In current times, issues of curriculum relevance are driving a raft of reforms and reviews in higher education. The unmet needs of students in terms of employment outcomes, particularly in the area of the performing arts are increasingly a matter of concern. For tertiary music training institutions, the need to attach greater importance to student needs has forced a more critical reappraisal of curriculum priorities. An effect of this has been ongoing contestation and debate within music institutions about the nature and purposes of music curriculum as a university offering. This thesis examines the implications of the above by undertaking an investigation into the relevance of keyboard curriculum, as it is currently understood in one tertiary institution, a Conservatorium of Music. It examines the contestation over student needs that is apparent within the curriculum of keyboard within such an institution. The aim is to improve the institution's capacity to respond appropriately to 'student needs' by better understanding issues about curriculum relevance. This is done by investigating how needs become articulated within this particular institution and curriculum domain and by investigating the effect these needs articulations have on the practices of those who teach and those who learn within this domain. The study uses the conceptual work of Nancy Fraser (1989) and Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989) and a doctoral study by Erica McWilliam (1992), to focus on needs articulations or needs talk that is related to the needs of keyboard students within this Conservatorium. This talk, which is generated in management, staff and student texts, is examined as produced out of systems of language use that are employed within and outside the Conservatorium. The analysis of the talk treats the contestations and struggle over student needs in the Conservatorium as products of, and productive of, power relations. The analysis reveals discourse communities that are not only fractured from within but which share very little common language. It demonstrates how systems of language use at work within the Conservatorium marginalise students at the same time as they permit the institution to continue its traditional work and practice. The study clearly demonstrates how the institution itself is actively producing 'failing' and 'blaming' students as discursive subjects. The conclusion is drawn that more attention needs to be paid to building shared communities that share a common discourse, rather than trying to wedge more 'relevant' material into the curriculum.

Over the last decade, storage of non text-based data in databases has become an increasingly important trend in information management. Image in particular, has been gaining popularity as an alternative, and sometimes more viable, option for information storage. While this presents a wealth of information, it also creates a great problem in retrieving appropriate and relevant information during searching. This has resulted in an enormous growth of interest, and much active research, into the extraction of relevant information from non text-based databases. In particular,content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems have been one of the most active areas of research. The retrieval principle of CBIR systems is based on visual features such as colour, texture, and shape or the semantic meaning of the images. To enhance the retrieval speed, most CBIR systems pre-process the images stored in the database. This is because feature extraction algorithms are often computationally expensive. If images are to be retrieved from the World-Wide-Web (WWW), the raw images have to be downloaded and processed in real time. In this case, the feature extraction speed becomes crucial. Ideally, systems should only use those feature extraction algorithms that are most suited for analysing the visual features that capture the common relationship between the images in hand. In this thesis, a statistical discriminant analysis based feature selection framework is proposed. Such a framework is able to select the most appropriate visual feature extraction algorithms by using relevance feedback only on the user labelled samples. The idea is that a smaller image sample group is used to analyse the appropriateness of each visual feature, and only the selected features will be used for image comparison and ranking. As the number of features is less, an improvement in the speed of retrieval is achieved. From experimental results, it is found that the retrieval accuracy for small sample data has also improved. Intelligent E-Business has been used as a case study in this thesis to demonstrate the potential of the framework in the application of image retrieval system. In addition, an inter-query framework has been proposed in this thesis. This framework is also based on the statistical discriminant analysis technique. A common approach in inter-query for a CBIR system is to apply the term-document approach. This is done by treating each image’s name or address as a term, and the query session as a document. However, scalability becomes an issue with this technique as the number of stored queries increases. Moreover, this approach is not appropriate for a dynamic image database environment. In this thesis, the proposed inter-query framework uses a cluster approach to capture the visual properties common to the previously stored queries. Thus, it is not necessary to “memorise” the name or address of the images. In order to manage the size of the user’s profile, the proposed framework also introduces a merging approach to combine clusters that are close-by and similar in their characteristics. Experiments have shown that the proposed framework has outperformed the short term learning approach. It also has the advantage that it eliminates the burden of the complex database maintenance strategies required in the term-document approach commonly needed by the interquery learning framework. Lastly, the proposed inter-query learning framework has been further extended by the incorporation of a new semantic structure. The semantic structure is used to connect the previous queries both visually and semantically. This structure provides the system with the ability to retrieve images that are semantically similar and yet visually different. To do this, an active learning strategy has been incorporated for exploring the structure. Experiments have again shown that the proposed new framework has outperformed the previous framework.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-118). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

This paper investigates the determinants of intra-year error in annual effective tax rate estimates, relative to the actual annual effective tax rate (“ETR Miss”) and examines whether ETR Miss contains value relevant information. I find that ETR Miss is affected by both unbiased estimation errors related to the predictability of business fundamentals and biased estimation related to varying managerial incentives within the year. Firms with higher ETR Miss exhibit less persistent pre-tax earnings and earnings components, consistent with ETR Miss containing information on earnings quality. Finally, for firms with higher ETR Miss, investors place a lower weight on accounting earnings, consistent with the market incorporating information in ETR Miss for valuation assessments.

Public participation in the EIA process of projects of wind power plants. Brno 2016. Diploma thesis. Mendel University in Brno, Faculty of Regional Development and International studies. The thesis deals with the participation of the public in the EIA process in the context of the construction of wind power plants in selected regions of the Czech republic. The first part of the work focuses on the comparison of individual regions from the point of view of the construction of wind power plants and installed capacity of wind energy. Most of the constructed wind power plants and at the same time, the largest installed capacity is in the Usti region. This region also has got the second greatest potential in the use of wind energy after the Vysocina region, so far is the installed capacity using 23 % of the total potential power in the region. The second part of the thesis describes the participation of the public in the EIA process, evaluates the public involvement in this process and at the same time, compares the region between them. The highest public participation in the EIA process is in the Olomouc region and South-Moravian region, where it is also about less than half approved of the project of wind power, compared to the other evaluated regions. In all examined regions is public opinion on the EIA process mainly reflecting the concern of the negative impact of projects of wind power stations on fauna and flora. The conclusion of the thesis is devoted to consideration of the comments received from the public related to the EIA proces for the projects of wind power plants.

Early and accurate prediction of the compressive strength of concrete is important in the construction industry. Modeling the compressive strength of concrete to obtain a balance and equality between prediction accuracy, time and uncertainty of the prediction is a very difficult task due to the highly nonlinear nature of concrete. For structural engineering purposes, the 28- day compressive strength is the most relevant parameter. In this study, an attempt has been made to predict the 28-day compressive strength of concrete using Relevance Vector Machine (RVM). An RVM belongs to the class of sparse kernel classifiers, which are powerful tools in classification and regression. It has a model of identical functional form to the popular and state-of-the-art `Support Vector Machine (SVM)'. The benefits of using RVM include automatic estimation of nuisance parameters, probabilistic prediction and the ability to model complex data with little information. A total of 425 different data of high performance mix designs were collected from the University of California, Irvine repository. The data used to predict the compressive strength consisted of nine components. The RVM model was trained and tested using 395 and 30 data sets respectively. The model's performance was assessed at the end of the training and testing period using four performance measures; coefficient of determination, root-mean-square error, percentage of relevance vectors and residual plots. All the performance measures confirmed the accuracy of the model. The results of the study suggested that RVM is an effective tool for predicting the 28- day compressive strength of concrete from its mix ingredients.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-29T15:33:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_3521_.pdf: 2782962 bytes, checksum: d4b2294e5ee9ab86b7a35aec083af692 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-02-12 / Os Modelos de Predição implementados pelos algoritmos de Aprendizagem de Máquina advindos como linha de pesquisa da Inteligência Computacional são resultantes de pesquisas e investigações empíricas em dados do mundo real. Neste contexto; estes modelos são extraídos para comparação de duas grandes técnicas de aprendizagem de máquina Redes Neuro-Fuzzy e de Regressão aplicadas no intuito de estimar um parâmetro de qualidade do produto em um ambiente industrial sob processo contínuo. Heuristicamente; esses Modelos de Predição são aplicados e comparados em um mesmo ambiente de simulação com intuito de mensurar os níveis de adequação dos mesmos, o poder de desempenho e generalização dos dados empíricos que compõem este cenário (ambiente industrial de mineração).

Submitted by Maykon Nascimento (maykon.albani@hotmail.com) on 2015-02-24T19:43:31Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Dissertação Felipe Maya Lirio.pdf: 693849 bytes, checksum: 1d045322c3399cc2264c508c2b286f80 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Elizabete Silva (elizabete.silva@ufes.br) on 2015-02-26T18:30:35Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Dissertação Felipe Maya Lirio.pdf: 693849 bytes, checksum: 1d045322c3399cc2264c508c2b286f80 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-02-26T18:30:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Dissertação Felipe Maya Lirio.pdf: 693849 bytes, checksum: 1d045322c3399cc2264c508c2b286f80 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-02-24 / O trabalho teve por objetivo verificar a influência da presença dos acordos de acionistas na qualidade das informações contábeis divulgadas pelas empresas listadas na BM&FBOVESPA, do ano de 2001 a 2011. Para inferir a respeito da qualidade das informações contábeis foram utilizadas as métricas de informatividade e value relevance. Foram analisados em separado: os acordos de comando (utilizados para garantir o controle) dos acordos de defesa (utilizados para garantir o acesso a determinados direitos através do alcance de um percentual mínimo de capital votante). A amostra teve como critério de corte o mínimo de 0,001 de liquidez na BM&FBOVESPA. Foi utilizada regressão linear múltipla com dados em painel desequilibrado, tendo como variáveis de controle: concentração de votos, tamanho, endividamento, market-to-book e perdas. Com base nos efeitos cumprimento e monitoramento, com a utilização da metodologia proposta, o trabalho aponta que empresas com qualquer um dos tipos de acordo entre acionistas possuem maior qualidade das informações contábeis divulgadas. / The goal of the thesis is to assess the influence of shareholders’ agreement in the quality of bookkeeping information released by the companies listed on BM&FBOVESPA, from 2001 to 2011. In order to infer about the quality of the bookkeeping information, informativeness metrics and value relevance were used. The command agreement (used to guarantee the control) of the defense agreements (used to guarantee the access to certain rights by reaching a minimal percentage of voting capital). The sample had as cutting criterion the minimum of 0.001 liquidity in BM&FBOVESPA. The multiple linear regression with unbalanced panel data was used, having as control variables: concentration of votes, size, debt incurring, market-to-book and losses. Based on achievement and monitoring effects, using the methodology proposed, the study shows that companies with any kind of agreements among shareholders have more quality of the released bookkeeping profits.

Este estudo investiga a relevância das informações contábeis antes e depois do início do processo de convergência para as normas internacionais de contabilidade no Brasil. Foram analisadas 2.277 observações trimestrais de todas as empresas que compuseram a carteira teórica do Ibovespa durante um período de 15 anos, entre 1995 e 2009. Especificamente, pretendeu-se analisar essa questão sobre três perspectivas distintas. A primeira perspectiva, com um enfoque de curto prazo, analisa a reação do mercado de capitais brasileiro associada à divulgação das demonstrações contábeis em três diferentes momentos: antes, durante e após a transição do padrão contábil brasileiro (BR_GAAP) para o padrão híbrido (BR_GAAP/IFRS). A metodologia utilizada para essa perspectiva foi o estudo de eventos. Adicionalmente, o estudo objetiva tratar as empresas analisadas de maneira heterogênea, conforme sugerido por Holthausen (2003) e Lopes e Walker (2008). Assim sendo, nessa primeira perspectiva ocorre a segmentação da amostra da pesquisa de acordo com alguns sinalizadores que indicam maior propensão das empresas em fornecer informações contábeis de maior qualidade, independentemente do regramento contábil do Brasil. Ou seja, intentou-se relacionar se os incentivos que as empresas têm para serem mais informativas mitiga o impacto da adoção de um padrão contábil de maior qualidade (IFRS). Os resultados encontrados indicam que: as demonstrações contábeis possuem conteúdo informacional, isto é, oferecem novas informações que são incorporadas aos preços; para a amostra de empresas que possuem os incentivos para serem mais informativas (ADR), não foram constatadas diferenças em seu conteúdo informacional antes e depois do início do processo de migração para as normas IFRS; para as empresas da amostra cujas boas práticas de governança corporativa foram mensuradas através do Brazilian Corporate Governance Index (BCGI), os resultados mostraram-se inconclusivos. A segunda perspectiva contemplada na pesquisa volta-se a uma análise de longo prazo entre a associação de variáveis contábeis e variáveis de mercado. Essa análise ocorreu de duas formas distintas, porém complementares. Através da investigação da associação entre as informações contábeis (lucro e patrimônio líquido) e o preço, pretendeu-se identificar se a adoção de um padrão contábil de maior qualidade no Brasil (IFRS), mesmo em se tratando de uma adoção considerada parcial, aumenta o nível de associação entre essas variáveis contábeis e o preço. De modo complementar, também foi analisada a relevância da informação contábil, mas com uma modelagem econométrica diferente. Trata-se do modelo de retorno ou timeliness. Nessa segunda perspectiva, os resultados indicam que a relevância da informação contábil, mensurada através dos modelos de preço e retorno, aumentou após a adoção parcial das normas IFRS no Brasil. Esses resultados foram obtidos por meio de dados anuais e trimestrais. Por fim, a terceira perspectiva inspirou-se na análise da relevância dos números contábeis em um momento específico, que é a divulgação dos ajustes de reconciliação do lucro e do patrimônio líquido nas demonstrações contábeis no período de transição entre o padrão contábil brasileiro e as normas IFRS. Salienta-se que os modelos econométricos para verificar essa associação são similares aos adotados na segunda perspectiva (relevância e timeliness). Nessa perspectiva, as evidências indicam que os ajustes de reconciliação do lucro líquido e do patrimônio líquido são relevantes para o mercado de capitais brasileiro. Isso significa que os mesmos eventos econômicos, quando mensurados por diferentes normas contábeis, alteram as expectativas dos investidores acerca dos lucros futuros da empresa e, por conseguinte, modificam os preços. / This study investigates the value-relevance of accounting information before and after the initial convergence process towards international accounting standards in Brazil. A total of 2,277 quarterly observations of all the companies that composed the theoretical portfolio of Ibovespa during a 15-year period, from 1955 to 2009, have been analyzed. The study aims at analyzing this issue from three different perspectives. The first one has a short-term focus, and analyzes the reaction of the Brazilian capital market to the disclosure of financial statements at three different moments: before, during and after the transition from the Brazilian accounting standard (BR_GAAP) to the hybrid standard (BR_GAAP/IFRS). The methodology used in this perspective is the event study. Additionally, the study aims at approaching the companies analyzed in a heterogeneous way, as suggested by Holthausen (2003) and Lopes & Walker (2008). Thus, in the first perspective, there is a segmentation of the research sample according to some markers signing that companies are more likely to provide higher quality accounting information, regardless the accounting rules in Brazil. The aim was to find out whether incentives the companies have to become more informative smooth the impact of adopting a higher quality accounting standard (IFRS). Results have shown that: financial statements have informational content, i.e. they provide new information that is then incorporated into prices; as to the companies from the sample that count on incentives to be more informative (ADR), no differences have been found in their informational content either before or after the beginning of the process of migration to IFRS norms; as to companies from the sample whose good corporate governance practices were measured through the Brazilian Corporate Governance Index (BCGI), results have been inconclusive. The second perspective has turned to a long-term analysis of the association between accounting variables and market variables. This analysis has been carried out in two different, but complementary manners. Through the investigation of the association between accounting information (earnings and equity) and price, the purpose is to identify whether the adoption of a higher quality accounting standard in Brazil (IFRS), despite being partial, increases the level of association between those accounting variables and price. In a complementary way, the value-relevance of the accounting information has also been analyzed, but with a different econometric model: the return model or timeliness. In the second perspective, the results have shown that the value-relevance of the accounting information, as measured through the return and price models, has increased after the partial adoption of IFRS norms in Brazil. These results have been obtained from annual and quarterly data. Finally, the third perspective has been inspired in the analysis of value-relevance of accounting figures at a specific moment, which is the disclosure of adjustments of equity and earnings reconciliation in financial statements along the period of transition from the Brazilian accounting standard to IFRS. We should highlight that the econometric models to check such association are similar to those adopted in the second perspective (value-relevance and timeliness). In this perspective, evidences have shown that the adjustments of earnings and equity reconciliation are value-relevant to the Brazilian capital market. This means that the same economical events, when measured through different accounting norms, both change investors\' expectations as to the future earnings of a company and, consequently, modify prices.

Ce travail de thèse s'inscrit dans le cadre des théories de l'appraisal (i.e., évaluation cognitive) et notamment du Modèle des Processus Composants qui postule que la pertinence d’un évènement (i.e., l'importance de cet évènement à un instant donné dans la hiérarchie des buts et des besoins de l’organisme) serait capable de moduler le traitement attentionnel de stimuli émotionnels (i.e., l'attention émotionnelle), et ce, de façon automatique. Ce modèle a l'avantage de replacer l'individu au centre des émotions. Lui seul peut déterminer si un évènement est susceptible d'attirer son attention et, à court terme de déclencher une émotion spécifique. Ce projet de recherche a pour but de tester l'hypothèse d'une attention émotionnelle qui serait guidée par l'appraisal de pertinence de l'individu et ce, quelles que soient les caractéristiques intrinsèques du stimulus. Le mécanisme d'appraisal de pertinence serait très précoce et pourrait se produire à des niveaux de traitements automatiques et non conscients permettant ainsi à l'organisme de s'ajuster rapidement à son environnement. Nous avons conduit quatre études expérimentales afin d'étudier l'influence du traitement non conscient de l'appraisal de pertinence sur l'attention émotionnelle. Pour ce faire, nous avons utilisé un paradigme innovant, la Continuous Flash Suppression, qui permet une présentation non consciente et de longue durée d'une information visuelle. Les résultats de nos études suggèrent qu'il est possible de manipuler la pertinence de stimuli initialement neutres et non pertinents afin de moduler leur capacité à provoquer des biais attentionnels en générant non consciemment un but temporaire chez nos participants. En effet, les résultats ont révélé des effets de capture attentionnelle par des stimuli devenus pertinents suite à une induction émotionnelle (i.e., dégoût) non consciente. De plus, nos données montrent que nous serions capables de détecter la présence d'un stimulus pertinent que nous ne percevons pas consciemment. En effet, après une induction émotionnelle consciente, des effets d'interférence attentionnelle ont été mis en évidence par des stimuli devenus pertinents, même si ceux-ci n'étaient pas perçus consciemment. Enfin, nos résultats suggèrent que l'appraisal de pertinence est efficient, que les stimuli pertinents utilisés soient des stimuli symboliques ou non (i.e., mots ou images). Plus largement, ce travail de thèse défend l'idée que l'appraisal de pertinence est un bon déterminant de l'attention émotionnelle et que ce mécanisme peut se déployer de façon automatique, en dehors de tout contrôle volontaire et même en condition de perception non consciente. / This thesis focuses on appraisal theories (i.e., cognitive evaluation) and more particularly on the Component Process Model. This model postulates that the relevance of an event (i.e., the importance of the event at a given time in the hierarchy of the goals and needs of the organism) is able to modulate the attentional processing of emotional stimuli (i.e., emotional attention) in an automatic way. This model has the advantage to place the individual at the center of his own emotions. The individual can determine if an event is likely to attract his attention and to trigger a specific emotion. The present research project aimed to test the hypothesis of an emotional attention that would be guided by the individual's appraisal of relevance, regardless of the intrinsic characteristics of the stimulus. The appraisal of relevance seems to occur very early in the appraisal sequence and could be deployed at different levels of processing, that is, in an automatic and non-conscious way, in order to allow the organism to adapt quickly to its environment. In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted four experiments in which we investigated the influence of non-conscious appraisal of relevance on emotional attention. To do so, we used an innovative paradigm, the Continuous Flash Suppression paradigm, allowing the non-conscious and long-term presentation of visual information. The results of our studies suggest that it is possible to manipulate the relevance of initially neutral and non-relevant stimuli, in order to generate non-consciously a temporary goal for our participants, which modulates the ability of stimuli to provoke attentional biases. Indeed, the results revealed attentional capture effects, as stimuli became relevant following a non-conscious emotional induction (i.e., disgust). In addition, our data support the idea that we are able to detect the presence of a relevant stimulus that we do not perceive consciously. Indeed, after a conscious emotional induction, attentional interference effects have been observed, generated by stimuli that became relevant, even if they were not perceived consciously. Finally, our results suggest that the appraisal of relevance is efficient both for symbolic relevant stimuli and non-symbolic relevant ones (i.e., words or pictures). In this thesis, we argue that the appraisal of relevance is a good determinant of emotional attention and that this mechanism can be deployed automatically, without any voluntary control and even in non-conscious perception conditions.