Whey protein and gum arabic encapsulated Omega-3 lipids. The effect of material properties on coacervation

The effect of material properties on complex coacervation of whey protein and gum Arabic from various sources was investigated. In this study, it was demonstrated that material properties of whey protein isolates and gum Arabic affect the complex coacervation process significantly. For whey protein, the coacervation capability could be correlated with their level of denaturation and calcium content. For gum Arabic, both material sources and salt content were found to be attributing factors to their coacervation capability. This study facilitated the development of Omega-3 lipids microcapsules with promising performances in certain food applications.

External public piano examinations in Malaysia : social and symbolic significance

The thesis investigated the social and symbolic significance of acquiring a 'music education' through the taking of piano tuition and external public music examinations. It aimed to discover why the learning of the piano and the certification of musical attainment are so prevalent and revered among Malaysian music students. Its purpose was to unravel the socio-cultural raison d'etre of this approach to music education through the creation of a metatheoretical schema, which is premised upon the theories of symbolic interactionist, George Herbert Mead, music analyst, Heinrich Schenker and social theorist, George Ritzer. Central to the argument in this instance is the symbolic significance associated with the act of playing the piano. The investigation attempted to determine if this 'act' conveyed a symbolic meaning that is peculiar to a specific cultural vista. It further examined the degree to which this practice represented both a validation and a sense of conformity to social norms in the continuity and stability of an expanding middle class society in Malaysia. The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) is the largest of the five main external public music examination boards that operate in Malaysia. Since 1948, over one million candidates have enrolled for ABRSM examinations in Malaysia and a team of approximately thirty ABRSM examiners visit Malaysia for three months every year. The majority of the candidates are pianists. Given such large numbers of piano candidates, one might expect a healthy development of musical talent in the country with aspiring pianists eager to demonstrate their musical prowess. However, this does not seem to be the case. On the contrary, there appears to be a curious lacuna between the growing number of students who enrol for external public music examinations and the seemingly lack of interest in public music making and the honing of general musicianship skills. The thesis hence examined the symbolic meaning of this socio-musicological phenomena.

Investigation into the interactive multimedia production processes of novice multimedia designer /producers in a constructivist environment

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the instructional interactive multimedia (IMI) production processes of adult novice multimedia production course. The study aimed at discovering whether a constructivistic teacher-learning environment facilitated these multimedia novice designer / producers to further develop metacognitivestates of higher-order thinking like schema formation, problem-solving and cognitive construction when producing their interactive multimedia project. To achieve this study examined the facilitative and limiting activities in planning, design and development that have assisted or hindered the NMDPs during their multimedia production work This research utilises a qualitative paradigm and makes extensive use of multiple data sources such as the participants’ proposals, planning aids, logs and final projects for single as well as cross-case analyses and discussion. Three cases were selected for in-depth analysis in the study because they provided interviews and more complete documentation and "thick descriptions" of their multimedia production activities. Findings about the NMDPs multimedia production endeavours showed that they learnt best about multimedia technology for teacing and learning by producing an interactive multimedia project themselves. Factors that enabled some of the NMDPs to flourish in a constructivistic environment included their ability to utilise their new and extended schemata to problem solve, their self regulation and a creative and positive attitude to demanding multimedia work NMDPs who utilised facilitative planning aids and design strategies produced impressive work. The study further indicates that the NMDPs’ holistic multimedia production experience made them aware of the levels of complexity involved and boosted their confidence about multimedia production for educational purposes. Suggestions for further research include examining the production styles of adult multimedia novices and young novices and investigating the implications of designing multimedia for large audience presentation rather than for single or small group learner usage.

As fire burns : functional work and praxis in ontology

The context: the historical and philosophical demise of the Marxist model of praxis as a unity of theory and practice organized by a Party in service of a Cause. The task: to remodel praxis by distinguishing it from functional work. The proving ground: the discourse of ontology. The thesis works through four types of ontology in its attempt to construct different ontological schemas for praxis and functional work. In the first three ontologies, Platonic, Aristotelian and relativist, ontological impasses occur in the accounts of the relation between one and the multiple, and of the existence of order. They prevent the successful construction of a schema for functional work. It is in the set-theory ontology of Alain Badiou that the means arise for the passage through these impasses and the definitive construction of distinct ontological schemas for functional work and praxis. This results in a new concept of praxis and a multiplication of its domains beyond politics to science, art and love

A semiotic view of Dewey's times and Habermas's lifeworlds

John Dewey (1859-1952) explained how life was ‘corporatised’ at the time of rampant, laissez faire capitalism in early 20th century America. This paper refers Dewey’s observations to Habermas’s notions of the colonisation of the lifeworld. The semiotic and pragmatist approaches of Charles Saunders Peirce are then enlisted to look further into these lifeworld changes. The
paper suggests modifications to Habermas’s schema to bring it more in line with Dewey’s empirical account. It puts together a theoretically and empirically informed picture of the contemporary disruption to ways of living and the accompanying social and political instability. The paper then goes on to suggest how that instability appears to have been quelled by communicative means. These stages of: (1) stability; (2) disruption/instability; and (3) the regaining of stability are compared to Habermas’s notions of: (1) an original lifeworld; (2) colonisation of that lifeworld by the consequences of purposive rational activity; then (3) communicative action which ‘rebuilds’— that is which replaces or modifies or reforms or repairs—the disrupted lifeworld in order to create a new lifeworld. ‘Colonisation’ could be said to have provoked social instability. Notions of building a new ‘lifeworld’—a new cultural and psychic reference—could be said to correspond with attempts to resume social and political stability. The implication is that whatever the degree of purposive rationalism there is always a need for a return to some level of shared values and
understandings which imply communicative rationality. This ‘return’ or ‘counter-colonisation’ can be thought of as operating via a ‘lifeworld negotiation’ which might best be understood with reference to a Peircean based pragmatism-semiotic theory of human subjectivity. This paper
has been criticised for discussing “arguments” which: “would justify those who accommodated themselves to Nazism.” What this paper in fact tries to do is to use the concepts of the above three philosophers to try to account for the ways people think. This paper is not about justifying what philosophies people should hold. It is presumed that most readers are sensible and ethical and can make their own minds up in that respect. Rather it attempts to draw from Dewey, Habermas and Peirce to offer a characterisation of what philosophies might be argued to be held and to offer an explanation about how these modes of thinking might be said to have come into existence.
This paper rejects the notion that ones ‘will’ and thus the way one is able to think, is totally free and beyond the formative influences of the social-cultural context—including the influences of public relations and other persuasive discourse industries.

Quality in disability service - whose indicators?

The study identified indicators of disability service quality used by three stakeholder groups (service users, providers and managers) in order to develop an explanatory schema regarding stakeholders' perceptions of quality and its indicators. The different perspectives were identified and the emerging quality indicator framework had a complex socio-ecological basis.

Prototyping real-time systems using Petri net and object-oriented models

The objective of the research for this thesis is to develop techniques in order to build an executable model of a real-time system. This model is to be used early in the development of the system not only to detect errors in the specification of the system but also to validate expectations of the developer as to the operation of the system. A graphical specification of a real-time system called the transformation schema was chosen to be used to build the model. Two executable models of a real-time system are described.

Potential of technology and a familiar context to enhance students' concept of rate of change

Students' concept image of rate of change may be incomplete or erroneous. This paper reports a pilot study, with secondary school students, which explores the potential of technology (JavaMathWorlds), depicting a familiar context of motion, to develop students' existing schema of informal understandings of rate of change to more formal mathematical representations. Students developed numerous 'models of' rate of change in a motion context which then transferred to serve as a 'model for' rate of change in other contexts.

Uomo universale : the imaginary relation between body and mathematic(s) in architecture

What is the role of the human figure in the drawing of the uomo universale? Interlocked with the “master architect” as a constituent component of the canonical bodies of architecture, is the idea of the uomo universale, the universal man, an idea that was especially compelling to Renaissance masters. In contemporary social theory the uomo universale is read for its generic sense as the “universal subject”. Critical to this is a dialectical sense in which “man” confronts its non-neutral association with a gender specificity, either man or woman. This paper looks at the drawing and image of the uomo universale and explores the distinction between presence and representation, between the visibility of the image, its content and detail and the symbolic role of the image as constitutive of a canon of architecture. Though we are not meant to “see” the human figure as corporeal presence and rather focus our attention on the image as a geometric schema, my argument is that only through the figure is the uomo universale engendered as an image of the highest form of nature.

Fault-tolerant scheduling with dynamic number of replicas in heterogeneous systems

In the existing studies on fault-tolerant scheduling, the active replication schema makes use of ε + 1 replicas for each task to tolerate ε failures. However, in this paper, we show that it does not always lead to a higher reliability with more replicas. Besides, the more replicas implies more resource consumption and higher economic cost. To address this problem, with the target to satisfy the user’s reliability requirement with minimum resources, this paper proposes a new fault tolerant scheduling algorithm: MaxRe. In the algorithm, we incorporate the reliability analysis into the active replication schema and the theoretical analysis and experiments prove that the MaxRe algorithm’s schedule can certainly satisfy user’s reliability requirements. And the MaxRe scheduling algorithm can achieve the corresponding reliability with at most 70% fewer resources than the FTSA algorithm.

Interpretation — appropriation : (making) an example of labor process theory

In this article, the author explores ethically problematic relations that may be reproduced within a genre of interpretive organizational research: namely, (U.K.) labor process theory (LPT). Although the author endorses LPT’s critical and explicitly antioppressive values, he argues that interpretive practices employed by core authors contradict the genre’s value base and function to silence and appropriate challenging empirical elements to affirm LPT’s valued interpretive schema. The author draws out deeply problematic implications of such appropriation through highlighting parallels between interpretation, appropriation, and colonization. The author ends by considering the nature of, and possibility for, more ethical “critical” interpretive organizational research.

Null referring expressions in a conversational context

Two contexts where null referring expressions seem to be the most appropriate form for tracking referents in Persian conversation are discussed in this paper. The null referring expression is the unmarked form of tracking referents in both contexts. One context is where a referent acts as the protagonist of the discourse and has a role of primary importance. The other context is where there is a general schema in the sense discussed by Fillmore (1975), Prince (1981) and Chafe (1987). In these contexts, however, where Persian speakers’ preference is for null referring expressions, English speakers’ preference is for a pronominal form.

How to make the rhetoric of joined-up government really work

"Joined-up' government and 'whole-of-government' approaches have evolved over the past two decades from the simple 'one-stop-shop' concept to much more formal organisational structures mandated at the highest levels. In many cases, the participants in these developments were learning on the job, as they responded to community and political demands for better service delivery and more accountability. This paper looks back at some of those developments and proposes a schema to assess and place policies, strategies and programs.

A policy-based web service redundancy detection in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are attractive for monitoring and gathering physical information (e.g. temperature) via lots of deployed sensors. For the applications in WSNs, Web service is one of the recommended frameworks to publish, invoke, and manage services. However, the standard Web service description language (WSDL), defines only the service input and output while ignoring the corresponding input-to-output mapping relationships. This presents a serious challenge in distinguishing services with similar input and output interface. In this paper, we address this challenge by embedding the service policy into the traditional WSDL2.0 schema to describe the input-to-output mapping relationships. The service policy is then transformed into a policy binary tree so that the similarity between different Web services can be quantitatively evaluated. Furthermore, a new service redundancy detection approach is proposed based on this similarity. Finally, the case study and experimental analysis illustrate the applicability and capability of the proposed service redundancy detection approach.

A GA-PSO layered encoding evolutionary approach to 0/1 knapsack optimization

This paper presents a layered encoding cascade evolutionary approach to solve a 0/1 knapsack optimization problem. A layered encoding structure is proposed and developed based on the schema theorem and the concepts of cascade correlation and multi-population evolutionary algorithms. Genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) are combined with the proposed layered encoding structure to form a generic optimization model denoted as LGAPSO. In order to enhance the finding of both local and global optimum in the evolutionary search, the model adopts hill climbing evaluation criteria, feature of strength Pareto evolutionary approach (SPEA) as well as nondominated spread lengthen criteria. Four different sizes benchmark knapsack problems are studied using the proposed LGAPSO model. The performance of LGAPSO is compared to that of the ordinary multi-objective optimizers such as VEGA, NSGA, NPGA and SPEA. The proposed LGAPSO model is shown to be efficient in improving the search of knapsack’s optimum, capable of gaining better Pareto trade-off front.