Although medical advances have improved prognosis for children with cystic fibrosis (CF) and congenital heart disease (CHD), these youth experience poor psycho - social health. Embedded within the Medical Research Council’s framework, the purpose of this Dissertation was to a) examine how CF and CHD children experience physical activity, b) explore parents’ perceptions toward their child’s activity, c) develop a theory of physical activity in childhood chronic diseases, d) develop a physical activity counselling program for youth with CF and their parents, and e) evaluate the program impact on quality of life and physical activity. Study One explored how 14 CF youth experience physical activity. Active and inactive youth were characterized by different experiences, such as a sense of hope or despair. Given the burden of treatment and the fatal nature of the disease, youth negotiated temporal barriers to activity. Study Two explored perceptions toward activity among 29 CF and CHD parents. Parents discussed the benefits and barriers associated with physical activity for both child and self, and underscored the importance of role modeling. By adopting a Grounded Theory approach, the theoretical constructs from Study One and Two were crystallized to develop a theory of physical activity in youth with CF and CHD. This theory was used to develop “CF Chatters:” A Six Week Physical Activity Counselling Program for Youth with CF and their Parents, and the intervention employed behavioural self regulation ii skills. In Study Three, four case families in the CF clinic at the Hospital for Sick Children participated in CF Chatters. Improvements were noted in quality of life and physical activity, and participants described the program as convenient and relevant to their activity concerns. CF Chatters afforded therapeutic benefits to participants. By employing an eclectic qualitative approach, this Doctoral Program has made theoretical and practical contributions toward our understanding of how physical activity is experienced among children living with CF/CHD. The findings support the use of behavioural counselling as an effective and feasible modality for enhancing quality of life and physical activity. This Dissertation calls on clinicians to attend to the activity needs of chronically ill Canadian youth.

In my teaching and software development practice, I realized that most applications with human-computer interaction do not respond to users’ emotional needs. The dualism of reason and emotion as two fairly opposite entities that dominated Western philosophy was also reflected in software design. Computing was originally intended to provide applications for military and industrial activities and was primarily associated with cognition and rationality. Today, more and more computer applications interact with users in very complex and sophisticated ways. In human-computer interaction, attention is given to issues of usability and user modeling, but techniques to emotionally engage users or respond to their emotional needs have not been fully developed, even as specialists like Klein, Norman and Picard argued that machines that recognize and express emotions respond better and more appropriately to user interaction (Picard, 1997; Picard & Klein, 2002; Norman, 2004). This study investigated emotion from designers’ perspectives and tentatively concludes that there is little awareness and involvement in emotional design in the IT community. By contrast, participants in this study (36 IT specialists from various fields) strongly supported the idea of emotional design and confirmed the need for methodologies and theoretical models to research emotional design. Based on a review of theory, surveys and interviews, I identified a set of themes for heuristics of emotional design and recommended future research directions. Attention was given to consequences; participants in this study raised issues of manipulation, ethical responsibilities of designers, and the need for regulations, and recommended that emotional design should carry standard ethical guidelines for games and any other applications. The research design utilized a mixed QUAN-qual methodological model proposed by Creswell (2003) and Gay, Mills, and Airasian (2006), which was modified to equally emphasize both quantitative and qualitative stages. An instrument in the form of a questionnaire was designed, tested and piloted in this study and will be improved and used in future research.

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 68 pages. / Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Florida, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: This study explores human-robot interaction during a 16-hour high-fidelity Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) disaster response drill with teleoperated robots. Situation awareness and team interaction were examined using communication analysis. Operators (n=5) sought assistance from team members to compensate for difficulties building or maintaining situation awareness. Operator-team member communication focused on relating what was seen through the robot's eye view with prior knowledge and planning search strategies. Results suggest operators need a new cognitive mental model to filter and comprehend data provided by the robot, and that robot-assisted search is a team task rather than an individual one. / ABSTRACT: USAR technical search teams need a new shared mental model of robot-assisted search in order to coordinate activities effectively. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Survey research is a popular methodology used to gather data on a myriad of phenomena. Self-report victim surveys administered by the Federal government are used to substantially broaden our understanding of the nature and extent of crime. A potential source of nonsampling error, respondent fatigue is thought to manifest in contemporary victim surveys, as respondents become "test wise" after repeated exposure to survey instruments. Using a special longitudinal data file, the presence and influence of respondent fatigue in national self-report victim surveys is examined from three perspectives. Collectively, results provide a comprehensive look at how respondent fatigue may impact crime estimates produced by national self-report victim surveys.

Women’s involvement in sport has remained a critical issue in society for several decades. Sex verification and drug testing are two methods that have been used to regulate women’s eligibility to compete in international sports competitions based on their testosterone levels. Organizations such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) have published and updated policies and rules that set eligibility criteria for who can compete in women’s sport and under what conditions. However, the academic literature addressing Chinese women’s perspectives on international sex verification and drug testing policies available in English is extremely limited. This study investigates how recent policy revisions regarding doping and sex eligibility rules impact women student- athletes competing in track and field at the university level in China. Using qualitative research methods, this thesis analyzes the impact of recent doping and gender policies on a sample of Chinese female student-athletes. / October 2015

To gain greater insight into the operation of online social networks, we applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to text-based communication to identify and describe underlying social structures in online communities. This paper presents our approach and preliminary evaluation for content-based, automated discovery of social networks. Our research question is: What syntactic and semantic features of postings in a threaded discussions help uncover explicit and implicit ties between network members, and which provide a reliable estimate of the strengths of interpersonal ties among the network members? To evaluate our automated procedures, we compare the results from the NLP processes with social networks built from basic who-to-whom data, and a sample of hand-coded data derived from a close reading of the text. For our test case, and as part of ongoing research on networked learning, we used the archive of threaded discussions collected over eight iterations of an online graduate class. We first associate personal names and nicknames mentioned in the postings with class participants. Next we analyze the context in which each name occurs in the postings to determine whether or not there is an interpersonal tie between a sender of the posting and a person mentioned in it. Because information exchange is a key factor in the operation and success of a learning community, we estimate and assign weights to the ties by measuring the amount of information exchanged between each pair of the nodes; information in this case is operationalized as counts of important concept terms in the postings as derived through the NLP analyses. Finally, we compare the resulting network(s) against those derived from other means, including basic who-to-whom data derived from posting sequences (e.g., whose postings follow whose). In this comparison we evaluate what is gained in understanding network processes by our more elaborate analyses.

In the past, raw information was frequently destroyed because it could not be stored, thereby precluding effective scholarly use of the materials. Today's computer technology allows preservation and compact storage of enormous quantities of highly detailed information. Maintenance of information in conventional paper format often required severe access restrictions to protect anonymity of particular cases, a problem which can be alleviated by utilizing the computer to delete or mask the identity of the individuals involved. The value of any archival record is enhanced by the existence of other sources, which when used in tandem more completely describe the social, administrative, or economic process. This is especially true of the machine readable record, where source materials from one file can be more easily linked with other files to provide more complete documentation of particular events and transactions, thus augmenting the potential value and increasing the analytic or explanatory potential of the original records.

“What does the global research environment look like?” This paper presents a summary look at the results of efforts to address this question using available indicators on global research production. It was surprising how little information is available, how difficult some of it is to access and how flawed the data are. The three most useful data sources were UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Research and Development data (1996-2002), the Institute of Scientific Information publications listings for January 1998 through March 2003, and the World of Learning 2002 reference volume. The data showed that it is difficult to easily get a good overview of the global research situation from existing sources. Furthermore, inequalities between countries in research capacity are marked and challenging. Information science offers strategies for responding to both of these challenges. In both cases improvements are likely if access to information can be facilitated and the process of integrating information from different sources can be simplified, allowing transformation into effective action. The global research environment thus serves as a case study for the focus of this paper – the exploration of information science responses to challenges in the management, exchange and implementation of knowledge globally.

The aim of the Science Foresight Project was to design and assess a simple, objective and cost-effective technique to gather information about emerging short and long-term research developments, primarily in the physical and engineering sciences. International experts were objectively chosen using co-citation patterns in scientific and technical literature, and were invited to submit their predictions about emerging developments in their research fields. They were questioned about how the effects of various factors and driving forces might affect their predictions. The cost and time required to administer the questionnaire and collect the responses was minimised through the use of Internet and Web based technologies. A simple process was used to report the predictions; short excerpts from each prediction were used as the summary and each prediction was classified into one of ten categories of emerging developments. Authors from 114 papers (23.7%) responded, identifying a total of 190 short-term and 111 long-term predicted emerging developments. Expert responses were received from an international group of senior researchers between the ages of 36 and 55, mostly engaged in basic research in academic institutions. Some experts described specific emerging developments, some discussed broad emerging trends in their field and others described both. Emerging development categories such as Atomic & Stellar Matter, Biology & Biosphere, Biomedical & Clinical, Computers & Robotics and Genomics & Proteomics were closely aligned with conventional science areas while other categories such as Mathematical & Computational and Nano Science & Technology contained predictions from almost every area of science. The technique developed and applied here appears to constitute an efficient means of surveying the international research community in order to gain insights into common patterns that evolve from their collective research activities. Dynamically monitoring emerging research developments on a continuous basis could provide valuable information to policy makers, planners and researchers.

Over the last few years the bibliographic control community has initiated a series of experiments that aim to improve access to the growing number of valuable information resources that are increasingly being placed on World Wide Web (here after referred to as Web resources). Much has been written about these experiments, mainly describing their implementation and features, and there has been some evaluative reporting, but there has been little comparison among these initiatives. The research reported on in this paper addresses this limitation by comparing five leading experiments in this area. The objective was to identify characteristics of success and considerations for improvement in experiments providing access to Web resources via bibliographic control methods. The experiments examined include: OCLC's CORC project; UKOLN's BIBLINK, ROADS, and DESIRE projects; and the NORDIC project. The research used a multi-case study methodology and a framework comprised of five evaluation criteria that included the experiment's organizational structure, reception, duration, application of computing technology, and use of human resources. This paper defines the Web resource access experimentation environment, reviews the study's research methodology, and highlights key findings. The paper concludes by initiating a strategic plan and by inviting conference participants to contribute their ideas and expertise to an effort will improve experimental initiatives that ultimately aim to improve access to Web resources in the new Millennium.