Submitted in partial fulfillment for the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Education in the Subject Educational Management in the Faculty of Education at the University of Zululand, 1993. / This research has looked into the methods which teachers and principals use to handle student-student, student-principal and student-teacher conflicts in KwaZulu secondary schools. It has revealed that teachers tend to use authoritarian and power based methods to manage conflicts with students. Authoritarian methods rely on coercive and position power to force students to comply. They include punishment and force of different kinds. The research has shown that authoritarian and power based methods of managing conflict in schools tend to have short term benefits only. The study has also found that some principals use competitive and authoritarian methods to manage conflicts which involve students. However, there is a definite effort by some principals to employ problem solving methods such as negotiation to solve conflicts with students. Where problem solving methods were used, positive relationships were enhanced. In some cases new ways of doing things at school were developed. The* extent to which other methods like avoidance and accommodation are used to deal with conflict was highlighted. The outcomes of these in schools were also shown. The research also indicated that the socio-economic and political history of education for Blacks in South Africa and KwaZulu, has created a great potential for conflict in schools. It was shown that schools in KwaZulu are in a situation where education does not adequately fulfill needs of students. As a result a lot of frustration occurs and students displace their feelings by resorting to socially disapproved means like violence. v(b) Other variables such as clash of values between teachers and students, misperceptions especially by students and lack of student involvement in decision making also contribute to conflict. According to the observations of principals, students also deal with conflict in aggressive and competitive ways. They demand whatever they believe they are deprived of; they become violent or resistant to school authority. Further, the study concluded that some teachers and principals increase the potential for conflicts in schools through defective management styles and negative interaction with students. The latter, namely negative interaction with students, was seen to be either part of estranged student-teacher or student-principal relationships or, in some cases, a result of poor communication and interpersonal skills of teachers or principals. All three parties (namely teachers, students and principals) cloud issues on conflicts by mixing them with emotions and by operating from certain belief systems. Such emotions as uncontrolled anger and resultant violence or beliefs that students cannot or may not participate in decisions at school, often worsened conflicts. The research discerned that a principal's or teacher's approach to managing conflicts tends to influence the outcomes.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / When the child welfare system becomes involved with a family in need of services it does so with the goal of concluding its involvement by finding a safe and permanent placement for the children, ideally with their parents. This challenging and complicated work often has many issues that need to be addressed before a successful closure can occur. To achieve this goal, multiple service providers with various backgrounds, degrees, and professions are tasked with working with each other and the family through a collaborative team called a multidisciplinary team (MDT). However, collaboration is not always guaranteed, and conflict can emerge as the team attempts to best serve the family. This conflict may emerge among professionals and between professionals and the family. Although the underlying factors of collaboration and conflict have been documented and studied, research on the process of resolving conflict when it occurs in MDTs is severely lacking in the literature. Furthermore, MDTs specific to the child welfare system also lack the focus they deserve within the child welfare literature. This grounded theory study addresses the gap by focusing on child welfare MDTs and specifically on home-based therapists (N=20) to determine not only their perceptions of facilitators and barriers to collaboration but also the process that they and their fellow service providers engage in when addressing and resolving conflict. In conducting this qualitative study, this researcher used grounded theory to construct a theory outlining the processes that home-based therapists utilize to resolve conflict within MDTs, starting with the emergence of the conflict and detailing the decision making process through the team’s reaction and the ultimate decision or final result. In the future, these findings could be used to aid and train other MDT members as they face their own conflicts with the hope that a more efficient conflict resolution process will lead to a more effective MDT that keeps its focus on the family and provides the needed treatment and services in a timely manner.

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No description available.

The advancement of computer architecture and chip design has set the stage for the deep learning revolution by supplying enormous computational power. In general, deep learning is built upon neural networks that can be regarded as a universal approximator of any mathematical function. In contrast to model-based machine learning where the representative features are designed by human engineers, deep learning enables the automatic discovery of desirable feature representations based on a data-driven manner. In this thesis, the applications of deep learning to visual content processing and analysis are discussed. For visual content processing, two novel approaches, named LCVSR and RawVSR, are proposed to address the common issues in the filed of Video Super-Resolution (VSR). In LCVSR, a new mechanism based on local dynamic filters via Locally Connected (LC) layers is proposed to implicitly estimate and compensate motions. It avoids the errors caused by the inaccurate explicit estimation of flow maps. Moreover, a global refinement network is proposed to exploit non-local correlations and enhance the spatial consistency of super-resolved frames. In RawVSR, the superiority of camera raw data (where the primitive radiance information is recorded) is harnessed to benefit the reconstruction of High-Resolution (HR) frames. The developed network is in line with the real imaging pipeline, where the super-resolution process serves as a pre-processing unit of ISP. Moreover, a Successive Deep Inference (SDI) module is designed in accordance with the architectural principle suggested by a canonical decomposition result for Hidden Markov Model (HMM) inference, and a reconstruction module is built with elaborately designed Attention based Residual Dense Blocks (ARDBs). For visual content analysis, a new approach, named PSCC-Net, is proposed to detect and localize image manipulations. It consists of two paths: a top-down path that extracts the local and global features from an input image, and a bottom-up path that first distinguishes manipulated images from pristine ones via a detection head, and then localizes forged regions via a progressive mechanism, where manipulation masks are estimated from small scales to large ones, each serving as a prior of the next-scale estimation. Moreover, a Spatio-Channel Correlation Module (SCCM) is proposed to capture both spatial and channel-wise correlations among extracted features, enabling the network to cope with a wide range of manipulation attacks. Extensive experiments validate that the proposed methods in this thesis have achieved the SOTA results and partially addressed the existing issues in previous works. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Over the coming decades, both food consumption and agricultural water use are expected to increase in response to growing populations. In light of these concerns, there has been a growing awareness and appreciation of the objectives of agricultural sustainability, which has the broad aim of securing food and water resources, without adversely affecting the environment or disenfranchising future generations. To ensure that irrigated fields optimize their water use towards a more sustainable application while remaining compliant with any imposed restrictions on access to water supplies (i.e. through water licensing), it is necessary to understand and quantify the water consumption of crops at appropriate spatial and temporal scales. Evaporation (E), also commonly referred to as evapotranspiration (ET), is the physical process of water vapor transport from the surface into the atmosphere. Evaporation can be estimated via interpretive modeling approaches that combine meteorological, radiative, vegetation, and other related properties to estimate land surface fluxes at any given time. The research presented herein aims to investigate the evaporative response of agricultural croplands across a range of spatial and temporal scales, with a focus on high-resolution and field-scale estimation. In particular, we explore the utility of novel CubeSat imagery to produce the highest spatial resolution (3 m) crop water use estimates ever retrieved from space. These high-resolution results are expanded through time by retrieving a daily evaporation product, offering an enhanced capacity to provide new insights into precision agriculture. The effects and implications of higher spatiotemporal resolutions are explored and contrasted against governmental satellite missions that operate at lower resolutions. An exploratory study on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is also performed, specifically in the context of their capacity to mount miniaturized thermal sensors: with the accuracy and limitations of these sensors for deriving evaporation-type products examined. The overarching goal of this research is to advance the utility of space-based estimates of evaporation for precision agricultural applications, and to provide new high-spatial and temporal agricultural insights that can be directed towards improving water management and address food security concerns in a more sustainable manner.

The tasks of entity recognition through ontological commitment, fact extraction and organization with respect to a target schema, and entity deduplication have all been examined in recent years, and systems exist that can perform each individual task. A framework combining all these tasks, however, is still needed to accomplish the goal of automatically extracting and organizing biographical facts about persons found in historical documents into disambiguated entity records. We introduce FROntIER (Fact Recognizer for Ontologies with Inference and Entity Resolution) as the framework to recognize and extract facts using an ontology and organize facts of interest through inferring implicit facts using inference rules, a target ontology, and entity resolution. We give two case studies of FROntIER's performance over a few select pages from The Ely Ancestry [BEV02] and Index to The Register of Marriages and Baptisms in the Parish of Kilbarchan, 1649-1772 [Gra12].

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are computer-generated representations of the earth's surface. These surfaces can be used to predicted Line-of-Sight (LOS) radio propagation. DEM resolution can affect the results of this prediction. This study examines the effect of DEM resolution on accuracy by comparing varied resolution terrain data for a portion of Blacksburg, Virginia using the prediction of ESRI's ArcView® viewshed algorithm. Results show that resolutions between one-meter and thirty-meters have little effect on the aggregate accuracy of the viewshed. / Master of Science

No / Nigeria is Africa's largest oil producing country. Oil generates enormous wealth but also extensive and devastating conflict in the country. High Stakes and Stakeholders critically explores the oil conflict in Nigeria, its evolution, dynamics and most significantly, the interplay and consequences of high stake politics for the reproduction and persistence of the conflict. It presents a conceptual anatomy of state-oil industry-society relations and demonstrates how the embedded material interests and accumulation patterns of different stakeholders underlie, shape and complicate both the oil conflict and security. In addition, the book provides key insights into comparable conflicts elsewhere in the global south, developing a logical framework for resolving the oil conflict in Nigeria and for reforming the security sector.

<p> The Lower Cretaceous (Upper Albian) Viking Formation of central Alberta contains numerous linear sandbodies and fewer large irregularly-shaped sandbodies. Most studies to date have focused on individual sandbodies, leaving their interrelationships largely unknown. Developing a high-resolution allostratigraphy for the Viking of central Alberta allows mapping of regional bounding discontinuities and the definition of distinct allomembers. Placement of the Viking hydrocarbon fields within this framework permits an understanding of the exact stratigraphic relationships of the various fields. </p> <p> Examination of 120 cores and numerous well log correlations suggests the existence of four regionally mappable bounding discontinuities (BDl-4) which separate five distinct allomembers (I-V). Sandbodies within these allomembers were deposited in a variety of sedimentologically distinct environments. These include 'regional Viking' offshore to shoreface sandstones, prograding highstand shoreface sediments, transgressive incised shoreface sediments, and forced regressive, onlapping shoreface 'tongues'. The series of linear trending hydrocarbon fields from Joffre to Chain are also stratigraphically distinct. The sandbodies exist at five separate stratigraphic horizons and therefore are not all part of the same incised shoreface deposits. </p> <p> The four regional bounding discontinuities are interpreted as transgressive surfaces of erosion formed by four separate drops and subsequent rises of relative sea level. These fluctuations were greater than 30m and each complete cycle occurred over roughly 375,000 years. </p> / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)