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<p>A survey of farmers was conducted to determine the extent of cost-share and non-costshare BMP implementation and to evaluate the impact of socio-economic variables of the adoption of BMPs in Virginia's Chesapeake Bay drainage basin. Farmers in 67 counties in Virginia were randomly selected using VirGIS land use data and GRASS 4.1. All of the counties included in the study had at least 90 percent of their total land in the Chesapeake Bay drainage basin. Surveys were mailed to approximately 5,850 farm operators and 1,377 responses were returned, with approximately 1,099 estimated to farm in the Chesapeake Bay basin.</p> <p> A concern for pollution in the Chesapeake Bay was evident by farmers throughout the Bay basin, as 80 percent of the respondents indicated being concerned about water pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. However, only 33 percent believed that their farm contributed to water quality problems. The most often indicated perceived causes of pollution were runoff from urban or paved areas, industrial waste or factory discharge, sewer systems, and litter or garbage.</p> / Master of Science

In the context of the high unemployment and poverty rates in South Africa, this research was undertaken to explore the best practices of successful international public works programmes (PWPs) around the world. The aim was to develop a strategy for poverty alleviation and job creation with respect to the infrastructure sector of the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) in South Africa. The purpose of the EPWP is to make the unemployed more employable through offering beneficiaries temporary employment and training opportunities. In the literature review, the strategy for poverty alleviation and job creation was formulated in terms of the design elements and implementation aspects of PWPs. This strategy was then used to evaluate the infrastructure sector of the EPWP. The data collection took the form of interviews with key informants who are directly involved with the infrastructure sector of the EPWP. The nature of the enquiry was qualitative, with narrative and content analysis used to explore the data. The research found that, overall, the design elements and the implementation aspects of the infrastructure sector of the EPWP are not appropriate for enabling the unemployed to become more employable on a large scale. Based on the international best practices, recommendations were then put forward as improvements which would enable the infrastructure sector of the EPWP to achieve its objectives more effectively. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

MAAS / Department of Developmental Studies

Legal rules regarding unaccompanied refugee children in the European Union (EU) are closely related to the refugee crisis and the community’s asylum policy. This study aims to investigate how the best interests of the unaccompanied refugee child is being ensured under EU law. Dworkin’s theory and various methods are used to answer the research question. Firstly, the focus is, with the use of the chosen theoretical framework and international legal method, on the interpretation of the principle of “the best interests of the child”. Secondly, the thesis studies how this principle is reflected in the EU law in relation to unaccompanied refugee children, by applying EU legal method. This study shows, on the one hand, that there are a few anomalies in the EU legislation in the area of asylum that arise with regard to the best interests of the unaccompanied refugee child. It is argued that the European Union’s restrictive asylum legislation leads to conflicts between the international law and the EU law. On the other hand, the thesis demonstrates that the EU law has continuously improved, and the international child rights principle was adopted in it. It will be shown in this study that despite the common asylum policy and the community acquis, the EU Member States’ domestic law enables different assessments of the best interests of the unaccompanied child. The solution of normative conflicts is also in the hands of the EU countries, since the status determination of refugees and the assessment of the child’s best interests are carried out by the EU Member States. This will be confirmed by analysing the most important applicable EU laws, particularly the Proposal for a Regulation establishing a Union Resettlement Framework. The Proposal is chosen for discussion, because this is an essential part of the Common European Asylum System and is consistent with two packages of legislative proposals to reform it. The conclusion of this thesis is that the best interests principle is guaranteed in the EU law, but it is not guaranteed in the spirit of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and further improvements are needed in the EU legal framework.

Orthology detection is an important task within the context of genome an- notation, gene nomenclature, and the understanding of gene evolution. With the rapidly accelerating pace at which new genomes become available, highly efficient methods are urgently required. As demonstrated in a large body of literature, reciprocal best match (RBH) methods are reasonably accurate and scale to large data sets. Nevertheless, they are far from perfect and prone to both, false positive and false negative, orthology calls. This work gives a complete characterization of best match as well as reciprocal best match graphs (BMGs and RBMGs) that arise at the first step of RBH methods. While BMGs as well as RBMGs with at most three species can be recognized in polynomial time, RBMGs with more than three species have a surprisingly complicated structure and it remains an open problem whether there exist polynomial time algorithms for the recognition of these RBMGs. In contrast to RBMGs, for which many (often mutually inconsistent) least re- solved trees may exist, there is a unique least resolved tree for BMGs. This tree is a homeomorphic image of the true, but typically unknown, gene tree. Furthermore, in the absence of horizontal gene transfer (HGT), the reciprocal best match graph contains the orthology relation suggesting that RBMGs can only contain false positive but no false negative orthology assignments. Simu- lation scenarios reveal that so-called good quartets, a certain graph pattern on four vertices in BMGs, can be used to successfully identify almost all false pos- itive edges in RBMGs. Together with the existence of a unique least resolved tree, this suggests that BMGs contain a lot of valuable information for orthol- ogy inference that would be lost by exclusively considering RBMGs. These insights motivate to include additional BMG and RBMG editing steps in or- thology detection pipelines based on the presented theoretical insights. Moreover, a workflow is introduced to infer best matches from sequence data by retrieving quartet structures from local information instead of reconstructing the whole gene tree. A crucial prerequisite for this pipeline is the choice of suitable outgroups. However, the empirical simulations also reveal that HGT events cause strong deviations of the orthology relation from the RBMG as well as good quartets that are no longer associated with false positive orthologs, suggesting the need for further investigation of the xenology relation. The directed Fitch’s xenology relation is characterized in terms of forbidden 3-vertex subgraphs and moreover, a polynomial time algorithm for the recog- nition and the reconstruction of a unique least resolved tree is presented. The undirected Fitch relation, in contrast, is shown to be a complete multipartite graph, which does not provide any interesting phylogenetic information. In summary, the results of this work can be used to develop new methods for inferring orthology, paralogy, and HGT. They promise major improvements in the accuracy and the computational performance of RBH-based approaches.

Intercountry adoption Abstract The theme of this masters thesis is legal regulation of intercountry adoption. This area of law is current and very severe, because it results in permanent status change for number of people, when one of them is a child, for which it is necessary to provide special protection. Although intercountry adoption can be in certain cases the best solution for particular child, this type of child care brings many risks, for example intercountry abduction or child trafficking. Due to these reasons, it is necessary to correctly to set rules for realisation of intercountry adoption to minimalise these risks, follow the best interest of the child and at the same time to apply this type of child care in a subsidiary way, therefore in case there is not possible to find appropriate family for certain child in its state of origin. The goal of my masters thesis is complex introduction of legal matters of intercountry adoption. The thesis is divided into five chapters, which are further divided into subsections. The first chapter focuses on development of adoption in general, its development from roman law roots to its current regulation in the civil code. Next chapter aims to the historical development of the intercountry adoption and causes for its expansion. Further there are analysed...

6 ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH The International Adoption has been introduced to the Czech law in a greater extent, in 2000, when the Czech Republic acceded to the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of intercountry Adoptions (1993). The Czech Republic currently provides a relatively large number of children each year for intercountry adoption to another contracting state. Nonetheless, no complex scientific publication on intercountry adoption does not exist in the Czech Republic so far, as most of the authors of expert's articles, textbooks or commentaries continue to perceive the intercountry adoption only as a marginal complement to adoption on national basis. International adoption pursues the same objective as adoption on national, namely, to find suitable new parents for the child, always in accordance with the child's best interests. However, international adoption is much more complex, as cooperation between several administrative authorities in the Czech Republic is not sufficient to effectively protect the rights and interests of the adopted child, but it is necessary to ensure mutual cooperation between administrative authorities in two sovereign states. This thesis contains a brief explanation of the institute of intercountry adoption, and its legal regulation,...

Academic and Clinical Partnerships have the potential to positively impact student learning and outcomes and are part of the recommendations from PTE21 study. As academic and clinical partnerships move forward to design and implement changes, preparing the next generation of physical therapists, both process and outcome evaluations must be incorporated in the planning. This interactive session will explore an example for working together in partnership between hospital and classroom. This example will focus on a joint collaboration with an academic and clinical partnership developing a clinical pathway at the hospital in conjunction with development of a specialty pediatrics course surrounding NICU and prematurity. A combination of lecture and small group discussion will be used for both entry-level and post-professional training and attendees will leave with concrete examples of how to implement in their communities.

The project was aimed at describing the mixing phenomena relevant for both safety analysis, particularly in steam line break and boron dilution scenarios, and mixing phenomena of interest for economical operation and the structural integrity. Measurement data from a set of mixing experiments, gained by using advanced measurement techniques with enhanced resolution in time and space help to improve the basic understanding of turbulent mixing and to provide data for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code validation. Slug mixing tests simulating the start-up of the first main circulation pump are performed with two 1:5 scaled facilities: The Rossendorf coolant mixing model ROCOM and the VATTENFALL test facility, modelling a German Konvoi type and a Westinghouse type three-loop PWR, respectively. Additional data on slug mixing in a VVER-1000 type reactor gained at a 1:5 scaled metal mock-up at EDO Gidropress are provided. Experimental results on mixing of fluids with density differences obtained at ROCOM and the FORTUM PTS test facility are made available. Concerning mixing phenomena of interest for operational issues and thermal fatigue, flow distribution data available from commissioning tests (Sizewell-B for PWRs, Loviisa and Paks for VVERs) are used together with the data from the ROCOM facility as a basis for the flow distribution studies. The test matrix on flow distribution and steady state mixing performed at ROCOM comprises experiments with various combinations of running pumps and various mass flow rates in the working loops. Computational fluid dynamics calculations are accomplished for selected experiments with two different CFD codes (CFX-5, FLUENT). Best practice guidelines (BPG) are applied in all CFD work when choosing computational grid, time step, turbulence models, modelling of internal geometry, boundary conditions, numerical schemes and convergence criteria. The BPG contain a set of systematic procedures for quantifying and reducing numerical errors. The knowledge of these numerical errors is a prerequisite for the proper judgement of model errors. The strategy of code validation based on the BPG and a matrix of CFD code validation calculations have been elaborated. Besides of the benchmark cases, additional experiments were calculated by new partners and observers, joining the project later. Based on the "best practice solutions", conclusions on the applicability of CFD for turbulent mixing problems in PWR were drawn and recommendations on CFD modelling were given. The high importance of proper grid generation was outlined. In general, second order discretization schemes should be used to minimise numerical diffusion. First order schemes can provide physically wrong results. With optimised "production meshes" reasonable results were obtained, but due to the complex geometry of the flow domains, no fully grid independent solutions were achieved. Therefore, with respect to turbulence models, no final conclusions can be given. However, first order turbulence models like K-e or SST K-w are suitable for momentum driven slug mixing. For buoyancy driven mixing (PTS scenarios), Reynolds stress models provide better results.