Malaria is still one of the most proli c communicable diseases in the world with more than 200 million infections annually, its greatest e ect is felt in the poor nations with-in sub-saharan Africa and south-east Asia. It is especially fatal for women and children where out of the 660 000 fatalities in 2010, 86% were below the age of 5. In the past decade the global fatality rate due to malaria has been signi cantly reduced, primarily due to proliferation of vector control using treated nets and indoor residual spraying of DDT. There have, however, been few innovations in anti-malarial therapeutics and with the threat of the spread of drug resistant strains a need still exists to develop novel drugs to combat malaria infections. One of the major hinderances to drug development is the huge cost of the drug development process, where candidate failures late in development are extremely costly. This is where post-genomic information has the potential of adding great value. By using all available data pertaining to a disease, one gains higher discerning power to select good drug candidates and identify risks early in development before serious investments are made. This need provided the motivation for the development of Discovery; a tool to aid in the identi cation of protein targets and viable lead compounds for the treatment of malaria. Discovery was developed at the University of Pretoria to be a platform for a large spectrum of biological data focused on the malaria causing Plasmodium parasite. It conglomerates various data types into a web-based interface that allows searching using logical lters or by using protein or chemical start points. In 2010 it was decided to rebuild Discovery to improve it's functionality and optimize query times. Also, since its inception various new datasources became available speci cally related to bio-active molecules, these include the ChEMBL database and TCAMS dataset of bio-active molecules and the focus of this project was the integration of said datasets into Discovery. Large quantities of high quality bioactivity data have never been available in the public domain and this has opened up the opportunity to gain even greater insight into the activity of chemical compounds in malaria. Due to conserved structural/functional similarities of proteins between di erent species it is possible to derive predictions about a malaria protein or a chemicals activity in malaria due to experiments carried out on other organisms. These comparisons can be leveraged to highlight potential new compounds that were previously not considered or prevent wasting resources persuing potential compounds that pose threats of toxicity to humans. This project has resulted in a web based system that allows one to search through the chemical space of the malaria parasite. Allowing them to view sets of predicted protein-ligand interactions for a given protein based on that proteins similarity to those existing in the bio-active molecule databases. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / gm2014 / Biochemistry / unrestricted

The success of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) as an online research platform has come at a price: MTurk has suffered from slowing rates of population replenishment, and growing participant non-naivety. Recently, a number of alternative platforms have emerged, offering capabilities similar to MTurk but providing access to new and more naïve populations. After surveying several options, we empirically examined two such platforms, CrowdFlower (CF) and Prolific Academic (ProA). In two studies, we found that participants on both platforms were more naïve and less dishonest compared to MTurk participants. Across the three platforms, CF provided the best response rate, but CF participants failed more attention-check questions and did not reproduce known effects replicated on ProA and MTurk. Moreover, ProA participants produced data quality that was higher than CF's and comparable to MTurk's. ProA and CF participants were also much more diverse than participants from MTurk.

Bien que la créativité soit au cœur du processus d’innovation, peu d’attention a été accordée à la dimension individuelle dans l’analyse de l’activité d’innovation. L’objet de cette thèse est d’étudier le rôle des inventeurs individuels, particulièrement des inventeurs prolifiques, dans la construction des capacités dynamiques des firmes et dans la direction de spécialisation technologique des pays. L’analyse empirique qui sous tend ce travail fait référence aux systèmes d’innovation français et britannique et aux caractéristiques des inventeurs prolifiques de ces deux pays. Nous procédons en premier lieu à une étude statistique des principales caractéristiques des inventeurs français et britanniques. Celle-ci révèle une forte hétérogénéité des inventeurs qui ne se réduit pas à leur productivité en termes de brevets seulement mais se généralise à leur mobilité inter-firmes et à la densité de leur réseau de collaboration. Concernant les sources de cette hétérogénéité, du moins dans sa dimension relative à la production de brevets, notre travail, tout en confirmant les principaux résultats de la littérature sur les déterminants de la productivité des inventeurs, montre de plus que la diversification technologique et la cohérence de la base de connaissances des inventeurs sont parmi les facteurs qui expliquent la différence de productivité des inventeurs tant français que britanniques. Après avoir mis en évidence l’hétérogénéité de la dimension individuelle de l’activité d’innovation, nous étudions la relation entre cette dimension individuelle et le niveau firme et le niveau pays. Notre travail met en évidence, à cet égard, une influence significative de la présence d’inventeurs prolifiques sur la direction de spécialisation technologique des deux pays appréhendée à travers leurs avantages technologiques révélés sectoriels. Par ailleurs, les données de brevets tant de la France que de la Grande Bretagne font apparaitre une relation significative entre le degré de prolificité des inventeurs dans le champ technologique dominant d’une firme et la formation par cette dernière de capacités dynamiques lui permettant de faire face aux évolutions de son environnement technologique. Finalement, en établissant l’hétérogénéité des inventeurs individuels d’une part, et d’autre part, en mettant en évidence une articulation entre la dimension individuelle et les niveaux firmes et pays dans le processus d’innovation, notre travail fournit les éléments d’une représentation qui considère la dimension individuelle comme une composante constitutive des systèmes nationaux d’innovation. / Although creativity is at the heart of the innovation process, little attention has been paid to the individual dimension in the analysis of innovation activity. The purpose of this thesis is to study the role of individual inventors, particularly prolific inventors in building dynamic capabilities of firms and in the direction of technological specialization of countries. The empirical analysis that underlies this work refers to the French and British systems of innovation and to the characteristics of prolific inventors of these two countries. We perform, first, a statistical study of the main characteristics of French and British inventors. The study shows a strong heterogeneity of inventors. This heterogeneity cannot be reduced to their productivity in terms of patents but can be generalized to the inter-firm mobility of inventors and to the density of their collaboration network. Regarding the sources of this heterogeneity, in its dimension relative to the production of patents, our work, while confirming the main findings of the literature on the determinants of the productivity of inventors, shows that technological diversification and coherence of the knowledge base of inventors are also among the factors that explain the difference in the productivity of both French and British inventors. Having highlighted the heterogeneity of the individual dimension of innovation activity, we study the dependence between the individual dimension and the firm and country level of the innovation process. Our work demonstrates, in this regard, a significant effect of the presence of prolific inventors on the direction of technological specialization of both countries in terms of their sectorial revealed technological advantages. Furthermore, patent data of France and the UK reveal a strong relationship between the degree of prolificness in the dominant technological field of firms and their dynamic capabilities.Finally, by establishing the heterogeneity of individual inventors on the one hand and by highlighting a link between the individual dimension and firms and country levels in the innovative process on the other hand, our work provides some elements of a representation which considers individual dimension as a constitutive component of national innovation systems.

La thèse vise à étudier l’impact des réseaux interpersonnels sur la capacité à innover (innovativeness) des inventeurs. Les contributions académiques soulignent qu’il existe une forte relation entre les réseaux interpersonnels et la coopération interindividuelle. Le comportement coopératif apparaît comme le meilleur moyen de mener à bien un projet innovant, un projet complexe. Nous énonçons donc l’hypothèse selon laquelle les collaborations répétées au sein d’un réseau d’inventeurs ont une influence sur leur innovativeness. Nous avons choisi d’étudier plus particulièrement la capacité à innover des inventeurs fortement productifs en mobilisant des données sur les co-inventeurs de brevets. Une étude empirique portant sur 1157 inventeurs prolifiques français qui ont obtenu 30477 brevets sur la période 1975-2002 a donc été menée. Les résultats de la régression logistique corroborent notre hypothèse et montrent un impact significatif des collaborations répétées sur la capacité à innover des inventeurs prolifiques. / This thesis aims at studying the impact of interpersonal networks on the innovativeness of inventors. The academic literature underlined the strong relation between interpersonal networks and interpersonal cooperation. The cooperative behaviour appears as the best way to success in an innovative project, a complex project. We make here the hypothesis according to which repeated collaborations in a network of inventors have an influence on their innovativeness. We chose to study more particularly the capacity to innovate of strongly productive inventors by mobilizing data on the co-inventors of patents. We run an empirical study concerning 1157 French prolific inventors who obtained 30477 patents over the period 1975-2002. The results of the logistic regression confirm our hypothesis and show a significant impact of repeated collaborations on the capacity of prolific inventors to innovate.

This thesis examines the interaction of criminal justice policy and social policy within the Prolific and Priority Offenders Scheme (PPOS), a government initiative which aims to reduce offending by persistent offenders. The research on which this thesis is based takes an interpretative approach to social inquiry and employs a qualitative methodology. It examines the operation of four PPO Schemes in the Thames Valley through semi-structured interviews with 22 practitioners and 16 offenders, and participant observation of over 45 multi-agency meetings. The interaction between crime and social policy is explored through examination of three aspects of the PPOS: the coercion of offenders within the Schemes; the working practices and roles of the police and probation officers seconded to the Schemes; and the way in which information and intelligence is used and generated within the Schemes. The central argument of this thesis is that the widely-accepted idea that social policy is being ‘criminalised’ provides an inadequate account of the relationship between criminal justice and social policy in the PPOS. Rather, this Scheme evidences a merger of criminal justice and social welfare agendas, which includes elements of the ‘socialisation’ of crime policy in addition to elements of ‘criminalisation’ of social policy. Whilst the ultimate aim of the PPOS is to reduce crime, and whilst social welfare services such as health, housing and benefits are provided in pursuance of this aim, the ways in which these services are provided accords with the ethos and values of social policy. The idea of a merger of criminal justice and social policy has relevance beyond the PPOS, providing a framework for analysis of other contemporary criminal justice policies, and contributing to broader debates in criminology which have for so long been dominated by the ‘criminalisation’ thesis.