Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores (Major Telecomunicação). Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2010

This study investigated the secondary school students' learning of genetics when their teachers included an interactive computer program BioLogica in classroom teaching and learning. Genetics is difficult to teach and learn at school because it is conceptually and linguistically complex for students who have little or no prior knowledge about it. Yet genetics is now central to learning and research in biomedical sciences and is essential for understanding contemporary issues such as genetic engineering and cloning. Interactive multimedia programs such as BioLogica have provided new opportunities for learning as these programs feature multiple external representations (MERs) of knowledge in different formats, including visualgraphical and verbal-textual and at different levels of organisation. Users can manipulate and observe the behaviour of these MERs. Ainsworth (1999) summarised three functions of MERs claimed by researchers in supporting learners - to provide complementary information or processes, to constrain interpretations of phenomena and to promote construction of deeper understanding of the domain. Using an interpretive, case-based research approach with multiple methods and multiple sources of data, this study was guided by two foci of inquiry - teachers' integration and implementation of BioLogica in their classroom teaching, and students' learning with BioLogica alongside other resources. The theoretical framework drew on perspectives from educational psychology, the conceptual learning model in science education, and cognitive/computational sciences. / Student learning was interpreted using a multidimensional conceptual change framework (Tyson, Venville, Harrison, & Treagust, 1997)-social/affective dimension in terms of students' interests and motivations, epistemological dimension in terms of genetics reasoning of six types (Hickey & Kindfield, 1999), and ontological dimension in terms students' gene conceptions (Venville & Treagust, 1998). Teaching and learning with BioLogica were also analysed and interpreted using Ainsworth's three functions of MERs. Necessary techniques including triangulation were used to increase the rigour of data analysis and interpretation in keeping with the qualitative research tradition. The study was conducted during the years 2001 and 2002 at six classroom sites across four senior high schools of different contexts in the metropolitan Perth area in Western Australia. Five teachers and their Year 10 students (four classes) and Year 12 students (two classes) - 117 students (90 girls and 27 boys), aged from 14 to 18, - participated in the study. Data were collected in response to the initial research questions and the reformulated case-specific research questions. The findings in terms of general assertions were generated from within-case and cross-case analyses and interpretations. Findings of the study suggest that teachers idiosyncratically incorporated (rather than integrated) BioLogica activities in their classroom teaching based on their beliefs and referents for normal classroom teaching. The teachers' implementation and scaffolding of student learning with BioLogica were affected by their knowledge of the software and beliefs about its usefulness based on the salient features of the MERs rather than their functions. / Institutional support, technical issues, and time constraints were the possible barriers for using BioLogica in teaching. The findings also suggest that most students were motivated and enjoyed learning with BioLogica but not all who were actively engaged in the activities improved their genetics reasoning. Mindfulness (Salomon & Globerson, 1987) in learning with the BioLogica MERs, learning together with peers, scaffolded learning within the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) were deemed important to students' conceptual learning. The postinstructional gene conceptions of most students were not sophisticated and were generally intelligible-plausible (IP) but not intelligible-plausible-fruitful (IPF). While most students identified two salient features of BioLogica MERs, visualisation and instant feedback, some students who substantially improved their reasoning believed that these two features helped their understanding of genetics. Overall, students exhibited social/affective (motivational) and epistemological conceptual change but little or no ontological change. The findings have implications for further and future research. First, Thorley's status analysis is useful in analysing multidimensional conceptual change (Tyson et al., 1997). Second, MERs have provided new learning opportunities and challenges for classroom learning and science teacher education. Third, there is urgency for improving Year 10 genetics teaching and learning. Fourth, the notion of multiple representations is promising in unifying theoretical constructs in psychology, cognitive/computational sciences, science education and science teacher education.

Three States of the Mind's Eye is a multimedia work composed of music, poetry, and video. The purpose of the work is to examine attributes of three different abstract states of mind: the dream, paranoia, and courage. The musical score both tells its own story as well as enhances the visuals and poetry as they are presented. This document will discuss the ideas behind the work, how the composer went about creating each section and combining them, and will provide musical excerpts, the poetry itself and other visual examples. All sounds for the project are synthetic or sampled and the use of technology will also be discussed. The thesis is divided into four parts: introduction, analysis, technology and workspace, and conclusion. / Mary Pappert School of Music; / Composition / MM; / Thesis;

Since the digital revolution, media studies has repositioned celluloid in media archaeology while drawing attention to new media, new visual, and new spectatorship. We could then conceive 'what is/was cinema?' by 're-placing' rather than replacing such film theory concepts as apparatus, image, and subjectivity in a feedback circuit between past and present. In this context, the new media term interface seems inspiring; its notion of contact surface between humans and/or machines has evolved in various ways to redefine cinema, screen, and body. But I find interfacial elements or aspects to be inherent in film (studies), given the term's specificity (compared to 'apparatus'), flexibility (applicable to 'sur/face'), universality (implying 'relationality''), and intermediality (rooming 'interdisciplinarity'). A creative adaptation of interface could then serve to discover and invent a synthetic, multi-faceted notion of interfaciality that seems to underlie both image and subjectivity. For this project, I rearticulate a variety of film and interdisciplinary theories such as ontology of image, narratology of material, psychoanalysis of the real, phenomenology of body, cognitivism of mind, ethics of the other, aesthetics of appearance, and sociology of the digital. Ultimately, I propose to remap film studies through the prism of this interface theory. / I introduce cinematic interface as any contact surface mediating two sides through spatial difference (object/medium/subject) and temporal deferment (recording/editing/projection). Then, the cinematic apparatus appears as a conveyer belt of interfaces from the single surface (object) through the triple medium-interface (camera/film/screen) to the double body-interface (eye/mind). This model allows us to combine Sigmund Freud's and Henri Bergson's still resonating ideas on perception and memory in a way of reshaping the former theories of apparatus, ideological or analytical. / Drawing on a wide range of films, five chapters then investigate the interfaces on screen: (1) the direct appearance of a camera/filmstrip/screen, (2) the character's bodily contact with such a medium-interface, (3) the object's surface and (4) the subject's face as 'quasi-interfaces,' and (5) image and subjectivity as such. In each chapter, interfaciality leads us beyond its basic notion of neutral mediation or transparent communication toward the inherent disequilibrium, intrinsic dialectics, inhuman dimension, and implosive dynamics between two sides of an interface, between object and subject. I elaborate on these inner qualities in terms of ''asymmetrical mutuality,' 'ambivalent tactility,' 'immanent virtuality,' 'multiple directionality,' and 'para- index'/'indexivity'--- five keywords correspondent to five crucial concepts in film theory: suture, embodiment, illusion, signification, and indexicality , which I continue to reframe through different methodologies, unearthing hidden niches and latent constellations between them. / Opening with Michael Haneke's Cache, Chapter 1 not only argues that its video-interface 'desutures' classical seamless narrative, but also locates the multiple suture/desuture dialectics in semiotic suture theory, renewed psychoanalysis, enunciation theory, narratography, etc. This process then leads to interfaciality not just before, but also immanent in the eye asymmetrically related to the inhuman Gaze in matter, while moving from the Lacanian to Deleuzian ontology of perception. Likewise, Chapter 2 takes Rossellini's Virginity as a springboard for rethinking the touch of the screen in the history of spectatorship theory: from psychoanalysis through early Rube film study to phenomenology of embodiment. Ambivalently tactile, embodied interfaciality is here found in the skin in terms of 'screen as body' and 'body as screen.' / Chapter 3 examines how the surface of an object can appear like a pseudo-camera, a virtual filmstrip, and a flat/fluid/fluorescent screen, as suggested in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century. Questioning the aesthetics of illusion, I here shed light on illusion of interfaciality immanent in the world, the cognitive effect of 'as if it is becoming interface.' On the opposite side, after looking at Kim Ki-duk's Time, Chapter 4 analyzes how the face can function as a multi-directional interface: a 'readerly window' to the character, a 'writerly mirror' for the viewer, a 'machinic simulacrum' of asubjectivity, and an 'uncanny icon' toward otherness. I accordingly trace the notion of signification from semiotics to phenomenology to ontology to ethics. / In the final chapter I readdress indexicality in two ways: the image as 'para-index' that only partially, impossibly indicates the absent but immanent Real, and subjectivity as 'indexical activity,' the act of indication for information or participation through our digits' tactile experience of digital interfaces. In this way, my upward trajectory from the infrastructure of apparatus through the superstructure of onscreen images to the apex of image itself goes back down to the actual ground of interface, geared up to our new media world. In so doing I suggest that interface might serve for a general theory of image and subjectivity through a meta-critical reengagement with film theory.

The impact of media on older women| Ageist attitudes towards biological, psychological, and social aging

The objectives of this thesis are to investigate the challenges on video streaming, to explore and compare different video streaming mechanisms, and to develop video streaming algorithms that maximize visual quality. To achieve these objectives, we first investigate scalable video multicasting schemes by comparing layered video multicasting with replicated stream video multicasting. Even though it has been generally accepted that layered video multicasting is superior to replicated stream multicasting, this assumption is not based on a systematic and quantitative comparison. We argue that there are indeed scenarios where replicated stream multicasting is the preferred approach. We also consider the problem of providing perceptually good quality of layered VBR video. This problem is challenging, because the dynamic behavior of the Internet's available bandwidth makes it difficult to provide good quality. Also a video encoded to provide a consistent quality exhibits significant data rate variability. We are, therefore, faced with the problem of accommodating the mismatch between the available bandwidth variability and the data rate variability of the encoded video. We propose an optimal quality adaptation algorithm that minimizes quality variation while at the same time increasing the utilization of the available bandwidth. Finally, we investigate the transmission control protocol (TCP) for a transport layer protocol in streaming packetized media data. Our approach is to model a video streaming system and derive relationships under which the system employing the TCP protocol achieves desired performance. Both simulation results and the Internet experimental results validate this model and demonstrate the buffering delay requirements achieve desired video quality with high accuracy. Based on the relationships, we also develop realtime estimation algorithms of playout buffer requirements.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-86). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2002. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-85). Also available on the World Wide Web.

<p> <i>Musica Speculativa</i> is a final project in two parts in which I explore, through both theory and practice, the role of metaphors in our understanding of reality with special attention given to the use of visual representation in multimedia concert works that employ electroacoustics. Part I, entitled, "Imaginary Cognition: Interpreting the Topoi of Intermedia Electroacoustic Concert Works," explores how metaphors play a core role in our musical experience and how aural metaphors can be enhanced by and ultimately interact with visual metaphors to create a contrapuntal intermedia experience. Part II, "<i>Musica Speculativa:</i> A Multimedia Concert in Five Movements and Three Intermezzi," for mezzo-soprano, flute, B-flat bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano, a percussionist performing an array of lightning bottles, a dancer with a gesture-sensing wand, and a technologist operating interactive audio and video processing, focuses on the medieval philosophy of <i>Musica Speculativa</i> and how it relates to our current understanding of the world. </p><p> In part I explore the heightened experience of metaphorical exchange through the utilization of multimedia. The starting point is the expansion of visual enhancement in electroacoustic compositions due to the widespread availability of projection in concert halls and the multimedia expectations created through 21st-century Western culture. With the use of visual representation comes the potential to map musical ideas onto visual signs, creating another level of cognition. The subsequent unfolding of visual signifiers offers a direct visual complement and subsequent interaction to the unfolding of aural themes in electroacoustic compositions. The paper surveys the current research surrounding metaphorical thematic recognition in electroacoustic works whose transformational processes might be unfamiliar, and which in turn create fertile ground for the negotiation of meaning. The interaction of media and the differences created among the various signs within the music and the visual art create a heightened concert experience that is familiar to and in many ways expected by contemporary listeners. </p><p> Composers such as Jaroslaw Kapuscinski have sought to use multimedia as a means to enhance the concert experience, giving movement to the acousmatic presence in their electroacoustic works. In turn, these works create a concert experience that is more familiar to the 21st-century audience. Through examining Kapuscinski's recent work, <i>Oli's Dream,</i> in light of cognitive research by Zbikowski (1998 &amp; 2002), topic theory by Agawu (1991 &amp; 2009), and multimedia research by Cook (1998), I propose a theory for analyzing contrapuntal meaning in multimedia concert works. </p><p> The themes explored in Part I, regarding the use of metaphor to interpret both visual and aural stimuli, ultimately creating a metaphor for a reality never fully grasped due to the limits of human understanding, are further explored artistically in the multimedia concert work, <i>Musica Speculativa. </i> The medieval philosophy of Musica Speculativa suggests that music as it is understood today (<i>musica instrumentalis</i>) is the only tangible form of the metaphysical music ruling human interactions (musica humana) and ordering the cosmos (<i>musica mundana</i>). I found the concept of <i>Musica Speculativa</i> to be a fitting metaphor for how music and art allude to our own perception of reality and our place within that world. The project as a whole re-examines the concept of <i> Musica Speculativa</i> in light of our current technological landscape to gain a deeper understanding of how we interact with the world around us. </p>

Scheherazade’s Sea is an interdisciplinary creative work, which brings together music, visual art, literary text, digital media, and performance art. Interdisciplinary creativity has existed for centuries in history. In fact, the ancients of different civilisations viewed the disciplines of science and art as inseparable. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw a resurgence of interdisciplinary interest in the form of artistic collaborations among proponents of the different arts forms, mainly music, visual art, theatre and dance. Today, this coalescence now includes digital and electronic media. However, such works focus mainly on the more dominant distal senses of sight and sound and fail to consider the multimodality of natural sensory perception in the experience of art, and many of these works are performed in settings where artists are separated from audience by physical and psychological barriers. In Scheherazade’s Sea, I shall address the limitations of prevalent approaches, by including the proximal senses, removing the traditional physical barriers and encouraging audience participation. On another level, Scheherazade’s Sea serves as a vehicle for exploration and reflection of the inherent sensory and cognitive peculiarities associated with Asperger’s Syndrome, and their possible influences upon creativity and artistic expression. Sensory and cognitive idiosyncrasy is a common feature in Asperger’s Syndrome. Individuals suffer from extremes of either heightened sensitivity or low arousal to external sensory stimuli, and their innate cognitive patterns differ from that of the typical majority. As a result, the sensory and cognitive world of a person with Autistic Spectrum Disorder can be fragmented, disjointed and confusing. While there exists substantial literature about famous artists with Asperger’s Syndrome and various aspects of their creativity, there is, to date, limited documentation from the perspective of the artist with Asperger’s Syndrome, using an original interdisciplinary work to illustrate the possible ways in which sensory and cognitive differences may affect and influence creative choices and outcomes. By charting and examining the features and various processes in the creation of Scheherazade’s Sea, I hope to discover and contribute more insights into this area of interdisciplinary study. The purpose of this examination is not to add to the already vast body of programmes aimed at social rehabilitation and adaptation to the neurotypical world, but rather to open more avenues for the identification and development of innate abilities in autistic individuals. My intention is not to ‘fix what is broken’, but to discover and empower beauty in the unusual and the different. / published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy