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本論文藉由分析兩位三歲兒童和他們母親的對話來探討兒童行使請求(request)的情形。文中的討論主要涵蓋了三個層面。分別是兒童行使請求時採取的策略，使用的語言形式，以及運用的互動知識(interactional knowledge)。結果發現，兩位兒童行使請求時會採用下面的策略：指明一特定的動作、指明想要取得的物體、指出自已的需求及間接暗示。此外，他們利用以上的策略行使請求時所使用的語言形式有所不同；而這些差異似乎間接反映出這兩位兒童的一些對話或是人際互動的知識(conversational or interpersonal knowledge)影響了他們請求時所使用的語言形式。因此，本論文推論兒童在三歲左右或許已經知道了一些互動知識，而這些互動知識會影響他們在對話中如何請求。 / This study aims to explore children’s requests in mother-children conversation based on dyads of two three-year-old children and their mothers. Three aspects about children’s requests in daily conversation are concerned: (1) the means or strategies children depend on to convey their request intents; (2) the formal or linguistic elements children employ to realize their request intents; and (3) the conversational or interpersonal skills children may have acquired as they are requesting. With a careful examination over the collected conversations, it is found that children at the age of three tend to demonstrate their requests through the following means. First, children indicate a specific action they intend their hearers to do in their utterances. Second, children request for a desired object by indicating literally the target objects, or information about the target object, e.g. adjectives or quantifiers. Thirdly, they indicate their self-want to have their hearer fulfill their desire. The last means children employ to request is hinting. They indirectly convey their request intents, and their hearer can infer the intended act. In addition, children usually use different formal elements to manifest their requests. For example, their requests for a specific action were found to be conveyed with imperatives, imperatives with sentence-final particles, or imperatives with A-not-A tags. Further investigation on the formal varieties of children’s requests reveals that some conversational or interpersonal factors may play a role in how children convey their request intents, e.g. cooperativeness, social status, conversational topic. The findings, therefore, show that children at the age of three have probably been aware of some conversational or interpersonal knowledge and the knowledge may affect their performance of requests in conversation.

Today’s Internet content providers primarily use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to deliver content to end-users with the aim to enhance their Web access experience. Yet the prevalent commercial CDNs, operating in isolation, often face resource over-provisioning, degraded performance, and Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations, thus incurring high operational costs and limiting the scope and scale of their services. / To move beyond these shortcomings, this thesis sets out to establish the basis for developing advanced and efficient content delivery solutions that are scalable, high performance, and cost-effective. It introduces techniques to enable coordination and cooperation between multiple content delivery services, which is termed as “CDN peering”. In this context, this thesis addresses five key issues ― when to peer (triggering circumstances), how to peer (interaction strategies), whom to peer with (resource discovery), how to manage and enforce operational policies (re-quest-redirection and load sharing), and how to demonstrate peering applicability (measurement study and proof-of-concept implementation). / Thesis Contributions: To support the thesis that the resource over-provisioning and degraded performance problems of existing CDNs can be overcome, thus improving Web access experience of Internet end-users, we have: / - identified the key research challenges and core technical issues for CDN peering, along with a systematic understanding of the CDN space by covering relevant applications, features and implementation techniques, captured in a comprehensive taxonomy of CDNs; / - developed a novel architectural framework, which provides the basis for CDN peering, formed by a set of autonomous CDNs that cooperate through an interconnection mechanism, providing the infrastructure and facilities to virtualize the service of multiple providers; / - devised Quality-of-Service (QoS)-oriented analytical performance models to demonstrate the effects of CDN peering and predict end-user perceived performance, thus facilitating to make concrete QoS performance guarantees for a CDN provider; / - developed enabling techniques, i.e. resource discovery, server selection, and request-redirection algorithms, for CDN peering to achieve service responsiveness. These techniques are exercised to alleviate imbalanced load conditions, while minimizing redirection cost; / - introduced a utility model for CDN peering to measure its content-serving ability by capturing the traffic activities in the system and evaluated through extensive discrete-event simulation analysis. The findings of this study provide incentive for the exploitation of critical parameters for a better CDN peering system design; and / - demonstrated a proof-of-concept implementation of the utility model and an empirical measurement study on MetaCDN, which is a global overlay for Cloud-based content delivery. It is aided with a utility-based redirection scheme to improve the traffic activities in the world-wide distributed network of MetaCDN.

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The purpose of the study was to investigate Chinese EFL interlanguage request behaviors in terms of both perception and production on the perspective of pragmatic transfer based on theoretical issues of Speech Act Theory, politeness theory and cultural dimension of individualism vs. collectivism. Data were obtained from three groups of participants: 30 native speakers of Chinese college students (CL1s), 30 non-English-major Chinese EFLs college students (Chinese EFLs) and 30 native speakers of English college students (EL1s). Data for analysis consisted of 5400 perception responses collected with the instrument of 5-point Scale-response Questionnaires (SRQ) and 1800 production responses collected with the instrument of 20-item Discourse Completion Task (DCT) varied with contextual factors of Degree of Imposition, Status and Distance. Responses of perceptions were analyzed in terms of Degree of Imposition, Degree of Difficulty, and the Likelihood of Request on performing the act. Responses of productions were coded into two parts: the head act of request strategies consisting of Direct (including Mood Derivable, Explicit Performative, Hedge Performative, Locution Derivable, Want Statement), Conventional Indirect (including Suggestory Formula, Query Preparatory), Non-conventional Indirect strategies (Strong Hint, Mild Hints) and external modifications (i.e. supportive moves) according to the coding schema of CCSARP (Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper, 1989). With qualitative and quantitative data analysis, some important findings were obtained. Regarding the perception task, CL1s and EFLs did not differ in their judgment on the Likelihood of Request, which further verified the validity of the questionnaire. However, CL1s generally perceived higher Degree of Imposition and Difficulty than did EL1s on requestive behaviors regardless of the shifting of contextual factors Status, Distance and Degree of Imposition and such perception reflected in their more frequent use of supportive moves than EL1s in all contexts. With regard to strategy use, the three groups yielded the same preference order: Conventional Indirect>Direct> Non-Conventional Indirect strategies in all contexts. Although CL1s were found to use more Direct strategies than did their EL1 counterparts, significant difference lay only in Low Imposition, Low Status and Low Distance situations. As for pragmatic transfer, negative pragmalinguistic transfers were found in Chinese EFLs¡¦ use of linguistic forms of Direct strategies such as Bare-imperative Help, Please+Imperative, Please+help and the Conventional Indirect strategy, Would you let me¡K? Negative sociolinguistic pragmatic transfers were found in Chinese EFLs¡¦ use of Direct strategies in Low Status/Distance situations, and the Conventional Indirect strategy of Can (Could) ¡K? /¯à¤£¯à (Neng bu neng )¡K? in Low Imposition/Distance and May I ¡K? Positive pragmalinguistic and sociolinguistic transfers were also found in either Chinese EFLs¡¦ Direct or Conventional Indiret strategies. The study ends up with some theoretical and pedagogical implications. It is suggested that both participants¡¦ requestive responses of production and perception be considered when analyzing interlanguage speech act behaviors in order to gain a better understanding of speakers¡¦ and learners¡¦ pragmatic awareness of speech act behaviors.

The writing performance of all students is a critical factor for school success. In order for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) to have increased positive social and academic outcomes, it is imperative to continue intervention research that addresses noncompliance behavior and completion of writing tasks. This study examined the effects of high-probability request sequence interventions on the compliance behaviors and writing outcomes of two students with EBD using a multiple-baseline-across-participants design. Additionally, this study examined the social validity of the intervention procedures through the use of questionnaires for both the teachers and the participants. Results indicated that the intervention is effective in increasing both behavioral and cognitive engagement in a writing task. Educational and research implications, measures of social validity, and measures of intervention effectiveness are discussed. / text

Diagnosing performance problems in modern datacenters and distributed systems is challenging, as the root cause could be contained in any one of the system’s numerous components or, worse, could be a result of interactions among them. As distributed systems continue to increase in complexity, diagnosis tasks will only become more challenging. There is a need for a new class of diagnosis techniques capable of helping developers address problems in these distributed environments. As a step toward satisfying this need, this dissertation proposes a novel technique, called request-flow comparison, for automatically localizing the sources of performance changes from the myriad potential culprits in a distributed system to just a few potential ones. Request-flow comparison works by contrasting the workflow of how individual requests are serviced within and among every component of the distributed system between two periods: a non-problem period and a problem period. By identifying and ranking performance-affecting changes, request-flow comparison provides developers with promising starting points for their diagnosis efforts. Request workflows are obtained with less than 1% overhead via use of recently developed end-to-end tracing techniques. To demonstrate the utility of request-flow comparison in various distributed systems, this dissertation describes its implementation in a tool called Spectroscope and describes how Spectroscope was used to diagnose real, previously unsolved problems in the Ursa Minor distributed storage service and in select Google services. It also explores request-flow comparison’s applicability to the Hadoop File System. Via a 26-person user study, it identifies effective visualizations for presenting request-flow comparison’s results and further demonstrates that request-flow comparison helps developers quickly identify starting points for diagnosis.This dissertation also distills design choices that will maximize an end-to-end tracing infrastructure’s utility for diagnosis tasks and other use cases.

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Peer code reviews play a critical role in maintaining code quality, and GitHub has introduced several new features to assist with the review process. One of these features is suggested changes, which allows for precise code modifications in pull requests to be suggested in review comments. Despite the availability of such helpful features, many pull requests remain unattended due to lower priority. To address this issue, we developed a bot called ``Suggestion Bot" to automatically review the codebase using GitHub's suggested changes functionality. An empirical study was also conducted to compare the effectiveness of this bot with manual reviews. The findings suggest that implementing this bot can expedite response times and improve the quality of pull request comments for pull-based software development projects. In addition to providing automated suggestions, this feature also offers valuable, concise, and targeted feedback. / Master of Science / Code review, often known as peer review, is a process used to ensure the quality of software. Code review is a process in software development that involves one or more individuals examining the source code of a program, either after it has been implemented or during a pause in the development process. The creator of the code cannot be one of the individuals. "Reviewers" refers to the individuals conducting the checking, excluding the author. However, the majority of reviewers won't have the time to examine and validate the peer's code base, so they'll assign it the lowest priority possible. This could cause pull requests to stall out without being reviewed. Therefore, as part of our research, we are creating a bot called SUGGESTION BOT that provides code changes in pull requests. The author can then accept, reject, or alter these ideas as a necessary component of the pull request. Additionally, we compared the effectiveness of our bot with the manual pull request review procedure, which clearly demonstrated that the incorporation of this bot significantly shortened the turnaround time. Besides giving automated recommendations, this functionality also provides useful, brief, and focused feedback.