Customer satisfaction is one of the hot topics also for a successfull Czech car producer ŠKODA AUTO a.s. This diploma thesis titled: Identification of best practices for customer satisfaction at ŠKODA AUTO a.s., analyses customer satisfaction management of sales and evaluates the applicability of proposed improvement process measurements.

Les recommandations de bonne pratique, issues de la médecine des preuves, s’insèrent dans un processus ancien visant à asseoir la légitimité médicale sur la science et se sont déployées en tant qu’instrument politique de rationalisation des pratiques.Comment rencontrent-elles les valeurs professionnelles et l’exercice de la médecine ?La question est traitée dans le cadre de la médecine générale et de l’hypertension artérielle (HTA) dont la mise en recommandations est exemplaire de la construction d’un risque en santé publique.La première partie s’intéresse à l’origine de la médecine des preuves et en quoi ce mouvement est porteur de continuité et de modification dans les relations entre Médecine et État, au sein de la profession, entre médecin et patient.La seconde partie, centrée sur une microsociologie des consultations de patients hypertendus, montre que les recommandations constituent un appui pour le travail médical de prise de conscience par le patient de la réalité pathologique de l’HTA et des risques cardiovasculaires associés. Mais le généraliste inscrit son action dans la durée et, sous influence du patient, négocie et fait des compromis voire déroge aux « bonnes pratiques », considérant que ce qui n’est pas réalisable aujourd’hui le sera demain.Les recommandations sont intégrées dans les pratiques sous forme d’un modèle hybride associant la référence aux données scientifiques et l’adaptation à la singularité de la situation. La figure du patient statistique porté par la médecine des preuves est confrontée à la réalité sociale de l’individu plus ou moins doté d’autonomie et de ressources dont il s’agit pour le médecin d’acquérir la confiance et de la conserver. / Best practice recommendations, stemming from evidence based medicine, are part of a well versed process aiming to claim medical legitimacy based on science and are used as policy tools in practice. How do they relate to professional values, and to the practice of medicine?This question is examined within the framework of recommendations regarding the treatment, control and prevention of arterial hypertension (AH) in general practice which can be said to exemplify the construction of a public health risk.The first part of this work is centred on the origins of evidence based medicine, and the way in which it brings continuity as well as change to the relationships between: medical professionals; the institution of medicine and the state; doctors and patients.The second part, a microsociological study of GP consultations with hypertensive patients, shows that recommendations are used to reinforce the doctor’s efforts to increase patients’ awareness of AH and the ensuing cardiovascular risks. However, GPs use their influence over a long time period and, influenced by their patients, they negotiate, compromise and even disregard some of the best practice recommendations, considering that what may not be achievable in the present, may be achievable in the long term. Recommendations are therefore used in practice in hybrid form, where science is merged with an adaptation to each unique situation. The ‘average patient’ as the basic unit of evidence based medicine is opposed with the social reality of an individual with a certain level of autonomy and resources whose trust the doctor needs to gain and maintain.

Although Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have found a niche in numerous applications, they are constrained by numerous factors. One of these important factors is security in WSNs. There are various types of security attacks that WSNs are susceptible to. The focus of this study is centred on Sybil attacks, a denial of service attack. In this type of attack, rogue nodes impersonate valid nodes by falsely claiming to possess authentic identities, thereby rendering numerous core WSN operations ineffective. The diverse nature of existing solutions poses a difficult problem for system engineers wanting to employ a best fit countermeasure. This problem is the largely unanswered question posed to all system engineers and developers alike whose goal is to design/develop a secure WSN. Resolving this dilemma proves to be quite a fascinating task, since there are numerous factors to consider and more especially one cannot assume that every application is affected by all identified factors. A framework methodology presented in this study addresses the abovementioned challenges by evaluating countermeasure effectiveness based on theoretical and practical security factors. Furthermore, a process is outlined to determine the application’s engineering requirements and the framework also suggests what security components the system engineer ought to incorporate into the application, depending on the application’s risk profile. The framework then numerically aligns these considerations, ensuring an accurate and fairly unbiased best fit countermeasure selection. Although the framework concentrates on Sybil countermeasures, the methodology can be applied to other classes of countermeasures since it answers the question of how to objectively study and compare security mechanisms that are both diverse and intended for different application environments. The report documents the design and development of a comparative framework that can be used to evaluate countermeasures against Sybil attacks in wireless sensor networks based on various criteria that will be discussed in detail. This report looks briefly at the aims and description of the research. Following this, a literature survey on the body of knowledge concerning WSN security and a discussion on the proposed methodology of a specific design approach are given. Assumptions and a short list of factors that were considered are then described. Metrics, the taxonomy for WSN countermeasures, the framework and a formal model are developed. Risk analysis and the best fit methodology are also discussed. Finally, the results and recommendations are shown for the research, after which the document is concluded. / Dissertation (MEng)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering / unrestricted

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The expansion of urban and suburban areas is a world-wide phenomena. One product of this development is a dramatic increase in impermeable surfaces and a consequent increase in stormwater runoff. Bioretention cells are one best management practice frequently used to mitigate the environmental impacts of urban stormwater runoff. To ensure that a bioretention cell will continue to perform adequately in the long term, it is imperative that the environmental conditions it will experience and their effect on its performance through time are considered during its design. Although bioretention cells are frequently used for stormwater management, very few quantitative data exist on how they perform through time and in varied physical environments. In regions with seasonal freeze-thaw cycles, it is important to understand the effects of freeze-thaw cycles on the infiltration rate of bioretention cell soil mixtures so that the integrity of the design will not be compromised by seasonal change. This project uses laboratory tests to investigate the effects of freeze-thaw cycles and sediment input on the infiltration capacity of three different bioretention cell soil mixtures. These results will provide an analog for long-term changes in bioretention cell infiltration rates due to freeze-thaw cycles, providing critical data on which soil mixture would be best implemented in geographic regions susceptible to freeze-thaw activity. Furthermore these results will inform design standards for bioretention cells to ensure their long-term performance.

This thesis presents three novel contributions to the application as well as development of ranking and selection procedures. Ranking and selection is an important topic in the discrete event simulation literature concerned with the use of statistical approaches to select the best or set of best systems from a set of simulated alternatives. Ranking and selection is comprised of three different approaches: subset selection, indifference zone selection, and multiple comparisons. The methodology addressed in this thesis focuses primarily on the first two approaches: subset selection and indifference zone selection. Our first contribution regards the application of existing ranking and selection procedures to an important body of literature known as system reliability design. If we are capable of modeling a system via a network of arcs and nodes, then the difficult problem of determining the most reliable network configuration, given a set of design constraints, is an optimization problem that we refer to as the network reliability design problem. In this thesis, we first present a novel solution approach for one type of network reliability design optimization problem where total enumeration of the solution space is feasible and desirable. This approach focuses on improving the efficiency of the evaluation of system reliabilities as well as quantifying the probability of correctly selecting the true best design based on the estimation of the expected system reliabilities through the use of ranking and selection procedures, both of which are novel ideas in the system reliability design literature. Altogether, this method eliminates the guess work that was previously associated with this design problem and maintains significant runtime improvements over the existing methodology. Our second contribution regards the development of a new optimization framework for the network reliability design problem that is applicable to any topological and terminal configuration as well as solution sets of any sizes. This framework focuses on improving the efficiency of the evaluation and comparison of system reliabilities, while providing a more robust performance and user-friendly procedure in terms of the input parameter level selection. This is accomplished through the introduction of two novel statistical sampling procedures based on the concepts of ranking and selection: Sequential Selection of the Best Subset and Duplicate Generation. Altogether, this framework achieves the same convergence and solution quality as the baseline cross-entropy approach, but achieves runtime and sample size improvements on the order of 450% to 1500% over the example networks tested. Our final contribution regards the development and extension of the general ranking and selection literature with novel procedures for the problem concerned with the selection of the -best systems, where system means and variances are unknown and potentially unequal. We present three new ranking and selection procedures: a subset selection procedure, an indifference zone selection procedure, and a combined two stage subset selection and indifference zone selection procedure. All procedures are backed by proofs of the theoretical guarantees as well as empirical results on the probability of correct selection. We also investigate the effect of various parameters on each procedure's overall performance.

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Magister Artium (Sport, Recreation and Exercise Science) - MA(SRES) / Football around the globe has been used as a vehicle for youth development initiatives. Youth development programmes foster social change in communities and provide an ideal development context that often results in active sport participation. In South Africa, there are a number of youth development programmes that not only use football, but also other sporting codes to implement and create sustainable youth development programmes. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore best practices in youth development programmes of selected football academies in the Western Cape

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Around the world, many forested areas have been and continue to be cleared for expanding agriculture. Canada’s remaining forested lands account for around 9% of the world’s forest cover. Although only a fraction is lost to deforestation annually (0.02%, 2013), Statistics Canada reports that conversion to agriculture is the most significant driver of forest loss. As climate changes and agricultural demand expands, this trend is expected to continue, and ecosystems will continue to be impacted by resulting habitat loss and hydrological changes that can impact infrastructure and communities. Additionally, changes to sediment and nutrient loadings can harm ecosystems and affect the downstream usability of freshwater supplies. The impact of increased sediment and nutrient concentrations in freshwater systems has been extensively documented in the literature. In some extreme cases, it can lead to anoxic ‘dead zones’ in riverine, lacustrine, and marine habitats. Many river systems in Canada have shown elevated nutrient levels in recent years, often tied to the expansion of agricultural land use and destruction of natural forests to increasing nutrient levels in downstream rivers, lakes, and oceans. This study applies numerical modelling to quantify the influence of forest loss, agricultural expansion and the application of best management practices (BMPs) on water quality and quantity in the South Nation Watershed in eastern Ontario, Canada. The land use in the watershed is mainly agricultural (over 60%) with forest (27%) that is unevenly distributed in the basin. Aerial photography surveys from 2008 and 2014 show a steady decline in forest cover. Recent water quality monitoring has shown nutrient concentrations at or above Canadian water quality standards in many parts of the basin. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was used to model the watershed because of its capacity to simulate comprehensive land management scenarios and assess their impact on a variety of water quantity and parameters quickly and effectively. The work was performed in four steps: 1. Recent land use configurations (2008-2014) in the watershed were acquired, and simplified land use projections based on the direct substitution of cropland for forest land were developed. 2. A numerical model was calibrated and validated for the initial land use scenario. 3. These land use scenarios, as well as more hypothetical scenarios representing more extensive deforestation and reforestation, were used as the basis for hydrological modelling using 31 years of real-world meteorological observations. 4. Idealized vegetated filter strips (VFSs) and grassed waterways (GWWs) were added to the cropped land packages to study the potential of these practices to contribute to the management of water quality. Analysis of the 33 output datasets derived from simulations of the suite of land use scenarios with and without VFSs and GWWs leads to several conclusions, while also raising some questions. Generally, forests significantly reduce sediment, nitrate and phosphorus outputs to streams as well as slightly reducing water yield compared to cropped areas due to an increase in surface runoff, groundwater and lateral flow combined with the absence of tile drainage. Across subbasins, this translates to significant reductions in sediment, nitrate and total phosphorus loadings entering the river reaches and a slight increase in water yield. At the basin outlet near Plantagenet, Ontario, streamflow and sediment loading show to have little sensitivity to changes in forest and crop cover, while increased forest cover leads to significantly reduced nutrient loadings, particularly in late spring and early winter. It is clear from this work that continued deforestation will continue to drive further nutrient enrichment in the South Nation River, while VFSs seems to have a significant potential for offsetting some of this enrichment. Streamflow and sediment loadings, however, are not significantly impacted by foreseeable deforestation. The influence of land use change and BMPs was much more significant in the runoff than in exports from the basin, suggesting there would be value in further examination of water quality and quantity at a higher spatial density to expand on assumptions of in-stream processes made here.