This thesis researched whether or not Sweden’s Economic Equalisation for Local Government evens out differences in regions’ healthcare quality that are due to structural differences, such as differences in demographic and geography. To be able to analyse healthcare quality amongst Sweden’s regions six healthcare quality indicators were created. By performing regression analysis it was researched whether or not they correlate with the healthcare aspect of the cost equalisation system. If the correlation is high then it is assumed that there are systematic differences in healthcare quality, but if the correlation is low to non-existent it is assumed that there are few to no systematic differences amongst regions. But even if regions’s healthcare quality does not systematically differ this does not necessarily mean that it is due to the equalisation system. Some regions may simply be spending more per capita on healthcare than other regions to be able to provide a comparable healthcare quality. This thesis therefore also analysed whether regions’ healthcare expenditure rates systematically differed or not.  How regional decision makers decide to spend the money received from the equalisation system is also of importance. Even if the equalisation is sufficient (ie. if the money from the system is actually enough to be able to even out structural differences in healthcare quality) does not mean it will actually be spent on healthcare. Therefore it is of interest to determine how regional decision makers spend the money. Because there is a distinct lack of theories on this specific subject, I myself created two models which were based on the wider schools of thought sociological institutionalism and rational choice theory and these were used to help model the different possible outcomes of the study and to thereby help explain on what basis regional decision makers make their decisions when it comes to healthcare. From these models I created four hypotheses that were then tested.  The results of my study gave some modest support for the fact that the economic equalisation system fulfills its aim ie. it evens out structural differences in healthcare quality. It also supported the hypothesis that regional decision makers act in accordance with sociological institutionalism. But three outliers were found when it comes to healthcare expenditure, which if examined further may change the results of this study. More research is therefore needed on this topic.

Amplitude-versus-offset, AVO, approximations allow the estimation of various properties from pre-stack seismic gathers. Recently it has been suggested that fluid mobility is a controlling factor in pore pressure equalisation and can result in anomalous velocity dispersion in the seismic bandwidth. However, current approximations all assume an elastic subsurface and are unable to account for velocity dispersion. I have applied existing methodologies to a real dataset to qualitatively detect and interpret spectral amplitude anomalies. Three areas had AVO and spectral signature consistent with frequency-dependent AVO theory. The results suggest that it is feasible to measure such effects on real data in the presence of random noise. It would imply that the relaxation parameter, tau, is larger in the field than has been measured in water-saturated real and synthetic sandstones in the laboratory. I extended a two-term AVO approximation by accounting for velocity dispersion and showed how the resultant reflection coefficient becomes frequency-dependent. I then used this to measure P- and S-wave reflectivity dispersion using spectrally-balanced amplitudes. The inversion was able to quantify the affect of the P-wave velocity dispersion as an instantaneous effect on the reflection. NMO stretch was an issue at the far offsets and I limited myself to the near offsets and effectively measured only the P-wave reflectivity dispersion. I showed how the P-wave reflectivity dispersion signs depend on the AVO classification of the reflection whilst the magnitude depends on the crack density of my model. I showed how the effect of noise and thin-bed tuning can enter uncertainties into the interpretation of spectral anomalies. Whilst it is possible to detect frequency-dependent AVO signatures on pre-stack gathers, the interpretation remains non-unique. I have quantitatively measured a new physical property, reflectivity dispersion, from pre-stack seismic data. I have presented a method of detecting and measuring velocity dispersion in pre-stack gathers but there remain ambiguities in the interpretation of such results. The approach incorporates spectrally decomposed data in an extended AVO inversion scheme. Future work should investigate the application of the methodology to a real seismic dataset.

Poverty reduction and Education for All (EFA) are important policy issues in many developing countries as they are both Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As the existing literature suggests, education positively influences poverty reduction, while poverty, or low income, adversely affects the quality and quantity of education. Accordingly, if education fails to facilitate poverty reduction, the following generation's schooling is likely to be adversely affected, thus perpetuating a vicious education–poverty circle. It was against such a background, and employing a mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis, that this study investigated the relationship between education and multidimensional poverty at an individual as well as household level, and the influence of deprivation on children's education, in the context of the slum in Delhi, India. The thesis reveals that education – particularly primary and middle schooling – enhances the earnings of male slum dwellers in particular, the overwhelming majority of whom suffer from informality and instability of employment. It also emerges that education plays an important role in the ability to participate with confidence in the public sphere. At the household level, education proves to have a positive association with monetary poverty, but a higher level of education per se does not necessarily facilitate escape from non-monetary poverty. In such a nexus of poverty and education, the thesis found that household wealth in association with social group and migration status tends to be positively correlated with child schooling, education expenditure, and basic learning. There may be a chance of escaping poverty through education, but such a likelihood is limited for those households that are underprivileged in terms of caste and religion owing to slow progress in basic learning, as well as migrant households due to lack of access to schooling. The thesis concludes by proposing some education policies drawn from the major findings of the study that may be implemented in the Indian slum context.

Educational subsidies are becoming important mechanisms in promoting access to education among many countries. In Ghana, subsidy for Secondary Education is available to all students irrespective of their income backgrounds with the government granting only partial subsidies. Despite the strong political commitment to redress historical inequities in educational funding mechanisms, policy actions in relation to Secondary Education Financing in Ghana appear to fall short of achieving the desirable goals when viewed through a vertical equity philosophical perspective. It was against this background that this study sought to explore the management of educational subsidies in public Senior High Schools in Ghana and its implications for enhancing meaningful access and participation in Secondary Education. Although the education financing field presents a landscape and proliferation of theories, this study employed the vertical equity theory as its theoretical foundation. The study employed the concurrent triangulation research strategy by incorporating both positivist and interpretivist paradigms (combining both qualitative and statistical analysis). This was necessary because of the wide range of data needed to draw the necessary conclusion on effective funding mechanism for Secondary Education. Heads of Senior High Schools, management of the Secondary Education Division of the Ghana Education Service and parents of students at the secondary school level participated in the study. Both primary and secondary data were collected. Interview guides were used in the collection of qualitative data while statistical data were collected from EMIS. Statistical data analysis was done using Microsoft Excel. The qualitative data from the interviews were thematically analysed using data transcription. The study found out that, social accountability mechanisms to monitor how heads of schools utilised their allocated funds are highly ineffective due to lack of transparency. There were weak internal controls and monitoring systems. The releases of the subsidy have been unduly delayed due to government inability to release the funds on time. The subsidy as a mechanism of financing Secondary Education in Ghana is quite inequitable; giving students with different needs the same amounts of resources. There is the need to verify the enrolment figures submitted by heads of schools for the subsidies before disbursement of funds are made while ensuring that the relevant stakeholders are involved in the management of the funds. Government alone cannot afford to provide secondary education hence a cost sharing policy seems to be the optimal choice in providing adequate funds to schools. However, it is essential to ensure that the poor who lack the ability to pay in a cost sharing system are targeted and their education paid for by the government. Again policies in relation to education financing must consider the principles of equity, affordability, adequacy and efficiency. The implication therefore is the formulation of an objective, targeting mechanism to cater for those who cannot pay.

Multiple antenna techniques are used to increase the robustness and performance of wireless networks. Multiple antenna techniques can achieve diversity and increase bandwidth efficiency when specially designed channel codes are used at the scheme’s transmitter. These channel codes can be designed in the space, time and frequency domain. These specially designed channel codes in the space and time domain are actually designed for flat fading channels and in frequency selective fading channel, their performance may be degraded. To counteract this possible performance degradation in frequency selective fading channel, two main approaches can be applied to mitigate the effect of the symbol interference due to the frequency selective fading channel. These approaches are multichannel equalisation and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In this thesis, a multichannel equalisation technique and OFDM were applied to channel codes specially designed for multiple antenna systems. An optimum receiver was proposed for super-orthogonal space-time trellis codes in a multichannel equalised frequency selective environment. Although the proposed receiver had increased complexity, the diversity order is still the same as compared to the code in a flat fading channel. To take advantage of the multipath diversity possible in a frequency selective fading channel, super-orthogonal block codes were employed in an OFDM environment. A new kind of super-orthogonal block code was proposed in this thesis. Super-orthogonal space-frequency trellis-coded OFDM was proposed to take advantage of not only the possible multipath diversity but also the spatial diversity for coded OFDM schemes. Based on simulation results in this thesis, the proposed coded OFDM scheme performs better than all other coded OFDM schemes (i.e. space time trellis-coded OFDM, space-time block coded OFDM, space-frequency block coded OFDM and super-orthogonal space-time trellis-coded OFDM). A simplified channel estimation algorithm was proposed for two of the coded OFDM schemes, which form a broad-based classification of coded OFDM schemes, i.e. trelliscoded schemes and block-coded schemes. Finally in this thesis performance analysis using the Gauss Chebychev quadrature technique as a way of validating simulation results was done for super-orthogonal block coded OFDM schemes when channel state information is known and when it is estimated. The results obtained show that results obtained via simulation and analysis are asymptotic and therefore the proposed analysis technique can be use to obtain error rate values for different SNR region instead of time consuming simulation. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering / unrestricted

The purpose of the present study is, by employing the methods of process-tracing and pattern-matching, to compare the policy-processes with regards to the cases of student and patient mobility. While the case-study approach to EU policy-making from a comparative perspective was introduced in the late 1970s, so far there has not been a study, which compares the cases of student and patient mobility. This gap in the academic literature is important in order to examine what conclusions can be drawn from such a comparison and as a result their consistency with previous theoretical work. In particular, and in contrast to current theoretical themes in the field of European studies and in the policy studies literature more generally, both of which stress policy change as opposed to policy stability, the comparison stresses the latter due to the interests of the most powerful member-states, that is, France, Germany and Britain. The role of interests is manifested with the adoption of the Erasmus Programme and of the European Health Insurance Card, which do not concern the free movement of students and patients. Through a synthesis between liberal intergovernmentalism and the concept of path-dependence it has been possible to create a model in order to explain why those particular policies were chosen when the alternative of free movement was also available. This interest-based account comes in direct opposition with those studies which stress the role of ideas in the policy-process but it also emphasizes the role played by the supranational institutions more specifically the Commission and the court.

No / A simple method for dynamically adjusting the number of taps of linear equalisers operating in unknown channel conditions is presented. Simulations with various scenarios show that the technique successfully predicts the optimum equaliser length and is capable of adjusting it as the environment changes

Mentoring ist die Weitergabe informeller Wissensbestände von einer erfahrenen an eine weniger erfahrene Person, von einer Mentorin bzw. einem Mentor an eine oder einen Mentee. Mentoring kann auch auf Gruppen bezogen sein. Die Handlungsfelder umfassen Frauenförderung, Integration, Wissensmanagement, Personalentwicklung, organisationalen Wandel oder die Vorbereitung auf eine Berufstätigkeit. Seit den 1990er Jahren wurden vermehrt Mentoringprogramme für Frauen und Mädchen entwickelt, deren Ziel es ist, Bildungs- und Karriereverläufe entsprechend der individuellen Talente und Fähigkeiten zu verwirklichen.

[Truncated abstract] The transmission of digital information over a wireless communication channel gives rise to a number of issues which can detract from the system performance. Propagation effects such as multipath fading and intersymbol interference (ISI) can result in significant performance degradation. Recent developments in the field of iterative detection have led to a number of powerful strategies that can be effective in mitigating the detrimental effects of wireless channels. In this thesis, iterative detection is considered for use in two distinct areas of wireless communications. The first considers the iterative decoding of concatenated block codes over slow flat fading wireless channels, while the second considers the problem of detection for a coded communications system transmitting over highly-dispersive frequency-selective wireless channels. The iterative decoding of concatenated codes over slow flat fading channels with coherent signalling requires knowledge of the fading amplitudes, known as the channel state information (CSI). The CSI is combined with statistical knowledge of the channel to form channel reliability metrics for use in the iterative decoding algorithm. When the CSI is unknown to the receiver, the existing literature suggests the use of simple approximations to the channel reliability metric. However, these works generally consider low rate concatenated codes with strong error correcting capabilities. In some situations, the error correcting capability of the channel code must be traded for other requirements, such as higher spectral efficiency, lower end-to-end latency and lower hardware cost. ... In particular, when the error correcting capabilities of the concatenated code is weak, the conventional metrics are observed to fail, whereas the proposed metrics are shown to perform well regardless of the error correcting capabilities of the code. The effects of ISI caused by a frequency-selective wireless channel environment can also be mitigated using iterative detection. When the channel can be viewed as a finite impulse response (FIR) filter, the state-of-the-art iterative receiver is the maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) based turbo equaliser. However, the complexity of this receiver's MAP equaliser increases exponentially with the length of the FIR channel. Consequently, this scheme is restricted for use in systems where the channel length is relatively short. In this thesis, the use of a channel shortening prefilter in conjunction with the MAP-based turbo equaliser is considered in order to allow its use with arbitrarily long channels. The prefilter shortens the effective channel, thereby reducing the number of equaliser states. A consequence of channel shortening is that residual ISI appears at the input to the turbo equaliser and the noise becomes coloured. In order to account for the ensuing performance loss, two simple enhancements to the scheme are proposed. The first is a feedback path which is used to cancel residual ISI, based on decisions from past iterations. The second is the use of a carefully selected value for the variance of the noise assumed by the MAP-based turbo equaliser. Simulations are performed over a number of highly dispersive channels and it is shown that the proposed enhancements result in considerable performance improvements. Moreover, these performance benefits are achieved with very little additional complexity with respect to the unmodified channel shortened turbo equaliser.

This thesis attempts to address the problem of how best to remedy different types of channel distortions on speech when that speech is to be used in automatic speaker recognition and verification systems. Automatic speaker recognition is when a person's voice is analysed by a machine and the person's identity is worked out by the comparison of speech features to a known set of speech features. Automatic speaker verification is when a person claims an identity and the machine determines if that claimed identity is correct or whether that person is an impostor. Channel distortion occurs whenever information is sent electronically through any type of channel whether that channel is a basic wired telephone channel or a wireless channel. The types of distortion that can corrupt the information include time-variant or time-invariant filtering of the information or the addition of 'thermal noise' to the information, both of these types of distortion can cause varying degrees of error in information being received and analysed. The experiments presented in this thesis investigate the effects of channel distortion on the average speaker recognition rates and testing the effectiveness of various channel compensation algorithms designed to mitigate the effects of channel distortion. The speaker recognition system was represented by a basic recognition algorithm consisting of: speech analysis, extraction of feature vectors in the form of the Mel-Cepstral Coefficients, and a classification part based on the minimum distance rule. Two types of channel distortion were investigated: • Convolutional (or lowpass filtering) effects • Addition of white Gaussian noise Three different methods of channel compensation were tested: • Cepstral Mean Subtraction (CMS) • RelAtive SpecTrAl (RASTA) Processing • Constant Modulus Algorithm (CMA) The results from the experiments showed that for both CMS and RASTA processing that filtering at low cutoff frequencies, (3 or 4 kHz), produced improvements in the average speaker recognition rates compared to speech with no compensation. The levels of improvement due to RASTA processing were higher than the levels achieved due to the CMS method. Neither the CMS or RASTA methods were able to improve accuracy of the speaker recognition system for cutoff frequencies of 5 kHz, 6 kHz or 7 kHz. In the case of noisy speech all methods analysed were able to compensate for high SNR of 40 dB and 30 dB and only RASTA processing was able to compensate and improve the average recognition rate for speech corrupted with a high level of noise (SNR of 20 dB and 10 dB).