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A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. Johannesburg, 2015. / Over 60% of the Swazi population resides in rural areas and rely on woodfuel for their daily cooking needs. Cooking with woodfuel on open fires is inefficient and unhealthy, leading to millions of deaths of women and children each year while also contributing to environmental degradation. This has necessitated the implementation of Government’s clean cookstoves programme in Swaziland. This study focused on household stove users in six chiefdoms in the Lower Usuthu Sustainable Land Management (LUSLM) Project area in Siphofaneni Swaziland. A survey conducted through the dissemination of a questionnaire was used to investigate how rural perceptions impact on the adoption of clean cookstove technologies as an alternative household energy technology contributing towards sustainable development in rural Swaziland. Results from this study indicate that although cooking on an open fire was the least desired cooking technology, only 2% of households in the project area own clean cookstoves and less than half of the households had knowledge of cookstoves. The study further revealed that over 80% of the households in the survey area would prefer using a clean cookstoves to reduce the labour intensive task of collecting firewood as well as reducing exposure to smoke. The households found to have some knowledge of the benefits of clean cookstoves indicated the willingness to pay for a clean cookstove; however, a third of the respondents indicated a preference of obtaining a free clean cookstove. The price and availability of the clean cookstove in rural areas were two main barriers to increased uptake of the stoves, coupled with the need to purchase new pots. Despite the general lack of awareness of these technologies, challenges such as danger of the stoves to children and stove durability were also cited. The results indicate the need for the ongoing clean cookstove programme being implemented by the Government of Swaziland to improve on its strategy, to focus on incorporation of perceptions of rural stove users in development of appropriate cookstove designs, distribution models, and the design and implementation of a cookstove quality control programme.

Thesis (M.Sc. (Computer Science)) --University of Limpopo, 2018 / The conversion of speech to text is essential for communication between speech and visually impaired people. The focus of this study was to develop and evaluate an ASR baseline system designed for normal speech to correct speech disorders. Normal and disordered speech data were sourced from Lwazi project and UCLASS, respectively. The normal speech data was used to train the ASR system. Disordered speech was used to evaluate performance of the system. Features were extracted using the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) method in the processing stage. The cepstral mean combined variance normalization (CMVN) was applied to normalise the features. A third-order language model was trained using the SRI Language Modelling (SRILM) toolkit. A recognition accuracy of 65.58% was obtained. The refinement approach is then applied in the recognised utterance to remove the repetitions from stuttered speech. The approach showed that 86% of repeated words in stutter can be removed to yield an improved hypothesized text output. Further refinement of the post-processing module ASR is likely to achieve a near 100% correction of stuttering speech Keywords: Automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech disorder, stuttering

Pancreatic cancer kills over 1700 people each year in Australia. In 2000, there were 1908 new cases diagnosed and it remains one of the least treatable malignancies. In the USA, it was the fourth leading cause of cancer death in 2004, with 31,860 new cases and 31,270 recorded deaths. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a novel, potentially useful treatment for locally advanced pancreatic cancer with only limited research and clinical work addressing this until now. PDT induces non-thermal, cytotoxic and ischaemic injury to a targeted volume of tissue. During PDT, a photosensitizer is activated by non-thermal light in the presence of oxygen, generating cytotoxic oxygen species and inducing cellular injury and microvascular occlusion. The aim of this thesis was to conduct an animal safety study using two second generation photosensitizers, talaporfin sodium and verteporfin, to assess the risks of pancreatic PDT by looking at injury to organs adjacent to the pancreas and assessing recovery from PDT treatment of the pancreas. The Syrian Golden hamster animal model was used to compare the results of this research to previous work by other authors. The study design incorporated a number of additional experiments, including quantitative tissue fluorescence techniques, plasma level analysis and histopathology techniques. The methods for the animal safety study were similar to the approach used in the clinical setting and provided vital data on the likely risks and side effects of phototherapy in humans. The first study, looking at talaporfin sodium, found likely risks of duodenal injury, gastric injury and death with a limited effect on normal pancreas at photosensitizer doses likely to be employed for pancreatic cancer PDT. The second study, using verteporfin, found similar results with a more potent effect on the normal pancreas at studied drug doses. Both agents had short drug-light intervals, ranging from 15 minutes to 2 hours, reducing the need for pre-treatment hospitalization and short photosensitivity periods of about one to two weeks. Some animals suffered minor cutaneous photosensitivity injuries. A human pancreatic cancer PDT pilot study is feasible and the risks and complications should be acceptable.

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