Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-228).

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2001. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 168 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 160-168).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-142).

Master's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 2003. / Title from title page of source document. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S. in Operations Research)--Naval Postgraduate School, September 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Susan M. Sanchez, Niki Goerger, Lloyd Brown. Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-143). Also available online.

Videogame designers hope to sculpt gameplay, but actually work in the concrete medium of computation. What they create is code, artwork, dialogue---everything that goes inside a videogame cartridge. In other materially constrained design domains, design-support tools help bridge this gap by automating portions of a design in some cases, and helping a designer understand the implications of their design decisions in others. I investigate AI-based videogame-design support, and do so from the perspective of putting knowledge-representation and reasoning (KRR) at the front. The KRR-centric approach starts by asking whether we can formalize an aspect of the game-design space in a way suitable for automated or semi-automated analysis, and if so, what can be done with the results. It begins with the question, "what could a computer possibly do here?", attempts to show that the computer actually can do so, and then looks at the implications of the computer doing so for design support. To organize the space of game-design knowledge, I factor the broad notion of game mechanics mechanics into four categories: abstract mechanics, concrete audiovisual representations, thematic mappings, and input mappings. Concretely, I investigate KRR-centric formalizations in three domains, which probe into different portions of the four quadrants of game-design knowledge: 1. using story graphs and story-quality functions for writing interactive stories, 2. automatic game design focused on the "aboutness" of games, which auto-reskins videogames by formalizing generalized spaces of thematic references, and 3. enhancing mechanics-oriented videogame prototypes by encoding the game mechanics in temporal logic, so that they can be both played and queried.

Social assistance is becoming a major part of education process in secondary schools. This sphere in secondary schools is quite new and little explored. In order to organize effective social assistance it is important to conduct more detailed research and evaluate factors which affect it. The topic of the Master thesis is „Social assistance organization for secondary school students”; its object is students’ attitude to social assistance organization at school; its aim is to examine social assistance for students’ state and factors influencing it in secondary schools. Referring to scientific and methodological resources the thesis discusses the forms of social assistance rendering, social assistance possibilities and peculiarities in secondary schools. The aim of the research was to find out social assistance organization in Trakai municipality secondary schools. The research was conducted in 2006 March and April. It helped to learn that social assistance organization factors at school were: organization of students’ occupation, class teacher’s work, preventive work, rendering social assistance and transportation organization. Research methodology is based on famous Lithuanian and foreign scientists and pedagogues thought, ideas, conclusions on the importance of school in positive child socialization process, social assistance organization; education and social security system confirming documents. 64.

This study is an examination of recent changes in the organisation and activity of Canada's foreign aid programme. Three conceptually distinct categories form the theoretical framework of the study: (a) contending approaches to the study of international relations; (b) contending conceptions of economic growth and development; and (c) contending approaches to the aid policy-making process. The study examines the multiple objectives underlying Canada's aid programme, develops and interprets a series of "aid quality" indices, and undertakes a detailed examination of the aid policy process. Emphasis is placed on tracing the specific combination of domestic "push" and international "pull" factors which have pressured Ottawa into initiatives promoting a closer linkage of the aid and trade facets of government activity. Attention is also drawn to the impact of these initiatives on the developmental objectives of the programme. / The principal finding of the study is that while Canada's aid programme has until recently been able to maintain a precarious balance between the opposing forces of philanthropy and self-interest, there are now unmistakable signs of a deliberate effort to tilt the programme in a more commercial direction. In this trend, the single case of Canada mirrors a more general pattern towards an increasingly commercial orientation in most donor aid programmes.

The effect of welfare policies is evident in the behaviours of welfare recipients and in their patterns of health. Yet there are very few studies with up to date analyses on the health consequences of the mid-1990s welfare reform in Canada. This study examines the effects of welfare income and welfare reforms on health outcomes of welfare recipients. I use National Population Health Survey (NPHS) in 1996 to present a baseline health differences by welfare status. I later utilize the mid-1900s welfare reform in a natural experiment setting to examine the health outcomes of welfare poor and working poor respondents. By using provincial welfare reform intensities, I detect exogenous variation that can indicate the effect of a greater reduction in welfare funding on health outcomes. Overall, my results show a strong correlation between welfare income and health outcomes, but policy makers must be cautious when interpreting causality.