Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / Perceptual watermarking is a promising technique towards the goal of producing invisible watermarks. It involves the integration of formal perceptual models in the watermarking process, with the purpose of determining those portions of an image that can better tolerate the distortion imposed by the embedding and ensuring that the watermarking will inflict the least possible degradation on the original image . In a previous study the Discrete Cosine Transform was used, and the watermark embedding was done in a non -uniform manner with criteria based on both the host image and the watermark. The decoder model employed made use of apriori access to unmarked and marked images as well as to the watermark. A fair level of success was achieved in this effort. In our research we refine this scheme by integrating a perceptual model and by proposing a modification to the decoder model that makes possible the successful recovery of the watermark without apriori access to it. The proposed perceptual scheme improves the watermark's transparency while at the same time maintains sufficient robustness to quantization and cropping. The proposed semi-blind variation offers adequate transparency and robustness to quantization, but its performance against cropping is considerably degraded. / Lieutenant, Hellenic Navy

Aspen Pharmacare is listed on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange South Africa (JSE) and is Africa’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturer. The company is a major supplier of branded pharmaceutical and healthcare products to the local and selected international markets. For decades, Aspen has manufactured a basket of affordable, quality, and effective products for the ethical, generic over-the-counter (OTC) and personal care markets. Aspen is also the leading supplier of generic medicines to the public sector, providing comprehensive coverage of the products on the Essential Drug List. Aspen continues to deliver on its commitment toward playing a role in social responsibility diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. In August 2003 Aspen developed Africa’s first generic anti-retroviral drug, namely Aspen-Stavudine. Aspen’s manufacturing facilities are based in Port Elizabeth (PE) and East London. Aspen has recently completed an Oral Solid Dosage (OSD) manufacturing facility worth approximately R150 million in PE. The Group manufactures approximately 20 tons of product daily and in excess of 400 tons of solid dosage pharmaceuticals, which equates to more than 2 billion tablets. In addition, more than 3 million litres of liquid pharmaceuticals and over 200 tons of pharmaceutical creams and ointments are produced per year [1]. Aspen excels at delivering quality products and services, exceeding customer expectations, complying with international standards in an environment that cultivates technical expertise and innovation. Following this philosophy through to the shop floor areas mean that there are always initiatives in continuous production improvement. One of these improvement projects introduced is called Six Sigma. 8 Ten members of the staff, selected from different expertise fields in the company were trained in Six Sigma. Knowledge gained from the two week training course were applied to different areas in the factory using Six Sigma principles. This dissertation focuses on the study undertaken in one of production areas, namely the filling process of the ointments and creams at the Aspen Port Elizabeth facility.

This work describes separate requirements of the Standard ISO 9001:2001 and implementation of these requirements in Wunderman Company. The evaluation of questionnaire, which was fulfilled by employees, is one part of this work.

This thesis analyses numerical methods used in finding solutions of diferential equations. Numerical methods are viewed as discrete dynamical systems that give useful information on continuous dynamical systems defined by systems of (ordinary) diferential equations. We analyse non-standard finite difference schemes that have no spurious fixed-points compared to the dynamical system under consideration, the linear stability/instability property of the fixed-points being the same for both the discrete and continuous systems. We obtain a sharper condition for the elementary stability of the schemes. For more complex dynamical systems which are dissipative, we design schemes that replicate this property. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of the above analysis on the numerical solution of partial differential equations. We specifically focus on reaction-diffusion equations that arise in many fields of engineering and applied sciences. Often their solutions enjoy the follow- ing essential properties: Stability/instability of the fixed points for the space independent equation, the conservation of energy for the stationary equation, and boundedness and positivity. We design new non-standard finite diference schemes which replicate these properties. Our construction make use of three strategies: the renormalization of the denominator of the discrete derivative, non-local approximation of the nonlinear terms and simple functional relation between step sizes. Numerical results that support the theory are provided. Copyright / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Mathematics and Applied Mathematics / unrestricted

abstract: This dissertation provides an account of evidentiality of a number of selected verbs of perception in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The verbs are divided into three categories: activity, experiential, and source-based, following Viberg (1983). The data shows that the activity P.Vs in MSA are rarely used evidentially whereas the experiential and the source-based ones are commonly used to indicate evidential meaning. It also shows that while the source-based verb is mostly used with an inferred evidential meaning, the evidentiality encoded by the experiential perception verbs is determined by the complementation pattern and the person of the subject (first or third person subject). With the non-finite complement, these verbs indicate a direct evidentiality when having a first person subject, and a reported evidentiality when having a third person subject. With the finite CP complement, they indicate an indirect evidentiality. This corpus-based study also examines the grammaticalization of these verbs when used evidentially. I argue that only the verb ra’aa of the selected experiential verbs is fully grammaticalized, but only when it is in the past tense and followed by a verbal non-finite complement. In this usage, it becomes a light verb. The source-based verb badaa/yabduu when indicating an evidentiality, it is grammaticalized into copulative verb when followed by an adjectival predicate, and modal verb when followed by a finite complement. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2019

Submitted to the faculty of Indiana University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Science in the School of Informatics Indiana University December 2005 / This project addresses the need for an increased expressivity and robustness of ontologies already supporting BACIIS and SIBIOS, two systems for data and service integration in the life sciences. The previous ontology solutions as global schema and facilitator of service discovery sustained the purposes for which they were built to provide, but were in need of updating in order to keep up with more recent standards in ontology descriptions and utilization as well as increase the breadth of the domain and expressivity of the content. Thus, several tasks were undertaken to increase the worth of the system ontologies. These include an upgrade to a more recent ontology language standard, increased domain coverage, and increased expressivity via additions of relationships and hierarchies within the ontology as well as increased ease of maintenance by a distributed design.

The provision of psychotherapeutic services has undergone many changes in its history. Recently the field of therapy has seen an increased emphasis on providing services in briefer periods of time, which has resulted in greater investigation into the parameters that influence rapid therapeutic growth by clients. Despite this push for quick results, many service agencies continue to utilize initial intake interviews that focus exclusively on gathering diagnostic and demographic information. Therapeutic intervention is therefore reserved for some later time when the clients can be accommodated from the agency's waiting list. The present study investigated the influence of a standard intervention presented during the intake interview on reported psychological distress, therapeutic alliance, and dropouts from therapy. In addition, the relationship of self-efficacy to these dimensions was investigated. Eighty subjects who were clients at a university counseling center in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States were split into two groups. One group received the intervention while the other experienced a standard intake without the intervention. Results indicated that the experimental subjects decreased more in their reported levels of distress between the time of the intake interview and their first counseling session than did the control subjects. Similarly, the experimental subjects reported significantly greater feelings of alliance with their therapists than did the control subjects. The number of dropouts from therapy (defined as those who failed to show for the first counseling session) was similar for the groups. Finally, high versus low levels of self-efficacy did not further explain changes in psychological distress or group differences in therapeutic alliance, although level of self-efficacy was related to level of distress. The results of this study suggest that a client's initial contact with a service agency (i.e., the intake interview) can be utilized to initiate therapeutic gain. It is notable that the observed changes occurred regardless of presenting problems and diagnosis. It was speculated that the therapeutic effects could be enhanced further by expanding this approach to provide specific interventions to individual clients based on initial diagnostic impressions.

Research for automatic readability prediction of text has increased in the last decade and has shown that various machine learning methods can effectively address this problem. Many researchers have applied machine learning to readability prediction for English, while Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has received little attention. Here I describe a system which leverages machine learning to automatically predict the readability of MSA. I gathered a corpus comprising 179 documents that were annotated with the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) levels. Then, I extracted lexical and discourse features from each document. Finally, I applied the Tilburg Memory-Based Learning (TiMBL) machine learning system to read these features and predict the ILR level of each document using 10-fold cross validation for both 3-level and 5-level classification tasks and an 80/20 division for a 5-level classification task. I measured performance using the F-score. For 3-level and 5-level classifications my system achieved F-scores of 0.719 and 0.519 respectively. I discuss the implication of these results and the possibility of future development.

Establishing valid and reliable passing scores is a vital activity for any examination used to make classification decisions. Although there are many different approaches to setting passing scores, this thesis is focused specifically on the Angoff standard setting method. The Angoff method is a test-centric classical test theory based approach to estimating performance standards. In the Angoff method each judge estimates the proportion of minimally competent examinees who will answer each item correctly. These values are summed across items and averages across judges to arrive at a recommended passing score. Unfortunately, research has shown that the Angoff method has a number of limitations which have the potential to undermine both the validity and reliability of the resulting standard. Many of the limitations of the Angoff method can be linked to its grounding in classical test theory. The purpose of this study is to determine if the limitations of the Angoff could be mitigated by a transition to an item response theory (IRT) framework. Item response theory is a modern measurement model for relating examinees' latent ability to their observed test performance. Theoretically the transition to an IRT-based Angoff method could result in more accurate, stable, and efficient passing scores. The methodology for the study was divided into three studies designed to assess the potential advantages of using an IRT-based Angoff method. Study one examined the effect of allowing judges to skip unfamiliar items during the ratings process. The goal of this study was to detect if passing scores are artificially biased due to deficits in the content experts' specific item level content knowledge. Study two explored the potential benefit of setting passing scores on an adaptively selected subset of test items. This study attempted to leverage IRT's score invariance property to more efficiently estimate passing scores. Finally study three compared IRT-based standards to traditional Angoff standards using a simulation study. The goal of this study was to determine if passing scores set using the IRT Angoff method had greater stability and accuracy than those set using the common True Score Angoff method. Together these three studies examined the potential advantages of an IRT-based approach to setting passing scores. The results indicate that the IRT Angoff method does not produce more reliable passing score than the common Angoff method. The transition to the IRT-based approach, however, does effectively ameliorate two sources of systematic error in the common Angoff method. The first source of error is brought on by requiring that all judges rate all items and the second source is introduced during the transition from test to scaled score passing scores. By eliminating these sources of error the IRT-based method allows for accurate and unbiased estimation of the judges' true opinion of the ability of the minimally capable examinee. Although all of the theoretical benefits of the IRT Angoff method could not be demonstrated empirically, the results of this thesis are extremely encouraging. The IRT Angoff method was shown to eliminate two sources of systematic error resulting in more accurate passing scores. In addition this thesis provides a strong foundation for a variety of studies with the potential to aid in the selection, training, and evaluation of content experts. Overall findings from this thesis suggest that the application of IRT to the Angoff standard setting method has the potential to offer significantly more valid passing scores.

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