Thesis (MA (African Languages))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / This study explores the theoretical work in articulating the motivations and conditions for account-giving in Isizulu. In this situation, accounts are similar to narratives and can be retained at the level of private reflections or written as diary entries or for others to read and refer to from time to time. The importance of the intelligibility of accounts is established with reference to Schank and Abelson (1977) who contend that people construct accounts based on their knowledge structure approach, causal reasoning and text comprehension. Thus, for an account to be honored, it has to be goal-oriented and coherent. In this study, the social-interactive aspects of account-giving are investigated and it is discovered that severe reproach forms involving personality attacks and derogatory aspects, elicit defensive reactions that result in negative interpersonal and emotional consequences. Narrative accounts based on McIntyre (1981) form the basis of moral and social events and as such, stories have two elements from which they are explored. They are explored firstly in the way in which they are told and secondly, on the way they are lived in the social context. These stories follow a historically or culturally based format and to this effect, Gergen (1994) suggested narrative criteria that constitute a historically contingent narrative form. Narrative forms are linguistic tools that have important social functions to satisfactorily fulfill such as stability narrative, progressive narrative and regressive narrative. According to Gergen (1994), self-narratives are social processes in which individuals are realized on the personal perspective or experience, and as such their emotions are viewed as constitutive features of relationship. The self-narratives used and analyzed in this study portray the contemporary culture-based elements or segments of a well-formed narrative.

This thesis explores the possibility of dialogue between leader and follower in order to further develop the theory and practice of relational leadership. It draws from and contributes to Relational Leadership Theory (Uhl-Bien 2006) and Buber’s concept of ‘I- Thou’ dialogue (Buber 1958). Using first-person and co-operative inquiry methods (Reason and Bradbury 2008b) the ‘space between’ (Bradbury and Lichtenstein 2000, Buber 1958) leader and follower is explored in order to reveal the complexities inherent within leadership relations. Four main findings are detailed which enrich our understanding of how leadership relations operate from ‘within living involvement’ (Shotter 2006). Firstly, the quality of leader-follower encounter could be affected by levels of ‘busyness’ and the ensuing assessment and prioritising process. Secondly, the pressure to ‘seem’ rather than ‘be’ may strengthen the construction of a façade which might be dismantled, in part, through disclosure, though this may feel extremely risky given organisational ‘rules’. Thirdly, mutuality between leader and follower may be crucially influenced by the way in which ‘leader’, ‘leadership’ and ‘power’ are constructed in the between space. Finally, ineffable dialogic moments may occur through sensing a particular quality of encounter amidst and despite the complexity of a myriad of micro-processes vying for attention in the between space. This thesis contributes a further strand to RLT constructionist work focused on the quality of leader-follower encounter which has not been previously revealed. Leadership constructs and macro-discourses relating to power, ‘busyness’ and the need for ‘worthwhile meetings’ encourages transactional relating. Consequently, opportunities for genuinely encountering others in organisational settings are suffocated. This holds important implications for ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ who wish to creatively address pressing organisational issues in the 21st century through dialogue. Fundamentally this thesis suggests we pause to consider the implications that the nature of our encounters in our work-life have upon us as human beings wishing to know what it is to be fully human.

This submission sets out a narrative of how a practitioner in the field of education identified and implemented the changes required, both in research methodology and in practice, in order to answer the question ‘how do I improve my practice?’ (Whitehead and McNiff, 2004) while remaining true to a personal value system by not teaching or researching in ‘a living contradiction’ (Ibid: 5) where a value system and a practice are not working in harmony. This submission chronicles a self-study journey to improve practice by identifying and reflecting on the changes required to improve that practice when ‘teaching’ ten-year-old pupils historical enquiry online. The narrative demonstrates how a practice can be reconceptualised and illustrates the outcomes of that re-conceptualisation. The particular practice in question was set within the context of technological advances in the Internet over the last half decade: in the early research the pupils used the Internet as an online encyclopaedia while in the later stages of the research they used the Internet as a means to access online authoring sites on the read-write resource Web 2.0. The journey of change follows the practitioner from teaching historical enquiry within a classroom setting to that of teaching historical enquiry within an online authoring site, called a wiki. To achieve those changes many key concepts (that had informed teaching practices at the beginning of the research journey) had to be deconstructed and subsequently restructured using an alternative design. The learning process was one of the key concepts teased apart and reconstructed using Wenger’s ‘communities of practice’ approach as a template for designing a small community of practices. It was the emerging small community of practices on the wiki that developed into a new perspective on how to promote the learning process most effectively in an online context. The submission also narrates the ontological dimension to the journey where the practitioner’s key personal values were used in the change process to create a living theory. This value driven methodology created living standards of judgement. The submission identifies, then critically reflects on, the two voices representing the significance of the developing perspectives of the writer as researcher and as practitioner. It then uses journal entries, articles and interviews to follow the practitioner journey from perspective point one to perspective point two. It reflects critically on the change process being experienced and the growing confidence that emerged as the practitioner and researcher voices began, in combination, to challenge accepted practice and develop a new single voice that impacts upon both the professional context and the field of educational theory. It leads to the acceptance of some of Wenger’s assertions that underpin his notion that meaning is negotiated in communities of practice and examines the changes in thinking that eventually led to this model being interpreted as a reference point only and to the suggestion of a new perspective on the learning process. The contribution to knowledge is, then, to be found in this new perspective of what is meant by a community of practices and the learning processes it generates with reference to teaching historical enquiry skills to ten-year-old pupils on an online authoring site called a wiki.

A presente dissertação apresenta uma primeira tradução em língua portuguesa (variante brasileira) para o conto \"O forno\" (1969), do escritor soviético Evguéni Kharitónov, seguida de um glossário. A proposta do trabalho é realizar uma análise literária desse texto, centrada na figura do narrador-protagonista e suas peculiaridades. O desenvolvimento dessa análise dar-se-á em três partes: considerações a respeito do narrador em primeira pessoa e a caracterização de seu discurso como sendo um \"discurso amoroso\"; a construção das demais personagens do conto e suas relações com o narrador-protagonista; as relações que esse narrador-protagonista estabelece com o tempo e o espaço de sua narrativa; e, por fim, a conclusão. Além da tradução e da análise, esta dissertação apresenta, em apêndice, uma cronologia da vida e obra do escritor, bem como quatro outros textos ficcionais de sua autoria. Há também anexos com imagens referentes ao conto \"O forno\", com o intuito de ilustrar um pouco o contexto em que a história se passa, e algumas fotos do próprio Kharitónov. / The present dissertation presents the first translation in Portuguese (Brazilian variant) of the short story \"The Oven\" (1969), by the soviet writer Yevgeny Kharitonov, followed by a glossary. The works proposition is to carry a literary analysis of the text out, centered on the first person narrator and its peculiarities. The analysis development will happen in three parts: considerations about fisrt-person narrator and the characterization of its discourse as a \"lover\'s discourse\"; the characters construction and their relations with the narrator; the relations the first-person narrator establishes with time and space in the narrative; and lastly, the conclusion. Besides the translation and the analysis, there are, in appendix, a life and work chronology, as well as four additional fiction texts of the author. There are also, in addendum, images related to the short story \"The Oven\", in order to illustrate the contex of the story, in addition to some photos of Kharitonov himself.

<div>First-person videos (FPVs) captured by wearable cameras provide a huge amount of visual data. FPVs have different characteristics compared to broadcast videos and mobile videos. The video quality of FPVs are influenced by motion blur, tilt, rolling shutter and exposure distortions. In this work, we design image and video assessment methods applicable for FPVs. </div><div><br></div><div>Our video quality assessment mainly focuses on three quality problems. The first problem is the video frame artifacts including motion blur, tilt, rolling shutter, that are caused by the heavy and unstructured motion in FPVs. The second problem is the exposure distortions. Videos suffer from exposure distortions when the camera sensor is not exposed to the proper amount of light, which often caused by bad environmental lighting or capture angles. The third problem is the increased blurriness after video stabilization. The stabilized video is perceptually more blurry than its original because the masking effect of motion is no longer present. </div><div><br></div><div>To evaluate video frame artifacts, we introduce a new strategy for image quality estimation, called mutual reference (MR), which uses the information provided by overlapping content to estimate the image quality. The MR strategy is applied to FPVs by partitioning temporally nearby frames with similar content into sets, and estimating their visual quality using their mutual information. We propose one MR quality estimator, Local Visual Information (LVI), that estimates the relative quality between two images which overlap.</div><div><br></div><div>To alleviate exposure distortions, we propose a controllable illumination enhancement method that adjusts the amount of enhancement with a single knob. The knob can be controlled by our proposed over-enhancement measure, Lightness Order Measure (LOM). Since the visual quality is an inverted U-shape function of the amount of enhancement, our design is to control the amount of enhancement so that the image is enhanced to the peak visual quality. </div><div><br></div><div>To estimate the increased blurriness after stabilization, we propose a visibility-inspired temporal pooling (VTP) mechanism. VTP mechanism models the motion masking effect on perceived video blurriness as the influence of the visibility of a frame on the temporal pooling weight of the frame quality score. The measure for visibility is estimated as the proportion of spatial details that is visible for human observers.</div>

Context. This thesis’ goal was to test whether or not perceptual elements which do not intrude on player movement were reliable methods of leading the player through an environment without specifically telling them where to go, focusing on players already accustomed to first person perspective(FPP) games. This was a remake of an older experiment in the hopes of finding different results than last time it was tested, by making improvements to the test chambers, and altering the application of these different elements which were used to test the participants navigation. Objectives. In the user study, the player was forced to pick between two mirrored pathways with a specific variable distinguishing them in the hopes that the players will follow a predictable pattern. By proving that none heads up display(HUD) elements were reliable tools for player navigation, it could introduce new ideas for level designers and artists working within the industry to guide player pathing in a first person perspective game. Methods. This experiment was constructed using different soft-wares commonly used in the game industry, and was made to be easily repeatable by other who would like to expand on the subject. References used were mostly scientific articles which could be found using google scholar, ACM library and researchgate. The articles in question were sourced by their use as references and the validity was assessed by their abstract, discussion thought process and own references used. Results. Using 17 different students from Blekinge institute of technology as participants in three different test scenarios where they had to navigate their surroundings by choosing between one of two pathways. The results show promising indications for further research in the subject, with the large majority of people picking the predicted path. Conclusions.While the data collected by the participants show promising results in favor of reliable means of navigation through the environmental effects used in the experiment, there were many altering factors at play which potentially could have altered the results. The topic of player navigation in games are a widely contested area with many factors at play. More research is necessary to reach a more conclusive answer, but shows great potential judging by the results.

The current models of skill in video games make one of two impositions on players: either to provide an estimate of their own skill, or complete several games before they can be properly assessed. However, in order to experience the most enjoyment and greatest sense of immersion, players need to play against the right difficulty. In order to assign the appropriate difficulty, the player's skill must first be captured accurately and quickly, before the player gets frustrated or bored. Rather than relying on game results that need to be averaged over several games, this thesis proposes predicting a player's skill from their behaviour within the first game. In order to do this, we explore methods for measuring skill in both a multiplayer and single-player game and methods for extracting appropriate information from the player's behaviour. The resulting predictions can then be used to automatically assign an appropriate difficulty to the player. In a multiplayer environment, we first demonstrate that a player's final rank canbe predicted within the first 30 seconds of a game with a correlation of over 0.8.This process is transferred to a single-player first-person shooter, where our modelis shown to assign difficulties comparable to a player's own assessment of theirskill within the first 30 seconds of a campaign. We argue that these methods forcapturing skill in a first-person shooter are transferable to other genres, and havethe potential to improve difficulty selection systems.

Mentshlichkeit – Yiddish for the ‘art of being a good hu(man)’ - is offered as an invitation to participate in practices that may have the power to dispel the haunting of a ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 1995). Inspired by ‘Action Research’, what Reason & Bradbury call inquiry into the ‘quality of our acting’, the author uses futuristic narrative, interwoven with discussion and dialogue, to see if it is possible to reflect and act generatively, as a man who is mindful of feminism’s challenge that ‘the personal is political’ (Reason and Bradbury 2001). Within a post-modern discourse, the author heads towards the irony and discomfort to be found in a text that explores goodness and masculinity in the same breath. But he is not alone, like some hero on a quest – rather he is inspired by the voices of challenge and support he hears in the course of his roles in diverse communities: as a Jew, a facilitator/consultant at Roffey Park Institute and a father. It is my intention to playfully invite you into this story; to see if it moves you, if it usefully meets your own experience and helps you consider your own action, within the paradoxes and dilemmas you face. Too often we can disappear within the words we write. It is my intention to ‘show up’, and as a man to meet the challenge of feminism, to live within this territory and act with some awareness of its contours. The characters in this story are inspired by the people I encounter, who remind me I am not ‘selfmade’, and that we men, in the words of Philip Corrigan, may usefully ‘re-member our bodies’ (Corrigan 1988). Ultimately this is a human-scale story, designed to provoke good conversations. I look forward to hearing what you would like to discuss.

Advances in wearable technologies are facilitating the understanding of human activities using first-person vision (FPV) for a wide range of assistive applications. In this thesis, we propose robust multiple motion features for human activity recognition from first-person videos. The proposed features encode discriminant characteristics from magnitude, direction and dynamics of motion estimated using optical flow. Moreover, we design novel virtual-inertial features from video, without using the actual inertial sensor, from the movement of intensity centroid across frames. Results on multiple datasets demonstrate that centroid-based inertial features improve the recognition performance of grid-based features. Moreover, we propose a multi-layer modelling framework that encodes hierarchical and temporal relationships among activities. The first layer operates on groups of features that effectively encode motion dynamics and temporal variations of intra-frame appearance descriptors of activities with a hierarchical topology. The second layer exploits the temporal context by weighting the outputs of the hierarchy during modelling. In addition, a post-decoding smoothing technique utilises decisions on past samples based on the confidence of the current sample. We validate the proposed framework with several classifiers, and the temporal modelling is shown to improve recognition performance. We also investigate the use of deep networks to simplify the feature engineering from firstperson videos. We propose a stacking of spectrograms to represent short-term global motions that contains a frequency-time representation of multiple motion components. This enables us to apply 2D convolutions to extract/learn motion features. We employ long short-term memory recurrent network to encode long-term temporal dependency among activities. Furthermore, we apply cross-domain knowledge transfer between inertial-based and vision-based approaches for egocentric activity recognition. We propose sparsity weighted combination of information from different motion modalities and/or streams. Results show that the proposed approach performs competitively with existing deep frameworks, moreover, with reduced complexity.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Este trabalho tem como tema central autobiografias escritas por indivíduos com autismo. A partir dos enredos que conduzem as narrativas, pretende-se mostrar como elas afetam e contribuem para visões existentes sobre autismo. O traço relevante e singular deste estudo é sua proposta de sublinhar a narrativa em primeira pessoa, as maneiras pelas quais eles se identificam e redefinem as noções existentes sobre autismo como categoria psiquiátrica. O objetivo é compreender as diferentes formas como os autistas se adaptam, negociam, resistem ou até mesmo criam novas normas para lidar com sua condição. Como ferramenta teórica, foram tomadas as ideias do filósofo canadense Ian Hacking, sobre tipos humanos e efeito looping, para analisar como as pessoas classificadas ou autoclassificadas ressignificam, através de suas experiências, as tipificações sobre autismo. As narrativas selecionadas não só permitem que autistas compartilhem suas experiências com o mundo, mas também ampliem os sentidos que atribuímos ao autismo como experiência e como diagnóstico. / The central theme of this work is related to the autobiographies of autistic individuals. Our objective is to demonstrate how these narratives affect and contribute to the current view of autism. The most relevant and unique aspect of this study is to highlight the autistics selfperception and the way in which they identify themselves with prevailing psychiatric notions and many times redefine them. Our objective is to understand the many different ways in which they adapt, negotiate, resist and find new forms to deal with their condition. We use philosopher Ian Hackings theory about human types and looping effect in order to analyze how classified or self-classified individuals through their own experiences give a new significance to the typifications of autism.