Bounded and unbounded knowledge : teaching and learning in a web 2 world

beginning of serious problems for the business models of publishers. The ease with which content can be accessed, copied and distributed disrupts the control of those whose role has been to manage and profit from the intellectual property rights of content producers. In effect, the number of “publishers” increased many fold as the Web and other Internet-based technologies became the dominant mode of content distribution. In education, and in other fields, matters of intellectual property, copyright and quality control came to the fore. More recently, with the advent of web based software that makes publishing online available to anyone with access to the Internet the number of “publishers” and modes of publication have increased massively. The shift from a Web which was, for many a read only environment to a read/write Web poses not only ongoing problems for the traditional distributors of content but also now, for the traditional producers of content and knowledge. In this respect, the role of universities as designers and producers of learning materials for credentialed learning is also under challenge. Just as publishers explore alternative business models to adapt to the new digital environment, now universities have begun to explore new ways of working with so-called Web2 software to support teaching and learning online. In particular, some Web2 software affords new opportunities for and different modes of collaboration, which in the view of some points to student participation in knowledge production. While these developments represent important and significant shifts for universities, this paper draws attention to the lack of empirical data and situated contextual knowledge concerning intellectual property rights for knowledge constructed in a collaborative context. In addition, we explore issues in relation to the maintenance of academic integrity and quality where knowledge building takes place in a collaborative, online environment.

Language processing and acquisition in languages of Semitic, root-based, morphology / Joseph Shimron

This book addresses a fundamental question in the morphological analysis and representation of Semitic languages—namely, whether Semitic word morphology is root based or word based. As Shimron suggests, “there are reasons to view the templates, not the roots, as the more influential factor in determining Semitic morphology” (p. 5). Yet, as others would argue, there are reasons not to disregard the root-based hypothesis altogether. In the case of Arabic morphology, for example, verbal forms inherently contain three nonlinear levels: the consonantal root, the vowel pattern, and the templatic prosody. This nonlinear feature provided a perfect illustration of what has become termed in the literature as root-and-patterns morphology (McCarthy & Prince, 1986, 1990).

Development of DAL and DAPL languages for building distributed applications

A common characteristic among parallel/distributed programming languages is that the one language is used to specify not only the overall organisation of the distributed application, but also the functionality of the application. That is, the connectivity and functionality of processes are specified within a single program. Connectivity and functionality are independent aspects of a distributed application. This thesis shows that these two aspects can be specified separately, therefore allowing application designers to freely concentrate on either aspect in a modular fashion. Two new programming languages have been developed for specifying each aspect. These languages are for loosely coupled distributed applications based on message passing, and have been designed to simplify distributed programming by completely removing all low level interprocess communication. A suite of languages and tools has been designed and developed. It includes the two new languages, parsers, a compilation system to generate intermediate C code that is compiled to binary object modules, a run-time system to create, manage and terminate several distributed applications, and a shell to communicate with the run-tune system. DAL (Distributed Application Language) and DAPL (Distributed Application Process Language) are the new programming languages for the specification and development of process oriented, asynchronous message passing, distributed applications. These two languages have been designed and developed as part of this doctorate in order to specify such distributed applications that execute on a cluster of computers. Both languages are used to specify orthogonal components of an application, on the one hand the organisation of processes that constitute an application, and on the other the interface and functionality of each process. Consequently, these components can be created in a modular fashion, individually and concurrently. The DAL language is used to specify not only the connectivity of all processes within an application, but also a cluster of computers for which the application executes. Furthermore, sub-clusters can be specified for individual processes of an application to constrain a process to a particular group of computers. The second language, DAPL, is used to specify the interface, functionality and data structures of application processes. In addition to these languages, a DAL parser, a DAPL parser, and a compilation system have been designed and developed (in this project). This compilation system takes DAL and DAPL programs to generate object modules based on machine code, one module for each application process. These object modules are used by the Distributed Application System (DAS) to instantiate and manage distributed applications. The DAS system is another new component of this project. The purpose of the DAS system is to create, manage, and terminate many distributed applications of similar and different configurations. The creation procedure incorporates the automatic allocation of processes to remote machines. Application management includes several operations such as deletion, addition, replacement, and movement of processes, and also detection and reaction to faults such as a processor crash. A DAS operator communicates with the DAS system via a textual shell called DASH (Distributed Application SHell). This suite of languages and tools allowed distributed applications of varying connectivity and functionality to be specified quickly and simply at a high level of abstraction. DAL and DAPL programs of several processes may require a few dozen lines to specify as compared to several hundred lines of equivalent C code that is generated by the compilation system. Furthermore, the DAL and DAPL compilation system is successful at generating binary object modules, and the DAS system succeeds in instantiating and managing several distributed applications on a cluster.

Bounded lower subdifferentiability optimization techniques : applications

In this article we develop a global optimization algorithm for quasiconvex programming where the objective function is a Lipschitz function which may have "flat parts". We adapt the Extended Cutting Angle method to quasiconvex functions, which reduces significantly the number of iterations and objective function evaluations, and consequently the total computing time. Applications of such an algorithm to mathematical programming problems inwhich the objective function is derived from economic systems and location problems are described. Computational results are presented.

Historical landscape languages : creating symbolic space over generations

Landscape creation takes time, patience, water, and languages of visions. Landscape ‘history’ is not short in time but progressive, evolutionary and slow. In the case of the Adelaide Park Lands, the spectre of the myth of the Park Lands as a historical statement is very evident in planning and design discourses in South Australia. It is a mental creation of a number of actors who sought initially to remove all vegetation and evidence of human sedentary occupation. These actors applied languages to argue for a certain type of landscape as well as for the human, water, plant and financial resources to construct this picture. Some were simple letters to editors, some were political statements and pronouncements, some were the actual endeavours and expressions of municipal officials and city gardeners who sought to plant and craft representations of what they thought were ideal visions, and some were consultants who equally sought to apply their ideals.

This paper considers the historiography of the Adelaide Park Lands through the languages of those who argued for and enabled its planting using their words, languages and action examples.

Negations generated by bounded lattices t-norms

From the birth of fuzzy sets theory, several extensions have been proposed changing the possible membership values. Since fuzzy connectives such as t-norms and negations have an important role in theoretical as well as applied fuzzy logics, these connectives have been adapted for these generalized frameworks. Perhaps, an extension of fuzzy logic which generalizes the remaining extensions, proposed by Joseph Goguen in 1967, is to consider arbitrary bounded lattices for the values of the membership degrees. In this paper we extend the usual way of constructing fuzzy negations from t-norms for the bounded lattice t-norms and prove some properties of this construction.