In this study the important issue of unilateral forgiveness is researched. Chapter one contains the problem, research questions, objectives, methodology and central theoretical argument which involves the following: the healthy (faith mature) treatment of unilateral forgiveness, in the absence of the offender's remorse, as a essential element in the healing process in recovering for the emotional wounded person. This is the reason why such a person should be guided pastorally. In chapter 2, the aspect of basic-theory is being looked into, which entails the following: The Old Testament example of forgiveness in Jonah, and also forgiveness and repentance in the New Testament, and four passages namely Luke 17:3-4, Matt 18:15,21-22; Mark 11-25 6:12-15 and Matt 6: 12-15 were discussed. Afterwards, penitence and forgiveness in Judaism and Christianity were also investigated where conditional and unconditional pardon came into question. The various dimensions of forgiveness -that is from the divine side, human side and intrapersonal were researched. Finally God's purpose for forgiveness was discussed. Chapter three fostered the meta-theoretical aspect of the study. A brief history was given of the psychology of forgiveness and the relationship between theology and psychology were examined. The definition of forgiveness also received attention in order to better understand the concept. The reason for forgiveness, and the consequences of anger, (a core element of unforgiveness) on the total person, the physical, neurological, psychological, and psychiatry sides were discussed. Attention were given to therapy where the process of forgiveness, with two different models were discussed namely Pyramid Model of Worthington and the Concept of prosesmodel of Enright & Fitzgibbons. The chapter ends with reconciliation and inner preparation to unilateral forgiveness. In chapter four the empirical research received the focus, which included the value of empirical research, different paradigms, the choice of an approach, and the nature and characteristics of qualitative research. Thereafter, data collection, including basic personal interviews, parameters of the interview, questionnaire design, sampling design and identification of themes for interviews, got attention The discussion of the interview results were concluded with a preliminary conclusion from the empirical research to end this chapter. In chapter 5 attention was given to the practical theoretical perspectives with regard to unilateral forgiveness. Because Zerfass's model were used in the study, particular attention had been given to examining of the effect of Zerfass's model. Then a summary were given of the findings of Scriptural perspective, relevant sciences, empirical research and practical theoretical guidelines in brief. It concludes with a summarized report of findings in respect of unilateral forgiveness, practical theory and proposed guidelines. The study ended in chapter six where the final conclusion regarding the research on unilateral forgiveness were given and topics were proposed for further research. / Thesis (M.A. (Pastoral))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

In this study the important issue of unilateral forgiveness is researched. Chapter one contains the problem, research questions, objectives, methodology and central theoretical argument which involves the following: the healthy (faith mature) treatment of unilateral forgiveness, in the absence of the offender's remorse, as a essential element in the healing process in recovering for the emotional wounded person. This is the reason why such a person should be guided pastorally. In chapter 2, the aspect of basic-theory is being looked into, which entails the following: The Old Testament example of forgiveness in Jonah, and also forgiveness and repentance in the New Testament, and four passages namely Luke 17:3-4, Matt 18:15,21-22; Mark 11-25 6:12-15 and Matt 6: 12-15 were discussed. Afterwards, penitence and forgiveness in Judaism and Christianity were also investigated where conditional and unconditional pardon came into question. The various dimensions of forgiveness -that is from the divine side, human side and intrapersonal were researched. Finally God's purpose for forgiveness was discussed. Chapter three fostered the meta-theoretical aspect of the study. A brief history was given of the psychology of forgiveness and the relationship between theology and psychology were examined. The definition of forgiveness also received attention in order to better understand the concept. The reason for forgiveness, and the consequences of anger, (a core element of unforgiveness) on the total person, the physical, neurological, psychological, and psychiatry sides were discussed. Attention were given to therapy where the process of forgiveness, with two different models were discussed namely Pyramid Model of Worthington and the Concept of prosesmodel of Enright & Fitzgibbons. The chapter ends with reconciliation and inner preparation to unilateral forgiveness. In chapter four the empirical research received the focus, which included the value of empirical research, different paradigms, the choice of an approach, and the nature and characteristics of qualitative research. Thereafter, data collection, including basic personal interviews, parameters of the interview, questionnaire design, sampling design and identification of themes for interviews, got attention The discussion of the interview results were concluded with a preliminary conclusion from the empirical research to end this chapter. In chapter 5 attention was given to the practical theoretical perspectives with regard to unilateral forgiveness. Because Zerfass's model were used in the study, particular attention had been given to examining of the effect of Zerfass's model. Then a summary were given of the findings of Scriptural perspective, relevant sciences, empirical research and practical theoretical guidelines in brief. It concludes with a summarized report of findings in respect of unilateral forgiveness, practical theory and proposed guidelines. The study ended in chapter six where the final conclusion regarding the research on unilateral forgiveness were given and topics were proposed for further research. / Thesis (M.A. (Pastoral))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

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Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons à l'estimation de modèles conditionnellement hétéroscédastiques (CH) sous différentes hypothèses. Dans une première partie, en modifiant l'hypothèse d'identification usuelle du modèle, nous définissions un estimateur de quasi-maximum de vraisemblance (QMV) non gaussien et nous montrons que, sous certaines conditions, cet estimateur est plus efficace que l'estimateur du quasi maximum de vraisemblance gaussien. Nous étudions dans une deuxième partie l'inférence d'un modèle CH dans le cas où le processus des innovations est distribué selon une loi alpha stable. Nous établissons la consistance et la normalité asymptotique de l'estimateur du maximum de vraisemblance. La loi alpha stable n'apparaissant que comme loi limite, nous étudions ensuite le comportement de ce même estimateur dans le cas où la loi du processus des innovations n'est plus une loi alpha stable mais est dans le domaine d'attraction d'une telle loi. Dans la dernière partie, nous étudions l'estimation d'un modèle GARCH lorsque le processus générateur de données est un modèle CH dont les coefficients sont sujets à des changements de régimes markoviens. Nous montrons que cet estimateur, dans un cadre mal spécifié, converge vers une pseudo vraie valeur et nous établissons sa loi asymptotique. Nous étudions cet estimateur lorsque le processus observé est stationnaire mais nous détaillons également ses propriétés asymptotiques lorsque ce processus est non stationnaire et explosif. Par des simulations, nous étudions les capacités prédictives du modèle GARCH mal spécifié. Nous déterminons ainsi la robustesse de ce modèle et de l'estimateur du QMV à une erreur de spécification de la volatilité. / In this thesis, we focus on the inference of conditionally heteroskedastic models under different assumptions. This thesis consists of three parts and an introductory chapter. In the first part, we use an alternate identification assumption of the model and we define a non Gaussian quasi maximum likelihood estimator. We show that, under certain conditions, this estimator is more efficient than the Gaussian quasi maximum likelihood estimator. In a second part, we study the inference of a conditionally heteroskedastic model when the process of the innovations is distributed as an alpha stable law. We establish the consistency and the asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimator. Since the alpha stable laws appear in general as a limit, we then focus of the behavior of this same estimator when the law of the innovation process is not stable but in the domain of attraction of a stable law. In the last part of this thesis, we study the estimation of a GARCH model when the data generating process is a conditionally heteroskedastic model whose coefficients are subject to Markov switching regimes. We show that, in a missspecified framework, this estimator converges toward a pseudo true value and we establish its asymptotic properties when this process is non stationary and explosive. Through simulations, we investigate the predictive ability of the missspecified GARCH model. Thus we determinate the robustness of the model and of the estimator of the quasi maximum likelihood to the missspecification of the volatility

College students often enter college academically unprepared, as evidenced by low high school cumulative GPAs or poor SAT scores. In response to this problem, administrators at a 4-year university in the Mid-Atlantic region of the Unites States implemented an intensive, semester-long program to introduce and acclimate conditionally admitted students to the rigors of collegiate life. The purpose of this study was to understand how to assist students in moving from Year 1 to full admission and beyond. In accordance with Bandura's reciprocal causation of social cognitive theory model, the research questions centered on conditionally admitted students' descriptions of their experiences with intensive, semester-long program participation. The qualitative case study used data collected from 10 semistructured interviews with conditional admission program student participants. Data analysis consisted of initial coding, axial coding, and iterative recategorization to identify the key findings. Among the findings were that the study site lacked strong faculty-student engagement and that students had mixed feelings regarding the seminar course being helpful. However, they found the university environment conducive to learning, leading them to stay. A white paper provided potential solutions to administrators, including increased faculty-student engagement and more meaningful required seminars for first-year conditionally admitted students. This study and the subsequent project may create positive social change by expanding degree achievement for underprepared, conditionally admitted college students, which thus increases opportunities for upward social mobility.

Reinforcement learning is the problem faced by an agent that must learn behavior through trial-and-error interactions with a dynamic environment. Generally, the problem to be solved contains subtasks that repeat at different regions of the state space. Without any guidance an agent has to learn the solutions of all subtask instances independently, which degrades the learning performance. In this thesis, we propose two approaches to build connections between different regions of the search space leading to better utilization of gained experience and accelerate learning is proposed. In the first approach, we first extend existing work of McGovern and propose the formalization of stochastic conditionally terminating sequences with higher representational power. Then, we describe how to efficiently discover and employ useful abstractions during learning based on such sequences. The method constructs a tree structure to keep track of frequently used action sequences together with visited states. This tree is then used to select actions to be executed at each step. In the second approach, we propose a novel method to identify states with similar sub-policies, and show how they can be integrated into reinforcement learning framework to improve the learning performance. The method uses an efficient data structure to find common action sequences started from observed states and defines a similarity function between states based on the number of such sequences. Using this similarity function, updates on the action-value function of a state are reflected to all similar states. This, consequently, allows experience acquired during learning be applied to a broader context. Effectiveness of both approaches is demonstrated empirically by conducting extensive experiments on various domains.

Malignant mesothelioma (MM) is an aggressive malignancy of the pleural and peritoneal surfaces. Australia has the highest reported national incidence of mesothelioma in the world, and rates are increasing (Leigh et al., 2002). The clinical outcome for patients with this disease is extremely poor, with median survival of 9 to 12 months (Rizzo et al., 2001; Carbone et al., 2002). The latest developments in chemotherapy, radiotherapy and radical surgery have done little to improve the overall survival rate (Kindler 2000; Zellos et al., 2002). New approaches to therapy are thus required (Nowak et al., 2002). Cancer therapy using conditionally replicative adenoviruses (CRAds) and attenuated measles virus (vaccine strain MV-Edm) are novel and promising approaches to cancer treatment. CRAds strategy relies on selective viral replication in tumour cells but not normal cells. Major efforts have been directed toward achieving selective replication by the deletion of viral functions dispensable in tumour cells or by the regulation of viral genes with tumour-specific promoters (Alemany et al., 2000). However, the major clinical limitation of viral therapy has been lack of efficacy rather than safety concerns. In this study, I constructed CRAds in which tumour-specific promoter for Flt-1 (vascular endothelial growth factor receptor) control the essential E1 gene expression, and evaluated the cell-killing efficacy and specificity of CRAds driven by VEGF and Flt-1 promoters in the number of established mesothelioma cell lines and actual primary tumour cells from patients. CRAds with either VEGF or flt-1 promoters showed a strong killeg effect on mesothelioma cells. Co-delivery of CRAds with MMP-9 (matrix metalloproteinase-9) was assessed to determine whether therapeutic efficacy could be improved by reducing tumourassociated fibrosis thereby enhancing viral spread through a tumour mass. Combined therapy did result in greater suppression of tumour growth in vivo. I also identified an immuno-competent murine model of mesothelioma that was permissive for adenoviral replication. Combined viral therapy with immunotherapy (FGK45, an anti-CD40 antibody) in this model resulted in greater effect than Adwt or FGK45 alone and in greatest survival. I evaluated the capacity of MV-Edm to infect human mesothelioma cells to form syncytia, and lead to apoptosis and cell death. I also assessed the mode of death by analysis of markers of apoptosis including caspase-3. In vivo study showed that MVEdm- GFP transduction could be detected in human xenografts in immune deficient mice. Further studies to evaluate the mechanisms and efficacy of anti-tumour immune stimulation induced by tumour cell killing with CRAds and MV-Edm will be discussed in this study. MV-Edm has good killing effect on mesothelioma cells in vitro. In summary the work presented herein provide new insights into stratgies to improve viral therapies for mesothelioma. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1342596 / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Medicine, 2008

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Autonomous vehicles are developing at a rapid pace while pedestrians' experience with autonomous vehicles is less researched. This paper reported an exploratory study where 40 participants encountered a conditionally autonomous vehicle with unusual driver behaviors at crossing by watching videos and photos. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used to investigate pedestrians' experience. The results showed distracted driver behaviors in the conditionally autonomous driving context had negative impact on pedestrians' crossing experience. Black window on conditionally autonomous vehicles made pedestrians feel uncomfortable and worried. / Autonoma fordon utvecklas i snabb takt medan fotgängares erfarenhet av autonoma fordon är mindre undersökt. I denna uppsats redovisades en undersökande studie där 40 deltagare observerat ett villkorligt autonomt fordon med ovanliga förarbeteenden vid en korsning, genom att titta på videor och foton. Frågeformulär och semi-strukturerade intervjuer användes för att undersöka fotgängares erfarenhet. Resultaten visade att distraherade förarbeteenden i det villkorliga autonoma förhållandet hade negativ inverkan på fotgängares upplevelse vid övergångsstället. Svarta vindrutor på villkorligt autonoma fordon gör att fotgängare känner sig obekväma och oroliga.

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