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This project investigates Interior Architecture as the design of space within established physical parameters. The concept of an Agora as a public meeting space generating memory forms the design platform from which the investigation happens. After 100 years, the University of Pretoria is still relatively young compared to other similar institutions worldwide, and the current diversity of users further add to the loss of corporate identity that is shared between these users. The Agora creates a generator of information by hosting interaction between previously separated groups, exposing information to a majority of users on the Campus. / Dissertation (MInt(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Architecture / MInt (Prof) / unrestricted

<p>The most common disease causing elements in feed is of microbial nature. Therefore it is of great importance for horse owners to be familiar with the fundamental requirements for microbial growth in feeds and the problems that can originate in case of insufficient handling. However, horse owners are not organized in a way that makes it easy to reach them with information as a target group. Additionally, most horse owners only have one horse and limited possibilities for education in feed safety. Thus, there is need for an easy accessed education material that is explicitly directed towards horse owners. The fundamental content of such an education material was composed in this project. Focus was on the importance of good microbial quality in horse feed and the material was structured into three chapters; FEED SAFETY, MICROORGANISMS IN FEEDS and CONSERVATION, STORING AND FEEDING. The aim was to publish the material as part of a larger web based education package on the web page, http://www.sva.se of the Swedish National Veterinary Institute. The basic structure for such a web education was also composed in this project.</p>

The most common disease causing elements in feed is of microbial nature. Therefore it is of great importance for horse owners to be familiar with the fundamental requirements for microbial growth in feeds and the problems that can originate in case of insufficient handling. However, horse owners are not organized in a way that makes it easy to reach them with information as a target group. Additionally, most horse owners only have one horse and limited possibilities for education in feed safety. Thus, there is need for an easy accessed education material that is explicitly directed towards horse owners. The fundamental content of such an education material was composed in this project. Focus was on the importance of good microbial quality in horse feed and the material was structured into three chapters; FEED SAFETY, MICROORGANISMS IN FEEDS and CONSERVATION, STORING AND FEEDING. The aim was to publish the material as part of a larger web based education package on the web page, http://www.sva.se of the Swedish National Veterinary Institute. The basic structure for such a web education was also composed in this project.

Habitat loss and fragmentation have been identified as the main drivers of biodiversity loss. These drivers increase the proportion of habitat edges and change the configuration of landscapes. Habitat edges are known to affect ecological patterns and processes, however, is still unknown how these boundaries affect the assemblage of interactions among species within a community, and particularly its structure. Food webs depict not only the composition of the community, but also the feeding links, which represent a measure of energy flow. Therefore, they can inform about the relationships among community diversity, stability, and ecosystem functions. This thesis explores the effects of habitat edges across native vs. managed forests on the food web of a tri-trophic system comprising plants, herbivores (Lepidoptera larvae) and predators (parasitoids). Particularly, it addresses three main objectives: 1) how food webs at habitat edges are assembled from the species and interactions present in the adjoining habitats; 2) how phylogenetic diversity and the coevolutionary signal among interacting species change across a habitat edge gradient; and 3) whether the mechanisms driving community-wide consumption rates and the ecosystem service of pest control are related to structural characteristics of the food webs. The key findings of this thesis are that, despite the composition of species and interactions of native and managed habitats merging at their interface, food-web structure did not arise as a simple combination of its adjacent habitat webs, potentially due to differential responses of organisms to habitat edges. Moreover, beyond taxonomic composition, the phylogenetic diversity and signal of coevolution among interacting species also change between habitat types, even though this did not translate to changes in consumption rates. Consumption rates and their stability increased with complementarity and redundancy in resource-use among predators. This reflects how environmental changes such as habitat fragmentation can have an effect beyond composition per se, affecting the assemblage of species interactions and even potentially interfering with natural evolutionary processes. Therefore, using interaction-network approaches for determining the impacts of changes may shed light on the underlying mechanisms driving such changes, and help to develop landscape management plans that reduce negative effects on species assemblages.

Large, exotic (those whose headwaters are in distant places) rivers are some of the most unique and diverse ecosystems on earth. Because they often flow through a multitude of biomes and climates, their waters are a vital resource not only for the organisms that inhabit these rivers, but for human societies as well. Thus, large rivers, like the Rio Grande, that flow through arid and agricultural regions are highly regulated and diverted. Regulation and dewatering upset a river’s natural flow regime (e.g., magnitude, duration, timing of large flood events), subsequently impacting the river’s ability to transport its sediment supply, and eventually perturbing a river into either sediment surplus or deficit. The combination of altered flow and sediment regimes influence the availability of habitat essential for the survival and viability of aquatic organisms, such as fish and invertebrates. In addition, increased deposition of sediment creates areas suitable for invasive riparian vegetation to establish, likely affecting habitat complexity and increasing the abundance of leaf litter deposited into the river. The altered flow and sediment regimes, in combination with invasive riparian vegetation, culminate and eventually affect the food resources and aquatic communities present in a river ecosystem. Most often, the links between the physical perturbations to a system with the biological factors are poorly understood. In this study, we use distinct segments of the Rio Grande along the US-Mexico border to compare areas with greater and lower habitat heterogeneity, water quality, and invasive riparian species abundance to better understand what physical factors can influence aquatic species such as fish and invertebrate communities. We identify critical limiting factors for the native fish community present, and link the altered flow and sediment regimes with the aquatic ecological template of the Rio Grande.

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The main motivation for the study described in this dissertation is to benefit from the development in technology and the huge amount of available data which can be easily captured, stored and maintained electronically. We concentrate on Web usage (i.e., log) mining and Web structure mining. Analysing Web log data will reveal valuable feedback reflecting how effective the current structure of a web site is and to help the owner of a web site in understanding the behaviour of the web site visitors. We developed a framework that integrates statistical analysis, frequent pattern mining, clustering, classification and network construction and analysis. We concentrated on the statistical data related to the visitors and how they surf and pass through the various pages of a given web site to land at some target pages. Further, the frequent pattern mining technique was used to study the relationship between the various pages constituting a given web site. Clustering is used to study the similarity of users and pages. Classification suggests a target class for a given new entity by comparing the characteristics of the new entity to those of the known classes. Network construction and analysis is also employed to identify and investigate the links between the various pages constituting a Web site by constructing a network based on the frequency of access to the Web pages such that pages get linked in the network if they are identified in the result of the frequent pattern mining process as frequently accessed together. The knowledge discovered by analysing a web site and its related data should be considered valuable for online shoppers and commercial web site owners. Benefitting from the outcome of the study, a recommendation system was developed to suggest pages to visitors based on their profiles as compared to similar profiles of other visitors. The conducted experiments using popular datasets demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed framework for Web mining and recommendation. As a by product of the proposed method, we demonstrate how it is effective in another domain for feature reduction by concentrating on gene expression data analysis as an application with some interesting results reported in Chapter 5.

The main motivation for the study described in this dissertation is to benefit from the development in technology and the huge amount of available data which can be easily captured, stored and maintained electronically. We concentrate on Web usage (i.e., log) mining and Web structure mining. Analysing Web log data will reveal valuable feedback reflecting how effective the current structure of a web site is and to help the owner of a web site in understanding the behaviour of the web site visitors. We developed a framework that integrates statistical analysis, frequent pattern mining, clustering, classification and network construction and analysis. We concentrated on the statistical data related to the visitors and how they surf and pass through the various pages of a given web site to land at some target pages. Further, the frequent pattern mining technique was used to study the relationship between the various pages constituting a given web site. Clustering is used to study the similarity of users and pages. Classification suggests a target class for a given new entity by comparing the characteristics of the new entity to those of the known classes. Network construction and analysis is also employed to identify and investigate the links between the various pages constituting a Web site by constructing a network based on the frequency of access to the Web pages such that pages get linked in the network if they are identified in the result of the frequent pattern mining process as frequently accessed together. The knowledge discovered by analysing a web site and its related data should be considered valuable for online shoppers and commercial web site owners. Benefitting from the outcome of the study, a recommendation system was developed to suggest pages to visitors based on their profiles as compared to similar profiles of other visitors. The conducted experiments using popular datasets demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed framework for Web mining and recommendation. As a by product of the proposed method, we demonstrate how it is effective in another domain for feature reduction by concentrating on gene expression data analysis as an application with some interesting results reported in Chapter 5.

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