This study endeavored to answer the question, what leadership model for change is effective in establishing exemplary programs for students with learning disabilities in private Christian colleges. The focus was on leaders in three private Christian universities who developed programs that positively affected students' success.This multiple case study of leaders produced evidence that Fullan's change model (2001), which is often utilized by leaders in K-12 education, could be applied to program development in higher education when collaboration is a strategic componet in all elements of the model. Interviews about the history and current status of each institution's program explored how leaders in the three institutions effectively implemented programs to assist students with learning disabilities. The interviewees indicated they endeavored to build collaborative relationships to create and share knowledge. Leaders developed collaborative groups to assist in coherence making. The overriding emphasis of the leaders in this study was on collaboration, which permeated all elements of the leadership model for change. Not surprisingly, given the context of the study, the data revealed that the guiding motivation for this service was faith in Christ. While data analysis revealed each leader used most elements of Fullan's (2001) model, there is little evidence of one element of the model, understanding the nature and effects of change. Findings included the importance of moral purpose, relationship building, knowledge creation and sharing, understanding change, and coherence making in program development. The researcher found three additional elements that seemed to enhance the success of disability services; (1) the leaders' propensity to innovate, (2) the faculty's attitude toward disability services, and (3) the administration's value of disability services. All of these elements functioned through a strong emphasis on collaboration. Due to the unique nature, culture, and structure of higher education, this study suggests that an emphasis on collaboration by the leaders is essential to all the elements of the model for developing programs for students with disabilities at Christian colleges and universities.

Massively Parallel Processors provide significantly higher peak performance figures than other forms of general purpose processors. However, this comes at a cost to the developer, who needs to deal with an increasingly complicated piece of hardware, for which applications need to be tweaked and optimised to achieve high performance. Domain-specific languages have been proposed as a potential solution to this complexity problem: generating GPU applications from high-level, declarative specifications. This thesis explores two related ideas: firstly, is it practical to synthesise DSLs from high-level languages, and secondly, how can we simplify the creation of such DSLs? This thesis proposes a novel approach whereby rather than considering single domains, we consider collections of collaborative domains in order to share common features and thus reduce the cost of development. We achieve this using a DSLs-within-a-DSL approach: a custom designed host language, into which extensions may be embedded. In order to ground our approach in a real case-study, we propose, design and develop a DSLs-within-a-DSL framework for bioinformatics. We use a restricted recursive functional language as the host language, and embed new DSLs into this language. Importantly, we describe how we can use a combination of novel and adopted automatic parallelisation techniques to synthesise a massively-parallel program for a GPU. This automatic parallelisation, achieved through the discovery of a schedule, and program synthesis techniques using the polyhedral model, interacts productively with our embedded extensions. To further simplify development, we provide a series of customisable heuristics for defining GPU parameters such as the block size (number of threads), grid size and location in the memory hierarchy of data-structures. This encapsulates GPU expertise within the compiler itself. We finally demonstrate that the total combination of these techniques results in applications with competitive performance, at much lower development cost and greater flexibility than comparable hand-coded applications.

Objective. This study was designed to test the hypotheses that a 16-week, individualized, intensive strength training program in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients taking Remicade™ (Infliximab) would improve strength, body composition, disease activity, physical function, pain and quality of life outcomes , as compared to RA patients on Remicade™ with no strength training program. Methods. Twenty-four patients with RA taking Remicade™, participated in a randomized, controlled trial. The exercise group carried out a three time a week strength training program, with the control group continuing standard of care. Assessments were completed at baseline, 8-week, and 16-week time points . Maximal strength, physical function, disease activity, body composition, quality of life, and pain were measured with active tests and via questionnaires. Patients also completed exit evaluations on their satisfaction with the study. Results. Highly significant strength gains were seen in the exercise group according to 3 repetition maximums (3RMs) (p<.01), as well as in all 8 exercises performed in the gym (p<.01). The mean exercise attendance for the 16 weeks was 82.0±10.6%. Compared to the control group, there was a significant increase in right hand grip strength (p<.1), and lean tissue in the trunk (p<.01). Significant improvements were also seen in physical function according to 50-foot walk time (p<.01), the Arthritis Impact Measurement Scale 2 (AIMS2) hand and arm function subscales (p<.05), and the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form 36 (MOS SF-36) (p<.1), as compared to controls. The exercise group showed clinically important differences via the Health Assessment Questionnaire Disability Index (HAQ DI), with a mean change of -0.41±0.42. Significant reductions in pain, as measured by the Pain Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), also occurred (p<.1). The individualization of the strength training program and personal attention received by the patients was critical to the success of the study. Patient satisfaction with the study was high, with limitations due primarily to funding constraints. Conclusion. This 16-week high intensity strength training program led to statistically significant improvements in strength, lean soft tissue, disease activity, function, pain and quality of life in this RA population. No detrimental effects on the disease were seen in this study.

Type inference can be considered a form of partial evaluation that only evaluates a program with respect to its type annotations. Building on this key observation, this dissertation presents a uniform framework for expressing computation, its dynamic properties and corresponding static type information. By using a unified approach, the static phase divide between values and types is lifted. Instead, computations and properties can be freely assigned to the static or dynamic phase of computation. Even more, moving a property from one world to the other does not require any program modifications. This thesis builds a bridge between two worlds: That of statically typed languages and the dynamically typed world. The former is wanted for the offered static guarantees and detection of a range of defects. With the increasing power of type systems available, the kinds of errors that can be statically detected is growing, nearing the goal of proving overall program correctness from the program’s source code alone. However, such power does come for a price: Type systems are becoming more complex, restrictive and invasive, to the point where specifying type annotations becomes as complex as specifying the algorithm itself. Untyped languages, in contrast, may provide less static safety but they have simpler semantics and offer a higher flexibility. They allow programmers to express their ideas without worrying about provable correctness. Not surprisingly, untyped languages have a strong following when it comes to prototyping and rapid application development. Using the framework presented in this thesis, the programmer can have both: Prototyping applications using a dynamically typed approach and gradual refinement of prototypes into programs with static guarantees. Technically, this flexibility is achieved with the novel concept of auxiliary computations. Auxiliary computation are additional streams of computation. They model, next to the data’s computation, the computation of property of data. These streams thereby may depend on the actual data that is computed, as well as on further auxiliary computations. This expressiveness brings auxiliary computations into the domain of dependent types. Partial evaluation of auxiliary computations is used to infer static knowledge from auxiliary computations. Due to the interdependencies between auxiliary computations, evaluating only those parts of a program that contribute to a property is non trivial. A further contribution of this work is the use of demands on computations to narrow the extent of partial evaluation to a single property. An algorithm for demand inference is presented and the correctness of the inferred demands is shown.

The web is the greatest information source in human history, yet finding all offers for flats with gardens in London, Paris, and Berlin or all restaurants open after a screening of the latest blockbuster remain hard tasks – as that data is not easily amenable to processing. Extracting web data into databases for easier processing has been a resource-intensive process, requiring human supervision for every source from which to extract. This has been changing with approaches that replace human annotators with automated annotations. Such approaches could be successfully applied to restricted settings such as single attribute extraction or for domains with significant redundancy among sources. Multi-attribute objects are often presented on (i) Result pages, where multiple objects are presented on a single page as lists, tables or grids, with most important attributes and a summary description, (ii) Detail pages, where each page provides a detailed list of attributes and long description for a single entity, often in rich format. Both result and detail pages are having their own advantages. Extracting objects from result pages is orders of magnitude faster than from detail pages, and the links to detail pages are often only accessible through result pages. Detail pages have a complete list of attributes and full description of the entity. Early web data extraction approaches requires manual annotations for each web site to reach high accuracy, while a number of domain independent approaches only focus on unsupervised repeated structure segmentation. The former is limited in scaling and automation, while the latter is lacked in accuracy. Recent automated data extraction systems are often informed with an ontology and a set of object and attribute recognizers, however they have focused on extracting simple objects with few attributes from single-entity pages and avoided result pages. We present an automatic ontology-based multi-attribute object extraction system AMBER, which deals with both result and detail pages, achieves very high accuracy (>96%) with zero site-specific supervision, and is able to solve practical issues that arise in real-life data extraction tasks. AMBER is also applied as an important component of DIADEM, the first automatic full-site extraction system that is able to extract structured data from different domains without site-specific supervision, and has been tested through a large-scale evaluation (>10, 000) sites. On the result page side, AMBER achieves high accuracy through a novel domain- aware, path-based template discovery algorithm, and integrates annotations for all parts of the extraction, from identifying the primary list of objects, over segment- ing the individual objects, to aligning the attributes. Yet, AMBER is able to tolerate significant noise in the annotations, by combining these annotations with a novel algorithm for finding regular structures based on XPATH expressions that capture regular tree structures. On the detail page side, AMBER integrates boilerplate removal, dynamic lists identification and page dissimilarity calculation seamlessly to identify data region, then employs a set of fairly simple and cheaply computable features for attribute extraction. Besides, AMBER is the first approach that combines result page extraction and detail page extraction by integrating attributes extracted from result pages and the attributes found on corresponding detail pages. AMBER is able to identify attributes of objects with near perfect accuracy and to extract dozens of attributes with > 96% across several domains, even in presence of significant noise. It outperforms uninformed, automated approaches by a wide margin if given an ontology. Even in absence of an ontology, AMBER outperforms most previous systems on record segmentation.

FOOPS is a concurrent object oriented specification language with an executable subset. In this thesis we propose an extension of FOOPS with features for specifying systems of distributed and autonomous objects. This extension supports most features of concurrent object oriented programming, including classes of objects with associated methods and attributes, object identity, dynamic object creation and deletion, overloading, polymorphism, inheritance with overriding, dynamic binding, concurrency, nondeterminism, atomic execution, evaluation of method expressions as background processes, and object protection. The main contribution of this thesis is to develop a framework for supporting formal development of software in the extension of FOOPS mentioned above. In particular, we introduce a structural operational semantics for FOOPS, a notion of refinement for concurrent object oriented programs, congruence properties of refinement of FOOPS programs, and tools for mechanising refinement proofs. The operational semantics is the core of the formal definition of FOOPS. It is used to define notions of refinement for FOOPS states, programs, and specifications. Those notions and associated proof techniques for proving refinement are used to illustrate stepwise formal development of programs in FOOPS. The congruence properties of refinement (with respect to some of FOOPS operators) justify compositional development of software in FOOPS. The tools help to validate the framework introduced in this thesis and motivate its use in practice.

Como reflexo do aumento da incidência de câncer no país, uma alta proporção de pacientes recebem alta hospitalar com diagnóstico de câncer no Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo. Por essa razão, a necessidade de um sistema de informações para a coleta, armazenamento e análise dos dados relativos aos pacientes com câncer atendidos na instituição se tornou bastante crítica para o registro do câncer do HC-FMUSP. Neste projeto de mestrado, realizamos uma avaliação das necessidades do grupo e detectamos a necessidade de criar um instrumento de informática que fosse complementar ao programa já em uso da Função Oncocentro de São Paulo, mas que também pudesse ser usado isoladamente. Isso foi feito tendo em conta uma reavaliação de todos os processos envolvidos com a coleta de dados relativos aos pacientes, desde a identificação deles até o resultado dos tratamentos envolvidos. A construção do instrumento abrangeu o ciclo de vida do sistema, desde o diagnóstico do ambiente, desenvolvimento dos projetos lógico e físico, programação e implantação. Esse sistema ainda está em teste, mas produtos como o boletim do RHC-FMUSP atesta que ele funciona a contento. / Possibly as a reflection of the cancer incidence increase in Brazil, a high proportion of patients are discharged from the Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo with the diagnosis of cancer. For this reason, the development of a system of information became critical in order to collect and analyse the amount of data stored by Cancer Registry at HCFMUSP. In this study, we first evaluated the needs of the cancer registry personnel and developed an software to support these needs as a complement of the active program in use. This instrument should be used alone if necessary. All processes were re-evaluated and taking into account. This study encloses the cycle of life of a system, since diagnosis of the environment, development of the projects logical and physical, programs e implantation. Although still being tested, the release of some small surveys shows its funcionality.

There are many issues that relate to the efficacy of the undergraduate degree in the field of communicative disorders. Some have advocated for the elimination of the degree while others vigorously fight to maintain it. Some believe that there should be clinic associated with the undergraduate degree while others argue to have the degree but without clinic. Some state departments of education allow persons with an undergraduate degree in communicative disorders to practice in the schools, others do not. Colleges and universities are afraid that without an undergraduate degree program, their departments will be seen as vulnerable to elimination in the academy. Other colleges and universities want to close their undergraduate programs to concentrate on their master's and doctoral degrees, especially because of the shortage of doctoral level faculty to adequately staff all their programs. All of these issues and many more play into the debate about the continuation of the undergraduate degree in the field of communicative disorders. Today you are going to hear from three members of the Council who have very different viewpoints on the issue. We hope to stimulate discussion that will be productive in helping you and your departments determine the efficacy of your undergraduate degree in the field

One out of 2 women and 1 out of 5 men over age 50 will sustain a fragility fracture (FF) in their lifetime. The risk of a 2nd FF increases dramatically after the 1st fracture and can lead to pain, disability, and mortality. Despite the evidence that secondary prevention programs are effective, the local facility did not have a formal mechanism to address this need. The purpose of this project was to design a program for secondary prevention of FFs and to address the need for a program for secondary FF prevention that was sustainable locally. The program was designed for facility patients age 50 or older who sustained a wrist fragility fracture within 6 months. The reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, maintenance (RE-AIM) framework was used to guide the project and program evaluation. A needs assessment was conducted prior to developing the program and included secondary data from the facility's provider survey. The 'Own the Bone' program, a nationally recognized program, was chosen as the intervention model. The 'Own the Bone' program provided a registry data for performance measures which assisted in the development of the program. The program included a short survey for providers to assess satisfaction with the referral process, and a telephone survey to referred patients who chose not to attend. Patient satisfaction with the program incorporated the Standardized Clinician Group Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey. Data collection and analysis plans were provided to the site with recommendations for implementation. This program was the 1st step in closing the local research-practice gap of secondary fragility fracture prevention. The project offers an opportunity to promote positive social change through the prevention of FF in a setting that had not previously addressed the problem.

This study aimed to explore a program development process and explain how each component of the process contributes to overall procedure for determining 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade students&rsquo / multiple intelligences profiles. The action research was conducted through implementing the incremental components of development process namely / (1) needs assessment, (2) program design, (3) program implementation and verification, (4) summative evaluation. Purposeful sampling methods were used to select the participants of the study. On the basis of the purposeful sampling methods, the participants comprised of two elementary schools with their 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade students, teachers, parents / three branch teachers / instruments developers / experts from the fields of multiple intelligences, psychology, sociology, social pediatrics, neurology, psychiatry, and child neurology. The data collection methods were interview, observation, written document analysis, questionnaire. Descriptive and content qualitative analyses were used to analyze the data. For the validity and reliability purposes of the materials developed throughout the study, quantitative data and quantitative data analysis were conducted. The results of the needs assessment indicated that the 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade teachers had various purposes to determine their students&rsquo / multiple intelligences profile. They used various methods having both weaknesses and strengths. The most appropriate method was using multiple methods / sources. The program with its materials was developed in the program design phase. The materials were &ldquo / story inventory,&rdquo / &ldquo / film inventory,&rdquo / &ldquo / parent questionnaire,&rdquo / and &ldquo / performance assessment.&rdquo / The program including its materials had both weaknesses and strengths. Therefore, effective modifications were conducted on the program in the program implementation and verification phase. Finally, the results of the summative evaluation indicated that the study and the program reached their purposes largely.