Software designers must understand the domain, work practices, and user expectations before determining requirements or generating initial design mock-ups. Users and other stakeholders are a valuable source of information leading to that understanding. Much work has focused on design approaches that include users in the software development process. These approaches vary from surveys and questionnaires that garner responses from a population of potential users to participatory design processes where representative users are included in the design/development team. The Design Exploration approach retains the remote and asynchronous communication of surveys while making expression of feedback easier by providing users alternatives to textual communication for their suggestions and tacit understanding of the domain. To do this, visual and textual modes of expression are combined to facilitate communication from users to designers while allowing a broad user audience to contribute to software design. One challenge to such an approach is how software designers make use of the potentially overwhelming combination of text, graphics, and other content. The Design Exploration process provides users and other stakeholders the Design Exploration Builder, a construction kit where they create annotated partial designs. The Design Exploration Analyzer is an exploration tool that allows software designers to consolidate and explore partial designs. The Analyzer looks for patterns based on textual analysis of annotations and spatial analysis of graphical designs, to help identify interesting examples and patterns within the collection. Then software designers can use this tool to search and browse within the exploration set in order to better understand the task domain, user expectations and work practices. Evaluation of the tools has shown that users will often work to overcome expression constraints to convey information. Moreover, the mode of expression influences the types of information garnered. Furthermore, including more users results in greater coverage of the information gathered. These results provide evidence that Design Exploration is an approach that collects software and domain information from a large group of users that lies somewhere between questionnaires and face to face methods.

<p>Requirements Engineering (RE) is nowadays considered to be an activity, that aims at supporting the whole lifecycle of an information system by: eliciting, documenting, validating, and managing the requirements of the system. This thesis aims at providing an overview of the area of Requirements Management (RM) and to identify important and interesting issues or areas where further research is needed.</p><p>RM includes two major areas; organising requirements and requirements change management. Organising requirements is concerned with structuring the requirements and storing additional relevant information about them e.g. attributes and traceability information. Requirements change management is concerned with dealing with changing requirement in a systematic way i.e. making informed decisions whether to implement a certain change or not, and support the implementation of approved changes.</p><p>In order to provided a broader view of RM, the literature study were complemented by an interview study of how RM is conducted in practice. This interview study shows that the effort resources spent on RM differs substantially between different organisations. Various reasons for these discrepancies are elaborated in the work, but one of the main reasons are the type of software development that is conducted in the organisation. There is a tendency that organisations that develop software products and continuously releases new versions of there products are more likely to spend resources on RM, compared with organisations that develop customers specific solutions in one shoot projects. The need to reuse requirements and knowledge, as well as the maturity of the RE/RM process, are other factors that affects the resources spent on RM. The RM activities performed in practice are concordant with the activities found in literature.</p><p>A number of areas where further research is needed were identified: requirements change management, dependencies between requirements, RM tools, and information management</p>

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The Ontario Water Resources Act requires a Permit To Take Water (PTTW) for withdrawals greater than 50,000 L/day. The permitting process includes a requirement to minimize the environmental effects of the withdrawal, but does not include a specific framework to do so. A methodology is proposed for estimating the water supply, the water demand, both anthropogenic and ecological, and the amount available for withdrawal. Water supply is estimated using statistical analysis of recorded daily flows in the watershed of interest, in adjacent watersheds, and in the region. Anthropogenic demand is given by the Ontario Ministry of the Environment’s PTTW database. Ecological demand is also estimated using statistical analysis of recorded daily flows, and through field measurement methods such as the Wetted Perimeter method. A case study of Millhaven Creek in eastern Ontario shows that the methodology is appropriate for this area and, with minor modifications, would apply to the rest of Ontario. Evaluation of the existing methods for water supply estimation showed that using long-term data for analysis is the best method, and that the regional analysis work completed for Ontario is out of data and needs revising. Estimation methods for ecological demand are not necessarily appropriate for all areas. A single instream flow requirement based on the Mean Annual Flow is not appropriate for Millhaven Creek, and even a set of flows based on Mean Monthly Flows needs modification to be acceptable for Millhaven Creek. Supply minus demand varies from month to month, and therefore the decision on whether to issue a permit depends on the season as well as the duration of the withdrawal (e.g. seasonal vs. continuous) and type of use proposed (e.g. golf course irrigation vs. municipal drinking water). / Thesis (Master, Civil Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2007-10-22 23:08:00.728

A series of experiments was carried out to study the factors affecting faecal endogenous P excretion in sheep. Experiments 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 involved intensive balance measurements and radio-isotope (<SUP>32</SUP>P) dilution measurements made on 6 mature sheep, to study the effect of changing salivary secretion on P metabolism. A hay diet (P intake 2.2 g/d) was fed in 3 different physical forms (finely ground, coarsely ground and chopped) in experiment 3.1 and a low-P oat husk based diet was given in coarse or finely ground form in experiment 3.2. The results of both the experiments indicated that there was no change in salivary P flow, faecal endogenous P excretion and P balance within each experiment. In experiment 3.3 sheep were fed different amounts of a low-P (P intake 1.2 g/d) oat husk based diet (0.8, 1.1 and 1.4 kg/d). There were no significant changes in salivary P flow or balance position. However, in this experiment there was an increase in faecal endogenous P excretion but the size of this increase with increase in dry matter intake was less than that reported by TCORN (1989). This increase was attributed to increased secretion of P in the intestinal secretions in response to an increase in dry matter flow through the intestine. Experiments described in Chapter 4 were performed to explore the possibility of using sheep maintained by total intra-gastric infusion to measure minimum endogenous excretion of P in faeces and urine. The results indicated that sheep given a near zero P intake excrete amounts of P that are comparable with the levels predicted by ARC (1980) as minimum endogenous P excretion. Chapter 5 describes experiments carried out to investigate factors affecting intestinal P absorption in the sheep. Experiment 5.1 was aimed at studying the effect of increasing demand for P, by intravenous infusion of CaCl<SUB>2</SUB>, on intestinal P absorption. The results of this experiment showed that while the amount of dietary P absorbed is mainly determined by P intake there is a component of this system that is sensitive to changes in P requirement. There was an increase in intestinal P absorption but no change in endogenous P secretion into the gut. Three sheep surgically prepared to isolate a one-metre section of proximal small intestine were used in experiments 5.2 and 5.3. In the Experiment 5.2 sheep were given a continuous intra-venous infusion of a buffered solution of P (Na<SUB>2</SUB>HPO<SUB>4</SUB>NaH<SUB>2</SUB>PO<SUB>4</SUB>, 3g of P/d) and the loops were perfused with a solution (pH 4.5, Tonicity 280 mOsmol/litre) containing 30 mmol/litre of P. The results showed that the amount absorbed was much less during intravenous P loading. Experiment 5.3 was performed to study the absorption of P from the intestinal loops when they were perfused with solutions containing a fixed quantity of P at varying P concentrations (20 mmol/litre and 30 mmol/litre). There were no significant differences seen either in the total amount or in the absorptive efficiency between treatments. A lactation study (described in Chapter 6) was carried out to investigate the effect of feeding a high protein diet on Ca and P metabolism. Measurements were made on two groups of six ewes with one group being restricted in protein supply while the other group was given supplementary protein in the form of blood meal. Balance measurements were made over 10-day periods separated by 10-day rest periods. <SUP>45</SUP>Ca and <SUP>32</SUP>P were used to measure faecal endogenous Ca and P losses. An extra balance experiment was carried out on the second set of ewes after they ceased producing milk. The results indicated that the loss of mineral from the skeleton in ewes in early lactation is proportional to milk production and is not directly dependent on dietary protein supply or N balance. The results also suggested that the rate of repair of bone matrix and its mineralization during the post lactation period is affected by protein supplementation. Two experiments (Experiments 7.1 and 7.2) were carried out to study the effects of high dietary Ca:P ratio on faecal endogenous faecal excretion in mature sheep which were given sufficient P to meet their maintenance requirement according to ARC (1980). The results obtained showed that faecal endogenous P excretion was not significantly affected by feeding diets high in Ca. All animals had a level of salivary P secretion that was more than adequate to meet rumen microbial requirements. Experiments 7.3 was a slaughter study carried out to investigate the effects of an increase in Ca intake on growth of the young lambs fed on diets supplying just sufficient P to meet their estimated requirements based on the revised TCORN (1989) growth model. A total of 40 lambs in four treatment groups were used in this study. The results of this trial showed that feeding high levels of Ca had no adverse effects on growth of the lambs when P was adequate . There was no beneficial effect of feeding excessive Ca and P but there was an increase in the incidence of urinary calculi. The amounts of Mg retained by the lambs were lower than the levels on which ARC (1980) based their estimates of requirements.

The aim of the study learn about if the court assesses boys and girls on an equal basis, or if there are norms of gender constructed in society that appears in the Administrative Court of Appeal. And we want to find out how norms, in this field, are different between boys and girls. We used the judgments of the Administrative Court of Appeal and went through the descriptions of the girls and boys. What basis was used in the judgment of LVU, to do this, we used discourse analysis. We summarized all judgments and then described the outcome of each requirement in LVU, we categorized the results for three requirements, other socially destructive behavior, criminal activity and abuse. Quote was taken from the judges to prove our result. The results were then analyzed by two theories, gender theory and theory of social constructivism. There, we showed what standards have emerged through our analysis and it is explained by the theories and previous research. We concluded that the Administrative Court of Appeal judge based on gender norms in the society. Finally, we discuss our results and what ideas and issues that have emerged during the study.

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