MMed, Community Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand / INTRODUCTION: Cervical cancer continues to be a significant cause of morbidity and mortality, particularly in women in the developing world, due to the lack of effective population screening. It has proven difficult to implement and sustain cytological screening programmes as health systems in these settings are not functional. South Africa has adopted an organised cervical screening programme, and the goal is to screen 70% of women over 30 years nationally, within ten years of initiating the programme. However, it is also necessary to ensure that women with abnormal Pap smears are treated if we are to reduce cervical cancer incidence. Ensuring treatment of abnormal Pap smears is a challenge, and current data on this is needed to inform service delivery. AIM: The study aims to assess the current status of the cervical screening programme in the Johannesburg Metro District, specifically looking at screening coverage, and referral for treatment in women with abnormal Pap smears. METHODOLOGY: Secondary analysis of data in the District Health Information System was done; and registers at a sample of primary health care clinics and their referral colposcopy services were evaluated for the period April 2007 – March 2008. Descriptive statistics were employed to analyse the data. Multivariate analysis was also done to evaluate factors associated with colposcopy attendance. vi RESULTS: Screening coverage for the district was 6.3% for 2008 and the cumulative coverage from 2000 to 2008 was 35.8%, with significant variation between subdistricts. A high proportion (19%) of smears was done in women less than 30 years. Of 557 women with abnormal Pap smears requiring further treatment, 57% were informed of their results and referred, 38% had appointments for colposcopy, and only 28% attended these appointments. Women experienced long waiting times for appointments (up to 15 months), and there was inadequate record keeping and client tracing. HIV status and the sub-district and health authority where women were screened were associated with colposcopy attendance; the referral hospital was associated with length of waiting time between Pap smear and colposcopy. CONCLUSION: Cervical screening coverage is below target, and the referral for diagnosis and treatment remains a challenge. Unless referral and access to colposcopy services is improved, increasing screening coverage will not have an impact on decreasing cervical cancer incidence and mortality. It is hoped that this study will provide the data to target interventions to improve cervical screening coverage and effective referral and treatment in the district.

M.A., Journalism and Media Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 2006 / The focus of this study is on the coverage of industrial action by the Mail & Guardian between 1999 and 2004. Mainly, the study seeks to understand the coverage of labour issues by the newspaper in post-apartheid South Africa. It is argued that the coverage, or lack of coverage, of labour issues by the paper is related to socio-economic and political conditions in the country. Literature on the influential role the ownership and control of media play in the content of news, as well as the influence of advertising, is analysed to attain a clear understanding of the pattern of coverage of labour news in post-apartheid South Africa. Therefore, the study uses the coverage of industrial action as a yardstick to measure as well as to understand the extent and the shift in editorial content of the newspaper with specific reference to industrial action. The main argument of the study is that the prevailing socio-economic and political conditions in South Africa, brought about by the advent of democracy, coupled with structural limitations play a fundamental role in determining the manner in which working-class issues are currently covered by the Mail & Guardian. It emerges in the study that the manner in which labour news in general and industrial action in particular are covered has shifted and thus replaced in the main by articles on labour politics. The extent to which the Mail & Guardian covers industrial action in the post-apartheid era has declined, and more emphasis is being placed on other beats that are not directly the interests of the poor and the working class.

The personal and national dimensions of terrorism victimhood lend the victims their unique moral authority and political legitimacy. The analysis of the news media coverage of victims' campaigns, on issues such as memorialization, criminal justice, hostage crises and peace activism, reveals that the more such campaigns are closer in time, space, and relevance to the attack that the victim-advocates underwent, the greater are their chances for positive coverage. Deferential coverage of victims' campaigns reflects journalism's cultural role as reinforcing common values and myths, including by way of portraying victims as heroes. Where victims' campaigns are less related to the physical memory of the attack and more concerned with the military or legal aspects of terrorism, journalists take on their informational role and employ traditional professional standards. Such standards include subjecting victims to potential criticism, and at the very least "balancing" their arguments with official views. In issues where the victims' arguments seem far removed from their personal experience, their influence over the news media is small. This range of journalistic notions is offered under the organizing mechanism of the Experience-Argument Scale. The two extreme ends of the Scale, the "deferential" end and the "disregarding" end, are where journalism's missions are in danger of compromise. Journalism at the "deferential" end is emotional, reluctant to bring forth opposing opinions, and in effect may contribute to policies that are driven more by trauma than by considered opinion. At the other end of the Scale, journalism is deaf to the victims, and fails to enrich policy debates with the lessons of their experience. The comparative examination of coverage in the U.S. and Israel illuminates the different relationships between press and government in these two cultures, and how local responses to victims reflect the particular local history of terrorism, and the particular notions of nationhood, solidarity and patriotism.

「社會企業責任」是一個自相矛盾的名詞 ，它擁有無數有可能的意思 -「企業」暗喻賺取利潤，「社會」暗喻很多不同人士關注的不同利益，「責任」暗喻必要及非自願的行動。它是一個非固定的概念。跟據跨媒體議題設定理論，這研究利用內容分析,探討香港兩間本地電力公司如何利用有關社會企業責任的新聞稿影響報章的報道。結果顯示社會企業責任主題的新聞稿並沒有得到報章的重視，報章普遍認為某些對與公眾相關的主題的重要性較高。但關於社會企業責任的描述，例如發生的地區及合作的機構，就與報章的報道有相關性。而與社會企業責任活動有關的持份者及新聞稿中的引述數目與報章報道的次數是沒有關連的。這研究將原本的議題設定理論作出更改，以社會企業責任不同的「主題」代替「議題」為第一層議題設定作出分析；而第二層的分析就以被引用的源頭及引用內容的取態作出分析。。在報章的報道中，不同報章對各個主題的重視程度不一，所以它們報道的取態都有所不同。由於社會企業責任相關的資訊都較為正面，新聞稿是結構性的策略，目的是改變傳媒的行為，希望得到重視。這研究顯示出在新聞選擇、取態及擬訂的過程中，某些因素能取決社會企業責任相關資訊的新聞價值。 / “Corporate social responsibility“ is an oxymoron with multiple possible meanings - “corporate“ implies profit making, “social“ implies a multiplicity of interests and “responsibility implies required, thus involuntary actions. It is a fluid concept. Based on the intermedia agenda setting theory, this study employed content analysis to investigate how the CSR-related news releases published by the two local electricity providers in Hong Kong have contributed to press coverage. The results reflect that the salience of CSR theme is not transferred - the press assigns different degrees of emphasis to themes of higher relevance to the general public. The descriptions using which the CSR information is presented, such as location and the CSR partner with whom the CSR activities were carried out, are found to be significant to the amount of press coverage. However, the stakeholder groups affected by the CSR activities and the number of sources quoted in the news releases are not related to the amount of press coverage. The original agenda setting effects model was revised; apart from measuring CSR theme as the 1st level, the 2nd level was changed - source attributions and the tone of those attributions were studied. In the media agenda, the newspapers differ in their degrees of emphasis assigned to each CSR theme, thus, also vary in the tone of their coverage. Given the distinctive nature of CSR information being mostly positive, news releases are structured efforts intended to push for a behavioral change in the media. This study shows the process involves contingent factors that highlight the measurements of the newsworthy elements of CSR themes during the process of news selection, framing and elaboration. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Tam, Lai Shan. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-148). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.5-11 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Theoretical Framework on Agenda Setting --- p.12-31 / The Agenda Setting Theory / Intermedia Agenda Setting Effects / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Theoretical Review on CSR Communication --- p.32-57 / What is Corporate Social Responsibility? / The Corporate Agenda / The Public Agenda / The Media Agenda / Research Questions / Chapter Chapter 4 --- Methodology --- p.58-69 / Methods / Sampling / Data Collection / Variables / Statistical Analysis / Revised Framework / Chapter Chapter 5 --- Results --- p.70-94 / The Corporate Agenda / The Media Agenda / Relationships between the Corporate and Media Agendas / Chapter Chapter 6 --- Conclusion & Discussion --- p.95-135 / Measuring “Issue“ in CSR Communication / Defining the “Attributes of Issues“ / Defining the “Transfer of Attributes“ / Monitoring Media Coverage / Measuring Consistency within CSR Communication / Contributions to the Intermedia Agenda Setting Research / CSR Communication & Intermedia Agenda Setting / The Media Ecology / Nature of Business & Application to Other Industries / The Hong Kong Context / Limitations / Chapter Chapter 7 --- References --- p.136-148

Abstract not available

In statistics it is of interest to find a better interval estimator of the absolute mean deviation. In this thesis, we focus on using the jackknife, the adjusted and the extended jackknife empirical likelihood methods to construct confidence intervals for the mean absolute deviation of a random variable. The empirical log-likelihood ratio statistics is derived whose asymptotic distribution is a standard chi-square distribution. The results of simulation study show the comparison of the average length and coverage probability by using jackknife empirical likelihood methods and normal approximation method. The proposed adjusted and extended jackknife empirical likelihood methods perform better than other methods for symmetric and skewed distributions. We use real data sets to illustrate the proposed jackknife empirical likelihood methods.

This paper studies the interval estimation of three discrete distributions: thebinomial distribution, the Poisson distribution and the negative-binomialdistribution. The problem is the chaotic behavior of the coverage probabilityfor the Wald interval. To solve this problem, alternative confidence intervals areintroduced. Coverage probability and expected length are chosen to be thecriteria evaluating the intervals.In this paper, I firstly tested the chaotic behavior of the coverageprobability for the Wald interval, and introduced the alternative confidenceintervals. Then I calculated the coverage probability and expected length forthose intervals, made comparisons and recommended confidence intervals forthe three cases. This paper also discussed the relationship among the threediscrete distributions, and in the end illustrated the applications on binomialand Poisson data with brief examples.

Terpios hoshinota is a blackish-gray cyanobacteriosponge encrusting on stony corals with fast expansion rates in shallow waters. The sponge population exploded at Green Island and Orchid Island during 2006 to 2008. Here, we surveyed at Green Island and Orchid Island in 2009 and 2010, compared the sponge densities, individual lengths, sponge coverage and scleractinian coral coverage between 2008 and 2010. We also tested the hypothesis that typhoon may play a role inhibiting the sponges by monitoring individual sponges before and after. In these three years, the sponge coverages remained the same; sponge length and densities had no significant difference at 2~3 m depth at Green Island, but densities decreased and length increase at 5 m depth at Green Island and 2~3 m depth at Orchid Island, but the rate increased was significant slower than average growth speed . Although sponge coverages were not significant different between these years, the scleractinian corals coverages decreased at Green Island among these years. The main wind direction was southwest during the Typhoon Marakot at Green Island, and only the sponges at southwest coast of Green Island decreased in size significantly among the three coasts monitored. The population of Sponge T. hoshinota exploded in 2006, the strength of typhoons were smaller than other years during 2005 to 2009. The typhoon may be the main factor that inhibiting the sponge T. hoshinota at these two islands.

In this thesis, we propose and evaluate algorithms for solving the worst-case-coverage deployment problem in ad-hoc wireless sensor networks. The worst-case-coverage deployment problem is to deploy additional sensors in the wireless sensor field to optimize the worst-case coverage. We derive a duality theorem that reveals the close relation between the maximum breach path and the minimum Delaunay cut. The duality theorem is similar to the well-known max-flow-min-cut theorem in the field of network optimization. The major difference lies in the fact that the object function we study in this paper is nonlinear rather than linear. Based on the duality theorem, we propose an efficient dual algorithm to solve the worst-case-coverage deployment problem. In addition, we propose a genetic algorithm for deploying a number of additional sensors simultaneously. We use analytical proofs and simulation results to justify the usage of the proposed approaches.

This thesis examines how three Lebanese satellite stations and two print journals cover the Syrian civil war. It is useful to analyze Lebanon’s news programming because the relative lack of regulation over its media allows them to take drastically different political stances. Syria and Lebanon’s unique political and cultural connection causes the conflict to permeate both the debates over foreign and domestic policy. My paper is significant because it elucidates the specific ways in which the Syrian crisis divides the already fractured Lebanese populace. My analysis reveals how regional news sources give meaning to the Arab Spring using language drawn from local historical and political experiences. / text