本研究主要探討新聞記者身為一個「直觀科學家」(intuitive scientists)，在報導新聞時會不會有假設？如果有，這些假設的內容是什麼？以及假設如何影響記者的採訪、報導工作？ 　　新聞記者在認知世界、認識社會的時候，並不會像張白紙一樣，毫無選擇的完全接受外來的訊息、刺激。根據認知心理學的理論指出，新聞記者在認知的時候，會以他的先前知識結構為基礎，選擇性的、主動的詮釋外來刺激。這些知識結構就像理論一樣，可能使記者對外來資訊，產生特定方向的預期和假設，整個資訊處理的過程，就如同科學研究的假設驗證過程。 　　本研究以立法院朝野黨團協商、中美智慧財產權諮商新聞，一共進行了二次個案研究，分別訪問、觀察了八位採訪記者。這二次個案研究的進行時間，分別是三天和四天。其中第一天主要的工作是訪談記者，了解記者對於報導事件是否有假設，以及他打算怎麼跑這條新聞（策畫）；第二天以及第二、三天參與觀察記錄新聞記者的採訪、寫作工作，探究假設是否會影響新聞記者的採訪、寫作工作；第三天以及第四天，則對記者進行事後訪問，以對照先前的訪談內容和觀察記錄，找出差異，了解記者採訪計畫改變的情形、原因、假設驗證的過程以及有無更換假設的情形。 　　資料分析結果發現，新聞記在採訪前，對於這二個報導事件，都採取了明確的類別假設、主題假設、結果假設、影響假設；這些假設並影響了記者的採訪、報導過程和方向。這些影響主要展現在以下幾方面： 　　一、新聞記者的的採訪策畫範圍和方向，都侷限在假設範圍內。 　　二、假設影響記者的採訪工作。 　　　　1. 記者選擇的消息來源，大部份和記者的假設有關。 　　　　2. 記者問的問題，大部份和記者的假設有關；記者問問題的方式和問題 的內容，多數傾向支持原先的假設。 　　三、假設影響新聞記者的寫作過程。 　　　　1. 記者選擇寫入新聞稿的資訊，大致上和記者的假設一致。 　　　　2. 記者詮釋新聞稿資訊的方向，也大致符合記者原先的假設。

<p>This is a case study influenced by Grounded Theory and Symbolic Interactionism. Its focus is on a small group of pupils isolated both geographically and socially from the ordinary school. The composition is written from the children’s perspective. Observations and interviews have made it possible to study both the interaction between the children and also the adults, how the children are described by the adults working with them and what expectations they have on the children. </p><p>In the light of earlier research, our case study can be seen as an example how the school is dealing with the children’s problems. The children’s school day seems to be characterized by frames that differ from between tight to and wide. Tight, in the sense that thesepupils are located in a restricted part of the school, together with just a few other pupils and adults. Wide in the sense that these pupils behaviour are all the same whether it is break or lesson. The social interaction between the children and the adults aims to be directed to show the pupils what they <i>are</i>, instead of what they can <i>become</i>. This attempt indicates that the teacher thinks that the children’s problems are caused by the individual child. The children’s individual biographical schemes are seen as the cause of the problem. Even if the children not have been moved from their originally classes only because of this problem, it is still mentioned as a strong argument for not letting the children return to their original classes. The school thinks that these children have bad influence on so called “normal children”, they even speak in terms as "risk of infection".</p>

<p>The objective of this study was to uncover what aspects of urban plazas and parks that are most important for users’ evaluations of places’ aesthetics and microclimate (the characteristic climate for a limited space). This was done by investigating people’s general ideas of plazas and parks (the prototypical concepts) and compare these with place users’ descriptions of four specific places. Interviews with two groups (31 and 24 persons respectively) were carried out in order to collect this information. Aspects commonly mentioned in the descriptions, but not included in the prototype, were considered salient and schema-irrelevant (perceived as outstanding but not needed as a defining attribute of the place). This part of the result was related to evaluations of aesthetics and microclimate of the specific places, as well as to subjects’ explanations of some of these evaluations. Evaluations were collected in 716 questionnaires and 1115 on-site interviews, and the explanations in the 24 persons interview concerning specific places. The results indicate that for urban places to be emotionally appreciated they have to manifest some kind of effect of contrast, i.e. they have to embrace some salient schema-irrelevant aspect outstanding enough to work as a centre of the total experience of the place. Furthermore, the results indicate that a separation between emotional and practical aspects of place experiences is needed. In view of that, for urban places to be practically useful, they have to have a prototypical character. For a plaza to be prototypical, it has to be experienced as an enclosed and mainly hard-grounded open square, with good opportunities for commerce and social life. A park has to be green and be able to house a range of activities such as relaxing, picnics and walking.</p>

<p>Uppsatsen är en komparativ studie av retorik och pedagogik vid högfungerande autism och Aspergers syndrom, med retorisk kommunikationsteori som plattform.</p><p>Den undersöker om retoriska mallar kan vara bra verktyg och därmed skapa möjligheter till eget kunskapande för personer som har funktionshindret.</p><p>Slutsatsen är att;</p><p>Partesmodellen borde kunna användas för att utöka mängden strategier de personer som har högfungerande autism eller Aspergers syndrom behöver för att bli förstådda och för att förstå. Likt schema, sociala berättelser och seriesamtal, de pedagogiska hjälpmedel som används idag.</p>

<p>Strong recent focus on unconscious processes has increased interest in subliminal stimulation and similar experimental technologies. Assumptions about the persistence of effects of unconscious stimulation are generally conservative, referring to seconds or minutes (Silverman, 1977; Velmans, 1991). In Study I, five experiments (<i>N </i>= 365) showed complex effects of unconscious stimulation ten days after subliminal exposure, implying that persistence estimates need reevaluation. Experimental stimuli were "mommy and I are one" (MIO) and "mommy and I are dissimilar" (MIDIS), and neutral control stimuli. Effects consisted of higher correlations between measures pertaining to the self-mother relationship and measures of psychological adjustment. </p><p>These ethically problematic findings prompted investigation in Study II of whether debriefing information to participants could prevent persistent effects of subliminal stimuli, an issue not previously investigated. Two experiments (<i>N</i>=188) tested two kinds of information to participants following subliminal MIDIS or control stimulation. Results showed different persistent effects depending on participant sex. Simple information about the stimulus was effective in preventing these, but elaborate information describing the effects and mechanisms for them was not. The findings have implications for ethical recommendations for subliminal research, and suggest that this unexplored area requires more attention. </p><p>In Study III, a theoretical account for the persistent effects is presented, based on unconscious activation of a relational schema containing goal motivation. Unless the goal is fulfilled or activation dissipates due to attributability or irrelevance of the goal, the activation will be maintained (motivated maintenance). Being unconscious, the influence results in automatic schematic processing of environmental cues, including perceptual, judgment, and behavioral biases. These in turn interactively maintain the activation of the schema (interactive maintenance). </p><p>The discussion includes the conclusion that previous estimates of the persistence of unconscious stimulation effects need revision. Theoretical and empirical questions concerning the studies are discussed and ethical research implications are considered.</p>

<p>In what ways and under what circumstances can a movie be a resource for individuals and their thoughts about existential matters? This central research question has been investigated using a both quantitative and qualitative approach. First, a questionnaire was distributed amongst 179 Swedish students to provide a preliminary overview of film habits. The questionnaire was also used as a tool for selecting respondents to individual interviews. Second, thirteen interviews were conducted, with viewers choosing their favourite movie of all time. In the study socio-cognitive theory and a schema-based theoretical tool is adopted to analyze how different viewers make use of movies as cultural products in an interplay between culture and cognition in three contexts; a socio-historic process, a socio-cultural interaction with the world and inner psychological processes. Summarizing the interviews some existential matters dominated. Matters of immanent orientation were in the foreground. Transcendental questions received much less attention. Summarizing the schema-based theoretical question, assessing which cognitive schema structures the narratives were processed through, the study found an emphasis on a combination of two main cognitive structures, person schema and self schema. Detailed person schematic cognitive processes about fictitious characters on the screen and their role model behaviour were combined by the respondents with dynamic cross-references to detailed self schematic introspections about their own characteristics, related to existential matters at some very specific moments in their lives. The viewers in the study seem to be inspired by movies as a mediated cultural resource, promoting the development of a personal moral framework with references to values deeply fostered by a humanistic tradition. It is argued that these findings support theories discussing individualised meaning making, developing ‘self-expression values’ and ‘altruistic individualism’ in contemporary western society.</p>

Grid computing emerged as a framework for supporting complex operations over large datasets; it enables the harnessing of large numbers of processors working in parallel to solve computing problems that typically spread across various domains. We focus on the problems of data management in a grid/cloud environment. The broader context of designing a services oriented architecture (SOA) for information integration is studied, identifying the main components for realizing this architecture. The BioFederator is a web services-based data federation architecture for bioinformatics applications. Based on collaborations with bioinformatics researchers, several domain-specific data federation challenges and needs are identified. The BioFederator addresses such challenges and provides an architecture that incorporates a series of utility services; these address issues like automatic workflow composition, domain semantics, and the distributed nature of the data. The design also incorporates a series of data-oriented services that facilitate the actual integration of data. Schema integration is a core problem in the BioFederator context. Previous methods for schema integration rely on the exploration, implicit or explicit, of the multiple design choices that are possible for the integrated schema. Such exploration relies heavily on user interaction; thus, it is time consuming and labor intensive. Furthermore, previous methods have ignored the additional information that typically results from the schema matching process, that is, the weights and in some cases the directions that are associated with the correspondences. We propose a more automatic approach to schema integration that is based on the use of directed and weighted correspondences between the concepts that appear in the source schemas. A key component of our approach is a ranking mechanism for the automatic generation of the best candidate schemas. The algorithm gives more weight to schemas that combine the concepts with higher similarity or coverage. Thus, the algorithm makes certain decisions that otherwise would likely be taken by a human expert. We show that the algorithm runs in polynomial time and moreover has good performance in practice. The proposed methods and algorithms are compared to the state of the art approaches. The BioFederator design, services, and usage scenarios are discussed. We demonstrate how our architecture can be leveraged on real world bioinformatics applications. We preformed a whole human genome annotation for nucleosome exclusion regions. The resulting annotations were studied and correlated with tissue specificity, gene density and other important gene regulation features. We also study data processing models on grid environments. MapReduce is one popular parallel programming model that is proven to scale. However, using the low-level MapReduce for general data processing tasks poses the problem of developing, maintaining and reusing custom low-level user code. Several frameworks have emerged to address this problem; these frameworks share a top-down approach, where a high-level language is used to describe the problem semantics, and the framework takes care of translating this problem description into the MapReduce constructs. We highlight several issues in the existing approaches and alternatively propose a novel refined MapReduce model that addresses the maintainability and reusability issues, without sacrificing the low-level controllability offered by directly writing MapReduce code. We present MapReduce-LEGOS (MR-LEGOS), an explicit model for composing MapReduce constructs from simpler components, namely, "Maplets", "Reducelets" and optionally "Combinelets". Maplets and Reducelets are standard MapReduce constructs that can be composed to define aggregated constructs describing the problem semantics. This composition can be viewed as defining a micro-workflow inside the MapReduce job. Using the proposed model, complex problem semantics can be defined in the encompassing micro-workflow provided by MR-LEGOS while keeping the building blocks simple. We discuss the design details, its main features and usage scenarios. Through experimental evaluation, we show that the proposed design is highly scalable and has good performance in practice.

In a joint dissertation project, 11 brass instrument and guitar lessons, with 4 teachers and 21 students aged 9-35 years, were videotaped, transcribed and ana­lyzed. Two were group lessons and 9 were private lessons. The object of the pro­ject was to study how music teaching and learning can be under­stood from an institutional perspective by describing, analyzing and in­terpreting musical in­strument lessons. The lessons were viewed as social encounters in which the action of participants creates and re-creates social orders at different institutional levels, by means of communication rou­tines using speech, music and gesture. Data were derived from micro-ethnographic transcriptions of speech, gesture and music of a total of five hours of videotape, supplemented by text analyses of 14 method-books. The transcripts were analyzed as text from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. At the analytical level the study applied the cognitive concepts of experiencing and learning music, as well as those of educational gen­res of speech and music use. The analyzed data were interpreted and discussed from the per­spectives of interaction-theory and institution-theory. The results show how the music during the lessons was broken down into sepa­rate notes, as read from the score. Music was not addressed as phrases, rhythms, or melodies. Expressive qualities of music performance were not ad­dressed. The characteristics of the interaction were found to be asymmetric, with the teacher being the one controlling the definition of the situation. Student at­tempts to take initiative were ignored by teachers. This asymmetric pattern of interaction had negative consequences for students’ as well as teachers’ opportu­nities to learn. The organization of the teaching situation as well as teaching methods is discussed from the perspective of institution-theory. A major conclu­sion is that the way instrument teaching is organized leaves little room for stu­dents and teachers to discuss and reflect on the teaching process.

Strong recent focus on unconscious processes has increased interest in subliminal stimulation and similar experimental technologies. Assumptions about the persistence of effects of unconscious stimulation are generally conservative, referring to seconds or minutes (Silverman, 1977; Velmans, 1991). In Study I, five experiments (N = 365) showed complex effects of unconscious stimulation ten days after subliminal exposure, implying that persistence estimates need reevaluation. Experimental stimuli were "mommy and I are one" (MIO) and "mommy and I are dissimilar" (MIDIS), and neutral control stimuli. Effects consisted of higher correlations between measures pertaining to the self-mother relationship and measures of psychological adjustment. These ethically problematic findings prompted investigation in Study II of whether debriefing information to participants could prevent persistent effects of subliminal stimuli, an issue not previously investigated. Two experiments (N=188) tested two kinds of information to participants following subliminal MIDIS or control stimulation. Results showed different persistent effects depending on participant sex. Simple information about the stimulus was effective in preventing these, but elaborate information describing the effects and mechanisms for them was not. The findings have implications for ethical recommendations for subliminal research, and suggest that this unexplored area requires more attention. In Study III, a theoretical account for the persistent effects is presented, based on unconscious activation of a relational schema containing goal motivation. Unless the goal is fulfilled or activation dissipates due to attributability or irrelevance of the goal, the activation will be maintained (motivated maintenance). Being unconscious, the influence results in automatic schematic processing of environmental cues, including perceptual, judgment, and behavioral biases. These in turn interactively maintain the activation of the schema (interactive maintenance). The discussion includes the conclusion that previous estimates of the persistence of unconscious stimulation effects need revision. Theoretical and empirical questions concerning the studies are discussed and ethical research implications are considered.

Uppsatsen är en komparativ studie av retorik och pedagogik vid högfungerande autism och Aspergers syndrom, med retorisk kommunikationsteori som plattform. Den undersöker om retoriska mallar kan vara bra verktyg och därmed skapa möjligheter till eget kunskapande för personer som har funktionshindret. Slutsatsen är att; Partesmodellen borde kunna användas för att utöka mängden strategier de personer som har högfungerande autism eller Aspergers syndrom behöver för att bli förstådda och för att förstå. Likt schema, sociala berättelser och seriesamtal, de pedagogiska hjälpmedel som används idag.