Our interest about interdisciplinary teaching has grown during our time at Högskolan Dalarna and especially during the subject physical education. It became clear that people learn in different ways. The theoretical education in school benefits the visual and auditory strong learners but the kinesthetic strong learners find it more difficult to absorb the information. We argue that integrating subjects is a good way to mix theory and practice and thus gives more students an opportunity to learn the content of the subject. The intention of this examination paper is to investigate the relationship between the attitudes of the teachers regarding interdisciplinary teaching, the practical restrains, possibilities and the presence of interdisciplinary teaching at three different schools. Semi-structured interviews with six physical educators and three principals have been performed. An ad-hoc method has been used, with categorizing (teachers), and narrative (principals). Teachers and principal’s definitions of, the pros and cons for, and the actual presence of interdisciplinary teaching have been investigated. The main results of our studies are: 1) That teachers and principals define interdisciplinary teaching as thematic work. 2) Teachers experience lack of time for collective planning due to others duties. 3) Teachers and principals understanding of physical education makes it difficult to integrate physical education with other subjects. Some of the conclusions from this study are that interdisciplinary teaching must be voluntary. Conditions to practice interdisciplinary teaching must be sufficient, e.g regarding collective planning time. An increased presence of interdisciplinary teaching that includes physical education requires a new understanding of physical education.

One of the primary goals of Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) research is to minimize network traffic and reduce the latency. One way to solve this problem is to use thread migration. In this thesis, we show how thread migration is implemented in a CDPthread-based system. To maintain high portability and flexibility, a generic thread migration package is implemented as a user library. This mechanism can be used to better utilize system resources and improve performance of a CDPthread-based system. It also provides programmer an easy way to migrate threads between different nodes. Moreover, we use thread migration to implement dynamic load balance. Our experimental results show that the dynamic load balance can improve system performance significantly in the average case.

Shared roadways are a cost effective method for providing bicycle facilities in areas with limited right-of-way; shared roadways have automobiles and bicycles operating in the same traveled way. However, shared roadways may negatively affect traffic operations and there is limited guidance on appropriate shared roadways implementation. This thesis has three objectives: evaluate the impact of shared roadways on automobile quality of service, compare automobile quality of service to bicycle quality of service on shared roadways, and provide guidance on the implementation of shared roadways. The author hypothesizes that shared roadways should only be implemented when automobile Level of Service (LOS), bicycle LOS, and facility safety are "acceptable." The author accomplishes the objectives by generating data using microsimulation models. The author uses microsimulation model data to evaluate automobile quality of service on shared roadways. In the evaluation of automobile quality of service, the measures of effectiveness are automobile LOS threshold (the maximum automobile flow-rate before a change in automobile LOS) and automobile average travel speed (the average travel time divided by the segment length, a space mean speed). To compare automobile and bicycle quality of service, the author uses the bicycle LOS model in NCHRP Report 616 to generate bicycle LOS thresholds (the maximum automobile flow-rate before a change in bicycle LOS). After generating bicycle LOS thresholds, the author compares the bicycle LOS thresholds to the automobile LOS thresholds. Finally, the author uses the findings of the investigations to provide guidance on the implementation of shared roadways. In this thesis, the author finds automobile quality of service on shared roadways decreases as automobile free-flow speed, automobile volume, and bicycle volume increase. For most conditions, the author finds bicycle quality of service is better than automobile quality of service on shared roadways. Bicycle quality of service is lower than automobile quality of service with increases in unsignalized access points per mile, signalized intersection crossing distance, and heavy vehicle percent. The author provides guidance on the implementation of shared roadways based upon automobile quality of service.

Teamwork has become increasingly important in many disciplines. To support teamwork in dynamic and complex domains, a teamwork programming language and a teamwork architecture are important for specifying the knowledge of teamwork and for interpreting the knowledge of teamwork and then driving agents to interact with the domains. Psychological studies on teamwork have also shown that team members in an effective team often maintain shared mental models so that they can have mutual expectation on each other. However, existing agent/teamwork programming languages cannot explicitly express the mental states underlying teamwork, and existing representation of the shared mental models are inefficient and further become an obstacle to support effective teamwork. To address these issues, we have developed a teamwork programming language called Role-Based MALLET (RoB-MALLET) which has rich expressivity to explicitly specify the mental states underlying teamwork. By using roles and role variables, the knowledge of team processes is specified in terms of conceptual notions, instead of specific agents and agent variables, allowing joint intentions to be formed and this knowledge to be reused by different teams of agents. Further, based on roles and role variables, we have developed mechanisms of task decomposition and task delegation, by which the knowledge of a team process is decomposed into the knowledge of a team process for individuals and then delegate it to agents. We have also developed an efficient representation of shared mental models called Role-Based Shared Mental Model (RoB-SMM) by which agents only maintain individual processes complementary with others?? individual process and a low level of overlapping called team organizations. Based on RoB-SMMs, we have developed tworeasoning mechanisms to improve team performance, including Role-Based Proactive Information Exchange (RoB-PIE) and Role-Based Proactive Helping Behaivors (RoBPHB). Through RoB-PIE, agents can anticipate other agents?? information needs and proactively exchange information with them. Through RoB-PHB, agents can identify other agents?? help needs and proactively initialize actions to help them. Our experiments have shown that RoB-MALLET is flexible in specifying reusable plans, RoB-SMMs is efficient in supporting effective teamwork, and RoB-PHB improves team performance.

In this thesis, we first propose a modified version of the CDPthread to eliminate the restriction on the number of execution engines supported¡Xby dynamically instead of statically allocating the execution engines to a process. Then, we describe a method to balance the workload among nodes under the control of the modified CDPthread to improve its performance. The proposed method keeps track of the workload of each node and decides to which node the next job is to be assigned. More precisely, the number of jobs assigned to each node is proportional to, but not limited to, the number of cores in each node. Our experimental results show that with a small loss of performance compared to the original CDPthread, which uses a static method for allocating the execution engines to a process, the modified CDPthread with load balancing outperforms the modified CDPthread without load balancing by about 25 to 45 percent in terms of the computation time. Moreover, the modified CDPthread can now handle as many threads as necessary.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 63 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-63).

Given the popularity of Java, extending the standard Java virtual machine (JVM) to become cluster-aware effectively brings the vision of transparent horizontal scaling of applications to fruition. With a set of cluster-wide JVMs orchestrated as a virtually single system, thread-level parallelism in Java is no longer confined to one multiprocessor. An unmodified multithreaded Java application running on such a Distributed JVM (DJVM) can scale out transparently, tapping into the vast computing power of the cluster. While this notion creates an easy-to-use and powerful parallel programming paradigm, research on DJVMs has remained largely at the proof-of-concept stage where successes were proven using trivial scientific computing workloads only. Real-life Java applications with commercial server workloads have not been well-studied on DJVMs. Their natures including complex and sometimes huge object graphs, irregular access patterns and frequent synchronizations are key scalability hurdles. To design a scalable DJVM for real-life applications, we identify three major unsolved issues calling for a top-to-bottom overhaul of traditional systems. First, we need a more time- and space-efficient cache coherence protocol to support fine-grained object sharing over the distributed shared heap. The recent prevalence of concurrent data structures with heavy use of volatile fields has added complications to the matter. Second, previous generations of DJVMs lack true support for memory-intensive applications. While the network-wide aggregated physical memory can be huge, mutual sharing of huge object graphs like Java collections may cause nodes to eventually run out of local heap space because the cached copies of remote objects, linked by active references, can’t be arbitrarily discarded. Third, thread affinity, which determines the overall communication cost, is vital to the DJVM performance. Data access locality can be improved by collocating highly-correlated threads, via dynamic thread migration. Tracking inter-thread correlations trades profiling costs for reduced object misses. Unfortunately, profiling techniques like active correlation tracking used in page-based DSMs would entail prohibitively high overheads and low accuracy when ported to fine-grained object-based DJVMs. This dissertation presents technical contributions towards all these problems. We use a dual-protocol approach to address the first problem. Synchronized (lock-based) and volatile accesses are handled by a home-based lazy release consistency (HLRC) protocol and a sequential consistency (SC) protocol respectively. The two protocols’ metadata are maintained in a conflict-free, memory-efficient manner. With further techniques like hierarchical passing of lock ownerships, the overall communication overheads of fine-grained distributed object sharing are pruned to a minimal level. For the second problem, we develop a novel uncaching mechanism to safely break a huge active object graph. When a JVM instance runs low on free memory, it initiates an uncaching policy, which eagerly assigns nulls to selected reference fields, thus detaching some older or less useful cached objects from the root set for reclamation. Careful orchestration is made between uncaching, local garbage collection and the coherence protocol to avoid possible data races. Lastly, we devise lightweight sampling-based profiling methods to derive inter-thread correlations, and a profile-guided thread migration policy to boost the system performance. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of all our solutions. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

A key debate within leadership research is whether leadership can be conceptualized as a specialized role occupied by individuals or as a shared influence process amongst all members of a group (Yukl, 2006). Since the mid-­‐ 1990s some leadership scholars, as a counterpoint to the dominance of the former and using terms such as shared and distributed leadership, have attempted to elaborate new ‘post-­‐heroic’ leadership models (Badaracco, 2001) of the latter, in which leadership is something that involves all group members. These new forms of leadership are often positioned as something that organizations can implement as part of an adaptive response to a rapidly changing world. Despite a 50-­‐year tradition of construing leadership as a group level construct, little attention has been paid in these emerging debates to the systems psychodynamic perspective. From this perspective there are grounds for suspecting that attempts to implement shared leadership may compound rather than ameliorate issues related to adaptive challenges (Huffington, James and Armstrong, 2004). This thesis engages with the shared and distributed leadership literatures and examines how a systems psychodynamic perspective can contribute not only to debates within these literatures but to the wider controversies in the leadership literature. This thesis reports on the findings of a single, 18-­‐month, longitudinal case study of a senior team whose managing director attempted to implement shared leadership. Using a clinical fieldwork methodology (Schein, 1987) in the systems psychodynamic tradition (Miller, 1993b; Miller and Rice, 1967), this study advances a number of contributions to theory. These include: findings that challenge existing approaches to conceptualizing leadership – shared or otherwise; the elucidation of complex unconscious team processes that are mobilized as a senior team undertakes adaptive work; and thirdly, a more sophisticated and theoretically robust conceptualization of leadership as a group level phenomenon.

Dialogic reading is an evidence-based practice for preschool children who are typically developing or at-risk (WWC, 2007). However, there is limited research to evaluate if dialogic reading has similar positive effects on the language and preliteracy skills of preschool children with disabilities (WWC, 2010). This quasi-experimental study examined the effects of dialogic reading, with the incorporation of pause time, on the language and preliteracy skills of 42 preschool children with disabilities within 5 inclusive and 7 self-contained preschool classrooms. Following random assignment of students at the level of the classrooms, participants were equally distributed into an intervention (n=21) and a comparison group (n=21). The intervention consisted of dialogic reading, with the incorporation of pause time, based on the Read Together, Talk Together (RTTT; Pearson Early Learning, 2006) program kit. The targeted outcomes were receptive language skills, expressive language skills, and preliteracy skills. Children received either dialogic reading or typical storybook reading for 10 to 15 minutes per day, three days per week, for six weeks (i.e., 18 sessions in total) in small groups. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4th Edition (PPVT-4; Dunn & Dunn, 2007), Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test-4th Edition (EOWPVT-4; Martin & Brownell, 2011), Get Ready to Read!-Revised (GRTR-R; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2010), and the ‘Which One Doesn’t Belong’ and Picture Naming subtests of the Individual Growth and Development Indicators of Early Literacy (IGDIs-EL; McConnell, Bradfield, Wackerle-Hollman, & Rodriquez, 2012) were used as pre and posttest assessments. A researcher developed near transfer test of receptive and expressive vocabulary words was also administered pre and post intervention to determine if words specifically targeted during the intervention were learned. These standardized and researcher developed measures were analyzed with one-way ANCOVAs, using pretest scores and age as covariates to determine within and between group differences. The Johnson-Neyman procedure was utilized as necessary when violations of heterogeneity of slopes occurred. Following the intervention period, children in the intervention group scored significantly higher on the receptive and expressive near transfer vocabulary assessments. This occurred both for words that were specifically targeted during dialogic reading, as well as additional vocabulary words in the storybook.

published_or_final_version / Computer Science and Information Systems / Master / Master of Philosophy