In all natural languages, ambiguity is a universal phenomenon. When a word has multiple meaning depending on its contexts it is called an ambiguous word. The process of determining the correct meaning of a word (formally named word sense) in a given context is word sense disambiguation(WSD). WSD is one of the most fundamental problems in natural language processing. If properly addressed, it could lead to revolutionary advancement in many other technologies such as text search engine technology, automatic text summarization and classification, automatic lexicon construction, machine translation and automatic learning agent technology. One difficulty that has always confronted WSD researchers is the lack of high quality sense specific information. For example, if the word "power" Immediately preceds the word "plant", it would strongly constrain the meaning of "plant" to be "an industrial facility". If "power" is replaced by the phrase "root of a", then the sense of "plant" is dictated to be "an organism" of the kingdom Planate. It is obvious that manually building a comprehensive sense specific information base for each sense of each word is impractical. Researchers also tried to extract such information from large dictionaries as well as manually sense tagged corpora. Most of the dictionaries used for WSD are not built for this purpose and have a lot of inherited peculiarities. While manual tagging is slow and costly, automatic tagging is not successful in providing a reliable performance. Furthermore, it is often the case that for a randomly chosen word (to be disambiguated), the sense specific context corpora that can be collected from dictionaries are not large enough. Therefore, manually building sense specific information bases or extraction of such information from dictionaries are not effective approaches to obtain sense specific information. A web text, due to its vast quantity and wide diversity, becomes an ideal source for extraction of large quantity of sense specific information. In this thesis, the impacts of Web texts on various aspects of WSD has been investigated. New measures and models are proposed to tame enormous amount of Web texts for the purpose of WSD. They are formally evaluated by experimenting their disambiguation performance on about 70 ambiguous nouns. The results are very encouraging and have helped revealing the great potential of using Web texts for WSD. The results are published in three papers at Australia national and international level (Wang&Hoffmann,2004,2005,2006)[42][43][44].

The Australian landcare movement is considered to be a major success, with an extensive community landcare network developed, raised levels and depth of awareness, and a range of demonstration projects undertaken. It has inspired people across Australia and has been emulated overseas. However, negative trends in environmental conditions continue unabated. If the approach of the Australian landcare movement to date has not addressed the current unsustainable farming practices, what approach will? This Australian study explores the history of the ‘mechanistic’ worldview, its influence on the attitudes to and treatment of landscapes and indigenous knowledge from colonisation, and the ongoing impacts on current social and natural rural landscapes. Increasing tension between the mechanistic worldview and the growing landcare ethic based on relationships is apparent. Through the focus project, Watershed Torbay, a different way of seeing and treating the world is explored by praxis. A worldview based on relationships and connection as the end purpose is proffered. Strengthening connection with one’s own moral framework, and relationships with people and place in community, are seen as the path to achieving sustainability based on ecological and values rationality. It is recognised that there are multiple ways of seeing and experiencing the world, and it is important to give voice to all players with a connection to decision making. This also means that there are different forms of knowledge; these can be grouped under the typology of epistemic or scientific knowledge, techne or technical/practical capability, and the central form of knowledge about values and interests. I have worked with the focus project as a reflective practitioner undertaking action research; this is evident in the movement between theory and practice through the thesis. The thesis concludes in praxis taking the learning from the focus project, and exploration of theory, to answer the question posed at the outset by outlining how the relational worldview can be applied to the regional bodies now delivering major landcare programs.

Those with chronic illnesses or disabilities face numerous obstacles and issues as they come to terms with and manage the realities of their situation. How well health care providers and funders understand this can determine the types and quality of services offered. Antonovsky (1993) has developed the Sense of Coherence (SOC) concept, which introduces a salutogenic (health promotion) model of health. This challenges the pathogenic model (origins of disease) that dominates health care. A relationship between the SOC and coping has been established in the literature. Currently, the SOC is widely viewed as a stable personality trait, but emerging evidence suggests that the SOC may be amenable to change. The purpose of the study was essentially to investigate the stability of the SOC in relation to an intervention over time. The study was conducted using a time series design (Pre-admission (T1), admission(T2), discharge (T3), 6-month follow up(T4)). A convenience sample of 120 participants (93 women, 27 men) was recruited for the study. The instruments used as dependant measures were the SOC-29, the Acceptance of Disability Scale ADM (modified) and the SF-36. Analysis of the SOC-29 revealed a significant change over time (p= .05), with the follow up analysis indicating that this change occurred following the intervention. This same finding was also true of the ADM scores (p=0.0005). This was not sustained at 6-month follow up for either the SOC or the ADM. Analyses of the SF-36 scores showed a significant improvement from admission to the 6-month follow up on all scores except general health. Only 72 participants completed at the 6-month follow up and this reduced the power of the study to yield a statistically significant result. Furthermore, a post-hoc analysis revealed that over 93% of the participants had medium to high SOC scores at the beginning of the study and this may have impacted on the outcome. There were significant correlations between the scores on the SOC-29 and the ADM and all scales of the SF-36 except physical function. As the significant change in SOC-29 scores was not sustained at the six-month follow up it could suggest that the SOC is indeed a stable trait. However, there were other factors identified, related to the characteristics of the sample and to wider factors that could have had an impact on the outcome of this study. In particular it is possible that a 3-week programme is not long enough to effect a lasting change in the SOC and this raises questions about health care delivery for those who have chronic illness or disability.

In 1975 Indonesian forces invaded Dili, the capital of East Timor. The invasion and ensuing occupation forced thousands of East Timorese to leave their homes and seek refuge in Australia and other countries. This study considers the situation of a particular group of East Timorese refugees: those who fled to Australia during the 1990s and who were children or young adolescents at the time of their flight. Founded upon an understanding of social identity as being constantly transformed though a dialectic relation between the individual and his or her sociocultural surroundings, this dissertation considers the consequences of refugee experiences on individual identity and belonging, as well as the processes of conceptualising self and negotiating identity within changing social and cultural structures. The relationship between conflict and flight, resettlement, acculturation, identity and attachment is explored, and particular attention is given to issues of socialisation and categorisation, age and agency, hybridity, and ambiguity. Through a qualitative anthropological methodology informed by theories of cultural identity, adolescence and cross-cultural socialisation, the thesis seeks to shed light on the various dynamics that have influenced the young East Timorese people’s identity and sense of belonging, and considers the impact of acculturation and socialisation into a new culture at a critical period of the young people’s lives. / Masters Thesis

As a result of two years working with the pre-service primary teachers in a College in Fiji I became aware of the difficulty many of the students were having understanding the primary school mathematics they would be required to teach. During that time I had attempted to help them overcome the difficulties by using different teaching approaches and activities but was far from satisfied with my efforts. Hence I decided to make a concerted effort to help the students by planning, implementing and partially evaluating a mathematics education unit, known as the Teaching Program for the first semester of their course. This work formed the basis of my study. For the Teaching Program I chose a constructivist teaching approach with number sense as the underlying theme. To examine the aspects of the Program I used my observations and those of the students especially ones reported in their mathematics journals. To evaluate the effectiveness of the Teaching Program I collected and analysed quantitative data from traditional testing of the class of forty students as well as data from case studies of six of the pre-service teachers in the class. To determine what features of the Teaching Program were linked to positive changes my main source of data was the case studies, especially entries from their journal writings. The findings suggested that a significant development of the cognitive aspects of the students’ number sense did occur during the time of the Teaching Program but not as much as was hoped for. As a result of the analysis of the data I came to a greater realisation of the importance of the non-cognitive aspects of number sense and the necessity for a greater consideration of them in the development of a Program. I also realise now that a major development that did occur was in my understanding of the knowledge and learning of mathematics. My ideas of a teaching paradigm of social constructivism had not guided me sufficiently to incorporate activities and procedures to develop the non-cognitive aspects. I suggest that a paradigm which extends the theory of social constructivism to give greater consideration of these aspects of learning in general, and hence numeracy and number sense in particular, was needed. As a result of this study, my introduction to the theory of enactivism appears to be giving me some direction in this search at this stage.

<p>The use of MRI for patient examinations has constantly increased as technical development has lead to faster image acquisitions and higher image quality. Nevertheless, an MR-examination still takes relatively long time and yet another way of speeding up the process is to employ parallel imaging. In this thesis, one of these parallel imaging techniques, called SENSE, is described and examined more closely.</p><p>When SENSE is employed, the number of spatial encoding steps can be reduced thanks to the use of several receiving coils. A reduction of the number of phase encoding steps not only leads to faster image acquisition, but also to superimposed pixel values in image space. In order to be able to separate the aliased pixels, knowledge about the spatial sensitivity of the coils is required.</p><p>There are several different alternatives to how and when information about the sensitivities of the coils should be collected, but in this thesis, focus is on the method of performing a reference measurement before the actual scan. The reference measurement consists of a fast, low-resolution sequence which either is collected with both the body coil and the parallel imaging coil or only with the parallel imaging coil. A comparison of these two methods by simulations in program written MATLAB leads to the conclusion that even if the scan time of the reference measurement is doubled it seems like there are numerous advantages of also collecting data with the body coil:</p><p>• the images are more homogeneous which facilitates the establishment of a diagnose</p><p>• the noise levels in the reconstructed images are somewhat lower</p><p>• images collected with a reduced sampling density show better agreement with those collected without reduction.</p><p>Furthermore, it is shown that the reference measurement preferably should be a 3D sequence covering all the volume of interest. If a 2D sequence is used it is absolutely necessary that it can be performed in any plane and it has to be repeated for every plane that is imaged.</p>

<p>The aim of my study was to investigate a few young peoples experience of their treatment. The study was qualitative based on interviews with three young persons at the end of their treatment there. The subject was chosen because this kind of youth housing is an interesting alternative to institutional care for young people, despite there is not much known about the results of the treatment. The results were analyzed from earlier research and central concepts from the theory of empowerment and Anton Antonovskys theory about Sense of coherence. The results of this study show that these young peoples are satisfied with their treatment at the youth housing. They felt that a positive change and an improvement of their self-esteem had occurred. Another interesting result of the study shows is that these young people have developed from being a hostile teenager at the edge of a life where they could see no future to living as responsible grown-ups with a much brighter perspective of the future full of hopes and dreams.</p>

<p>Many business schools teach the importance of using strategy tools when engaging in strategizing activities. Despite this fact there is an ongoing debate concerning what is taught in business schools and what is actually used in practice. In spite of this debate there has been little research done regarding how these strategy tools are used in practice. This study seeks to address this through the adoption of a strategy as practice perspective which helped to identify what is actually practiced by managers while engaging in strategizing activities. Managers use strategy to respond to complex forces (social, political, economic) in their business environments. However to develop and implement strategy encompasses a full range of strategizing activities such as strategic thinking, strategic analysis, strategic decision making and implementation. Many business schools teach strategy tools are techniques which managers use to structure and influence strategizing activities. Previous research on strategy tools played emphasis on the benefits that can be derived if tools are used in different context. Others have highlighted the frequency of tool usage. Nevertheless, there is a need to make a review what is taught and how strategy tools are used in practice.</p><p>A qualitative study was conducted in two universities through the use of semi structured interviews to gather data. The use of an inductive and interpretivism perspective through a case study helped the researcher identify the context in which events were taking place. The choice of a small yet deliberate sample size was done to focus in on the various levels of management within these universities and to review how strategy tools were used at these levels. After each interview the interviewees were given a list of 15 strategy tools (all of which were taught in the researcher’s masters programme) to identify whether they used any of the strategy tools on the list and if they did how did they use them. It was noted from the empirical data acquired that quite often strategy tools were not always being used for the purpose for which they were taught nevertheless managers were altering components of various tools to meet their individual business needs. Strategy tools were often used to assist in strategic thinking and strategic decision making. Managers’ perception of strategy tools affected the extent to which tools were used and the frequency of usage. While strategy tools were often used for growth and development, communication and persuasion and best practices it was its use in sense-making and evaluation which indicated that there is a need for a greater understanding into how managers make sense of strategy tools. The study answers how strategy tools are used in practice in a university context by giving illustrations and quotations from the various interviewees regarding strategy tools.</p>

<p>Competence in mental arithmetic is recognised by many as essential to be active participants in the fast flowing, high technological society we live in today.  Many have noticed pupils’ unwillingness to set their calculators aside and practice this aspect of mathematics when possible.  Furthermore, some studies show that pupils’ ability to compute mentally deteriorates as they pass through the school system.  Through testing classes in a Swedish obligatory school and an upper secondary school, the aim of this thesis is to see if the goals set by The National [Swedish] Agency for Education regarding mental arithmetic, are being fulfilled.  Through using questionnaires to collect the strategies and ideas of the pupils, a wide range of problematic mathematical misconceptions became evident.  These are highlighted since they are important aspects teachers should be aware of.  The results of this study show that the obligatory school classes are far from reaching the goals set for them whereas the upper secondary classes show good results.  Furthermore, there is an apparent improvement in their progression, resulting in a fulfilment the official goals.  Many pupils however, seem reluctant to rely on their mental arithmetic capabilities and resort to algorithmic strategies.  Other problems to emerge are in carrying out table calculations and in a lack of number sense when deeming if the answers are reasonable.   </p>

<p>Forskning har visat att self-efficacy, självkänsla, KASAM och locus of control alla har en effekt på graden av upplevd stress. Dock inte alla tillsammans, vilket denna studie avsåg att undersöka samt deras inbördes relationer och vilken variabel som predicerar stress bäst. Högskolestudenter (<em>n </em>= 65) svarade på varsin enkät. Resultatet visade att alla variablerna hade signifikant negativ korrelation med upplevd stress. Ju högre nivå på variablerna desto mindre stressade var studenterna. De kvinnliga studenterna var mer stressade än de manliga. Resultatet visade även genom multiple regression att self-efficacy var den variabel som var viktigast för att hantera stress inför en examination, näst viktigast var KASAM. Slutsatsen blev att dessa variabler hade en avgörande inbördes relation när det gäller graden av upplevd stress inför en examination.</p>