A research report submitted to the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MSc (Dent) / A comparison of radiation doses to selected vital organs in the maxillo-facial region at three different settings on the Galileos cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) machine in the Wits Dental Hospital, was conducted with the courtesy of the Department of Medical Physics of the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital. The study made use of the RANDO phantom and TLD- 100 detector chips, which provided detailed mapping of the dose distribution from the Galileos CBCT machine. Sixty-two Sanford® lithium fluoride dosimeters- (TLD- 100) were irradiated using a calibrated known x-ray source after having undergone a recommended annealing cycle. The data showed great consistency in the results. Association between the different imaging modalities was further investigated using Kruskal-Wallis equality-of-populations rank test and Chi-squared test. A p-value of <0.05 was considered statistically significant. Since there do not appear to be major differences between the radiation doses for the different settings of the Galileos CBCT machine, the author recommends the use of the combined setting at all times for optimum image quality.

Degree of Master of Science in Dentistry by coursework and dissertation A research report submitted to the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Health Sciences. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Dentistry Johannesburg, 2014 / Introduction: Dental Cone beam CT has encountered great success in diagnostics and treatment planning in dentistry. However, it makes use of ionizing radiation. Lots of concern on the effects of x-rays on vital organs of the head and neck region has been raised. Clarity on the amount of radiation received on these specific organs will be a contribution to a better use of the emergent technology. Aim: The aim of this study is to determine the potential dose of radiation received on the eye and thyroid and to quantify the amount of potential scatter on the gonads during CBCT examinations. Material and Methods: Calibrated Lithium- Fluoride thermoluminescent dosimeters were inserted inside an anthropomorphic phantom, on sites of the eye, thyroid and the gonads. After its submission to a CBCT examination, using the high and standard resolution for a similar scanning protocol, the dose of radiation received on each organ was calculated according to the ICRP guidelines. Results: An equivalent dose of 0.059 mGy was calculated for the eye. Compared to the threshold dose of 0.5 Gy fixed by the ICRP 2007, this can be considered as relatively low. The thyroid with an effective dose of 23.5 μSv represented 20% of the full body effective dose existing in literature. The gonads absorbed an effective dose of 0.05 μSv, which was considered as negligible. Conclusion: The doses calculated were considered as relatively low. However, dentists must be aware of risks of cumulative exposure. Therefore adherence to the ALARA principle and consideration of clinical indication for CBCT remain a priority.

Thesis advisor: Vincent Cho / The purpose of this study was to understand the role of school leaders in supporting teachers as they build relationships with and between students in the classroom. These two important aspects of creating a positive classroom learning environment are necessary for Social Emotional Learning to be successful. This qualitative case study drew upon data from interviews with school leaders, teacher focus group interviews, and redacted teacher evaluations in one school district in Massachusetts. While the role of school leaders in the academic success of students has been explored in the literature, there is less research on the specific actions school leaders take to support teachers struggling with classroom environment issues. This study will explore the actions of school leaders through the lens of three leadership practices: setting direction, developing people, and redesigning the organization (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004). The findings highlighted the difference in school leaders’ perception of the capacity of adults versus students to learn relationship building skills. In some cases school leaders were not confident that building these skills was possible and consequently they struggled to provide clear and specific strategies to teachers. The findings also reflect the reactive versus proactive nature of the support teachers received for building relationships with and between students. Recommendations include re-organizing resources to allow for more teacher collaboration, targeted professional development in relationship building and exploration regarding the difference in how student peer relationships were viewed compared to teacher student relationships. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Thesis advisor: John E. Ebel / The seismicity of the mid Atlantic Ridge (MAR) was compared in space and time with the seismicity along the Atlantic continental margins of Europe, Africa, North America, the Carribean and South America in a bid to appraise the level of influence of the ridge push force at the MAR on the Atlantic coastal seismicity. By analyzing the spatial and temporal patterns of many earthquakes (along with the patterns in their stress directions) in diverse places with similar tectonic settings, it is hoped that patterns that might be found indicate some of the average properties of the forces that are causing the earthquakes. The spatial analysis of the dataset set used shows that areas with higher seismic moment release along the north MAR spatially correlate with areas with relatively lower seismic moment release along the north Atlantic continental margins (ACM) and vice versa. This inverse spatial correlation observed between MAR seismicity and ACM seismicity might be due to the time (likely a long time) it takes stress changes from segments of the MAR currently experiencing high seismic activity to propagate to the associated passive margin areas presently experiencing relatively low seismic activity. Furthermore, the number of Atlantic basin and Atlantic coast earthquakes occurring away from the MAR is observed to be independent of the proximity of earthquake’s epicenters from the MAR axis. The effect of local stress as noted by Wysession et al. (1995) might have contributed to the independence of Atlantic basin and Atlantic coast earthquake proximity from the MAR. The Latchman (2011) observation of strong earthquakes on a specific section of the MAR being followed by earthquakes on Trinidad and Tobago was tested on other areas of the MAR and ACM. It was found that that the temporal delay observed by Latchman does not exist for the seismicity along other areas along the MAR and ACM. Within the time window used for this study, it appears that seismicity is occurring randomly in space away from the MAR. The weak anticorrelations between ACM and MAR seismicity show that the ridge push force probably has some level of influence on the ACM seismicity. However, as revealed from previous research on the study area, the forces resulting from lateral density contrasts related to topographic features and lateral density variations between oceanic and continental crust also appear to significantly influence the seismicity of the Atlantic coastal margins. / Thesis (MS) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Geology and Geophysics.

In text mining, being able to recognize and extract named entities, e.g. Locations, Persons, Organizations, is very useful in many applications. This is usually referred to named entity recognition (NER). This thesis presents a cascaded framework for extracting named entities from text documents. We automatically derive features on a set of documents from different feature templates. To avoid high computational cost incurred by a single-phase approach, we divide the named entity extraction task into a segmentation task and a classification task, reducing the computational cost by an order of magnitude. / To handle cascaded errors that often occur in a sequence of tasks, we investigate and develop three models: maximum-entropy margin-based (MEMB) model, isomeric conditional random field (ICRF) model, and online cascaded reranking (OCR) model. MEMB model makes use of the concept of margin in maximizing log-likelihood. Parameters are trained in a way that they can maximize the "margin" between the decision boundary and the nearest training data points. ICRF model makes use of the concept of joint training. Instead of training each model independently, we design the segmentation and classification models in a way that they can be efficiently trained together under a soft constraint. OCR model is developed by using an online training method to maximize a margin without considering any probability measures, which greatly reduces the training time. It reranks all of the possible outputs from a previous stage based on a total output score. The best output with the highest total score is the final output. / We report experimental evaluations on the GENIA Corpus available from the BioNLP/NLPBA (2004) shared task and the Reuters Corpus available from the CoNLL-2003 shared tasks, which demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance achieved by the proposed models. / Chan, Shing Kit. / Advisers: Wai Lam; Kai Pui Lam. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-06, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-133). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

This thesis examines an aspect of embodied relationship that is recognised in colloquial figures of speech but is not theorised, nor even much acknowledged in the psychotherapeutic literature. It argues that when we experience subtle sensations of extending towards another person, as we might when our "heart goes out" to them, and of pulling away, as we might when we "draw back", this seemingly internal experience is snesed by the other. Using a phenomenological-hermeneutic methodology underpinning by Merleau-Ponty, van Manen and Todres, exercised were used to bring such experiences to the awareness of several cohorts of experienced and inexperienced therapists attending a training course. Verbal and written accounts of what was felt during the exercised, and of similar experiences from more naturalistic settings, were collected along with the researchers' own accounts. These accounts are discussed within the framework of a Gadamerian Conversation with a view to making explicit the implication for Person-centred therapy with regard to practice, supervision and training. The conversation speaks of the the impact of these experiences upon whether or not clients perceive therapists as authentic, unconditionally accepting and empathic. Assumptions are uncovered and challenged and an alternative narrative emerges from a consideration of multiple contexts. The conversation also speaks of an unseen dance of closeness and distance that arises as each moves towards and away from the other. Conversation (and silence) is inevitably accompanied and impacted by this dance, which happens in the background of every interaction. The unseen dance impacts not only the relationship, but also each person's organismic state.

"As artificially intelligent agents become more advanced, they will require corresponding advances in social capability. In particular, they will require an understanding of the development of relationships. This work is intended to aid in addressing this need. We have developed a model of the development of relationships, designed and implemented a planning module based on this model, and performed an evaluation study verifying the functionality of the model and implementation. This should provide a foundation for future work in developing artificially intelligent agents capable of appropriately dealing with the development of social relationships."

Citrobacter rodentium is a gut pathogen, which infects the distal colon of mice. It has many similarities to human Enteropathogenic and Enterohemorrhagic E.coli in terms of mechanisms of pathogenicity and methods of transmission. Like many other gram negative bacteria, C. rodentium has developed a complex and highly specialised protein secretion system, known as type three (T3SS), to deliver bacterial proteins into eukaryotic cells. By injecting effector proteins into host cell cytoplasm, the pathogens are able to modulate host cellular functions to facilitate their own survival and replication. There is growing evidence that Attaching Effacing (AE) pathogens can inject effector proteins into gut epithelial cells, which dampen pro-inflammatory responses. There is also evidence that EPEC, Yersinia and Shigella can inject effectors into immune cells and also modulate their function. The objective of this work was to visualise and identify the host cells targeted for type III secretion by C. rodentium, and consequently determine the effect on host immune responses. The method chosen to detect cells targeted for effector protein delivery was the β-lactamase reporter system, where cells loaded with the fluorogenic substrate CCF2-AM emit a green FRET signal upon excitation by UV light, but emit a blue signal when cleaved by β-lactamase. By creating reporter strain of C.rodentium expressing fusion proteins between NleD effector and β-lactamase, I was able to show that C.rodentium is capable of injecting NleD in a wide variety of murine cell lines including Swiss 3T3 fibroblasts, J774 macrophages, CMT93 epithelial cells and BW715 T cells in a dose and time dependent manner in vitro. In addition, I found that C.rodentium has the ability to inject proteins into the cytoplasm of immune cells isolated from mouse lymphoid tissues including the spleen, mesenteric lymph nodes and Peyer's patches. Detailed analysis of the types of cells injected with effectors in vitro showed that NleD- injected cells represented B cells, dendritic cells and T cells. After inoculation of mice with the reporter strain of CitropACYCnleD, the plasmid encoded reporter fusion remained stable throughout infection and was able to inject cells in vitro after passage through the mouse gut. Unfortunately under the conditions described in this study, we were unable to visualise any gut cells targeted for protein delivery by C. rodentium in vivo, thus highlighting the complex nature of the host pathogen relationships in the gut. Although there is a need to develop better strategies to visualise effector translocation in vivo, our study has demonstrated, for the first time, the ability of C. rodentium to target immune cells for effector injection in vitro.

Magister Artium - MA (Psychology) / The state of postgraduate studies in South Africa has come under renewed enquiry in recent years as concern is placed on the inconsistency between postgraduate enrolment and graduation rates. The discrepancy between the enrolment and completion rates is attributable to a range of factors. Literature identified the supervisory relationship as an important and significant factor in predicting completion. The establishment of a good working alliance in the beginning of the thesis process has been identified as a crucial task. As a result, it is useful to gain insight into how students set about establishing working relationships with new supervisors and how they rate the quality thereof. The present study was conducted with Psychology Masters students who were in their first semester of the first enrolment in the Community and Health Sciences faculty at the University of the Western Cape. Attachment theory provided the theoretical framework for the study as it posits that the quality of current relationships are a function of early relationship experiences. Thus students were thought to draw on earlier experiences when setting about establishing new relationships such as the supervisory relationship. The study was exploratory and descriptive in nature. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eleven eligible participants who have been selected purposively. Transcriptions have been subjected to a Thematic Analysis. Ethics clearance has been requested from and granted by the Senate Research Committee and all relevant ethics principles such as, confidentiality, anonymity, voluntary participation and informed consent, have been adhered to. Findings indicated that supervision was a central component for graduate completion, underscoring the importance of early supervisory sessions to form a strong working alliance. Furthermore, the findings indicated that the supervisor's role in providing the expertise and support largely contributed to the success of establishing strong and productive supervisory relationships. Participants perceived strong supervisory relationships as necessary to foster completion of higher degree requirements. The development of a new supervisory relationship activated relational patterns for students that underscored the importance of recognizing the supervisory relationship as a relationship.

This study investigates the dynamic and challenging affluent market of the South African banking sector. An evolution in client demands has created a need for a more exclusive banking solution known as private banking. The research project takes place in the ABSA Private Bank Gauteng Division, the population of which are private bankers and financial planners involved in the actual client facing engagements. Through a questionnaire sampling 40 client facing staff, responses were gathered followed by deeper investigation into the objectives through interviews of both the direct reporting lines in each of the suites in the province, including the provincial executive.