In this paper a definitions shall be given for different types of improper integrals and several theorems concerning them shall be proved.

An alarming number of compression ignition (CI) engines in the transport, mining and heavy engineering environments have been failing due to combustion irregularities within their combustion chambers. It has been found that diesel fuels containing contaminants or diesel fuels with poor lubricity characteristics lead to stickiness of diesel injector needles, which badly affects injector spray patterns resulting in the phenomenon of “cold combustion”. This study has been undertaken to develop a technique for detecting and preventing the damage resulting from this deviation in the combustion of a diesel engine. The technique has been formulated with a view to being as non intrusive as possible, so as not to require major modification of an existing test engine to accommodate the technique. The practice of monitoring individual cylinder exhaust gas temperatures (EGTs) proved to be an effective way of determining whether potentially destructive combustion abnormalities were taking place within the diesel engine. By recording these temperatures at certain stages during the engine’s operation, taking their average, and comparing each one to this average it is also possible to isolate the location of the combustion abnormality. This method proved to be most effective at full loads and maximum fuel delivery where combustion temperatures are highest and the effects of poor combustion are most noticeable and potentially damaging. The second goal was to develop a small, portable electronic device that makes use of the monitoring technique developed and provides a visual and audible alarm to notify a vehicle operator or technician of a combustion fault within a diesel engine. A Combustion Monitoring System (CMS) prototype was developed and tested on a small naturally aspirated engine at the University of Pretoria’s engine testing facilities. The prototype met its primary goal of detecting simulated combustion abnormalities under a variety of test conditions. It is envisaged that the monitoring techniques applied in developing the CMS unit may eventually be incorporated into the powerful processing abilities of the modern diesel Engine Control Unit (ECU). In its current form the CMS prototype is a useful tool in sensing combustion related malfunctions within a diesel engine and preventing damage from occurring. / Dissertation (MEng)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering / unrestricted

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Magister Pharmaceuticae - MPharm / Evidence indicates that most South African households do not dispose of unused medicines in the manner prescribed by the medicine’s regulatory authority. This trend is not unique to South Africa, but several developing nations have also lagged. An in-depth understanding of practices of disposal of unused as well as expired medicines is cardinal and critical to the development of an effective programme to reverse the situation. This study aimed to identify factors influencing the disposal practices of household unused and expired medicines, and the role of pharmacists in creating an efficient and robust system for proper disposal of unused medicine from households in the southern suburbs area of Cape Town.

The label-feedback hypothesis (Lupyan, 2012) states that language can modulate visual processing. In particular, hearing or reading aloud target names (labels) speeds up performance in visual search tasks by facilitating target detection. The current study conceptually expands previous investigations by comparing the effect of a multimodal label presentation (i.e., an audio+visual, AV, priming label), with that of a multimodal (i.e. noise+visual, NV, label) and two unimodal (i.e. audio, A, label or visual, V, label) control conditions in a visual search task. Furthermore, the name of a category (i.e. a label at the superordinate level) was used as a cue, instead of the more commonly used target name (a basic level label), with targets belonging to one of three categories: proper weapons, improper weapons, garments. According to legislation, objects are typically classified as weapons if they are offensive per se (referred to here as proper) and if they are adapted for use as weapons or carried with the intent of causing injury (referred to here as improper), with specific regulations on their usage and possession in public spaces. However, little evidence exists on the validity of this distinction in psychology, despite a widespread recognition of the importance of psychological states and perceptions in risk assessment. These categories were found to vary for their structure, improper weapons being an ad hoc category unlike proper weapons and garments, and for the perceived dangerousness and familiarity of their exemplars, which increase from garments to proper weapons. Results of the two experiments on the label-feedback effect show an overall transient facilitation of visual search performance in the AV condition compared to control conditions. However, for improper weapons, no significant difference was found between the AV and the NV label condition, suggesting that the specificity of the superordinate label effect can be modulated by the structural properties of a category. The findings are consistent with the idea that the AV condition prompted an "up regulation" of the label, a requirement for enhancing the label’s beneficial effects, with the exception of improper weapons. They also highlight the status of the category of improper weapons and offer additional proof that sets it apart from proper weapons.

Viešojo administravimo srityje keliamas gero administravimo reikalavimas, kad būtų garantuojamas konstitucinio principo „valdžios įstaigos tarnauja žmonėms” įgyvendinimas, užtikrinamos žmonių teisės ir teisėti interesai jų kasdieniuose santykiuose su valdžios institucijomis. Gero administravimo principai yra pamatinės nuostatos teisiniam reguliavimui, teisės realizavimui, teisinei praktikai viešojo administravimo sistemos veiksmingumo, atskaitingumo bei skaidrumo stiprinimo srityje. Gero administravimo standartų laikymasis ir įgyvendinimas viešojo administravimo srityje užtikrina, kad viešojo administravimo subjektai teisingai ir efektyviai tvarkys viešuosius reikalus, suinteresuotiems asmenims teiks kokybiškas administracines ir viešąsias paslaugas. Teisės aktų analizė leidžia daryti išvadą, kad teisės į gerą administravimą užtikrinimui sukurta pakankama teisinė bazė bei institucinis mechanizmas. Tačiau gyventojų apklausa bei teisės į gerą administravimą įgyvendinimo kontrolės funkcijas vykdančių institucijų veiklos analizė rodo, kad realizuojant šią teisę praktikoje neišvengiama jos pažeidimų. Darbe siekta atskleisti, dėl kokių priežasčių teisės į gerą administravimą teorija ne visada pasireiškia praktikoje, bei kokie galėtų būti šios problemos sprendimo variantai. / The requirement of good administration is put forward in the sphere of public administration in order to guarantee execution of the constitutional principle “authority institutions serve people” and people’s rights and legal interests regarding their everyday relations with authority institutions. The principles of good administration are basic provisions for legal regulation, law realization and law practice in the sphere of public administration system efficiency, accountability and transparency strengthening. Observation and execution of good administration standards in the field of public administration guarantee that public administration entities will handle public matters in a proper and efficient way and will render qualitative administrative and public services to interested persons. The analysis of legal acts allows us to draw a conclusion that a sufficient legal basis and institutional mechanism is established for guaranteeing the right to good administration. Nevertheless the survey of population and the analysis of the activity of institutions fulfilling the functions of good administration execution control show that while putting this right into practice no violations of it can be avoided. The thesis is aimed at revealing the causes why the theory of right to good administration does not always manifests itself in practice and what ways of this problem solution could be.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第22451号 / 工博第4712号 / 新制||工||1736(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院工学研究科材料化学専攻 / (主査)教授 田中 勝久, 教授 田中 功, 教授 陰山 洋 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DGAM

Hardware impairments (HWIs) impose a huge challenge on modern wireless commu- nication systems owing to the characteristics like compactness, least complexity, cost ef- fectiveness and high energy efficiency. Numerous techniques are implemented to minimize the detrimental effects of these HWIs ,however, the residual HWIs may still appear as an additive distortion, multiplicative interference, or an aggregate of both. Numerous studies have commenced efforts to model one or the other forms of hardware impairments in the ra- dio frequency (RF) transceivers. Many presented the widely linear model for in-phase and quadrature imbalance (IQI) but failed to recognize the impropriety induced in the system because of the self-interfering signals. Therefore, we have presented not only a rigorous ag- gregate impairment model along with its complete impropriety statistical characterization but also the appropriate performance analysis to quantify their degradation effects. Lat- est advances have endorsed the superiority of incorporating more generalized impropriety phenomenon as opposed to conventional propriety. In this backdrop, we propose the improper Gaussian signaling (IGS) to mitigate the drastic impact of HWIs and improve the system performance in terms of achievable rate and outage probability. Recent contributions have advocated the employment of IGS over traditional proper Gaussian signaling (PGS) in various interference limited scenarios even in the absence of any improper noise/interference. It is pertaining to the additional degree of freedom (DoF) offered by IGS, which can be optimized to reap maximum benefits. This reduced-entropy signaling is the preferred choice to pose minimal interference to a legitimate network yielding another mechanism to tackle undesired interference. Evidently, the incorporation of both inherent and induced impropriety characteristics is critical for effective utilization. Most of the recent research revolves around the theoretical analysis and advantages of improper signaling with minimal focus on its practical realization. We bridge this gap by adopting and optimizing asymmetric signaling (AS) which is the finite discrete implemen- tation of the improper signaling. We propose the design of both structural and stochastic shaping to realize AS. Structural shaping involves geometric shaping (GS) of the symbol constellation using some rotation and translation matrices. Whereas, stochastic shaping as- signs non-uniform prior probabilities to the symbols. Furthermore, hybrid shaping (HS) is also proposed to reap the gains of both geometric and probabilistic shaping. AS is proven superior to the conventional M-ary symmetric signaling in all of its forms. To this end, probabilistic shaping (PS) demonstrates the best trade-off between the performance en- hancement and added complexity. This research motivates further investigation for the utilization of impropriety concepts in the upcoming generations of wireless communications. It opens new paradigms in inter- ference management and another dimension in the signal space. Besides communications, the impropriety characterization has also revealed numerous applications in the fields of medicine, acoustics, geology, oceanography, economics, bioinformatics, forensics, image processing, computer vision, and power grids.

Next generation of wireless communication mostly relies on multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) configuration and full-duplex relaying to improve data-rates, spectrale efficiency, spatial-multiplexing, quality-of-service and energy-efficiency etc. However, multiple radio frequency (RF) transceivers in MIMO system and multi-hops in relay networks, accumulate transceiver impairments, rendering an unacceptable system performance. Majority of the technical contributions either assume ideal hardware or inappropriately model hardware impairments which often induce misleading results especially for high data-rate communication systems. We propose statistical mathematical modeling of various hardware impairment (HWI) to characterize their deteriorating effects on the information signal. In addition, we model the aggregate HWI as improper Gaussian signaling (IGS), to fully characterize their asymmetric properties and the self-interfering signal attribute under I/Q imbalance. The proposed model encourages to adopt asymmetric transmission scheme, as opposed to traditional symmetric signaling. First, we present statistical baseband equivalent mathematical models for general MIMO system and two special scenarios of receive and transmit diversity systems under HWI. Then, we express their achievable rate under PGS and IGS transmit schemes. Moreover, we tune the IGS statistical characteristics to maximize the achievable rate. We also present optimal beam-forming/pre-coding and receive combiner vector for multiple-input single-output (MISO) and single-input multiple output (SIMO) systems, which lead to SDNR maximization. Moreover, we propose an adaptive scheme to switch between maximal IGS (MIGS) and PGS transmission based on the described conditions to reduce computational overhead. Subsequently, two case studies are presented. 1) Outage analysis has been carried out for SIMO, under transceiver distortion noise, for two diversity combining schemes 2) The benefits of employing IGS is investigated in full duplex relaying (FDR) suffering from two types of interference, the residual self-interference (RSI) and I/Q distortions. We further optimize the pseudo-variance to compensate the interference impact and improve end-to-end achievable rate. Finally, we validate the analytic expressions through simulation results, to quantify the performance degradation in the absence of ideal transceivers and the gain reaped from adopting IGS scheme compared with PGS scheme.