Thesauri have been important information and knowledge organisation tools for more than three decades. The recent emergence and phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web has created new opportunities to introduce thesauri as information search and retrieval aids to end user communities. While the number of web-based and hypertextual thesauri continues to grow, few investigations have yet been carried out to evaluate how end-users, for whom all these efforts are ostensibly made, interact with and make use of thesauri for query building and expansion. The present paper reports a pilot study carried out to determine the extent to which a thesaurus-enhanced search interface to a web-based database aided end-users in their selection of search terms. The study also investigated the ways in which users interacted with the thesaurus structure, terms, and interface. Thesaurus-based searching and browsing behaviours adopted by users while interacting with the thesaurus-enhanced search interface were also examined.

Knowledge organization and concepts, knowledge organization as information policy, groupings as discoveries and constructions, semantics and its "warrant", structural linguistics, compositional semantics and semantic primitives, and universal solutions along with limitations are discussed in a series of 42 slides. "The most important conclusion, ... is that different "paradigms" or conceptualizations in the discourses should be made visible and semantic tools should support the navigation not just between "topics" but also between "views" and interests. If such information is made explicit it might improve the possibilities for internationalization because nobody's vital interests are then threatened." A reference list (of seven references) is included.

A major challenge faced by users during the information search and retrieval process is the selection of search terms for query formulation and expansion. Thesauri are recognised as one source of search terms which can assist users in query construction and expansion. As the number of electronic thesauri attached to information retrieval systems has grown, a range of interface facilities and features have been developed to aid users in formulating their queries. The pilot study reported here aimed to explore and evaluate how a thesaurus-enhanced search interface assisted end-users in selecting search terms. Specifically, it focused on the evaluation of users' attitudes toward both the thesaurus and its interface as tools for facilitating search term selection for query expansion. Thesaurus-based searching and browsing behaviours adopted by users while interacting with a thesaurus-enhanced search interface were also examined

The main aim of this thesis was to examine internal representation in the context of nurse education using two main output variables - namely imagery and identity. The initial basic argument for the thesis was that procedures to facilitate the acquisition of psychomotor skills that have been developed in sports science could fruitfully be applied to the development of skills in other areas, such as nurse education. Study one approached this through the use of an imagery training programme - PETTIER (Holmes & Collins, 2001) on an undergraduate nursing curriculum. PETTIER served as the independent variable with the dependent variable - performance - being measured through Obje&tive Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs). Unexpected results revealed no significant differences between the control and experimental groups, with the control group actually performing better overall. Given this, the explicit choice was made to pursue investigation into the other plausible factors affecting behaviour, in order to explicate and underpin the results obtained. Study two investigated students' perceptions of and preparation for the OSCEs using a skills training questionnaire. Results revealed common concerns, specifically related to skills practice. Furthermore these concerned the amount of practice time provided; the practice environment; and the amount of support and training during teaching. In light of these findings, study three pursued a contrasting and comparative investigation from the professionals' perspective on the curriculum. This specifically examined perceptions of the assessment structure and expectations within the curriculum; the content of the curriculum; levels of support and provision for training; and the application of theory and practice. This aimed to identify any coherent or conflicting views between the students' receiving the curriculum and the staff delivering the curriculum. Results revealed coherency in the professional view that theory and practice were equally as important for nurse education. However, students commonly perceived practice as the most important aspect. Also, some students often struggled to apply theory to practice and vice versa. In light of this it became apparent that students may in fact identify differently with the content of the curriculum. Therefore, appraisal of the content may have different significance for students and affect behaviour differently both internally and/or externally. Study four investigated this using Identity Structure Analysis (ISA)/lpseus (Weinreich & Saunderson, 2003).This explored how students applied themselves to the various aspects of nursing in the contexts of healthcare and broader affiliations, and how these fitted into students' broader sense of identity. It also looked at typologies within nursing and whether identity fitted into three distinct categories depending on construals. Study five followed this up using two individual case studies. The purpose of this was to encapsulate meaning behind individual construals and typologies and explicate the findings of ISA/lpseus and the implications for nurse education. Results found that construals are grounded in experiences which can affect development, behaviour and identity towards nursing and the broader affiliations in individuals' lives. In conclusion identity in nursing should be investigated further in order to provide stronger evidence in regards to typologies and how these may be influencing students' behaviour and development in nurse education. Such research could have important implications for the future of nurse education and be a positive step towards future curriculum revisions.

This dissertation is concerned with the gendered discourse of nation and home where women carry the symbolic duty of holders of a pure, uncontaminated culture passively confined to the domestic space. I consider two commonplace tropes, the woman-as-nation metaphor and the Victorian angel in the house, both of which convey a limited view of women's agency and her significance in simultaneously resisting and ratifying patriarchal visions of nation and gender. The novels in this study document various phases of nation building under periods of colonialism and postcolonialism, and each features the plight of women affected by the realities of sham democracies and political instability. My analysis rests on the claim that postcolonial authors continue the inquiries into the ironic and futile foundations on which nation and identity is built which define modernist despair. I assert the value in understanding how women respond to disillusionment across cultures in an attempt to recover the experience of women and her political consciousness, granting a relevance to the role women play in textual deliberations on political skepticism and political idealism often reserved for male actors.

This study explores how imagined communities based on U.S. mainstream values and social attitudes are embedded in multicultural children's literature through a critical content analysis of cultural representations in 24 Korean-American picture books. Korean-American culture is often defined through other Asian cultures in picture books and the collective interpretations of Asian culture perpetuate otherness and marginality of Korean-American culture. Otherness can be viewed through postcolonialism as a way to rethink and reconstruct the ways in which racial, ethnic, and cultural others have been repressed, misrepresented, omitted, and stereotyped by colonial mentality (Xie, 2000).The term "Asian American" was used after the Civil Rights movement by Asian Americans to claim a lawful right as representative citizens to reconstruct their own collective identities (Chae 2008). This collective identity of Asian American enhances misrepresentations of Korean culture as one of the Asian cultures. Korean-American culture in picture books is misrepresented through confusion with other Asian cultures, misunderstandings of Asian-Americans, and social mind-set of Korean-Americans. The study discusses the dominant social attitudes toward Korean-Americans as forever `new' foreigners because of the dominance of contemporary picture books which depict Korean-Americans only as recent immigrants. Ahmad (1996) states that postcolonial perspectives are often a polite way of saying "not-White" or Korean-Americans are "not-America-but-inside-America."A critical content analysis of 24 picture books published in the U.S. and 98 reviews of those books examines the representation and misrepresentation of Korean culture and Korean-American culture through the frame of critical discourse analysis and cultural studies. This study contributes to the previous studies of multicultural children's literature by differentiating from the collective approaches in which ethnic groups were grouped together in data collection and analysis.The findings of this study indicate that the "cultural diversity" celebbrated by U.S. multiculturalism has actually contributed to reinforcing the image of Korean-Americans as one of the Orientals by focusing too strongly on difference. The use of multicultural children's literature in classrooms needs to include a focus on difference as a tool used by readers to understand, not stereotype, a particular cultural group and should be combined with a focus on human connection and commonality.

Authors: Siri Amram and Cecilia Hedquist Title: Big equality between the sexes in a small form- a quantitative and qualitative thesis of Lilla Aktuellt from a gender perspective. Language: Swedish Level: BA thesis in journalism Location: University of Kalmar Number of pages: 43 (with appendices 64) Abstract In this study we have analyzed a television news show in Sweden for children – Lilla Aktuellt – from a gender perspective. We have analyzed the program both from quantitative and qualitative aspects. In the quantitative analysis of twelve episodes we compared females and males in the following respects: number of participants and for how long the participants were allowed to speak. In the qualitative analysis of three episodes we aimed to discover what different roles and stereotypes the participants displayed. We have in our study applied the theory about gender and the theory of representation, stereotypes and identity with the aim to find out if the girls/women and the boys/men appearing in the programs were ascribed different characteristics and attributes and if they were divided in different spheres. Our study shows that the allotment between the genders in Lilla Aktuellt is very even. In our quantitative analysis the participants were approximately 51 percent girls and women and 49 percent boys and men. The same allocation between females and males applied when it came to for how long the participants were allowed to speak. In our qualitative analysis we found that the children and the adults did represent different stereotypes and played different roles but that there were hardly any differences in this respect between the genders.

Neuroscientific data may be usefully invoked in the arbitration of debates concerning the scope of representational theories of the mind. Contemporary cognitivists (e.g. Fodor) tend toward theoretical imperialism in that they argue that all types of intelligent behaviour, including perceptual-motor skills, can be explained within the framework of representationalism. Phenomenologists (e.g. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Dreyfus) argue that the scope of cognitivism is not as vast as its proponents suppose. They claim that perceptual-motor skills are non-representational and thus fall beyond the purview of cognitivism. I argue that this debate can be resolved in favour of the phenomenologists by citing the neuroscientific evidence for the claim that there are two distinct neural memory systems: (1) a hippocampal system which operates over neurally realized Fodorian representations and subserves rational thought and action and (2) a non-representational striatal system which subserves perceptual-motor skills.

A software developer explores a software system by asking and answering a series of questions. To answer these questions, a developer may need to consult various sources providing information about the program, such as the static relationships expressed directly in the source code, the run-time behaviour of a program recorded in a dynamic trace, or evolution history as recorded in a source management system. Despite the support afforded by software exploration tools, developers often struggle to find the necessary information to answer their questions and may even become disoriented, where they feel mentally lost and are uncertain of what they were trying to accomplish. This dissertation advances a thesis that a developer's questions, which we refer to as conceptual queries, can be better supported through a model to represent and compose different sources of information about a program. The basis of this model is the sphere, which serves as a simple abstraction of a source of information about a program. Many of the software exploration tools used by a developer can be represented as a sphere. Spheres can be composed in a principled fashion such that information from a sphere may replace or supplement information from a different sphere. Using our sphere model, for example, a developer can use dynamic runtime information from an execution trace to replace information from the static source code to see what actually occurred. We have implemented this model in a configurable tool, called Ferret. We have used the facilities provided by the model to implement 36 conceptual queries identified from the literature, blogs, and our own experience, and to support the integration of four different sources of program information. Establishing correspondences between similar elements from different spheres allows a query to bridge across different spheres in addition to allowing a tool's user interface to drive queries from other sources of information. Through this effort we show that sphere model broadens the set of possible conceptual queries answerable by software exploration tools. Through a small diary study and a controlled experiment, both involving professional software developers, we found the developers used the conceptual queries that were available to them and reported finding Ferret useful.

This thesis is an expository account of three central theorems in the representation theory of semisimple Lie groups, namely the theorems of Borel-Weil-Bott, Casselman-Osborne and Kostant. The first of these realizes all the irreducible holomorphic representations of a complex semisimple Lie group G in the cohomology of certain sheaves of equivariant line bundles over the flag variety of G. The latter two theorems describe the Lie algebra cohomology of a maximal nilpotent subalgebra of Lie(G) with coefficients in an irreducible Lie(G)-module. Applications to geometry and representation theory are given. Also included is a brief overview of Schmid's far-reaching generalization of the Borel--Weil--Bott theorem to the setting of unitary representations of real semisimple Lie groups on (possibly infinite-dimensional) Hilbert spaces.