No description available.

The principal purposes of this study were to investigate the persistence of therapeutic change during the posttherapy period and the client variables associated with the persistence of therapeutic change. Secondary attention was given to the analysis of change and associated variables during the actual treatment period. Thirty outpatient, psychotherapy clients were studied and their relative change of status at termination and six-month follow-up was assessed through percent gain and residual change score analysis. Emphasizing the probability of change, the vast majority of clients (97%), using the percent gain analysis, and a substantial minority (30%), using residual change analysis, gained significantly during the treatment period. These differing results were attributed to the "outlier" effect, in which 17% of the clients did not evidence regression toward the mean, and thus made residual change an overly conservative estimate of improvement. Additionally, the low correlation between the residual change scores and the Follow-Up Rating supported this position. A majority (73%) maintained or continued to gain during the posttherapy period, using the residual gain analysis, while a majority (77%) maintained or continued to gain during the posttherapy period, using the percent gain analysis. Socioeconomic status, age, total psychotherapy sessions, initial neuroticism, and initial extroversion were identified as predictors of positive change in status at termination and follow-up. Socioeconomic status, negative life events, marital change, total psychotherapy sessions, initial neuroticism, and age were identified as variables discriminating between positive change and negative change in status groups. A number of limitations for this study were incorporated in implications for future research. These suggestions were designed to assist future researchers and therapists in understanding the persistence of change following psychotherapy.

No description available.

My thesis is a critique of Adorno's method that stays true to the dialectical spirit of his philosophy precisely by calling it in question. It opens, in Part I, with an account of Habermasian objections to negative dialectics. Habermas is concerned that Adorno's assault on rationality is so allembracing that it undermines the very standards it requires rationally to legitimate its critique. Adorno consciously embraces this self-undermining position. But Habermas believes its aporias, however self-conscious, to be misguided because a less paradoxical standard was close to hand. Language itself could have supplied negative dialectics with the norms it needed to criticize the abuses of instrumental reason. If Adorno is not logically forced to adopt an aporetic position, the question arises why a philosopher so gifted should manoeuvre himself into a theoretical dead-end. Habermas's answer to this, in the essay on Dialektik der Aufklärung included in Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, is that Adorno illicitly privileges one of the three distinct logics of modernity, inappropriately judging cognitive and moral discourses by aesthetic criteria. When compared to the subject's awe-struck contemplation of a work of art, any more practical intervention in the world is bound to appear crude and instrumental. [continued in text ...]

Thesis--Heidelberg. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. i-x).

Dissertation submitted in compliance with the requirements for the Masters Diploma in Technology: Education, Technikon Natal, 1996. / This research examined whether an andragogical model of instruction is preferable to a pedagogical model for adult learners in a technikon context. / M

Efficiency of software application is one of the important metrics that are used to measure the quality of software applications. Nowadays, more and more professionals are focusing on programming technology because suitable programming may make the products more efficient. The emergence of multiprocessor systems and multi-core CPUs makes concurrent programs much more popular than sequential programs. However, a great number of large complex software applications that have already been released and are currently being used by many clients are programmed in sequential fashion. Compared to developing the program from scratch again, code refactoring with the concept of concurrent programming would be a better choice. It saves effort, time, manpower and money. This thesis studies the problems of introducing concurrency into large and complex software applications and proposes a methodology for transforming sequential programs into concurrent programs. We successfully speeded up a prototype of IBM Security AppScan Source for Analysis by introducing concurrency into the program. The performance of the application was improved, thus demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed methodology.

Ethnomethodolagy is considered in relation to conventional sociology; especially with regard to the epistemological critique of conventional sociology made by ethnomethodology. The pretheoretical assumptions of conventional sociology are analogous to the pretheoretical assumptions of natural science. Conventional sociology sees itself as identifying the causes of the social order. Its assumptions are (1) that the social world is analogous to the physical world in its givenness, its already-thereness, and (2) that the perceived orderliness of the social world is explicable by social laws analogous to physical laws of the natural world. The consequences of these assumptions are (1) a programme of investigation whose aim is a hypothetico-deductive explanation, and hence a division of the world into cause and effect, and (2) as a result, the reification and ‘scientification' of the social world. Ethnomathodologists take the social order to be an ongoing accomplishment of its members. Within the ethnomethodological framework, the documentary method, typification, and some features of members' accounting practices are considered. Brief consideration is given to the potential problems for ethnomethodological research. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

In geochemical applications, data classification commonly involves 'mapping' continuous variables into discrete descriptive categories, and often is achieved using thresholds to define specific ranges of data as separate groups which then can be compared with other categorical variables. This study compares several classification methods used in applied geochemistry to select thresholds and discriminate between populations or to recognize anomalous observations. The comparisons were made using monte carlo simulation to evaluate how well different techniques perform using different data set structures. A comparison of maximum likelihood parameter estimates of a mixture of normal distributions using class interval frequencies versus raw data was undertaken to study the quality of the corresponding results. The more time consuming raw data approach produces optimal parameter estimates while the more rapid class interval approach is the approach in common use. Results show that provided there are greater than 50 observations per distribution and (on average) 10 observations per class interval, the maximum likelihood parameter estimates by the two methods are practically indistinguishable. Univariate classification techniques evaluated in this study include the 'mean plus 2 standard deviations', the '95th percentile', the gap statistic and probability plots. Results show that the 'mean plus 2 standard deviations' and '95th percentile' approaches are inappropriate for most geochemical data sets. The probability plot technique classifies mixtures of normal distributions better than the gap statistic; however, the gap statistic may be used as a discordancy test to reveal the presence of outliers. Multivariate classification using the background characterization approach was simulated using several different functions to describe the variation in the background distribution. Comparisons of principal components, ordinary least squares regression and reduced major axis regression indicate that reduced major axis regression and principal components are not only consistent with assumptions about geochemical data, but are less sensitive to varying degrees of data set truncation than is ordinary least squares regression. Furthermore, correcting the descriptive statistics of a truncated data set and calculating the background functions using these statistics produces residuals and scores which are predictable and thus can be distinguished easily from residuals and scores calculated for data from another distribution. / Science, Faculty of / Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Department of / Graduate

This study seeks to provide an analysis of some of the features which underly any ethnographic description. First, it focuses on the daily routine of a community medical clinic in a large city in Western Canada, then it "looks back" on the methodological and theoretical issues inherent in the production of any ethnography. A daily routine known as "chart rounds" (a review of patients' medical histories) is examined in detail. That description itself then becomes a topic of inquiry in its own right. The analysis rests on field observations conducted over a year and a half within the research setting. During this period the researcher was privy to medical examinations, to chart rounds, and to much of the ongoing routine of the Clinic. I was also able to tape-record various aspects of its organization. Most of the material which I have analyzed consists of transcriptions taken from tape recordings of doctor-patient interviews and of chart rounds. Some of the issues which will be given special attention are (1) the beginning of the ethnographic report and the relationship of this section to the subsequent sections of an ethnography; (2) how it is that ethnographic descriptions are necessarily based in a set of common sense relevancies; (3) the use of 'talk' in interaction and as a source of data for "discovering" the self-organizing features of the settings and occasions from which this talk is collected; and (4) the relationship between ethnographic description and the researcher in the research setting. The research reported here is to be seen as exploratory and tentative. It is not intended as a -manual for ethnographic researchers, but as an attempt to explicate some of the organizational features in the construction of an ethnographic description. No doubt it raises many more questions than it answers, but its purpose will be satisfied if it is able to generate some debate about the organization of ethnographies. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate