'A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts'. Johannesburg 1987

The laminin-binding integrin (LBI) family are cell adhesion molecules that are essential for invasion and metastasis of human epithelial cancers and cell adhesion mediated drug resistance. We investigated whether copy number alteration (CNA) or mutations of a five-gene signature (ITGB4, ITGA3, LAMB3, PLEC, and SYNE3), representing essential genes for LBI adhesion, would correlate with patient outcomes within human epithelial-type tumor data sets currently available in an open access format.

Copy number Variants (CNVs), which comprise deletions, insertions and inversions of genomic sequence, are a main form of genetic variation between individual genomes. CNVs are commonly present in the genomes of human and other species. However, they have not been extensively characterized as their ascertainment is challenging. I reviewed current CNV studies and CNV discovery methods, especially the algorithms which infer CNVs from whole genome Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) arrays and compared the performance of three analytical tools in order to identify the best method of CNV identification. Then I applied this method to identify CNV events in three European population isolates—the island of Vis in Croatia, the islands of Orkney in Scotland and villages in the South Tyrol in Italy - from Illumina genome-wide array data with more than 300,000 SNPs. I analyzed and compared CNV features across these three populations, including CNV frequencies, genome distribution, gene content, segmental duplication overlap and GC content. With the pedigree information for each population, I investigated the inheritance and segregation of CNVs in families. I also looked at association between CNVs and quantitative traits measured in the study samples. CNVs were widely found in study samples and reference genomes. Discrepancies were found between sets of CNVs called by different analytical tools. I detected 4016 CNVs in 1964 individuals, out of a total of 2789 participants from the three population isolates, which clustered into 743 copy number variable regions (CNVRs). Features of these CVNRs, including frequency and distribution, were compared and were shown to differ significantly between the Orcadian, South Tyrolean and Dalmatian population samples. Consistent with the inference that this indicated population-specific CNVR identity and origin, it was also demonstrated that CNV variation within each population can be used to measure genetic relatedness. Finally, I discovered that individuals who had extreme values of some metabolic traits possessed rare CNVs which overlapped with known genes more often than in individuals with moderate trait values.

This creative project presents the first three modules of a proposed fifteen-module textbook on copy editing. The three modules contain college-level instruction and practice in the elements of copy editing, the tools of the profession, basic line editing, and guides for attribution of news sources and the editing of biased news copy. At the end of each module, there are lists of important terms contained in the text and a series of three editing exercises concentrating on subject matter in the text.The creative project also includes an up-to-date examination of modern newspaper technology and how it affects the copy editor. This examination explores video display terminals, optical character recognition and pagination, including examples of how the editing process is conducted in the computer age.

"A Master's paper submitted to the faculty of the School of Information and Library Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Library Science." / Title from PDF title page (viewed on May 3, 2005). Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-39).

Web documents that are either partially or completely duplicated in content are easily found on the Internet these days. Not only these documents create redundant information on the Web, which take longer to filter unique information and cause additional storage space, but also they degrade the efficiency of Web information retrieval. In this thesis, we present a new approach for detecting similar (HTML)Web documents and evaluate its performance. To detect similar documents, we first apply our sentence-based copy detection approach to determine whether sentences in any two documents should be treated as the same or different according to the degrees of similarity of the sentences, which is computed by using either the three least frequent 4-gram approach or the fuzzy set information retrieval (IR) approach. These copy detection approaches, which achieve a high success rate in detection similar(not necessary the same) sentences, (i) handles wide range of documents in different subject areas (such as sports, news, and science, etc.) and (ii) does not require static word lists, which means that there is no need to look up for words in a predefined dictionary/thesaurus to determine the similarity among words. Not only we can detect similar sentences in two documents, we can graphically display the relative locations of similar (not necessary the same) sentences detected in the documents using the dotplot views, which is a graphical tool. Experimental results show that the fuzzy set IR approach outperforms the three least-frequent 4-gram approach in copy detection. For this reason we adopt the fuzzy set IR copy detection approach for detecting similar Web documents, especially HTML documents, by computing the degree of resemblance between any two HTML documents, which represents to what extent the two documents under consideration are similar. Hereafter, we match the corresponding hierarchical content of the two documents using a simple tree matching algorithm. Our copy detection approach is unique since it is sentence-based, instead of wordbased on which most of the existing copy detection approaches are developed, and can specify the relative positions of same (or similar) sentences in their corresponding HTML documents graphically, as well as hierarchically, according to the document structures. The targeted documents to which our copy detection approach applies is different from others, since it (i) performs copy detection on HTML documents, instead of any plain text documents, (ii) detects HTML documents with similar sentences apart from exact matches, and (iii) is simple, as it uses the fuzzy set IR model for determining related words in documents and filtering redundant Web documents, and is supported by well-known and yet simple mathematical models. Experimental results on detection of similar documents have been performed to check for accuracy using false positives, false negatives, precision, recall, and Fmeasure values. With over 90% F-measure, which indicates that the percentage of error is relatively small, our approach to detect similar documents performs reasonably well. The time complexity for our copy detection approach is O(n2), where, n is the total number of sentences in a HTML document, whereas the time complexity for detecting similar HTML documents using our copy detection approach is O(n log n). The overall time complexity of our copy detection and similar HTML documents detection approach is O(n log n + n^2) ≅ O(n^2).

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Multicore processors have become prevalent and spurred interest in scalable synchronization mechanisms, such as Read-Copy Update. While RCU is popular in monolithic operating system kernels it has yet to see an implementation in a microkernel environment. In this thesis we design and implement RCU for the microkernel operating system HelenOS. Moreover, we explore potential uses of RCU in HelenOS and illustrate its utility in both the kernel and user space. Benchmarks demonstrate that the RCU implementation provides linearly scalable read-sides and incurs significantly less overhead than traditional locking even if uncontended. Furthermore, RCU was used in user space to speed up traditional locking 2.6 times in the common case. In the kernel, RCU ensured linear scalability of a previously non-scalable futex subsystem. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)