Thesis (MSc (Botany and Zoology))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Although the Bengal tiger, Panthera tigris tigris, appears on the IUCN Red Data List for endangered animals, very little information is available in the literature on the components of this animal's marking fluid. Scent marking is the main form of communication in all cat species. In some species, including the Bengal tiger, the liquid used for spraying is not pure urine, but is mixed with scent gland secretions. The objective of this study was to characterise the volatile components in the marking fluid of the Bengal tiger to achieve a better understanding of the semiochemical communication of this animal. The marking fluid of the tiger was characterised through the use of analytical techniques, such as gaschromatography, low resolution gas chromatography - mass spectrometry and retention time comparison. Homologous series of alkanes, alcohols, aldehydes, methyl ketones, carboxylic acids, γ- and δ-lactones, amides and lactams, as well as esters and nitrogen containing compounds, were identified. Of these identified compounds the unbranched alkanes, saturated alcohols, aldehydes, branched methyl ketones, saturated carboxylic acids and γ- and δ- lactones are commonly found in mammalian secretions. Compounds that aren't as common in their secretions are the methyl ketones, branched carboxylic acids, dimethyl esters of dicarboxylic acids and amides. The marking fluid contains a phthalic acid ester. Phthalic acid esters are used in the polymer industry and are nowadays found almost everywhere in nature. It is known that these pollutants have endocrine disrupting properties. The heat, humidity and wet conditions that are characteristic of the Bengal tiger's natural habitat makes it necessary for the tiger to make use of a fixative to prolong the life of the semiochemical message. The compounds and the concentrations in which these compounds are present in the urine and the lipid fraction of the marking fluid of the tiger was determined and compared to assess the fixative role of the lipids. This study has provided evidence that the lipid material has a greater affinity for the volatile organic constituents of the marking fluid and that it can therefore extend the lifetime of a semiochemical message left by the tiger.

We explore the language production process by eliciting subject-verb agreement errors. Participants were asked to create complete sentences from sentence beginnings such as The elf's/elves' house with the tiny window/windows and The statue in the eirs/elves' gardens. These are subject noun phrases containing a head noun and controller of agreement (statue), and two nonheads, a "local noun" (window(s)/garden(s)), and a possessor noun (elf's/elves'). Past research has shown that a plural nonhead noun (an "attractor") within a subject noun phrase triggers the production of verb agreement errors, and further, that the nearer the attractor to the head noun, the greater the interference. This effect can be interpreted in terms of relative hierarchical distance from the head noun, or via a processing window account, which claims that during production, there is a window in which the head and modifying material may be co-active, and an attractor must be active at the same time as the head to give rise to errors. Using possessors attached at different heights within the same window, we are able to empirically distinguish these accounts. Possessors also allow us to explore two additional issues. First, case marking of local nouns has been shown to reduce agreement errors in languages with "rich" inflectional systems, and we explore whether English speakers attend to case. Secondly, formal syntactic analyses differ regarding the structural position of the possessive marker, and we distinguish them empirically with the relative magnitude of errors produced by possessors and local nouns. Our results show that, across the board, plural possessors are significantly less disruptive to the agreement process than plural local nouns. Proximity to the head noun matters: a possessor directly modifying the head noun induce a significant number of errors, but a possessor within a modifying prepositional phrase did not, though the local noun did. These findings suggest that proximity to a head noun is independent of a "processing window" effect. They also support a noun phrase-internal, case-like analysis of the structural position of the possessive ending and show that even speakers of inflectionally impoverished languages like English are sensitive to morphophonological case-like marking.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

The InterdIsciplInary and exploratory nature of thIs thesis has made It difficult to write. The thesIs is InterdIscIplinary in the sense that it touches on a number of broad areas of study. The methodology which was adopted, In partIcular the use of content analysis and of certaIn statIstical processes rests on a knowledge of psychology. The category system which is made up of a number of types of hIstory could only be constructed after an extensIve consideration of the nature of history. The discussIon of the case for and agaInst the current syllabus,and the proposal for a new alternative syllabus at '0' and 'A' level (see Chapters 13 and 14), draws mainly on an understanding of the theoretical debates about the teaching of history which have occurred since the Second World War. FInally throughout the thesis references are made to the evidence and Ideas put forward by historians about particular periods of history. The thesis Is also exploratory.· The findings which are reported arise from the use of a category system drawing on the different types of history developed by hIstorians. No other researchuhas attempted to create such a broad category system, to assess Its valIdIty and reliability and then to employ It to code material dealinq with extensive periods of British and European history. At the same time the arguments, whIch are employed to defend and to attack the existinq syllabus (see Chapter 13), and to construct the outlines of a new syllabus (see Chapter 14), had to be created almost ab initio, since the dominance of particular types of history. both at university and school level. has not been debated extensively. either by historians. or by those writers. who discuss the teaching o f h·I story. These two asoects of the thesis have had a number of reoercussions. First of all vast topics have had to be discussed in a cursory fashion. For example all the arguments for the inclusion or exclusion of oartlcular types of history in the category system had to be reviewed in one chapter. a few pages being devoted to each of the types of history. Secondly maior themes and arguments relating to the nature of history. and to history teachinQ. have had to be exemplified with disturbing brevity. Thus the debate over the impact of oarticular types of history on the community(l) had to be illustrated by a small number of examples when the whole thesis could have been devoted to the discussion. Thirdly. and finally. the wide ranging nature of the thesis has made it impossible to conduct the exhaustive study of every aspect of the subject which would have been appropriate had the topic been more narrowly defined. However. despite these disadvantages. it is to be hoped that this interdisciplinary and exploratory study will throw light on a vital area of the history syllabus in schools.

Automatic marking of coursework has many advantages in terms of resource benefits and consistency. Diagrams are quite common in many domains including computer science but marking them automatically is a challenging task. There has been previous research to accomplish this, but results to date have been limited. Much of the meaning of a diagram is contained in the labels and in order to automatically mark the diagrams the labels need to be understood. However the choice of labels used by students in a diagram is largely unrestricted and diversity of labels can be a problem while matching. This thesis has measured the extent of the diagram label matching problem and proposed and evaluated a configurable extensible framework to solve it. A new hybrid syntax matching algorithm has also been proposed and evaluated. This hybrid approach is based on the multiple existing syntax algorithms. Experiments were conducted on a corpus of coursework which was large scale, realistic and representative of UK HEI students. The results show that the diagram label matching is a substantial problem and cannot be easily avoided for the e-assessment of diagrams. The results also show that the hybrid approach was better than the three existing syntax algorithms. The results also show that the framework has been effective but only to limited extent and needs to be further refined for the semantic stage. The framework proposed in this Thesis is configurable and extensible. It can be extended to include other algorithms and set of parameters. The framework uses configuration XML, dynamic loading of classes and two design patterns namely strategy design pattern and facade design pattern. A software prototype implementation of the framework has been developed in order to evaluate it. Finally this thesis also contributes the corpus of coursework and an open source software implementation of the proposed framework. Since the framework is configurable and extensible, its software implementation can be extended and used by the research community.

The aim of this thesis is to show that standard approaches to grammatical case fail to provide an explanatory account of such cases in Estonian. In Estonian, grammatical cases form a complex system of semantic contrasts, with the case-marking on nouns alternating with each other in certain constructions, even though the apparent grammatical functions of the noun phrases themselves are not changed. This thesis demonstrates that such alternations, and the differences in interpretation which they induce, are context dependent. This means that the semantic contrasts which the alternating grammatical cases express are available in some linguistic contexts and not in others, being dependent, among other factors, on the semantics of the casemarked noun and the semantics of the verb it occurs with. Hence, traditional approaches which treat grammatical case as markers of syntactic dependencies and account for associated semantic interpretations by matching cases directly to semantics not only fall short in predicting the distribution of cases in Estonian but also result in over-analysis due to the static nature of the theories which the standard approach to case marking comprises. On the basis of extensive data, it is argued that grammatical cases in Estonian have underspecified semantic content that is not truth-conditional, but inferential, i.e. it interacts with linguistic context and discourse. Inspired by the assumptions of Relevance Theory (Wilson & Sperber 1993, 2002, 2004) and Dynamic Syntax (Cann et al 2005), it is proposed that grammatical cases in Estonian provide procedural information: instead of taking cases to encode grammatical relations directly, and matching them to truth-conditional semantics, it is argued that it is more useful and explanatory to construe case marking in Estonian as providing information on how to process the case-marked expression and interpret it within an immediate discourse (or sentence). This means that grammatical cases in Estonian are seen to encode a heavily underspecified semantics which is enriched by pragmatic processes in context. In this way, certain problematic constructions in Estonian, such as transitive clauses in which the object is marked by either genitive or nominative, depending on number (often referred to as the accusative in the relevant literature, e.g. Ackerman & Moore 1999, 2001; Hiietam 2003, 2004) and constructions in which the nominative occurs on the object both with singular and plural nouns, are shown to have a unitary explanation.

Automatic memory management is crucial in implementation of runtime systems even though it induces a significant computational overhead. In this thesis I explore the use of statistical properties of the directed graph describing the set of live data to decide between garbage collection and heap expansion in a memory management algorithm combining the dynamic array represented heaps with a mark and sweep garbage collector to enhance its performance. The sampling method predicting the density and the distribution of useful data is implemented as a partial marking algorithm. The algorithm randomly marks the nodes of the directed graph representing the live data at different depths with a variable probability factor p. Using the information gathered by the partial marking algorithm in the current step and the knowledge gathered in the previous iterations, the proposed empirical formula predicts with reasonable accuracy the density of live nodes on the heap, to decide between garbage collection and heap expansion. The resulting heuristics are tested empirically and shown to improve overall execution performance significantly in the context of the Jinni Prolog compiler's runtime system.

Dissertation submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Master's Degree in Technology: Fine Art, Durban Insititute of Technology, 2006. / The aim of this dissertation is to investigate and critically evaluate the use of skin as a form of identity in Zulu culture. This investigation wil /foc'uu on the historical and contemporary practices of scarification and ear - piercing in Zulu culture. 1 In Chapter One, Section One the candidate will discuss the scarification and tattooing i techniques, and refer to the decline in the practice of scarification in contemporary Africa. 'l The scarification and tattooing techniques have the following elements in common, incisions `made on the body or skin to create scar patterns or shapes. Chapter \xAEne, Section Two the candidate will discuss the different purposes of carification practiced by people in Africa Scarification has traditionally been used for any different purposes, such as rite of passage, tribal/clan identity, civilizing, beauty, sexual atttraction, healing and medicinal. In Chapter Two, Section One the candidate will discuss the concepts of culture and identity and propose a definition of identity and culture for the purposes of this dissertation. In Chapter Two, Section Two the candidate will write a personal history and describe the origins of his identity. Chapter 'two, Section Three will discuss the historical formulation 0. of Zulu identity and culture. Chapter Two, Section ]Foam will investigate how internal and external influences have changed Zulu identity and culture over time. / M

The present research was an investigation of the effect of two methods of reporting pupil progress on adjustment and achievement of fourth grade pupils in a suburban elementary school. One method involved the use of an evaluation form reflecting performance in terms of ability, parent-teacher conferences, and work samples. The other method was comprised primarily of competitive grading and marking procedures, utilizing a standard report card to report results.

<div> <p>Understanding the dispersal ability of invasive insects provides useful insights for developing effective management strategies. Historically, methods for marking insects for dispersal studies have been expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive, especially for woodboring beetles. In addition, capturing or rearing insects requires human handling, which can alter behavior. Immunomarking is a well-established technique for studying the dispersal of insects, however, it has not been broadly applied to woodborers. This study evaluates the potential for using immunoproteins applied directly to woodborer-infested trees to mark emerging beetles. <a>Specifically, in the first experiment I sprayed varying concentrations of ovalbumin (egg white) solution directly onto logs infested with emerald ash borer (EAB, <i>Agrilus planipennis </i>Fairmaire) (Buprestidae: Agrilini) and ELISA was used to detect the presence of protein on emerged beetles. To test the persistence of the mark, I applied varying concentrations of albumin to freeze-killed beetles, mounted them on pins, and placed them in an exposed location outdoors. Adult EAB self-marked as they emerged from protein-treated trees, with higher protein concentrations persisting for longer on the cuticle when exposed to sun and rain. </a>This technique offers a convenient, inexpensive and durable means of marking woodborers and circumvents the need for human handling, allowing for more natural behavior and more realistic estimates of dispersal. Protein self-marking may find application in studies of woodborer dispersal within natural forest environments.<a></a></p> </div> <br>