Abstract The aim of this study was to evaluate plant growth, grain yield and symbiotic N contribution by 32 cowpea genotypes, at Taung in South Africa. The data from a 2-year field study conducted in 2005 and 2006 showed that genotypes Fahari, Pan 311 and Glenda exhibited the highest dry matter yield and N contribution as they produced 2.9-, 2.7- and 3.5-fold more dry matter than cv. ITH98-46 and yielded 2.7-, 2.2- and 3.2-fold more N than cultivar ITH98-46 from IITA. Except for Benpila, all the 32 cowpea genotypes derived between 52.0 and 80.9% of their N nutrition from symbiotic fixation in 2005, with IT82D-889, Botswana White, IT93K-2045-29 and Ngonji exhibiting the highest %Ndfa values. The genotype Fahari showed the highest amount N-fixed (182 kg N-fixed/ha), followed by Pan 311, Glenda, TVu11424 and Mamlaka which contributed 160, 146, 130 and 125 kg N/ha, respectively. Genotypes Pan 311, Fahari and Glenda were among those that produced highest grain yield in 2005 and except for CH14 and IT86S-2246 (which produced 131 kg N/ha each), Fahari, Glenda and Pan 311, were again the highest in symbiotic N contribution (112, 106 and 105 kg N/ha, respectively). Grain yield was similarly high in Glenda, Pan 311 and Fahari (3.3, 3.1 and 2.9 t/ha, respectively) in 2006. In general, these data show that genotypes that fixed more N also produced more biomass and grain yield and are therefore, the best candidates for inclusion in cropping systems as biofertilizers.

The field plate test has been used to derive elastic stiffness and undrained strength parameters of clay soils. Generally the interpretations are based on the measurements of the plate load and settlement, though occasionally additional measurements have been made in an attempt to improve the interpretation. The interpretations of soil parameters from the test rely on simplified assumptions of the soil behaviour. In particular the soil-is often assumed to be linear elastic perfectly-plastic. The complexity of the stress and strain paths induced within the soil by a field plate load test belies the simplicity of the interpretations. This Thesis examines the use of the field plate load test as a method of deriving in-situ parameters of clay soils, using the finite element method to conduct a parametric study of the test. The results of these studies have been used to assess the validity of the parameters determined from the test and also to examine how the interpretation may be improved. The Thesis concludes that the interpretation of the plate test can be improved to yield non-linear elastic parameters of soil at small strain. In addition the results from a plate test can, theoretically, be used to predict the elastic load settlement response of full scale foundations. The test can also be used to measure consolidation and undrained strength characteristics of a clay soil appropriate to the analysis/design of full scale foundations of similar geometry and load direction.

This thesis examines the transformative potential of applied theatre, specifically through a study of the playmaking process, and the embodiment and performance of stories, as a tool for middle school girls to articulate ideas about and personalize the notion of leadership. This study documents the theory and practitioners who informed my work in the creation and implementation of an applied theatre program piloted in the fall of 2009. Through a process of qualitative, reflective practitioner research, I examined the participants’ perceptions of, and relationship to, leadership throughout the project, while simultaneously analyzing my own changing perceptions of what it means to lead and facilitate an applied theatre process and performance. The resulting discussion offers a need for a balance between the process and the product in applied theatre, and most importantly the need for practitioners to continuously reexamine their intentions and practices throughout an applied theatre project. / text

On an overgrown path Book 1 / Leos Janacek / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

The requirement of high quality services is increasing day by day. So, in order to meet up with this requirement new technologies are being developed one of them being virtualization. The main agenda of introducing virtualization is that though virtualization needs more powerful devices to run the hypervisor, the technique also helps to increase consolidation which makes efficient use of resources like increase in the CPU utilization. The virtualization technique helps us to run more VM’s (Virtual Machine) on the same platform i.e. on the same hypervisor. In virtualization as number of VM’s share the CPU will there be any effect on the performance of TCP with the performance influencing factors of virtualization. While TCP being the most widely used protocol and most reliable protocol can performance of TCP vary if different TCP congestion control mechanism are used in the virtualized environment are the main aims of this research.   In this study, we investigate the performance influencing factor of TCP in the virtualized environment and whether those influencing factors have any role to play with the performance of the TCP. Also which TCP congestion control mechanism is best suitable in order to download files when virtualization is used will be investigated by setting up a client-server test bed. The different TCP congestion control mechanism which have been used are CUBIC, BIC, Highspeed, Vegas, Veno, Yeah, Westwood, LP, Scalable, Reno, Hybla. Total download time has been compared in order to know which congestion control algorithm performs better in the virtualized environment.   The method that has been used to carry out the research is by experimentation. That is by changing the RAM sizes and CPU cores which are the performance influencing factors in virtualization and then analyzing the total download time while downloading a file by changing the TCP congestion control mechanisms by running a single guest VM. Apart from changing only congestion control mechanisms the other network parameters which effect the performance of the TCP such as Delay have been injected while downloading the file, to match up with the real time scenarios.   Results collected include average download time of a file by changing the different memory sizes and different CPU cores. Average Download time for different TCP congestion controls mechanisms with inclusion of the parameter that effects the total download time such as Delay.   From the results we got we can see that there is a slight influence on the performance of TCP by the performance influencing factors memory sizes and CPU cores allotted to the VM in the KVM virtualized environment and of all the TCP congestion control algorithms having TCP – BIC and TCP- YEAH performs the best in the KVM virtualized environment. The performance of TCP – LP is the least in the KVM virtualized environment.

Rich Communication Services(RCS) program is a GSM Association (GSMA) initiative to create inter-operator communication services based on IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) . This initiative came up as the Global Telecom Operators ́response to the decline in their revenues and to help compete ’Over The Top’(OTT) service providers such as Viber, whatsapp, etc. RCS is an universal standard, making it inter-operable between mul- tiple service providers unlike OTT services with closed communities. RCS services use IMS as the underlying architecture with a RCS stack imple- mented into Android background service which offers high level API. For the purpose of testing RCS stack functionality which is usually affected by external dependencies like third party vendors, or ISP customizations in real telecommunication scenario, there is a persistent demand for scenario replay tools that can recreate the range of test conditions similar to those experienced in live deployments. There is also a need to evaluate the per- formance of service provided by application servers in the network in-order to predict the factors affecting the RCS service in general. In this work, we propose a tool to address the RCS scenario repro- duction in a test environment. The tool is implemented within an automated test environment with full control on interaction with the RCS stack, hence the ability to replay the scenario in a controlled fashion. To achieve the goal, the tool replays trace interactively with the RCS stack in a stateful manner , it ensures no improper packet generation which is critical feature for test environments where protocol semantics accuracy is fundamental. A detailed demonstration of how the tool can be deployed in test environ- ments is stated. A novel approach is used to validate the effectiveness of the replayed scenario, the sequence of events and states are compared to those from the recorded scenario using a call-back service to indicate the state. The replayed scenario showed strong relationship with the recorded RCS scenario. The paper also presents a performance evaluation of Application service by considering the request-reponse times of Network Registration procedure. The obtained results show that the average time taken for the Registration process is 555 milliseconds and in few instances there exists larger deviations from this average value showing the faulty behavior of the Server which is most crucial during the debugging process for the developers.

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