Magister Artium (Child and Family Studies) - MA(CFS) / The aim of this research was to explore and describe the challenges of 'undocumented' Zimbabwean immigrants with regards to preserving their family and identity while in South Africa. Three main objectives identified which were: (i) To explore and describe what family and identity means to the 'undocumented' Zimbabwean immigrants. (ii) To explore and describe 'undocumented' Zimbabwean immigrants' challenges with regards to their family life and identity upon arrival in South Africa. (iii) To explore and describe 'undocumented' Zimbabwean immigrants' challenges at preserving and maintaining their family relations and identity while in South Africa. A qualitative study utilising explorative and descriptive research designs was employed in a bid to answer the research question, namely: How do 'undocumented' Zimbabwean immigrants preserve their family and identity while in South Africa? Data were collected by means of unstructured individual interviews and transcribed verbatim. Initially, six participants were purposively selected and they in turn directed the researcher through snowball sampling to the other nine participants who fit the research criteria until data saturation had been attained. The interviews were analysed according to Creswell's (2008) steps as well as guidelines for phenomenological data. Data were also analyzed to ensure its dependability, conformability, transferability and credibility. The researcher adhered to ethical considerations of confidentiality, self-determination, no harm, as well as beneficence. From the data emerged four main themes i.e. • 'undocumented' Zimbabwean immigrants in SA's challenges in preserving their families • 'undocumented' Zimbabwean immigrants in SA's challenges in preserving their identity 'undocumented' Zimbabwean immigrants' challenges relating to their journey to SA • challenges experienced by 'undocumented' Zimbabwean immigrants during their stay in SA. Based on these findings, recommendations were made to social workers, social service professionals, governmental and Non-Governmental Organizations on how to mitigate the challenges that come with 'undocumentation.'

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Smart grid is an advanced electrical grid equipped with communication capability which is utilized to improve the efficiency, reliability, and sustainability of electricity services. Countries within Europe, North America and East Asia are undergoing a transformation from an antiquated infrastructure to the smart grid. However, some of problems arise due to the security and privacy issues of smart grid. Since smart meters and a grid operator can interact through its communication channel, there is a possibility that a hacker can hack into the system to steal information or even cut off the electricity service. Moreover, people are protesting and refusing to use smart meter since it enables the grid operator to perform frequent meter reading which unveils the customers¡¦ private energy usage information that could be abused. To cope with the privacy issue, we proposed an enhanced version of aggregation protocol from Garcia-Jacobs protocol where our protocol protects not only customers¡¦ energy consumption information but also the consumption information of a neighborhood. Furthermore, we proposed a novel privacy preserving billing protocol based on Priced Oblivious Transfer (POT) protocol which guarantees the grid operator to get the correct amount of money without knowing the individual energy consumption of the customers. Additionally, we also implement our proposed protocols.

In this thesis, we shall study disjointness preserving linear functionals of the Wiener ring. It is clear that Wiener ring is a dense subalgebra of C(T)in the usual supremum norm .However, Wiener ring is also isomorphic to L1(Z). So it has an 1 norm . By studying the structure of ideals of the Wiener ring, we discover that disjointness preserving linear functionals are the same under different norms. Bounded disjointness preserving linear functionals of the Wiener ring is a multiple of the point mass in both cases. Finally, we establish the existence of unbounded disjointness preserving linear functionals of the Wiener ring.

In healthcare-related studies, individual patient or hospital data are not often publicly available due to privacy restrictions, legal issues or reporting norms. However, such measures may be provided at a higher or more aggregated level, such as state-level, county-level summaries or averages over health zones such as Hospital Referral Regions (HRR) or Hospital Service Areas (HSA). Such levels constitute partitions over the underlying individual level data, which may not match the groupings that would have been obtained if one clustered the data based on individual-level attributes. Moreover, treating aggregated values as representatives for the individuals can result in the ecological fallacy. How can one run data mining procedures on such data where different variables are available at different levels of aggregation or granularity? In this thesis, we seek a better utilization of variably aggregated datasets, which are possibly assembled from different sources. We propose a novel "cross-level" imputation technique that models the generative process of such datasets using a Bayesian directed graphical model. The imputation is based on the underlying data distribution and is shown to be unbiased. This imputation can be further utilized in a subsequent predictive modeling, yielding improved accuracies. The experimental results using a simulated dataset and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) dataset are provided to illustrate the generality and capabilities of the proposed framework. / text

Stickiness is a ubiquitous property of dynamical systems. However, recognizing whether an orbit is temporarily `stuck' (and therefore very nearly quasiperiodic) is hard to detect. Outlined in this thesis is an approach to quantifying stickiness in area-preserving maps based on a tool called recurrence plots that is not very commonly used. With the analyses presented herein it is shown that recurrence plot methods can give very close estimates to stickiness exponents that were previously calculated using Poincare recurrence and other methods. To capture the dynamics, RP methods require shorter data series than more conventional methods and are able to represent a more-global analysis of recurrence. A description of stickiness of the standard map for a wide array of parameter strengths is presented and a start at analyzing the standard nontwist map is presented. / text

The efficacy of biodiesel as a co-solvent for copper naphthenate wood preservative treating solutions was evaluated using two fungal decay methodologies (AWPA E10-09, British Standard Method EN113). Four fungal species (Gloeophyllum trabeum, Trametes versicolor, Poria xantha, Postia placenta) and three wood species (Douglas fir, Southern yellow pine, Western red cedar) with six replicates were utilized in both studies. Two levels of biodiesel: diesel (30:70 and 50:50) were compared to diesel-only solvent systems for copper naphthenate treating systems and treated to AWPA recommended retentions. No differences in decay efficacy between the biodiesel blends and diesel-only treatment in either the AWPA or the EN113 decay studies were detected for either standard method. Copper distribution was evaluated using SEM-EDX and no differences were noted with either solvent system. It was determined that the presence of biodiesel did not have a negative impact upon the efficacy of copper naphthenate as a wood preservative.