose. Šiuolaikiniame pasaulyje pramonėje labai svarbūs yra termostabilūs fermentai, o Geobacillus genties bakterijų kamienai būdami termofilai, yra tokių fermentų producentai. Dėl šios priežasties Geobacillus gentis yra aktualus tyrimų objektas. Labai svarbu tiksliai identifikuoti kamienus produkuojančius tiriamus fermentus. Vienu iš pirminio identifikavimo būdų galėtų būti visų ląstelės baltymų analizės metodas. Šiame darbe buvo parodyta, kad Geobacillus genties kamienų tarpusavio panašumas gali būti nustatytas visų ląstelės baltymų analizės metodu. Tarp G. stearothermophilus rūšies kamienų visų ląstelės baltymų elektroforetinių profilių panašumas buvo apie 80% ir atitiko DNR-DNR hibridizacijos rezultatus. Taip pat sutapo ir 22 kamieno panašumas su tipiniu G. vulcani kamienu: WCPP parodė 84% panašumą, DNR-DNR hibridizacija – 93,9%. Pagal visų ląstelės baltymų analizės metodą gauti rezultatai paneigė G. stearothermophilus 10 DSM 13240 kamieno priklausomybę šiai rūšiai. Pagal panašumo... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Summary Electrophoretic whole-cell protein profile analysis (WCPP) – is a method providing phenotypic information. It is widely used to group bacterial strains and estimate their primal identity. In most cases reliability of this method is equal to DNA-DNA hybridization – that is the main method of genotypic information. WCPP is performed quickly and it is cheap. Therefore this method is widely used in laboratories of medical diagnostic and laboratories related to food industry. In modern world termostable enzymes are very important in industry, whereas thermophilic bacterial strains of the genus Geobacillus are producers of these enzymes. Consequently genus Geobacillus is an actual object of research. It is very important to strictly identify bacterial strains producing needed enzymes. One of the primal ways for identification of this genus could be WCPP. During this work it was shown that similarity of strains of the genus Geobacillus can be determined by WCPP. There was an 80% similarity among strains of G. stearothermophilus. These results matched with DNA-DNA hybridization of these strains. Also there were similar results of WCPP and DNA-DNA hybridization between strain 22 and typical strain of G. vulcani: 84% and 93,9% respectively. Results of WCCP denied dependence of strain G. stearothermophilus 10 DSM 13240 to this species. According to similarity dendrogram this strain should be assigned to G. vulcani because of its 97% similarity to this species. There were also... [to full text]

Accurate identification of pathogens and vectors is essential in epidemiological studies of mosquito-borne pathogens. However, the members of the communis and punctor complexes are difficult to distinguish because they are highly cryptic species, with little to no species-specific morphological characters. The objective of this thesis is to develop molecular tools, including RFLP and DNA barcoding using cytochrome oxidase I (COI), internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) and the intron of ribosomal protein S12 (RPS12) to facilitate identification of the members of these two complexes in Manitoba. A distinct interspecific distance for COI was found between the members of the communis complex included here, and diagnostic RFLP profiles were developed for Oc. communis and Oc. churchillensis. Relatively low average interspecific genetic distances using COI, ITS2 and RPS12 were observed between the members of the punctor complex, indicates no discernable boundaries between these species based on DNA barcoding.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been used in many fault detection and identification (FDI) applications due to their pattern recognition abilities. In this study, two ANNs, a supervised network based on Backpropagation (BP) learning and an unsupervised network based on Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART-2A), were tested for FDI on an automated assembly machine and compared to a conventional rule-based method. Three greyscale sensors and two redundant limit switches were used as cost-effective sensors to monitor the machine's operating condition. To test each method, sensor data were collected while the machine operated under normal conditions, as well as 10 fault conditions. Features were selected from the raw sensor data to create data sets for training and testing. The performance of the methods was evaluated with respect to their ability to detect and identify known, unknown and multiple faults. Their modelling and computational requirements were also considered as performance measures. Results showed that all three methods were able to achieve perfect classification with the test data sets; however, the BP method could not classify unknown or multiple faults. In all cases, the performance depended on careful tuning of each method’s parameters. The BP method required an ideal number of neurons in the hidden layer and good initialization. The ART-2A method required tuning of its classification parameter. The rule-based method required tuning of its thresholds. Although it was found that the rule-based system required more effort to set up, it was judged to be more useful when unknown or multiple faults were present. The ART-2A network created new outputs for these conditions, but it could not give any more information as to what the new fault was. By contrast, the rule-based method was able to generate symptoms that clearly identified the unknown and multiple fault conditions. Thus, the rule-based method was judged to be the best overall method for this type of application. It is recommended that future work examine the application of computer vision-based techniques to FDI with the assembly machine. The results from this study, using cost-effective sensors, could then be used as a performance benchmark for image-based sensors. / Thesis (Master, Mechanical and Materials Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2014-05-16 17:21:13.676