It is generally acknowledged that there is no sufficient, exhaustive and elaborate empirical examination of the quantitative impact of policies pertaining to import demand and economic growth in South Africa. In order to arrive at conclusive, sagacious and applicable policies on the economic growth potential of an economy, it is imperative to evaluate, empirically, whether envisaged economic growth rates and employment creation are feasible, given the socio-economic circumstances. The fundamental question of the constraint or rather effective constraints to high economic growth rates, measured by gross domestic product, has always desired urgent attention but has been neglected. There appears to be strong reasons to believe that the South African economy, like other middle-income developing economies, is subject to a "powerful balance of payments constraint that effectively aborts the growth process before it is able to deliver rising per capita incomes" (Industrial Strategy Project1, 1995:49 ). Furthermore, although this issue is widely recognized, there has been little systematic analysis of this important question. Many writings which, implicitly or explicitly, note the foreign exchange shortages as adversely affecting the economy's growth capacity have tended to focus and give enormous emphasis on exports and export expansion as a means to eradicate this economic dilemma. However, together with exports the demand for imports clearly determines the behavior of the trade account of the balance of payments as a whole. Consequently, this dissertation intends to consider one important aspect of the balance of payments constraint, namely, the determinants of the demand for imports in South Africa and the behavior of foreign trade. This study briefly examines the theoretical foundations of the savings and foreign exchange constraints using the 'two-gap' model. In that the main lesson is that the economy characterized by foreign exchange bottlenecks and/or lack of savings will not accomplish its perceived growth capacity. This is the background and motivation for the study of import demand elasticities as it gives impetus to the importance of both imports and exports in an economy. The dissertation derives the import demand function and employs the recent time-series techniques to modeling economic time-series. Prior to the empirical model, the study quantitatively describes the behavior of both imports, and exports, though more emphasis is placed on the former than the latter. In this section, simple quantitative techniques are utilized in order to determine the cyclical and trend behavior of import performance since the beginning of the 1970s. The study also briefly looks at the relationship between import of capital goods and investments into South Africa. Description of trade behavior involves examination of trade flows and their geographical destination by regional trading blocks. That is followed by an extensive literature survey conducted on import demand elasticities in South Africa and trade elasticities in general. This analysis gives a strong background to the time-series model of import demand estimated in this work. Time-series analysis examines the import demand at both aggregate and sectoral levels. Prior to the empirical model chapter there is an overview of time-series econometrics with regards to co-integration, error correction and non-stationary data. Import performance and import demand functions were studied in an economic policy context and the analyses were in some cases restricted by data constraints. Import behavior patterns and empirical results of the import demand models are discussed and international comparisons are drawn. 1 The Industrial Strategy Project (ISP) was authored by Joffe et al (1995). In this dissertation it is referred to as ISP (1995) although in the reference section I refer to Joffe et al (1995) as done in other publications. For instance, see Bell (1995). The same applies to the Normative Model Approach (NEM), in the text it is referred to as NEM (1993) while in the references it is reflected as Central Economic Advisory Services (1993). / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1999.

In the area of process safety, many efforts have focused on studying methods to prevent the transition of the state of the system from a normal state to an upset and/or catastrophic state, but many unexpected changes are unavoidable, and even under good risk management incidents still occur. The aim of this work is to propose the principles and factors that contribute to the resilience of the chemical process, and to develop a systematic approach to evaluate the resilience of chemical processes in design aspects. Based on the analysis of transition of the system states, the top-level factors that contribute to Resilience were developed, including Design, Detection Potential, Emergency Response Planning, Human, and Safety Management. The evaluation framework to identify the Resilience Design Index is developed by means of the multifactor model approach. The research was then focused on developing complete subfactors of the top-level Design factor. The sub-factors include Inherent Safety, Flexibility, and Controllability. The proposed framework to calculate the Inherent Safety index takes into account all the aspects of process safety design via many sub-indices. Indices of Flexibility and Controllability sub-factors were developed from implementations of well-known methodologies in process design and process control, respectively. Then, the top-level Design index was evaluated by combining the indices of the sub-factors with weight factors, which were derived from Analytical Hierarchical Process approach. A case study to compare the resilience levels of two ethylene production designs demonstrated the proposed approaches and gave insights on process resilience of the designs.

With the proliferation of cameras and advanced video analytics, situation awareness applications that automatically generate actionable knowledge from live camera streams has become an important class of applications in various domains including surveillance, marketing, sports, health care, and traffic monitoring. However, despite the wide range of use cases, developing those applications on large-scale camera networks is extremely challenging because it involves both compute- and data-intensive workloads, has latency-sensitive quality of service requirement, and deals with inherent dynamism (e.g., number of faces detected in a certain area) from the real world. To support developing large-scale situation awareness applications, this dissertation presents a distributed framework that makes two key contributions: 1) it provides a programming model that ensures scalability of applications and 2) it supports low-latency computation and dynamic workload handling through opportunistic event processing and workload distribution over different locations and network hierarchy. To provide a scalable programming model, two programming abstractions for different levels of application logic are proposed: the first abstraction at the level of real-time target detection and tracking, and the second abstraction for answering spatio-temporal queries at a higher level. The first programming abstraction, Target Container (TC), elevates target as a first-class citizen, allowing domain experts to simply provide handlers for detection, tracking, and comparison of targets. With those handlers, TC runtime system performs priority-aware scheduling to ensure real-time tracking of important targets when resources are not enough to track all targets. The second abstraction, Spatio-temporal Analysis (STA) supports applications to answer queries related to space, time, and occupants using a global state transition table and probabilistic events. To ensure scalability, STA supports bounded communication overhead of state update by providing tuning parameters for the information propagation among distributed workers. The second part of this work explores two optimization strategies that reduce latency for stream processing and handle dynamic workload. The first strategy, an opportunistic event processing mechanism, performs event processing on predicted locations to provide just-in-time situational information to mobile users. Since location prediction algorithms are inherently inaccurate, the system selects multiple regions using a greedy algorithm to provide highly meaningful information at the given amount of computing resources. The second strategy is to distribute application workload over computing resources that are placed at different locations and various levels of network hierarchy. To support this strategy, the framework provides hierarchical communication primitives and a decentralized resource discovery protocol that allow scalable and highly adaptive load balancing over space and time.

Institutions of higher learning are currently faced with the crisis of finding appropriate criteria for undergraduate admission. This concern has been sparked by the fact that matriculation grades are no longer seen as an accurate reflection of students' academic potential. As tertiary education is becoming more expensive, it is therefore becoming more and more important to select only students who have a realistic chance of being successful in their studies. The main aim of this study is to validate the Situation Specific Evaluation Expert (SPEEX) as a predictor of academic success of first year students of Mechanical Engineering at the Vaal Triangle Technikon. The design used in this study is a non-experimental correlational design. This design was selected because the investigation of this study is aimed at determining the presence or absence of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables without specific reference to causality. The sample of this study consisted of a total of 140 mechanical engineering student at the Vaal Triangle Technikon. This sample was the total number of students from the Mechanical Engineering department who enrolled for mechanical engineering courses for the year 2000. The sample consisted of 94% males and females 6% females. Subject matter experts from industry as well as those involved in the training of Mechanical Engineering at the Vaal Triangle Technikon selected competencies, which were hypothesised to be indicative of a potentially successful student. Based on the selected competencies the assessment battery was compiled with the selected indices being considered as predictor variables. A multiple regression analysis was performed on data in order to establish the predictive validity of the assessment battery. SPEEX 2502 (Language proficiency) consistently showed a positive correlation on the prediction of academic success. / Thesis (MA (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

ABSRACTThis thesis focuses on the monitoring, fault detection and diagnosis of Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTP), which are important fields of research for a wide range of engineering disciplines. The main objective is to evaluate and apply a novel artificial intelligent methodology based on situation assessment for monitoring and diagnosis of Sequencing Batch Reactor (SBR) operation. To this end, Multivariate Statistical Process Control (MSPC) in combination with Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) methodology was developed, which was evaluated on three different SBR (pilot and lab-scales) plants and validated on BSM1 plant layout. / ENEsta tesis se enfoca en la monitorización, detección de defectos y diagnosis de Plantas de Tratamiento de Aguas Residuales (Wastewater Treatment Plants - WWTP), el cual son importantes campos de investigación par un amplio rango de disciplinas en Ingeniería.El objetivo principal es evaluar y aplicar una metodología novel de inteligencia artificial basada en evaluación, monitorización y diagnosis de la operación de Reactores de secuencia por lotes (Sequencing Batch Reactor -SBR). Para lograr este fin, se desarrolla una metodología que combina Control de Procesos Multivariable (Multivariate Statistical Process Control -MSPC) con Razonamiento Basado en Casos (Case-Based Reasoning -CBR)., el cual se evalúa en tres diferentes plantas SBR y se valida en una planta BSM1.

Jerusalem, Univ., Diss.

Zugl.: München, Univ., Diss., 2006

Universiẗat, Dipl.-Arb., 2006--Linz.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (MEd (Educational psychology))-University of Pretoria, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.