The aim of this study is to conduct a thorough theoretical study on the establishment of a web-based cession collateral registration platform for agri-financiers in South Africa. The agricultural industry is earmarked for growth due to pressures of food security and the role it could play in rural development, job creation and social upliftment. Agri-finance to farmers for primary input costs, is the catalyst which kick-starts the agricultural value chain. Due to many reasons, the traditional asset-based collateral in the fashion of mortgage bonds will become more and more unavailable to agri-financiers to secure their loans. Agri-financiers will have to rely on commodity-based collateral (cession) as security for repayment of their loans. The law of cession and trite common law principle of first in time first in right creates an undue credit risk to agri-financiers. A market gap exists to establish a cession collateral registration platform in South Africa to mitigate the aforementioned credit risk assumed by agri-financiers. This platform is an entrepreneurial opportunity which could be operated as a viable and sustainable business enterprise. The results of the empirical research have shown that the market will embrace such platform as solution to the credit risk associated with commodity-based collateral in the form of a cession of crop income. / MBA, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

The aim of this study is to conduct a thorough theoretical study on the establishment of a web-based cession collateral registration platform for agri-financiers in South Africa. The agricultural industry is earmarked for growth due to pressures of food security and the role it could play in rural development, job creation and social upliftment. Agri-finance to farmers for primary input costs, is the catalyst which kick-starts the agricultural value chain. Due to many reasons, the traditional asset-based collateral in the fashion of mortgage bonds will become more and more unavailable to agri-financiers to secure their loans. Agri-financiers will have to rely on commodity-based collateral (cession) as security for repayment of their loans. The law of cession and trite common law principle of first in time first in right creates an undue credit risk to agri-financiers. A market gap exists to establish a cession collateral registration platform in South Africa to mitigate the aforementioned credit risk assumed by agri-financiers. This platform is an entrepreneurial opportunity which could be operated as a viable and sustainable business enterprise. The results of the empirical research have shown that the market will embrace such platform as solution to the credit risk associated with commodity-based collateral in the form of a cession of crop income. / MBA, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper describes the basic foundations of XML and the description of a JAVA-based eXtensible Markup Language (XML) prototype application being developed for the E-9A Airborne Telemetry Platform. In an effort to eliminate proprietary software and improve range safety data exchange, radar boat position data will be tagged with pre-defined XML tags prior to being transmitted from the E-9A. Ground Station software will then processes the XML-based boat position data to provided a means for ground station personnel to strip out data and distribute over the Internet. Leveraging XML for a telemetry application provides the ability to efficiently exchange telemetry data between users over the Internet and harness a web based standard with industry wide support.

This report investigates the technical and economic viability of introducing a Near Field Communication (NFC) client system in a gym environment. The system aims to aid the customers with logging their workout, retrieving information regarding exercises as well as enhancing the attendance control for both staff and customers. To identify what information to be presented, the most important quality factors and what functionalities are most desired, an exploratory case study was conducted. The study showed that there is a discrepancy between the desire to log ones workout and actually doing it. Most people want to keep track of how they workout, but despite the wide variety of workout applications on the market, they choose not to use them. The main concern expressed was that the logging needs to be fast and easy, indicating that the existing apps do not fulfill the ease of use desired. The system presented in this report is coupled to the gym where NFC tags pair an exercise to its corresponding logger and information in the application. The ability for the gym to track its customers’ workout habits is a rare feature that provides several economic benefits such as targeted advertisement, better maintenance control and new customer services analyzing their workout. For the system to be effective the customers need to use the system and log their workout, therefore it needs to be supported by the major mobile platforms. To accommodate this a hybrid platform approach using PhoneGap was used. This approach allows for development in one language that translates into native embedded web applications. At the time of writing Apple’s latest models do include the hardware for NFC communication. However, it is not possible to develop a custom NFC application for iPhone yet. By adopting the hybrid approach there is no need to create a whole new app when they do release the rights to do so. In conclusion, the technical viability of the NFC based system comes with the tradeoffs of dealing with the lack of standards of a new technology and being early on the market with a new feature. This calls for some custom solutions, since each platform adopts their own way of NFC implementation, but is manageable. The economic aspects are tied to the use of the system where the ease of use is the key factor for the customers. The end user tests indicate that NFC provides that small advantage over traditional workout applications needed to make logging attractive.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 13-16, 1986 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Airborne Platform Telemetry Relay System (AP/TM) is currently being built for the Gulf Range Instrumentation System. The AP/TM will allow air-to-air missile test and training missions to be conducted beyond the line-of-sight of land-based instrumentation. The AP/TM is comprised of the following subsystems: C a Telemetry Data Relay C a Sea Surveillance Radar and Radar Data Link C a Drone Control Relay C a UHF Radio Relay The Telemetry Data Relay Subsystem will receive telemetry signals from five independent sources and will retransmit them to land based receiving sites. This subsystem contains a 75 square foot, electronically steerable, five beam phased array antenna and uses polarization diversity to eliminate polarization mismatch loss and to improve reception in the presence of multipath propagation. The AP/TM will also have the capability of relaying four channels of voice communications and drone tracking data and to perform sea surveillance of the mission area. The coordinates of targets detected by the radar will be relayed to the range control center over a high frequency (HF) data link. In addition to the airborne equipment, the system also includes a ground support instrumentation van which is used for pre- and post-flight checkout and maintenance.

As modern embedded systems are becoming more sophisticated the demands on their applications significantly increase. A current trend is to utilize the advances of heterogeneous platforms (i.e. platform consisting of different computational units (e.g. CPU, FPGA or GPU)) where different parts of the application can be distributed among the different computational units as software and hardware implementations. This technology can improve the application characteristics to meet requirements (e.g. execution time, power consumption and design cost), but it leads to a new challenge in finding the best combination of hardware and software implementation (referred as system configuration). The decisions whether a part of the application should be implemented in software (e.g. as C code) or hardware (e.g. as VHDL code) affect the entire product life-cycle. This is traditionally done manually by the developers in the early stage of the design phase. However, due to the increasing complexity of the application the need of a systematic process that aids the developer when making these decisions to meet the demands rises. Prior to this work a methodology called MULTIPAR has been designed to address this problem. MULTIPAR applies component-/model-based techniques to design the application, i.e. the application is modeled as a number of interconnected components, where some of the components will be implemented as software and the remaining ones as hardware. To perform the partitioning decisions, i.e. determining for each component whether it should be implemented as software or hardware, MULTIPAR proposes a set of formulas to calculate the properties of the entire system based on the properties for each component working in isolation. This thesis aims to show to what extent the proposed system formulas are valid. In particular it focuses on validating the formulas that calculate the system response time, system power consumption, system static memory and system FPGA area. The formulas were validated trough an industrial case study, where the system properties for different system configurations were measured and calculated by applying these formulas. The measured values and calculated values for the system properties were compared by conducting a statistical analysis. The case study demonstrated that the system properties can be accurately calculated by applying the system formulas.

The global aim of this thesis was to study the use of microarray technology for the screening and identification of biocompatible polymers, to understand physiological phenomena, and the design of biomaterials, implant surfaces and tissue-engineering scaffolds. This work was based upon the polymer microarray platform developed by the Bradley group. Polymer microarrays were successfully applied to find the best polymer supports for: (i) mouse fibroblast cells and used to evaluate cell biocompatibility and cell morphology. Fourteen polyurethanes demonstrated significant cellular adhesion. (ii) Analysis of the adhesion of human erythroleukaemic K562 suspension cells onto biomaterials with particular families of polyurethanes and polyacrylates identified. A DNA microarray study (to access the global gene expression profiles upon cellular binding) demonstrated that interactions between cells and some polyacrylates induced a number of transcriptomic changes. These results suggested that, during these interactions, a chain of cellular changes is triggered, most notably resulting in the downregulation of membrane receptors and ligands. (iii) Identification of polymers with potential applications in the field of stem cell biology. Polymers were identified that showed attachment, promotion and stabilisation of hepatocyte-like cells. A polyurethane support (PU-134) was pinpointed, which significantly improved both hepatocyte-like cell function and “lifespan”. A second project investigated biomaterials that promoted adhesion, growth and function of endothelial progenitor cells. A new polymer matrix was identified which contained the necessary signals to promote endothelial phenotype and function. This has potential application in the creation of blood vessels and the endothelialisation of artificial vessel prostheses and stent coatings for improving angioplasty therapy. (iv) The study of bacterial adhesion, focusing on the adhesion of food-borne pathogenic bacterium Salmonella enterica serovar typhimurium, strain SL1344, and the commensal bacterium Escherichia coli, strain W3110. Several polymers were found to support selective bacterial enrichment, as well as others that minimised bacterial adhesion.

Military acquisition programs have long been criticized for the exponential growth in program costs required to generate modest improvements in capability. One of the most promising reform efforts to address this trend is the open system architecture initiative, which uses modular design principles and commercial interface standards as a means to reduce the cost and complexity of upgrading systems over time. While conceptually simple, this effort has proven to be exceptionally difficult to implement in practice. This difficulty stems, in large part, from the fact that open systems trade additional cost and risk in the early phases of development for the option to infuse technology at a later date, but the benefits provided by this option are inherently uncertain. Practical implementation therefore requires a decision support framework to determine when these uncertain, future benefits are worth the cost and risk assumed in the present. The objective of this research is to address this gap by developing a method to measure the expected costs, benefits and risks associated with open systems. This work is predicated on three assumptions: (1) the purpose of future technology infusions is to keep pace with the uncertain evolution of operational requirements, (2) successful designs must justify how future upgrades will be used to satisfy these requirements, and (3) program managers retain the flexibility to adapt prior decisions as new information is made available over time. The analytical method developed in this work is then applied to an example scenario for an aerial Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance platform with the potential to upgrade its sensor suite in future increments. Final results demonstrate that the relative advantages and drawbacks between open and integrated system architectures can be presented in the context of a cost-effectiveness framework that is currently used by acquisition professionals to manage complex design decisions.

With the development of the Internet and online payment, Online to Offline (O2O) platforms come into people’s lives. O2O platforms provide offline goods and ser-vices for their online users and these platforms are various, for example, they can help the users to call taxis, order food, call babysitters, make orders for cleaning the car and so on, which help people a lot for its convenience. At the same time, attracting customers for these platforms becomes a problem and many of these choose to make discount strategies to reach their goals. Companies invest a lot of money on discounts for competition while investment sometimes is risky, because the company maybe cannot earn the money back, so it is very important to learn how to make discount strategies for O2O platform wisely.Eleme will be studied as the case of this study, because it is a successful example of developing its food delivery O2O platform through investing a lot of money on giving discounts to attract lots of users. Eleme is one of the best food delivery O2O platforms in China, and its users are quite many, so it is a suitable choice to investigate. A mixed method is used in this study. Interviews have been done on commercial tenants of Eleme and questionnaires have been sent to ordinary end-users of Eleme, and the combination of these two parts can lead to good dis-count strategies. To answer the questions of the thesis, relevant knowledge about O2O platform, market strategies, discount strategies, consumer behavior and measures taken by Eleme will be used.The result of this study shows that discounts of the O2O platform do attract lots of customers and giving discounts is a good way to be competitive. At the same time, the platform needs to balance the profits of itself and its commercial tenants, and pays attention to needs of the ordinary end-users behind discounts in case of los-ing them. Eleme used a lot of wise discount strategies to develop itself, but the competition in this area is continuing and many measures can be taken for further development.

While some parts of identity remain constant throughout one’s life, many aspects of a person’s identity are subject to rapid and constant change and negotiation. Using theories regarding the role possessions play in the construction, reinforcement, and manifestation of a person’s identity, this thesis project explores the potential to facilitate meaningful insights and awareness into one’s own identity. This will be achieved by designing a reflexive journaling process. A qualitative evaluation of this prototype journal process used by a pilot group of young creative individuals will generate an assessment of the proposed process