Several years ago it was difficult to imagine distant learning in Lithuania. When the SC (Stock company) „Lietuvos Telekomas“ mastered the ISDN service, it became possible to organise video conferences, but the equipment, used for these video conferences was very expensive and for a video conference in two or more places, the subsequent number of equipmnet sets was necessary. With the appearance of cable Internet providers, the ADSL service, Atviras Takas service, the Internet became cheaper, and it has become possible to arrange video conferences with any place in Lithuania, which has cable Internet or phone connection. With the appearance of technologies, allowing to arrange video conferences in Lithuania, distant learning auditoriums were equipped and broadcast was begun from Kaunas Technological University to other towns: Panevėžys, Utena, Marijampolė and etc. Ar first the NetMeeting conferencing program, which belongs to the Windows operational system, was used. Lectures were broadcast with the help of this program from a computer in KTU. Since the NetMeeting program can transmit sound and view between two points at the same time, there was an MCU (multipoint control unit) used to transmit sound and view to several distant points at the same time. Problems appeared during broadcast: the sound, view or slides would break down. This was noticed when five or more users connected. Later, KTU established an internet site, which allowed students to watch lectures in the real... [to full text]

This thesis draws upon poststructuralist theory, case study methodology, and multiple research methods to explore children’s representations of distant places, particularly African places such as Ghana. It investigates the ways in which a particular group of children’s representations of Ghana can be understood as exemplifying an ‘exoticist’ way of thinking explored by Edward Said in his seminal studies Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), and it explores how and to what extent these representations shifted over the course of a unit of geography teaching on Ghana. The research agenda presented here thus focuses (as Said puts it) on the ‘ideas, ... forms, ... images and imaginings’ of contemporary geographies of otherness, and considers geography education furthermore as a form of ‘struggle over geography’ in which different approaches to distant places come into contact, with some approaches becoming more dominant than others. The findings from this thesis therefore help to illuminate contemporary challenges in geographical education regarding distant places, and African distant places in particular.

In this thesis I analyse the reporting and the reception of news about distant suffering in the light of John Howard Yoder‘s work on witness. Studies of news reporting about foreign wars, genocide and disasters commonly conclude that the practice of bearing witness to distant suffering contributes to a context where both journalists and spectators appear to have limited moral agency. I argue that the practice of bearing witness has ethical significance for those actively engaged in bearing witnessing. In his work on Christian witness, Yoder demonstrates how witness can be understood as a method for moral reasoning. I assert that Yoder‘s argument presents a fruitful approach for interdisciplinary consideration of the ethical significance found in the practice of bearing witness to distant human suffering. In chapter one, I lay the foundation of my investigation into the ethical agency involved in bearing witness. John Howard Yoder‘s theological approach to social ethics provides that foundation. Central to Yoder‘s claim that witness is a form of ethics, is the premise that presence testifies. Yoder calls this the 'phenomenology of social witness‘. Yoder‘s work opens new ways in which to ask questions about the practice of bearing witness as a form of social ethics. It is from this foundation that I begin to ask questions about the news media practice of bearing witness to distant suffering, the subject of chapter two. Media practices are social practices that involve a dense interaction of many layers of society. In the media practice of witnessing distant suffering, governments, charities, news media organisations, and audiences are all involved in what I call the social formation of the Global Samaritan. The foundational work on Yoder in chapter one allows me to ask the question: How is the Global Samaritan a presence, and to what does this presence testify? In chapters three and four, I focus on two of the prominent groups which contribute to the formation of the Global Samaritan: audiences and foreign correspondents. News audiences as moral agents already seem a problem for Yoder‘s claim that presence testifies. Do audiences who bear witness to distant suffering have moral agency? How can the amorphous and fleeting presence of television, internet, or twitter audiences testify? In the chapter on audiences, the initial claim regarding presence makes for an important investigation into how audiences can potentially move beyond mere spectatorship and towards participation in care for the suffering. Foreign correspondents bearing witness to distant suffering do not face the same obstacles to testifying as audiences do. After all, foreign correspondents are often live, on-the-scene of extraordinary circumstances of suffering. The danger and risks foreign correspondents face in order to report live from scenes of devastation and disaster testify to the fact that the situation is indeed dangerous and causing suffering. Yoder‘s claim that presence testifies is a claim strongly paralleled within the tradition of investigative journalism. In chapter four, I investigate the ethical function of foreign correspondent presence. I consider the foreign correspondent‘s dual role as the proxy 'eyes and ears‘ of the public and the proxy voice for those without a voice. Through these two roles, I explore major concepts involved in the practice of investigative journalism. One prominent issue I explore is the tension between the principles of a liberal democratic press and the practice of frontline reporters live, on-the-scene of extraordinary and extreme situations. In the final chapter, chapter five, I focus on the experience of three frontline reporters bearing witness to human suffering. BBC [British Broadcasting Company] reporter John Simpson‘s reflections on his coverage of the beginning of the Iraq War illustrate the importance of bearing witness as involving real presence on location. Norwegian freelance reporter Ǻsne Seierstad‘s reflections on covering the Iraq War from Baghdad further contributes to the concept of 'being there‘ as central to bearing witness. Focus on Seierstad also furthers discussion on women reporters bearing witness to war. The third reporter I highlight is BBC reporter Fergal Keane. I focus on his reflections covering the Rwandan genocide to illustrate how the claim to bearing witness involves more than spectatorship, but often involves participation. I conclude with an analysis of the media practice of bearing witness, involving the range of reporter presence to the quasi-presence of the audience, in the light of John Howard Yoder‘s claim that bearing witness is a form of social ethics.

Paganism is a burgeoning belief system in the UK, which has received little attention from psychological researchers. Healing is a key aspect of modern Pagan practice, yet it too receives little attention from those investigating distance healing practices. Given the growth of Paganism in recent years these omissions from the literature should be addressed by researchers. This thesis investigates the healing practices of modern Paganism using a mixed methods approach across three phases. The first phase is a meta-analysis of existing non-contact healing research. There has been much research investigating the efficacy of various forms of non-contact healing which has resulted in reviews and meta-analysis which suggest that non-contact practices can have some positive effect upon the recipient’s wellbeing; however they also raise the issue of low study quality in this area. The most recent comprehensive review of this subject area was published in 2000; much more research has been published since then and the legitimacy of some previously published research has since been questioned. Also, such reviews focus on ‘whole’ human participants who might be susceptible to expectancy effects or benefit from the healing intentions of friends, family or their own religious groups. To address these issues an up to date, comprehensive meta-analysis was conducted that included healing studies that involved biological systems other than ‘whole’ humans (e.g., studies of plants or cell cultures) that were less susceptible to placebo-like effects and investigated the impact of study quality. Phase two employed interviews with practising Pagans regarding their spell casting practices. Eight Pagans from a variety of traditions were interviewed using semi structured interviews and the data were analysed using thematic analysis. Six major themes and 16 subthemes were extracted from the data and used to inform the design of phase three. Phase three is a randomised controlled trial of Pagan healing spells. The trial utilised a delayed intervention design. Various aspects of the trial design were informed by phase two interviews, such as the choice of outcome measure, the use of spell request forms, participant pictures and items, and scepticism measures.

Learning representations is a central challenge in machine learning. For speech recognition, we are interested in learning robust representations that are stable across different acoustic environments, recording equipment and irrelevant inter– and intra– speaker variabilities. This thesis is concerned with representation learning for acoustic model adaptation to speakers and environments, construction of acoustic models in low-resource settings, and learning representations from multiple acoustic channels. The investigations are primarily focused on the hybrid approach to acoustic modelling based on hidden Markov models and artificial neural networks (ANN). The first contribution concerns acoustic model adaptation. This comprises two new adaptation transforms operating in ANN parameters space. Both operate at the level of activation functions and treat a trained ANN acoustic model as a canonical set of fixed-basis functions, from which one can later derive variants tailored to the specific distribution present in adaptation data. The first technique, termed Learning Hidden Unit Contributions (LHUC), depends on learning distribution-dependent linear combination coefficients for hidden units. This technique is then extended to altering groups of hidden units with parametric and differentiable pooling operators. We found the proposed adaptation techniques pose many desirable properties: they are relatively low-dimensional, do not overfit and can work in both a supervised and an unsupervised manner. For LHUC we also present extensions to speaker adaptive training and environment factorisation. On average, depending on the characteristics of the test set, 5-25% relative word error rate (WERR) reductions are obtained in an unsupervised two-pass adaptation setting. The second contribution concerns building acoustic models in low-resource data scenarios. In particular, we are concerned with insufficient amounts of transcribed acoustic material for estimating acoustic models in the target language – thus assuming resources like lexicons or texts to estimate language models are available. First we proposed an ANN with a structured output layer which models both context–dependent and context–independent speech units, with the context-independent predictions used at runtime to aid the prediction of context-dependent states. We also propose to perform multi-task adaptation with a structured output layer. We obtain consistent WERR reductions up to 6.4% in low-resource speaker-independent acoustic modelling. Adapting those models in a multi-task manner with LHUC decreases WERRs by an additional 13.6%, compared to 12.7% for non multi-task LHUC. We then demonstrate that one can build better acoustic models with unsupervised multi– and cross– lingual initialisation and find that pre-training is a largely language-independent. Up to 14.4% WERR reductions are observed, depending on the amount of the available transcribed acoustic data in the target language. The third contribution concerns building acoustic models from multi-channel acoustic data. For this purpose we investigate various ways of integrating and learning multi-channel representations. In particular, we investigate channel concatenation and the applicability of convolutional layers for this purpose. We propose a multi-channel convolutional layer with cross-channel pooling, which can be seen as a data-driven non-parametric auditory attention mechanism. We find that for unconstrained microphone arrays, our approach is able to match the performance of the comparable models trained on beamform-enhanced signals.

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Traditionally, humanities scholars carrying out research on a specific or on multiple literary work(s) are interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages. But the digital age has opened possibilities for scholars to enhance their traditional workflows. Enabled by digitization projects, humanities scholars can nowadays reach a large number of digitized texts through web portals such as Google Books or Internet Archive. Digital editions exist also for ancient texts; notable examples are PHI Latin Texts and the Perseus Digital Library. This shift from reading a single book “on paper” to the possibility of browsing many digital texts is one of the origins and principal pillars of the digital humanities domain, which helps developing solutions to handle vast amounts of cultural heritage data – text being the main data type. In contrast to the traditional methods, the digital humanities allow to pose new research questions on cultural heritage datasets. Some of these questions can be answered with existent algorithms and tools provided by the computer science domain, but for other humanities questions scholars need to formulate new methods in collaboration with computer scientists. Developed in the late 1980s, the digital humanities primarily focused on designing standards to represent cultural heritage data such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for texts, and to aggregate, digitize and deliver data. In the last years, visualization techniques have gained more and more importance when it comes to analyzing data. For example, Saito introduced her 2010 digital humanities conference paper with: “In recent years, people have tended to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of information in various contexts. Therefore, arguments about ’Information Visualization’ as a method to make information easy to comprehend are more than understandable.” A major impulse for this trend was given by Franco Moretti. In 2005, he published the book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”, in which he proposes so-called distant reading approaches for textual data that steer the traditional way of approaching literature towards a completely new direction. Instead of reading texts in the traditional way – so-called close reading –, he invites to count, to graph and to map them. In other words, to visualize them. This dissertation presents novel close and distant reading visualization techniques for hitherto unsolved problems. Appropriate visualization techniques have been applied to support basic tasks, e.g., visualizing geospatial metadata to analyze the geographical distribution of cultural heritage data items or using tag clouds to illustrate textual statistics of a historical corpus. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on developing information visualization and visual analytics methods that support investigating research questions that require the comparative analysis of various digital humanities datasets. We first take a look at the state-of-the-art of existing close and distant reading visualizations that have been developed to support humanities scholars working with literary texts. We thereby provide a taxonomy of visualization methods applied to show various aspects of the underlying digital humanities data. We point out open challenges and we present our visualizations designed to support humanities scholars in comparatively analyzing historical datasets. In short, we present (1) GeoTemCo for the comparative visualization of geospatial-temporal data, (2) the two tag cloud designs TagPies and TagSpheres that comparatively visualize faceted textual summaries, (3) TextReuseGrid and TextReuseBrowser to explore re-used text passages among the texts of a corpus, (4) TRAViz for the visualization of textual variation between multiple text editions, and (5) the visual analytics system MusikerProfiling to detect similar musicians to a given musician of interest. Finally, we summarize our and the collaboration experiences of other visualization researchers to emphasize the ingredients required for a successful project in the digital humanities, and we take a look at future challenges in that research field.

<p>We are currently in an ongoing internationalisation period, demanding organizations to coordinate activities spanning geographically through time and traditional boundaries. Co-workers begin to work more frequently geographically dispersed from each other creating new challenges for leaders and organisations all over the world. The distance requires groups to use technology to cooperate, bringing both advantages and disadvantages. These changes demand organizations to go from traditional team formations to virtual. This leads us to our topic of research, investigating Marina Systems' experience with the previously stated work setting.What problems can be found at Marina Systems regarding their dispersed work setting and how can they be solved?The purpose of our research was to find the challenges and possibilities that Marina Systems perceive, as well as contributing with sustainable solutions for managing their distant teams. We conducted a qualitative case study with interviews. Different theories used in this case study regarded geographically dispersed teams, virtual teams, hybrid teams and distant leadership.The results found in the interviews showed that Marina Systems had some ofthe challenges and problems found in the theory chapter. They can become more successful in their planned expansion if they start considering their employees as members of a hybrid team and start adapting their leadership behavior to what such groups need. Areas of communication and a lacking reward system were some of the opportunities for improvement.</p>

We are currently in an ongoing internationalisation period, demanding organizations to coordinate activities spanning geographically through time and traditional boundaries. Co-workers begin to work more frequently geographically dispersed from each other creating new challenges for leaders and organisations all over the world. The distance requires groups to use technology to cooperate, bringing both advantages and disadvantages. These changes demand organizations to go from traditional team formations to virtual. This leads us to our topic of research, investigating Marina Systems' experience with the previously stated work setting.What problems can be found at Marina Systems regarding their dispersed work setting and how can they be solved?The purpose of our research was to find the challenges and possibilities that Marina Systems perceive, as well as contributing with sustainable solutions for managing their distant teams. We conducted a qualitative case study with interviews. Different theories used in this case study regarded geographically dispersed teams, virtual teams, hybrid teams and distant leadership.The results found in the interviews showed that Marina Systems had some ofthe challenges and problems found in the theory chapter. They can become more successful in their planned expansion if they start considering their employees as members of a hybrid team and start adapting their leadership behavior to what such groups need. Areas of communication and a lacking reward system were some of the opportunities for improvement.