The purpose of this research is to inform planning, engineering, and management decisions concerning transportation systems that serve the petroleum exploration and production industry in North America. The research applies the transportation systems analysis approach to characterize the petroleum activity system and transportation system in southwest Manitoba and to develop freight flows. The research develops a framework to estimate and assign petroleum-related truck traffic to the regional highway network taking into account the variability of the industry. This is done by integrating components of freight demand modeling and truck traffic monitoring processes to improve understanding of truck traffic flow characteristics related to the industry. The results of the research are presented in an interactive mapping data dissemination tool. The approach and methodologies of this research are transferable to other jurisdictions and can be used to address the needs of other industry-specific developments.

Studien använder sig av en Multimodal Kritisk Diskursanalys (MCDA) för att analysera vanliga människor i reality-TV ur ett klassperspektiv. Syftet är att undersöka huruvida programmet Ullared reproducerar idéer om klass och hur detta gör sig synligt genom konstruktionen av karaktären Morgan. Studien använder sig av ett teoretiskt ramverk bestående av vanlighet, klass, diskurs och skratt. I analysen undersöks utvalda sekvenser där semiotiska resurser granskas för att se hur de arbetar för att konstruera Morgan. Resultatet visar på att musik och videoredigering är två viktiga resurser i konstruktionen av Morgan, dock har allt som ses och hörs i bild en komplex samverkan med varandra som bidrar till slutkonstruktionen. Konstruktionen kommunicerar idéer om klass och gör det framförallt genom ett avvikande från normer som standardiserats av medelklassen.

In Images of Leadership (1991), Bolman and Deal identified four “frames” that school administrators use when making decisions: structural, symbolic, human resource and political. They discovered that the latter two frames, which focus on relationships, partnerships, and communication, were most frequently identified as predicting a school administrator’s success “as both leader and manager”(12). Strikingly, Bolman and Deal found that little emphasis and professional time are afforded to help school administrators learn about these critical frames. While there is ample logistical advice about language use, there is scant research that examines it from a theatrical perspective. The purpose of this autoethnographic study was to examine my literate life as a school administrator through the use of multimodal interaction analysis (Norris, 2004) and dramaturgical metaphors (Goffman, 1959). The study attempted to address the following research questions: (1.) How does my role as a school administrator dramaturgically define the roles I inhabit as I engage in everyday literacy practices in school? and (2.) How do I use language –both verbal and nonverbal language --to negotiate those roles with my various audiences, specifically with teachers and staff, other leaders, students and parents? The participant was myself –in my former role as an assistant principal at a suburban elementary school. Data collection and analysis began in May 2012 and concluded at the end of August 2012. Data for the study was collected through a journal based on questions using dramaturgical terms and a collection of the author’s/participant’s videotaped “performances” with various audiences. The dramaturgical journal was analyzed through Critical Discourse Analysis and deductive coding, while the videotapes were analyzed using Multimodal Interaction Analysis. Poetry was also used throughout the study to include the author’s voice, to recontextualize the experience, and to challenge the traditional prose form. The study revealed the intersection of language and leadership in the life of a school administrator. It also showed how multimodal interaction analysis and dramaturgical metaphors can help educational leaders understand their own literate lives through new lenses and how they can grow from that understanding.

This study assessed the in vivo effects of various serotonin (5-HT) receptor modulators on 5-HT neurotransmission in the rat hippocampus. Vortioxetine, humanized-vortioxetine, and escitalopram blocked the 5-HT transporter, but similar to ipsapirone did not dampen the sensitivity of postsynaptic 5-HT1A receptors. Long-term administration of all treatments increased the tonic activation of postsynaptic 5-HT1A heteroreceptors, an effect common to all antidepressants. Vortioxetine decreased the function of the terminal 5-HT1B autoreceptor under high but not a low degree of activation, thus showing that its partial agonism led to increased 5-HT release and that long-term administration results in the desensitization of terminal 5-HT1B autoreceptors. Vortioxetine overcame the effects of 5-HT1B and 5-HT3 receptor agonists. This study was unable to determine the involvement of 5-HT7 receptor antagonism exerted by vortioxetine affects 5-HT neurotransmission. Therefore, vortioxetine would appear to exert different actions, via transporter and receptor activity, on the serotonergic system in the hippocampus, consistent with its unique pharmacological profile.

Over the past few decades the use of industrial robots has increased the efficiency as well as the competitiveness of several sectors. Despite this fact, in many cases robot automation investments are considered to be technically challenging. In addition, for most small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) this process is associated with high costs. Due to their continuously changing product lines, reprogramming costs are likely to exceed installation costs by a large margin. Furthermore, traditional programming methods of industrial robots are too complex for most technicians or manufacturing engineers, and thus assistance from a robot programming expert is often needed. The hypothesis is that in order to make the use of industrial robots more common within the SME sector, the robots should be reprogrammable by technicians or manufacturing engineers rather than robot programming experts. In this thesis, a novel system for task-level programming is proposed. The user interacts with an industrial robot by giving instructions in a structured natural language and by selecting objects through an augmented reality interface. The proposed system consists of two parts: (i) a multimodal framework that provides a natural language interface for the user to interact in which the framework performs modality fusion and semantic analysis, (ii) a symbolic planner, POPStar, to create a time-efficient plan based on the user's instructions. The ultimate goal of this work in this thesis is to bring robot programming to a stage where it is as easy as working together with a colleague.This thesis mainly addresses two issues. The first issue is a general framework for designing and developing multimodal interfaces. The general framework proposed in this thesis is designed to perform natural language understanding, multimodal integration and semantic analysis with an incremental pipeline. The framework also includes a novel multimodal grammar language, which is used for multimodal presentation and semantic meaning generation. Such a framework helps us to make interaction with a robot easier and more natural. The proposed language architecture makes it possible to manipulate, pick or place objects in a scene through high-level commands. Interaction with simple voice commands and gestures enables the manufacturing engineer to focus on the task itself, rather than the programming issues of the robot. The second issue addressed is due to inherent characteristics of communication with the use of natural language; instructions given by a user are often vague and may require other actions to be taken before the conditions for applying the user's instructions are met. In order to solve this problem a symbolic planner, POPStar, based on a partial order planner (POP) is proposed. The system takes landmarks extracted from user instructions as input, and creates a sequence of actions to operate the robotic cell with minimal makespan. The proposed planner takes advantage of the partial order capabilities of POP to execute actions in parallel and employs a best-first search algorithm to seek the series of actions that lead to a minimal makespan. The proposed planner can also handle robots with multiple grippers, parallel machines as well as scheduling for multiple product types.

In early 2003, in a major shift in policy, the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) announced that its learning materials would progressively move from a predominantly print-based mode of delivery to a new 'hybrid' mode of delivery across all discipline areas. Central to this delivery would be a resource-rich CDROM containing all study materials, supported with a range of multimedia based enhancements, online support and selective print materials. As this represented a fundamentally new approach to the delivery of materials at USQ, it was essential to ascertain a clear understanding of about the implications of this change for student learning. In implementing this policy it was necessary to establish a range of pedagogically sound, cost effective delivery guidelines, for the development of the course materials and the multimedia based enhancements. In response to this need, this study has developed a set of 10 multimodal design heuristics used to guide the development of these materials. In establishing these guidelines, this thesis contextualises important issues associated with hybrid delivery and considers how catering for a multiliterate clientele by using a combination of multimedia based enhancements in an electronic environment may improve the learning opportunities for students. Two Faculty of Business courses delivered in 2004, ECO2000 'Macroeconomics for Business and Government' and MGT2004 'People Development', were chosen to pilot the new hybrid mode of delivery. The combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches was used to investigate how students have utilised this new environment. This approach rendered a clear indication of student views about the CD based delivery and, more particularly, an appreciation of how they utilised the multimedia based enhancements to augment their studies. Analysis of the research data indicated a strong acceptance of the CD based learning environment. This was particularly true for off-campus and international students. On the whole, students reported a preference for a CD based resource, though this acceptance was moderated by a desire to still receive some print-based materials. Importantly, from this analysis it was possible to add a further four multimodal design heuristics to the original set of ten which informed the design of the multimedia based enhancements for each course. This study demonstrates that higher levels of student engagement are possible when integrating a range of multimedia based enhancements to cater for a range of student learning modalities, whilst also maintaining a balanced environment for more traditional learners1.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis investigates the problem of seeking multimodal mid-level representations for semantic analysis of broadcast video. The problem is of interest as humans tend to use high-level semantic concepts when querying and browsing ever increasing multimedia databases, yet generic low-level content metadata available from automated processing deals only with representing perceived content, but not its semantics. Multimodal mid-level representations refer to intermediate representations of multimedia signals that make various kinds of knowledge explicit and that expose various kinds of constraints within the context and knowledge assumed by the analysis system. Semantic multimedia analysis tries to establish the links from the feature descriptors and the syntactic elements to the domain semantics. The goal of this thesis is to devise a mid-level representation framework for detecting semantics from broadcast video, using supervised and data-driven approaches to represent domain knowledge in a manner to facilitate inferencing, i.e., answering the questions asked by higher-level analysis. In our framework, we attempt to address three sub-problems: context-dependent feature extraction, semantic video shot classification, and integration of multimodal cues towards semantic analysis. We propose novel models for the representations of low-level multimedia features. We employ dominant modes in the feature space to characterize color and motion in a nonparametric manner. With the combined use of data-driven mode seeking and supervised learning, we are able to capture contextual information of broadcast video and yield semantic meaningful color and motion features. We present the novel concepts of semantic video shot classes towards an effective approach for reverse engineering of the broadcast video capturing and editing processes. Such concepts link the computational representations of low-level multimedia features with video shot size and the main subject within a shot in the broadcast video stream. The linking, subject to the domain constraints, is achieved by statistical learning. We develop solutions for detecting sports events and classifying commercial spots from broad-cast video streams. This is realized by integrating multiple modalities, in particular the text-based external resources. The alignment across modalities is based on semantic video shot classes. With multimodal mid-level representations, we are able to automatically extract rich semantics from sports programs and commercial spots, with promising accuracies. These findings demonstrate the potential of our framework of constructing mid-level representations to narrow the semantic gap, and it has broad outlook in adapting to new content domains.

Huvudsyftet med denna empiriska studie har varit att undersöka om och hur några lärare på Åland praktiskt arbetar med multimodalt skrivande i årskurs 4-6, samt deras upplevelser av och inställning till det multimodala skrivandet i skolan. Det multimodala skrivandet har i denna studie definierats som att skriftlig, visuell och auditiv teckenvärld kombineras på ett eller annat sätt. Skrivuppgifter där text kombinerats med bild och ljud är exempel på detta. Genom halvstrukturerade intervjuer visar studien att det multimodala skrivandet förekommer relativt ofta, främst det som innefattar text och bild. Dessutom förekommer både analoga och digitala multimodala skrivuppgifter i undervisningen. Det visar sig att möjligheterna är många med lärare som generellt är positiva till det multimodala skrivandet i skolan. Det är snarare lärarna själva som begränsar den multimodala skrivundervisningen på grund av egen osäkerhet. Den digitala tekniken kan stundtals också ställa till med bekymmer. Vidare visar studien att lärare behöver utveckla och förstå att den multimodala skrivprocessen är en integrerad process där helheten är det centrala. Lärare behöver även utveckla den multimodala skrivkompetensen eftersom den granskande aspekten av texters budskap är lika viktig som att låta olika teckenvärldar samspela. Trots en obekanthet med begreppet så inkluderar lärare multimodalt skrivande i sin undervisning. / <p>Svenska</p>

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis focuses on a community of multilingual adolescents who are high performers in mathematics and science, and whose primary language of teaching and learning is English. The participants who form part of the study all attend selected educational enrichment programmes in the greater Johannesburg area. The thesis is particularly interested in how students' language repertoires feature in their learning and in how their language repertoires contribute to their identity construction. This research is informed by literature which views identity not only as complex, contradictory, multivoiced and multifaceted, but also as dynamic and subject to constant renegotiation across space and time. In seeking answers to specific questions about the linguistic identities of the teenage participants in this study, this study will establish what the full linguistic repertoire of each participant is, and whether or not participants identify themselves by means of language. While there have been a number of very authoritative studies of language repertoires, many of these have focused on indigenous minorities, migrants or refugees who need to improve their life chances in a context where their L1 is not dominant. Although this study does include a number of participants originally from outside of South Africa, the majority of the participants are South Africans whose first languages are official languages. This study uses a multimodal approach in data collection and analysis in an attempt to investigate the multi-semiotic nature of the linguistic identities of the participants. Following the work of Busch (2010), I argue, that multilingualism can no longer be seen as an abstract competency, and that "language crossing", the appropriation of elements across boundaries, becomes a competency in its own right. These competencies can thus be used as a way of constructing a speaker's linguistic identity. Finally, the thesis makes a recommendation that more multimodal studies should be conducted in order to investigate the 'performativity' of 'identity construction'. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis fokus op ʼn gemeenskap van veeltalige adolessente wie toppresteerders is in wiskunde en wetenskap en vir wie Engels die primêre taal van leer en onderrig is. Die deelnemers aan die studie woon almal geselekteerde opvoedkundige verrykingsprogramme by in die groter Johannesburg area. Die tesis is spesifiek geïnteresseerd in hoe studente hul 'taal repertoires' gebruik wanneer hulle leer en hoe dit moontlik bydra tot die konstruering van hul identiteite. Die studie gebruik as uitgangspunt literatuur wat 'identiteit' as kompleks, teenstellend, veelstemmig en dinamies beskou. Verder word 'identiteit' ook beskou as onderworpe aan konstante heronderhandeling in elke spesifieke situasie en konteks. Die studie probeer vasstel wat die volle 'taalrepertoire' van elke deelnemer is en of die deelnemers hulself d.m.v. taal identifiseer. Hoewel daar verskeie belangrike studies oor taal repertoires bestaan fokus baie van hierdie studies op inheemse minderhede, migrante of vlugtelinge wie hul lewenskanse moet verbeter in ʼn konteks waarin hulle eerstetaal (T1) nie dominant is nie. Alhoewel hierdie studie ʼn aantal deelnemers insluit wat oorspronklik van buite Suid-Afrika afkomstig is, is die meerderheid van die deelnemers aan die studie Suid-Afrikaners wie se eerstetale, amptelike tale is. Die studie gebruik ʼn multimodale manier van data insameling en analise in ʼn poging om die multisemiotiese aspekte van die 'taalidentiteite' van die deelnemers te ondersoek. In ooreenstemming met Busch (2010) stel ek voor dat veeltaligheid nie langer gesien kan word as ʼn abstrakte vermoë nie maar dat ander praktyke soos 'taal oorkruissing', die gebruik van elemente oor taalgrense, ʼn vaardigheid in eie reg is. Hierdie soorte vaardighede kan dus ook gebruik word om die 'taalidentiteit' van ʼn spreker te konstrueer. Laastens word die aanbeveling gemaak dat meer multimodale studies gebruik moet word om die 'performatiwiteit' (performativity) van identiteitskonstruksie te ondersoek.

In communicative and task-based classrooms learners spend much of their time in interactions with one another, and it is through the practices of small-group and pair work that many learners experience language education. The present study aims to shed light on what learners do when engaged in these small-group interactions in Japanese university EFL classrooms. In particular, the study aims to shed light on the relationship between identities, interaction practices and potentials for learning. One of the motivations for doing this project is that, while much research has investigated teacher-student interactions, less attention has been paid to peer interactions in the classroom, and our understandings of learners' interactions with one another are arguably less developed than our understandings of their interactions with the teacher. The findings of this study should be of interest to practicing teachers who wish to gain insights into how learners in small groups organize their classroom practices, as well as researchers investigating classroom interaction. Analysing two groups of 15 participants over one university semester, the approach that I adopted was informed by the methodological framework of Multimodal Interaction Analysis, which combines moment-by-moment analysis of interactions with an ethnographic approach to data collection. The interaction analysis also made use of concepts and tools from Conversation Analysis. This allowed me to come to understandings not only about the structure of classrooms interactions, including turn-taking and repair practices, but also about the learners as social beings. The study found that participants often followed predictable turn-taking practices in small-group interactions, which gave the interactions a fairly 'monologic' character. However, it also found that, over the course of the semester, certain participants began to perform off-task personal conversations in English, which more resembled the sort of conversational talk found outside of the classroom. These conversations provided students with opportunities to negotiate meaning in more dialogic interactions in which they performed a wider range of actions, which also included some use of the L1. I argue that this personal talk can play an important role in the language classroom, and suggest that teachers may need to rethink attitudes to off-task talk and also to learners' use of the L1 in the classroom. This was a localized study of just two groups of learners, and further research would thus be needed to confirm how far we can generalize these findings. Furthermore, more research is needed to investigate whether or not the learning opportunities provided in off-task classroom conversations actually do lead to long-term learning.