The ability to learn from catastrophe and the science of managing such events has plagued man for centuries. From its insurance origins, corporate risk management has developed into a fully fledged management function and is progressing into business areas that were originally considered unrelated. The evolution of risk management towards such a corporate approach recognises that risks are interrelated and that significant benefits may be achieved from evaluating and monitoring them on a company-wide basis. This study aims at providing the reader with information on the major risks facing the private healthcare administration organisation in South Africa as well as the suitable corporate risk management methodology that may be applied in effectively managing these threats and opportunities from an internal audit perspective. Pressing issues facing the private healthcare environment today include: • Dramatic increase in regulatory oversight within the private healthcare industry; • the need for more innovative actuarial and financial models to address countrywide epidemics such as HIV and AIDS; • increased prevalence of capitation contracts to ensure the financial stability of healthcare service providers; • increases in expected fraudulent activity; • increasing the scope of private healthcare to incorporate a larger share of the South African population; and • providing effective healthcare cover to members whilst facing significant medical inflation increases. The development and implementation of a consistent risk management methodology provides stakeholders with greater confidence that pressing issues, such as those listed above, are being optimally managed. This type of improved risk management consists of distinct phases. Key phases of the suggested methodology presented in this work are supported by results from an empirical study representing 27% of the registered medical schemes in South Africa. Based upon assessments of literature, current definitions for risk and corporate risk management are also presented. Also, the study will be approached from the perspective of the internal auditor, with suitable insights and suggestions made from this standpoint. The study concludes with the author’s evaluation of the current state of risk management for private healthcare administration organisations in South Africa and future predictions regarding this management field. / Thesis (DCom(Internal Auditing))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Auditing / unrestricted

For years the quality of Ethiopian education has been lamented over and some have warned of the crises of running an inefficient educational system and its detrimental effects on nation building (Tekeste 1990:84). One of the factors in the students’ inability to benefit from their lessons is their lack of reading skills. The Ethiopian Education Sector Development Program (ESDP) is calling for the introduction of supplementary readers to reinforce the learning of English at primary level. In response, many organisations such as The British Council, CODE, Emmanuel Home and PLAN International are providing primary schools with readers. A case in point is the Primary Readers Scheme of the British Council. This thesis examines if there is any tangible effect on the students’ reading skills by conducting a comparative study between two government schools that received a donation of primary readers and two schools that did not. To begin with a short review of the suitability of the readers selected by the teachers after an initial pilot scheme is made. Then 454 students were tested in this evaluation to check if there had been a significant improvement in the reading skills of the students in the school that received donations of supplementary readers. It was found that there has been no significant increase in the students’ reading abilities. This is not because there is a weakness in modern theories that preach the usefulness of supplementary readers but because government schools lack the capacity to utilise supplementary readers. Most of the librarians are not qualified, while the teachers, though qualified, lack training in how to use supplementary readers and also tend to be demotivated. Moreover, the administration and running of most of the schools libraries do not allow first cycle students (Grade 1-4) to use the libraries and prohibit second cycle students (Grades 5-8) from borrowing books, thereby limiting the books’ accessibility. It is also very likely that the country’s socio-economic situation in general and the children’s backgrounds do not encourage the habit of reading for pleasure. Consequently, the Education Sector Development Program will have to make some modifications to maximise the benefits of extensive reading in the future, such as training teachers and librarians as well as encouraging supplementary reading amongst the students. The study concludes that though extensive reading schemes produce impressive results in experimental situations, care should be taken in actual implementation of such schemes in real life. Efforts must be made to ensure the actual delivery of appropriate supplementary readers selected by the students themselves to the schools. Moreover, other important and related aspects including good school administration of libraries, training of teachers, a sustainable supply of books and most of all project monitoring and evaluation should be given due consideration. / Thesis (DLitt (English))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / English / unrestricted

Multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been the focus of numerous research efforts during the past few years. These efforts aimed at extending the utilization of technologies based on the IEEE 802.11 standard in large-scale communities and even for city wide networking. However, mesh nodes in these networks are typically limited in their resources (e.g., bandwidth, power and radio interfaces). Such a limitation has led to an unsatisfactory network performance as well as users dissatisfaction. This dissertation addresses three important performance issues related to WMNs, namely, network performance enhancement, network survivability and green communications. To address the first issue, a novel quality of service (QoS) aware joint channel assignment (CA) and routing algorithm is developed. The proposed algorithm employs both dynamic and static CA techniques and corresponding link schedules that maximize the network throughput and minimize the delay and packet loss ratio. Next, the thesis addresses the problem of network survivability and theoretically analyzes the effects of node failure probabilities on the ability of the remaining network nodes to maintain their connectivity. A tight upper bound on the node failure probabilities needed to maintain full network connectivity on the one hand is first developed. On the other hand, a lower bound, at which the system loses connectivity, is also derived. We show that these bounds are dependent only on the nodes' geometric distribution and density. Based on the premise that failure of nodes in a small area may lead to failure of dependent nodes in other areas due to the quick divergence of traffic in these areas, an efficient node failure backup scheme is presented. The scheme relies on the capacity of the surviving network components in order to find new paths that do not overload the neighbours of the failed node which reduces the probability of generating congestion. Finally, the thesis addresses the problem of realizing energy-efficient WMNs that can operate using renewable energy sources. In these systems, batteries are often used to store and regulate the use of the supplied green energy to transmit the received data at each network router in order to overcome the problem of supply fluctuating of various energy sources. To realize these networks, the behaviour of the residual energy of the battery at a heavily loaded green wireless mesh node with a general traffic arrival and energy charging functions is first analyzed. Based on obtained theoretical results, both an online and an offline QoS aware packet scheduling schemes are proposed to minimize the probability of depleting the battery. Each of the aforementioned contributions is supported with various experimental evaluations to demonstrate the achieved performance enhancements.

In this thesis, we examine the architecture and the security framework underlying the Android operating system. We explore existing Android end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging applications and derive four categories of common issues that are applicable to these applications. We then provide an overview of the known issue of privilege escalation wherein a malicious privileged application can utilize inter-process communication techniques to send protected data to an unauthorized application on a user’s device. We demonstrate through a proof of concept how this behavior can be achieved in real applications, and we suggest potential countermeasures that can help prevent this issue. Furthermore, in the interest of diminishing the common issues that are applicable to E2EE messaging applications, we propose a new design for such applications that employs some of the principal security features offered by the Android operating system. We explain how our design can help eliminate trust-related issues associated with such applications, as well as how it can help minimize issues in other categories. Finally, we demonstrate how our proposed design can be used in practice by implementing a proof of concept.

Dans cette thèse, nous étudions les décompositions arborescentes qui satisfont certaines contraintes supplémentaires et nous proposons des algorithmes pour les calculer dans certaines classes de graphes. Finalement, nous résolvons des problèmes liés au routage en utilisant ces décompositions ainsi que des propriétés structurelles des graphes. Cette thèse est divisée en deux parties. Dans la première partie, nous étudions les décompositions arborescentes satisfaisant des propriétés spécifiques. Dans le Chapitre 2, nous étudions les décompositions de taille minimum, c’est-À-Dire avec un nombre minimum de sacs. Etant donné une entier k 4 fixé, nous prouvons que le problème de calculer une décomposition arborescente de largeur au plus k et de taille minimum est NP-Complet dans les graphes de largeur arborescente au plus 4. Nous décrivons ensuite des algorithmes qui calculent des décompositions de taille minimum dans certaines classes de graphes de largeur arborescente au plus 3. Ces résultats ont été présentés au workshop international ICGT 2014. Dans le Chapitre 3, nous étudions la cordalité des graphes et nous introduisons la notion de k-Good décomposition arborescente. Nous étudions tout d’abord les jeux de Gendarmes et Voleur dans les graphes sans long cycle induit. Notre résultat principal est un algorithme polynomial qui, étant donné un graphe G, soit trouve un cycle induit de longueur au moins k+1, ou calcule une k-Good décomposition de G. Ces résultats ont été publiés à la conférence internationale ICALP’12 et dans la revue internationale Algorithmica. Dans la seconde partie de la thèse, nous nous concentrons sur des problèmes de routage. / A tree decomposition of a graph is a way to represent it as a tree by preserving some connectivity properties of the initial graph. Tree decompositions have been widely studied for their algorithmic applications, in particular using dynamic programming approach. In this thesis, we study tree decompositions satisfying various constraints and design algorithms to compute them in some graph classes. We then use tree decompositions or specific graph properties to solve several problems related to routing. The thesis is divided into two parts. In the first part, we study tree decompositions satisfying some properties. In Chapter 2, we investigate minimum size tree decompositions, i.e., with minimum number of bags. Given a fixed k 4, we prove it is NP-Hard to compute a minimum size decomposition with width at most k in the class of graphs with treewidth at least 4. We design polynomial time algorithms to compute minimum size tree decompositions in some classes of graphs with treewidth at most 3 (including trees). Part of these results will be presented in ICGT 2014. In Chapter 3, we study the chordality (longest induced cycle) of graphs and introduce the notion of good tree decomposition (where each bag must satisfy some particular structure). Precisely, we study the Cops and Robber games in graphs with no long induced cycles. Our main result is the design of a polynomial-Time algorithm that either returns an induced cycle of length at least k+1 of a graph G or compute a k-Good tree decomposition of G. These results have been published in ICALP 2012 and Algorithmica. In the second part of the thesis, we focus on routing problems.

L'objectif de la thèse est de développer un albédo de surface journalier pronostique dans les modèles météorologiques et d’évaluer son impact pour le bilan d'énergie et l'hydrologie dans la plate-forme de modélisation SURFEX sur le domaine France. En premier lieu, un albédo climatologique est à ce jour considéré dans SURFEX. Il est analysé dans cette étude par rapport aux albédos quotidiens de SEVIRI et MODIS dont ce dernier est obtenu à partir d'une méthode originale que l'on valide. Ensuite, une méthode est développée pour obtenir des albédos du sol et de la végétation de façon séparée à la fois statiquement, donc sur une base climatologique, puis dynamiquement en s'appuyant sur plusieurs années de données du satellite MODIS. Une fois réglé l'albédo du sol journalier, il est recherché une calibration avec l'humidité du sol nu à l'aide des données du réseau de stations sol SMOSMANIA du sud-ouest de la France. Il est montré que l'on peut prédire l'évolution de l'albédo de surface, par comparaison avec les observations spatiales avec l'humidité seule dans la limite d'une végétation faiblement couvrante. Cet albédo simulé est complété par celui de la végétation seule à partir d'une paramétrisation simplifiée du code de transfert radiatif PROSAIL. L'approche théorique est validée avec les données du site de Majadas pour lequel on montre que l'on sait simuler le cycle d'évolution de l'albédo total avec prise en compte de la chlorophylle au niveau de la feuille. En dernier lieu, il a été réalisé une étude d'impact du nouveau albédo évolutif sur le bilan d'énergie et l'hydrologie dans SURFEX sur la France. Il est aussi mis en place une assimilation de l'albédo conjointement avec l'indice foliaire et l'humidité superficielle, ce qui a des effets positifs pour le cas des végétations qui ne sont pas trop denses. / The main objective of the thesis is to develop a prognostic surface albedo of the visible spectrum and near infrared and assess its impact on the energy balance and hydrology in the modelling platform of SURFEX. First, a statistical approach has generated a global climate albedo product at 0.05 ° for bare soil and vegetation using multiple years 8 -day MODIS onboard TERRA and AQUA satellites heliosynchronous data. Then, an original method has been developed to reduce temporal resolution of MODIS 500m albedo to daily. The result is validated against in situ measurements as well as daily albedo from geostationary satellite MSG / SEVIRI Land SAF project after projection of MODIS. Then a method of separating albedo of bare soil and vegetation is applied to the datasets of the two satellite systems. Using a threshold of vegetation cover, a calibration of the albedo bare soil with measured soil moisture is derived from 2007 to 2010 for 12 SMOSMANIA stations over southwestern France. We derived a parameterization of the albedo of bare soil with moisture to make the climate changing albedo. The albedo and simulated happens to be very well correlated with observations from space, which helps to explain the albedo variations at very short notice. To change seasonally albedo, a simple parameterization of canopy albedo derived from detailed radiative transfer code PROSAIL is used. The variables are the albedo of the sheet, canopy geometry and chlorophyll content. In order to be sensitive to chlorophyll, the study is based on an albedo at 560 nm. The theoretical approach is validated with MODIS satellite data for the site Majadas (Spain). The next step is to conduct an impact study of this new predictive albedo on the energy balance and hydrology within SURFEX over France and highlighting effects on temperature. More preliminary restricted to a SMOSMANIA station, an assimilation scheme is developed for surface albedo together with the leaf area index LAI and surface moisture. This effects an improvement in the prescribed LAI at the beginning of crop growth.

The main goal of my thesis is to find market value for the company XXX, Ltd.. on the date 1st January, 2010. The valuation is a result of several steps. The financial analysis , strategic analysis, forecasting of important indexes of value and creating the financial scheme. For the final valuation there is used the method called DCF Equity.

The subject of diploma thesis is the pension system in the Czech Republic. We warn about the deficit increase in the future and suggest taking the number of children raised into consideration in the pension system construction. Pension system in the Czech Republic is described in detail. The first "pay-as-you-go" pillar represents the main part of the system. It could bring financial problems (if the retirement pension and pension income tax will stay at the same level as now) considering the expected trends in demography. Population projection was calculated using cohort component method (including migration). The threshold for the projection is year 2011, projection is calculated with 100-year horizon. There were also calculated revenues and expenses of the pension system for each projected year. If the expected parameters of the projection will be realized, the deficit of pension system in the hundred year period will reach 9.5 billion Kč (prices 2011). It represents the deficit 95.3 milliard Kč each year in the average. To reduce the deficit it is possible to increase the pension tax paid by productive people. But it could also bring the decline of fertility, because lower income could make people decide to reduce number of children. It would deepen the problems in the pay-as-you-go system. The financial problem of pension system could be solved by taking the number of children raised into consideration of the pension system construction. It would eliminate the situation that it is economically more favourable to be childless during the life. It could also bring the fertility increase. In the diploma thesis the value of the deficit is simulated for the various parameters of pension system and for the various demographic development in the future.

Thesis (M.Dev.) -- University of Limpopo, 2017. / This mini-dissertation examines the policies regulating the National Health Insurance Scheme. It explores the reforms on the health care system in South Africa. In addressing this issue, the mini-dissertation investigates the constitutional obligation of the South African government regarding the provision of health care services. It also focuses on the two primary issues relating to health care services. Firstly, South Africa has allocated significant budget to fix the ailing health care system. Secondly, South Africa commands huge health care resources compared with many other middle-income countries, however the bulk of these resources are in the private sector and serve a minority of the population. It further looks at the lessons that South Africa could learn from the successes of the National Health Insurance Scheme implementation in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries as it proceeds with the implementation of the National Health Insurance.

- 1 - Material security of the elderly - old age pension and pension reform Abstract The topic of this diploma thesis is the material security of the elderly - old age pension and pension reform. Its aim is to present the issue of old-age pensions in detail, to point out the shortcomings of the Czech pension system and offer the possibility of comparing it with the pension systems of Chile, Great Britain and Sweden. The first part defines the legal regulation of old-age pensions and their purpose. The conditions of entitlement to a pension are also described, namely the retirement age and the condition for obtaining the required period of pension insurance. The calculation and amount of old-age pensions are outlined and individual types of this pension are illustrated by using model example. Moreover, the issue of working pensioners is discussed. The second part of the thesis deals with the organization and management of the material security of the elderly. Specifically, the competence of social security authorities in this area is determined and then the individual phases of proceedings before these authorities are described. The proceedings have the nature of administrative proceedings and require a high level of expertise of the Czech Social Security Administration officials. In addition, the chapter is...