There is a tendency in the international literature to generalise about developments and reforms in public administration across groups or types of country, often across those in close geographical proximity. Since the revolutions across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the late 1980s, this tendency is revealed by various labels: ‘transitory states’, ‘post-communist states’, ‘post-socialist states’, which suggests that they all possess similar characteristics, and thus have similar administrative systems. Furthermore, many of these states are now members of the European Union (EU). However, the CEE countries are on differing reform trajectories; they have not all arrived at the same stage at the same time (some await EU membership; chiefly those in South East Europe). This thesis concentrates on Romania to provide a detailed analysis of its public administration trajectory and contends that is too simplistic to regard Romania as ‘similar’ to its CEE neighbours. Moreover, there is no definitive account of the development of public administration in the country, and this is one contribution that this thesis makes. The thesis engages with institutional theory; both historical and sociological, to provide a framework for analysing the present state of public administration in Romania, characterised as an ‘unprofessional bureaucracy’. The thesis employs the concept of path dependency from the institutionalist framework to explain the lack of change in Romania despite apparently ‘path breaking’ events such as the revolution of 1989 and accession to the EU. The empirical research at the heart of the thesis is based on interviews with members of the bureaucratic and political elites of Romania. The resulting commentary also provides a further important contribution for the thesis as this is the first instance of academic research on public administration in Romania that harnesses such information. By definition, elite interviews are difficult to attain, especially within the political context of Romania. By using institutionalist theory, the thesis clearly explains the current state of public administration in the country, which is far removed from the idealised and internationalised approaches to administrative change typified by reform movements such as New Public Management and Governance.

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Accompanying the increasing interest on Vehicle Ad-hoc Network (VANET), there is a request for high quality and real-time video streaming on VANET, for safety and infotainment applications. Video Streaming on VANET faces extra issues, comparing to the Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET), like the high dynamic topology. However, there are also benefits in VANET, like large buffer and battery capacity, predictable motion of vehicles and powerful CPU and GPU. Video streaming on VANET can be highly improved by these features. However the poor performance of wireless networks is an critical issue for video streaming in VANET. The high packet loss probability of wireless networks significantly reduces the quality of the transmitted video. An error recovery process is proposed in our research for high quality and real-time video streaming in VANET, which is call Multi-path Error Recovery Video Streaming (MERVS). The performance improvement of wireless networks is also considered in our research. The cross layer technique is adopted in our research, in order to increase the accuracy on the network condition monitoring and to guarantee the fairness on network resource distribution. Cross layer protocols on both the Media Access Control (MAC) layer and the Network layer are proposed to improve the performance collaboratively. The contribution of my researches are: 1) I proposed a MERVS, which provides high quality and real-time video streaming; 2) several improvement techniques are also designed to improve the performance of MERVS; 3) simulation results verifies that MERVS can have a higher quality on transmitted video comparing to the existing protocols in an acceptable delay.

The preparation of a glide path prior to the use of rotary nickel titanium instrumentation reduces torsional stress and the risk of rotary nickel titanium instrument separation. The objective of this in vitro study was to evaluate 3 different glide path preparation techniques in respect of:  Percentage change of curvature from original canal anatomy; and  The occurrence of aberrations in canal anatomy (ledging, zipping and elbows). One hundred and twenty S-shaped Endo-Training-Blocks were selected. The canals were injected with India ink dye. The blocks were indexed with 3 bur marks and placed into a template before pre-instrumentation images were acquired digitally. The blocks were randomly divided into four groups of thirty each. Glide paths were prepared by a single operator with stainless steel hand K-files only, up to ISO size 20 (group 1, control), stainless steel hand K-files in the M4 reciprocating hand-piece up to ISO size 20 (group 2), hand K-files to ISO size 10 then NiTi rotary PathFiles (group 3) and hand K-files to ISO size 10 then NiTi rotary X-Plorer files (group 4). After glide path preparation the blocks were replaced into the template and post-instrumentation images were digitally acquired. Percentage change of curvature from original canal anatomy: Pre-instrumentation and post-instrumentation images were imported into Rhinoceros software to determine the end points of the canal curves and calculate the percentage change of canal curvature for the radii of apical and coronal curves. The data was collected and tabulated. Differences in canal curvature modification were statistically analysed with respect to logarithmic transformed change from baseline using ANCOVA (p<0.001) with logarithmic transformed pre-instrumentation values as covariate. After establishing preparation differences, both for change from baseline (pre-instrumentation) for apical and coronal curves, specific differences were tested using Fisher’s LSD for pairwise comparisons. Prepared groups differed significantly (p<0.001) and in particular, group 1 (Hand K-files) (control) and group 2 xiii (Hand K-files in M4 Safety reciprocating hand piece) differed significantly from all the other groups while group 3 (Hand K-files and PathFiles) and group 4 (Hand K-files and X-Plorer files) did not differ significantly. Group 3 (Hand K-files and PathFiles) and group4 (Hand K-files and X-Plorer files) were also superior to group1 (Hand K-files) (control) and group2 (Hand K-files in M4 Safety reciprocating hand piece). The occurrence of aberrations in canal anatomy (ledging, zipping and elbows): Pre-instrumentation and post-instrumentation images were superimposed using Adobe Photoshop software. The images were imported into a PowerPoint presentation and examined by three different blinded clinicians independently, for the presence of aberrations. There were no differences between the examiners in their assessment of the images. The data was collected and tabulated. The incidence of canal aberrations was analysed using Fisher’s exact test (p<0.05). The groups differed significantly regarding the number of aberrations (p=0.005). In particular, group 1 (control) (Hand K-files) and group 2 (Hand K-files in the M4 reciprocating hand piece) did not differ statistically (p=0.254; 20% and 6.67%). However group 2 (hand K-files in the M4 reciprocating hand piece) also did not differ significantly from group 3 (Hand K-files and PathFiles) and Group 4 (Hand K-files and X-Plorer files) (p=0.326). There were no aberrations detected in the rotary NiTi groups (group 3 and group 4). / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Odontology / unrestricted

Bibliographic note KULESZA, Izabela A. PATH DEPENDENCE IN AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION . Mater thesis. Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Sociological Studies. Supervisor Prof. PhDr. Arnošt Veselý, Ph.D. Abstract This thesis is concerned with the study of public education in the United States as a path-dependent phenomenon. By reviewing the historical background of the institution of education, several key sequences emerge that are foundational principles. They are: a decentralized system, secular education, universal access, decreasing the achievement gap and global competition. Testing these sequences against school choice theories shows the foundational principles behind traditional public schooling in America are being challenged. The institutional reproduction of this pathway is likely to be interrupted in the utilitarian, functional, power and legitimation explanations of path dependence theory. Keywords public education, school choice, path dependence theory Range of thesis: 66

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, 2018 / Path replanning in high dimensional dynamic environments is critical to the success of interactive and reactive robotic agents. State of the art replanning algorithms typically extend sampling-based methods such as rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT) or probabilistic roadmaps (PRM). However, the speed of replanning in complex configuration spaces is relatively slow, which limits the effectiveness of robotic agents in highly dynamic environments. This thesis proposes DRM-connect, a novel generalisation of the PRM and RRT-connect algorithms, which carries out replanning in dynamic environments by executing graph searches over an underlying graph G, using lazy collision checking. If a path through the graph is not found, DRM-connect will repair the graph using a novel extension to RRT-connect, which we call PRM-connect. Additionally, we investigate using an approximate Reeb graph as the underlying graph G, which attempts to capture the underlying topology of the task manifold from prior experience. DRM-connect is tested with both a Reeb graph and na¨ıve graph in a 2-D domain and compared to RRT, while DRMconnect with a Reeb graph is tested in three 7-D domains, and compared to RRT-connect. Through simulation we show that the combination of DRM-connect and a Reeb graph typically outperforms both RRT/RRT-connect and DRM-connect with a na¨ıve graph in terms of replanning times, with minimal impact on the length of the solution path. / XL2019

A path π = (v1, v2, ⋯ , vk+1) in a graph G = (V,E) is a downhill path if for every i, 1 ≤ i ≤ k, deg(vi) ≥ deg(vi+1), where deg(vi) denotes the degree of vertex vi ∈ V. The downhill domination number equals the minimum cardinality of a set S ⊆ V having the property that every vertex v ∈ V lies on a downhill path originating from some vertex in S. We investigate downhill domination numbers of graphs and give upper bounds. In particular, we show that the downhill domination number of a graph is at most half its order, and that the downhill domination number of a tree is at most one third its order. We characterize the graphs obtaining each of these bounds.

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The exchange of topology information is a potential attack target in mobile ad-hoc networks. To provide an intrinsic security mechanism, it is possible to validate topology advertisements in the control plane against records of the path taken by transmission in the data plane. In this work, different path recording mechanisms are discussed. Their performance - in terms of packet overhead and reconstruction complexity - is analyzed and evaluated.

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