Inserido no âmbito da Pragmática intercultural, o presente trabalho tem com objetivo investigar ordens e pedidos em língua italiana, identificando os elementos que caracterizam e diferenciam esses dois atos de fala a partir da percepção de falantes nativos e de brasileiros aprendizes de italiano. Nossas investigações foram motivadas principalmente por questões relacionadas à prática de ensino que, a nosso ver, precisa incluir aspectos relacionados à língua em uso e em contexto. Além disso, ao investigar ordens e pedidos, podemos, do ponto de vista linguístico, abordar o estereótipo segundo o qual os italianos seriam pessoas mais autoritárias em relação aos brasileiros. Para atingir nossos objetivos, elaboramos um questionário online composto por interações verbais entre falantes nativos, gravadas em áudio e vídeo, e diálogos extraídos de material cinematográfico. Os vídeos foram selecionados a partir de critérios que estabelecemos com base naquilo que é afirmado, sobre ordens e pedidos, pelas teorias e estudos que escolhemos para guiar a investigação. O questionário foi enviado a falantes nativos e a brasileiros aprendizes de italiano, aos quais pedimos que, após assistirem a cada interação, avaliassem o ato de fala em destaque e o classificassem como ordem, pedido, ou outro. Além disso, solicitamos que, após cada resposta, os informantes descrevessem os fatores que motivaram suas escolhas. Sobre a comparação entre ordens e pedidos, partimos da hipótese que os elementos que caracterizam esses dois atos de fala criam diferenças por estarem associados tanto à estrutura linguística quanto ao contexto que envolve a interação. A respeito dos italianos parecerem mais autoritários, nossa hipótese era que brasileiros reconheceriam de maneira diferente os elementos que constituem e diferenciam ordens de pedidos. Os resultados deste estudo confirmam, em parte, aquilo que assumimos como hipótese. Com a análise dos dados, observamos que, de fato, ordens e pedidos em língua italiana, tanto para falantes nativos quanto para brasileiros, são diferenciados pela estrutura linguística e pelos elementos contextuais que envolvem a interação. Ao compararmos os dados, verificamos também que, para justificar suas respostas, informantes italianos recorreram mais frequentemente a elementos prosódicos enquanto nas respostas dos brasileiros prevaleceram elementos de natureza pragmalinguística. Por fim, constatamos ainda que não há diferenças significativas entre a forma como italianos classificaram os atos de fala e o modo como foram interpretados por brasileiros. / Inserted in the context of intercultural pragmatics, this work has the objective to investigate orders and requests in the Italian language, identifying the elements that characterize and differentiate these two speech acts based on the perception of native speakers and Brazilian Italian language students. Our investigations were motivated mainly by questions related to the teaching practice which, in our view, needs to include aspects related to the language in use and in context. Moreover, while investigating orders and requests we can, from a linguistic viewpoint, approach the stereotype which has the Italians painted as more authoritarian people in relation to the Brazilians. To achieve our objectives, we elaborated an online questionnaire composed by verbal interactions between native speakers, recorded in audio and video, and dialogues extracted from cinematographic material. The videos were selected based on criteria which were established based on what is affirmed, about orders and requests, by the theory and studies chosen to guide this investigation. The questionnaire was sent to native speakers and Brazilian Italian language students, to whom we requests that, after watching each interaction, to evaluate the speech act highlighted and classified it as order, request or other. In addition to that, we requested , after each answer, for the informers to describe the factors that motivated their choices. While comparing orders and request, we used as hypothesis that the elements which characterize these two speech acts create differences because they\'re associated as much to the linguistic structure as to the context of the interaction. About the Italians appearing to be more authoritarian, our hypothesis was that the Brazilians would recognize in different ways the elements which constitute and differentiate orders from requests. This study\'s results confirm that, to some extend, that which we assumed in our hypothesis. With the data analysis, we observed that, indeed, orders and requests in Italian language, for both native speakers and Brazilians, are differentiated by the linguistic structure and by the contextual elements that are part of the interaction. Comparing the data, we also verify that to justify their answers, the Italian informers used, more often than not, the prosodic elements while in the Brazilians\' answers the elements of a pragmalinguistic nature were more present. Finally, we realized that there weren\'t significant differences between the way in which the Italians and Brazilians classified speech acts.

The practice of promoting food to children via advergames is a highly topical issue which attracts much concern due to the low nutritional value of the promoted foods. This thesis examines the effects of customised food advergames on children’s affective, cognitive and conative responses. It also investigates the role persuasion knowledge and prior brand usage have in children’s interaction with advergames. In particular, whether children’s persuasion knowledge acts as a barrier to those responses. This research is situated within the domains of marketing communications, consumer behaviour and consumer socialisation. It adopts an affect transfer theory, the Dual Mediation Hypothesis (DMH), to explain the transfer of affect from an advergame to children’s responses. Three versions of the same advergame were designed for the purpose of this thesis with different levels of customisation (i.e. control, low and high experimental conditions). An experiment among younger (5-7 year olds) and older (11¬12 year olds) children reveals that customisation in advergames has a detrimental effect on children’s affective, cognitive and conative responses. It was the control condition, without customisation options, that rendered a positive impact on brand attitudes and preferences relative to the other two experimental conditions. Persuasion knowledge does not influence children’s affective, cognitive or conative responses. This implies that children’s understanding of the persuasive intent of an advergame does not act as a barrier against its effects. Age had a significant role on children’s attitudes towards the advergame, but not on their other responses to it. Finally, prior brand usage has a positive impact on children’s responses apart from on advergame attitudes. This thesis has implications to policy and practice. It is evident that children from two distinct age and cognitive developmental groups cannot protect themselves from advergames’ effects. Therefore, regulators should broaden the scope of concern to older and younger children alike.

There is currently a gap in research related to the potential effects of student race on school consultation and teacher help seeking behavior. It is well documented in the existing research that racial/ethnic bias exists in education at many levels. These biases lead to negative systemic effects such as achievement gaps, disproportionality in discipline, and disproportionality in special education referrals. Biases can also have negative effects on classroom interactions between teachers and students. It seems plausible that if biases exist in other domains of education, that they may also exist in the school consultation process. The purpose of the current study is to fill the gap in the school consultation literature by evaluating pre-service teacher’s ratings of situation severity and their likelihood to seek assistance. Participants (n= 179) were shown 4 vignettes depicting various classroom scenarios and asked to rate both situation severity and their likelihood to seek assistance. Participants were randomized to consider either white sounding names or black sounding names within the vignettes. Findings from this study indicate that perceived student race did not have a significant effect on pre-service teachers’ ratings of situation severity and ratings of situation severity. These findings provide insight into the help seeking behaviors of pre-service teachers. Additionally, results have implications for graduate training in consultation. Limitations to this study as well as recommendations for future research in this area are discussed.

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This thesis investigates the issues of creating a publicly accessible Web interface to a remote autonomous robot: the Bradford Robotic Telescope. The robot is situated on Mount Teide, on the island of Tenerife, Spain. Its mission is to provide interactive access to the stars to people who would otherwise not be able to appreciate the wonders of the night sky due to light pollution. Whenever weather and darkness permits, the robot processes the observation requests submitted by users via the Internet, operating all the hardware including the dome, telescope mount and cameras. The question of how to enable a content rich high quality dialogue between one robot and thousands of users is explored and divided into seven areas of research. How to design a Web site enabling high quality interaction with the user, how to enable users to request service from a robot, how to store and manage all the user and robot generated data, how to enable communication between the Web interface and the robot, how to schedule many observation requests in the best order, how to support a constant dialogue between the robot and users to engage users in the robot's work, and how to present and display users' completed observations. These seven areas of research are investigated; solutions are presented and their implementations examined and evaluated for their suitability and performance with the Bradford Robotic Telescope, and for how they might perform for any job-based remote robot.

Children with Down syndrome often have high body mass index scores, brought on by hypothyroidism, poor mastication, decreased metabolic rates, and inconsistent physical fitness routines. Along with various genotypic characteristics, several behavioral tendencies accompany the diagnosis of Down syndrome. People with this condition often engage in noncompliant behaviors in an attempt to escape work-related tasks such as exercising. A lack of a consistent fitness regimen may result in additional health complications for this particular group of people, as well as ensuing concerns from the parents or guardians who care for them. Because of the propensities for poor physical health in people with Down syndrome, it is imperative that this group of people include exercise-related activities in their health-care routines to help promote a positive well-being from childhood to adulthood.The purpose of this study is to report on the results of an intervention which utilized high-probability tasks and principles of generalization to address noncompliant behaviors in a 9-year-old boy who had Down syndrome and a history of engaging in refusal towards exercise-related activities. Gross motor skills adapted from the Test of Gross Motor Development assessment were used throughout the study to evaluate both compliance and accuracy of the pre-selected movements. This study used a changing conditions design to assess John’s growth throughout 5 distinct phases. Results from both the high-probability tasks and generalization interventions showed an overall increase in the participant’s compliance and accuracy of skill development throughout all stages of the experiment. Implications from this study provide positive support for using antecedent-based interventions to help individuals with Down syndrome engage in exercise-related activities.

No description available.

This research serves two main purposes: to create an analyzed edition of Ray Brown's bass lines from the Oscar Peterson Trio's 1964 recording We Get Requests, and to better understand Brown's lines through the lens of Ray Brown's Bass Method. This comparative analysis identifies significant events in the recorded music that closely relate to or resemble exercises from the book. By analyzing the music from the lens of Ray Brown's Bass Method, performers, students, and educators will gain a stronger understanding of the application of select technical devices provided by Brown in his book. The most prominent techniques discussed include scales and intervals, major triads, minor triads, and chords, exercises in tenths, rhythm patterns with drops, and diminished patterns. These evidence-based conclusions have significant applications in jazz bass pedagogy by revealing potential relationships between technical ideals and practical use. Although these conclusions may seem of concern only to jazz bassists, it should in fact concern anyone who cares about the connection between pedagogy and performance.

Aujourd’hui, il ne s’agit plus seulement aux institutions de microfinance d’accorder des crédits mais de s’assurer que leurs activités contribuent bien au développement économique et social des territoires. Ainsi, pour améliorer leur performance totale, les institutions de microfinance sollicitent des structures susceptibles de les accompagner dans le processus d’identification et de formulation des besoins mais aussi, pour la mise en place d’actions concrètes pour leur réalisation. Plusieurs organismes de développement et prestataires offrent donc de l’accompagnement technique aux institutions de microfinance. Ce travail de thèse a pour objet d’appréhender le modèle d’accompagnement technique des institutions de microfinance en interrogeant à l’aide de grilles d’entretien des salariés d’organismes de développement en France, des consultants, des salariés d’IMF, des membres du Conseil d’Administration d’IMF, des structures étatiques au Burkina Faso et au Sénégal. Cette démarche nous a permis de noter que : l’accompagnement est toujours à réinventer en fonction du contexte et de la réalité spécifique de chaque organisation, aucun accompagnement ne se ressemble et un bon accompagnement est un accompagnement participatif qui crée de la valeur ajoutée, un changement, une évolution constatée qui doit prendre en compte tous les enjeux, les implications de la demande de l’institution de microfinance, être un accompagnement sur mesure. / Nowadays, it is no longer just microfinance institutions to grant credit but to ensure that their activities contribute to the economic and social development of territories. Thus, to improve their total performance, microfinance institutions solicit structures that can support them in the process of identification and formulation of needs but also, for the implementation of concrete actions for their achievement. Several development organizations and service providers therefore offer technical support to microfinance institutions. This Thesis work aims to formalize the process of technical support for microfinance institutions by interviewing stakeholders. This approach allowed us to note that: support is always reinvented according to the context and the specific reality of each organization, no support is alike and good support is a participatory support that creates added value, a change, an evolution noted that must take into account all the issues, the implications of the request of the microfinance institution, be a tailored accompaniment.

A gerência adequada de recursos e serviços de Tecnologia da Informação (TI) se tornou imperativa para o sucesso de organizações modernas. A Biblioteca de Infraestrutura de Tecnologia da Informação (Information Technology Infrastructure Library, ITIL) representa, nesse contexto, o framework mais popular para ajudar a alcançar esse fim. Para lidar com mudanças em TI, a ITIL define o processo de gerência de mudanças (change management), cujo principal objetivo é garantir que métodos e procedimentos padronizados são utilizados para o tratamento imediato e eficiente dessas mudanças. Para alcançar esse objetivo, é fundamental reutilizar a experiência adquirida com mudanças passadas no projeto de requisições futuras. A ITIL sugere o uso de modelos de mudanças (change models) como uma forma para permitir o reuso de tal experiência em mudanças recorrentes e similares. A criação de modelos de mudanças pode ser concretizada considerando duas abordagens distintas. Em uma abordagem top-down, operadores de TI podem projetar os modelos manualmente, com base no conhecimento adquirido no passado. Em uma perspectiva alternativa, bottom-up, esses modelos poderiam ser extraídos a partir de traços de mudanças passadas obtidos com orquestradores de mudanças. Na prática, no entanto, mudanças tem sido geralmente descritas e documentadas de forma ad hoc, devido `a falta de mecanismos adequados para apoiar o projeto das mesmas. Isso impede que o conhecimento adquirido na especificação, planejamento e condução de mudanças passadas seja reutilizado em requisições futuras. Para abordar esse problema, nesta dissertação são propostos (i ) o conceito de templates de mudança como um mecanismo para formalizar, preservar, e (re)usar conhecimento na especificação de mudanças recorrentes e similares, (ii ) um algoritmo para o refinamento automatizado de planos de mudanças em workflows executáveis, (iii ) um mecanismo para extrair templates de mudanças a partir de traços de execuções passadas, e (iv) uma solução fim-a-fim, apoiada por um sistema real, para permitir o planejamento e implantação de mudanças em TI. Para provar conceito e viabilidade técnica da solução proposta, foi realizada uma implementação prototípica de um sistema de gerência de mudanças chamado ChangeLedge, o qual foi utilizado para conduzir uma série de experimentos considerando mudanças típicas em TI. Os resultados alcançados indicam a efetividade da solução e eficiência do sistema, o qual é capaz de gerar planos de mudança executáveis e corretos em um período de tempo substancialmente menor que o que seria gasto por um operador humano experiente, e de extrair templates que descrevem com acurácia mudanças passadas executadas na organização. / Proper management of Information Technology (IT) resources and services has become imperative for the success of modern organizations. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) represents, in this context, the most widely accepted framework to help achieve this end. In order to deal with IT changes, ITIL defines the change management process, whose main goal is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for the efficient and prompt handling of these changes. To meet this goal, it is of paramount importance reusing the experience acquired from previous changes in the design of subsequent ones. ITIL suggests the use of change models as a mean of enabling the reuse of such experience across recorrent, similar changes. The creation of change models can be done considering two distinct approaches. In a top-down approach, IT operators may manually design models based on the knowledge owned/acquired in the past. In contrast, in a bottom-up perspective, these models could be discovered from past execution traces gathered from IT provisioning tools. In practice, however, changes have been usually described and documented in an ad hoc fashion, due to the lack of proper mechanisms to both support the change design process. This hampers knowledge acquired when specifying, planning, and carrying out previous changes to be reused in subsequent requests. To address this problem, in this thesis we propose (i ) the concept of change templates as a mechanism to formalize, preserve, and (re)use knowledge in the specification of (recurrent and similar) IT changes, (ii ) an algorithm for the automated refinement of change plans into actionable workflows, (iii ) a mechanism to discover change templates from traces of past changes, and (iv) an end-to-end solution, supported by a real system, to allow planning and implementation of IT changes to be designed and executed. To prove concept and technical feasibility of the proposed solution, we have developed a prototypical implementation of a change management system called ChangeLedge and used it to carry out a set of experiments, considering typical IT changes. The results obtained indicate the effectiveness of the solution and efficiency of the system, which is able to generate accurate and actionable change plans in substantially less time than would be spent by a skilled human operator, and to extract templates that accurately describe IT change procedures previously executed in the organization.