The objectives of this study were to (1) establish whether a relationship exists between individuals’ perception of organisational culture, measured by the South African Cultural Instrument (2005) and lifelong learning, measured by the Dimensions of the Learning Organisation Questionnaire (2003); and (2) determine whether the participants differed with regard to these variables in terms of sociodemographic contextual factors such as age, race, gender, education, years of service, disability status and job level. A quantitative study, using primary data, was conducted on a convenient sample (N=257) of full-time public service officials in a South African public service organisation. Correlational and inferential statistical analyses revealed statistically significant positive relationships between individuals’ perception of organisational culture and lifelong learning. Significant differences were found in the perception of these variables for individuals with different years of service and for individuals of different age groups. The findings should contribute valuable knowledge to the field of organisational behaviour, which could be used to promote a lifelong learning culture in public service organisations. The study concludes with recommendations for future practice / Industrial & Organisational Psychology

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-25T20:20:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sancha Livia Resende.pdf: 2688564 bytes, checksum: 79838198764ba455d0ab17a0df30bf37 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-11-29 / This master thesis deals with the goldsmith activity in the city of Belo Horizonte - MG, from data and information collected about three situations of jewel-making. On the first situation, a goldsmith who works in a atelier where he creates and executes the jewel, having full control of all the steps of this making. On the second situation, the goldsmith has a small manufactory, where he executes the jewel created by another person, in this case, the designer. On the third, a goldsmith works in an industry, making parts of jewels or small adjustments to finished jewels. On the jewel-making, they use both hands and head, but not every one of them acts at the various steps of this making. Although in the situations selected for this study the relations between hands and heads shows up in the goldsmith's working practice, theirs working places are different and in the industry most of them are distributed by separated departments and offices, executing standard models created by other people / Esta dissertação de mestrado trata do fazer do ourives na cidade de Belo Horizonte MG, a partir de dados e informações coletados sobre três situações do fazer joia. Na primeira situação, um ourives que trabalha em um atelier onde cria e faz uma joia, tendo o domínio de todas as fases desse fazer. Na segunda situação, o ourives tem uma pequena oficina, onde faz joia concebida por outro, no caso o designer. Na terceira, um ourives trabalha em uma indústria, executando partes de uma joia ou ajustes em joias prontas. No fazer joias todos eles usam mãos e cabeça, porém nem todos atuam nas várias etapas desse fazer. Ainda que nas situações selecionadas para o estudo, as relações entre mãos e cabeça apareçam nas práticas de trabalho dos ourives, os seus locais de trabalho são diferentes e na indústria a maioria deles está distribuída por setores e salas separadas, executando modelos padronizados criados por outros

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T14:52:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sancha Livia Resende.pdf: 2688564 bytes, checksum: 79838198764ba455d0ab17a0df30bf37 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-11-29 / This master thesis deals with the goldsmith activity in the city of Belo Horizonte - MG, from data and information collected about three situations of jewel-making. On the first situation, a goldsmith who works in a atelier where he creates and executes the jewel, having full control of all the steps of this making. On the second situation, the goldsmith has a small manufactory, where he executes the jewel created by another person, in this case, the designer. On the third, a goldsmith works in an industry, making parts of jewels or small adjustments to finished jewels. On the jewel-making, they use both hands and head, but not every one of them acts at the various steps of this making. Although in the situations selected for this study the relations between hands and heads shows up in the goldsmith's working practice, theirs working places are different and in the industry most of them are distributed by separated departments and offices, executing standard models created by other people / Esta dissertação de mestrado trata do fazer do ourives na cidade de Belo Horizonte MG, a partir de dados e informações coletados sobre três situações do fazer joia. Na primeira situação, um ourives que trabalha em um atelier onde cria e faz uma joia, tendo o domínio de todas as fases desse fazer. Na segunda situação, o ourives tem uma pequena oficina, onde faz joia concebida por outro, no caso o designer. Na terceira, um ourives trabalha em uma indústria, executando partes de uma joia ou ajustes em joias prontas. No fazer joias todos eles usam mãos e cabeça, porém nem todos atuam nas várias etapas desse fazer. Ainda que nas situações selecionadas para o estudo, as relações entre mãos e cabeça apareçam nas práticas de trabalho dos ourives, os seus locais de trabalho são diferentes e na indústria a maioria deles está distribuída por setores e salas separadas, executando modelos padronizados criados por outros

Knowledge is the center of operation in modern organizations. This understanding leads them to clearly recognize that their intellectual capital is the essential source of competitive advantage. Organization integration is the todays tendency, which calls for the need to understand the organization as a complete system, implementing new concepts and approaches in an adaptive way to their organizational reality. Knowledge management, in this new approach, incorporates all of these aspects becoming a complex job, which must be fully studied to be brought into the organization routine. This document analyses the technical & scientific committees as an able instrument to contribute to the easiness of group activities in highly complex research organization as the Aerospace Technological Center (CTA) here taken as a case study. Several factors organizational, cultural and behavior have influence when implementing this management tool and need to be analyzed to guarantee a successful way of implementation. The objective of this research is to identify favorable and unfavorable aspects of technical & scientific committees in CTA. These aspects must not be considered separately. To implement these committees successfully the interrelationship of all aspects must be analyzed in a systemic view of the organization. It was possible to verify as well in this research that the committees are considered very important for the Aerospace Technologic al Center activities. / O conhecimento é o centro de operação das organizações, na atualidade. Este entendimento leva as organizações a reconhecerem explicitamente que o seu capital intelectual é fonte essencial de vantagem competitiva. A tendência atual é a de integração da organização, o que cria a necessidade de entendê-la como um todo sistêmico, implementando os novos conceitos e abordagens de forma adaptativa à realidade organizacional. A gestão do conhecimento, nessa nova abordagem, incorpora todos esses aspectos, tornando-se uma tarefa complexa que deve ser amplamente estudada para ser inserida na rotina da organização. Neste trabalho são abordados os comitês técnico-científicos, um instrumento julgado capaz de contribuir para a criação de um contexto de facilitação das atividades em grupo em organizações complexas de ensino e/ou pesquisa, tal como o Centro Técnico Aeroespacial, aqui tomado como estudo de caso. Diversos fatores organizacionais, culturais e comportamentais influenciam a implantação desse instrumento gerencial e necessitam ser analisados, a fim de se ter uma sistemática de implantação que tenha êxito. O objetivo da pesquisa foi a identificação de aspectos favoráveis e desfavoráveis à implantação dos comitês técnico-científicos no Centro. Esses fatores não devem ser considerados isoladamente. Para o sucesso da implantação dos comitês, o inter-relacionamento desses fatores deve ser analisado, contemplando uma visão sistêmica da organização. Pôde-se verificar também, nesta pesquisa, que os comitês são considerados importantes para as atividades do Centro Técnico Aeroespacial.

<p>Doktorska disertacija razmatra kori&scaron;ćenje računarskog adaptivnog testa u evaluaciji znanja programskih jezika C++ i Java. Za potrebe istraživanja realizovana je aplikacija koja omogućava adaptivno testiranje i njena funkcionalnost proverena je u praksi. Izvr&scaron;eno je anketiranje studenata radi evaluacije, dobijeni podaci su statistički obraĎeni i protumačeni. Na osnovu rezultata istraživanja utvrĎeno je da postoji statistički značajna razlika u korist studenata eksperimentalne grupe, naspram studenata koji su test radili na konvencionalan način (papir i olovka).</p> / <p>The doctoral dissertation discusses the application of the computer adaptive test in knowledge evaluation of the programming languages C++ and Java. For the purpose of this research an application was realized which enables adaptive testing. Its functionality was checked in practice. A survey was carried out among students for the purpose of evaluation, the attained data was statistically analyzed and interpreted. Based on the results of the research it was determined that there is a statistically significant difference in favor of the students in the experimental group as opposed to the students who had taken the test in the conventional way (paper-pencil tests).</p>

Service composition integrates existing services to fulfill specific tasks using a set of standards and tools. Existing service composition techniques and tools are mainly designed for SOA professionals. The business processes used in the service composition systems are primarily designed by experienced business analysts who have extensive process knowledge. Process knowledge is the information about a process, including the tasks in a process, the control flow and data flow among tasks. It is challenging for end-users without sufficient service composition skills and process knowledge to find desired services then compose services to perform their daily activities, such as planning a trip. Context-aware techniques provide a promising way to help end-users find services using the context of end-users. However, existing context-aware techniques have limited support for dynamic adapting to new context types (e.g., location, time and activity) and context values (e.g., “New York City”). To shelter end-users from the complexity of service composition, we present our techniques that assist non-IT professional end-users in service composition by dynamically composing and recommending services to meet their requirements. To acquire the desired process knowledge for service composition, we propose an approach to automatically extract process knowledge from existing commercial applications on the Web. By analyzing the context of end-users, our techniques can dynamically adapt to new context types or values and provide personalized service recommendation for end-users. Instead of requiring end-users to specify detailed steps for service composition, the end-users only need to describe their goals using a few keywords. Our approach expands the meaning of an end-user's goal using process knowledge then derives a group of tasks to help the end-user fulfill the goal. The effectiveness of our proposed techniques is demonstrated through a set of case studies. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-30 11:43:39.151

The objectives of this study were to (1) establish whether a relationship exists between individuals’ perception of organisational culture, measured by the South African Cultural Instrument (2005) and lifelong learning, measured by the Dimensions of the Learning Organisation Questionnaire (2003); and (2) determine whether the participants differed with regard to these variables in terms of sociodemographic contextual factors such as age, race, gender, education, years of service, disability status and job level. A quantitative study, using primary data, was conducted on a convenient sample (N=257) of full-time public service officials in a South African public service organisation. Correlational and inferential statistical analyses revealed statistically significant positive relationships between individuals’ perception of organisational culture and lifelong learning. Significant differences were found in the perception of these variables for individuals with different years of service and for individuals of different age groups. The findings should contribute valuable knowledge to the field of organisational behaviour, which could be used to promote a lifelong learning culture in public service organisations. The study concludes with recommendations for future practice / Industrial and Organisational Psychology / M. Com. (Industrial and Organisational Psychology)

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in women in the United States. Several factors have been identified that interfere with women's breast cancer screening practices, including lack of knowledge and confidence in the breast self-examination (BSE) technique, and lack of information provided by health care provider. One of the reasons nurses do not teach breast cancer detection could be the little emphasis given to breast cancer examination in nursing schools. The BSE is a measure of significant value in detecting cancer of the breast. However, less than half of the women in the United States are participating in breast cancer screening. The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the relationship between the freshman and senior nursing students' breast cancer knowledge (BCK) and breast self-examination technique confidence (BSE_TC). An online survey was administered to measure the students' BCK and their BSE_TC. The social cognitive theory guided this study. A sample 100 nursing students (54 senior and 46 freshman) were included for hypothesis testing. The study results indicate that senior nursing students had higher mean scores on the BCK and BSE_TC, as would be expected. However, senior nursing students' BCK_BSE_TC scores were also very low. This is a concern for the future of breast cancer detection. This study provides data showing breast cancer screening concepts are unclear to freshman students, and remain unclear with senior students. Nursing educational curricula in breast cancer screening should be revised to affect improvements in nurses' role in advising and educating patients.