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Radio frequency identification, RFID is a technology that is used in many fields including locks. The unlimited access to the reader and the transponder has resulted in severe security weaknesses and made it possible to apply different attacks. To classify door locks as secure they must at least fulfil two main criteria: the first is the use of a challenge-response authentication protocol and the second is to deploy sophisticated and secure algorithms. MiFare classic and KeeLoq are two widely applied technologies that are still in use in many security critical applications and are considered to be secure but which have been broken by cryptanalysis and with modest efforts and cost. How secure a certain solution is depends on how expensive it is to buy the equipment that can break the system and reveal the secret key and how secure a lock should be depends on the value of what it is protecting. The dropping price of powerful computers and the availability of security related information on the web will lead to an increase of the number of attacks on different systems. By the time this thesis is published those locks evaluated are not secure enough, to overcome the security shortage some improvements have to be made such as: the use of sophisticated algorithms, the use of longer key of at least 128-bit, the use of non-deterministic random number generators and the use of pure hardware solutions both in the receiver and the transmitter to reduce leakage.

Magister Public Health - MPH / Mycobacterium Tuberculosis (MTB) is an endemic disease in Nigeria. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the incidence rate for all forms of Tuberculosis at 322 per 100,000 population in Nigeria in 2014 (WHO, 2015). This figure places Nigeria fourth among the 22-high burden countries in the world after India, Indonesia and China. These 22 countries have been prioritized for intensified Tuberculosis (TB) control at the global level, and together they accounted for over 82% of all estimated forms of Tuberculosis the world over in 2014 (WHO, 2014). The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) estimates the Osun state Tuberculosis Case Notification Rate for all forms of TB to be 54 per 100,000 (USAID, 2014). Osun state also has a total of 30 Local Government Areas (LGAs) with 30 TB and Leprosy Supervisors (TBLS) overseeing TB control at local government level. Osun state TB, Leprosy and Buruli Ulcer programme was established in 1993 and currently comprises of 218 health centres implementing the DOTS (Directly Observed Therapy Short-course) strategy and 55 Acid Fast Bacilli (AFB) diagnostic microscopy centres.

This study gives an overview of why violence is applied so often in RPGs. It features a breakdown of the RPG-genre and reflects upon how violence is commonly used to create challenge in a game. The study will also bring attention to the psychology of rewards and discuss how game mechanics can encourage players to act in the most rewarding way. The study also conducts a research by creating an artefact and qualitative interviews to test the research question; is it the challenge or the violence itself that is the determining factor for conflict resolution in RPGs? This research concludes that there are several factors that influence the player’s decision making outside when choosing either a challenging or a violent path. Factors such as a narrative, character representation and the aspect of game flow in accordance with the game genre also seem to be of higher importance than expected at first glance.

Mentoring is defined as an “intense caring relationship in which persons with more experience work with less experienced persons to promote both professional and personal development” (Caffarella, 1992, p. 38). It is “a powerful emotional, and passionate interaction whereby the mentor and protégé experience…intellectual growth and development” (Galbraith & Zelenak, 1991, p. 126). In cross-cultural mentoring, mentors and protégés from different cultures confront social and cultural identities, goals, expectations, values, and beliefs (Cross & Lincoln, 2005) to “achieve a higher level of potency in education and society” (Mullen, 2005, p. 6). Cross-cultural mentoring research explores attitudes, behaviors, linguistics and motivators of the more visible racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. (Elmer, 1986, Ulmer, 2008). The cross-cultural mentoring experiences of Indo-Caribbeans in the U.S. are obscured from the research despite their rich socio-historic culture. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions of Indo-Caribbean protégés regarding the effects of their cross-cultural mentoring experiences in the United States. Phenomenology is “the systematic attempt to uncover and describe…the internal meaning structures, of lived experience [by studying the] particulars or instances as they are encountered” (Van Manen, 1990, p. 10). Criterion and snowball sampling were used to recruit 15 participants. A semi-structured interview guide was used to gather data and Creswell’s (2007) simplified version of Moustakas’s (1994) Modification of the Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen Method of Analysis of Phenomenological Data was used to analyze the data. Three themes emerged: (a) “Sitting at the feet of gurus” taught protégés how to accept guidance, (b) Guru-Shishya: Learning and Discipleship, ways that protégés perceived mentors’ guidance related to work, skill acquisition, and social or emotional support, and (c) Samavartan sanskar: Building Coherence, helped protégés understand, manage and find meaning. Protégés’ goals and professional expectations determined what they wanted from cross-cultural mentoring relationships and what they were willing to endure within those relationships. Since participants valued achievement and continuous improvement, mentor support was integral to making meaning and developing a sense of coherence in their lives. Implications regarding cross-cultural mentoring relationships together with recommendations for future research conclude the study.

The current study considered school stress appraisal, as a challenge or hindrance, as it relates to individual school outcomes (performance and satisfaction), and individual health outcomes (physiological and psychological). Correlations were calculated between predictor and outcome variables. Confidence intervals were calculated and regression analyses performed in order to highlight differences in the relationship between predictors on the same outcome variables. A mediation analysis was conducted to establish the potential effect of health on the relationship between the predictors and performance/satisfaction outcomes. Challenge and hindrance stress were each found to be correlated with both types of health outcomes. Hindrance stress was found to be correlated with satisfaction. Challenge stress was found to be correlated with performance. Physical and psychological health were found to partially mediate the relationship between hindrance stress and satisfaction. Overall, stress appraisal was found to be a good predictor of individual outcomes. Health outcomes were found to mediate the relationship between satisfaction outcomes.

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / Small enterprises (SMME) have become central to South Africa's efforts to create jobs, alleviate poverty and develop the economy. SMMEs, however, face a wide range of problems, with "market access" one of the key bottlenecks. This centres (i.a.) around the ease of access to outsourcing markets of larger corporations and public-sector procurement opportunities. To address some of these specific challenges in the Western Cape, the Business Opportunity Network (Bon) was established in 1995 as an NOO. It was at that stage a path-breaking institution in the Western Cape, paralleled by only a few in the rest of the country. It is the purpose of this minithesis to assess the role, operation and evolution of the Bon. This study examines the background and particular factors that lead to the establishment of the Bon as a business-linkage organisation. Then critically assess the actual process of how the Bon attempted to facilitate SMME access to corporate and public-sector procurement in the Western Cape's metropolitan and platteland areas from 1994 to 2004. Thereafter moving toward the evaluation of the process, an assessment of the effectiveness of Bon's business-linkage efforts in the light of a continuously changing and evolving procurement environment. It is also the intention to reveal and assess how Bon's procurement support relates to BEE efforts unfolding in the Western Cape

In this thesis, we describe an approach that won a psychiatric symptom severity prediction challenge. The challenge was to correctly predict the severity of psychiatric symptoms on a 4-point scale. Our winning submission uses a novel stacked machine learning architecture in which (i) a base data ingestion/cleaning step was followed by the (ii) derivation of a base set of features defined using text analytics, after which (iii) association rule learning was used in a novel way to generate new features, followed by a (iv) feature selection step to eliminate irrelevant features, followed by a (v) classifier training algorithm in which a total of 22 classifiers including new classifier variants of AdaBoost and RandomForest were trained on seven different data views, and (vi) finally an ensemble learning step, in which ensembles of best learners were used to improve on the accuracy of individual learners. All of this was tested via standard 10-fold cross-validation on training data provided by the N-GRID challenge organizers, of which the three best ensembles were selected for submission to N-GRID's blind testing. The best of our submitted solutions garnered an overall final score of 0.863 according to the organizer's measure. All 3 of our submissions placed within the top 10 out of the 65 total submissions. The challenge constituted Track 2 of the 2016 Centers of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS) Neuropsychiatric Genome-Scale and RDOC Individualized Domains (N-GRID) Shared Task in Clinical Natural Language Processing.

The objective of the study was to investigate how individual appraisal of high workload as a challenge or a hindrance stressor correlates with work engagement and burnout. The work environment is fraught with high workloads, resulting in stress for employees. The cost of employee stress and ill health to organisations and society is reported to be high due to lost productivity and healthcare costs. The current study used the challenge-hindrance stressor model to determine the impact of appraisal on the relationship between work overload and work engagement/burnout. The current study proposed that employees experience both work engagement and burnout concurrently depending on whether they appraise work overload as a challenge or a hindrance stressor. An explanatory quantitative design was used to survey employees from multiple organisations in South Africa, yielding 144 full-time, permanently employed respondents. Findings from the study indicated that stressors that were appraised as challenges were linked to work engagement, whereas stressors that were appraised as hindrances were linked to burnout. The study also found that employees appraise work overload as a hindrance not a challenge, resulting in a negative relationship between work overload and work engagement and a positive relationship between work overload and burnout. The implication is that when employees have high workloads, their engagement does not increase; their likelihood of burnout increases. The study determined no positive outcomes of high workloads, only the risk of highly engaged employees becoming fatigued and burnt out. Hence, it is recommended that organisations manage the workloads of their employees.

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