The objective of this program of research was to listen to parents voices on homework with a focus on what homework means for their children, themselves and their families. While, within this body of literature, there is consensus on a definition of homework, a multitude of studies on homework and its effect on academic achievement and the development of work habits, and an extensive body of literature on types of homework assignments, there are no known qualitative studies on homework from parents perspectives. Within schools, teachers are positioned as knowing professionals and parents are positioned as helpers, who know less about the learning process. Power and authority rest with educators who make decisions important to teaching and learning decisions about homework policies and practices, for example often with little or no parent input or participation. Because teachers ask for little input from parents, parents rarely feel they can talk to teachers about their childrens experiences with homework and the resulting impact on their family.<p> Determining what knowledge parents of elementary school children (pre-Kindergarten through Grade 8) hold about homework, how they feel about homework, how homework impacts their children, how homework impacts them as parents, and how homework impacts their families was the focus of this narrative inquiry. The parents stories highlight the non-academic benefits the parents believe exist for their children through their engagement with homework. They also bring to the fore the many reasons homework can be problematic for their children and for them as they attend to the individuality of their children and the complexity of their family lives. They raise important issues for educators to consider in relation to homework: the implications variations within families, schools, teachers, parents and students may have for homework policies and practices; the need for reciprocity in home/school communications and the development of equitable rather than hierarchical relationships between parents and educators. Possibilities for changes in teacher education, both preservice and inservice; for a rethinking of policy and practice for both parents and educators; and for the direction of future research all emerge in this work.

The racialized realities faced by Black students provide an impetus to examine the controversy over Canada's first Africentric Alternative School, approved on January 29, 2008 by the Toronto District School Board. Newspaper articles, editorials and letters to the editor, as well as speeches by delegations and trustees, provide a rich snapshot of the arguments put forth in the heated political debate. Through the lens of equity and critical race theory, the diverse and divergent stances taken by both proponents and opponents of the school are analysed and understood. A conceptual framework of hidden and public transcripts (Scott, 1990) is used to distinguish arguments that reflect on the lived experiences of Black students from those that reiterate the dominant discourses of liberal democratic societies. The findings emerge as three opposing sets of themes that reveal a transcript reflective of the ongoing salience of racism within ostensibly liberal claims to racial equality.

The racialized realities faced by Black students provide an impetus to examine the controversy over Canada's first Africentric Alternative School, approved on January 29, 2008 by the Toronto District School Board. Newspaper articles, editorials and letters to the editor, as well as speeches by delegations and trustees, provide a rich snapshot of the arguments put forth in the heated political debate. Through the lens of equity and critical race theory, the diverse and divergent stances taken by both proponents and opponents of the school are analysed and understood. A conceptual framework of hidden and public transcripts (Scott, 1990) is used to distinguish arguments that reflect on the lived experiences of Black students from those that reiterate the dominant discourses of liberal democratic societies. The findings emerge as three opposing sets of themes that reveal a transcript reflective of the ongoing salience of racism within ostensibly liberal claims to racial equality.

長久以來音樂於人們生活中扮演著極為重要角色，在大多數人的成長過程裡或多或少皆有令其印象深刻之旋律。然而這些旋律常由專業人士所創作，對於未接受過專業訓練的民眾而言，若欲創作自己專屬之音樂難度甚高，而此目標也變得遙不可及。 為解決上述問題，降低音樂自行創作門檻，本研究以行動裝置之使用環境不受限及直覺性觸控介面兩大特性為運行環境，設計Android系統上之音樂創作軟體，協助未受過音樂專業訓練的庶民透過音樂主旋律並搭配適合的和弦配樂達成自行創作音樂之目標。本創作音樂軟體利用行動裝置提供「繪畫旋律曲線」與「字詞輸入」兩種輸入方式，將使用者繪畫的旋律曲線轉換為一段音樂主旋律，進行調性判斷、修正主旋律組成音並利用音樂動機樣式變化加以使主旋律更為豐富，輔以隱藏式馬可夫模型產生適切之和弦序列。最後將主旋律聲波與其產生的和弦聲波以混音的結果呈現給予使用者。 為評估本創作軟體是否符合使用者需求，以實驗觀察法邀請38位受試者進行軟體操作與評估。分析結果顯示，近75%的受試者認為由音樂創作軟體所產生之主旋律與和弦彼此搭配良好且符合其音樂動機。在介面易用性評估方面，結果顯示有近90%受測者認為本研究所提出的音樂創作軟體具有簡單易用之特性且能夠協助其降低創作音樂之門檻。簡單且易用的音樂創作軟體在實務上之重要性不言可喻，不但可使非專業使用者達成自我創作音樂之夢想，更可讓其沉浸於音樂創作成就感之中。 / Music plays as an essential role in human life and it affects the listeners on a certain extent. However, a pleasing music is the production of musicians and is difficult to be created by novices without musical specialty. To lower the entry point of music creation, this thesis design and develop a music accompaniment system on Android with the characteristics of intuitive input and ubiquity for novices without professional music background. The developed system consists of the following modules, main melody preprocessing (key determination and melody modification), music similarity retrieval, main melody post processing (music motif variance), chord accompaniment (Hidden Markov Model and mixing main melody and chord melody) and text processing (tone determination and pitch finding) to automatically match the accordance between melodies and chords that are inputted by patting or word. Thirty-eight participants were invited for system evaluation using the observational experiment. Nearly 75% of participants perceived that the melody and chord matching fits their musical motivations, while 90% stated that they can rely on the system to easily produce desirable music. Our findings contribute to the essence of music creation that the system provides a simplified interface for novice being immersed in music accomplishments, similar to that of professional musicians.

This thesis analyzes the impact of the political decision to broaden the scope of the Government of Canada's 3-year National Homelessness Initiative (Human Resource Development Canada, NHI, 2002) from an urban focus to one that includes smaller communities. This change provided the opportunity to study the phenomenon of homelessness and how rural responses are formed. This author postulates that this focus of attention on an almost invisible phenomenon—rural homelessness—and the accompanying community planning processes funded by the Supportive Community Partnership Initiative (SCPI) will impact local social policy development. A multi-dimensional analytical approach was adopted and considered three components: first, a policy review, a broad look at the policy agenda framework in Canada; then, a case study to illustrate implementation issues related to the National Homelessness Initiative; and, finally, a reflection on current practice in order to realize a holistic critique of public policy. The influence of socio-economic, political, and cultural factors on local planning and capacity building will be highlighted. Various models of governance were adopted across the country and guided the collaborative processes. This thesis presents an in-depth look at the community action plans and activities of the Simcoe County Alliance to End Homelessness (SCATEH) in both the rural and urban settings of Simcoe County. The processes adopted, capacity building components identified, and outcomes over the 7 years covered by the SCPI agreement are examined. The limitations of using participatory local action planning to respond to complex issues such as homelessness are detailed along with a modified community-based policy development model recommended as a learning tool to be used by those volunteers acting as agents of change. It is widely recognized that safe, affordable social housing is a fundamental need, and one that is extremely difficult to meet. The contribution this research makes is to reveal how effective government-community partnerships can be in a rural setting.

Acoustic Event Detection / The detection of the Acoustic Events (AEs) naturally produced in a meeting room may help to describe the human and social activity. The automatic description of interactions between humans and environment can be useful for providing: implicit assistance to the people inside the room, context-aware and content-aware information requiring a minimum of human attention or interruptions, support for high-level analysis of the underlying acoustic scene, etc. On the other hand, the recent fast growth of available audio or audiovisual content strongly demands tools for analyzing, indexing, searching and retrieving the available documents. Given an audio document, the first processing step usually is audio segmentation (AS), i.e. the partitioning of the input audio stream into acoustically homogeneous regions which are labelled according to a predefined broad set of classes like speech, music, noise, etc. Acoustic event detection (AED) is the objective of this thesis work. A variety of features coming not only from audio but also from the video modality is proposed to deal with that detection problem in meeting-room and broadcast news domains. Two basic detection approaches are investigated in this work: a joint segmentation and classification using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) with Gaussian Mixture Densities (GMMs), and a detection-by-classification approach using discriminative Support Vector Machines (SVMs). For the first case, a fast one-pass-training feature selection algorithm is developed in this thesis to select, for each AE class, the subset of multimodal features that shows the best detection rate. AED in meeting-room environments aims at processing the signals collected by distant microphones and video cameras in order to obtain the temporal sequence of (possibly overlapped) AEs that have been produced in the room. When applied to interactive seminars with a certain degree of spontaneity, the detection of acoustic events from only the audio modality alone shows a large amount of errors, which is mostly due to the temporal overlaps of sounds. This thesis includes several novelties regarding the task of multimodal AED. Firstly, the use of video features. Since in the video modality the acoustic sources do not overlap (except for occlusions), the proposed features improve AED in such rather spontaneous scenario recordings. Secondly, the inclusion of acoustic localization features, which, in combination with the usual spectro-temporal audio features, yield a further improvement in recognition rate. Thirdly, the comparison of feature-level and decision-level fusion strategies for the combination of audio and video modalities. In the later case, the system output scores are combined using two statistical approaches: weighted arithmetical mean and fuzzy integral. On the other hand, due to the scarcity of annotated multimodal data, and, in particular, of data with temporal sound overlaps, a new multimodal database with a rich variety of meeting-room AEs has been recorded and manually annotated, and it has been made publicly available for research purposes.

Tracking and understanding human gait is an important step towards improving elderly mobility and safety. This thesis presents a vision-based tracking system that estimates the 3D pose of a wheeled walker user's lower limbs with cameras mounted on the moving walker. The tracker estimates 3D poses from images of the lower limbs in the coronal plane in a dynamic, uncontrolled environment. It employs a probabilistic approach based on particle filtering with three different camera setups: a monocular RGB camera, binocular RGB cameras, and a depth camera. For the RGB cameras, observation likelihoods are designed to compare the colors and gradients of each frame with initial templates that are manually extracted. Two strategies are also investigated for handling appearance change of tracking target: increasing number of templates and using different representations of colors. For the depth camera, two observation likelihoods are developed: the first one works directly in the 3D space, while the second one works in the projected image space. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the tracking system with different users for all three camera setups. It is demonstrated that the trackers with the RGB cameras produce results with higher error as compared to the depth camera, and the strategies for handling appearance change improve tracking accuracy in general. On the other hand, the tracker with the depth sensor successfully tracks the 3D poses of users over the entire video sequence and is robust against unfavorable conditions such as partial occlusion, missing observations, and deformable tracking target.

The objective of this program of research was to listen to parents voices on homework with a focus on what homework means for their children, themselves and their families. While, within this body of literature, there is consensus on a definition of homework, a multitude of studies on homework and its effect on academic achievement and the development of work habits, and an extensive body of literature on types of homework assignments, there are no known qualitative studies on homework from parents perspectives. Within schools, teachers are positioned as knowing professionals and parents are positioned as helpers, who know less about the learning process. Power and authority rest with educators who make decisions important to teaching and learning decisions about homework policies and practices, for example often with little or no parent input or participation. Because teachers ask for little input from parents, parents rarely feel they can talk to teachers about their childrens experiences with homework and the resulting impact on their family.<p> Determining what knowledge parents of elementary school children (pre-Kindergarten through Grade 8) hold about homework, how they feel about homework, how homework impacts their children, how homework impacts them as parents, and how homework impacts their families was the focus of this narrative inquiry. The parents stories highlight the non-academic benefits the parents believe exist for their children through their engagement with homework. They also bring to the fore the many reasons homework can be problematic for their children and for them as they attend to the individuality of their children and the complexity of their family lives. They raise important issues for educators to consider in relation to homework: the implications variations within families, schools, teachers, parents and students may have for homework policies and practices; the need for reciprocity in home/school communications and the development of equitable rather than hierarchical relationships between parents and educators. Possibilities for changes in teacher education, both preservice and inservice; for a rethinking of policy and practice for both parents and educators; and for the direction of future research all emerge in this work.

I syfte att undersöka om, och i så fall hur, förskollärare arbetar med djuretik som en värderingsfråga undersöks (1) förskollärares tolkning av läroplanens skrivning om ”respekt för allt levande”, (2) hur förskollärare arbetar med värderingsfrågan djuretik och (3) vilken hänsyn de tar till läroplanens krav på saklighet och allsidighet i detta arbete. Empirin bygger på kvalitativa intervjuer med sex förskollärare varav 3 är vegetarianer. Analysen baseras på poststrukturalistisk teori och teori om den dolda läroplanen. Informanterna anger att de arbetar med djuretik i ringa omfattning men visar också att förskollärarna förmedlar omedvetna budskap om djuretik. Hur dessa förskollärare arbetar med djuretik kännetecknas av en relativt stor heterogenitet som delvis är beroende av de intervjuades kostval. Mot bakgrund av att lärarna i denna studie tolkar in djur i läroplanens direktiv om att arbeta för att barn utvecklar ”respekt för allt levande”, dras en slutsats att den lärare som vill arbeta för att barn ska utveckla respekt för djur kan hänvisa till denna skrivning för att rättfärdiga sitt arbete. / In order to examine whether and, if so, how preschool teachers work with animal ethics, I investigate (1) preschool teachers' interpretation of the the formulation of the Swedish curriculum about "respect for all living things", (2) how preschool teachers work with issues of animal ethics, and (3) which consideration they give in this work to the curriculum requirements of objectivity and comprehensiveness. The empirical data is based on qualitative interviews with six pre-school teachers whereof three are vegetarians. The analysis is based on poststructuralist theory and theory of the hidden curriculum. The informants tell that they are working with animal ethics to a small extent. However, the teachers do also mediate unconscious messages about animal ethics. How these preschool teachers work with animal ethics is characterized by a relatively high heterogeneity that partly depends on the food choice of the interviewees. Given that the teachers in this study do include the animals when they interpret the curriculum directives on working to ensure that children develop "respect for all living things", I conclude that the teachers who want to work for children to develop respect for animals may refer to this curriculum wording to justify their work.

Speech recognition systems have been implemented using a wide range of signal processing techniques including neuromorphic/biological inspired and Digital Signal Processing techniques. Neuromorphic/biologically inspired techniques, such as silicon cochlea models, are based on fairly simple yet highly parallel computation and/or computational units. While the area of digital signal processing (DSP) is based on block transforms and statistical or error minimization methods. Essential to each of these techniques is the first stage of extracting meaningful information from the speech signal, which is known as feature extraction. This can be done using biologically inspired techniques such as silicon cochlea models, or techniques beginning with a model of speech production and then trying to separate the the vocal tract response from an excitation signal. Even within each of these approaches, there are multiple techniques including cepstrum filtering, which sits under the class of Homomorphic signal processing, or techniques using FFT based predictive approaches. The underlying reality is there are multiple techniques that have attacked the problem in speech recognition but the problem is still far from being solved. The techniques that have shown to have the best recognition rates involve Cepstrum Coefficients for the feature extraction and Hidden-Markov Models to perform the pattern recognition. The presented research develops an analog system based on programmable analog array technology that can perform the initial stages of auditory feature extraction and recognition before passing information to a digital signal processor. The goal being a low power system that can be fully contained on one or more integrated circuit chips. Results show that it is possible to realize advanced filtering techniques such as Cepstrum Filtering and Vector Quantization in analog circuitry. Prior to this work, previous applications of analog signal processing have focused on vision, cochlea models, anti-aliasing filters and other single component uses. Furthermore, classic designs have looked heavily at utilizing op-amps as a basic core building block for these designs. This research also shows a novel design for a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) decoder utilizing circuits that take advantage of the inherent properties of subthreshold transistors and floating-gate technology to create low-power computational blocks.