Application of Narrative Pedagogy to Promote Excellence in the Clinical Setting

The clinical setting has become increasingly complex in recent years. Nurse educators have recognized the limitations of traditional pedagogies in the clinical setting. The need for innovative, student-centered learning is essential in order to transfer knowledge to practical situations and discover new ways of thinking about clinical situations. Narrative pedagogy which emphasizes how students learn and experience learning is an effective evidence-based approach to clinical education.

Talangfabriken : Om organisation av kunskap och kreativitet i skivindustrin

The purpose of this dissertation is to describe, explain and understand how record companies identify and develop new music and new talent. The analysis is carried out on three levels: individual, organizational and sector level. In a record company, this task formally goes to A&R (Artist and Repertoire). This dissertation takes its point of departure in how the capacity for discovering new talent can be understood in terms of knowledge, creativity and competence and how this capacity is affected in the meeting between the record company and the industry. The theoretical framework of the dissertation spans two sociological fields: the sociology of organizations and the sociology of knowledge. While it takes its organizational starting point in the Knowledge Company Approach, it employs a practice-based approach to discuss knowledge. I argue that within the Knowledge company approach there are two contrasting ways to understand knowledge; a distinction is made between knowledge- and creativity-intensive enterprises. The results show that the record industry’s polarized structure can be seen as a result of the Knowledge Company’s typical problems. The A&R’s work is described as including two phases, one intuitive and one analytical. The intuitive assessment is direct, unconscious and without reflection. This ability has been described as "intuition" and "gut feeling". The analytical phase adds analysis and reflection based on knowledge. The results from the interviews with A&R’s reveal the limit of formal and explicit knowledge not only in the choice of music but also in the marketing strategies. The overarching picture is one in which record companies move in a space characterized by tension between dichotomous forces – art and commercialism, creativity and knowledge, culture and economy, chaos and order, but where opposite poles are not mutually exclusive but complementary.

Undersökande arbetssätt i NO-undervisningen i grundskolans tidigare årskurser

This thesis deals with the use of inquiry-based approaches in primary school science. The aim is to investigate the goals and purposes that are constituted by the curriculum and by the teachers in interviews and through their teaching in the classroom. The results are used to develop conceptual tools that can be used by teachers’ in their work to support students’ learning of science when using an inquiry-based approach. The thesis is comprised of four papers. In paper one a comparative analysis is made of five Swedish national curricula for compulsory school regarding what students should learn about scientific inquiry. In paper two 20 teachers were interviewed about their own teaching using inquiry. Classroom interactions were filmed and analyzed in papers three and four, which examine how primary teachers use the various activities and purposes of the inquiry classroom to support learning progressions in science. The results of paper one show how the emphasis within and between the two goals of learning to carry out investigations and learning about the nature of science shifted and changed over time in the different curricula. Paper two describes the selective traditions and qualities that were emphasized in the teachers’ accounts of their own teaching. The results of papers three and four show how students need to be involved in the proximate and ultimate purposes of the teaching activities for progression to happen. The ultimate purposes are the scientific purposes for the lesson (as given by the teacher or by the curriculum), whereas the proximate purposes are the more student-centered purposes that through different activities should allow the students to relate their own experiences and language to the ultimate purpose. The results show the importance of proximate purposes working as ends-in-viewin the sense of John Dewey, meaning that the students see the goal of the activity and that they are able to relate to their experiences and familiar language.

Real time video segmentation for recognising paint marks on bad wooden railway sleepers

Wooden railway sleeper inspections in Sweden are currently performed manually by a human operator; such inspections are based on visual analysis. Machine vision based approach has been done to emulate the visual abilities of human operator to enable automation of the process. Through this process bad sleepers are identified, and a spot is marked on it with specific color (blue in the current case) on the rail so that the maintenance operators are able to identify the spot and replace the sleeper. The motive of this thesis is to help the operators to identify those sleepers which are marked by color (spots), using an “Intelligent Vehicle” which is capable of running on the track. Capturing video while running on the track and segmenting the object of interest (spot) through this vehicle; we can automate this work and minimize the human intuitions. The video acquisition process depends on camera position and source light to obtain fine brightness in acquisition, we have tested 4 different types of combinations (camera position and source light) here to record the video and test the validity of proposed method. A sequence of real time rail frames are extracted from these videos and further processing (depending upon the data acquisition process) is done to identify the spots. After identification of spot each frame is divided in to 9 regions to know the particular region where the spot lies to avoid overlapping with noise, and so on. The proposed method will generate the information regarding in which region the spot lies, based on nine regions in each frame. From the generated results we have made some classification regarding data collection techniques, efficiency, time and speed. In this report, extensive experiments using image sequences from particular camera are reported and the experiments were done using intelligent vehicle as well as test vehicle and the results shows that we have achieved 95% success in identifying the spots when we use video as it is, in other method were we can skip some frames in pre-processing to increase the speed of video but the segmentation results we reduced to 85% and the time was very less compared to previous one. This shows the validity of proposed method in identification of spots lying on wooden railway sleepers where we can compromise between time and efficiency to get the desired result.

Granularity and disaggregation in compositional modelling with applications to ecological systems

In the past decade, compositional modelling (CM) has established itself as the predominant knowledge-based approach to construct mathematical (simulation) models automatically. Although it is mainly applied to physical systems, there is a growing interest in applying CM to other domains, such as ecological and socio-economic systems. Inspired by this observation, this paper presents a method for extending the conventional CM techniques to suit systems that are fundamentally presented by interacting populations of individuals instead of physical components or processes. The work supports building model repositories for such systems, especially in addressing the most critical outstanding issues of granularity and disaggregation in ecological systems modelling.

Compositional Model Repositories via Dynamic Constraint Satisfaction with Order-of-Magnitude Preferences

The predominant knowledge-based approach to automated model construction, compositional modelling, employs a set of models of particular functional components. Its inference mechanism takes a scenario describing the constituent interacting components of a system and translates it into a useful mathematical model. This paper presents a novel compositional modelling approach aimed at building model repositories. It furthers the field in two respects. Firstly, it expands the application domain of compositional modelling to systems that can not be easily described in terms of interacting functional components, such as ecological systems. Secondly, it enables the incorporation of user preferences into the model selection process. These features are achieved by casting the compositional modelling problem as an activity-based dynamic preference constraint satisfaction problem, where the dynamic constraints describe the restrictions imposed over the composition of partial models and the preferences correspond to those of the user of the automated modeller. In addition, the preference levels are represented through the use of symbolic values that differ in orders of magnitude.

Does The Risk Of Groundwater Depletion Drive Tube-Well Technology Adoption: A Case Of Pakistan

We employ a moment-based approach to empirically analyse farmer’s decisions about adoption of tube-well technology under depleting groundwater resources using a farm level data from 200 farming households in the Punjab province, Pakistan. The results indicate that the higher the expected profit the greater the probability of adoption. Similarly, with increasing variance the probability of adopting tube-well increases significantly indicating that farmers choose to adopt tube-well technology in order to hedge against production risks. Statistical non-significant the third moment i.e., skewness indicates that farmer generally do not consider downside yield risk when decide to adopt tube-well technology whereas highly significant fourth moment (kurtosis) employ that probability of adoption decreases as a result of extreme events in profit distribution. In addition, we show that land tenureship and three other exogenous variables, i.e., extension services, access to different sources of information and off-farm income play a significant role in the adoption process.

Multi-Objective Pipe Smoothing Genetic Algorithm For Water Distribution Network Design

This paper describes the formulation of a Multi-objective Pipe Smoothing Genetic Algorithm (MOPSGA) and its application to the least cost water distribution network design problem. Evolutionary Algorithms have been widely utilised for the optimisation of both theoretical and real-world non-linear optimisation problems, including water system design and maintenance problems. In this work we present a pipe smoothing based approach to the creation and mutation of chromosomes which utilises engineering expertise with the view to increasing the performance of the algorithm whilst promoting engineering feasibility within the population of solutions. MOPSGA is based upon the standard Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) and incorporates a modified population initialiser and mutation operator which directly targets elements of a network with the aim to increase network smoothness (in terms of progression from one diameter to the next) using network element awareness and an elementary heuristic. The pipe smoothing heuristic used in this algorithm is based upon a fundamental principle employed by water system engineers when designing water distribution pipe networks where the diameter of any pipe is never greater than the sum of the diameters of the pipes directly upstream resulting in the transition from large to small diameters from source to the extremities of the network. MOPSGA is assessed on a number of water distribution network benchmarks from the literature including some real-world based, large scale systems. The performance of MOPSGA is directly compared to that of NSGA-II with regard to solution quality, engineering feasibility (network smoothness) and computational efficiency. MOPSGA is shown to promote both engineering and hydraulic feasibility whilst attaining good infrastructure costs compared to NSGA-II.

A Framework supporting collaboration on the distributed design of integrated systems

The work described in this thesis aims to support the distributed design of integrated systems and considers specifically the need for collaborative interaction among designers. Particular emphasis was given to issues which were only marginally considered in previous approaches, such as the abstraction of the distribution of design automation resources over the network, the possibility of both synchronous and asynchronous interaction among designers and the support for extensible design data models. Such issues demand a rather complex software infrastructure, as possible solutions must encompass a wide range of software modules: from user interfaces to middleware to databases. To build such structure, several engineering techniques were employed and some original solutions were devised. The core of the proposed solution is based in the joint application of two homonymic technologies: CAD Frameworks and object-oriented frameworks. The former concept was coined in the late 80's within the electronic design automation community and comprehends a layered software environment which aims to support CAD tool developers, CAD administrators/integrators and designers. The latter, developed during the last decade by the software engineering community, is a software architecture model to build extensible and reusable object-oriented software subsystems. In this work, we proposed to create an object-oriented framework which includes extensible sets of design data primitives and design tool building blocks. Such object-oriented framework is included within a CAD Framework, where it plays important roles on typical CAD Framework services such as design data representation and management, versioning, user interfaces, design management and tool integration. The implemented CAD Framework - named Cave2 - followed the classical layered architecture presented by Barnes, Harrison, Newton and Spickelmier, but the possibilities granted by the use of the object-oriented framework foundations allowed a series of improvements which were not available in previous approaches: - object-oriented frameworks are extensible by design, thus this should be also true regarding the implemented sets of design data primitives and design tool building blocks. This means that both the design representation model and the software modules dealing with it can be upgraded or adapted to a particular design methodology, and that such extensions and adaptations will still inherit the architectural and functional aspects implemented in the object-oriented framework foundation; - the design semantics and the design visualization are both part of the object-oriented framework, but in clearly separated models. This allows for different visualization strategies for a given design data set, which gives collaborating parties the flexibility to choose individual visualization settings; - the control of the consistency between semantics and visualization - a particularly important issue in a design environment with multiple views of a single design - is also included in the foundations of the object-oriented framework. Such mechanism is generic enough to be also used by further extensions of the design data model, as it is based on the inversion of control between view and semantics. The view receives the user input and propagates such event to the semantic model, which evaluates if a state change is possible. If positive, it triggers the change of state of both semantics and view. Our approach took advantage of such inversion of control and included an layer between semantics and view to take into account the possibility of multi-view consistency; - to optimize the consistency control mechanism between views and semantics, we propose an event-based approach that captures each discrete interaction of a designer with his/her respective design views. The information about each interaction is encapsulated inside an event object, which may be propagated to the design semantics - and thus to other possible views - according to the consistency policy which is being used. Furthermore, the use of event pools allows for a late synchronization between view and semantics in case of unavailability of a network connection between them; - the use of proxy objects raised significantly the abstraction of the integration of design automation resources, as either remote or local tools and services are accessed through method calls in a local object. The connection to remote tools and services using a look-up protocol also abstracted completely the network location of such resources, allowing for resource addition and removal during runtime; - the implemented CAD Framework is completely based on Java technology, so it relies on the Java Virtual Machine as the layer which grants the independence between the CAD Framework and the operating system. All such improvements contributed to a higher abstraction on the distribution of design automation resources and also introduced a new paradigm for the remote interaction between designers. The resulting CAD Framework is able to support fine-grained collaboration based on events, so every single design update performed by a designer can be propagated to the rest of the design team regardless of their location in the distributed environment. This can increase the group awareness and allow a richer transfer of experiences among them, improving significantly the collaboration potential when compared to previously proposed file-based or record-based approaches. Three different case studies were conducted to validate the proposed approach, each one focusing one a subset of the contributions of this thesis. The first one uses the proxy-based resource distribution architecture to implement a prototyping platform using reconfigurable hardware modules. The second one extends the foundations of the implemented object-oriented framework to support interface-based design. Such extensions - design representation primitives and tool blocks - are used to implement a design entry tool named IBlaDe, which allows the collaborative creation of functional and structural models of integrated systems. The third case study regards the possibility of integration of multimedia metadata to the design data model. Such possibility is explored in the frame of an online educational and training platform.

Creating buyer-supplier commitment in food supply chains at the base of the pyramid

Esta pesquisa analisa o papel dos aspectos relacionais tais como confiança, comprometimento, interdependência e uso de poder âmbito das estratégias de negócios inclusivos que envolvem pequenos agricultores nas cadeias de valor de multinacionais dos agronegócios no Brasil. Os negócios inclusivos de abastecimento direto por empresas com pequenos agricultores em países em desenvolvimento têm sido reconhecidos como uma abordagem economicamente viavél e promissora para criar impacto social e melhorar as condições de vida de produtores rurais da "base da pirâmide", ao mesmo tempo permitindo que as empresas reforçar as suas posições nos mercados locais e adquirir matérias primas de qualidade a custos mais baixos. Estudos sobre este tema focam amplamente sobre as vantagens comerciais e competitivas que as empresas derivam do abastecimento direito com pequenos fornecedores, apresentando modelos de cadeia de valor customizados e ajustados estratégias globais de negócios, no entanto ainda há pouco conhecimento teoricamente fundamentado sobre os desafios organizacionais e relacionais da relação entre o comprador multinacional e o fornecedor de baixa renda. Além disso, pouco foco tem-se prestado sobre como assimetrias entre multinacionais e produtores de baixa renda, em questão de poder, dependência e de valores pode afetar a evolução dessas relações de negócios. O objetivo do estudo foi descrever os fatores que permitem a esses parceiros assimétricos de construir relacionamentos comerciais de longo prazo e mutuamente benéficos. A metodologia da teoria fundamentada foi usada e foi particularmente adequada para examinar as relações entre comprador e fornecedor e para recolher experiências de campo em três setores principais dominados pela agricultura familiar no Brasil, ou seja laticínios, avi-suinocultura e produção hortícola. Os principais conceitos teóricos da área de Relationship Marketing foram usados para apoiar os resultados da pesquisa de campo. A principal conclusão desta pesquisa é a importância de ir além da construção de confiança na estratégia de gestão do relacionamento entre comprador e fornecedor e de criar parcerias diádicas baseadas na interdependência mútua, a fim de reduzir as assimetrias e melhorar o comprometimento entre a empresa e o pequeno agricultor.

Brazil's middle classes

This paper discusses the Brazilian middle class, its definition, evolution, profile, attitudes and durability. It describes the methodology that uses per capita household income derived from household surveys to determine economic classes. It gauges their respective aggregate trends and gauges individual income risks using longitudinal data. An income-based approach is only the beginning. This initial approach is integrated with subjective data to measure expectations and attitudes of different economic classes combined with a structural approach that takes into account the roles played by human, physical and social capital in the production factors, in terms of income generation and temporal allocation of resources. In all cases, income is the chosen numeraire by which all dimensions analyzed are projected. In the end of the article, all forms of measurement proposed – current income, consumption smoothing (permanent income), productive assets and subjective aspects – are combined to discuss the design of public policies aimed at the Brazilian middle classes.

Superando os riscos da segurança baseada em perímetro - Uma abordagem com identificação federada através de certificados digitais A3/ICP-Brasil e SAML

The traditional perimeter-based approach for computer network security (the castle and the moat model) hinders the progress of enterprise systems and promotes, both in administrators and users, the delusion that systems are protected. To deal with the new range of threats, a new data-safety oriented paradigm, called de-perimeterisation , began to be studied in the last decade. One of the requirements for the implementation of the de-perimeterised model of security is the definition of a safe and effective mechanism for federated identity. This work seeks to fill this gap by presenting the specification, modelling and implementation of a mechanism for federated identity, based on the combination of SAML and X.509 digital certificates stored in smart-cards, following the A3 standard of ICP-Brasil (Brazilian official certificate authority and PKI)

Fractal analysis of leaf-texture properties as a tool for taxonomic and identification purposes: a case study with species from Neotropical Melastomataceae (Miconieae tribe)

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Marcadores da organização do padrão discursivo narrativo: uma abordagem funcional centrada no uso

This thesis has as its object the Markers Organization Standard Narrative Discourse (MON), from its occurrence in oral and written corpora of different realizations of narrative discourse, considering its locus of occurrence in the narrative and discursive functioning. The research is guided by the Functional Linguistic Usage-Based, approach to which the organization of language is directly linked to the user experience, so that grammar is shaped by discourse. We examined only the narrative portions of Experience Reports, Tales and Legends in the oral and written, as follows: 3 inquiries Corpus Reports Remaining Quilombo (RN); 11 Corpus Legends legends of the Amazon, 14 Tales of Corpus Tales Brazilians and 21 Reports of experiences of Corpus and Discourse Grammar, with about 10,000 words in each corpus. A total of 22 markers were identified, which were: (1) classified according to the locus of occurrence in the narrative structure, as Labov (1972), (2) associated, according to the type of pattern that occur in narrative discourse, (3) described from the discursive function they perform. The research has relevance to the extent it is based speech analysis and offers proposals for productive teaching of mother tongue in which students and teachers can, grounded in language studies, consider living language, as an object of study, based on the National Curriculum Guidelines (OCN) and making use of New Technologies of Information and Communication (NTIC)

Narrativas de professores em formação sobre a didatização de podcasts para o ensino de inglês na floresta

Considering the following conditions: (1) the fluency demands of students in an undergraduate program in Languages and Literatures/English in the Amazon region; (2) the listening and speaking needs of pre-service teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL); (3) my continuing education as a professor of EFL and my academic literacy as a teacher-researcher and pre-service-teacher trainer, this study, which is based on Narrative Inquiry, reports on a teacher experience of working didactically with oral genres through podcasting an activity that emerged with the advent of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Through this process, I engage with some theorists who promote teaching as a process that is driven by a concept of language as social practice. Subsequently, I make use of the notions of context of culture and context of situation, derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics, as well as the concept of genre and register derived from the perspective of this theory. Based on these principles and beliefs, the Amazon region constitutes the register (situation) of the genres used in this study. These principles also provide, opportunities for building learning strategies appropriate to this local context, and also to teach listening and speaking skills from a task-based approach. During the experience, based on the reflective teacher-education model, the participants produced narratives about the process, which I then analyzed according to Ely, Vinz, Downing and Anzul (2001), who propose possibilities of composing meanings in Narrative Inquiry. Based on this perspective, I discuss the following topics, which were highly emphasized in the participants narratives: the lack of didactic activities using oral genres; the relevance of context within teacher education; and collaborative work as a strategy to overcome gaps in digital literacy, language fluency and teaching skills. The meanings I thereby compose point to a paradigm shift in English language teaching within this context. I also argue for a pedagogical practice that is engaged with historical and socio-cultural issues, and with the development of language skills, also one that promotes the implementation of ICTs at the very start of teacher training programs, adopting teaching and learning strategies that correspond to the demands of fluency in this particular context, and deficiencies imposed by geographical isolation