<p> Foundations and communities for open-source projects often want to determine the impact of their software projects. This impact can be understood in a variety of ways, and this research explores this subject by examining the interdependencies between an open-source project and other projects. In this context, the open-source project is dependent on components created upstream by the other projects. Conversely, software is used downstream by other projects. This thesis proposes an index called the V-index, through which impact of an open-source project, as used in downstream projects, can be measured. The V-index is developed using the open database libraires.io, which provides the requisite dependencies and, thus, a determination of the impact of open-source projects. Further, to explore how the V-index can be understood, project-specific open-source health metrics are identified as potentially easier targets for change than is project impact. A correlation matrix is formed among the identified metrics and the V-index is calculated to determine the corresponding relationships among them. Finally, the conclusions and implications of this research are drawn.</p><p>

<p> The trend of using personally owned mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in the workplace, referred to as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), is being rapidly adopted by U.S. healthcare organizations. Because of the many advantages of BYOD policies, this trend is expected to continue. However, the use of personally owned devices in healthcare settings does present risks and challenges to health information technology professionals responsible for data security. A research gap exists as scholars have not yet identified what factors influence healthcare professionals&rsquo; intentions to accept and use an organization&rsquo;s BYOD policy. Using the technology adoption model (TAM) as a theoretical framework, the variables of perceived trust, perceived usefulness (PU), and perceived ease of use (PEOU) were examined to better understand the phenomenon of BYOD adoption in U.S. healthcare industry. A nonexperimental, correlational research design was chosen, and data were collected using a cross-sectional, online survey instrument. The population of interest included individuals working in the U.S. healthcare industry that owned a mobile device. The sample consisted of 130 healthcare personnel including clinical practitioners and health information technology personnel. Data were analyzed using a multiple linear regression technique. The results indicated that perceived trust and PU were significantly related to BYOD adoption, but no significant relationship existed between PEOU and BYOD adoption. These findings suggest that to promote BYOD adoption, organizations should focus on building trust and ensuring that users can derive utility from these devices. Ease of use was not a significant factor in this study, possibly as users were already familiar with their personal devices.</p><p>

<p> In the Data Era, the future success of many businesses will heavily depend on the business&rsquo;s ability to collect and process consumer personal information. Business leaders must understand and implement practices that increase consumer trust to influence their willingness to disclose their information. The problem addressed by this study is many consumers do not trust online service providers with their personal information, and as a result, have refrained from engaging in online activities. This lack of consumer trust impacts the consumers, businesses, and the global economy. The privacy calculus theory, which provided the theoretical framework for this study, suggests that consumer conduct a risk-benefit analysis to aid in their decision to disclose personal information. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to understand how consumers use privacy notices in their decisions whether to share their personal information with online businesses. This study was designed to answer how consumers view the relationship between privacy notice type and trust, privacy-related costs, and their likeliness to disclose personal information. A sample of 288 American adult privacy pragmatists were recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk. The participants were randomly assigned to read one of three privacy notice formats, a full-text format, a layered text format, or a standardized table format, and asked to answer a survey. A one-way analysis of variance was used to test the hypotheses. This study <i>F</i>(8, 55) = 2.08, <i>p</i> = .04 found a relationship between privacy notice type and consumer trust (&eta; = .22, <i>p</i> = .001). No relationship was found between privacy notice type and a consumer&rsquo;s perceived protection belief (&eta; = .14, <i>p</i> = .07), perceived risk belief (&eta; = .05, <i> p</i> = .70) or likeliness to disclose (&eta; = .11, <i>p</i> = .20). Practitioners should focus factors that will encourage disclosure collect consumer personal information other than website privacy notice format. Further research is needed to study these relationships in different online contexts and with different populations. Further research is also needed to study the relationships using other privacy format types.</p><p>

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SignSupport is a collaborative project between the Computer Science departments of the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. The intention of the software is to assist Deaf users to communicate with those who can hear in domain-specific scenarios.The penultimate version of this software is a mobile application that facilitates communication between Deaf patients and hearing pharmacists through the use of Sign Language videos stored locally on the mobile device. In this iteration, adding any new content to the mobile application necessitates redevelopment, and this is seen as a limitation to Sign Support. The architecture hinders the addition of new domains of use as well as extending the existing domains. This Dissertation presents the development and assessment of a new mobile application and data structure, together called SignDIn, and named as an amalgamation of the words 'Sign', Display' and'Input'. The data structure facilitates the easy transfer of information to the mobile application in such a way as to extend its use to new domains. The mobile application parses the data structure, and presents the information held therein to the user. In this development, the Dissertation sets out to address the following:1.How to develop a generalisable data structure that can be used in multiple contexts of Sign Language use.2. How to test and evaluate the resulting application to ensure that parsing the data structure does not hinder performance. The first objective of this research aims to develop a data structure in a generalised format so that itis applicable to multiple domains of use. Firstly, data structure technologies were evaluated and XML selected as the most appropriate out of three candidates (Relational Databases and JSON being the other two) with which to build the data structure. Information was collected from the International Computer Driver's Licence (ICDL) and Pharmacy domains and an XML data structure designed passing through three stages of development. The final outcome of the data structure comprises two XML types: display XMLs holding the display information in a general format of screen, video, image, capture and input; and input XMLs holding the list of input options available to users. The second objective is to test the performance of the mobile application to ensure that parsing the XML does not slow it down. Three XML parsers were evaluated, SAX Parsing, DOM Parsing, and the XML Pull Parser. These were evaluated against the time taken to parse a screen object as well as the screen object throughput per second. The XML Pull Parser is found to be the most efficient and appropriate for use in SignDin.

Myasthenia gravis (MG) is an autoimmune disorder in which auto-antibodies directed at the acetylcholine receptors (AChR) of the neuromuscular junction (NMJ) block, alter or destroy their targets. The anti-AChR antibodies cause activation of the classical complement pathway leading to inflammatory injury at the NMJ. Decay Accelerating Factor (DAF), a member of complement regulatory proteins, prevents activation of autologous components of complement pathways. The absence of DAF, in knock-out mouse models, has been shown to significantly increase the susceptibility to experimental autoimmune MG. A previous study showed that a high proportion of South African MG patients of African genetic ancestry develop immunosuppressive therapy-resistant extraocular muscle (EOM) dysfunction. We hypothesized that these patients have deficient DAF expression in their EOMs resulting in less protection from complement injury. Sequence analysis of relevant regions of the DAF gene revealed a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), c.-198C>G, in the promoter region in MG patients of African genetic ancestry with severe EOM MG involvement (MG n=101; Control n= 132; Odds ratio= 6.6; p=0.009). DAF-luciferase reporter assays, using 3 different cell lines (COS-7, HT1080 and C2C12) revealed that the c.-198C>G SNP (Mut-DAF) led to an increase in DAF promoter activity (

Short message service (SMS) message compression allows either more content to be fitted into a single message or fewer individual messages to be sent as part of a concatenated (or long) message. While essentially only dealing with plain text, many of the more popular compression methods do not bring about a massive reduction in size for short messages. The Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) specification suggests that untrained Huffman encoding is the only required compression scheme for SMS messaging, yet support for SMS compression is still not widely available on current handsets. This research shows that Huffman encoding might actually increase the size of very short messages and only modestly reduce the size of longer messages. While Huffman encoding yields better results for larger text sizes, handset users do not usually write very large messages consisting of thousands of characters. Instead, an alternative compression method called lossy dictionary-based (LD-based) compression is proposed here. In terms of this method, the coder uses a dictionary tuned to the most frequently used English words and economically encodes white space. The encoding is lossy in that the original case is not preserved; instead, the resulting output is all lower case, a loss that might be acceptable to most users. The LD-based method has been shown to outperform Huffman encoding for the text sizes typically used when writing SMS messages, reducing the size of even very short messages and even, for instance, cutting a long message down from five to two parts. Keywords: SMS, text compression, lossy compression, dictionary compression

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-93). / This study represents a seamless weaving of new and previously seemingly unrelated concepts on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) participation into an integrated substantive framework. The research demonstrates how patterns of behaviour amongst FOSS participants serve as currency for the acquisition of status. Stages of the Basic Social Process (BSP) that lead to the resolution of the status concern are proposed. The core elements of the BSP are found to be Joining, Learning, Locating, Cultivating and Consolidating. These constructs represent the non-linear stages which the members of the community encountered in their FOSS journey towards acquiring status. The conditions for variation of the constructs are also addressed in this study.

Includes bibliographical references. / Modern Molecular Dynamics force fields, such as the CHARMM36 and GLYCAM06carbohydrate force fields, are parametrised to reproduce behaviours for specific molecules under specific conditions in order to be able to predict the behaviour of similar molecular systems, where there is often no experimental data. Coupled with the sheer number available, this makes choosing the appropriate force field a formidable task. For this reason it is important that modern force fields be regularly compared. Streptococcus pneumoniae is a cause of invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) such as pneumonia and meningitis in children under five. While there are over 90 pneumococcal serotypes only a handful of these are responsible for disease. Immunisation with the conjugate vaccine PCV7, has markedly decreased invasive pneumoccocal disease. Following PCV7 immunisation, incidences of non-vaccine serotypes, especially serotype19A, have increased.

Recording university lectures through lecture capture systems is increasingly common. However, a single continuous audio recording is often unhelpful for users, who may wish to navigate quickly to a particular part of a lecture, or locate a specific lecture within a set of recordings. A transcript of the recording can enable faster navigation and searching. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies may be used to create automated transcripts, to avoid the significant time and cost involved in manual transcription.