Thesis (MPhil (Afrikaans and Dutch))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / This study investigates the role of that which the style concept people‐orientation plays with regard to image formation and image projection in documentation, with specific reference to the Stellenbosch University’s registration forms. The goal of this study was firstly to determine how the concept people‐orientation could be operationalized within this specific case study. Regarding image formation and image projection, the researcher aimed to determine (a) what students’ current image of the University Stellenbosch is, (b) if students regard peopleorientation as an important style aspect within communication and (c) if the presence or absence of people‐orientation has an effect on the image of an institution. The Integrated Model for Image Formation and Projection (IFP‐model), whereupon this study is based, suggests that different messages in a document can have an effect on the image of an institution. These messages can however be manipulated in order to determine or adjust the image of an institution. In reference to this, this study investigated the effects of a presence or lack of people‐orientation as an aspect of style in communication. The researcher defines people‐orientation as a concept that bears reference to those aspects which directly or indirectly writes the human role player (including the writer and the reader) into the text. In other words, it refers to communication that puts the role of the person in the foreground of the communication situation. The concept of people‐orientation is however very complex in the sense that it can be created by a number of document design aspects. Thus the best way to test people‐orientation was to identify a number of operationalizeable design aspects. The researcher selected five style aspects which at core has relevance to people‐orientation. These five aspects were forms of address, reference to self, the use of passive or active voice, the use of politeness and empathy markers and the use of graphical illustration, which for the purpose of this study also classifies as a stylistic signal. Thirty‐two respondents from the Humaniora faculties were selected to participate in this study. Although the faculty of Economical and Management Sciences and the Faculty of Law traditionally fall under this division, only the Faculty of Theology, the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Education were used. Gender and race were incorporated as independent variables of this study. Respondents’ attitudes were tested using interviews as the primary methodology, aided by informal questionnaires as secondary methodology. Questionnaire results were however not processed by use of the traditional statistical methods, mainly because the sample of the study was too small. These results were only functional as a basis from which tendencies could be identified. Interview results had a very multi‐dimensional quality and the researcher therefore decided that it would be best to discuss these results in a thematic order rather than listing responses in tables. The results clearly demonstrate that students have a preference for forms which contain people‐orientation and that they dislike forms which lack people‐orientation. Their responses indicate that style aspects which promote people‐orientation have a relative to high probability to positively effect an institution’s image . Thus, Afrikaans‐speaking students from the Humanioria‐faculties regard people‐orientation as an important component in the management of effective communication, especially that of a positive image.

BACKGROUND:There is a need for more Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) to strengthen the evidence base for clinical and policy decision-making. Effectiveness Guidance Documents (EGD) are targeted to clinical researchers. The aim of this EGD is to provide specific recommendations for the design of prospective acupuncture studies to support optimal use of resources for generating evidence that will inform stakeholder decision-making.METHODS:Document development based on multiple systematic consensus procedures (written Delphi rounds, interactive consensus workshop, international expert review). To balance aspects of internal and external validity, multiple stakeholders including patients, clinicians and payers were involved.RESULTS:Recommendations focused mainly on randomized studies and were developed for the following areas: overall research strategy, treatment protocol, expertise and setting, outcomes, study design and statistical analyses, economic evaluation, and publication.CONCLUSION:The present EGD, based on an international consensus developed with multiple stakeholder involvement, provides the first systematic methodological guidance for future CER on acupuncture.

published_or_final_version / Humanities / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

No description available.

In the world we live in today, having a social media account such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Google+ has become deeply ingrained in our society. The old way of networking with who you knew or who knew your family is no longer in play for many people. In the times in which we live, much personal and professional networking is completed via social media. The old way of networking had unwritten rules of engagement which, basically, were to be respectful and not cause any embarrassment within the network. Rules for best practice engagement are still evolving for this new way of using social media for personal and professional networking, which is the premise for the current study which addresses: the gap in U.S. university social media policies, with regard to teaching and learning. In order to gauge the policy interlude, a sample of over 49 U.S. university social media policies were gathered for a comprehensive document analysis. The Google search engine was used to find the policies, next the qualitative software NVivo10 was used to procure and analyze the policies. Additionally, triangulation was performed by three member checking volunteer investigators. The results of the study, disclosed that current policies are intended to train faculty and staff, in the legal and proper manner, in which the universities expect their employees to positively represent the sampled universities.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / The Department of Defense (DoD) is both challenged by the quest for interoperability and capable of the bottom-up development of a solution. The predominant method for achieving interoperability is the development of an intermediate representation that provides a common integration language or data model. An example is Young's Object-Oriented Method for Interoperability (OOMI), which produces a Federation Interoperability Object Model (FIOM) for the resolution of heterogeneities in representation and view of a real-world entity. An FIOM generates a standard for interoperability by associating the non-standard, component system data models into an extensible lattice, which captures translations that resolve data modeling differences. To support the bottom-up creation of an FIOM we; (1) describe a self-similar approach to data storage that allows generic data structures to be manageable, extensible and asynchronously populated, and (2) introduce a lattice concept for facilitating efficient and scalable object inheritance relationships. We assert that DoD's acquisition environment necessitates a distributed approach to solving the interoperability challenge. We present the description of a distributed software system to facilitate the collaborative construction of an FIOM within the existing DoD structure and provide an architecture to guide the development of such a distributed collaborative environment. / Lieutenant, United States Navy

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / William H. Hsu / Logistic regression is a model for function estimation that measures the relationship between independent variables and a categorical dependent variable, and by approximating a conditional probabilistic density function using a logistic function, also known as a sigmoidal function. Multinomial logistic regression is used to predict categorical variables where there can be more than two categories or classes. The most common type of algorithm for optimizing the cost function for this model is gradient descent. In this project, I implemented logistic regression using conjugate gradient descent (CGD). I used the 20 Newsgroups data set collected by Ken Lang. I compared the results with those for existing implementations of gradient descent. The conjugate gradient optimization methodology outperforms existing implementations.

The word diaspora is currently understood as the large scale voluntary movement of people, along with capital and goods due to the mechanisms of globalization. Adopting a diaspora, gender and leisure perspective, this dissertation looked at the information and document experiences of a particular fan community of women belonging to the Indian diaspora and the online spaces created and occupied by them (fan fiction blogs which can be viewed as book clubs). The study also looked at memory making and documenting of the same as a part of document experience, resulting in what can be termed as "serendipitous memory archives." The blogs hosting fan fiction and the mediated practices they support were viewed as documents for the study. The online spaces were conceptualized as small worlds and the theoretical framework used for the study consisted of a preliminary model of a small world (based on literature review and my understanding of the world under study), information experience as a concept as well as document experience models. The results show that social ties play a big role in the information and document experience, while memory making and documenting of the same are also seen to happen as part of the document experience. The results also show that adopting a document perspective enables us to see the myriad ways in which information is experienced, freeing us from considering as information only that which helps us in meeting a purpose or which fills a gap. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

L’amélioration rapide du nombre de documents stockés électroniquement représente un défi pour la classification automatique de documents. Les systèmes de classification traditionnels traitent les documents en tant que texte plat, mais les documents sont de plus en plus structurés. Par exemple, XML est la norme plus connue et plus utilisée pour la représentation de documents structurés. Ce type des documents comprend des informations complémentaires sur l'organisation du contenu représentées par différents éléments comme les titres, les sections, les légendes etc. Pour tenir compte des informations stockées dans la structure logique, nous proposons une approche de représentation des documents structurés basée à la fois sur la structure logique du document et son contenu textuel. Notre approche étend le modèle traditionnel de représentation du document appelé modèle vectoriel. Nous avons essayé d'utiliser d'information structurelle dans toutes les phases de la représentation du document: -procédure d'extraction de caractéristiques, -La sélection des caractéristiques, -Pondération des caractéristiques. Notre deuxième contribution concerne d’appliquer notre approche générique à un domaine réel : classification des documents techniques. Nous désirons mettre en œuvre notre proposition sur une collection de documents techniques sauvegardés électroniquement dans la société CONTINEW spécialisée dans l'audit de documents techniques. Ces documents sont en format représentations où la structure logique est non accessible. Nous proposons une solution d’interprétation de documents pour détecter la structure logique des documents à partir de leur présentation physique. Ainsi une collection hétérogène en différents formats de stockage est transformée en une collection homogène de documents XML contenant le même schéma logique. Cette contribution est basée sur un apprentissage supervisé. En conclusion, notre proposition prend en charge l'ensemble de flux de traitements des documents partant du format original jusqu’à la détermination de la ses classe Dans notre système l’algorithme de classification utilisé est SVM. / Rapid improvement in the number of documents stored electronically presents a challenge for automatic classification of documents. Traditional classification systems consider documents as a plain text; however documents are becoming more and more structured. For example, XML is the most known and used standard for structured document representation. These documents include supplementary information on content organization represented by different elements such as title, section, caption etc. We propose an approach on structured document classification based on both document logical structure and its content in order to take into account the information present in logical structure. Our approach extends the traditional document representation model called Vector Space Model (VSM). We have tried to integrate structural information in all phases of document representation construction: -Feature extraction procedure, -Feature selection, -Feature weighting. Our second contribution concerns to apply our generic approach to a real domain of technical documentation. We desire to use our proposition for classifying technical documents electronically saved in CONTINEW; society specialized in technical document audit. These documents are in legacy format in which logical structure is inaccessible. Then we propose an approach for document understanding in order to extract documents logical structure from their presentation layout. Thus a collection of heterogeneous documents in different physical presentations and formats is transformed to a homogenous XML collection sharing the same logical structure. Our contribution is based on learning approach where each logical element is described by its physical characteristics. Therefore, our proposal supports whole document transformation workflow from document’s original format to being classified. In our system SVM has been used as classification algorithm.