Wire and Arc Additive Manufacturing is a novel Additive Manufacturing technology. As a result, the process for progressing from a solid model to manufacturing code, i.e. the Part Programming process, is undeveloped. In this report the Part Programming process, unique for Wire and Arc Additive Manufacturing, has been investigated to answer three questions; What is the Part Programming process for Wire and Arc Additive Manufacturing? What are the requirements on the Part Programming process? What software can be used for the Part Programming process? With a systematic review of publications on Wire and Arc Additive Manufacturing and related subjects, the steps of the Part Programming process and its requirements have been clarified. The Part Programming process has been used for evaluation of software solutions, resulting in multiple recommendations for implemented usage. Verification of assumptions, made by the systematic review, has been done by physical experiments to give further credibility to the results.

Working hours, its lenght and distribution, with the focus on part-time Abstract The thesis deals with the issue of working hours and its distribution with a special focus on part-time. The thesis also introduces the legislation of part-time in the foreign law system, particularly in the Netherlands. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the current legal regulation of working hours, its length and distribution, focusing on part-time. The thesis is divided into six chapters, which represent labor law in the system of law, historical development of working hours, sources of labor law, legal regulation of working hours and rest periods and distribution of working hours. The fifth chapter deals with labor law institutes in which part-time deviate from the set weekly working hours. The chapter defines persons that are entitled to apply for part-time or another suitable adjustment of their working hours, forms of these suitable adjustments and the interpretation of the concept of operational reasons by the Supreme Court of the Czech Republic. The thesis also describes the method of calculating and remunerating overtime work for part-time employees and the calculation of the leave of those part-time employees whose working hours are unequally spread over several working days per week. The chapter also describes...

The overall aim of the research was to understand the potential impact of sustained part-time working on women’s identities with regards to motherhood and work. Despite an implicit assumption in public discourse, policy and research that mothers will resume full-time careers once their children are ‘older’, half of working mothers with their youngest child at secondary school are working part-time (ONS, Q3, 2011). Often in the literature ‘good’ part-time working has been framed as short-term (see for example Tilly, 1996). The part-time ‘hidden brain drain’ (Equal Opportunities Commission, 2005) has been described as a waste of education and skills (Connolly and Gregory, 2010) and contributing to gender inequality (Walby, 2007). This PhD explored the life stories of twenty university educated, partnered mothers of older children (youngest at secondary school), who had mostly worked part-time since becoming mothers. Dialogic narrative analysis (Frank, 2010) was used to explore how these women made sense of where they had ended up through their story telling. A key finding is that for these women ‘becoming’ a part-time working mother was neither an informed ‘choice’, nor a fixed orientation, but was an ongoing process of negotiation, within a matrix of inter-related, constantly shifting and interacting tensions. Compromises to their jobs often became more extensive than expected and a continuing need to ‘be there’ for teenagers was unanticipated. Damage to ‘career’ is conceptualised as a ‘creeping trauma’. This is considered in light of the mothering stories indicating this was a price worth paying. The majority of women were engaging in a narrative of reorientation, using various strategies to reframe standards of ‘good’ working and the meaning of work within life. Success in reorientation differed according to individual experiences of constraints and opportunities.

Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-21T20:31:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Maria Eutemia.pdf: 1993207 bytes, checksum: e8444b9c80ab524ff93c84592470c5ed (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-12-10 / This essay is about the curriculum and the teaching and learning process of physics in high school teaching. It aimed at identifying the changes that took place in the period of 1999 up to 2004 in physics teaching, in terms of schedule time, content, and new subjects of the curriculum Diversified Part, elapsed from the do Art. 26 of LDB 9394/96. It was theoretically based on authors such as Moreira A. (1995, 2003, 2004, 2005), Silva (1996) and Lopes (2004, 2006), Apple (2006), Giroux (1988), Forquin (1993, 1996), Sacristán (2000) and Goodson (1995). Its character was exploratory and document research, by following a qualitative approach. It was accomplished among with six state schools of Ponta Grossa. Indicator sources were constituted by curricular matrixes, course plans, pedagogic political project, laws, resolutions and interviews made with directors, representatives of the pedagogical group, teachers and a representative of the Education Regional Center. The information analysis refers to the Common National Basis (BNC) and the subjects of the Diversified Part (PD) related to the Physics. Content analysis was used for indicators treatment. The results demonstrate that on practical aspect the law compliance was risked by administrative political matters in local and state sphere of action that resulted in content and schedule time dilution between PD and BNC. The choice for curricular organization of the form of knowledge disciplinarization promoted a fragmentation on the curriculum, in a way that risks the teaching and learning process of physics subject. / Esta dissertação trata do currículo e do processo ensino-aprendizagem de Física no Ensino Médio. Objetivou identificar as mudanças ocorridas no período de 1999 até 2004 no ensino de Física, em termos de carga horária, conteúdo e novas disciplinas da Parte Diversificada do currículo, em decorrência do Art. 26 da LDB 9394/96. Fundamentou-se teoricamente em autores como Moreira A. (1995, 2003, 2004, 2005), Silva (1996) e Lopes (2004, 2006), Apple (2006), Giroux (1988), Forquin (1993, 1996), Sacristán (2000) e Goodson (1995). Teve caráter de pesquisa documental e exploratória, seguindo uma abordagem qualitativa. Foi realizada junto a seis escolas estaduais de PG. Constituíram fontes de indicadores, as matrizes curriculares, planos de curso, projeto político pedagógico, leis, deliberações e entrevistas realizadas com diretores, representantes da equipe pedagógica, professores e um representante do Núcleo Regional de Educação. A análise das informações se referem à Base Nacional Comum (BNC) e as novas disciplinas da Parte Diversificada (PD) relacionadas com a Física. Utilizou-se da análise de conteúdo para o tratamento dos indicadores. Os resultados demonstram que no aspecto prático o cumprimento da lei ficou comprometido por questões político administrativas em âmbito estadual e local que resultaram em diluição de conteúdo e carga horária entre PD e BNC. A opção pela organização curricular da forma de disciplinarização do conhecimento promoveu uma fragmentação no currículo, de modo a comprometer o processo de ensino-aprendizagem da disciplina de Física.

A etiquetagem morfossintática envolve atribuir às palavras de uma sentença suas classes morfossintáticas de acordo com os contextos em que elas aparecem. Cadeias de Markov de Tamanho Variável (VLMCs, do inglês \"Variable-Length Markov Chains\") oferecem uma forma de modelar contextos maiores que trigramas sem sofrer demais com a esparsidade de dados e a complexidade do espaço de estados. Mesmo assim, duas palavras do português apresentam um alto grau de ambiguidade: \'que\' e \'a\'. O número de erros na etiquetagem dessas palavras corresponde a um quarto do total de erros cometidos por um etiquetador baseado em VLMCs. Além disso, essas palavras parecem apresentar dois diferentes tipos de ambiguidade: um dependendo de contexto não local e outro de contexto direito. Exploramos maneiras de expandir o modelo baseado em VLMCs através do uso de diferentes modelos e métodos, a fim de atacar esses problemas. As abordagens mostraram variado grau de sucesso, com um método em particular (aprendizado guiado) se mostrando capaz de resolver boa parte da ambiguidade de \'a\'. Discutimos razões para isso acontecer. Com relação a \'que\', ao longo desta tese propusemos e testamos diversos métodos de aprendizado de informação contextual para tentar desambiguá-lo. Mostramos como, em todos eles, o nível de ambiguidade de \'que\' permanece praticamente constante. / Part-of-speech tagging involves assigning to words in a sentence their part-of-speech class based on the contexts they appear in. Variable-Length Markov Chains (VLMCs) offer a way of modeling contexts longer than trigrams without suffering too much from data sparsity and state space complexity. Even so, two words in Portuguese show a high degree of ambiguity: \'que\' and \'a\'. The number of errors tagging these words corresponds to a quarter of the total errors made by a VLMC-based tagger. Moreover, these words seem to show two different types of ambiguity: one depending on non-local context and one on right context. We searched ways of expanding the VLMC-based model with a number of different models and methods in order to tackle these issues. The approaches showed variable degrees of success, with one particular method (Guided Learning) solving much of the ambiguity of \'a\'. We explore reasons why this happened. Rega rding \'que\', throughout this thesis we propose and test various methods for learning contextual information in order to try to disambiguate it. We show how, in all of them, the level of ambiguity shown by \'que\' remains practically c onstant.

Depuis les années 1970, le salariat à temps partiel s’étend sur les marchés de l’emploi allemand et français. Le rôle joué par l’intermédiation publique dans ce phénomène constitue l’objet de cette thèse. Nous l’étudions de manière comparative par l’immersion ethnographique dans quatre agences, par une analyse quantitative portant sur 2000 offres stockées et par une enquête socio-historique sur les dispositifs d’indemnisation. Grâce à ce matériau, nous mettons au jour les transactions temporelles auxquelles sont exposés les chômeurs durant leur traitement institutionnel. Au sein des agences d’intermédiation, les heures recherchées par les chômeurs jouent le triple rôle d’outil de gestion, d’outil d’intermédiation et d’outil d’arbitrage marchand. Elles sont mobilisées, manipulées et négociées durant les entretiens en face-à-face auxquels sont convoqués les chômeurs. Au terme des interactions, de nombreux profils de recherche sont révisés, en abaissant le nombre d’heures d’emploi souhaitées. Ce rationnement du temps d’emploi est organisé autour de trois modes de régulation, inégalement présents sur les différents terrains : une régulation par l’indemnisation-chômage, une régulation par les pratiques professionnelles des conseillers et une régulation par les progiciels informatiques d’appariement. Le temps d’emploi souhaité par les chômeurs apparaît ainsi comme un objet d’action publique. À partir de nos résultats empiriques, nous montrons que les logiques sociales de la rencontre bureaucratique établissent un lien étroit entre les ressources mobilisables dans l’interaction et les positions envisageables sur le marché de l’emploi. De plus, cette thèse présente les guichets d’intermédiation comme un niveau de régulation de l’emploi à part entière. / Since the 1970s, part-time employment has grown in the German and French labour markets. The relation between public intermediation and part-time employment is the subject of this thesis. Our comparative analysis is based on ethnographic immersion in four agencies, a quantitative analysis of 2000 job offers stored in the agencies files and a socio-historical inquiry concerning the unemployment benefit systems. With these data, we expose the temporal transactions experienced by the unemployed during their institutional treatment. Within the agencies, the working hours sought by the unemployed represent a tool with three functions: managing the registered users, matching employers and jobseekers, and arbitrating the relation between capital and labour. These hours are mobilized, manipulated and negotiated during the compulsory interviews between caseworkers and unemployed. Thus, many research profiles are modified, in the sens of lowering the desired amount of employment hours. This rationing of hours is organized around three modes of regulation, always perceptible but inequally significant in the various agencies: benefits-oriented regulation, professional regulation and computerized regulation. The working hours the unemployed look for appear as an object of public action. Based on our empirical results, we show how the configuration of bureaucratic encounters establish a close relation between the social resources mobilized during the interaction and the position on the labour market. In addition, this thesis present the employment agencies as an autonomous level of employment regulation.

O Processamento de Linguagem Natural (PLN) é uma área da Ciência da Computação, que vem tentando, ao longo dos anos, aperfeiçoar a comunicação entre o homem e o computador. Varias técnicas tem sido utilizadas para aperfeiçoar esta comunicação, entre elas a aplicação de métodos estatísticos. Estes métodos tem sido usados por pesquisadores de PLN, com um crescente sucesso e uma de suas maiores vantagens é a possibilidade do tratamento de textos irrestritos. Em particular, a aplicação dos métodos estatísticos, na marcação automática de "corpus" com categorias morfo-sintáticas, tem se mostrado bastante promissora, obtendo resultados surpreendentes. Assim sendo, este trabalho descreve o processo de marcação automática de categorias morfo-sintáticas. Inicialmente, são apresentados e comparados os principais métodos aplicados a marcação automática: os métodos baseados em regras e os métodos estatísticos. São descritos os principais formalismos e técnicas usadas para esta finalidade pelos métodos estatísticos. E introduzida a marcação automática para a Língua Portuguesa, algo até então inédito. O objetivo deste trabalho é fazer um estudo detalhado e uma avaliação do sistema rotulador de categorias morfo-sintáticas, a fim de que se possa definir um padrão no qual o sistema apresente a mais alta precisão possível. Para efetuar esta avaliação, são especificados alguns critérios: a qualidade do "corpus" de treinamento, o seu tamanho e a influencia das palavras desconhecidas. A partir dos resultados obtidos, espera-se poder aperfeiçoar o sistema rotulador, de forma a aproveitar, da melhor maneira possível, os recursos disponíveis para a Língua Portuguesa. / Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an area of Computer Sciences, that have been trying to improve communication between human beings and computers. A number of different techniques have been used to improve this communication and among them, the use of stochastic methods. These methods have successfully being used by NLP researchers and one of their most remarkable advantages is that they are able to deal with unrestricted texts. Namely, the use of stochastic methods for part-of-speech tagging has achieving some extremely good results. Thus, this work describes the process of part-of-speech tagging. At first, we present and compare the main tagging methods: the rule-based methods and the stochastic ones. We describe the main stochastic tagging formalisms and techniques for part-of-speech tagging. We also introduce part-of-speech tagging for the Portuguese Language. The main purpose of this work is to study and evaluate a part-of-speech tagger system in order to establish a pattern in which it is possible to achieve the greatest accuracy. To perform this evaluation, several parameters were set: the corpus quality, its size and the relation between unknown words and accuracy. The results obtained will be used to improve the tagger, in order to use better the available Portuguese Language resources.

Le développement de réseaux de vidéosurveillance, civils ou militaires, pose des défis scientifiques et technologiques en termes d’analyse et de reconnaissance des contenus des flux compressés. Dans ce contexte, les contributions de cette thèse portent sur : - une méthode de segmentation automatique des objets mobiles (piétons, véhicules, animaux …) dans le domaine compressé, - la prise en compte des différents standards de compression les plus couramment utilisés en surveillance (MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 et MPEG-4 Part 10 / H.264 AVC), - une chaîne de traitement multi-flux optimisée depuis la segmentation des objets jusqu’à leur suivi et description. Le démonstrateur réalisé a permis d’évaluer les performances des approches méthodologiques développées dans le cadre d’un outil d’aide à l’investigation, identifiant les véhicules répondant à un signalement dans des bases de données de plusieurs dizaines d’heures. En outre, appliqué à des corpus représentatifs des différentes situations de vidéosurveillance (stations de métro, carrefours, surveillance de zones en milieu rural ou de frontières ...), le système a permis d’obtenir les résultats suivants : - analyse de 14 flux MPEG-2, 8 flux MPEG-4 Part 2 ou 3 flux AVC en temps réel sur un coeur à 2.66 GHZ (vidéo 720x576, 25 images par seconde), - taux de détection des véhicules de 100% sur la durée des séquences de surveillance de trafic, avec un taux de détection image par image proche des 95%, - segmentation de chaque objet sur 80 à 150% de sa surface (sous ou sur-segmentation liée au domaine compressé). Ces recherches ont fait l’objet du dépôt de 9 brevets liés à des nouveaux services et applications rendus opérationnels grâce aux approches mises en oeuvre. Citons entre autres des outils pour la protection inégale aux erreurs, la cryptographie visuelle, la vérification d’intégrité par tatouage ou l’enfouissement par stéganographie / The increasing deployment of civil and military videosurveillance networks brings both scientific and technological challenges regarding analysis and content recognition over compressed streams. In this context, the contributions of this thesis focus on: - an autonomous method to segment in the compressed domain mobile objects (pedestrians, vehicles, animals …), - the coverage of the various compression standards commonly used in surveillance (MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Part 10 / H.264 AVC), - an optimised multi-stream processing chain from the objects segmentation up to their tracking and description. The developed demonstrator made it possible to bench the performances of the methodological approaches chosen for a tool dedicated to help investigations. It identifies vehicles from a witness description in databases of tens of hours of video. Moreover, while dealing with corpus covering the different kind of content expected from surveillance (subway stations, crossroads, areas in countryside or border surveillance …), the system provided the following results: - simultaneous real time analysis of up to 14 MPEG-2 streams, 8 MPEG-4 Part 2 streams or 3 AVC streams on a single core (2.66 GHz; 720x576 video, 25 fps), - 100% vehicles detected over the length of traffic surveillance footages, with a image per image detection near 95%, - a segmentation spreading over 80 to 150% of the object area (under or over-segmentation linked with the compressed domain). These researches led to 9 patents linked with new services and applications that were made possible thanks to the suggested approaches. Among these lie tools for Unequal Error Protection, Visual Cryptography, Watermarking or Steganography

Data from the National Center for Education Statistics projects total enrollment in post secondary degree-granting institutions to increase 15% from 2010 to 2021 (U.S. Department of Education, 2012). National and state education efforts such as President Obama’s American Graduation Initiative, Tennessee’s Drive to 55, and Tennessee Promise encourage Americans to expand their educational pursuits in order to increase the number of individuals completing a post secondary degree. As states adopt funding formula measures tied directly to student success and retention, higher education institutions increasingly must rely on the effectiveness of academic and student service programs. Although the employment of adjunct faculty as a cost-saving measure has been on the rise for many years (Kezar & Maxey, 2013), research regarding the possible impact on student learning has been slow to develop and studies in this area have produced contradictory results. The purpose of this quantitative comparative study was to examine whether there is a significant difference in the fall to fall retention rate and proportion of assigned grades for first- time freshmen attending Motlow State Community College (MSCC) in regard to instructor status (full-time or adjunct). Existing data were used to conduct the study gathered from instructor and student information maintained by the colleges Banner information system using stratified random sampling. A non proportional sampling technique was chosen because of the potential small sample size and ease of subgroup comparison. Data were analyzed using chi-square tests of independence at the .05 level of significance. Results indicated no significant difference in the fall-to-fall retention rate and proportion of assigned grades for first-time, full-time students; first-time students; first-time students with a high school grade point average (GPA) of 3.0 or higher; first-time students with a high school grade point average (GPA) of 2.9 or lower; and traditional and non traditional age students. Significant differences were found in the fall-to-fall retention rate for first-time, part-time students. First-time, part-time students taught by adjunct faculty are retained at a significantly lower rate than first-time, part-time students taught by full-time faculty. As states adopt funding formula measures tied directly to student success and retention at the same time colleges and universities brace for enrollment increases, the use of adjunct faculty continues to rise. Acknowledging the need for highly skilled instructors, higher education institutions must consider the potential impact adjunct faculty instruction has on student success given the potential implications on institutional funding at state and national levels.

With the passage of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), Congress made changes to several important federal health programs. First, MACRA reformed the Sustainable Growth Rate, a mechanism created under the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Second, MACRA instituted the framework for the QPP which solidifies efforts to shift payments to value-based arrangements and streamline several existing programs under a single policy. This thesis aims to better understand how providers are responding to this new policy in four parts. First, I explain how MACRA passed in Congress with nearly unanimous bipartisan support. Second, I review the QPP and the two tracks offered under the program. Third, I review the literature on value-based payment arrangements, including the response of providers and health systems to these arrangements. Finally, I present original research on how major health systems and provider groups in the state of Iowa are preparing for MACRA implementation. I find several characteristics among health systems and provider groups that are associated with efforts to align payments to value-based measures. Across the tracks laid out under the QPP, there is consistency in the types of investments and operational changes being made. Work on these changes has been occurring for several years, and continued investment and reforms are likely.