Thesis (MCIS - Computer and Information Sciences) -- AUT University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references. Also held in print (x, 102 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm.) in City Campus Theses Collection (T 332.7 OET)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX184766.

Magister Scientiae Dentium - MSc(Dent) / The investigation was designed to evaluate the scoring systems of pitts (1984), and that of Murray and Majid(1978), when used to monitor caries progression in deciduous teeth. The evaluation.was based on the reproducibility and discrlininatory ability of the two systems. The Reproducibility Study was designed to compare the reproducibility of the two systems, and in addition, to illustrate, firstly the use of the subject as the sampling unit in measuring reproducibility, and secondly, a more sensitive method of measuring reproducibility when analysing caries progression data. The Progression Study was designed to discriminatory ability. In addition the compare use of the the effect on subject as the sampling unit in monitoring caries progression was illustrated in the analysis of this part of the investigation. A sub-sample of the posterior bitewing radiographs of 301, 5 year old children from a Duraphat clinical trial (Murray et al. 1977, Murray and Majid 1978) were re-examined. For the Reproducibility Study 150 sets of radiographs were examined a total of 4 times, (repeated examinations for each method). For the Progression Study three serial bitewing radiographs of 50 children were examined using the two methods. For the Reproducibility Study, Kendall's Tau-B was used as an approxlination of the weighted Kappa as a measure of reproducibility. While the pitts method appeared to be more reliable, the difference .between the tYK>methods was not significant( p~ 05). The surface cannot be used as an independent unit in measuring reproducibility. A method using the subject as the sampling unit was illustrated. Attention was drawn to the need to develop a measure of reproducibility for progression studies which would take into account the magnitude of the disagreement (instead of just disagreement) into the overall index of reproducibility. The use of weighted Kappa is suggested as a more appropriate measure of reproducibility. In the Progression Study Method 1 is more sensitive to the various stages of the disease process and provides a more complete overall picture of the carious process. The proportion of enamel lesions recorded for Method 1 were consistantly higher than that for Method 2. The behaviour of outer and inner enamel lesions differed considerably and Method 1 allowed the behaviour of these lesions to be considered separately. The progression rates were found to be faster with Method 2. With Method 1 30% of enamel lesions per subject had progressed to dentine or been filled 12 months later, the corresponding figure for Method 2 was 50%. Method 2 by excluding outer enamel lesions introduces two biases. The combination of these biases favour overestimating the proportion of lesions deemed to have progressed. The use of Method 2 may lead to the unnecessary loss of valuable data; more surfaces were excluded as being unreadable because of overlap. The average proportion of surfaces per subject recorded as unreadible due to overlap was 7% at baseline, 8% at 12 months and 8% at 24 months, the corresponding figures for Method 2 were 13%, 13% and 22% for Method 2. Method 1 thus appears to offer some advantages. The use of the subject as the sampling unit in analysing caries progression data offers a mnnber of advantages when canpared to the use of the surface as the sampling unit. The findings of the study indicate the proportions of high risk subjects (subjects in whom a large proportion of lesions progressed in a given time period) was low. With Method 1 in only 11% of the subjects did 80-100% of the enamel lesions progress after 12 months. The findings indicate that the Pitts system is the more useful scoring system in studies monitoring caries progression in deciduous teeth. / British Council

A Research Report Submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment in partial fulfilment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering / The research centred on improving the current software systems development life cycle (SDLC) of the credit scoring process at a financial institution based on systems engineering principles. The research sought ways to improve the current software SDLC in terms of cost, schedule and performance. This paper proposes an improved software SDLC that conforms to the principles of systems engineering. As decisioning has been automated in financial institutions, various processes are developed according to a software SDLC in order to ensure accuracy and validity thereof. This research can be applied to various processes within financial institutions where software development is conducted, verified and tested. A comparative analysis between the current software SDLC and a recommended SDLC was performed. Areas within the current SDLC that did not comply with systems engineering principles were identified. These inefficiencies were found during unit testing, functional testing and regression testing. An SDLC is proposed that conforms to systems engineering principles and is expected to reduce the current SDLC schedule by 20 per cent. Proposed changes include the sequence of processes within the SDLC, increasing test coverage by extracting data from the production environment, filtering and sampling data from the production environment, automating functional testing using mathematical algorithms, and creating a test pack for regression testing which adequately covers the software change. / MT2016

Thesis (M.M. (Research))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Governance, 2016. / Most economies today are calling upon their or rather are starting to rely on their Small and Medium business Enterprises to stimulate the economy and also help address issues of unemployment. However it is also believed that even though this maybe the case, most economies still don’t give SMEs enough funding. The underlying public assumption is that all that is needed for SMEs to thrive is access to funding, as such this study sought to investigate the role of financial access in the success of SMEs. The study had intended to use financial ratios as proxies for success, however, the record keeping of the SMEs or lack thereof impeded this intention, so the study measured the success of the enterprise as perceived by the owner. The study sampled SMEs from all for regions of Swaziland, and besides a descriptive analysis that were carried out to examine the utilization of credit by the SMEs. This study also used a statistical model known as the Logit model, to determine the effect that credit access had on the success of the SME and also assess the challenges/barriers that the SMEs faced when trying to access funding. The results of this study deviated from the underlying public assumption, as they showed that an SME owner that had access to funding had reduced odds of success, if anything the results showed that the success of an SME did not entirely depend on the availability of funding, and there were other potent factors that posed as barriers to financial access. / DM2016

Spelling ability is not static; rather, as children age, learning how to encode morphophonologically complex words in conventional ways is motivated by the increasingly complex demands imposed by academic experiences with morphologically complex words. Success requires ongoing integration of phonological (P), orthographic (O) and morphological (M) knowledge. However, current research on the development and assessment of spelling has not sufficiently accounted for the way word features and participant characteristics interact with students' POM knowledge in the spelling of derived words. This study used a linear mixed effects regression approach to provide new insights about how both word characteristics and students' linguistic knowledge affected the application of POM from grades 3-7 in the spelling of derived forms. Spelling data (WIAT-II) were taken from a larger longitudinal study focused on reading development (Garcia et. al., 2010). Eleven words from the WIAT-II with derivational morphology (which included one inflected form with a derived homophone possibility) were analyzed first with the Phonological Orthographic Morphological Analysis of Spelling (POMAS; an unconstrained scoring system) in order to identify linguistic feature errors within misspellings. Next, misspellings were quantified with the POMplexity metric to evaluate the individual and combined influences of phonology (P), orthography (O), and morphology (M) to derivational misspellings over time. A linear mixed effects regression approach evaluated the impact of item-level characteristics (derivational frequency and shifts), participant characteristics (rime, spelling choice and morphological awareness task scores), and time (grade level) on POMplexity scores. Results indicated item-level characteristics, participant characteristics and time significantly predicted variation in P, O, M, and total POMplexity scores. Frequency had a significant impact on scores, with high frequency words resulting in lower POMplexity scores than low frequency words and these effects were most obvious in grades 3 and 4. Slope differences between words suggested that low frequency misspellings resolve more rapidly than high frequency words. Derivational shift was shown to have a significant interaction with time for O, M and Total scores, but not P scores. In all cases, the slopes for derived words with no shift improved more quickly than shift categories. Finally, performance on measures on the measures of linguistic skill correlated to improved scores for the related POMplexity code. These results strongly suggest that the developmental course of learning to spell derivations is not a linear accumulation of POM knowledge, but instead is a recursive process with both general and word-specific knowledge affecting how an individual student produces a derivational spelling at any given point in time. Contributions of word characteristics, such as frequency and number/type of derivational shift, suggest that morphemic features challenge encoding; that is, increased complexity taxes the system's ability to represent both sound and meaning orthographically. Educational and clinical implications will be described.

Controlling for the wide variability in the physical health status of geriatric populations is important as severity of illness is known to both moderate and suppress relationships examined in psychosocial research. The purpose of the present investigation was to develop a uniform, easily administered quantitative index of illness severity, composed of disease-specific scales, that was independent of psychosocial factors and appropriate for use with a geriatric population. As well, the aim was to collect preliminary data on the reliability and validity of the scale. The development of the Severity of Illness-Geriatric (SOI­G) scale involved the adaptation of a previously developed severity of illness instrument Severity of Renal Disease Scale (SORDS). <p>The present investigation involved five programmatically linked studies. Study 1 involved the determination of the items to be included on SOI-G while Study 2 defined the severity criteria for each item. In Study 3, five geriatric specialists scaled each level of each item on the same underlying threat to life scale. There was a high level of initial agreement between the raters supporting the reliability of the severity values. The final scale consisted of 32 items. <p>In Study 4, archival data was collected on 61 patients admitted to the geriatric unit of a rehabilitation hospital. The SOI-G was compared to the Cumulative Illness Rating Scale-Geriatric (CIRS-G) and a global severity rating. <p>SOI-G inter-rater reliability estimates were low (likely due to rater error) but promising. SOI-G demonstrated support for content validity, face validity, and construct validity but evidence for convergent validity was not established. SOI-G scores were sensitive to differences among patients with respect to discharge outcome. The utility of SOI-G as a moderator variable in psychosocial research with the elderly could not be explored in Study 5 due to a limited sample size. <p>It was concluded that the present investigation demonstrated the potential usefulness of SOI-G in psychosocial research with the elderly but further research is needed before definitive conclusions can be made. The SOI-G offers researchers a tool for controlling disease variability that is not measured by psychological tests but must be accounted for in research designs.

Controlling for the wide variability in the physical health status of geriatric populations is important as severity of illness is known to both moderate and suppress relationships examined in psychosocial research. The purpose of the present investigation was to develop a uniform, easily administered quantitative index of illness severity, composed of disease-specific scales, that was independent of psychosocial factors and appropriate for use with a geriatric population. As well, the aim was to collect preliminary data on the reliability and validity of the scale. The development of the Severity of Illness-Geriatric (SOI­G) scale involved the adaptation of a previously developed severity of illness instrument Severity of Renal Disease Scale (SORDS). <p>The present investigation involved five programmatically linked studies. Study 1 involved the determination of the items to be included on SOI-G while Study 2 defined the severity criteria for each item. In Study 3, five geriatric specialists scaled each level of each item on the same underlying threat to life scale. There was a high level of initial agreement between the raters supporting the reliability of the severity values. The final scale consisted of 32 items. <p>In Study 4, archival data was collected on 61 patients admitted to the geriatric unit of a rehabilitation hospital. The SOI-G was compared to the Cumulative Illness Rating Scale-Geriatric (CIRS-G) and a global severity rating. <p>SOI-G inter-rater reliability estimates were low (likely due to rater error) but promising. SOI-G demonstrated support for content validity, face validity, and construct validity but evidence for convergent validity was not established. SOI-G scores were sensitive to differences among patients with respect to discharge outcome. The utility of SOI-G as a moderator variable in psychosocial research with the elderly could not be explored in Study 5 due to a limited sample size. <p>It was concluded that the present investigation demonstrated the potential usefulness of SOI-G in psychosocial research with the elderly but further research is needed before definitive conclusions can be made. The SOI-G offers researchers a tool for controlling disease variability that is not measured by psychological tests but must be accounted for in research designs.

Previous research investigations in the area of spelling development have adopted two approaches, the broad approach and the narrow approach. The broad approach suggests that spelling develops in sequential stages whereas the narrow approach focuses on individual linguistic patterns. However, research findings have revealed that children’s spellings do not exhibit errors pertaining to specifically one stage or reflecting one linguistic element, yet a research void exists in resolving how these two approaches might intermix. This study examined the spelling errors of typically developing children in first through fourth grades (N = 400) to determine the quantitative and qualitative differences in misspellings among grade levels. Each grade level had an equal representation of children (N = 100) and male and female participants. The spelling errors were extracted from two writing samples completed by the children, a narrative and expository sample. In an attempt to combine the broad and narrow approaches, a coding system was designed to evaluate the linguistic category (phonological, orthographic, morphological) and specific features (letter name spelling, vowel error, digraph, etc.) of the spelling errors. The findings revealed a significant interaction between grade level and error type for phonologically-based spelling errors (1 st graders made more errors than 2nd and 4th graders) and a greater number of morphological errors was noted in 4 th vs. 2nd grade. No significant effects were noted for writing genre or gender. Analysis of performance patterns for specific linguistic category errors within and across grade levels revealed that all four grade levels committed the most phonological errors in the PSE (phonological – silent /e/) and PSON (phonological – sonorant clusters) categories. The OLN (orthographic – letter name) and ODI (orthographic – digraph) errors also occurred frequently in all four grades with first graders demonstrating significantly more occurrences of the OLN than ODI error. Morphological findings revealed that first graders made significantly more MINF (morphological – inflection) than MHOM (morphological – homonym) errors and all four grades had significantly more MINF than MCON (morphological – contraction) errors. A qualitative analysis regarding the most frequently misspelled words and most frequently encountered codes was also performed. The clinical and educational implications of these findings are discussed.

Despite being governed by several laws aimed at preventing racial inequality in access to housing and credit resources, the mortgage lending market remains a contributor to racial and place-based disparities in homeownership rates, wealth, and access to high-quality community resources. Scholarship has identified persistent disparities in mortgage loan approval rates and subprime lending between white borrowers and those from other racial and ethnic groups, and between white neighborhoods and neighborhoods with high levels of non-white residents. Against this backdrop, the mortgage lending industry is undergoing rapid, technology-driven changes in risk assessment and application processing. Traditional borrower risk-assessment methods including face-to-face discussions between lenders and applicants and the prominent use of FICO credit scores have been replaced or supplemented by automated decision-making tools at a new generation of institutions known as fintech lenders. Little is known about the relationship between lenders using these new tools and the racial and spatial disparities that have long defined the wider mortgage market. Given the well-documented history of discrimination in lending along with findings of technology-driven racial inequality in other economic sectors, fintech lending’s potential for racial discrimination warrants increased scrutiny. This dissertation compares the lending outcomes of traditional and fintech mortgage lenders in the United States depending on applicant and neighborhood racial characteristics. Using data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, an original dataset classifying lenders as fintech or traditional, and an array of complimentary administrative data sources, it provides an assessment of the salience of race and place in the rates at which mortgage loans from each lender type are approved and assigned subprime terms. Results from a series of regression-based quantitative analyses suggest fintech mortgage lenders, like traditional mortgage lenders, approve and deny loans and distribute subprime credit at disparate rates to white borrowers and neighborhoods relative to nonwhite borrowers and neighborhoods. Findings suggest that policymakers and regulators must increase their oversight of fintech lenders, ensuring that further advances in lending technology do not concretize longstanding racial and spatial disparities.