The purpose of this study was to examine the relative effectiveness of three-dimensional visualization techniques for learning about protein conformation and molecular motion in association with a ligand and receptor binding event. Increasingly complex versions of the same binding event were depicted in each of four animated treatments. Students (n = 131) were tested at three time points, and over both the short and longer term, the most complex of the four animated treatments was the most successful at fostering students’ understanding of the events depicted. A follow-up study including eight biology students was conducted to gain greater insight into the students’ underlying thought processes and better characterize their understanding of the animated representations. Analysis of verbal reports and eye tracking data suggest that students are able to attend to the same narrative elements regardless of the level of complexity depicted in each animation. Analysis of verbal protocol data revealed a positive correlation between the number of explanatory statements expressed by participants and the complexity of the animation viewed. As well, prior knowledge was positively correlated with the number of explanatory statements contained in each protocol. Overall, students demonstrated an understanding of protein conformation and molecular crowding. However results suggest that students have difficulty understanding and associating randomness with molecular events. The verbal reports contained several instances of students’ attaching agency to protein and ligand, anthropomorphizing their movements and subsequent binding. Ordinarily cellular events, owing to their sheer complexity, are depicted in a highly schematized, simplified form. The results of this study would suggest that under select circumstances this may not be the most appropriate approach to depicting dynamic events. However additional attention must be given to exploring techniques that can satisfactorily balance the random nature of molecular events with narrative explanations of these processes.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relative effectiveness of three-dimensional visualization techniques for learning about protein conformation and molecular motion in association with a ligand and receptor binding event. Increasingly complex versions of the same binding event were depicted in each of four animated treatments. Students (n = 131) were tested at three time points, and over both the short and longer term, the most complex of the four animated treatments was the most successful at fostering students’ understanding of the events depicted. A follow-up study including eight biology students was conducted to gain greater insight into the students’ underlying thought processes and better characterize their understanding of the animated representations. Analysis of verbal reports and eye tracking data suggest that students are able to attend to the same narrative elements regardless of the level of complexity depicted in each animation. Analysis of verbal protocol data revealed a positive correlation between the number of explanatory statements expressed by participants and the complexity of the animation viewed. As well, prior knowledge was positively correlated with the number of explanatory statements contained in each protocol. Overall, students demonstrated an understanding of protein conformation and molecular crowding. However results suggest that students have difficulty understanding and associating randomness with molecular events. The verbal reports contained several instances of students’ attaching agency to protein and ligand, anthropomorphizing their movements and subsequent binding. Ordinarily cellular events, owing to their sheer complexity, are depicted in a highly schematized, simplified form. The results of this study would suggest that under select circumstances this may not be the most appropriate approach to depicting dynamic events. However additional attention must be given to exploring techniques that can satisfactorily balance the random nature of molecular events with narrative explanations of these processes.

The aim is to examine how students with attention difficulties may demonstrate their mathematical understanding through visual representations. A curiosity about how students think about mathematics, national tests and Concepts cartoons has also permeated the study.   With help of observations combined with interviews and actively work for a week, the study shows an idea of how visual representations can help students with concentration difficulties to stay focused on their tasks.   I chose a selection of pupils to do some mathematical tasks from the national tests which they had not been able to solve before. Now in the form of Concepts cartoons, which I designed, they managed to solve the same mathematics data. In my study treatment and interaction reveals as key pillars for a successful educational work with the students with concentration difficulties. Thus, all pupils who previously have been unable to solve these assignments on the National test were now able to show their mathematical understanding supported by visual representations. / Syftet var att undersöka hur elever med koncentrationssvårigheter kan visa sin matematiska förståelse med hjälp av visuella representationer inspirerade av Begreppsbubblor. En nyfikenhet kring hur elever tänker om matematik, nationella prov och Begreppsbubblor har också genomsyrat studien. En av mina frågeställningar rör även hur lärare bemöter koncentrationssvaga elever i verksamheten.   Med hjälp av observationer och intervjuer med undervisande lärare fick jag en bild av hur visuella representationer kan hjälpa koncentrationssvaga elever att behålla fokus på sina uppgifter och vilken roll lärarens bemötande har.   Jag valde att låta ett urval elever göra om några textuppgifter från de nationella proven, som de inte klarat tidigare, men nu med stöd av Begreppsbubblor, som jag själv konstruerat. I studien framkommer bemötande och interaktion som viktiga grundpelare för ett lyckat pedagogiskt arbete med koncentrationssvaga elever. Samtliga elever som inte klarat av de valda textuppgifterna på det nationella provet kunde med stöd av visuella representationer visa sin matematiska förståelse och därmed lösa uppgifterna.

This thesis is a theoretically guided empirical discussion of fashion and its role within the production of national identity in Germany. In recent years, a new patriotism in contemporary German fashion could be observed, starting with the fashion designer Eva Gronbach in 2001. I will approach the term patriotism with the aid of one of Michel Foucault's key terms, the notion of the episteme. In my case study, singular fashion images from three consecutive collections by Gronbach are examined with regard to their role in the discourse of German patriotism. But I am not only interested in the "how" of this discourse. Building up upon Antonio Gramsci's notion of "cultural hegemony", I also explain the recent rise of this fashion patriotism. Thus, my discourse analysis of Gronbach's fashion becomes embedded in social struggles and transformations in Germany. Argueing that fashion is a discursive practice that can show up as well as promote changes in discursive formations, I assume a dialectical structure-agency conception: On the one hand the case of Gronbach hints at the deeper structural problematic of patriotism and social cohesion which allowed Gronbach to become popular. On the other hand, this structure is also produced via discursive practices such as Gronbach´s. The what I term "inclusionary patriotism" comprises cultural normalisation. Thus, the case of Gronbach demonstrates a "constrained heterogeneity" with regard to the discourse of patriotism in Germany, in which diversity is only acceptable within certain discursively constructed limits.

Racialization, Representation, and Resistance: Black Visual Artists and the Production of Alterity queries the relationship between Black visual representation and Black social and cultural politics. For the past two centuries Black visual artists throughout the African Diaspora have painted, sculpted, and filmed images of blackness inspired, funded, and otherwise supported by progressive patrons and institutions. Largely produced outside of mainstream art worlds, these visual representations focused on Black social and cultural politics and Black alterity more than mainstream tastes or stereotypes. As the coherence of Black social and political movements and resources declined in the late twentieth century, however, commercialization and the mainstream art world had increasing influence on Black visual culture. These changes created intense resistance and debate about the politics of visual representation throughout the Black Atlantic, particularly in the United States, Cuba, and the United Kingdom. Ethnographic observations, interviews, and gallery talks with artists in these three nations, including John Yancey, Vicky Meek, Marcus Akinlana, Kara Walker, Michael Ray Charles, Gloria Rolando, Anissa Cockings, and Andrew Sinclair, along with cultural and historical comparisons, provide fresh insight into the relationship between Black visual representation and contemporary Black social and cultural politics. / text

A Cyber-Physical System (CPS) has a tight integration of computation, networking and physicalprocess. It is a heterogeneous system that combines multi-domain consisting of both hardware andsoftware systems. Cyber subsystems in the CPS implement the control strategy that affects the physicalprocess. Therefore, software systems in the CPS are more complex. Visualization of a complex system provides a method of understanding complex systems byaccumulating, grouping, and displaying components of systems in such a manner that they may beunderstood more efficiently just by viewing the model rather than understanding the code. Graphicalrepresentation of complex systems provides an intuitive and comprehensive way to understand thesystem. OpenModelica is the open source development environment based on Modelica modeling andsimulation language that consists of several interconnected subsystems. OMEdit is one of the subsystemintegrated into OpenModelica. It is a graphical user interface for graphical modeling. It consists of toolsthat allow the user to create their own shapes and icons for the model. This thesis presents a methodology that provides an easy way of understanding the structure andexecution of programs written in the imperative language like C through graphical Modelica model.

Knowing the semantic category of a robot's current position not only facilitates the robot's navigation, but also greatly improves its ability to serve human needs and to interpret the scene. Visual Place Categorization (VPC) is addressed in this dissertation, which refers to the problem of predicting the semantic category of a place using visual information collected from an autonomous robot platform. Census Transform (CT) histogram and Histogram Intersection Kernel (HIK) based visual codebooks are proposed to represent an image. CT histogram encodes the stable spatial structure of an image that reflects the functionality of a location. It is suitable for categorizing places and has shown better performance than commonly used descriptors such as SIFT or Gist in the VPC task. HIK has been shown to work better than the Euclidean distance in classifying histograms. We extend it in an unsupervised manner to generate visual codebooks for the CT histogram descriptor. HIK codebooks help CT histogram to deal with the huge variations in VPC and improve system accuracy. A computational method is also proposed to generate HIK codebooks in an efficient way. The first significant VPC dataset in home environments is collected and is made publicly available, which is also used to evaluate the VPC system based on the proposed techniques. The VPC system achieves promising results for this challenging problem, especially for important categories such as bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. The proposed techniques achieved higher accuracies than competing descriptors and visual codebook generation methods.

[pt] A segmentação de documentos HTML tem sido essencial para as tarefas de extração de informações, como mostram vários estudos na área. Nesta dissertação investigamos a relação entre o documento HTML e sua representação visual, mostrando como esta ligação ajuda na abordagem estrutural para a identificação de segmentos. Também investigamos como utilizar algoritmos de distância de edição em árvores para encontrar padrões na árvore DOM, tornando possível resolver duas tarefas de identificação de segmentos. A primeira tarefa é a identificação de tabelas genuínas, aonde foi obtido 90,40% de F1 utilizando o corpus fornecido por (Wang e Hu, 2002). Mostramos através de um estudo experimental que este resultado é competitivo com os melhores resultados da área. A segunda tarefa que consideramos é a identificação de listas de produtos em sites de comércio eletrônico, nessa obtivemos 94,95% de F1 utilizando um corpus com 1114 documentos HTML, criado a partir de 8 sites. Concluímos que os algoritmos de similaridade estrutural ajudam na resolução de ambas às tarefas e acreditamos que possam ajudar na identificação de outros tipos de segmentos. / [en] The segmentation of HTML documents has been essential to information extraction tasks, as showed by several works in this area. This paper studies the link between an HTML document and its visual representation to show how it helps segments identification using a structural approach. For this, we investigate how tree edit distance algorithms can find structural similarities in a DOM tree, using two tasks to execute our experiments. The first one is the identification of genuine tables where we obtained a 90.40% F1 score using the corpus provided by (Wang e Hu, 2002). We show through an experimental study that this result is competitive with the best results in the area. The second task studied is the identification of product listings in e-commerce sites. Here we get a 94.95% F1 score using a corpus with 1114 HTML documents from 8 distinct sites. We conclude that algorithms to calculate trees similarity provide competitive results for both tasks, making them also good candidates to identify other types of segments.

Domestic violence against women (DVAW) is a global pandemic that affects approximately one in three women living in the United Kingdom. One of the biggest challenges in combating and preventing DVAW is the underreporting of incidences to law-enforcement by victims and the collective silence of bystanders who are aware of the abuse but choose to remain silent (i.e. social silence). This degree project compares evidence regarding social silence and underreporting of DVAW and how DVAW is represented in British awareness campaigns to answer the research question: What gaps exist between evidence available in respect of contributing factors to social silence and underreporting of DVAW and how key players in the space of DVAW prevention in the United Kingdom (UK) represent DVAW in public awareness campaigns aimed at addressing these issues? A literature review served to establish state of the art evidence and was followed by a Foucauldian discourse analysis of selected visual media texts from awareness raising campaigns published by British key players (i.e. NGOs and government agencies) in the area of DVAW. The analysis was conducted in three stages: 1) relevant discourse fragments were identified according to strict sampling criteria, 2) texts were analysed with a step-by-step approach, in order to identify key themes and a typical sub-sample of discourse fragments, and 3) an in-depth analysis of two typical campaign texts was conducted. The analysis revealed that a range of misalignments and gaps exist. DVAW is represented in isolation as an issue of individuals rather than society. Some of the most problematic attitudes contributing to social silence and underreporting of DVAW such as victim blaming remain largely unaddressed. Victims of DVAW are represented in isolation and the responsibility to act and stop the abuse is often placed on the them. Perpetrators of DVAW in particular, but also men in general, are largely excluded from the discourse. Instead of encouraging victims and building their confidence, a bleak picture of isolation and fear is painted in campaign texts. Some of the discourse fragments included in the analysis appear to perpetuate the very misconceptions and stereotypes they are trying to address. There is ample opportunity for British key players in the space of DVAW to take a leading role in challenging the current discourse and assume their role of influencer in the fight to break social silence and increase the reporting of DVAW.

Based on fieldwork with human rights organizations in New York City and Belize, Central America, this dissertation explores--through the prism of ethics--how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) represent violence against indigenous women--in text, image, and action--as human rights "evidence." By ethics I mean the deliberate use of morals, stated or unstated, in the representation of human rights abuses. In New York, my research focuses on the production, launch, and circulation of a United Nations shadow report on violence against indigenous women. In Belize, I contextualize indigenous women's experiences of gender violence within an indigenous movement to obtain collective land rights, a national women's movement, and national rhetoric on culture and gender. In both locales, I consider and compare: 1) how the "ethical" stance of NGOs shapes human rights activism; 2) how NGOs create visual and discursive "evidence" to represent violence and indigenous women's experiences; and 3) very real neoliberal state repression that immobilizes social movements for human rights and social justice. My concern is with the ways social movement NGOs struggle to maintain their feminist and social justice objectives as they interface with the demands of a transnational human rights system, and the strategies they use as they suffer from vilification, marginalization or mainstreaming, and lack of resources. Far from protective, human rights claims, explored here as "evidence," often obscure both social inequalities and the response of state-level policies to these inequalities, especially for marginalized women. / Anthropology