In the last fifty years, there has been a concern in the theatre world especially in Europe, about how to train actors to be open and responsive. One of the most respected and well-known teachers in this area is Monika Pagneux who taught for many years in Paris and now aged in her seventies, works as a freelance artist around the world. Her area of expertise is movement for actors. The aim of her work is to develop not only a responsive body but also an open and alive actor who is able to be creative in a disciplined yet risk-taking manner. This thesis is an investigation of the world of Monika Pagneux, including her fundamental principles and platforms of teaching movement for actors. A portrait of her work will be drawn and her influence on other performing arts practitioners. The data comes from three sources: my own field notes based on six weeks of classes in Australia and Paris, additional class notes by a movement expert and ten responses to an open ended questionnaire by former students. Their answers provide insights into the impact of her teaching professionally, in their lives and how they were transformed by her practice.

The dominant view in the information systems (IS) and software engineering literature is that the application of a rigorous pre-investment evaluation methodology is the key to ensuring the selection of the best IS projects ?? that is those with the highest expected value for the organisation and with the highest probability of success. While the literature is replete with methodologies that take a narrow view of IS evaluation, there is insufficient attention given to the evaluation process itself and to what constitutes successful IS evaluation. Whilst some within IS argue that the development of more elaborate evaluation methodologies, especially calculations of costs and benefits, is necessary for the advancement of the field, many report that it is not methodologies as such that need improvement. What is missing is an understanding of IS evaluation processes in practice and how organisations can adopt and apply evaluation methodologies so as to improve these processes. This thesis aims to provide in-depth knowledge of IS evaluation processes in practice and re-conceptualise the notion of the IS project proposal, the evaluation process and evaluation methodology that reflect the needs and critical issues in practice. These aims are achieved by conducting an in-depth case study of IS project evaluation processes in a company with a history of high success rates of its IS projects ($3 billion worth of successfully delivered IS projects in the past few years). By adopting Actor-Network Theory as a philosophy, approach and theoretical lens to the investigation of IS project evaluation processes in the case company the thesis demonstrates that: a) IS project proposals are dynamic, evolving and relational entities that become ??focal?? objects around which the actor-networks of aligned interest tend to emerge; b) that the evaluation process both creates an IS project proposal and its assessment within a core actor-network within which multiple business realities are enacted and continually negotiated; c) the evaluation methodology plays an important role of an actant (a non-human actor) by acting from a periphery of the core actor-network of an IS project proposal evaluation d) the evaluation methodology acts on behalf of management to regulate communication within actor-networks, ensure that company strategy is effectively implemented and that different IS Project Proposals are consistently presented in a mutually comparable manner; e) by defining a series of processes (steps), inscription aids (inscription forms, norms and rules) and mandated checkpoints the evaluation methodology engenders the evaluation process as ??science??; f) by allowing a degree of freedom in conducting the evaluation processes the methodology is also enabling the evaluation processes to emerge as ??art?? thus stimulating creativity and innovation, and finally, g) by balancing the science and the art of IS project proposal evaluation, the methodology is enabling, assisting and inspiring numerous actors in taking on ??journeys?? of IS project proposals and evaluation and thereby making a difference in their business environments. The thesis makes important contributions to knowledge in the IS discipline. Theoretically, the adoption and use of ANT revealed that the IS Project Proposal is not dormant but rather active, and key to the IS evaluation effort. The IS Project Proposal has thus been re-conceptualised as emerging, relational and dynamic. This thesis also makes a contribution to the re-conceptualisation of the evaluation methodology as being multi-purpose and active as it defines the ??science?? and enables the ??art?? in IS evaluation. The thesis also makes a number of contributions to practice, firstly by showing that documents in IS evaluation are not simply ??outputs?? that are archived away, but are active and are used to attract the right stakeholders. Secondly, it reveals that the ultimate success of the IS Proposal relies on finding a balance between the science and the art in IS evaluation and that the evaluation methodology can play a key role in promoting this balance.

Open access (OA) to scholarly publishing is encouraged and enabled by new technologies such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, their standards and protocols, and search engines. Institutional repositories (IR) as the most recent technological incarnations of OA enable researchers and their institutions to make accessible the outputs of research. While many OA repositories are being implemented, researchers are surprisingly slow in adopting them. While activists promote OA as emanating from the ideals of scholarship, others revile OA as undermining of scholarly publishing's economic base and therefore undermining quality control and peer review. Change is occurring but there are contested views and actions. This research seeks to increase understanding of the issues by addressing the research questions: "How and why is open access reassembling scholarly publishing?" and "What role does introducing an open access institutional repository to researchers play in this reassembly?" This thesis contributes to answering these questions by investigating two IR implementations and the research communities they serve. The research was conducted as an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) field study, where the actors were followed and their relations and controversies explored in action as their landscape was being contested. The research found that central to our understanding of the reassembling of scholarly publishing is the agency emerging from the sociomaterial relations of the OA vision, IR technology and researchers. Being congruent with the aims of scholarship, and also being flexible and mutable, the OA vision enrols researchers to enact it through OA IR, thus transforming scholarly communications. This is counteracted by publishers aligned with the academic reward network within traditional publishing networks. In this delicate choreography the OA IR, its developers, researchers, university administrators and policy makers are merging as critical actors with their more or less congruent vision of OA enacted in their network. The comparative ANT account of the two IR life stories shows how such enactment depends on the degree to which different OA visions could converge, enrol and mobilise other actors, in particular institutional actors, such as a mandate, in transforming researchers' publishing behaviour. This thesis contributes to a novel and in-depth understanding of OA and IR and their roles in reassembling scholarly publishing. It also contributes to the use of ANT in information systems research by advancing a sociomaterial ontology which recognises the intertwining of human and material agency.

In the last fifty years, there has been a concern in the theatre world especially in Europe, about how to train actors to be open and responsive. One of the most respected and well-known teachers in this area is Monika Pagneux who taught for many years in Paris and now aged in her seventies, works as a freelance artist around the world. Her area of expertise is movement for actors. The aim of her work is to develop not only a responsive body but also an open and alive actor who is able to be creative in a disciplined yet risk-taking manner. This thesis is an investigation of the world of Monika Pagneux, including her fundamental principles and platforms of teaching movement for actors. A portrait of her work will be drawn and her influence on other performing arts practitioners. The data comes from three sources: my own field notes based on six weeks of classes in Australia and Paris, additional class notes by a movement expert and ten responses to an open ended questionnaire by former students. Their answers provide insights into the impact of her teaching professionally, in their lives and how they were transformed by her practice.

En möbel som har ett tydligt program, en tydlig funktion kan vara begränsande. I min metod har jag utgått ifrån en möbel och förbisett dess program för att vidga mitt sökfält när jag har gjort om den. Jag har sett begreppen funktion, upplevd funktion och materiell funktion som värden som går att höja eller sänka. Möbelns nätverk av komponenter har tillåtits bli instabilt för en stund, för att sedan se till helheten och göra nätverket stabilt åter igen - programmet får komma tillbaka men med en ny gestaltning.

The interest in further expansion of wind power has increased significantly during the last decades, as it is an environmentally and financially competitive energy source. Wind power is an important part of achieving energy goals and climate commitments in several countries, not least in Sweden. The localisation of the wind turbines has, however, appeared to be controversial and local resistance occurs more frequently as the energy source expands. This creates a complex environmental conflict where various actors struggle to obtain differing goal settings. Such a situation occurred in Ödeshög municipality, when wind power entrepreneurs expressed their interests in establish wind turbines in forest and transition areas of the municipality. This thesis aims to emphasise how wind power expansion became such a controversial environmental conflict in Ödeshög. To be able to do this, the conflict is analysed from an Actor-Network Theory perspective. This theoretical framework has been used with the ambition to describe how the involved actors strategically have acted to possibly influence the outcome of the conflict. The situation in Ödeshög have much to say about how these conflicts occur and by learning from this situation several similar conflicts may be avoided.

Two experiments were designed to examine the influence of the strength of perceptionaction coupling on the control and learning of a visuomotor tracking pattern. Participants produced rhythmic elbow flexion-extension motions to learn a visually defined 90° relative phase tracking pattern with an external sinusoidal signal which was set at 0.8 Hz with 8 cycles in a trial. Day 1 and Day 2 practice sessions consisted of a total of 72 practice trials. There were two visuomotor congruency groups, a congruent group with visual feedback representing the elbow’s rotation and an incongruent group with feedback representing the elbow’s rotation transformed by 180°. Before Day 1 practice (pre-practice) and 24 hours after Day 2 practice (post-practice), participants produced 0°, 45°, 90°, 135°, and 180° relative phase tracking patterns either with or without tracking feedback. The external signal and the limb’s feedback were provided in the same workspace in Experiment 1, while both signals were provided in a separate workspace in Experiment 2. The pre-practice results demonstrated that the 0° relative phase pattern was the most accurate and stable pattern, whereas the 90° and 135° relative phase patterns were less accurate and more variable. The incongruent group produced a more accurate and less variable 180° relative phase pattern compared to the congruent group. Practice led to a decrease in phase error and variability toward the required 90° relative phase pattern in both experiments. The congruent group produced more accurate tracking and less variable elbow amplitude compared to the incongruent group in the separate workspace, whereas no such congruency effects were found in the same workspace during practice. The post-practice results showed overall improvements in phase accuracy and stability in most relative phase patterns with practice. Overall deterioration in tracking performance was found when tracking without feedback in the pre- and post-practice sessions. These findings demonstrated that the perception-action coupling strength was modified by feedback, visuomotor mapping, perceptual pattern, and workspace framework. The differential strength of perception-action impacted the learning of the required visuomotor tracking pattern as well as the production of tracking accuracy and stability differentially among the other tracking patterns.

No description available.

Univ., Diss.--Göteborg, 2005. / Literaturverz. S. [289] - 313.

Thesis (M.A.)--Victoria University of Wellington, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.