Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1997. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-86). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1997. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-86). Also available on the Internet.

How we come to know about social phenomena is an important sociological question and a central focus of this thesis. How knowledge is organised and produced and becomes part of ruling relations is empirically interrogated through an institutional ethnography. I do this in the context of explicating the construction of a public history concerning Aboriginal Australian child separations over the 20th century, and in particular as it arose in the 1990s as a social problem. Particular attention is given to knowledge construction practices around the Australian National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal Children from Their Families (1996-1997) and the related Bringing Them Home Oral History Project (1998-2002). The once separated children have come to be known as The Stolen Generation(s) in public discourse and have been represented as sharing a common experience as well as reasons for the separations. Against the master narrative of common experience and discussion of the reasons for it, this thesis raises the problematic that knowledge is grounded in particular times and places, and also that many people who are differently related and who have experiences which contain many differences as well as similarities end up being represented as though saying the same thing. Through an institutional ethnography grounded in explicating the social organising activities which produced the Bringing Them Home Oral History Project, I examine how institutional relations coordinate the multiplicity and variability of people’s experiences through a textually-mediated project with a focused concern regarding the knowing subject, ideology, accounts, texts and analytical mapping. Through this I show how ruling relations are implicated in constructing what is known about the Aboriginal child separation histories, and more generally how experience, memory, the telling of a life and the making of public history are embedded in social organising practices.

Yes / Participants generated both autobiographical memories (AMs) that they believed to be true and intentionally fabricated autobiographical memories (IFAMs). Memories were constructed while a concurrent memory load (random 8-digit sequence) was held in mind or while there was no concurrent load. Amount and accuracy of recall of the concurrent memory load was reliably poorer following generation of IFAMs than following generation of AMs. There was no reliable effect of load on memory generation times; however, IFAMs always took longer to construct than AMs. Finally, replicating previous findings, fewer IFAMs had a field perspective than AMs, IFAMs were less vivid than AMs, and IFAMs contained more motion words (indicative of increased cognitive load). Taken together, these findings show a pattern of systematic differences that mark out IFAMs, and they also show that IFAMs can be identified indirectly by lowered performance on concurrent tasks that increase cognitive load.

Points-to analysis is a static program analysis that tries to predict the dynamic behavior of programs without running them. It computes reference information by approximating for each pointer in the program a set of possible objects to which it could point to at runtime. In order to justify new analysis techniques, they need to be compared to the state of the art regarding their accuracy and efficiency. One of the main parameters influencing precision in points-to analysis is context-sensitivity that provides the analysis of each method separately for different contexts it was called on. The problem raised due to providing such a property to points-to analysis is decreasing of analysis scalability along with increasing memory consumption used during analysis process. The goal of this thesis is to present a comparison of precision and scalability of context-sensitive and context-insensitive analysis using three different points-to analysis techniques (Spark, Paddle, P2SSA) produced by two research groups. This comparison provides basic trade-offs regarding scalability on the one hand and efficiency and accuracy on the other. This work was intended to involve previous research work in this field consequently to investigate and implement several specific metrics covering each type of analysis regardless context-sensitivity – Spark, Paddle and P2SSA. These three approaches for points-to analysis demonstrate the intended achievements of different research groups. Common output format enables to choose the most efficient type of analysis for particular purpose.

No description available.