In this study I’ve used qualitative interviews to examine four male preschool teachers’ interpretations of gender and their work with gender in preschool. Specifically, I’ve been interested in what thoughts male teachers have about the preschool gender assignment, how they express these thoughts in their work, and how they perceive their role as men in preschool in relation to gender and gender equality. The teachers express that the preschool gender assignment means that one should treat girls and boys equally and give them the same opportunities. Based on their interpretations they explain how they work with gender, that they´re trying to change the image of what’s feminine and masculine through interactions with the children by using the language as an instrument. Despite this, they seem to have difficulties presenting substantial examples of how to counteract gender stereotypes. Unlike previous studies, the teachers in this study express their awareness that the replication of gender is unconscious. They’re not certain if they treat girls and boys equally. The male teachers believe that their role as men in the gender assignment is to show children that regardless of gender one can do everything and that there isn’t anything that´s typically feminine or masculine. / I denna studie har jag med kvalitativ intervju som metod undersökt fyra manliga pedagogers uppfattningar om genus och genusarbete i förskolan. Jag har genom mitt arbete velat ta reda på vilka tankar pedagogerna har om förskolans genusuppdrag, hur de berättar om hur de arbetar med detta i verksamheten samt hur de ser på sin roll som man i arbetet med genus och jämställdhet. Genusuppdraget innebär för pedagogerna att man ska behandla flickor och pojkar lika och ge dem samma möjligheter. Utifrån deras tolkningar berättar de om hur de arbetar med genus i verksamheten, de försöker att ändra bilden av vad som är kvinnligt och manligt genom interaktioner med barnen, med språket som verktyg. Däremot upplever jag att de har svårigheter att ge konkreta exempel på hur man kan motverka könsstereotyper i förskolan. Till skillnad från tidigare forskning framhåller pedagogerna i denna studie att de är medvetna om att reproduktionen av kön är omedveten och de menar att de inte vet om de behandlar flickor och pojkar lika. Pedagogerna ser att deras roll som man i förskolans genusuppdraget är att visa barn att man oavsett kön kan göra allting samt att det inte finns något som är typiskt kvinnligt eller manligt.

Text -to-speech systems currently are of great importance in the community. One core technology in this human language technology resource is stress assignment which plays an important role in any text-to-speech system. At present no automatic stress assigner for Afrikaans exists. For these reasons, the two most important aims of this project will be: a) to develop a complete and accurate set of stress rules for Afrikaans that can be implemented in an automatic stress assigner, and b) to develop an effective and highly accurate stress assigner in order to assign Afrikaans stress to words quickly and effectively. A set of stress rules for Afrikaans was developed in order to reach the first goal. It consists of 18 rules that are divided into groups for words that contain a schwa, derivations, and disyllabic, tri-syllabic and polysyllabic simplex words. Next, different approaches that can be used to develop a stress assigner were examined, and the rule-based approach was used to implement the developed stress rules within the stress assigner. The programming language, Perl, was chosen for the implementation of the rules. The chosen algorithm was used to generate a stress assigner for Afrikaans by implementing the stress rules developed. The hyphenator, Calomo and the compound analyser, CKarma was used to hyphenate all the test data and detect word boundaries within compounds. A dataset of 10 000 correctly annotated tokens was developed during the testing process. The evaluation of the stress assigner consists of four phases. During the first phase, the stress assigner was evaluated with the 10 000 tokens and achieved an accuracy of 92.09%. The grapheme - to-phoneme converter was evaluated with the same data and scored 91.9%. The influence of various factors on stress assignment was determined, and it was established that stress assignment is an essential component of rule-based grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. In conclusion, it can be said that the stress assigner achieved satisfactory results, and that the stress assigner can be successfully utilized in future projects to develop training data for further experiments with stress assignment and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for Afrikaans. Experiments can be conducted in future with data-driven approaches that possibly may lead to better results in Afrikaans stress assignment and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. / Thesis (M.A. (Applied Language and Literary Studies))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Text -to-speech systems currently are of great importance in the community. One core technology in this human language technology resource is stress assignment which plays an important role in any text-to-speech system. At present no automatic stress assigner for Afrikaans exists. For these reasons, the two most important aims of this project will be: a) to develop a complete and accurate set of stress rules for Afrikaans that can be implemented in an automatic stress assigner, and b) to develop an effective and highly accurate stress assigner in order to assign Afrikaans stress to words quickly and effectively. A set of stress rules for Afrikaans was developed in order to reach the first goal. It consists of 18 rules that are divided into groups for words that contain a schwa, derivations, and disyllabic, tri-syllabic and polysyllabic simplex words. Next, different approaches that can be used to develop a stress assigner were examined, and the rule-based approach was used to implement the developed stress rules within the stress assigner. The programming language, Perl, was chosen for the implementation of the rules. The chosen algorithm was used to generate a stress assigner for Afrikaans by implementing the stress rules developed. The hyphenator, Calomo and the compound analyser, CKarma was used to hyphenate all the test data and detect word boundaries within compounds. A dataset of 10 000 correctly annotated tokens was developed during the testing process. The evaluation of the stress assigner consists of four phases. During the first phase, the stress assigner was evaluated with the 10 000 tokens and achieved an accuracy of 92.09%. The grapheme - to-phoneme converter was evaluated with the same data and scored 91.9%. The influence of various factors on stress assignment was determined, and it was established that stress assignment is an essential component of rule-based grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. In conclusion, it can be said that the stress assigner achieved satisfactory results, and that the stress assigner can be successfully utilized in future projects to develop training data for further experiments with stress assignment and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for Afrikaans. Experiments can be conducted in future with data-driven approaches that possibly may lead to better results in Afrikaans stress assignment and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. / Thesis (M.A. (Applied Language and Literary Studies))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

As more students enter Canadian universities from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, supporting the development and transition of their academic writing skills through assignment and feedback design has become very important. Many of these students and their instructors identify academic writing as one of the students’ biggest problems in a Western university or college (Robertson, Line, Jones & Thomas, 2000; Yang, 1994; Zhu & Flaitz, 2005). Yet there is little support available for the instructors who work with these students (Dedrick & Watson, 2002). This study focuses on my interactions with three instructors in graduate programs that have a high proportion of international students who use English as an additional language (EAL). By weaving together action research and case study research, three themes became apparent: the instructors saw no clear distinction between the needs of EAL students and those who have English as a first language; the instructors were unclear about how to teach writing in their discipline; and, the instructors felt frustrated and overburdened by their workload. I also learned how I, as a researcher and an educational developer, can better interact with instructors to ensure support at the level of assignment and feedback design. The first lesson is when interacting with others it is necessary to identify the lens that represents one’s institutional and cultural lens. Because I did not adequately identify and interrogate my lens, I gave in to my colonial impulse to direct the study and the participants. The second lesson is the space in which we two instructors – the person from a given discipline and the person who is an educational developer – come together as a kind of “contact zone” (Pratt, 1998). I had hoped that the instructors and I would come together as a kind of Venn diagram, with our knowledge overlapping in a neutral and fruitful way, but I learned that the space where we come together is fraught and vulnerable for both the participants and the researcher. The third lesson is that relationships, which traditionally are not highly valued in our workplace in higher education, are extremely important in order to foster dialogue, continue conversations, and allow for the necessary revisiting and development of our work together. The main recommendation stemming from this study is workplace training for administrative staff who are in educational development positions. This study is important because there is little previous research in this area. As more Learning and Teaching Centres emerge at Canadian institutions, we must learn how to work effectively with instructors to affect curricular and assignment change. We must also question whether the kind of support a member of a Learning and Teaching Centre can provide is enough to affect this change, or whether other models, such as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and faculty mentoring, are essential in the development of the understanding of how to better support the development of the academic writing skills of international EAL students.

A piece of popular music is usually defined as a combination of vocal melody and instrumental accompaniment. People often start with the melody part when they are trying to compose or reproduce a piece of popular music. However, creating appropriate instrumental accompaniment part for a melody line can be a difficult task for non-musicians. Automation of accompaniment generation for vocal melodies thus can be very useful for those who are interested in singing for fun. Therefore, a computer software system which is capable of generating harmonic accompaniment for a given vocal melody input has been presented in this thesis. This automatic accompaniment system uses a Hidden Markov Model to assign chord to a given part of melody based on the knowledge learnt from a bank of vocal tracks of popular music. Comparing with other similar systems, our system features a high resolution key estimation algorithm which is helpful to adjust the generated accompaniment to the input vocal. Moreover, we designed a structure analysis subsystem to extract the repetition and structure boundaries from the melody. These boundaries are passed to the chord assignment and style player subsystems in order to generate more dynamic and organized accompaniment. Finally, prototype applications are discussed and the entire system is evaluated.

Due to its ability to deliver scalable and fault-tolerant solutions, applications based on the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm are used by millions of users on the internet. Recently, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have attracted a lot of interest from both academia and industry, because of their potential to provide flexible and alternative broadband wireless internet connectivity. However, due to various reasons such as unstable wireless link characteristics and multi-hop forwarding operation, the performance of current P2P systems is rather low in WMNs. This dissertation studies the technological challenges involved while deploying P2P systems over WMNs. We study the benefits of location-awareness and resource replication to the P2P overlay while targeting efficient resource lookup in WMNs. We further propose a cross-layer information exchange between the P2P overlay and the WMN in order to reduce resource lookup delay by augmenting the overlay routing table with physical neighborhood and resource lookup history information. Aiming to achieve throughput maximization and fairness in P2P systems, we model the peer selection problem as a mathematical optimization problem by using a set of mixed integer linear equations. A study of the model reveals the relationship between peer selection, resource replication and channel assignment on the performance of P2P systems over WMNs. We extend the model by formulating the P2P download problem as chunk scheduling problem. As a novelty, we introduce constraints to model the capacity limitations of the network due to the given routing and channel assignment strategy. Based on the analysis of the model, we propose a new peer selection algorithm which incorporates network load information and multi-path routing capability. By conducting testbed experiments, we evaluate the achievable throughput in multi-channel multi-radio WMNs. We show that the adjacent channel interference (ACI) problem in multi-radio systems can be mitigated, making better use of the available spectrum. Important lessons learned are also outlined in order to design practical channel and channel bandwidth assignment algorithms in multi-channel multi-radio WMNs.

Understanding biological phenomena at atomic resolution is one of the keys to modern drug design. In particular, knowledge of 3D structures of proteins and their interactions with other macromolecules are necessary for designing chemical compounds that modify biological processes. Conventional methods for protein structure determinations comprise X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. These techniques can also determine the binding mode of chemical compounds. Either technique can be slow and costly, making it highly relevant to explore alternative strategies. Paramagnetic NMR spectroscopy is emerging as such an alternative technique. In order to measure the paramagnetic effects, two NMR spectra are compared that have been measured with and without a bound paramagnetic metal ion. In particular, pseudocontact shifts (PCS) of nuclear spins are easily measured as the difference (in ppm) of the chemical shifts between the two spectra. PCSs provide long range and orientation dependent restraints, allowing positioning of the spin with respect to the magnetic susceptibility tensor anisotropy (Δχ-tensor) of the metal ion. In this thesis, I used the PCS effect to computationally extract information from NMR spectra. I developed (i) a tool (called Possum) to automatically assign diamagnetic and paramagnetic spectra of the methyl groups of amino acid side chains, given structural information of the protein studied and prior knowledge of the Δχ-tensor; (ii) I designed a comprehensive software package (called Numbat) to extract Δχ-tensor parameters from assigned PCS values and the available 3D structure; and (iii) I incorporated PCS-based restraints into the protein structure prediction software CS-ROSETTA and demonstrated that this combination (PCS-ROSETTA) presents a significant improvement for de novo structure determination. The three projects serve different purposes at different stages of protein NMR studies. They could be combined in the following manner: Starting from assigned backbone PCSs, PCS-Rosetta could be used to determine the 3D structure of the protein. Possum can then be used to automatically assign the NMR resonances of the methyl groups using PCSs. Finally, Numbat can be used to fit improved Δχ-tensors to all the PCS data, analyze the quality of the Δχ-tensors and identify possible wrong assignments. Iterative repetition of this protocol would give a 3D structural model of the protein with a minimum of data. Alternatively, the Δχ-tensor parameters and PCSs could be used as input for a traditional software package such as Xplor-NIH to compute a 3D structure of the protein.

Understanding biological phenomena at atomic resolution is one of the keys to modern drug design. In particular, knowledge of 3D structures of proteins and their interactions with other macromolecules are necessary for designing chemical compounds that modify biological processes. Conventional methods for protein structure determinations comprise X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. These techniques can also determine the binding mode of chemical compounds. Either technique can be slow and costly, making it highly relevant to explore alternative strategies. Paramagnetic NMR spectroscopy is emerging as such an alternative technique. In order to measure the paramagnetic effects, two NMR spectra are compared that have been measured with and without a bound paramagnetic metal ion. In particular, pseudocontact shifts (PCS) of nuclear spins are easily measured as the difference (in ppm) of the chemical shifts between the two spectra. PCSs provide long range and orientation dependent restraints, allowing positioning of the spin with respect to the magnetic susceptibility tensor anisotropy (Δχ-tensor) of the metal ion. In this thesis, I used the PCS effect to computationally extract information from NMR spectra. I developed (i) a tool (called Possum) to automatically assign diamagnetic and paramagnetic spectra of the methyl groups of amino acid side chains, given structural information of the protein studied and prior knowledge of the Δχ-tensor; (ii) I designed a comprehensive software package (called Numbat) to extract Δχ-tensor parameters from assigned PCS values and the available 3D structure; and (iii) I incorporated PCS-based restraints into the protein structure prediction software CS-ROSETTA and demonstrated that this combination (PCS-ROSETTA) presents a significant improvement for de novo structure determination. The three projects serve different purposes at different stages of protein NMR studies. They could be combined in the following manner: Starting from assigned backbone PCSs, PCS-Rosetta could be used to determine the 3D structure of the protein. Possum can then be used to automatically assign the NMR resonances of the methyl groups using PCSs. Finally, Numbat can be used to fit improved Δχ-tensors to all the PCS data, analyze the quality of the Δχ-tensors and identify possible wrong assignments. Iterative repetition of this protocol would give a 3D structural model of the protein with a minimum of data. Alternatively, the Δχ-tensor parameters and PCSs could be used as input for a traditional software package such as Xplor-NIH to compute a 3D structure of the protein.

<p>The aim of this study was to examine which effect tabloidization has had on the news content and the presentation of the Swedish news program Rapport, during the years 1979 and 2009. Rapport is broadcasted in the Public Service channel "Sveriges Television".</p><p>Our main concern was to examine whether Rapport has stayed true to their assignment or if they have made changes to appeal to the popularised audience. To do so we focused on three questions: What is the journalist’s role? What becomes news? Who are interviewed?</p><p>We used theories such as social representation, news value and media logic to help us perform the analysis. Qualitative methods were used to analyse the news broadcasts, of which John Langer’s story-types was the primary method. In addition to that we used the method of semiotics to reveal signs of tabloidization in the imagery of the broadcasts.</p><p>Our results showed that the tabloidization of Rapport lies in the format rather than the news content. The changes in the news content are barely noticeable, even though the time span is quite long. The format however, has seen some tabloidization in 2009, with changes to the vignette and the feature structure. We also found changes in which people that Rapport chose to interview and changes among the journalists themselves. For instance we discovered that the representation of different groups of people is much more varied in 2009 than it was in 1979. The results also showed that the journalistic role has shifted from the task of educating the citizens to the task of being sensational and entertaining.</p><p><p><p> </p></p></p>

Η αλματώδης ανάπτυξη που παρατηρείται τα τελευταία χρόνια στον τομέα των οπτικών δικτύων τηλεπικοινωνιών, έχει ως συνέπεια την αύξηση της κατανάλωσης ενέργειας. Σήμερα υπολογίζεται ότι η ενέργεια που οφείλεται σε IT τεχνολογίες αποτελεί το 1%-2% της παγκόσμιας κατανάλωσης. Ωστόσο, τα ποσοστά αυτά αναμένεται να αυξηθούν δραματικά μιας και όλο και περισσότερες εφαρμογές, που απαιτούν μεγάλο εύρος ζώνης (π.χ. video streaming, HDTV), αναπτύσσονται ταχύτατα. Μέχρι πρόσφατα ο κύριος περιορισμός στην ανάπτυξη των δικτύων ήταν το κόστος εξοπλισμού και μετάδοσης. Σήμερα το μεγαλύτερο πρόβλημα είναι η όλο και αυξανόμενη κατανάλωση ενέργειας. Έτσι λοιπόν πιο energy-aware προσεγγίσεις για το σχεδιασμό, την υλοποίηση και τη λειτουργία των οπτικών δικτύων κρίνονται πλέον απαραίτητες. Για την αντιμετώπιση του προβλήματος της κατανάλωσης ενέργειας σε οπτικά δίκτυα υπάρχουν δυο προσεγγίσεις: η ανάπτυξη ενεργο-αποδοτικών συσκευών δικτύου ή η ανάπτυξη αλγορίθμων δρομολόγησης και ανάθεσης μήκους κύματος (RWA) που να λαμβάνουν υπόψη τους και την ενέργεια που καταναλώνει το δίκτυο. Στην παρούσα διπλωματική εργασία επιλέχθηκε η δεύτερη προσέγγιση όπου και αναπτύχθηκαν Energy Aware RWA αλγόριθμοι για τον σχεδιασμό WDM οπτικών δικτύων με στόχο την ελαχιστοποίηση της ενέργειας που καταναλώνεται. Αυτό επιτυγχάνεται μειώνοντας τον αριθμό των συσκευών του δικτύου, όπως αναγεννητές, ενισχυτές, add/drop τερματικά κ.τ.λ. που είναι γνωστό ότι καταναλώνουν αρκετή ενέργεια κατά τη λειτουργία τους. Αρχικά αναπτύχθηκε ένας αλγόριθμος σε Ακέραιο Γραμμικό Ακέραιο Προγραμματισμό (Integer Linear Programming - ILP) που ελαχιστοποιεί από κοινού όλες εκείνες τις συσκευές του δικτύου που καταναλώνουν ενέργεια. Έπειτα το πρόβλημα χωρίζεται σε δυο υπο-προβλήματα: την κατανομή αναγεννητών σε κόμβους του δικτύου όπου η αναγέννηση είναι απαραίτητη και στο Energy Aware RWA. Σε αυτή τη περίπτωση εκτός από ILP προγραμματισμό εφαρμόζεται επίσης και χαλάρωση των περιορισμών ακεραιότητας (LP προγραμματισμός) ώστε να μπορούν να προκύψουν λύσεις και για μεγαλύτερες τοπολογίες. Για τον υπολογισμό της απόδοσης των προτεινόμενων αλγορίθμων διεξάγονται μια σειρά από πειράματα εξομοιώσεων σε Matlab, με τη βοήθεια του LINDO API για την επίλυση των (I)LP προβλημάτων σε ένα μικρό δίκτυο αλλά και στο ευρωπαϊκό δίκτυο Geant-2. Oι προτεινόμενοι αλγόριθμοι συγκρίνονται με τυπικούς RWA αλγορίθμους που δεν λαμβάνουν υπόψη την ενέργεια ή ελαχιστοποιούν κάποιες από τις συνιστώσες του δικτύου. Οι υπολογισμοί δείχνουν ότι η κατανάλωση της ενέργειας του δικτύου μπορεί να μειωθεί μέχρι και 45% σε δίκτυο με συνδέσμους μονής ίνας και μέχρι και 65% σε συνδέσμους διπλής ίνας. / The continuing deployment and upgrade of optical telecommunication networks drive up power and energy consumption, in a way that makes operators worry that future energy consumption levels may pose constraints on communications growth that are more significant than those posed by bandwidth considerations. As community concerns about global energy consumption grow, the power consumption of the optical networks is becoming an issue of increasing importance. Even though energy consumption of IT-related infrastructure currently represents between 1% and 2% of global energy consumption, such values are destined to rise, as more bandwidth-hungry applications (such as video streaming, and HDTV in particular) continue to be developed. Thus, it seems that an energy-aware approach is increasingly needed during the design, implementation and operation of optical networks. Two different approaches can be explored to reduce energy consumption in optical networks: the improvement of the energy efficiency of the equipment and the energy awareness of the Routing and Wavelengths Assignment (RWA) algorithms. In this work the energy minimization problem in optical networks is considered from an algorithmic perspective. The objective of the proposed algorithms is to plan optical WDM networks so as to minimize the energy consumed, by minimizing the number of the most energy-consuming components. Such components can be amplifiers, regenerators, add/drop terminals, optical fibers, etc. Firstly an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation is given that aims at jointly minimizing the energy consuming modules present in an optical network, such as the regenerators, amplifiers, wavelength selective switches, etc. Then the problem for a general (translucent network) is decomposed into a regeneration placement problem, and an energy-aware RWA for transparent networks problem, where again ILP formulations are given to minimize energy consumption. The ILP of the decomposed problem is solved as an LP problem, by relaxing the integer constraints, in order to obtain solutions for larger network topologies. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed Energy Aware (EA)-RWA algorithms a number of simulation experiments is carried out. All the RWA algorithms are implemented in Matlab and LINDO API is used to solve the corresponding (I)LP problems. The proposed algorithms are compared with RWA algorithms that do not consider energy minimization techniques or RWA algorithms that partially take into account energy consuming components. The simulation results showed that the energy consumption in the optical layer can be reduced by up to 45% in single fiber networks and by up to 65% in multi-fiber networks.