This study aims to establish the effectiveness and sustainability of Kenya‟s Constituency Development Fund as a fiscal decentralized initiative aimed at poverty reduction. The study focuses on the contribution of CDF on education and how this has brought about changes related to increased access to education, better education facilities and improved performance. The study also seeks to highlight prime factors such as participation in decision making as necessary for the implementation of the CDF, while also highlighting those factors that hinder the effective and sustainable implementation of the program.

This study aims to establish the effectiveness and sustainability of Kenya‟s Constituency Development Fund as a fiscal decentralized initiative aimed at poverty reduction. The study focuses on the contribution of CDF on education and how this has brought about changes related to increased access to education, better education facilities and improved performance. The study also seeks to highlight prime factors such as participation in decision making as necessary for the implementation of the CDF, while also highlighting those factors that hinder the effective and sustainable implementation of the program.

This dissertation answers the question what is and what is not ellipsis and specifies criteria for identification of elliptical sentences. It reports on an analysis of types of ellipsis from the point of view of semantic (semantico-syntactic) representation of sentences. It does not deal with conditions and causes of the constitution of elliptical positions in sentences (when and why is it possible to omit something in a sentence) but it focuses exclusively on the identification of elliptical positions (if there is something omitted and what) and on their semantic representation, specifically on their representation on the tectogrammatical level of the Prague Dependency Treebanks. In this dissertation, the dependency approach (used in the Prague Dependency Treebanks) is also compared with the generative approach (used in the Penn Treebank). It is possible to utilize this comparison in the (automatic) conversion from constituency trees to dependency trees.

Magister Artium (Development Studies) - MA(DVS) / This study aims to establish the effectiveness and sustainability of Kenya's Constituency Development Fund as a fiscal decentralized initiative aimed at poverty reduction. The study focuses on the contribution of CDF on education and how this has brought about changes related to increased access to education, better education facilities and improved performance. The study also seeks to highlight prime factors such as participation in decision making as necessary for the implementation of the CDF, while also highlighting those factors that hinder the effective and sustainable implementation of the program. / South Africa

Magister Artium (Development Studies) - MA(DVS) / The Constituency Development Fund (CDF) is a type of decentralised government funding that is supposed to deliver goods and services directly to constituents by providing additional funds for local community development, outside line ministries. It is predominantly a developing country policy that is intended to meet the immediate social needs of local communities. In countries where it is operational, CDF is appropriated by Parliament within a country’s national budget. CDF in Zambia was introduced in 1995 for the implementation of community based projects which would in the long term improve the socio-economic wellbeing of the constituents. The stated objective of the CDF in Zambia is to provide Members of Parliament and their constituent communities with the opportunity to make choices and implement (MPs) projects that maximise their welfare in line with their needs and preferences. However, questions have been raised over whether CDF actually represents efforts to spur local development and consequently national development, or whether it is primarily a political project aimed at benefitting MPs by providing them with the resources to help them gain popularity with the electorate. The study aims to assess the effectiveness of CDF as a tool for community development. This has been done through a case study of Katuba Constituency in the Central Province of Zambia, using qualitative research methods. The study seeks to gain insight into of the impact of CDF projects in relation to the goals espoused by the CDF as laid down in Zambia’s Guidelines for the Utilisation and Management of the Constituency Development Fund.

No description available.

L’analyse syntaxique consiste à prédire la représentation syntaxique de phrases en langue naturelle sous la forme d’arbres syntaxiques. Cette tâche pose des problèmes particuliers pour les langues non-configurationnelles ou qui ont une morphologie flexionnelle plus riche que celle de l’anglais. En particulier, ces langues manifestent une dispersion lexicale problématique, des variations d’ordre des mots plus fréquentes et nécessitent de prendre en compte la structure interne des mots-formes pour permettre une analyse syntaxique de qualité satisfaisante. Dans cette thèse, nous nous plaçons dans le cadre de l’analyse syntaxique robuste en constituants par transitions. Dans un premier temps, nous étudions comment intégrer l’analyse morphologique à l’analyse syntaxique, à l’aide d’une architecture de réseaux de neurones basée sur l’apprentissage multitâches. Dans un second temps, nous proposons un système de transitions qui permet de prédire des structures générées par des grammaires légèrement sensibles au contexte telles que les LCFRS. Enfin, nous étudions la question de la lexicalisation de l’analyse syntaxique. Les analyseurs syntaxiques en constituants lexicalisés font l’hypothèse que les constituants s’organisent autour d’une tête lexicale et que la modélisation des relations bilexicales est cruciale pour désambiguïser. Nous proposons un système de transition non lexicalisé pour l’analyse en constituants discontinus et un modèle de scorage basé sur les frontières de constituants et montrons que ce système, plus simple que des systèmes lexicalisés, obtient de meilleurs résultats que ces derniers. / Syntactic parsing consists in assigning syntactic trees to sentences in natural language. Syntactic parsing of non-configurational languages, or languages with a rich inflectional morphology, raises specific problems. These languages suffer more from lexical data sparsity and exhibit word order variation phenomena more frequently. For these languages, exploiting information about the internal structure of word forms is crucial for accurate parsing. This dissertation investigates transition-based methods for robust discontinuous constituency parsing. First of all, we propose a multitask learning neural architecture that performs joint parsing and morphological analysis. Then, we introduce a new transition system that is able to predict discontinuous constituency trees, i.e.\ syntactic structures that can be seen as derivations of mildly context-sensitive grammars, such as LCFRS. Finally, we investigate the question of lexicalization in syntactic parsing. Some syntactic parsers are based on the hypothesis that constituent are organized around a lexical head and that modelling bilexical dependencies is essential to solve ambiguities. We introduce an unlexicalized transition system for discontinuous constituency parsing and a scoring model based on constituent boundaries. The resulting parser is simpler than lexicalized parser and achieves better results in both discontinuous and projective constituency parsing.

The concept of BIM is nascent but evolving rapidly, thus, its deployment has become the latest shibboleth amongst both academics and practitioners in the construction sector in the recent couple of years. Due to construction clients buy-in of the BIM concept, the entire industry is encouraged to pursue a vision of changing work practices in line with the BIM ideas. Also, existing research recognises that the implementation of BIM affects all areas of the construction process from design of the building, through the organisation of projects, to the way in which the construction process is executed and how the finished product is maintained. The problem however is that, existing research in technology utilisation in general, and BIM literature in particular, has offered limited help to practitioners trying to implement BIM, for focusing predominantly, on technology-centric views. Not surprisingly therefore, the current BIM literature emphasises on topics such as capability maturity models and anticipated outcomes of BIM rollouts. Rarely does the extant literature offer practitioners a cohesive approach to BIM implementation. Such technology-centric views inevitably represent a serious barrier to utilising the inscribed capabilities of BIM. This research therefore is predicated on the need to strengthen BIM implementation theory through monitoring and analysing its implementation in practice. Thus, the focus of this thesis is to carry out a sociotechnical systems (STS) analysis of BIM implementation in construction organisations. The concept of STS accommodates the dualism of the inscribed functions of BIM technologies and the contextual issues in the organisations and allows for the analysis of their interactive combination in producing the anticipated effect from BIM appropriation. An interpretive research methodology is adopted to study practitioners through a change process, involving the implementation of BIM in their work contexts. The study is based on constructivist ontological interpretations of participants. The study adopts an abductive research approach which ensures a back-and-forth movement between research sites and the theoretical phenomenon, effectively comparing the empirical findings with the existing theories and to eventually generate a new theoretical understanding and knowledge regarding the phenomenon under investigation. A two-stage process is also formulated for the empirical data collection - comprising: 1) initial exploratory study to help establish the framework for analysing BIM implementation in the construction context; and 2) case studies approach to provide a context for formulating novel understanding and validation of theory regarding BIM implementation in construction organisations. The analysis and interpretation of the empirical work follows the qualitative content analysis technique to observe and reflect on the results. The findings have shown that BIM implementation demands a complete breakaway from the status quo. Contrary to the prevailing understanding of a top-down approach to BIM utilisation, the study revealed that different organisations with plethora of visions, expectations and skills combine with artefacts to form or transform BIM practices. The rollout and appropriation of BIM occurs when organisations shape sociotechnical systems of institutions, processes and technologies to support certain practices over others. The study also showed that BIM implementation endures in a causal chain of influences as different project organisations with their localised BIM ambitions and expectations combine to develop holistic BIM-enabled project visions. Thus, distributed responsibilities on holistic BIM protocols among the different levels of influences are instituted and enforced under binding contractual obligations. The study has illuminated the centrality of both the technical challenges and sociological factors in shaping BIM deployment in construction. It is also one of the few studies that have produced accounts of BIM deployment that is strongly mediated by the institutional contexts of construction organisations. However, it is acknowledged that the focus of the research on qualitative interpretive enquiry does not have the hard and fast view of generalising from specific cases to broader population/contexts. Thus, it is suggested that further quantitative studies, using much larger data sample of BIM-enabled construction organisations could provide an interesting point of comparison to the conclusions derived from the research findings.

本論文的研究主旨勿探討立法委員的選區經營方式，作者將選區經營中的選民服務(casework)獨立出來，探討它與選區經營的其他部份工作的關係。筆者發現，選民服務與連任得票之間的確有正相關的關係，而且與選民對立委的工作滿意度亦有正相關的關係。 　　本論文分為六章，分別略述於下：第一章緒論：分析選民服務的特性，並且建立選區經營與選民服務之研究架構。第二章研究背景，概述台灣國會選舉制度與政治文化。第三章選民服務案分析，剖析立委的選區服務組織與服務案處理程序，並且畫分服務案的特質。第四章選區經營分析，探討選區經營的兩項工作：拜訪選民與發行國會通訊。第五章選民服務的效果分析，證明選民服務的效果。第六章為結論。

This study focuses on educational psychology students’ self-efficacy beliefs in career counselling. The research was conducted in the Department of Educational Psychology of the University of Pretoria. An Interactive Qualitative Analysis (IQA) as described by Northcutt and McCoy (2004) was done. The constituency comprised seven students who have provided career counselling to at least one client.</p.> The IQA approach to research postulate that the ideal in qualitative research is to create a process that invite participants to produce data while minimizing the effect of the research process on the content. With the IQA approach the participants in the research have a remarkable degree of freedom and are empowered to generate and analyze their own data with minimal external influence. The role of the researcher in this process is to facilitate the process and to teach participants the process while guiding them to generate and analyze their own data. The central assumption in IQA, namely that the people closest to the phenomenon are in the best position to report about the phenomenon was confirmed by the researcher. The main findings of the study indicate that self-efficacy develops through formal and personal development. The identification of possible areas of growth and how this is communicated by the supervisor is fundamental for both formal and personal development processes of students. A positive cooperative developmental approach during feedback sessions is conducive to the growth of the career counsellor. The importance of experiential learning and modelling as a means to develop self-efficacy was confirmed by the research participants. The reduction of anxiety with the increase of self-efficacy was reported as a very important benefit of increased self-efficacy. / Dissertation (MEd (Educational Psychology))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Educational Psychology / unrestricted