Student Number : 8707660F - MA research report - School of Literature and Language Studies - Faculty of Humanities / This paper considers the interaction between the process of producing a documentary video film ‘The Medicine Bag’ and an indigenous knowledge system from the Northern Cape where herbalists or traditional healers are known as ! aixa (Qaiga). These healers use indigenous plants and other raw materials, sounds, rubbing or massaging techniques, incisions and other methods to heal or to harm members of the community. The Schwartz family, Namas who hail from this region, have for many years passed the knowledge and the skills for healing on from generation to generation. For as long as the family can remember, members of each generation, specially gifted and interested in acquiring these skills, have been selected and trained to recognise and harvest medical plants, prepare medicines and apply the various skills required to heal the sick. The raw herbs, potions and medicines have been kept in a medicine bag, made from a tanned springbuck hide. Research for a documentary video to record oral accounts and practices attached to the medicine bag, revealed various themes related to the interaction between oral accounts and the process of recording and transcribing these narratives. These themes included the absence of a fixed storyline or a single ‘correct’ text as is often assumed when one engages with written literature; shifts in meaning that occur when the physical forms of the accounts change as each recording or re-editing acquires a ‘performative aura’ and issues such as the importation of cultural authority and resources on the participants, their active participation in the process of memory and archive creation as well as the impact of the process on the filmmaker/researcher that included an enriched understanding of the scope and possibilities of working with oral texts

Chatbots are computer programs with the capability to lead a conversation with a human user. When a chatbot is unable to match a user’s utterance to any predefined answer, it will use a fallback intent; a generic response that does not contribute to the conversation in any meaningful way. This report aims to investigate if a content-based recommender system could provide support to a chatbot agent in case of these fallback experiences. Content-based recommender systems use content to filter, prioritize and deliver relevant information to users. Their purpose is to search through a large amount of content and predict recommendations based on user requirements. The recommender system developed in this project consists of four components: a web spider, a Bag-of-words model, a graph database, and the GraphQL API. The anticipation was to capture web page articles and rank them with a numeric scoring to figure out which articles that make for the best recommendation concerning given subjects. The chatbot agent could then use these recommended articles to provide the user with value and help instead of a generic response. After the evaluation, it was found that the recommender system in principle fulfilled all requirements, but that the scoring algorithm used could achieve significant improvements in its recommendations if a more advanced algorithm would be implemented. The scoring algorithm used in this project is based on word count, which lacks taking the context of the dialogue between the user and the agent into consideration, among other things.

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo avaliar a técnica de desaguamento de resíduos sólidos gerados em estações de tratamento de água utilizando tubos geotêxteis - Bags, que representam uma alternativa tecnológica para a redução do teor de umidade dos resíduos. O trabalho foi dividido em duas etapas: ensaios com Bags suspensos e com Bags dispostos sobre o solo. Nos estudos são abordadas as características mais relevantes do processo de desaguamento face às solicitações mecânicas e hidráulicas a que qualquer sistema está submetido, bem como são apresentados resultados e discussões sobre as características físico-químicas dos resíduos gerados, geocondicionados nos Bags geotêxteis e da água drenada. A técnica de desaguamento por Bags mostrou-se uma alternativa viável para a redução do teor de umidade, apresentando um melhor desempenho em relação às técnicas convencionais. Pode-se também utilizá-la em paralelo com outras técnicas já existentes para a otimização do processo de desaguamento. Ressalta-se que a correta operação da tecnologia garante a eficiência da drenagem, sendo, então, necessária a adição de polímeros como agentes coagulantes, de forma a promover a separação da fase líquida da fase sólida. Observou-se que os resíduos geocondicionados ao reduzirem o teor de umidade passam a concentrar alguns componentes químicos tais como: sílica, nitrogênio e alumínio. As dificuldades relacionadas à disposição de resíduos sólidos em estações de tratamento de água justificam esse estudo. A despeito dos resultados satisfatórios desse estudo, é importante salientar a necessidade de mais projetos que avaliem os resultados obtidos nos ensaios e o comportamento dos Bags com o passar do tempo, já que a técnica mostrou-se viável ambiental, econômica e tecnicamente. / The present study aims at evaluating the disposal process of slurry from a water treatment plant. In replacement to the conventional technique of disposing slurry in pools, a geotextile tube has been used to dehydrate and retain the slurry inside the Bag. This is achieved because the geotextile is permeable, yet soil-tight, and any excess water pressure is expelled from the tube. The work has been divided in two sets of tests: suspended Bags to define a treatment methodology and a prototype geoBag laid on the ground over a drained layer to simulate the treatment process. The mechanical, hydraulic and chemical responses associated with this process considering both solid waste and drained water contents have been evaluated and discussed. As a whole, the use of geoBags has proved to be a viable option to reduce the water content in slurry, as well as an attractive alternative to replace or to be combined with other techniques currently in use in Brazil. A critical aspect controlling the efficiency of the operation is the addition of polymers for flocculation before introducing slurry into the Bag so that liquid and solid phases are dissociated. Upon monitoring the process, it has been observed that solids retained inside the Bag exhibit concentrated levels of chemical components such as silica, nitrogen and aluminum. This study has been considered relevant in face of the environmental needs and public policy control of the disposal of solid wastes. In spite of being a promising alternative technique to slurry treatment, further investigation is needed to evaluate the trials results of this research and bag behavior as time goes by. So far, the technique has proved to be environmentally, economically and technically feasible.

Submitted by Aline Batista (alinehb.ufpel@gmail.com) on 2018-04-19T13:23:06Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Dissertacao_Fernando_Angelin.pdf: 1204993 bytes, checksum: 3cf6b9f14201e8e7168987d5dfd7354b (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Aline Batista (alinehb.ufpel@gmail.com) on 2018-04-19T14:44:30Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Dissertacao_Fernando_Angelin.pdf: 1204993 bytes, checksum: 3cf6b9f14201e8e7168987d5dfd7354b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-04-19T14:44:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Dissertacao_Fernando_Angelin.pdf: 1204993 bytes, checksum: 3cf6b9f14201e8e7168987d5dfd7354b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-08-30 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / A Computação em Nuvem vem apresentando um crescimento extraordinário nos últimos anos, em questão de quantidade e variedade de serviços oferecidos, estes, tomando uma forma onipresente no cotidiano. Com isso, usuários que necessitam, geralmente, de alta disponibilidade de processamento, buscam na Nuvem soluções que diminuam custos pontuais, como construção e manutenção de uma infraestrutura privada. A saída para tal é alugar infraestrutura em uma Nuvem ou até mesmo utilizar a Nuvem para dimensionar uma infraestrutura própria que supra sua demanda, sem sub ou superdimensionamento. Este trabalho apresenta um modelo de simulação mista, o qual busca comparar uma infraestrutura física limitada à uma infraestrutura virtual simulada com as mesmas características. Para isto, foram executados testes em uma infraestrutura física limitada e testes de simulação utilizando o CloudSim, escalando o tamanho das tarefas do tipo Bag of Tasks (BoT) e o número de hosts e núcleos computacionais. Para tais testes foram implementados algoritmos que realizam a transformação da entrada BoT para a execução na infraestrutura física e na simulada. Também, foram prototipadas classes para complementação do CloudSim, tanto para leitura dos BoTs transformados quanto para a criação da infraestrutura simulada.Com os testes realizados, notamos a estabilidade do sistema, quando simulados testes com BoT pequenos, médios e grandes em infraestruturas que, para nosso caso, foram classificadas como pequena, média e grande. Outra observação importante realizada foi a de que quando a infraestrutura oferece carga externa à execução desejada (utilização por outro usuário, por exemplo), o tempo final de execução dos BoTs aumenta proporcionalmente à quanto a infraestrutura está em utilização. Também percebemos que a granularidade das tarefas impacta na execução. Com relação à escalabilidade, foi percebido que BoTs classificados como grandes para infraestruturas categorizadas como pequenas foram agrupados como pequenos para infraestruturas identificadas como grandes. / Cloud Computing has been showing extraordinary growth in recent years, in terms of the quantity and variety of services offered, these, taking a ubiquitous form in everyday life. As a result, users who generally require high availability of processing, search on cloud solutions that reduce specific costs, such as building and maintaining a private infrastructure. The way out is to rent infrastructure in a Cloud or even use the Cloud to size an infrastructure that suits your demand, without sub or oversize. This dissertation presents a mixed simulation model, which seeks to compare a limited physical infrastructure to a simulated virtual infrastructure with the same characteristics. For this, tests were performed on a limited physical infrastructure and simulation tests using CloudSim, scaling the size of Bag of Tasks (BoT) tasks and the number of hosts and processing cores. For such tests, were implemented algorithms that perform the transformation of the BoT input for execution in real infrastructure and simulation. Also, classes to complement CloudSim were prototyped, both for reading the transformed BoTs and for creating the simulated infrastructure. With the tests carried out, we noticed the stability of the system when simulated small, medium and large BoT tests in infrastructures that, in our case, were classified as small, medium and large. Another important observation was that when the infrastructure offers external load to the desired execution (use by another user, for example), the final execution time of the BoTs increases proportionally to how much the infrastructure is in use. We also realize that the granularity of tasks impacts execution. With regard to scalability, it was noticed that BoTs classified as large for infrastructures categorized as small were grouped as small for infrastructures identified as large.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T14:59:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2007- Vinicius Pimentel Silva.pdf: 2345431 bytes, checksum: 39b89841a5352bbec854edc58a64e8ff (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-02-15 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / This work aimed to evaluate digestibility and degradability of nutrients, and kinetics of passage in horses fed with forages using mobile bag and in situ cecal digestion. Two digestion trials were carried out and seven forages were used, lucerne (Medicago sativa), peanut (Arachis pintoi), Desmodium ovalifolium, Stylosanthes guianensis, Cajanus cajan, Macroptyloma axilares and coastcross (Cynodon dactylon cv. coastcross). Basal diet were composed by 80% hay and 20% concentrate. In first assay with mobile bags, five crossbreed horses were used with age varying from 17 to 27 years and average weight of 350 kg. A nylon cloth were used with 45? pore size, and bags with dimensions of 7,5 x 2 cm, containing 510mg DM of sample/bag. These assay had 12 days of duration, and three for adaptation, five days for naso-gastric insertion of bags and four days for bags collection in feces. Randomized block design were used with seven treatments and five repetitions. Naso-gastric insertion of bags were made twice a day, at morning and afternoon, inserting 29 bags, and four bags of each feed and one blank. Transit time and excretion of bags were evaluated until 96h from insertion. Nutrients digestibility of forages were calculated through residues inside the bags. In situ assay was conducted with caecum fistulated horse, weight 210Kg. Bags with 20x 6,5cm were used with 5,2g of sample incubated inside caecum along times 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24, and 48 hours. A randomized design was used with seven treatments and three repetitions during 30 days. Orskov & McDonald degradation model was used to fit the nutrients degradation curves. Nutrients digestibility of peanut, Desmodium and Macroptiloma were high than others roughages (P<0.05). Any difference were observed (P>0.05) among transit time, mediun retention time and passage rate, average values were 23.34, 48.63 and 2.07, respectively. Degradation rate were high to peanut, Desmodium and Macroptyloma. Peanut fiber and protein degradability is superior to others tropical legumes, and peanut presented high protein contents. Tropically forages peanut, Stylosanthes guianensis and Macroptyloma axilares presented potential to be use in horse diets. / Este trabalho foi realizado com o objetivo de estimar a digestibilidade e a degrada??o dos nutrientes e a cin?tica de passagem de alimentos volumosos em eq?inos utilizando as t?cnicas de sacos de n?ilon m?veis e da digest?o in situ. Foram realizados dois ensaios de digest?o e os alimentos volumosos utilizados nos dois estudos foram, alfafa (Medicago sativa), amendoim forrageiro (Arachis pintoi), Desmodium ovalifolium, Stylosanthes guianensis, guandu (Cajanus cajan), Macroptyloma axilares e capim coastcross (Cynodon dactylon cv. coastcross). A alimenta??o foi uma dieta basal composta por 80% de feno e 20% de concentrado. No primeiro ensaio, com sacos m?veis, foram utilizados cinco eq?inos mesti?os com idades variando de 17 a 27 anos, com peso vivo m?dio de 350kg. Para a confec??o dos sacos, utilizou-se tecido de n?ilon com porosidade de 45? com dimens?es de 7,5x 2cm, inserindo 510mg de MS de amostra/saco. O ensaio teve dura??o de 12 dias, sendo tr?s para a adapta??o, cinco para inser??o g?strica dos sacos e quatro de coleta dos sacos. O delineamento foi em blocos inteiramente casualizados com sete tratamentos e cinco repeti??es. A sonda nasog?strica foi inserida duas vezes ao dia, de manh? e ? tarde com 29 sacos, sendo quatro para cada alimento e um em branco, anotou-se o tempo de tr?nsito e a excre??o dos sacos foi considerada at? 96 horas ap?s a inser??o. A estimativa da digestibilidade dos nutrientes dos alimentos volumosos foi calculada atrav?s do res?duo obtido no saco. No ensaio in situ utilizou-se um animal fistulado no ceco, com peso vivo de 210 Kg e sacos de 20 x 6,5 cm, com 5,2 g de amostra, incubadas no ceco nos tempos de 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24 e 48 horas. Utilizou-se o delineamento inteiramente casualizado com sete tratamentos e tr?s repeti??es, com dura??o de 30 dias e o modelo de degrada??o citado por Orskov & McDonald para descrever as curvas de degrada??o dos nutrientes. A digestibilidade dos nutrientes dos alimentos volumosos Amendoim, Desmodium e Macroptyloma foram maiores (P<0,05). N?o houve diferen?a (P>0,05) entre os alimentos em rela??o ao tempo de tr?nsito, tempo m?dio de reten??o e taxa de passagem dos sacos, observando-se os valores m?dios de 23,3 h, 48,6 h e 2,0 h, respectivamente. Os valores da taxa de degrada??o foram superiores no Amendoim, Desmodium e Macroptiloma. A degrada??o da fibra do amendoim forrageiro ? superior ?s demais leguminosas tropicais, assim como seu conte?do prot?ico. Os alimentos volumosos tropicais amendoim, Stylosanthes guianensis e Macroptyloma axilares apresentaram potencial para o uso em dietas para eq?inos.

Introduction: Cataract surgery, is nowadays the most common surgical procedure performedin Sweden. Late in-the-bag intraocular lens dislocation (LITBILD), occurring many yearsafter uneventful surgery, is due to progressive zonular weakness and capsular shrinkage.Known risk factors include among others pseudoexfoliations (PXF), high myopia andprevious vitreoretinal surgery. LITBILD has been reported with an increasing frequency inrecent years. Thus, there is a value in further investigating this patient group and describerelated risk factors. Aim: Determine the 15-year cumulative risk of LITBILD after standard cataract surgery2003 in Örebro and describe possible risk factors causing LITBILD. Method: Retrospective nested case-control study examining patients who underwent cataractsurgery with phacoemulsification in 2003 at Örebro University Hospital. To locate patientswithin that group who sustained LITBILD ICD10 diagnosis codes relating to LITBILDcovering years 2003-2018 were assessed. Each case was matched with two controls ofidentical sex and age. Results: The LITBILD group was 9 patients out of 1499 operated with median age atLITBILD of 80 years (range 57-82). Median time between cataract surgery and LITBILDwas 134 months (range 39-167). Glaucoma before and/or after cataract surgery and highintraocular pressure before surgery were independently statistically significant risk factors forLITBILD. Conclusion: Patients who underwent cataract surgery 2003 had a cumulative risk of 0.6% todevelop LITBILD. 78% of patients with dislocation had one or more of the risk factorsstudied whilst the control group represented 40% (p=0.08).

Soft Tissue Sarcomas (STS) are among the most dangerous diseases, with a 50% mortality rate in the USA in 2016. Heterogeneous responses to the treatments of the same sub-type of STS as well as intra-tumor heterogeneity make the study of biopsies imprecise. Radiologists make efforts to find non-invasive approaches to gather useful and important information regarding characteristics and behaviors of STS tumors, such as aggressiveness and recurrence. Quantitative image analysis is an approach to integrate information extracted using data science, such as data mining and machine learning with biological an clinical data to assist radiologists in making the best recommendation on clinical trials and the course of treatment. The new methods in “Radiomics" extract meaningful features from medical imaging data for diagnostic and prognostic goals. Furthermore, features extracted from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are demonstrating very powerful and robust performance in computer aided decision systems (CADs). Also, a well-known computer vision approach, Bag of Visual Words, has recently been applied on imaging data for machine learning purposes such as classification of different types of tumors based on their specific behavior and phenotype. These approaches are not fully and widely investigated in STS. This dissertation provides novel versions of image analysis based on Radiomics and Bag of Visual Words integrated with deep features to quantify the heterogeneity of entire STS as well as sub-regions, which have predictive and prognostic imaging features, from single and multi-sequence Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). STS are types of cancer which are rarely touched in term of quantitative cancer analysis versus other type of cancers such as lung, brain and breast cancers. This dissertation does a comprehensive analysis on available data in 2D and multi-slice to predict the behavior of the STS with regard to clinical outcomes such as recurrence or metastasis and amount of tumor necrosis. The experimental results using Radiomics as well as a new ensemble of Bags of Visual Words framework are promising with 91.66% classification accuracy and 0.91 AUC for metastasis, using ensemble of Bags of Visual Words framework integrated with deep features, and 82.44% classification accuracy with 0.63 AUC for necrosis progression, using Radiomics framework, in tests on the available datasets.

This business plan outlines the setup of a golf bag company, Piranha, and its strategy with financial projections. The plan started with company description and followed by detailing of its product, marketing operational plan. The purpose of this business plan is to study the market, and see how business can be develop within targeted customers, regions, product segment and price bands. Piranha started small as a sole proprietary with a 4.5 million NTD as its startup capital. First two years focusing on Taiwan market and will expanded to China in year 3. As a 4 year projection model, the projected NPV at year 4 end is around 3 million in with a 20.11% IRR. Breakeven point will be at approximately early year 5.

Cloud computing is emerging as a promising platform for compute and data intensive scientific applications. Thanks to the on-demand elastic provisioning capabilities, cloud computing has instigated curiosity among researchers from a wide range of disciplines. However, even though many vendors have rolled out their commercial cloud infrastructures, the service offerings are usually only best-effort based without any performance guarantees. Utilization of these resources will be questionable if it can not meet the performance expectations of deployed applications. Additionally, the lack of the familiar development tools hamper the productivity of eScience developers to write robust scientific high performance computing (HPC) applications. There are no standard frameworks that are currently supported by any large set of vendors offering cloud computing services. Consequently, the application portability among different cloud platforms for scientific applications is hard. Among all clouds, the emerging Azure cloud from Microsoft in particular remains a challenge for HPC program development both due to lack of its support for traditional parallel programming support such as Message Passing Interface (MPI) and map-reduce and due to its evolving application programming interfaces (APIs). We have designed newer frameworks and runtime environments to help HPC application developers by providing them with easy to use tools similar to those known from traditional parallel and distributed computing environment set- ting, such as MPI, for scientific application development on the Azure cloud platform. It is challenging to create an efficient framework for any cloud platform, including the Windows Azure platform, as they are mostly offered to users as a black-box with a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to access various service components. The primary contributions of this Ph.D. thesis are (i) creating a generic framework for bag-of-tasks HPC applications to serve as the basic building block for application development on the Azure cloud platform, (ii) creating a set of APIs for HPC application development over the Azure cloud platform, which is similar to message passing interface (MPI) from traditional parallel and distributed setting, and (iii) implementing Crayons using the proposed APIs as the first end-to-end parallel scientific application to parallelize the fundamental GIS operations.

Semantic query optimization is an important issue in many contexts of databases including information integration, view maintenance and data warehousing and can substantially improve performance, especially in today's database systems which contain gigabytes of data. A crucial issue in semantic query optimization is query containment. Several papers have dealt with the problem of conjunctive query containment. In particular, some of the literature admits SQL like query languages with aggregate operations such as sum/count. Moreover, since real SQL requires a richer semantics than set semantics, there has been work on bag-semantics for SQL, essentially by introducing an interpreted column. One important technique for reasoning about query containment in the context of bag semantics is to translate the queries to alternatives using aggregate functions and assuming set semantics. Furthermore, in SQL, order by is the operator by which the results are sorted based on certain attributes and, clearly, ordering is an important issue in query optimization. As such, there has been work done in support of ordering based on the application of the domain. However, a final step is required in order to introduce a rich semantics in support. In this work, we integrate set and bag semantics to be able to reason about real SQL queries. We demonstrate an ordered bag semantics for SQL using a relational algebra with aggregates. We define a set algebra with various expressions of interest, then define syntax and semantics for bag algebra, and finally extend these definitions to ordered bags. This is done by adding a pair of additional interpreted columns to computed relations in which the first column is used in the standard fashion to capture duplicate tuples in query results, and the second adds an ordering priority to the output. We show that the relational algebra with aggregates can be used to compute these interpreted columns with sufficient flexibility to work as a semantics for standard SQL queries, which are allowed to include order by and duplicate preserving select clauses. The reduction of a workable ordered bag semantics for SQL to the relational algebra with aggregates - as we have developed it - can enable existing query containment theory to be applied in practical query containment.