A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master’s in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Zululand, 2015 / According to the Constitution, Act No.108 of 1996 of the Republic of South Africa, every person has the right to clean water. The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry’s Community Water Supply Programme was established in 1994 to achieve this objective. Access to safe drinking water is the basic need to human life and wellbeing, and is a key to public health issues. The UGu District Municipality is the water distributor to the Umzumbe Local Municipality residents. The study area for this research is the Umzumbe Local Municipality, which is the second largest municipality under the UGu District Municipality. Communities, especially in rural areas under the Umzumbe Local Municipality, are still unable to access adequate safe drinking water which meets the national standards for protecting human health. The main concern of this research was to assess water access and provisioning in the Umzumbe Local Municipality, under the UGu District Municipality. The research assessed the water supply system in the UGu District Municipality by engaging with all the stakeholders involved in water provision to verify their roles in the water supply and development of water service delivery projects. The study was predicated on three theories which were assumed to explain water provisioning. The first theory is the top-down and bottom up approach to service delivery. The second approach is the privatisation concept which is based on neo-liberalism. This explains that buying what could hinder efficient delivery, mostly in poor environments. The final theory of the study deals with project management. This theory asserts that the way a project is packaged and commissioned will have implications in the delivery of services, in this case, water delivery. The research employed mixed a methods research design. The reason for employing both qualitative and quantitative methods is because the research sought to obtain a comprehensive interpretation of the occurrences in the research area. The adoption of qualitative data alone is likely to provide limited vision which would not be sufficient for the research without the inclusion of quantitative data. The population for the research consisted of the Umzumbe Local Municipality residents, both males and females from twenty one years of age, upwards. Seventy participants were chosen for the research. Interview schedules and survey questionnaires were used as data collection instruments. vii The findings showed that the UGu District Municipality infrastructure does have some challenges, which come in the form of skills challenges, and capacity challenges. Other challenges that the study identified include inability to access municipality’s infrastructure grant (M.I.G) and bulk infrastructure grant (B.I.G). The UGu District Municipality areas that are far inland are likely to have water, and also the problems because of the low capacity of engines that are used to pump water also the problem is exacerbated by power failures. The findings further indicated that unskilled contractors could be the cause of water outage in the Umzumbe Local Municipality. It has been established that contractors who are hired to run projects have a tendency of abandoning projects that have not been completed. The findings presented that the UGu District Municipality does not consider the involvement of community members when they take decisions on project matters. The research established that water tankers do not provide community with adequate water and the utilization of water tankers is an expensive option that can cause community not to be served. The findings also indicated that some of the water infrastructure is old and it can be the cause of water shortage. Lastly, the findings showed that the Umzumbe Local Municipality has low income opportunities, causing its inhabitants to be unable to pay for water services. On the basis of the findings the study recommends that the UGu District Municipality needs to adhere to the principles of monitoring and evaluation of all activities and projects that relate to water provisioning. At a broader scale the study suggests that further research be done to determine whether the Department of Water and Sanitation can consider the construction of water reservoir in UMzimkhulu River. The reservoir should be linked with the Umgeni Water Board to provide water to communities during water outage.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第21909号 / 情博第692号 / 新制||情||119(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科知能情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 神谷 之康, 教授 熊田 孝恒, 教授 西野 恒 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DGAM

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Decision diagrams have recently emerged as a promising approach for difficult scheduling problems, along with other challenging discrete optimization problems. Decision diagrams can offer a compact representation of the solution space, and has the ability to capture complex constraints that are hard to model or express in other techniques. This thesis explores two standard construction methods for relaxed decision diagrams, top-down construction and incremental refinement. The techniques are compared on their ability to handle scheduling problems with multiple time windows and precedence constraints. The construction methods are evaluated on several metrics, including generated bound, execution time, and the size of the diagram, on instances of the problem with up to 200 tasks. The results show that incremental refinement generates smaller diagrams with good bounds when compared to the top-down compilation algorithm; the reduction in diagram size and increase in bounds for incremental refinement comes at the expense of execution time compared to top-down compilation.

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Detta examensarbete syftar till att undersöka vilka strategier elever använder sig av vid text-, hör- och ordförståelse i franska. Jag har genom undervisningsförsök och elevenkäter undersökt vilka strategier elever i en niondeklass har när de arbetar med ovanstående moment där uppgifterna är hämtade utanför den ordinarie läroboken. Jag har därutöver intervjuat lärare på den skola jag gjort mina undervisningsförsök för att se om de ger eleverna strategier för arbete kring text-, hör- och ordförståelse. Projektet STRIMS och Tornbergs forskningsresultat har givit mig inspiration till arbetet. Eleverna använde sig huvudsakligen av framgångsrika strategier när de tog sig an de olika uppgifterna. De framgångsrika strategier eleverna i huvudsak använde sig av var att de drog slutsatser utifrån kontexten, de använde sina kunskaper i andra språk samt att de utbytte tankar och idéer vid samarbete i par eller i grupp.

Svärm-AI är en variant av artificiell intelligens (AI) som används för att simulera ett bettende liknande det man kan se i svärmar, flockar eller stim. Syftet med detta arbete är att undersöka ifall man kan använda svärm-AI för att förbättra en AI i ett top down shooter spel där två lag slåss mot varandra. Ett program skapades för att testa detta där de två lagen båda var datorstyrda enheter och fick slåss mot varandra för att samla mätvärden. Resultaten visar att svärm-AI presterade bättre i labyrintliknande banor utan stora tomma områden. De visade även att svärm-AI använde betydligt mycket mer prestanda. / <p>Det finns övrigt digitalt material (t.ex. film-, bild- eller ljudfiler) eller modeller/artefakter tillhörande examensarbetet som ska skickas till arkivet.</p><p>There are other digital material (eg film, image or audio files) or models/artifacts that belongs to the thesis and need to be archived.</p>

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The European Neighbourhood policy is the union’s joint foreign policy framework for themajority of the nations in the Caucasus, Eastern European, Middle eastern and North african regions, which are divided into an eastern, and a southern region. One of the main goals of the policy is to foster democratic progress in the regions involved. This task has, however, proven to be a complex and difficult one which has seen mixed results. This study uses a frameworkbased on the theory of soft power to examine what strategy the union utilizes to achieve democratization in these regions. The use of a comparative approach allows the drawing of conclusions about the subject matter based on differences in the approach between the regions. The study found that a top-down strategy of democratization was utilized in the eastern region, while a grassroot, bottom-up approach was more prevalent in the southern.This study is thus a useful addition to the plentiful research regarding the Neighbourhood policy as its findings offer opportunities for further comparative study by highlighting that there are indeed relevant differences in the relationship of the EU to the two regions.