No abstract available / Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Architecture / unrestricted

The failed projects of modernism and post-modernism leaves a theoretical void. More specifically the author takes issue with the apparent purposelessness of architecture. At the outset of this project the author ventured a Faustian attempt at relevance. Appendix A is a speculative description of architecture as a market deliverable - a consumer product. It proposes a design method adapted to a production-line view of architectural production. In this view the architect is an integrator of ideas, constraints, processes, implications - his main deliverable is a drawing. However, during the course of researching and designing this scheme even these sentiments were found not to be watertight. Inevitably the discourse degenerated into questions of poetics and spontaneity, character and meaning, liveliness and above all - Design. The term ‘design’ mentioned here refers to the same idea encountered among pre-graduate architectural students and lay-people - consumers of architectural pornography. Design in the sense: “Can you add some design to our house. Design in the sense: “No, it doesn’t matter if it works or not - I just want to know what it’s going to look like”. The architect is the queerly dressed individual with dark-framed glasses always dressed in black - a designer, a critic, a satirist, an esoteric. At the 2005 UIA congress in Istanbul Peter Eisenmann prophesied the end of this concept of the role of architecture. Our fascination with the ocular - the image - came to a climax with 9/11. Assuming a cyclic trend he predicts that the importance of the visual spectacle will wane (Sobuwa, 2005). It is clear therefore that selling architecture to the free-market gives us a profession that is relevant but not essential. The architect is a fashion designer - his most valuable asset is his opinion packaged in reputation. His career is built on benevolent clients, dedicated to the cause of ‘good architecture’, which he meets through ‘contacts’. Here is a movement away from art - which uses a moral language to describe itself - pure forms, honest use of materials, truth, god is in the... etc - and therefore unfit for the free market (since money still resides outside moral good despite Ayn Rand’s every effort) - towards craft - which is fundamentally a method. The architect therefore does not ask why?, or in what manner? but how? The architectural craft, the acquisition of which is deemed to be the main quest of tertiary architectural education is then appropriated as a design method. This design method is a system of sequential activities manifesting nonsequential thinking and can be graphically expressed as in Figure 1. The project presented here is an attempt to apply this method. / Dissertation (MArch (Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Architecture / unrestricted

No description available.

Objectives: To understand how and to what extent drop-in centres are associated with the physical and mental health and substance use status of street children in New Delhi. Methods: In a qualitative study, I interviewed 23 street children and two drop-in centre staff members in New Delhi. Subsequently, I conducted a cross-sectional study with 69 street children who attended centres and 65 street children who did not visit centres. I used questionnaires to assess their physical and mental health and substance use. Findings: Participants believed that because street children regularly visited drop-in centres, their health outcomes improved. Street children participated in drop-in services because staff members were nonjudgmental, they were free to be a child, their daily struggles were lessened, they received protection, they were given moral direction and they had an opportunity for a better life. However, children continued to live on the streets because street life had become normal. Quantitative findings showed that street children who visited centres had better physical and mental health outcomes and engaged in less substance use than street children who did not visit centres (p<0.01). For every month of attendance, street children experienced 2.1% (95% CI 0% to 4.1%, p=0.05) fewer ill health outcomes per month and used 4.6% (95% CI 1.3% to 8%, p=0.01) fewer substances. Street children were also less likely to have been a current substance user than a never substance user for every additional month at a center (OR: 0.79, 95% CI: 0.66 to 0.96, p=0.02). Duration of attendance was not significant in predicting mental health. Conclusion: According to participants, drop-in centres positively influence the physical and mental health and substance use status of street children by providing services in an environment tailored for them. Quantitatively, centres may improve the physical health of street children and reduce their substance use. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Street children in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) experience poor health. Drop-in centres are one of most common interventions for street children; however, they have not been evaluated in LMICs. I aimed to understand how and how much drop-in centres influence the physical and mental health and substance use status of street children in New Delhi, India. Street children and drop-in centre staff members were interviewed about how they believed centres influenced the health and substance use habits of street children. Participants felt that drop-in centres improve children’s health and substance use habits because the centres provided services in an environment tailored for street children. I also used questionnaires to evaluate the impact of drop-in centre attendance on 69 street children who regularly came to centres and 65 street children who did not come to centres. Quantitatively, centres may improve the physical health and substance use status of street children.

Thèse--Sciences--Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1974. / Bibliogr. p. 705-726.

The aim of the work is to design the completion of the block in the historic center of Ostrava in a place called Kostelní náměstí. The work deals with the topic of appropriate integration of contemporary architecture into the historic city center with the choice of the right functions to revitalize this locality. The problem of the city center is quantity of gaps in the historical city core, a few attractive features for people, shifting the focus of interest to the shopping center Nova Karolina and problematic relations between private owners and the city council.

High-commitment call-centers kännetecknas av investeringar i HR-praktiker såsom utbildning, vilka kräver transfer till arbetet för att generera avkastning på investeringen. Studien ämnade undersöka hur demografiska profiler relaterar till transfereffekter, self-efficacy och prestation. Den ämnade även undersöka vikten av antal utbildningstillfällen för self-efficacy och prestation samt faktorer som hindrar/faciliterar transfer. En multi-methods sequential explanatory design användes, där två studier genom-fördes på ett svenskt call-center som utförde en utbildningsinsats. I studie 1 samlades data in med en enkät (n = 51) och i studie 2 genomfördes intervjuer (n = 6). I studie 1 identifierades tre kluster med skilda demo-grafiska bakgrunder, bl.a. ålder och utbildningsnivå. En signifikant skillnad i transfer återfanns dem emellan. Neutral transfer återfanns och self-efficacy var högst hos deltagare som slutfört utbildningen. I studie 2 framkom att det upplevdes viktigt att utbildningens nytta var tydlig och att ett neutralt transferklimat rådde. Studierna antyder att hänsyn bör tas till det övergripande transfersystemet tillsammans med individen för att bäst facilitera transfer.

The PhD thesis addresses the analysis of GABA and glycine cotransmitting (GgC) neurons in the Pre-Bötzinger Complex (PBC), a region important for rhythm generation of the respiration. GgC neurons were identified in the PBC using different approaches including single-cell RT-PCR and immunohistochemistry. Furthermore, novel transgenic mouse-lines were generated to facilitate the analysis of these neurons in-vivo and in living-tissue preparations: The mouse-line Cofluor allows the identification of GABAergic, glycinergic as well as GgC neurons by the expression of different fluorescent proteins. This mouse-line was used to investigate the number of cells of each neuron type during development from E15.5 to 2.5 month revealing a decrease of GgC neurons paralleled by an increase of glycinergic and GABAergic neurons. The mouse line COTRIND expresses the tamoxifen-inducible Split-CreERT2 system exclusively in GgC neurons allowing for the permanent labelling of these neurons with the Red Fluorescent Protein at the time-point of tamoxifen application. In COTRIND mice, GgC neurons were irreversibly labelled at the age of P1/P2 and analysed at the age of three days as well as after 2.5 month to investigate their fate by using immunohistochemistry. It was found that GgC neurons differentiated to mostly glycinergic neurons and to a minor percentage to GABAergic neurons whereas some GgC neurons remained GgC neurons. The results obtained from this study disclosed the presence of GgC neurons in the PBC of mice and their development from the embryonic day 15.5 to the adult stage. Furthermore, the inducible Split-CreERT2 system was for the first time established in transgenic COTRIND mice and found to be functional in vivo without leakage. With the novel transgenic mouse lines the present work provides tools for the analysis of GgC neurons in the PBC and contributes to the characterisation of this neuron type including the role for rhythm generation of the respiration.

Within urban geography the development of defensive strategies encompassing the fortification and privatisation of the city has attracted significant attention during the 1990s. This research is articulated in the light of these recent debates concerning risk, security, and the spatial restructuring of contemporary Western cities. In this context, the concern of this thesis is with examining how the perceived risk of terrorist attack led to changes in the physical form and institutional infrastructure of the City of London between 1992 and 1997 during which the City was a prime terrorist target. To undertake this enquiry an urban landscape approach was adopted which took account of the three interrelated components of landscape - namely form (the arrangement of the built environment) which is constructed and activated through a number of social, economic, and political processes that gives the built environment cultural and symbolic meaning. Methodologically this research was based on a series of interviews with the police, security experts, insurers, risk managers, terrorism analysts, and other business organisations, as well as being supplemented by an array of documentary and archival material. Such an approach provided the framework to interpret the key processes and institutional decisions involved in the evolution of enhanced City security. This thesis has explored the formal and informal strategies adopted by a number of key urban managers as they attempted to reduce both the physical and financial risk of terrorism through a series of place-specific security initiatives and insurance policies. It is shown that the terrorist threat led to increased fortification, a substantial rise in terrorism insurance premiums and changing institutional relations at a variety of spatial scales. It is argued that these changes were necessary to protect this area from further attack and to preserve the City's reputation as a global financial centre as well as London's position as a so-called world city. 1 Furthermore, this thesis argues that for both political and legal necessity the security measures deployed were advanced not in terms of an anti-terrorist effort, but in relation to the unintended by-products of such approaches, namely decreases in general crime, reduced levels of pollution and enhanced traffic management capabilities. ii

Both semantic web applications and individuals are in need of knowledge infrastructures that can be used in dynamic and distributed environments where autonomous entities create knowledge and build their own view of a domain. The prevailing view today is that the process of ontology evolution is difficult to monitor and control, so few efforts have been made to support such a controlled process formally involving several ontologies. The new paradigm we propose is to use an infrastructure mechanism that processes ontology change proposals from autonomous entities while maintaining user-defined consistency between the ontologies of these entities. This makes so called semantic autonomy possible. A core invention of our approach is to formalise consistency constraints as so called spheres of consistency that define 1) knowledge regions within which consistency is maintained and 2) a variable degree of proof-bounded consistency within these regions. Our infrastructure formalism defines a protocol and its computational semantics, as well as a model theory and proof theory for the reasoning layer of the mechanism. The conclusion of this thesis is that this new paradigm is possible and beneficial, assuming that the knowledge representation is kept simple, the ontology evolution operations are kept simple and one proposal is processed at a time.