A model study has been conducted to understand the influence of hydrodynamic features, environmental conditions as well as bather shedding and animal fecal sources on the fate and transport of indicator microbe enterococci at a subtropical marine beach in South Florida. The model being used is based on an existing finite element hydrodynamic and transport model CAFE3D to which a first order microbe deactivation function due to solar radiation is added. The decay coefficient is assumed to be linearly proportional to the solar insolation value, while the constant coefficient linking the two is determined to be 0.368[m2/MJ] using local experimental data. This value corresponds to decay coefficients in the range of 0 to 1 hr-1 and is of similar magnitude to values found in the literature. The hydrodynamic model produces water current velocities, which are used in the transport model to simulate water enterococci concentration in space and time. Previous measurements have suggested that enterococci originate from the beach shoreline area. In this case the simulated velocity fields and Lagrangian particle trajectories indicate that the small velocity (generally less than 0.05m/s) and weak dilution at the water?s edge may cause enterococci accumulation and elevated concentration. Among human and animal sources, the impacts on maximum enterococci concentration in descending order is a dog fecal event, human bather shedding and seagull fecal events. A single dog fecal event at the middle part of the beach is found to cause enterococci far field concentrations to reach hundreds of CFU/100ml, which exceeds the EPA water quality standard (104 CFU/100ml). These high concentrations, however, only impact a small area. Concentration due to tens of bathers shedding enterococci during a course of 4 hours reaches 0.01 CFU/100ml, while the concentration due to thousands of bather shedding during a Memorial Day weekend reaches about 1 CFU/100ml. Concentration due to tens of seagull fecal events reaches only 0.0001 CFU/100ml. Thus, only the presence of dogs could explain the high enterococci observations infrequently found in monitoring data. The limited spatial extent compared to beach survey data of the enterococci plume from a dog fecal event suggests that other microbial sources are present, most likely microbes released from the beach sand.

Large corporations increasingly utilize business process models for documenting and redesigning their operations. The extent of such modeling initiatives with several hundred models and dozens of often hardly trained modelers calls for automated quality assurance. While formal properties of control flow can easily be checked by existing tools, there is a notable gap for checking the quality of the textual content of models, in particular, its activity labels. In this paper, we address the problem of activity label quality in business process models. We designed a technique for the recognition of labeling styles, and the automatic refactoring of labels with quality issues. More specifically, we developed a parsing algorithm that is able to deal with the shortness of activity labels, which integrates natural language tools like WordNet and the Stanford Parser. Using three business process model collections from practice with differing labeling style distributions, we demonstrate the applicability of our technique. In comparison to a straightforward application of standard natural language tools, our technique provides much more stable results. As an outcome, the technique shifts the boundary of process model quality issues that can be checked automatically from syntactic to semantic aspects.

Business Process Management (BPM) is often adopted by organizations as a method to increase awareness and knowledge of their business processes. Business process modeling is used as a method to represent business processes in form of business process models. The number of organizations adopting BPM is quickly increasing. By this means, so is the number of business process models as result of a BPM initiative. Within a single organization the number of business process models often ranges from hundreds to even thousands. In order to handle such large amount of business process models, organizations structure them by the help of a process architecture. It includes a process map, which is considered as the top-most view of the process architecture where the organization's business processes and the relations between them are visually and abstractly depicted. The details of each business process shown on the process map are stored in the lower levels of the corresponding process architecture. The purpose of a process map is to provide an overview of how an organization operates as a whole without necessarily going into the process details. Therefore, the design of a process map is vital not only for the understanding of the company's processes, but also for the subsequent detailed process modeling. This is primarily because, a process map is often the result of the process identification phase of the BPM lifecycle, and is used as a foundation for the subsequent phases, where the detailed process modeling and process improvement takes place. Despite their importance, the design of process maps is still more art than science, essentially because there is no standardized modeling language available for process map design. As a result, we are faced with a high heterogeneity of process map designs from practice, although they all serve a similar purpose. This has accordingly been our main motivation for pursuing the research presented in this thesis. The research question for this thesis is the following: How to effectively model processes on an abstract level? In this thesis, we document the development of a language for designing process maps. In particular, we provide the following contributions. First, we present a holistic reference BPM framework. It is a consolidation of procedural frameworks introduced by prominent BPM researchers. The framework includes eleven BPM elements, each holding activities organizations need to consider when adopting BPM. Second, we provide a method for assessing cognitive effectiveness of process maps used in practice. For this, we follow the nine principles for cognitively effective visual notations introduced by Moody cite{moody2012physics}. In addition, we employ the cognitive fit theory to check whether the design of process maps has an effect on the BPM success in the respective organization. Second, we conduct a systematic literature review on the quality of modeling languages and models. We use the quality requirements we found as basis for developing the language for designing process maps. Third, we define the abstract syntax, semantics, and concrete syntax of the language for process maps. We follow an explorative method, hence we rely on empirical data for the language development. Accordingly, we reuse symbols in our language which have already been used in practice as part of process maps. We follow this approach in order to ensure the language will consist of elements already familiar to organizations. We evaluate the language by means of an experiment, in which we assess the effectiveness and efficiency of process maps designed using elements from our language against process maps that have not been designed using our language. Last, this thesis provides a method for testing the suitability of existing languages for specific purposes. (author's abstract)

Demokratinėje visuomenėje, įgyvendinančioje galimybių lygybę, švietimo tikslas leidžia plėtoti, žmonių pareigas ir gebėjimus, reikalingus šių individų asmeninių funkcijų visuomenėje realizavimui. Šia prasme didelė reikšmė skiriama ir ikimokykliniam ugdymui (Blackledge, Hunt, 1997). Ikimokykliniame amžiuje vyksta vaiko socializacija, kuri pasireiškia socialine branda ir brandinimo procesų kokybe. Mokslinių tyrimų duomenys (Bokhvin, 1996; Berchmann, 1995; Cooley, 1989) ir geriausių vaikų ugdymo įstaigų patirtis rodo, kad „vaikiškos" veiklos ir „vaikiškų" pasaulio pažinimo formų raidos logika (ypač jei yra suaugusiųjų išmintingai toleruojama) veda prie vaikų psichosocialinių savybių atsiradimo, ypač tokių, kaip mokėjimas bendrauti ir bendradarbiauti (Ivoškaitė, 2007). Tačiau ikimokyklinis ugdymas reikšmingas ne tik vaikams, jų sėkmingai socializacijai, bet ir tėvams, nes, vaikui pradėjus lankyti ikimokyklinę įstaigą, jo gyvenimas įgyja naujų prasmių. Savo gyvenimą jis turi dalinti į dvi iš esmės skirtingas socialines aplinkas – šeimą ir vaikų darželį (Dencik, 2005, p.81), nes socializacijos situacija, vaikui reiškia, jog šeima yra privataus, o ikimokyklinė įstaiga – viešojo socialinio gyvenimo aplinka. Vaikui, lankančiam ikimokyklinio ugdymo įstaigą, tenka taikytis prie šios situacijos ir prisiderinti prie kiekvienos iš jų atskirai bei siekti, kad jos taptų joms socialinio-kultūrinio gyvenimo erdve. Ikimokyklinis ugdymas Lietuvoje įteisintas (Lietuvos Respublikos Švietimo... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / In democratic society implementing the equality of possibilities, the aim of education allows to elaborate “people’s responsibilities and capacities” necessary for the realization of individuals’ personal functions in society. Thus a big attention is paid to pre-school education as well (Blackledge and Hunt 1997). In the age of pre-school education a child’s socialization is taking place, that is conveyed by social maturity and the quality of maturity processes. In accordance to scientific research data (Bokhvin, 1996; Berchmann, 1995; Ch.Cooley, 1989) and the experience of the best children’s education institutions shows that “childish” activity and the logics of the development of the forms of “childish” world cognition (especially if it is exceptionally tolerated by adults) lead towards the origin of children’s psychosocial features, such as ability to communicate and collaborate (Ivoškaitė, 2007). Nevertheless, the pre-school education is significant not only for children and their successful socialization, but also for parents as when a child stars to attend the pre-school institution, his/her life obtains new purport. He/She has to divide his/her life into two essentially different social environments – family and preschool (Dencik 2005 p.81), as in accordance to the situation of socialization, a child conceives family as private and preschool institution as social life environment. A child, who attends the institution of pre-school education, has to adapt to this... [to full text]