Thesis (MA(Praktiese Teologie))--Universiteit van Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-75) Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Proefschrift--Godgeleedheid--Utrecht, 1978. / Mention parallèle de titre ou de responsabilité : Gerrit Jan Vos, Az. Résumé en allemand. Bibliogr. des œuvres de G.J. Vos Az. p. 220-223. Bibliogr. p.215-220. Index.

Currently, in the period of Poststructualism literature is widely approached as a cultural and social phenomenon and the aims of literary studies as the illuminating of social codes, ideology etc. embedded in literature. This study evaluates the contribution of specific critics working within the so-called "New paradigm". The concept "New paradigm" is used as an umbrella term covering a number of distinct developments, referring to literature as a system of literary "actions" rather than as a canon of books. In recent years several Afrikaans critics have embraced or adapted current theories in the domains of Deconstruction, Ideology Criticism, Literary, Sociology, Recepticm Aesthetics, Semiotics and Feminism. This study explores and evaluates the application of such theoretical paradigms to their work in the field of practical criticism. This study also explores the relationship between current theories of literature and their antecedents. The notion of current literary theory and practice not only as a broadening of scope and content of the notion of the "literary" but on the other hand as a liberation of theory and practice from an over-deterministic thrust (i.e. the approach of literature as no more than a set of social documents) is also evaluated in this study. A twofold aim of this study can thus be defined: a. to determine the extent to which the shift from the "old" to "new" theories was made necessary by the developing literary and social scene; b. to examine the links beween theory and practice in the work of specific, key figures in Afrikaans. Is it possible for theory and practice to be separated? Is there an important consistence in the relationship between the two in the work of the figures chosen?

Background: Modern Code Review (MCR) is a process of reviewing code which is a commonly used practice in software development. It is the process of reviewing any new code changes that need to be merged with the existing codebase. As a developer, one receives many code review requests daily that need to be reviewed. When the developer receives the review requests, they are not prioritised. Manuallyprioritising them is a challenging and time-consuming process. Objectives: This thesis aims to address and solve the above issues by developing a machine intelligence-based code review prioritisation tool. The goal is to identify the factors that impact code review prioritisation process with the help of feedback provided by experienced developers and literature; these factors can be used to develop and implement a solution that helps in prioritising the code review requests automatically. The solution developed is later deployed and evaluated through user and reviewer feedback in a real large-scale project. The developed prioritisation tool is named as Pineapple. Methods: A case study has been conducted at Ericsson. The identification of factors that impact the code review prioritisation process was identified through literature review and semi-structured interviews. The feasibility, usability, and usefulness of Pineapple have been evaluated using a static validation method with the help of responses provided by the developers after using the tool. Results: The results indicate that Pineapple can help developers prioritise their code review requests and assist them while performing code reviews. It was found that the majority of people believed Pineapple has the ability to decrease the lead time of the code review process while providing reliable prioritisations. The prioritisations are performed in a production environment with an average time of two seconds. Conclusions: The implementation and validation of Pineapple suggest the possible usefulness of the tool to help developers prioritise their code review requests. The tool helps to decrease the code review lead-time, along with reducing the workload on a developer while reviewing code changes.

Background. Code reviewing is a commonly used practice in software development. It refers to the process of reviewing new code changes, commonly before they aremerged with the code base. However, in order to perform the review, developers need to be assigned to that task. The problems with a manual assignment includes a time-consuming selection process; limited pool of known candidates; risk of high reuse of the same reviewers (high workload). Objectives. This thesis aims to attempt to address the above issues with a recommendation system. The idea is to receive feedback from experienced developers in order to expand upon identified reviewer factors; which can be used to determinethe suitability of developers as reviewers for a given change. Also, to develop and implement a solution that uses some of the most promising reviewer factors. The solution can later be deployed and validated through user and reviewer feedback in a real large-scale project. The developed recommendation system is named Carrot. Methods. An improvement case study was conducted at Ericsson. The identification of reviewer factors is found through literature review and semi-structured interviews. Validation of Carrot’s usability was conducted through static analysis,user feedback, and static validation. Results. The results show that Carrot can help identify adequate non-obvious reviewers and be of great assistance to new developers. There are mixed opinions on Carrot’s ability to assist with workload balancing and decrease of review lead time. The recommendations can be performed in a production environment in less than a quarter of a second. Conclusions. The implemented and validated approach indicates possible usefulness in performing recommendations, but could benefit significantly from further improvements. Many of the problems seen with the recommendations seem to be a result of corner-cases that are not handled by the calculations. The problems would benefit considerably from further analysis and testing.

Background: With the development of software, its quality is increasingly valued by people. The developing technical ability was absolutely taken to underpin the performance of the developer, and code quality was raised as being related to developer performance, thus code quality could be a measure of developer performance. Developer performance is often influenced by multiple factors. Also, different factors have different impacts on developer performance in different project types. It is important for us to understand the positive and negative factors for developer performance in a certain project. If these factors are valued, developers will have better performance and project will have higher quality.   Objectives: The objective of our study is to identify how factors (developer experience, task size, and team size) impact the developer performance in each case. Though understanding how factors impact the developer performance, developers can have a better performance, which is a big benefit to the quality of project.   Methods: We decided to use the characteristics of commits during the Gerrit code review to measure the committed code quality in our research, and from committed code quality we can measure  the developer performance. We selected two different projects which use Gerrit code review as our cases to conduct our archive study. One is the legacy project, another is the open-source project. Then we selected five common characteristics (the rate of abandoned application code, the rate of abandoned test code, abandoned lines of application code, abandoned lines of test code and build success rate) to measure the code quality The box plot is drawn to visualize the relationship between the factor experience and each characteristic of the commits. And Spearman rank correlation is used to test the correlation between each factor and characteristic of commits from the statistical perspective. Finally, we used the multiple linear regression to test how a specific characteristic of commits impacted by the multiple factors.   Results: The results show that developers with high experience tend to abandon less proportion of their code and abandon less lines of code in the legacy project. Developers with high experience tend to abandon less proportion of their code in the open-source project. There is a similar pattern of the factor task size and the factor amount of code produced in these two cases. Bigger task or more amount of code produced will cause a great amount of code abandoned. Big team size will lead to a great amount of code abandoned in the legacy project.   Conclusions: After we know about how factors (experience, task size, and team size) influence the developers' performance, we have listed two contributions that our research provided:  1. Big task size and big team size will bring negative impact to the developer performance.  2. Experienced developers usually have better performance than onboarded developers. According to these two contributions, we will give some suggestions to these two kinds of projects about how to improve developer performance, and how to assign the task reasonable.

My dissertation contributes to the material and sensorial interest in the humanities by focusing on the beholder’s phenomenological experience of multi-panel paintings by Gerrit Dou (1613-1675), Rembrandt’s first and most financially successful pupil. Dou has long been hailed as the founder of the Leiden fijnschilders (fine painters), who brought mimesis to the height of artistic achievement around mid-century. Archival documents reveal that at least eight of Dou’s paintings were once fitted within cases that featured highly illusionistic still life paintings on the outer surfaces of their hinged doors or sliding lids. While only two of the recorded covers survive, they feature both common and luxury objects with varied surface textures and lighting effects that exhibit a level of artifice true to the goal of painting professed by Philips Angel: schijn zonder sijn (“semblance without being”). Projecting out of the darkness of false shallow niches, the objects addressed the viewer in a trompe l’oeil mode and with a startling mimetic force that invited closer scrutiny. Yet, Dou’s still life works are rarely the subject of critical analysis and remain on the periphery of seventeenth-century Dutch art historical scholarship, overshadowed by his novel achievements in genre painting. Scholars most often interpret Dou’s still lifes as protective mechanisms for and allegorical glosses on the paintings they concealed. Instead, I argue that these approaches have limited our understanding of their significance. The disassembly and loss of most of these painted covers has further obscured their functions and meanings. My phenomenological approach underscores the ways in which these painted still life covers fostered an embodied relationship with the beholder in the context of the art collections for which they were destined. In Chapter 1, I gather evidence of Dou’s extant and lost still life covers and quantify this practice and consider these paintings together as an understudied corpus in concert with the paintings they covered. In Chapter 2 and 3, I provide historical and theoretical contexts for Dou’s nested paintings to ground them in pictorial and material traditions of concealment and revelation that permeated early modern culture (Netherlandish, German, and Italian) from the fourteenth- to the late seventeenth century. I consider them modern adaptations of the illusionistic images on the exterior of devotional diptychs and triptychs, insisting on their presence in the liminal space that connects the painted and real world. In Chapter 4, I analyze Dou’s painted still life covers as “meta-paintings,” characterizing them as theoretical objects charged with their own agency and the ability to invite the beholder to “think” with both their mind and body. Ultimately, I explore the ways in which Dou’s still life covers and René Descartes’s natural philosophy exhibit a shared and contemporaneous distrust of the senses through an epistemology of doubt and deceit, a premise that expanded the horizons of their respective fields in the seventeenth century. / 2025-09-21T00:00:00Z

This thesis presents new models for determining piezoresistive response in long, thin polysilicon beams with either axial and bending moment inducing loads or torsional loads. Microelectromechanical (MEMS) test devices and calibration methods for finding the piezoresistive coefficients are also presented for both loading conditions. For axial and bending moment inducing loads, if the piezoresistive coefficients are known, the Improved Piezoresistive Flexure Model (IPFM) is used to find the new resistance of a beam under stress. The IPFM first discretizes the beam into small volumes represented by resistors. The stress that each of these volumes experiences is calculated, and the stress is used to change the resistance of the representative resistors according to a second-order piezoresistive equation. Once the resistance change in each resistor is calculated, they are combined in parallel and series to find the resistance change of the entire beam. If the piezoresitive coefficients are not initially known, data are first collected from a test device. Piezoresistive coefficients need to be estimated and the IPFM is run for the test device's different stress states giving resistance predictions. Optimization is done until changing the piezoresistive coefficients provides model predictions that accurately match experimental data. These piezoresistive coefficients can then be used to design and optimize other piezoresistive devices. A sensor is optimized using this method and is found to increase voltage response by an estimated 10 times. For torsional loads, the test device consists of a slider-crank connected to two torsional legs. The slider-crank creates torsional stress in the legs which causes a change in the electrical resistance through the legs. A model that predicts the effects of a scissor hinge on the slider-crank is presented. Torsional stresses in the legs are calculated delete{using the membrane analogy.} and the legs are discretized into long parallel resistors and the stresses delete{from the membrane analogy} applied to each resistor. Assuming a second-order piezoresistance, an optimization is then done to find the piezoresistive coefficients by changing them until the model prediction fits the test data. These coefficients can be used to predict angular displacement from resistance measurements in fully integrated torsional sensors. Potential applications are discussed, and a torsional accelerometer is presented.

Dans un climat de réforme globale, touchant l’ensemble de la société hollandaise, émerge un certain nombre de compositions picturales nouvelles, peintes, au cours la première moitié du XVIIe siècle, par de jeunes artistes amstellodamois avides de reconnaissance. Prenant généralement pour sujet le repos de soldats, retranchés dans de sombres intérieurs, ces scènes se diffusent rapidement dans les Pays-Bas de l’époque. Les différents experts et théoriciens de l’époque les identifient alors comme des scènes de cortegaerd, terme issu du français « corps de garde ». Renvoyant dans un premier temps à la brûlante actualité de la guerre de Quatre-Vingts Ans (1568-1648), de telles œuvres s’en éloignent néanmoins rapidement au gré d’une transformation, aussi subtile que radicale, opérée par ces peintres sur l’iconographie du mercenaire pillard : celui-ci quitte, en effet, peu à peu, dans ces scènes, les tristes oripeaux du maraudeur pour revêtir les luxueux atours de l’officier éclairé et raffiné. En miroir de cette progressive assimilation de la figure de l’officier à celle de l’amateur, doit également être perçue celle du peintre à l’officier, régnant en maître sur son atelier. Initiée dans les années 1630, cette double mutation croisée des images du soldat et de l’artiste témoigne de la mise en place d’un intense mouvement de légitimation. Si une guerre de l’art a bien eu lieu en Hollande au cours de la première moitié du siècle, il s’agit avant tout d’une guerre de conquête de marchés et de statuts, menée par d’ambitieux artistes s’identifiant eux-mêmes comme les membres d’un corps moderne et indépendant de la peinture, portant haut les couleurs d’un discours théorique nouveau. / Amid a climate of overall reformation, which encompassed the whole of Dutch society, a group of ambitious young artists from Amsterdam developed a new kind of compositions during the first half of the XVIIth century. These painters were mostly known in the Netherlands for their depictions of relaxing soldiers in dark interiors. Those works were quickly given the label cortegaerd by art experts and theorists from the time, a term that derives from the French military term corps de garde, or guardroom. While initially referring to the brutal actualities of the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) in their art, these artists seem to have quickly moved away from the image of the pillaging mercenary towards a radically different iconography. Indeed, the Dutch soldier rapidly started to leave behind its sad rags for the luxurious attire of the enlightened officer and amateur. Mirroring this painted transformation of the officer into the art lover, painters similarly created visual parity between themselves, as masters reigning over their workshop. Beginning in the 1630s, this twofold transformation testifies to the existence of an intensity of ambition. If a war of art really did take place in Holland during the first half of the XVIIth century, it was therefore a war of conquest of new markets and social statuses by young artists who saw themselves as members of a modern painting corps. This desire for artistic legitimacy was launched by an emerging class of painters who were not only eager to establish their independence from a dominant form of painting, but also become the standard-bearers for a new theoretical discourse.

This paper focuses on the Secret Six who consisted of Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Samuel Gridley Howe, George Luther Stearns, and Gerrit Smith, and the concepts that these men believed in regarding the type of society they wanted established in the United States. The dominant theme in the minds of this Secret Six was the romantic belief in the free individual. The belief in the free individual living in a free, progressive society held out the promise that America could become a perfect community of autonomous individuals and an example for all the world. But the Secret Six realized that for America to be this perfect community of autonomous individuals, America had to be freed of any determinism in its institutions. These six crusaders had such faith in their theories of individualism, that they abandoned moral persuasion and accepted violence as the principal means of establishing their society. These men believed that only the type of an individual who was willing to use violence if necessary and to die for the dictates of his conscience, could reform America into a community that exemplified to the world a belief in the free individual.