Global ETD Search

1	They didn't ask the question...An inquiry into the learning experiences of students with spina bifida and hydrocephalus Rissman, Barbara Murray January 2006 (has links) The researcher has a daughter who was born with an encephalocele and her neuropsychological assessment indicates a Nonverbal Learning Disability (NLD). The difficulties of the educational experiences that emerged over time, mainly because her learning profile was not understood, prompted reflection on the consequences for other students who present with this profile. A concern for the long-term implications for students and parents of the frequent misunderstandings of the NLD has inspired this study. A review of the literature suggested a need to raise educator awareness about the subtle but disabling nature of the NLD syndrome. This study explored the perceptions of teachers, teacher aides and parents involved with 5 students who showed hallmark signs of an NLD. The theoretical foundation rests in the understanding that a student's learning experiences are influenced by past and present school experiences, the attitudes of peers, and parental expectations. The purpose of this thesis is to help parents, teachers and others appreciate the school experiences of children at Level 1 risk of developing an NLD, those with a hydrocephalic condition. It does not purport to offer ultimate solutions or to contribute to diagnosis but rather to act as a starting point for a body of theory to guide development of suitable learning environments for such children. Of further importance is emphasis on the need for similar studies to be conducted into the learning experiences of other children who demonstrate specific syndromes or mosaic forms of those syndromes. Naturalistic Inquiry methodology was used to explore the educational experiences of five students who attended different Australian schools. After completion of all interviews, psychological testing assessed general intelligence and the NLD status of each student. All students were found to be severely learning disabled and all were high on the NLD parameter. Educators generally did not reveal understanding of the NLD syndrome &quotNonverbal, what is it? So is it a visual ..." Some teachers devised innovative strategies to help the student cope in class while others expressed frustration ... if the traditional instruction &quotdoesn't work either, what does?" What stood out was an absence of understanding about nonverbal deficits. Frustration about poor organisation, decision making, task completion and problem-solving was expressed and a mixture of concern and criticism was levelled at social incompetence. Students who could not work independently were perceived by some teachers and aides as &quotlazy" or &quotmolly-coddled" and problems with everyday living skills were sometimes blamed on the student's family. Findings revealed a compelling need to raise educator awareness about the range of cognitive, learning and social problems associated with shunted hydrocephalus and spina bifida. They also highlighted a need for teachers to question &quotWhy can't this student do things one would expect they could do" and demand answers that explicate the serious difficulties being experienced. nonverbal learning disability NLD NLD profile spina bifida hydrocephalus shunted hydrocephalus teacher aide parent student educator Education Queensland acquired brain injury ABI assets deficits strengths weaknesses perception phenotype psychological psychometric assessment
2	A GIS-Based Data Model and Tools for Analysis and Visualization of Levee Breaching Using the GSSHA Model Tran, Hoang Luu 17 March 2011 (has links) (PDF) Levee breaching is the most frequent and dangerous form of levee failure. A levee breach occurs when floodwater breaks through part of the levee creating an opening for water to flood the protected area. According to National Committee on Levee Safety (NCLS), a reasonable upper limit for damage resulting from levee breaching is around $10 billion per year during 1998 and 2007. This number excludes hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 which resulted in economic damages estimated to be more than $200 billion dollar and a loss of more than 1800 lives. In response to these catastrophic failures, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) started to develop the National Levee Database (NLD) on May 2006. The NLD has a critical role in evaluating the safety of the national levee system. It contains information regarding the attributes of the national levee system. The Levee Analyst Data Model was developed by Dr Norm Jones, Jeff Handy and Thomas Griffiths to supplement the NLD. Levee Analyst is a data model and suite of tools for managing levee information in ArcGIS and exporting the information to Google Earth for enhanced visualization. The current Levee Analyst has a concise and expandable structure for managing, archiving and analyzing large amounts of levee seepage and slope stability data. (Thomas 2009). The new set of tools developed in this research extends the ability of the Levee Analyst Data Model to analyze and mange levee breach simulations and store them in the NLD geodatabase. The capabilities and compatibilities with the NLD of the new geoprocessing tools are demonstrated in the case study. The feasibility of using GSSHA model to simulate flooding is also demonstrated in this research. GSSHA levee breach flood inundation National Levee Database NLD levee analyst WMS Google Earth Civil and Environmental Engineering
3	United States counter-narcotics policies towards Burma, and how the illegal myanmar regime is manipulating those policies to commit ethnic genocide. Hochstedler, Robert. 06 1900 (has links) US counter-narcotic policies towards Burma have possessed a singular-focus. In other words, they have been based on the traditional bilateral triumvirate strategies of eradication, education, and interdiction. Eradicate the crops used to produce illicit narcotics, interdict the flow of illicit drug traffickers, and educate the general population on the dangers of continual drug usage. In the country of Burma though, there are other US policies which also have a singular focus, which have undermined the effectiveness of these policies. Since the Burmese military regime's brutal suppression of the pro-democracy movement in 1988, the US has severed all economic relations with the country. The Burmese economy, which was already far from stable, fell into a downward spiral as a result of these US-led policies. This did not result in a democratic transition. Over seventeen years since these economic sanctions have been in place, the US has not achieved a peaceful regime change in Burma. Furthermore, the attempts to remove the significant flow of illicit narcotics from the country have failed as well. The reason these two singular-oriented policies have failed is that they are targeted at a country much more complex than these strategies have been designed to handle. First of all, there are 135 ethnicities in Burma, while only a small portion of the Burman population maintains political and economic control. Although this would result in ineffective policies with little collateral impact, the ruling Tatmadaw regime has manipulated these policies to commit ethnic genocide upon the ethnic minorities within their territory. Unless a re-assessment of these policies is undertaken by the US and its allies, the only result of their policies will be the elimination of millions of ethnic minorities in this totalitarian state. Therefore, the US must re-assess its position of isolating the Myanmar regime, and focus on a policy of engagement. Only if a structured and progressive incentive policy of economic development is created in conjunction with the regime, can the separate triumvirate policies of counter-narcotics against the ethnic minorities in Burma become effective. / US Navy (USN) author. Burma Myanmar narcotics opium heroin minority insurgent Southeast Asia ASEAN UN United Nations United Nations Security Council Shan Karen Wa yaa baa methamphetamine illicit drug DEA Thailand US China Laos SSA UWSA KNLA SPDC NLD democracy sanctions Aung San Suu Kyi Burma Myanmar narcotics opium heroin minority insurgent Southeast Asia ASEAN UN United Nations United Nations Security Council Shan Karen Wa yaa baa methamphetamine illicit drug DEA Thailand US China Laos SSA UWSA KNLA SPDC NLD democracy sanctions Aung San Suu Kyi
4	Investigating the Portuguese-English Bilingual Mental Lexicon: Crosslinguistic Orthographic and Phonological Overlap in Cognates and False Friends Alves-Soares, Leonardo 01 October 2020 (has links) This dissertation investigates how cognates are organized in the bilingual mental lexicon and examines whether orthography in one language, via phonological representations, influences the processing of cognates and false friends in the other language. In light of the framework of two well-known models of bilingual visual word recognition, the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) and the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+), the premise is that there is activation from orthography to phonology across a bilingual’s two languages and that this activation is modulated by the degree of orthographic and phonological code overlap. Two objective metrics were used to assess crosslinguistic similarity of Portuguese-English cognates and false friends that were selected for a cross-language lexical decision task with masked priming. Dynamic time warping (DTW), an algorithm that was originally conceived to compare different speech patterns in automatic speech recognition and to measure acoustic similarity between two time-dependent sequences, was used to compute crosslinguistic phonological similarity. The Normalized Levenshtein Distance (NLD), an algorithm that calculates the minimum number of single-character insertions, deletions or substitutions required to change one word into another and normalizes the result by their lengths, was used to compute crosslinguistic orthographic similarity. Portuguese-English bilinguals who acquired their second language after reaching puberty, and English functional monolinguals who grew up speaking primarily English were recruited to participate in the experimental task. Based on collected reaction time and accuracy data, mixed-effects models analyses are used to estimate the individual effects of crosslinguistic orthographic, phonological and semantic similarity and the role each of them, along with English proficiency, word frequency and length play in the organization of the Portuguese-English bilingual mental lexicon. bilingual mental lexicon Portuguese English Portuguese-English bilinguals English functional monolinguals cognates false friends crosslinguistic overlap crosslinguistic similarity semantic lexical decision task LDT masked priming spreading activation RHM BIA BIA+ Multilink orthographic representations phonological representations dynamic time warping DTW Normalized Levenshtein Distance NLD mixed-effects models lmer glmer reaction time accuracy

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