Inaugural dissertation--Universität Regensburg, 1998.

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M.Comm. / The use of employee share schemes as a talent management strategy and as part of companies’ reward systems has gained impetus. Most employers make use of the share option schemes because they are believed to align the interests of employees with those of the company, offer succession planning opportunities, attract , retain best talent, and motivate employees. What needs to be established is whether employee share schemes do in fact effectively contribute towards talent management strategies and organisational performance. The current prevailing global economic landscape and the effect of globalisation combined with the global framebreaking talent war requires South African companies to attract and keep the best technical, managerial and supervisor skills to remain competitive. Talent management includes components such as skills retention and attract ion, employee motivation, reward systems, employment branding, employee value proposition and other relevant initiatives that instil employee sense of belonging.

This thesis addresses three economic and social impediments to the successful deployment of community-based micro hydro grids using a case study from the Republic of Kenya. Kenya is one of the countries in Sub-Sahara Africa currently faced with low rural electricity access rates, but with abundant micro hydro resources spread across vast rural locations. Although majority of financial resources are channeled to grid extension in developing countries like Kenya, many rural households still live 'under the grid' because they cannot afford connection fees and/or cost of grid electricity. Such phenomenon has led to innovative solutions such as the concept of Community-Based Renewable Energy Schemes (CRES), facilitating joint exploitation of a local renewable energy (RE) resources. The government of Kenya in partnership with non-state actors set up demonstration points for Community-Based Micro Hydro Schemes (CBMHS) in two locations, and other communities have adopted this model by setting up their own electrification schemes in Kenya. However, the success of such schemes continues to be very limited in Kenya and other developing countries with majority of them disintegrating after few years of operation. This phenomenon is widely documented in literature, and a variety of barriers to success of such schemes continue to be interrogated in both published and unpublished academic literature. There are issues relevant to both establishment and continued operation of such electrification that have not received much scholarly research, but continue to largely limit delivery of sustainable and quality service, as well as hindering scaling up of these potentially useful rural electrification alternatives. These include: a) mismatch between the provided services by such group electrification schemes and the expectations of their consumers b) lack of supportive capacity for joint effort mobilization and capacity for self-governance within such schemes c) unsubstantiated claims of the capability of small scale renewable energy electrification impact on households that make them not to be considered as equally important energy solutions. This thesis makes a threefold contribution to the literature of rural electrification by firstly analyzing preference for properties of decentralized electricity delivery service in a field dominated by utility provided grid solutions. Secondly, the literature on governance of man-made common pool resources (CPR) is extended by providing evidence for the requirements for successful management of a small-scale electricity commons line a CBMHS. Lastly, the study produces reliable evidence regarding immediate or short-term changes to households anticipated from small scale electrification projects. Overall, the study presents lessons on implementing and sustaining rural communities' investments in decentralized RE electrification while demonstrating why such schemes should now form essential part of rural electrification delivery models. The three research issues are addressed independently in three chapters that follow the introductory chapter of this thesis.

Companies are under pressure to develop and design effective incentive schemes for their employees with an aim of attracting and retaining talent. Whilst other organisations consider various methods to motivate employees, employee share schemes have dominated the agenda in many companies. It is expected that share schemes would achieve the desired objective through aligning the objectives of the employer with those of the employees. In the study, employee perceptions of share schemes are investigated to establish if the above objective is maintained. A medium sized company listed on the JSE was selected for the study with 105 respondents being solicited for a population of 242. The results confirmed that employee shareholders do have perceptions ranging from expectations of empowerment to employee engagement in decision-making. The study contributes to the body of knowledge and research in remuneration strategies for today‟s work environment, and makes recommendations for companies with the intention to improve the worker‟s social well-being. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

<p> General theory of nuclear reactor kinetics is discussed, with emphasis on CANDU* reactors. The numerical solution of the group diffusion equations using the IQS+ method is presented. Several important numerical parameters are studied with reference to a one-dimensional slab reactor undergoing a LOC° accident. These parameters are: number of mesh points in the region of solution, frequency of shape calculations, and convergence criteria. * Canada - Deuterium - Uranium + Improved Quasi-Static o Loss of Coolant / Thesis / Master of Engineering (MEngr)

Resource constraints and wireless nature of communication render the securing of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) challenging. Ad hoc deployment of sensors make key pre distribution schemes (KPSs) more suitable for establishing security associations between resource constrained sensors. Specifically, probabilistic key pre distribution schemes (PKPSs) which mandate very low computational complexity, are good choices for securing WSNs. In this thesis we examine the suitability of PKPSs for sensor networks and propose several improvements to PKPSs for their use in WSNs. The specific contributions of this thesis are fourold: ? Strategies to improve trade-offs between connectivity and collusion resistance. ? Enumeration of the need for authentication, and strategies to improve the strength of authentication. ? Exploiting imbalances between costs of different resources (computation, storage), and ? Taking advantage of external storage resources to improve security of WSNs.

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Cryptographic digital signatures provide authentication to communicating parties over communication networks. They are integral asymmetric primitives in cryptography. The current digital signature infrastructure adopts schemes that rely on the hardness of finding discrete logarithms and factoring in finite groups. Given the recent advances in physics which point towards the eventual construction of large scale quantum computers, these hard problems will be solved in polynomial time using Shor’s algorithm. Hence, there is a clear need to migrate the cryptographic infrastructure to post-quantum secure alternatives. Such an initiative is demonstrated by the PQCRYPTO project and the current Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization competition run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This dissertation considers hash-based digital signature schemes. Such algorithms rely on simple security notions such as preimage, and weak and strong collision resistances of hash functions. These notions are well-understood and their security against quantum computers has been well-analyzed. However, existing hash-based signature schemes have large signature sizes and high computational costs. Moreover, the signature size increases with the number of messages to be signed by a key pair. The goal of this work is to develop hash-based digital signature schemes to overcome the aforementioned limitations. First, FORS, the underlying few-time signature scheme of the NIST PQC alternate candidate SPHINCS+ is analyzed against adaptive chosen message attacks, and DFORS, a few-time signature scheme with adaptive chosen message security, is proposed. Second, a new variant of SPHINCS+ is introduced that improves the computational cost and security level. Security analysis for the new variant is presented. In addition, the hash-based group digital signature schemes, Group Merkle (GM) and Dynamic Group Merkle (DGM), are studied and their security is analyzed. Group Merkle Multi-Treem (GMMT) is proposed to solve some of the limitations of the GM and DGM hash-based group signature schemes. / Graduate