Thesis (J.C.L.)--Catholic University of America, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-76).

Thesis (MTech (Human Resource Management))--Cape Technikon, Cape Town, 2003. / Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 165-172). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 165-172). Also available on the Internet.

Arbetet undersökte vad manliga och kvinnliga spelare föredrar hos en kvinnlig hjälte i ett actionspel. Inledningsvis diskuterades en rad tidigare studier kring genus i spel och annan visuell media. Därefter redogörs begreppen fysionomi och stereotyp för att få en förståelse för hur man kan dra slutsatser kring en karaktär från så lite information som en konceptbild. Därefter redogörs kända kvinnliga fiktiva hjältar från det senaste århundradet från film, spel och annan visuell media. Artefakten som skapades var fyra olika karaktärskoncept av olika kvinnliga hjältar som var baserade på en förundersökning. Förundersökningen bestod av en karaktärsstudie och en kvantitativ enkätundersökning. Karaktärerna utvärderades sedan med hjälp av semistrukturerade intervjuer där fem kvinnor och fem män deltog. Resultatet visade på indikationer att kvinnor lägger mer fokus vid karaktärers utseende och personlighet medan män lägger mer fokus vid karaktärers funktionalitet.

Work, especially that in complex, dynamic workplaces, often requires subtle, local judgment with regard to timing of subtasks, relevance, importance, prioritization and so forth. Still, people in Nuclear Industry seem to think safety results from people just following procedures. In the wake of failure it can be tempting to introduce new procedures and an even stricter "rule following culture". None, or at least very little, attention is given to tacit knowledge and individual skills. I am aiming to highlight the inadequacy of putting too much trust in formalization and that reporting and trending of events will contribute to increased learning, an increased nuclear safety and an efficient operational experience. The ability to interpret a situation concrete depends on proven experience in similar situations, analogical thinking and tacit knowledge. In this essay I intend to problematize the introduction and use of so-called Corrective Action Program (CAP) and computerized reporting systems linked to CAP in the Nuclear Industry. What I found out is that the whole industry, from regulators to licensees, seems to be stuck in the idea that the scientific perspective on knowledge is the only "true" perspective. This leads to an exaggerated belief in that technology and formalized work processes and routines will create a safer business. The computerized reporting system will not, as the idea was from the beginning, contribute to increased nuclear safety since the reports is based on the trigger and not the underlying causes and in-depth analysis. Managing safety by numbers (incidents, error counts, safety threats, and safety culture indicators) is very practical but has its limitations. Error counts only uphold an illusion of rationality and control, but may offer neither real insight nor productive routes for progress on safety. The question is why the CAP, error counts and computerized reporting systems have had such a big impact in the nuclear industry? It rests after all, on too weak foundations. The answer is that the scientific perspective on knowledge is the dominating perspective. What people do not understand is that an excessive use of computerized systems and an increased formalization actually will create new risks when people lose their skills and ability to reflect and put more trust in the system than in themselves.

Although much national and international attention has been given to the disastrous effects of oil spills in indigenous, Amazonian communities, virtually nothing is known about the effects of oil refinement, storage and shipping that takes place in the urban, largely Afro-descendent communities of Esmeraldas. This work addresses the near disregard of environmental suffering and injustice experienced by people in Esmeraldas and provides an understanding of both their resistance and acquiescence to the burdens created by the oil economy. I look at how these perspectives feed (and do not feed) collective action to demand protections from the environmental harms of the refinery and other industrial facilities in the area. In addition to exploring questions of mobilization, my hope is that this work gives voice to the environmental suffering in the city of Esmeraldas and that it adds to a growing body of work that considers the urban environmental suffering in Latin America. / text

Traditional computer vision algorithms depend on information taken by visible-light cameras. But there are inherent limitations of this data source, e.g. they are sensitive to illumination changes, occlusions and background clutter. Range sensors give us 3D structural information of the scene and it’s robust to the change of color and illumination. In this thesis, we present a series of approaches which are developed using the depth information by Kinect to address the issues regarding human detection and action recognition. Taking the depth information, the basic problem we consider is to detect humans in the scene. We propose a model based approach, which is comprised of a 2D head contour detector and a 3D head surface detector. We propose a segmentation scheme to segment the human from the surroundings based on the detection point and extract the whole body of the subject. We also explore the tracking algorithm based on our detection result. The methods are tested on a dataset we collected and present superior results over the existing algorithms. With the detection result, we further studied on recognizing their actions. We present a novel approach for human action recognition with histograms of 3D joint locations (HOJ3D) as a compact representation of postures. We extract the 3D skeletal joint locations from Kinect depth maps using Shotton et al.’s method. The HOJ3D computed from the action depth sequences are reprojected using LDA and then clustered into k posture visual words, which represent the prototypical poses of actions. The temporal evolutions of those visual words are modeled by discrete hidden Markov models (HMMs). In addition, due to the design of our spherical coordinate system and the robust 3D skeleton estimation from Kinect, our method demonstrates significant view invariance on our 3D action dataset. Our dataset is composed of 200 3D sequences of 10 indoor activities performed by 10 individuals in varied views. Our method is real-time and achieves superior results on the challenging 3D action dataset. We also tested our algorithm on the MSR Action3D dataset and our algorithm outperforms existing algorithm on most of the cases. / text

Given the prominence of the transformational theory of action in major urban educational reform efforts, this study intends to describe and analyze the initial and sustaining leadership actions taken by the superintendent and his leadership team, the board of trustees and the Dallas Achieves! Commission in the development of the Dallas Achieves! transformational theory of action framework. Specifically, this study seeks to encourage the research community to discover, understand, and gain insight concerning the Dallas Achieves! transformational theory of action. The study utilized the constructs of Bolman and Deal’s (2003) Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership four frames for “making sense” of organizations as the analytical tool for the description of initial and sustaining leadership actions taken to develop the Dallas Achieves! transformational theory of action framework. This analytical framework guided the data collection, categorization, and emergent themes. The answers to the research questions posed in this study emanated from the analysis of the data. The findings indicate the superintendent and his leadership team, the board of trustees, and the Dallas Achieves! Commission utilized specific leadership actions in the development of the Dallas Achieves! transformational theory of action framework. Ultimately, the findings of this study provide information for researchers and those who design, enact and implement transformational theories of action. / text

An important idea in knowledge representation is that of libraries of reusable knowledge components. The goal of this research is to apply this idea to action description languages. An action language may be used to specify the effects and preconditions of actions, and serves to describe “transition systems” -- directed graphs with the vertices representing the states of an action domain and the edges representing the transitions that are caused by performing actions (or by the passage of time). Many actions can be described as special cases of other actions. (For example, pushing, carrying, going can all be described as special cases of moving things around.) However, descriptions of action domains in existing action languages describe the effects of all actions from scratch, which leads to common aspects of different domains getting reinvented over and over. In this dissertation we first developed a method for defining actions in terms of other actions, in the action language C+, a language with a rich set of features for describing action domains. This provided a theoretical basis for developing a library of general-purpose action descriptions and influenced the design of the Modular Action Description (MAD) language [Lifschitz and Ren, 2006], the semantics of which is based on C+. We extended the original MAD language in several ways, both in the syntactic dimension and in the semantic dimension, and developed an implementation of this extended language. The extended semantics not only provides new features but also addresses some shortcomings of the original semantics, which were identified during the course of our research. The implemented system was used to develop a library of basic MAD modules, each describing a group of general commonsense facts related to actions. Several action domains from the knowledge representation literature were formalized using the library of basic action descriptions. The availability of the library led to the representations being much simpler than before and also enabled us to recognize structural similarities of seemingly quite different domains. / text