This article describes the Xtrieval framework - a flexible platform for testing and evaluating different aspects of retrieval systems. The background for the design of the framework is to develop an extensible platform for the combination of text and content-based multimedia retrieval. We describe the general composition of the framework and its main functionality. An evaluation of the framework capabilities is given with two exemplary retrieval evaluation tasks.

Univ., Diss.--Zürich, 2005.

Potsdam, Universität, Thesis (doctoral), 2001.

This study focused on fathers and their willingness to participate in family related research studies. Traditional expectations of parental roles have hindered the inclusion of fathers in research studies despite gradual changes in cultural norms and research studies that indicate fathers have a significant influence on the developmental outcomes of children. Recent work in this area indicates that fathers are just as likely as mothers to participate in family related research. This study sought to shed light on this issue. Employees at three large Southeastern Universities were asked to participate in one of three different types of research: Academics, Athletics, and Behavioral Functioning. The requests were manipulated to be framed as either positive, negative, or neutral requests for parental participation in the study. Requests were sent to employees either via interdepartmental mail for one institution or via email for two institutions. It was hypothesized that (1) requests framed in a negative manner would have higher rates of participation than requests framed in either a positive or a neutral manner, (2) there would be more mothers than fathers who agreed to participate in the study across research type (Academic, Athletic, and Behavioral), (3) fathers would have higher rates of participation in athletic related research vs. academic and behavioral research, (4) the Lum Emotional Availability of Parents Scale (LEAP) would be found construct valid, and (5) parental willingness to participate in future research would be related to parental emotional availability. Only hypothesis four received strong support as the LEAP was found to be correlated with measures of parental warmth and involvement in expected directions. Additional findings revealed that mothers had a higher response rate than fathers. Implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.

Effective software cost estimation is one of the most challenging and important activities in software development. The software industry does not estimate projects well. Poor estimation leads to poor project planning with resulting schedule overruns, inadequate staffing, low system quality, and many aborted projects. Research on software estimation is needed to build more accurate models of the key aspects of software development. The goals of research in this dissertation are to investigate and improve the modeling of team size and project structures in current software estimation methods.Mathematical models for estimating the impacts of project team size and three variations of project structure are developed. These models accept the outputs of the COCOMO II software estimation tool, allow variation in both team size and project structure, and produce more detailed project estimates. This new extended model of COCOMO II is implemented in a decision support tool f or software estimators called PSEstimate.Following the design science research paradigm, the artifact is evaluated with an experiment with experienced software project managers. Three treatment groups: a manual (no tool) group, a COCOMO II group, and a PSEstimate group, completed two multipart software cost estimation tasks. The accuracy and consistency of the cost and schedule estimates, the participants' confidence in their estimates, and their satisfaction with and perceived usefulness of the cost estimation tool are measured.The experimental results support most of the hypotheses of the dissertation. For most tasks, individuals aided by computer-based decision support tools produce more accurate project effort estimates and are more confident in their estimates than manual estimators. There are no significant differences between the three groups on schedule estimation. A possible explanation is that experienced estimators in the manual group compensate for the inaccuracy of th eir effort estimates by adding time to their schedule estimates.The research contributions are new mathematical models for software estimation based on project team size and structure; a decision support tool (PSEstimate) that incorporates these models; and the experimental results that demonstrate improvements in software estimation by experienced project managers when the new models and tool are applied in practice.

This item was digitized as part of the Million Books Project led by Carnegie Mellon University and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Cornell University coordinated the participation of land-grant and agricultural libraries in providing historical agricultural information for the digitization project; the University of Arizona Libraries, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Office of Arid Lands Studies collaborated in the selection and provision of material for the digitization project.

This item was digitized as part of the Million Books Project led by Carnegie Mellon University and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Cornell University coordinated the participation of land-grant and agricultural libraries in providing historical agricultural information for the digitization project; the University of Arizona Libraries, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Office of Arid Lands Studies collaborated in the selection and provision of material for the digitization project.

Syftet med denna studie är att redogöra hur förskollärare ser på och använder sig av naturvetenskapliga experiment i förskolan. Studien ska ta fram vilka motiv och målsättningar en förskollärare har inför en aktivitet med experiment. Tidigare forskning visar att naturvetenskap och teknik inte varit så högt prioriterade i förskolans pedagogiska verksamhet. Därför så reviderade Skolverket Läroplanen för förskolan 2010, då bl.a. naturvetenskap och teknik fick ett större utrymme i den pedagogiska verksamheten. För att introducera naturvetenskap på ett stimulerande och roligt sätt så undersöker jag om experiment kan vara ett bra pedagogiskt verktyg. I denna studie har jag gjort kvalitativa intervjuer med sju olika förskollärare. Jag besökte fem olika förskolor, varav två är belägna i storstad och tre i ett mindre samhälle. Förskolorna drivs med olika profiler som Montessori, Reggio Emilia, kristen och teknik. Studien utgår från arbetet med experiment i den pedagogiska verksamheten med hjälp av John Dewey och Lev S Vygotskij. Resultatet av studien visade att arbetet med experiment i förskolans verksamhet uppfylldes genom att barnen fick en lustfylld erfarenhet av naturvetenskapliga experiment. Att få arbeta med att undersöka, upptäcka och utforska nya fenomen genom experiment tycker respondenterna är viktigt. Respondenterna försökte i största mån att göra experiment utifrån barnens intresse och upptäckarlust.

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