This research interrogates Bennie van der Walt’s third way as a solution for the “divided soul” of the African people - a divided soul that creates a false dilemma. This division is the creation of political colonialism and neo-colonialism, which impacts negatively on the African socio-economic and political structure. The myth of the superiority of Western culture propagates this vice. Van der Walt’s clarification of the concepts of a world view and culture are depicted in chapter 1. He wrestles with the complexity of culture and world view; showing that a world view is deeply religious and pre-scientific and shapes culture. He also shows how religion, world view and culture relate to one another. In chapter 2 Van der Walt’s comparison and evaluation of the African and Western cultures and their world views is reconstructed. It is pointed out that Van der Walt notices fundamental differences between the two cultures, and that he warns of difficulties in the reconstruction endeavour. He then identifies the underlying presuppositions of both the African and Western cultures. Chapter 3 discusses Van der Walt’s articulation of the impact of the world view clash between African and Western cultures on African society. This impact is felt in the socio-economic-political and educational environment. He considers the Western derogatory approach towards African culture and African reactions towards it. Van der Walt rejects especially ethnocentric approaches to African culture and also the African ethnocentric reaction. In chapter 4, the fundamentals of Van der Walt’s third way is enunciated. He notes that his views are founded on Scripture, acknowledgement of sin and redemption through Christ, the sustaining nature of God’s grace and the recognition of trans-cultural dialogue and non-reductionists ontology. Chapter 5 critically analyses Van der Walt third way. Major strengths and weaknesses of Van der Walt third way are identified. Solutions to Van der Walt’s weak points are recommended for his consideration. Finally, chapter 6 articulates that Van der Walt’s third way aimed to prevent any future damage to African culture as it counters a reductionist ontology prevalent in shaping Africa by propagating a non-reductionist ontology. This ensures that Africa’s problem of a false dilemma, divided soul, and negative ethnocentrism is resolved. / MA (Philosophy), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

This research interrogates Bennie van der Walt’s third way as a solution for the “divided soul” of the African people - a divided soul that creates a false dilemma. This division is the creation of political colonialism and neo-colonialism, which impacts negatively on the African socio-economic and political structure. The myth of the superiority of Western culture propagates this vice. Van der Walt’s clarification of the concepts of a world view and culture are depicted in chapter 1. He wrestles with the complexity of culture and world view; showing that a world view is deeply religious and pre-scientific and shapes culture. He also shows how religion, world view and culture relate to one another. In chapter 2 Van der Walt’s comparison and evaluation of the African and Western cultures and their world views is reconstructed. It is pointed out that Van der Walt notices fundamental differences between the two cultures, and that he warns of difficulties in the reconstruction endeavour. He then identifies the underlying presuppositions of both the African and Western cultures. Chapter 3 discusses Van der Walt’s articulation of the impact of the world view clash between African and Western cultures on African society. This impact is felt in the socio-economic-political and educational environment. He considers the Western derogatory approach towards African culture and African reactions towards it. Van der Walt rejects especially ethnocentric approaches to African culture and also the African ethnocentric reaction. In chapter 4, the fundamentals of Van der Walt’s third way is enunciated. He notes that his views are founded on Scripture, acknowledgement of sin and redemption through Christ, the sustaining nature of God’s grace and the recognition of trans-cultural dialogue and non-reductionists ontology. Chapter 5 critically analyses Van der Walt third way. Major strengths and weaknesses of Van der Walt third way are identified. Solutions to Van der Walt’s weak points are recommended for his consideration. Finally, chapter 6 articulates that Van der Walt’s third way aimed to prevent any future damage to African culture as it counters a reductionist ontology prevalent in shaping Africa by propagating a non-reductionist ontology. This ensures that Africa’s problem of a false dilemma, divided soul, and negative ethnocentrism is resolved. / MA (Philosophy), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Three-dimensional technology, more commonly referred to as 3D technology, has revolutionised many fields including entertainment, medicine, and communications to name a few. In addition to 3D films, games, and sports channels, 3D perception has made tele-medicine a reality. By the year 2015, 30% of the all HD panels at home will be 3D enabled, predicted by consumer electronics manufacturers. Stereoscopic cameras, a comparatively mature technology compared to other 3D systems, are now being used by ordinary citizens to produce 3D content and share at a click of a button just like they do with the 2D counterparts via sites like YouTube. But technical challenges still exist, including with autostereoscopic multiview displays. 3D content requires many complex considerations--including how to represent it, and deciphering what is the best compression format--when considering transmission or storage, because of its increased amount of data. Any decision must be taken in the light of the available bandwidth or storage capacity, quality and user expectations. Free viewpoint navigation also remains partly unsolved. The most pressing issue getting in the way of widespread uptake of consumer 3D systems is the ability to deliver 3D content to heterogeneous consumer displays over the heterogeneous networks. Optimising 3D video communication solutions must consider the entire pipeline, starting with optimisation at the video source to the end display and transmission optimisation. Multi-view offers the most compelling solution for 3D videos with motion parallax and freedom from wearing headgear for 3D video perception. Optimising multi-view video for delivery and display could increase the demand for true 3D in the consumer market. This thesis focuses on an end-to-end quality optimisation in 3D video communication/transmission, offering solutions for optimisation at the compression, transmission, and decoder levels.

Key to achieving more efficient machine intelligence is the capability to analysing and understanding data across different views - which can be camera views or modality views (such as visual and textual). One generic learning paradigm for automated understanding data from different views called cross-view learning which includes cross-view matching, cross-view fusion and cross-view generation. Specifically, this thesis investigates two of them, cross-view matching and cross-view generation, by developing new methods for addressing the following specific computer vision problems. The first problem is cross-view matching for person re-identification which a person is captured by multiple non-overlapping camera views, the objective is to match him/her across views among a large number of imposters. Typically a person's appearance is represented using features of thousands of dimensions, whilst only hundreds of training samples are available due to the difficulties in collecting matched training samples. With the number of training samples much smaller than the feature dimension, the existing methods thus face the classic small sample size (SSS) problem and have to resort to dimensionality reduction techniques and/or matrix regularisation, which lead to loss of discriminative power for cross-view matching. To that end, this thesis proposes to overcome the SSS problem in subspace learning by matching cross-view data in a discriminative null space of the training data. The second problem is cross-view matching for zero-shot learning where data are drawn from different modalities each for a different view (e.g. visual or textual), versus single-modal data considered in the first problem. This is inherently more challenging as the gap between different views becomes larger. Specifically, the zero-shot learning problem can be solved if the visual representation/view of the data (object) and its textual view are matched. Moreover, it requires learning a joint embedding space where different view data can be projected to for nearest neighbour search. This thesis argues that the key to make zero-shot learning models succeed is to choose the right embedding space. Different from most existing zero-shot learning models utilising a textual or an intermediate space as the embedding space for achieving crossview matching, the proposed method uniquely explores the visual space as the embedding space. This thesis finds that in the visual space, the subsequent nearest neighbour search would suffer much less from the hubness problem and thus become more effective. Moreover, a natural mechanism for multiple textual modalities optimised jointly in an end-to-end manner in this model demonstrates significant advantages over existing methods. The last problem is cross-view generation for image captioning which aims to automatically generate textual sentences from visual images. Most existing image captioning studies are limited to investigate variants of deep learning-based image encoders, improving the inputs for the subsequent deep sentence decoders. Existing methods have two limitations: (i) They are trained to maximise the likelihood of each ground-truth word given the previous ground-truth words and the image, termed Teacher-Forcing. This strategy may cause a mismatch between training and testing since at test-time the model uses the previously generated words from the model distribution to predict the next word. This exposure bias can result in error accumulation in sentence generation during test time, since the model has never been exposed to its own predictions. (ii) The training supervision metric, such as the widely used cross entropy loss, is different from the evaluation metrics at test time. In other words, the model is not directly optimised towards the task expectation. This learned model is therefore suboptimal. One main underlying reason responsible is that the evaluation metrics are non-differentiable and therefore much harder to be optimised against. This thesis overcomes the problems as above by exploring the reinforcement learning idea. Specifically, a novel actor-critic based learning approach is formulated to directly maximise the reward - the actual Natural Language Processing quality metrics of interest. As compared to existing reinforcement learning based captioning models, the new method has the unique advantage of a per-token advantage and value computation is enabled leading to better model training.

Community colleges serve the most diverse student populations in higher education. They consist of non-traditional, part-time, older, intermittent, and mobile students of different races, ethnic backgrounds, language preferences, physical and mental abilities, and learning style preferences. Students who are academically challenged may have diverse learning characteristics that are not compatible with the more traditional approaches to the delivery of instruction. With this need come new ways of solving the dilemma, such as Computer-aided Instruction (CAI). This case study investigated the use of CAI as a laboratory component of college-level biology in a small, rural community college setting. The intent was to begin to fill a void that seems to exist in the literature regarding the role of the faculty in the development and use of CAI. In particular, the investigator was seeking to understand the practice and its effectiveness, especially in helping the under prepared student. The case study approach was chosen to examine a specific phenomenon within a single institution. Ethnographic techniques, such as interviewing, documentary analysis, life's experiences, and participant observations were used to collect data about the phenomena being studied. Results showed that the faculty was primarily self-motivated and self-taught in their use of CAI as a teaching and learning tool. The importance of faculty leadership and collegiality was evident. Findings showed the faculty confident that expectations of helping students who have difficulties with mathematical concepts have been met and that CAI is becoming the most valuable of learning tools. In a traditional college classroom, or practice, time is the constant (semesters) and competence is the variable. In the CAI laboratory time became the variable and competence the constant. The use of CAI also eliminated hazardous chemicals that were routinely used in the more traditional lab. Outcomes showed that annual savings from operations were realized after the initial capital investment for computer hardware and software were made. / Graduation date: 1998

The multiple authorship view for film is the claim that multiple authors exist for almost any given film. This view is a recent development in opposition to the longstanding single authorship view which holds that there is only one author for every film, usually the director. One of the most often-cited reasons in support of the multiple authorship claim is that multiple authorship views more successfully explain the following fact about filmmaking better than single authorship views: filmmakers’ intentions sometimes conflict with each other during the production of a film. However, since multiple authorship views cannot adequately explain how a single filmic utterance can result from conflicting intentions, I want to argue that the single authorship view should be reinstated in those special cases where two or more agents are involved in the production of a filmic utterance and where the intentions of those agents are incompatible.

ABSTRACT Title: Influence of Internal and External Factors on Expansion Strategy-Swedish Cleantech Subsidiaries in the US Authors: Jungmin Choi, Maria Mogyoro Purpose The purpose is to contribute to the knowledge regarding internal and external factors‟ influence on the expansion strategy of a foreign subsidiary in a growing market. Design/Methodology/Approach Originating from the resource-based view and industrial organization view literature, an analysis model is developed. The model shows influences of internal and external factors on a subsidiary‟s expansion strategy. Propositions were formulated based on the analysis model and five case studies of Swedish clean technology subsidiaries operating in the US were compiled. Findings This study found that high business relatedness between a subsidiary and parent firm are positively associated with a broad market scope and differentiation strategy. Secondly, international experience is positively associated with a differentiation strategy. The study also found that perceived competition is positively associated with a broad market scope and perceived low competition influences a narrow product/market scope. Finally, perceived barriers positively impact a differentiation strategy. Implications This study provides evidence that both internal and external factors have an influence on a subsidiary‟s expansion strategy. The study also showed that there were linkages among factors. For example there were indications that external factor such as competition affects business relatedness. Hence, a revised model was developed demonstrating those relationships. For managers this research has importance since it has been shown that managers need to consider both the external and internal factors when they formulate strategy. Originality/value By integrating insights from the resource-based view and industrial organization view literature, this thesis develops a unique analysis model where factors from both schools are used to study expansion strategies of subsidiary firms in a growing market.

With the significant progress of information system, information technique has been the essential surviving key to a business. Enterprise adopts various information systems so as to be able to aware of the ever-changing environments coming from either internally or externally and still maintain stable and reliable management mechanism. Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) has been widely applied to the integration of companies¡¦ internal processing systems. Nevertheless, focusing too much on either structure view, or process view, or isolated structure-process views always hinds the success of implementing an ERP within a company. Consequently, to be classified as a blue ocean enterprise, this research urges companies describe ERP with Distribution ERP Architecture Model (DERPAM), hence structure-process-integration constructing distribution ERP systems. In such case, combination of 80% distribution ERP and 20% core competence of each unique company becomes highly achievable. Outstandingly, DERPAM helps companies derive an optimized distribution ERP.

In this thesis, real time image rendering for hand held devices is studied according to user&rsquo / s view point choice and using image frames with corresponding depth maps obtained from 2 different cameras, of which positions on coordinate system is known. User&rsquo / s view point choice is restricted to the area between right, and left cameras. Occlusion handling methods for image rendering systems is explored and discussed together with frame enhancement techniques. Median filtering is studied for multicolor image frames and post processing methods are discussed for image enhancement at the end of rendering algorithm. In this thesis, OMAP3530 microprocessor is used as the main processor which processes suggested rendering algorithm with occlusion handling and frame enhancement. proposed algorithms are implemented on DSP core and ARM cores of OMAP3530 separately and their performances are evaluated through experiments. Embedded Linux (Kernel-2.6.22) is run as the operating system for applications. Driver usage together with devices for Linux embedded operating system is explored and studied. 3 boards are used for the realization of proposed system. OMAP35x EVM board from Mistral Solutions Company is used for processor utilization, high resolution LCD utilization, system monitoring, user interface and communication purposes. Two daughter cards are designed for user view point determination. First daughter card handles communication process with EVM board and calculates view point according to input from second daughter card with single axis response GYRO sensor (ADIS16060). Spartan&reg / -3A DSP FPGA family is utilized in this system for view point determination. DSP slices that are hardly present inside gate arrays of this FPGA family are utilized and their performance is studied. Asynchronous memory interface, i2c bus interface, SPI interface are studied and implemented on FPGA.

The electric arc furnace steelmakers produce steel across wide ranging sizes and different quality levels. The method of using electric arc for melting is an important process to produce steel from iron or scraps. The diversity of products and markets makes the steelmakers to operate within a large number of constraints of limited enterprise resources, so the electric arc furnace manufacturing system faces problems to integrate the enterprise resource planning system with the manufacturing execution system. The international automation society has come out a solution with an international standard, also known as ISA-95 aimed to help manufacturing industries such as electric arc furnace steelmakers, for the integration of enterprises and control systems. However, ISA-95 only emphasizes on the integration of enterprises and control systems, but does not provide a whole picture of the entire system. This research utilizes the tool of system architecture to develop the architecture-oriented electric arc furnace manufacturing system model, abbreviated as AOEAFMSM, to illustrate coherently the structure view and the behavior view of the electric arc furnace manufacturing system. Furthermore, AOEAFFMSM is able to fully describe many other views of the electric arc furnace manufacturing system. This capability satisfies everybody¡¦s need for capturing different views of the system. Consequentially, AOEAFFMSM simplifies the software development and reduces many communication difficulties among system developers and customers. In modeling the electric arc furnace manufacturing system model, AOEAFFMSM is superior to ISA-95.