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The purpose of this research was to explore four social contexts and determine the kinds of events that specify information for interactive possibilities. Subjects' descriptions of their own videotaped interaction were analyzed for two types of convergence: agreement on the selection of the most important events and similar interpretations of the functional meaning of these events. These were compared to descriptions from independent observers. Critics of a hypothetico-deductive paradigm, particularly in social psychology, claim that experimental controls have eliminated most of what is social in experiments concerned with social interaction. The methodological principles of Kurt Lewin (1943/51) are here suggested as a possible solution to the design problems of abstraction, categorization and interpretation, and form the basis of this research design. In addition, the concept of "affordance", coined by Gibson (1979) to refer to the complementarity of an animal and its environment is adopted in this dissertation. The dynamic relations referred to by the concept of affordance make it well-suited to describe the reciprocal relations in social interaction. Gibson's ecological view can be extended to the social environment and integrated with the sociogenetic theories of Mead (1934) and Vygotsky (1978). The main conceptual hypotheses are as follows: (1) In social interaction, behaviour, gestures and speech constitute events that specify perceptual information for interactive possibilities. The concept affordance encompasses the reciprocal relations as well as the functional meaning of these events. (2) Situations that appear to be different on the surface have dynamic structures that are invariant. These structures or events are perceived by interactants and used to coordinate their interaction. (3) Social relations have been internalized such that the above perceived events have a functional meaning and operate as "signs" of that meaning. Results indicated that there are main events in a social interaction which are more meaningful to interactants than others, and, that there is convergence, both on which events these are, and their general meaning. Also, independent observers shown two of the dyads, identified the same main events as important and described them in a similar way as the original interactants. The conceptual and practical implications of an ecological approach, a Lewinian methodology and the ability of subjects to consistently report on the function and meaning of their own behaviour are discussed. / Graduate

M.Com. (Computer Science) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

Clinical performance monitoring applications enable performance management of care processes in clinical settings. Although information technology has been advocated as a solution to support the provision of better care, the development of clinical performance monitoring applications is often a non-trivial task. A high rate of failure in IT healthcare project implementations has been reported in the literature due to the disconnect between clinicians and the development team. Furthermore, challenges inherent to the configuration of the healthcare system add to the complexity of developments. Often data sources are not adequately structured or cannot be accessed in a timely fashion; processes are uncoordinated or ill-defined; a plethora of information technologies across different healthcare organizations make interoperability problematic; and there are concerns related to privacy and security. Getting the right information to measure the achievement of the right goals at the right time for the right people is the main task to address when developing clinical performance monitoring applications. In this thesis we propose a development methodology that combines technical and managerial aspects of application development following a user-centered approach. It involves the engagement of stakeholders and users throughout in a three phase iterative process of modeling, implementation and evaluation to ensure user acceptance and adoption of applications when deployed. In particular, our focus is on the development of mobile clinical performance monitoring applications, where raw data about clinical problems are logged by healthcare providers and then transformed into meaningful reports that will support decision-making. The development methodology is evaluated using a case study of a Resident Practice Profile (RPP) application that was developed by a team lead by Dr. Gary Viner from the University of Ottawa medical school.

In order to ensure genuine public acceptance of both planning proposals and of community planning per se, professional planning practices should involve a high degree of active citizen participation. The process of democratic action in contemporary North American urban areas is frustrated by the institutionalization of authority and responsibility, and as a result, the usual approach to the resolution of planning problems is often manipulative and managerial. Professionals tend to plan for the community rather than with it. Planning is conceived as a six-step process beginning with problem identification, and proceeding through goal formation, survey and analysis, design of a plan, plan implementation, and evaluation and reorientation. Community development, a process by which members of a community learn why and how to participate in the planning and control of changes which will affect them, is suggested as a technique whereby personal interest and democratic participation can be reinstilled in today's complex communities, as determining forces in the planning process. Community development achieves not only all the advantages of active citizen participation, but is concerned also with the progress of the individual, the development of co-operative facilities, and the strengthening of the process of democratic action. The process of community development involves fourteen elements, arranged according to seven periods over time, which can be integrated with the planning process. Although this integration appears to detract from the efficiency of the usual planning process, it does create good will and co-operation between citizens and technical planning experts, and provides continuity to the planning process through the conservation of organized community resources. It is no surprise to members of the planning profession to find that the degree of public acceptance of local government planning proposals is directly related to the amount of citizen participation which occurs during the evolution of those proposals. But for planners to relate the relative degree of public acceptance of a planning proposal to the number of elements of community development which were evidently utilized, either implicitly or explicitly, in the evolution of that proposal, is another matter. From a detailed study of five local government planning proposals developed in the City of Vancouver, it is concluded that community development should be used as a technique in the planning process, in order to gain the advantages of active citizen participation, and to ensure that the proposals will be acceptable to the people they are to affect. The responsibility for executing the community development process rests with the technical planners, the local municipal administration, and the leaders of the community in question. The financing of such a scheme would be shared between the community to be affected, and the municipal government, either through voluntary subscriptions, or tax revenues, or both. The conclusion based on the analysis of the case studies supports the arguments subtended previously. However, because planning is action oriented, it is concluded that the only true method of testing the hypothesis would be by attempting to apply a community development program in conjunction with the planning process, in an actual problem situation. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

Carbonyl reduction is a fundamental transformation that underpins synthetic chemistry. The re-routing of carbonyl reduction through less-conventional intermediates allows new selectivity and reactivity to be found in the resulting reaction space. We have shown for the first time that the unusual radical anions formed by electron transfer to the ester carbonyl group can be exploited in additions to alkenes. We have demonstrated that the reductive cyclisations of lactones, triggered by electron-transfer from SmI2-H2O, allow for highly decorated cyclopentane and cycloheptane ring systems to be constructed. Futhermore, the reductive cyclisations of lactones can be exploited in cyclisation cascades. The cascade sequences involve the generation and trapping of unusual radical anions formed from the ester carbonyl followed by the trapping of more conventional radical anions from the carbonyl groups of ketone intermediates.

The development of information systems consumes an increasing share of economic resources. Over a trillion dollars worldwide is invested in information technology annually, and this investment is growing over $100 billion a year. This investment occurs despite failure rates for large information system development projects that are estimated as high as 75%. The large investment and high failure rates combine to create the potential for significant impact from information system development practices that are able to address these failure rates. Researchers, over the past thirty years, have studied factors that drive these high failure rates. One of the factors repeatedly mentioned in practitioner surveys is the importance of accurate communication in the "upstream" analysis and planning stage of a project. System development professionals are aided in their upstream planning through the use of information system development methods (ISDM's). ISDM's are modeling tools and techniques that are capable of representing information about an information system. Many alternative system analysis modeling techniques have been developed, yet few empirical comparisons of the alternative techniques have been completed. The lack of comparative empirical data has contributed to a proliferation of modeling methods and increased the confusion surrounding the adoption of system analysis methods by system development professionals and teachers. This study addresses the issue of empirical comparison of system analysis modeling techniques. A new instrument and empirical method is proposed for developing a comparison of the level of "understanding" that a participant is able to create by viewing a description of a particular domain. The level of "understanding" is addressed using three measures: comprehension, problem solving, and text reconstruction. The new measures of "problem solving", suggested by Mayer in the field of Education Psychology, and "text reconstruction" or "Cloze", suggested by Taylor in the field of Communications, extend empirical instruments previously used by system analysis researchers. To test the efficacy of the proposed instrument and method, two empirical studies were developed in this thesis. The first study used the new instrument to compare three development methods "grammars: Text descriptions; Structured Analysis (using Data Flow Diagrams and Entity Relationship Diagrams); and Object Oriented Diagrams. The study was labeled an "Intergrammar" comparison, as three grammars representing three fundamental approaches to developing an analysis model were compared. Two propositions, in regards to the intergrammar study, were tested. The first suggested that viewing descriptions created with diagrams would lead to a higher level of understanding than viewing a description based solely on text. This hypothesis was confirmed. The second hypothesis suggested that viewing a domain description created using an object oriented grammar would lead to a higher level of "understanding" than viewing a description created using the "Structured Analysis" approach. The results confirmed the hypothesis that the group of participants using the Object-Oriented grammar scored higher in "understanding" than participants using the Structured Analysis grammar. A follow-up protocol analysis was undertaken to illuminate why the participants using object methods scored. The analysis of these protocols indicated two things. First, participants using Structured Analysis made little use of the Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD). Second, participants seemed to favor the "object" concept when answering questions. These findings provide some empirical evidence that objects may be more "natural" cognitive constructs than those used in Structured Analysis. The second study revisited a study Bodart and Weber's study regarding alternative grammars for the Entity Relationship Diagram. A grammar using mandatory attributes and relationships with sub types, the other using optional attributes and relationships, were compared. The grammars shared a common primary grammar, therefore, the second study was labeled an "Intragrammar" comparison. The new instrument was again used in this study. The ontological constructs proposed in the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) model were used to suggest the theoretical advantage of the grammar using mandatory attributes and relationships with subtypes. The results supported the theoretical advantage associated with mandatory attributes and relationships with subtypes. This intragammar study provided further evidence of the utility of the empirical instrument proposed in this thesis. This study has implications for future empirical research in system analysis. The empirical instrument described in this thesis extends previous empirical research instruments with the introduction of the problem solving and the Cloze task. In two studies, the new instrument has displayed the sensitivity to differentiate between treatment groups. The results from the two empirical studies suggest that object-oriented analysis may hold advantages over traditional structured analysis, and that mandatory attributes and relationships may be preferred to optional attributes and relationships in the entity relationship grammar. / Business, Sauder School of / Management Information Systems, Division of / Graduate

Bibliography: leaves 97-101. / The aim of this paper is, firstly, to consider a contemporary literary methodology, that of Paul Ricoeur, and secondly, to critique that methodology from the perspective of a sharply contextual approach, in association with a materialist theory of literature, such as that emerging from the South African context. Ricoeur's position is useful as a starting point because of the eclectic make up of his theory. His work includes aspects of the historical critical approach, psychoanalytic theory, structuralism, philosophy and a response to materialist thinking. We are, however, choosing to restrict ourselves to the more recent work of Ricoeur corresponding broadly to the period 1975-1990. In this period Ricoeur's concentration shifts from the hermeneutics of symbol to the hermeneutics of language.

In 2004, the Municipal Property Rates Act 6 of 2004 (MPRA) was promulgated which repealed all the Valuation Ordinances that existed in South Africa. This introduced a single piece of legislation for the purposes of conducting municipal valuations. This study concentrated on the Cape Town Metropolitan 2006 General Valuation that, at the time, was the first local authority to conduct municipal valuations in terms of the new legislation. The research explored the extent to which local authorities intervened in the valuation process, the in dependent judgment of property valuers as well as non-co-operation by oil companies during the valuation process, which was evident by them not responding to the survey questions. The manner in which petrol filling stations were valued, the most frequently used methodology applied and the application of the MPRA in the process were explored. The research was supplemented with a survey of property valuers employed by the local authorities as well as in private practices. This culminated in a holistic overview of the shortcomings in the legislation, the methodology and practice by interested parties in arriving at the municipal valuation in order to provide a critical review. From the critical review, the shortcomings in the valuation processes were identified, the methodology was addressed and recommendations made to the local authority.

The current generation of structural equation modeling (SEM) is loosely split in two divergent groups - covariance-based and variance-based structural equation modeling. The relative newness of variance-based SEM has limited the development of techniques that extend its applicability to non-metric data. This study focuses upon the extension of general linear model techniques within the variance-based platform of partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). This modeling procedure receives it name through the iterative PLS‑SEM algorithm's estimates of the coefficients for the partial ordinary least squares regression models in both the measurement model and the overall structural model. This research addresses the following research questions: (1) What are the appropriate measures for data segmentation within PLS‑SEM? (2) What are the appropriate steps for the analysis of rank-ordered path coefficients within PLS‑SEM? and (3) What is an appropriate model selection index for PLS‑SEM? The limited type of data to which PLS-SEM is applicable suggests an opportunity to extend the method for use with different data and as a result a broader number of applications. This study develops and tests several methodologies that are prevalent in the general linear model (GLM). The proposed data segmentation approaches posited and tested through post hoc analysis of structural model. Monte Carlo simulation allows demonstrating the improvement of the proposed model fit indices in comparison to the established indices found within the SEM literature. These posited PLS methods, that are logical transfers of GLM methods, are tested using examples. These tests enable demonstrating the methods and recommending reporting requirements.