Are schools able to bring sense into pupils' lives? - an experiment to use Antonovsky's concept sense of coherence from a school perspective. : Paper presented at the ENIRDEM conference in Kilkenny, Ireland 26th-29th September, 2002

Young people now spend a longer and longer period of their lives at school then ever before. Not always because that they want to, but because society has nothing else to offer. The situation in many schools may also, in different aspects, be seen as highly problematic. Andersson (2001) has, for example, found in a large longitudinal study - The Life Project – that schools seem to be adapted to the needs of only a minority of the students - around 30%. On the other hand school is badly adjusted to the requirements of another 30 %. This group of students often find school meaningless, uninteresting and boring. For these students school is mostly a waste of time. In such circumstances, it seems natural that society has a responsibility to offer young people a meaningful time at school, both here and now and to prepare them for a future live as adults, not only as a part of the work force.As a part of departure I briefly describe the model that Antonovsky has developed and try to use it in a school context instead. I have here, of course, no possibility to make a deeper analysis of a complex problem such as this.In Antonovsky’s spirit, using a salutogenic perspective, instead of asking ourselves why do pupils fail or perhaps also not like being at school we have to ask, instead: What it is that makes pupils successful? From this background the purpose of this paper is to discuss some aspects of how pupils may use different strategies to handle their school situation in a proper way.

Effective measures to decrease air contaminants through risk and control visualization : a study of the effective use of QR codes to facilitate safety training

Woodworking industries still consists of wood dust problems. Young workers are especially vulnerable to safety risks. To reduce risks, it is important to change attitudes and increase knowledge about safety. Safety training have shown to establish positive attitudes towards safety among employees. The aim of current study is to analyze the effect of QR codes that link to Picture Mix EXposure (PIMEX) videos by analyzing attitudes to this safety training method and safety in student responses. Safety training videos were used in upper secondary school handicraft programs to demonstrate wood dust risks and methods to decrease exposure to wood dust. A preliminary study was conducted to investigate improvement of safety training in two schools in preparation for the main study that investigated a safety training method in three schools. In the preliminary study the PIMEX method was first used in which students were filmed while wood dust exposure was measured and subsequently displayed on a computer screen in real time. Before and after the filming, teachers, students, and researchers together analyzed wood dust risks and effective measures to reduce exposure to them. For the main study, QR codes linked to PIMEX videos were attached at wood processing machines. Subsequent interviews showed that this safety training method enables students in an early stage of their life to learn about risks and safety measures to control wood dust exposure. The new combination of methods can create awareness, change attitudes and motivation among students to work more frequently to reduce wood dust. 

PERFORMANCE EVOLUTION OF PEER TO PEER NETWORKS

This thesis work concerns about the Performance evolution of peer to peer networks, where we used different distribution technique’s of peer distribution like Weibull, Lognormal and Pareto distribution process. Then we used a network simulator to evaluate the performance of these three distribution techniques.During the last decade the Internet has expanded into a world-wide network connecting millions of hosts and users and providing services for everyone. Many emerging applications are bandwidth-intensive in their nature; the size of downloaded files including music and videos can be huge, from ten megabits to many gigabits. The efficient use of network resources is thus crucial for the survivability of the Internet. Traffic engineering (TE) covers a range of mechanisms for optimizing operational networks from the traffic perspective. The time scale in traffic engineering varies from the short-term network control to network planning over a longer time period.Here in this thesis work we considered the peer distribution technique in-order to minimise the peer arrival and service process with three different techniques, where we calculated the congestion parameters like blocking time for each peer before entering into the service process, waiting time for a peers while the other peer has been served in the service block and the delay time for each peer. Then calculated the average of each process and graphs have been plotted using Matlab to analyse the results

Learning in and through drama : The necessity to use multiple theoretical perspectives in order to understand how learning takes place in drama

The complexity of learning implies that learning seldom is about just one thing. It can be said that learning processes are interdisciplinary. Within educational contexts, learning is not limited to constructed school subjects. In drama education, learning is simultaneously about drama as aesthetic expression and content because drama always is about something. The mainly focus can be on form, content or social aspects. The different aspects are always present, but may be more or less foreground or the background depending on the purpose of education. How do development concerning understanding of form, content, and social interaction, interact in a learning process in drama? My research is based on the view that learning at the same time takes place as an individual, internal process and a socially situated, inter-subjective process. Can learning in drama imply learning that can be transferred between different situations, a transformative learning and if so, how? Transformative learning includes cognitive, affective and corporal and social action aspects and means that the individual's frames of reference are transformed, evolved, to become more insightful and flexible which implies a change of personality. It leads to an integrated knowledge that can be applied in different contexts.   In the paper that will be presented at the conference, theories about how we learn in drama will be discussed in relation to my empirical research concerning drama and learning.

Push or pull? : The relationship between quality of care and use of complementary and alternative medicine among patients with lung cancer in Sweden

Little is known about relationships between quality of care (QoC) and use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) among patients with lung cancer (LC). Purpose: This study examines CAM-use among patients with LC in Sweden, associations between QoC and CAM-use among these patients, and reported aspects of LC-care perceived as particularly positive and negative by patients, as well as suggestions for improving QoC. Methods: Survey data from 94 patient members of the Swedish LC patient organization about CAM-use and QoC as measured by the instrument “Quality from the patient’s perspective” were analyzed. Results: Fifty (53%) LC-patients used CAM, with 40 of the CAM-users reporting that CAM helped them. The most common CAMs used were dietary supplements and natural remedies, followed by prayer. Significantly more patients reported using prayer and meditation for cure than was the case for other types of CAM used. Less than half the CAM-users reported having spoken with staff from the biomedical health care system about their CAM-use. Patients provided numerous suggestions for improving LC-care in a variety of areas, aiming at a more effective and cohesive care trajectory. No differences in QoC were found between CAM-users and non-CAM-users, but differences in CAM-use i.e. type of CAM, reasons for using CAM, and CAM-provider consulted could be associated with different experiences of care. Conclusions: It is important to recognize that CAM-users are not a homogeneous group but might seek different types of CAMs and CAM-providers in different situations depending on experiences of care.