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Background: Malaria has remained a major public health burden in Malawi despite recent global progress in its control. Children under the age of five and pregnant women are among the groups most affected by the disease. Malaria research has been identified to provide vital evidence that contributes to addressing this burden through the development of evidence-based policies. One of the challenges however, is the lack of a systematic mechanism through which malaria research can be fully utilised for policy development. Unless research is commissioned by the government, individual researchers often do not know the pathway through which they can engage with policymakers. While some institutions or elements that promote health research in policy development exist, they remain fragmented and overwhelmed by the totality of health research in the country. This study aimed at developing a framework for promoting the utilisation of malaria research for policy development in Malawi. The framework seeks to encourage the engagement of researchers and policymakers, and to increase visibility and coordination of the existing elements presently promoting research utilisation for policy development. Methods: The study utilised both quantitative and qualitative methods depending on the study objectives. Several specific approaches were employed towards the development of the framework. The first step described the type and amount of malaria research conducted in Malawi, and its related sources of funding from 1984 to 2016. Its approach included an online systematic literature review in the Medline/PubMed database for Malawian publications, and the extraction of approved malaria studies from two Ethical Committees. The second approach assessed the research contribution to malaria policy development and the understanding of policy formulation process in Malawi. This step was done through case studies that adopted systematic literature search, in-depth interviews with key informants and relevant stakeholders, and record review. The third step examined the facilitating factors and barriers to utilisation of malaria research in the policy development process and involved in-depth interview with key informants, and review of records. In addition, the assessment of challenges to the implementation of malaria policies in Malawi was conducted through in-depth interviews with key informants and key stakeholders. The development of the framework was then guided by the lessons from the case studies and findings from the assessment of facilitating factors and barriers while being informed by literature of existing research-to-policy frameworks. In addition, a rigorous iterative approach with stakeholders was conducted for validation and applicability of the framework. Findings: The research revealed that clinical and basic research in the fields of malaria in pregnancy, severe malaria, and vector and/or agent dynamics dominated the publications while morbidity studies, severe malaria, and health policy and systems research dominated the approved studies. The results show that malaria research output increased steadily from 1996 to 2016 and this was attributed to the establishment of the College of Medicine and its research affiliates. However, the major malaria research funding came from external sources. The case studies showed that primary research was instrumental in changing the malaria treatment policies and in some cases Malawi was the first country to adopt these changes. Policy development process was found to follow the established process that involves agenda setting, policy formulation, and policy implementation. Many factors were identified as facilitating the utilisation of malaria research in policy development and these included the government commitment through the ministry of health, by reviving the policy development unit and the establishment of the office for the director of research, the knowledge translation unit, and academic and non-academic research institutions. Specific tools that support these institutions are the national health research agenda, guidelines for policy development and analysis, and guidelines for evidence use in policy-making. Barriers to the utilisation of malaria research included, the lack of knowledge by researchers to involve, collaborate and communicate their research findings to policy makers. Other barriers included lack of platforms for researcher-public engagement, politics, funder driven research, unknown World Health Organization policy position, and the lack of a malaria research repository. Challenges to the implementation of malaria policies included inadequate resources, unavailability of trained staff, poor supervision and mentorship, politics, parallel implementation of policies, lack of a platform for engagement with communities, top-down approach in policy development, lack of understanding of socio-cultural factors affecting policy uptake by communities, and incomplete stakeholder analysis during policy development. Lessons from the case studies and the assessment of facilitating factors and barriers contributed to the development of a contextual knowledge-to-policy framework which proposes an integrated approach to knowledge translation between malaria researchers and the government, through the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the National Malaria Control Programme (NMCP), which is considered as the main user of research knowledge. Conclusion: Malaria research provides the relevant evidence for policy decision-making to address the malaria burden in Malawi. The developed framework offers a basis for the identified factors and their linkages to promote a coordinated approach to malaria research utilisation in policy making. Its applicability and success would, however, hinge on its wider dissemination and ownership by the government through the NMCP. It is important for the government to support health policy and systems research that seeks to explore bottlenecks in the delivery of health services within the health system. This evidence should provide solutions to challenges of policy implementation. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / University of Pretoria Institute for Sustainable Malaria Control (UP ISMC) and MRC Collaborating Centre for malaria research / School of Health Systems and Public Health (SHSPH) / PhD / Unrestricted

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Having presented the "basic numbering systems" the writer ettempts to draw on his department store background, research materials, and personal interviews with well informed business executives, in order to present meaningful facts in a logical sequence as to their application to the numbering of Indianapolis accounts. In the final analysis account numbering in this thesis will apply specifically to the assignmentof an individual number to each customer's account in the Accounts Receivable Depertment of a department store or stores. As background information, however, the writer will draw extensively on the experiences of banks in order to establish a sound basis for numbering.

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Thesis (M.S. in Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 1990. / Thesis Advisor: Doyle, Dick. Second Reader: Hochberger, Lyle K. "December 1990." Description based on title screen as viewed on April 1, 2010. DTIC Identifier(s): Test and evaluation, weapon systems, research management, critical technologies, CTP (critical technologies plan), military planning, technology forecasting, planning programming budgeting, simulation, parallel processing, computerized simulation, test equipment, electronic equipment, detectors. Author(s) subject terms: Test and Evaluation, Critical Technologies Plan, technology. Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-136). Also available in print.

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In this thesis we study the model reduction problem in terms of the geometric concepts of linear system theory. By appropriate selection of reducing subspaces, useful lower-order system models can be achieved. The reducing subspaces can be chosen as parts of a system which are "most" and "least" controllable or observable; retaining, of course, the most controllable/observable subspace for model reduction. We review results showing how several measures of controllability and observability can provide this information. Balanced, Jordan canonical form, and dual GHR representations are shown to be state space realizations which naturally identify the reducing subspaces based on these measures. Several results unifying these methods are given. In another approach, we show that the reducing subspaces can be chosen such that after completing model reduction, a number of Markov parameters and time moments of the full system are retained by the reduced order model. We show how the dual GHR can be used as a tool which identifies these subspaces and state space realizations which naturally display them. Along these lines, a connection between model reduction in the state space and second-order systems is established, particularly the reduction of structures via the Lanczos algorithm. / Master of Science

Fuzzy control is a rule based type of control that aims to imitate the human's ability to express a control policy using linguistic rules, and to reason using those rules to control a system. Fuzzy control is nonlinear and not dependent on a precise mathematical description of the plant, and is therefore more easily applied to systems such as industrial processes that are hard to model. An overview is given of the fuzzy controller, along with descriptions of applications and theoretical approaches to designing and analyzing the controller. The self-organizing controller is able to generate or modify its rules in real time based on the system performance. It was tested to determine how well it was able to learn a quality control policy. The self-organizing controller was found to exhibit poor steady state performance, and to be equally likely to learn poor control as to learn good control. It was not found to eliminate the need for careful tuning of the controller parameters and gains. / Master of Science

Three methods of indicating active (linked) words in hypertext documents were investigated. The Methods consisted of font-manipulation techniques (such as shadowed and outlined text), word-enclosure techniques (variations of a box and pseudo-brackets around the word), and "punctuation-like" icons (located directly above the first letter of an active word). Two Cues were nested within each Method, yielding a total of six Cues. Twenty-four subjects (12 males and 12 females) performed reading tasks and visual search tasks to evaluate each of the three Methods and six Cues. A hierarchical, within-subjects experimental design was used, employing a completely counterbalanced order of treatments. The study consisted of two experiments. For Experiment 1 (reading tasks), participants read Tinker (1955) passages and identified an inappropriate word in each passage. Passages contained either one of the six Cues or no Cues (control condition). The times taken to read each passage and locate the target word, as well as the number of errors made, were recorded. For Experiment 2 (visual search tasks), participants scanned text fields and located and counted the number of active words contained within each text field; again, the times taken to locate all active words and the number of errors made were recorded. For both experiments, participants rated Cueing Methods along various dimensions and selected a preferred Cue and Method for the tasks performed in each of the two experiments. For reading tasks, no single Cueing Method yielded significantly shorter reading times than any other Method. Similarly, no particular Method was preferred by significantly more participants than any other Method. However, user ratings were more favorable for Icons than for Enclosures or Character Styles. In addition, Character Styles were consistently rated as being highly distracting for reading tasks. For visual search tasks, Character Styles yielded shorter search times (<i>p</i> < 0.05) as well as significantly more favorable salience ratings. Participants also preferred the Character Styles significantly more often than either Enclosures or Icons for locating linked words. The number of errors produced for both experiments was very low (less than 2%) and there were no significant differences in errors across Methods or Cues. This finding is not unexpected considering the low level of difficulty for the reading and search tasks. Based on the results of both experiments, Icons are the recommended Method for indicating linked words in hypertext documents. Icons provide moderate perceived readability (reflected in subjective ratings, though not in reading times or preferences), whereas Enclosures were not sufficiently salient and Character Styles were perceived to have degraded text readability. A discussion of a wide variety of techniques which either are currently used in existing hypertext systems or could potentially be used is included in the Literature Review section. The issue of trade-offs between Cue salience and obtrusiveness is addressed in the Discussion. / Master of Science