In this research, a transdisciplinary synthesis and extension of design thinking is created, leading to a comprehensive and philosophically grounded “fit, stick, spread and grow” framework for analysing designs and designing as a social, technological and pedagogic process. Through this framework the [re]making of higher education is seen in a new light. The framework is built using insights from design research, architecture, innovation studies, computer science, sociology, higher education pedagogy studies, business studies and psychology. The research is further enriched and empirically grounded through case studies and design studies, in many instances co-developed with participant staff, students and alumni using techniques from “design anthropology”. The research is carried out at the University of Warwick, an example of a young, fast growing, self styled, entrepreneurial higher education institution. In addition professional designers (architects) and creative industry leaders are interviewed so as to put these cases in the wider context of design and business today. In Part One of the thesis, the University of Warwick is explored as a supercomplex organisation, following Barnett (2000). Supercomplexity has positive consequences for individuals with already well developed design capabilities in that they can more effectively exploit opportunities, but for the majority, it presents difficulties and disruption. This creates a design divide, related to the digital divide, which limits the spread and growth of vital innovations. Part Two moves on to the positive task of creating a framework that examines and defines the nature of design (using an assemblages approach adapted from Deleuze and Guattari), designing, designers (professional, guerrilla and everyday), designerliness and design capability (both individual and collective). It considers challenges in managing design capability (especially ad hocism in everyday designing) and strategies for more designerly designing (including Design Thinking, the Thick Boundaries approach and practices from the creative industries). Designing is shown to work most effectively when it achieves fit (with our practices, projects and concerns), stick (enduring over a reasonable time), spread (to further people, projects and concerns) and grow (extending our capability for further designing). The fit, stick, spread and grow framework is shown to be a simple but powerful set of concepts for easing the transition to designerliness by default and more evenly distributed design capabilities.

Indoor positioning is a rapidly growing research area, enabling new innovative location-aware applications and user-oriented services. Location Fingerprinting (LF) is the positioning technique of coupling a physical location with observed radio signal measurements. In the terms of indoor LF using Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) it refers to the use of network measurements from the WLAN Access Points (APs) to tag known locations. A data set is created containing reference fingerprints for the area of interest and is known as a radio map. A radio map can later be used to find a user's location in the area of interest. WLAN infrastructures are vulnerable to many kinds of faults and malicious attacks, including, an attacker jamming the signal from an AP, or an AP becoming unavailable during positioning due to power outage. These faults can be collectively characterized as an AP-failure. In LF positioning systems, AP-failure faults can significantly degrade the performance of a LF system due to the difference between the current fingerprints and radio map created with all APs being available. It is desirable to detect such faulty APs, in order to take actions towards fault-mitigation and restoration, in case of a malicious attack. In this work, we have developed a fault detection algorithm that uses inertial sensors (i.e., accelerometer, magnetometer) available in smartphones to detect AP-failure faults in LF systems. Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) has become an integral part of all high-end smartphones. IMU can be used to infer location information on the smartphone. The main idea is to have two parallel position streams, the LF positioning and the IMU positioning, and to compare the mean positioning error between the two. Since IMU positioning is fairly accurate once provided with starting coordinates, we use it to detect abnormal behaviour in LF positioning system, such as highly erroneous estimates signifying an AP-failure fault present in the system. The performance of the proposed detection algorithm is evaluated with several real-life AP-related faults. The proposed algorithm exhibits low probability of false alarms in the detection of faulty APs. The conclusion is that using IMU based positioning is an effective and robust solution in terms of fault detection in LF systems.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of a purpose built, co-educational Roman Catholic comprehensive school that was conducted between April 1973 and July 1974, when the researcher took a part-time teacher role in the school. The main methods of social investigation were: participant observation, unstructured interviews and documentary evidence. The study examines the operation of the school from a teacher's point of view. Special attention is given to the ways in which teachers and pupils define and redefine situations within the school. An opening chapter surveys the problems, theories and methods that were used in the study. Part one locates the school in a social context and examines the extent to which its physical division into Houses and Departments influenced the Headmaster's conception of the school and the definitions and redefinitions of the situation that were advanced by Heads of Houses and Departmental staff. There are chapters on the Headmaster's conception of the school, House staff and Department staff, and an analysis of the social processes involved in three social situations. Similar themes are examined in part two in relation to Newsom pupils and their teachers. There are chapters on Newsom pupils and Newsom teachers and the definitions, redefinitions and strategies that were used in classrooms by teachers and pupils. The thesis concludes that the physical division of the school into Houses and Departments influenced staff recruitment, school organization and the ways in which teachers and pupils defined and redefined their activities. The evidence in this study suggests that although different pupils were brought together in a comprehensive school on a single site, it is doubtful whether one school was in operation as the label 'comprehensive' appeared to cover a diverse set of activities. An appendix examines the problems of conducting ethnographic research in a comprehensive school.

This thesis provides a model-theoretic semantic analysis of aspects of the LF logical framework

Hurricane Bret underwent a rapid intensification (RI) and subsequent weakening between 1200 UTC August 21 and 1200 UTC August 22, 1999, before it made landfall as a category 3 hurricane on the Texas coast 12 h later. Its minimum sea-level pressure dropped 35 hPa from 979 to 944 hPa within 24 h. During this period, aircraft of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) flew several research missions that sampled the environment and inner core of the storm. These data sets combined with gridded data from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction's (NCEP) Global Model and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) reanalyses are used to document the atmospheric and oceanic environments of the tropical cyclone (TC) as well as their relation to the observed structural and intensity changes. Bret's RI was linked to movement over a warm ocean eddy and high sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Gulf of Mexico coupled with a simultaneous decrease in vertical wind shear. SSTs at the beginning of the storm?s RI were approximately 29 degrees Celcius and steadily increased to 30 degrees Celcius as it moved northward. The vertical wind shear relaxed to less than 10 kt during this time. Mean values of oceanic heat content (OHC) beneath the storm were about 20 % higher at the beginning of the RI period than 6 h before. Cooling of near-coastal shelf waters (to between 25 and 26 degrees Celcius) by pre-storm mixing combined with an increase in vertical wind shear were responsible for the weakening of the storm. The available observations suggested that intrusion of dry air into the circulation core did not contribute to the intensity evolution. In order to quantitatively describe the influence of environmental conditions on the intensity forecast, sensitivity studies with the Statistical Hurricane Intensity Prediction Scheme (SHIPS) model were conducted. Four different cases with modified vertical wind shear and/or SSTs were studied. Differences between all cases were relatively small due to the model design, but much cooler prescribed SSTs resulted in the greatest intensity changes. Model runs with idealized environmental conditions demonstrated the model?s general lack of capability to forecast RIs and also stressed the need of more accurate SST observations in the coastal shelf regions when predicting the intensity of landfalling TCs.

Parametric speech synthesis has received increased attention in recent years following the development of statistical HMM-based speech synthesis. However, the speech produced using this method still does not sound as natural as human speech and there is limited parametric flexibility to replicate voice quality aspects, such as breathiness. The hypothesis of this thesis is that speech naturalness and voice quality can be more accurately replicated by a HMM-based speech synthesiser using an acoustic glottal source model, the Liljencrants-Fant (LF) model, to represent the source component of speech instead of the traditional impulse train. Two different analysis-synthesis methods were developed during this thesis, in order to integrate the LF-model into a baseline HMM-based speech synthesiser, which is based on the popular HTS system and uses the STRAIGHT vocoder. The first method, which is called Glottal Post-Filtering (GPF), consists of passing a chosen LF-model signal through a glottal post-filter to obtain the source signal and then generating speech, by passing this source signal through the spectral envelope filter. The system which uses the GPF method (HTS-GPF system) is similar to the baseline system, but it uses a different source signal instead of the impulse train used by STRAIGHT. The second method, called Glottal Spectral Separation (GSS), generates speech by passing the LF-model signal through the vocal tract filter. The major advantage of the synthesiser which incorporates the GSS method, named HTS-LF, is that the acoustic properties of the LF-model parameters are automatically learnt by the HMMs. In this thesis, an initial perceptual experiment was conducted to compare the LFmodel to the impulse train. The results showed that the LF-model was significantly better, both in terms of speech naturalness and replication of two basic voice qualities (breathy and tense). In a second perceptual evaluation, the HTS-LF system was better than the baseline system, although the difference between the two had been expected to be more significant. A third experiment was conducted to evaluate the HTS-GPF system and an improved HTS-LF system, in terms of speech naturalness, voice similarity and intelligibility. The results showed that the HTS-GPF system performed similarly to the baseline. However, the HTS-LF system was significantly outperformed by the baseline. Finally, acoustic measurements were performed on the synthetic speech to investigate the speech distortion in the HTS-LF system. The results indicated that a problem in replicating the rapid variations of the vocal tract filter parameters at transitions between voiced and unvoiced sounds is the most significant cause of speech distortion. This problem encourages future work to further improve the system.

This thesis sets out to describe and discuss, to analyse and criticise post-compulsory education in the francophone part of Switzerland, or Suisse romande. A further object is to see whether this part of the oldest confederation in the world might have lessons on the educational front to offer the European Community or indeed whether there might be practices in the EC whose adaptation to Suisse romande's situation and circumstances might be beneficial. The remaining object is to propose a series of models for educational structures - autonomous, synthetic and pluralist - and to determine which model fits which part of Suisse romande's post-compulsory education. After describing the rationale behind the work, the thesis moves on to set out the historical, geographical, economic and cultural background to the area in question in order to provide a context for the main body of the discussion. This reduces the need for tangential digressions to explain particular aspects of education in Suisse romande. The main text covers post-compulsory school (with a description of the end of compulsory school), vocational training, adult education and higher education with a concluding chapter devoted to drawing together some of the threads spun in the course of the thesis. The writer found that Suisse romande in particular and Switzerland in general have much experience which the EC might do well to examine. There is, for example, the creation of national certificates in vocational training which, although of equal value throughout the country, bear the clear stamp of their Canton of origin. Autonomous structures have been brought together, in the case of schools, by negotiation between Cantonal authorities (with the encouragement of Federal government).

Strategy development is an issue of great importance for the practitioners and at the centre of the academic research over the last century. This thesis concentrates on the investigation of strategy from the development and implementation process point of view. In particular, this thesis presents a study on the relationship between organisational direction and performance measurement. Organisational direction manifests the purpose of the existence for the organisation and its future desired state, while performance measurement is a monitoring and control mechanism for the assessment of the performance achievements. It is a common place that organisational success requires the alignment between organisational direction and performance measurement. On this topic, the existing published literature includes a significant number of recommendations on how to manage effectively the relationship between organisational direction and performance measurement; nevertheless, there is a distinct lack of empirical evidences on the current status and trends of this relationship. Therefore, this thesis examines the interrelationship and interdependencies between these two concepts. The present research has been conducted through three different empirical investigations: an exploratory case study, a survey and follow up interviews. The exploratory case study examines the relationship between organisational direction and performance within an academic institution, the University of Warwick. The survey, was built on the observations made on the exploratory case study, and examined the role of organisational direction and performance measurement in the success of the strategic development process. Finally, the follow up interviews have been undertaken in order to enhance the findings of the survey and to provide insights and explanations for the variations observed in the survey. Synthesising the results from the three empirical investigations, it is attempted to describe the trends, dynamics and practicalities of the relationship between organisational direction and performance measurement and to present the determinants of this relationship.

The introduction of regional language bilingual education in France dates back to the late 1960s in the private education system and to the 1980s in the public system. Before this time the extensive use of regional languages was forbidden in French schools, which served as ‘local centres for the gallicisation of France’ (Blackwood 2008, 28). France began to pursue a French-only language policy from the time of the 1789 Revolution, with Jacobin ideology proposing that to be French, one must speak French. Thus began the shaping of France into a nation-state. As the result of the official language policy that imposed French in all public domains, as well as extra-linguistic factors such as the Industrial Revolution and the two World Wars, a significant language shift occurred in France during the twentieth century, as an increasing number of parents chose not to pass on their regional language to the next generation. In light of the decline in intergenerational transmission of the regional languages, Judge (2007, 233) concludes that ‘in the short term, everything depends on education in the [regional languages]’. This thesis analyses the development of language policy in bilingual education programmes in Alsace; Spolsky’s tripartite language policy model (2004), which focuses on language management, language practices and language beliefs, will be employed. In spite of the efforts of the State to impose the French language, in Alsace the traditionally non-standard spoken regional language variety, Alsatian, continued to be used widely until the mid-twentieth century. Whilst Alsatian has been spoken, the traditional language of writing and reference has been standard German. Today Alsace is a region of north eastern France, but it has existed under the political control of Germany for prolonged periods of time in the past, changing hands between the two countries five times between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Since the mid-twentieth century a significant language shift away from Alsatian has occurred in the region, with estimates that over 90% spoke the language variety in 1946 in comparison with only 43% of the population in 2012 (OLCA 2012a). Regional language bilingual education programmes were introduced in Alsace in the early 1990s in the private and public education systems. In both systems the language-in-education policy supported has primarily promoted the learning of and through French and standard German. The case study that forms the central part of the thesis seeks to examine current language policy in practice. It will analyse the place of Alsatian in the modern regional language bilingual classroom and examine the language beliefs of the key actors in the bilingual education programmes (namely parents, teachers and policy-makers at regional level). Finally, it will discuss what this means for efforts to reverse the language shift in twenty-first-century Alsace.

This aim of this study was to explore the various influences on the food choices and behaviours of Maltese primary schoolchildren. Using an ecological framework and following sociological theory of consumption it sought to uncover any group differences in food perceptions, beliefs, preferences and intake, as well as identify any culture-cuisine orientations of foods consumed in different settings. A multi-method grounded approach was adopted, where results from each stage of the research informed the focus of subsequent stages. A culture-sensitive research tool was developed for exploring children’s food consumption and preferences in ten different home-based and non-home-based settings. Data was collected via a large-scale survey with a stratified sample of 7-8-year-old children (N=1088) and their parents (N=932). Follow-up focus group interviews with children (N=16 groups) and telephone interviews with parents (N=30) were also conducted in order to obtain more detail on influences on food intake. Analysis based on gender, household level of schooling, school type, region and access to cable TV showed that Maltese children’s overall food intake was fairly similar across groups, though some specific patterns did emerge. Girls seemed to prefer and consume ‘lighter’ more ‘feminine’ foods and boys ‘heavier’ more ‘masculine’ foods. Children attending independent (fee-paying) schools tended to exhibit more ‘modern’ food practices based on novel and processed foods. They also tended to eat weekday supper with their family less frequently than other groups. Children attending state schools tended to consume more meat-based meals, milk and traditional Maltese foods. Children from the rural island of Gozo seemed to place greater value on balance, quality and freshness of food and ate their weekday supper with their family more frequently. A pronounced Westernisation of Maltese children’s diet was evident. Traditional Maltese foods were only predominant in home-based snacks. Grandparents emerged as having an important role in exposing children to traditional cuisine. Mothers’ provision of food for children was based primarily on hedonic and health motives. Strategies used to promote consumption of healthy food included controlling availability, information-giving and being prescriptive rather than restrictive. In general, both children and parents acknowledged the value of school food rules, although attitudes differed with regard to extent of imposition. Parents also felt that TV food portrayal was a strong influence on their children’s food requests, as was to a lesser extent modelling of food behaviours by peers. Children’s knowledge of the health value of food was good, though a few misperceptions existed and certain food associations were barriers to intake. Taste, texture, convenience and healthfulness were key attributes which attracted children to food. Local health promotion initiatives and nutrition education interventions need to target the different influences on Maltese children’s food intake functioning at the different ecological levels. These include the children’s own food perceptions, beliefs and valuations, as well as the different routes of influence of the mother, grandparents, the school and television.