Title: Compensatory exercise as a complement to the training schedule for children of younger school age in figure skating Objectives: The main aim of this work is to highlight muscle dysbalance and their subsequent weakening and hypermobility in younger school age children in figure skating. Based on these weaknesses, create a stack of release, stretching and exercise exercises that can be used under any circumstances. Methods: In my work, I used a Janda muscle test, an analytical method that was focused on determining the strength of each muscle group. In individual tests, we are not only measuring the muscular strength of the main muscle, but we also investigate and analyze the performance of the whole movement. I was based on qualitative and quantitative values. Results: The measured data were compared and evaluated according to the literature. The impact of one-sided load in the long-term sports practice of figure skating was confirmed. It has also been shown that these exercises can be used for this particular set of probands to compensate for unilateral loading and adjust the training so that compensatory exercises are part of the training. Furthermore, I managed to design a program that would reduce these weaknesses for this selected group of probands. Keywords: Figure skating, training,...

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Masters of Technology in Graphic Design Degree, Durban University of Technology, 2017. / The aim of this research is to investigate the influence of context on the artistic exploration of the nude figure, in the work of selected artists. Qualitative research methods were used. The research is practice-led, as my art making plays an essential part in guiding my research. An outline detailing the various influences and changes to artistic practice surrounding the nude – from ancient Greece to the development of feminist ideas - provides an historic context to the study. I look at major sociocultural and technological advances to examine the relationship between artistic representations of nudity and context. This includes a look at the terminology, naked and the nude, and how these shape understanding. Contextual influences are narrowed down to how they have affected the work of selected artists’ whose work utilizes the nude as a communication tool. The selected artists that I investigate are Jenny Saville (1970-), Erin M. Riley (1985-), Vinz (1979-), and myself. In my own work, issues of public and private space are interrogated by looking at aspects of social networking and online behaviour. This exploration focuses on issues relating to the overlap of these two spaces that where once seen as dichotomous. Through this research I showed that contemporary artists still make use of the historic subject matter. By including symbolism taken from contemporary sociocultural surroundings the nude’s communicative value is continuously updated. This supports the idea that context effects the artistic exploration of the nude. / M

M.A. (Religious Studies) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

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This thesis deals with the detection of three rhetorical figures based on repetition of words: chiasmus (“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”), epanaphora (“Poor old European Commission! Poor old European Council.”) and epiphora (“This house is mine. This car is mine. You are mine.”). For a computer, locating all repetitions of words is trivial, but locating just those repetitions that achieve a rhetorical effect is not. How can we make this distinction automatically?  First, we propose a new definition of the problem. We observe that rhetorical figures are a graded phenomenon, with universally accepted prototypical cases, equally clear non-cases, and a broad range of borderline cases in between. This makes it natural to view the problem as a ranking task rather than a binary detection task. We therefore design a model for ranking candidate repetitions in terms of decreasing likelihood of having a rhetorical effect, which allows potential users to decide for themselves where to draw the line with respect to borderline cases.  Second, we address the problem of collecting annotated data to train the ranking model. Thanks to a selective method of annotation, we can reduce by three orders of magnitude the annotation work for chiasmus, and by one order of magnitude the work for epanaphora and epiphora. In this way, we prove that it is feasible to develop a system for detecting the three figures without an unsurmountable amount of human work.  Finally, we propose an evaluation scheme and apply it to our models. The evaluation reveals that, even with a very incompletely annotated corpus, a system for repetitive figure detection can be trained to achieve reasonable accuracy. We investigate the impact of different linguistic features, including length, n-grams, part-of-speech tags, and syntactic roles, and find that different features are useful for different figures. We also apply the system to four different types of text: political discourse, fiction, titles of articles and novels, and quotations. Here the evaluation shows that the system is robust to shifts in genre and that the frequencies of the three rhetorical figures vary with genre. / Denna avhandling behandlar tre retoriska figurer som bygger på upprepning av ord, kiasm (“Om inte Muhammed kan komma till berget får berget komma till Muhammed.”), anafor (“Det är inte rimligt. Det är inte hållbart. Det är inte rättvist.”), och epifor (“Den här stugan är min. Den här bilen är min. Du är min.”). En dator kan lätt identifiera upprepningar av ord i en text, men att urskilja enbart de upprepningar som har en retorisk effekt är svårare. Hur kan vi få datorer att göra detta? För det första föreslår vi en ny definition av problemet. Vi noterar att retoriska figurer är ett graderbart fenomen, med prototypiska fall å ena sidan, och klara icke-fall å andra sidan; däremellan finns ett brett spektrum av gränsfall. Detta gör det naturligt att se problemet som en uppgift som gäller rangordning snarare än binär klassificering. Vi skapar därför en modell för att rangordna repetitioner efter sannolikheten att de har en retorisk effekt. Därigenom tillåts  systemets användare att själva avgöra hur gränsfall ska hanteras. För det andra försöker vi undvika tänkbara svårigheter med att samla in annoterade data för att träna modellen för rangordning. Genom att använda en selektiv metod kan vi reducera mängden annoteringsarbete tusenfalt för kiasm och tiofalt för anafor och epifor. Det är alltså möjligt att utveckla ett system för att identifiera de aktuella retoriska figurerna utan en stor mängd manuell annotering. Slutligen föreslår vi en metod för utvärdering och tillämpar den på våra modeller. Utvärderingen visar att vi även med en korpus där få exempel är annoterade kan träna ett system för identifiering av repetitiva figurer med godtagbart resultat. Vi undersöker effekten av olika särdrag som bygger på t.ex. längd, n-gram, ordklasser och syntaktiska roller. En slutsats är att olika särdrag är användbara i olika grad för olika figurer. Vi prövar också systemet på ytterligare texttyper: politisk diskurs, skönlitteratur, titlar på artiklar och romaner, samt citat. Utvärderingen visar att systemet är robust vad gäller genreskillnader. Vi ser även att figurernas frekvens varierar över olika genrer.

In modern times German authors have made ample use of the Job-theme. The study examines the transformations that the story of Job has undergone in German narrative and dramatic works from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Der neue Hiob (1878) to Fritz Zorn's Mars (1977). The most striking feature of these works lies in their diverse characterization of the Job-figure. As a mythical figure he remains synonymous with the sufferer, but he may be characterized as patient or impatient, humble or arrogant, innocent or guilty, rich or poor, courageous or cowardly; he may be a Jew or a Christian, a Nazi or an anti-Nazi, a believer or an agnostic. The authors have retained most of the characters included in the Old Testament story. The Job-figure usually has a wife (who doubts and despises God), a number of children (who die in an impending disaster), and several friends (who accuse him of wrong-doing). Concerning the plot, most writers have excluded any prologue in heaven. The suffering of the Job-figure (usually brought on by the loss of loved ones, by physical pain and by mental agony) is always central to the story. More often than not, however, the modern Job-figure exhibits a form of impatience and impiety once misfortune has struck. A theophany (literal confrontation with God) does not occur, but a divine agent may be provided in the form of a dream or a vision, or indirectly by nature. An epilogue (the restoration of Job's health, possessions and children) is usually omitted, but some authors imply a renewal of Job, so as to suggest a purpose for and a hope after his arduous trials. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

The Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Task (ROCFT) has been a standard in neuropsychological assessment for six decades. Many researchers have contributed administration procedures, additional scoring systems and normative data to improve its utility. Despite the abundance of research, the original 36-point scoring system still reigns among clinicians despite documented problems with ceiling and floor effects and poor discrimination between levels of impairment. This study is an attempt to provide a new method based upon item response theory that will allow clinicians to better describe the impairment levels of their patients. Through estimation of item characteristic curves, underlying traits can be estimated while taking into account varying levels of difficulty and discrimination within the set of individual items. The ultimate goal of the current research is identification of a subset of ROCFT items that can be examined in addition to total scores to provide an extra level of information for clinicians, particularly when they are faced with a need to discriminate severely and mildly impaired patients.

One of the key requirements in the design of wireless sensor nodes and miniature biomedical devices is energy efficiency. For a sensor node, which is a sensor and readout circuit, to survive on limited energy sources such as a battery or harvested energy, its energy consumption should be minimized. Capacitive sensors are candidates for use in energy-constrained applications, as they do not consume static power and can be used in a wide range of applications to measure different physical, chemical or biological quantities. However, the energy consumption is dominated by the capacitive interface circuit, i.e. the capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC). Several energy-efficient CDC architectures are introduced in this dissertation to meet the demand for high resolution and energy efficiency in smart capacitive sensors. First, we propose an energy-efficient CDC based on a differential successive-approximation data converter. The proposed differential CDC employs an energy-efficient operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) based on an inverter. A wide capacitance range with fine absolute resolution is implemented in the proposed coarse-fine DAC architecture which saves 89% of silicon area. The proposed CDC achieves an energy efficiency figure-of-merit (FOM) of 45.8fJ/step, which is the best reported energy efficiency to date. Second, we propose an energy efficient CDC for high-precision capacitive resolution by using oversampling and noise shaping. The proposed CDC achieves 150 aF absolute resolution and an energy efficiency FOM of 187fJ/conversion-step which outperforms state of the art high-precision differential CDCs. In the third and last part, we propose an in-vitro cancer diagnostic biosensor-CMOS platform for low-power, rapid detection, and low cost. The introduced platform is the first to demonstrate the ability to screen and quantify the spermidine/spermine N1 acetyltransferase (SSAT) enzyme which reveals the presence of early-stage cancer, on the surface of a capacitive biosensor. This platform, which is a biosensor combined with a highly energy-efficient digital CDC, is implemented and fabricated in a CMOS technology and can sense and convert the capacitance value from the biosensor to a digital word in an energy efficient way. The platform achieves an ultra-low power consumption: four orders of magnitude less than the state-of-the-art biosensor-CMOS platforms.

Ten figurativ paintings from kitchen. Technology - acrylic on canvas.

With power conversion efficiency surpassing the 10% milestone for commercialization, photovoltaic technology based on solution-processable polymer solar cells (PSCs) provides a promising route towards a cost-efficient strategy to address the ever-increasing worldwide energy demands. However, to make PSCs successful, challenges such as insufficient light absorption, high maintenance costs, and relatively high production costs must be addressed. As solutions to some of these problems, the unique properties of nanostructured materials and complimentary light absorption in multi-junction device structure could prove to be highly beneficial. As a starting point, integrating nanostructure-based transparent self-cleaning surfaces in PSCs was investigated first. By controlling the length of the hydrothermally grown ZnO nanorods and covering their surface with a thin layer of chemical vapor-deposited SiO2, a highly transparent and UV-resistant superhydrophobic surface was constructed. Integrating the transparent superhydrophobic surface in a PSC shows minimal impact on the figure of merit of the PSC. To address the low mechanical durability of the transparent superhydrophobic surface based on SiO2-coated ZnO nanorods, a novel method inspired by the water condensation process was developed. This method involved directly growing hollow silica half-nanospheres on the substrate through the condensation of water in the presence of a silica precursor. Benefit from the decreased back scattering efficiency and increased light transport mean free path arise from the hollow nature, a transparent superhydrophobic surface was realized using submicrometer sized silica half-nanospheres. The decent mechanical property of silica and the “direct-grown” protocol are expected to impart improved mechanical durability to the transparent superhydrophobic surface. Regarding the application of multi-junction device structure in PSCs, homo multi-junction PSCs were constructed from an identical polymer absorber, in which the homo-tandem device showed an enhanced power conversion efficiency (PCE) (8.3% vs 7.7%) relative to the optimized single junction PSC. The high open voltage (>1.8 V) achieved in homo-tandem PSCs allowed for water splitting with an estimated solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency of 6%. Lastly, a hybrid tandem cell was also constructed using a polymer and a colloidal quantum dot subcell. Different hybrid tandem device architectures were proposed and show a promising PCE of 6.7%.