Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Family Studies and Human Services / Farrell J. Webb / The current military family life is punctuated by a series of events that are not present in the lives of most Americans, most notably the stress, fear, and disruption of lives that accompany the periodic absences of one or both adults in the family. These absences fostered by deployments, challenges of readjustments, coupled with combat injuries have tremendous effects on not only the troops and their families, but also the communities that military families live in as well. This investigation examined how military assistance, family connectedness and community networks contribute to the well-being of families affected by anticipated and repeated deployments that cause family interruptions. Despite the myriad of studies on military deployments and the impact on families, there has been little focus on the spouse and children that relates to their resilience during the deployment process. Using an online national all service unit sample from military spouses (n = 185) who have children and have experienced a recent deployment (n = 153) it was possible to isolated the specific components that influenced the well-being of those affected by deployments. The Influence of Interruptions on Family Well-Being Model—which combines ideas from both the ecological systems and boundary ambiguity perspectives—was tested and utilized in this study. It was disclosed that 45% of the variance in well-being could be explained by knowing how families perceive the deployment process, military assistance, community networks, family connectedness, and how these families coped with periodic family interruptions. These data revealed that deployments have a greater impact than originally conceived and that issues addressing deployments must be placed on the national agenda, particularly where family well-being is concerned. The research findings underscore the importance of family to both the deployed personnel and the ones that they leave home. The implications from this investigation are simple and direct—there needs to be a more comprehensive program for children that employ pre-, during- and post-deployment related issues, such as adjustments to absent parents, developing better responses to the authority structure of the remaining parent, and some program focused on the immediate and long-term psychological needs of the children and their families.

Researchers point to the fact that stress and anxiety among college students are a

M.A.University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities (Fine Arts), 2012 / The ‘Bath Series’ (1983-1988) of Jasper Johns shows the artist’s meditation on his oeuvre of the past thirty years, and the examples of his previous works demonstrate his interest in instabilities of visual perception. The latter are activated when the viewer’s expectation to see conventional representational strategies are destabilized, and figure/ground pictorial space, particularly, becomes ambiguous. This first recorded academic study focusing exclusively on the series as a unit, discovers that figure/ground switching, an ‘Ur-Gestalt’ (Gandelman 1989: 209), appears to be a core energy motivating ambiguous pictorial space in Johns’ art, and constitutes the theoretical component of the research. The practical component is a site specific installation which shows some visual and verbal processes and meditates on the perpetual interaction between the eye and the mind, which is a fundamental concern of Johns (Varnedoe 1996b: 245, 257), as well as of myself. The work invites viewers to experience destabilized conventional visual perceptions and to explore, as Johns said, ‘something new’ (Varnedoe 1996a: 17).

A defining feature of humanitarian crises is their unpredictable nature, making them interesting sites to analyse how accounting systems can facilitate engagement with the unexpected. This thesis explores the question of how evaluation systems can be designed and practiced to engage with the complexities of humanitarian crisis settings, in which the potential for disastrous errors is overwhelming. Informed by empirical research on the management practices in a large-scale refugee camp, the study investigates principles and tactics that allow humanitarian evaluation systems to make a resource of the inevitable ambiguity and incompleteness that define their contexts. In doing so, the thesis draws from and further develops the concept of heterarchy, defined as ‘governance through difference’, and shows how it provides promising insights for accounting research. To explain how evaluation systems can become performable in the dynamic humanitarian environments, the study theorizes four interlinked principles that emerge from the empirical findings. These principles are: (1) in-built tensions between evaluation dimensions; (2) open and participatory design; (3) relational value and incompleteness; and (4) enacting minimalist control through a community of practitioners. In doing so, the study makes three contributions. Firstly, the study contributes to the accounting literature on the enabling role of ambiguity by theorizing how evaluation systems can foster approaches and techniques that embrace ambiguity as a resource to engage with complex settings. Secondly, it further develops the notion of heterarchy by explicating how heterarchical tensions can become productive without leading to chaos and by theorizing additional principles that are necessary to sustain heterarchies in an organized fashion. Thirdly, departing from the emerging literature on humanitarian crises that primarily focuses on how accounting systems can be used to normalize and control disaster settings, the thesis advances understanding of how accounting technologies can serve as anomalizing devices for the adaptive management of crises.

Yip, Chi-Wing. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-62).

Transformative Space is a project positioned between the field of architecture and textile design. In this work the definition of space focuses on the experience of space in contrast to defining space as static shape or built enclosure. Due to the pliability and ambiguous materiality of textiles, textile space proposes a more instable logic which constitutes the relation between the individual and architecture in form of the solid. Throughout the material exploration ambiguity, light and inside outside are used as major place holders to develop woven textiles. The material is configured in a large scale structure as an “open system” open for the user to transform or define. “Blurred Surfaces”, “Extended Layers”, “Float Free” and Transformative Structures” are results of design explorations in this research which relate both to spatial as well as material scale. The work proposes different examples of ambiguous structures whereof one is further developed into an installation in the exhibition context. / Program: Konstnärligt masterprogram i mode- och textildesign

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T14:23:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Renato Dias Bigonha.pdf: 10953889 bytes, checksum: 8c20bbbb1d7fd15e9dd8777f3e88f879 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-09-17 / The development of a software system is a complex task. For development to occur, it is necessary communication between software developers and those interested in the use of such software (client). Through the interpretation of the client's intentions, is the specification of requirements that describe the features of the software and give rise to the application model. The use of natural language for such communication can bring ambiguities and vagueness communication and requirements specification. For any communication to take place a code or common language is needed for a sender and recipient and the software context, customer and developer. When the terms of the language used in communication does not mean exactly the same thing to both sides, communication can be impaired, giving way to the assumption, which may prove to generate specifications for software that does not meet customer needs. The fix for this software system can lead to rework that can be costly and increase development time. This research starts from the assumption that with the elimination or reduction of ambiguity and vagueness in communication and specification of the list of requirements, the resulting software development can be more likely to come to meet the client's goals. During the research it was noted that with the use of ubiquitous language during development can bring about improvements in development for proposing the setting of arbitrary terms according to the viewpoint and client context thus causing ambiguity and are reduced vagueness communication and requirements specification. But the requirements specification can never generate an absolute model, since the model is always abstracted from a different viewpoint / O desenvolvimento de um sistema de software é uma tarefa complexa. Para que o desenvolvimento ocorra, é necessária a comunicação entre os desenvolvedores de software e os interessados no uso de tal software (cliente). Através da interpretação das intenções do cliente, ocorre a especificação dos requisitos que descrevam as funcionalidades do software e dão origem ao modelo da aplicação. O uso da linguagem natural para essa comunicação pode trazer ambiguidades e vagueza à comunicação e especificação de requisitos. Para que qualquer comunicação ocorra é necessário um código ou linguagem comum à um remetente e ao destinatário e no contexto de software, ao cliente e desenvolvedor. Quando os termos da linguagem utilizada na comunicação não significam exatamente a mesma coisa para ambos os lados, a comunicação pode ficar prejudicada, dando espaço à suposição, que pode vir a gerar especificações de um software que não atende as necessidades do cliente. A correção desse sistema de software pode levar a retrabalho que pode ser custoso e aumentar o tempo de desenvolvimento. Essa pesquisa parte da hipótese de que com diminuição da ambiguidade e vagueza na comunicação e especificação da lista de requisitos, o software resultante do desenvolvimento possa ter mais chances de vir a satisfazer os objetivos do cliente. Durante a pesquisa, notou-se que com o uso da Linguagem Ubíqua durante o desenvolvimento pode trazer melhorias no desenvolvimento por propor a definição de termos arbitrários de acordo com o ponto de vista e contexto do cliente assim fazendo com que sejam diminuídas a ambiguidade e vagueza comunicação e especificação de requisitos. Mas a especificação de requisitos nunca poderá gerar um modelo absoluto, uma vez que o modelo é abstraído sempre a partir de um ponto de vista diferente

Lack of clarity about professional roles and responsibilities of school counselors has resulted in role ambiguity and role diffusion among this group of professionals. Role ambiguity and role diffusion contribute to job dissatisfaction. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine whether role ambiguity and role diffusion predicted school counselor job satisfaction after controlling for years of experience as a school counselor, and to examine whether role ambiguity, role diffusion, and job satisfaction differed for school counselors at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. The theoretical framework was role theory, which conceptualizes how job roles within organizations serve as boundaries between individuals and organizations. Survey data were collected from 86 school counselors at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. Results of linear regression analysis indicated that role ambiguity and role diffusion were significant predictors of job satisfaction after controlling for years of school counselor work experience. Results of discriminant analysis indicated no significant differences in school counselor role ambiguity, role diffusion, and job satisfaction based on school level. Findings may be used to advocate for aligning school counselors' duties and responsibilities with the training and education they receive, which may enable school counselors to be more satisfied in their jobs. The social change implication is that school counselors who are satisfied with their jobs could more effectively serve the children, schools, and communities in which they are assigned.

This thesis is composed of three chapters. Chapter 1 considers the existence of equilibria in games with complete information, where players may have non-ordered and discontinuous preferences. Chapter 2 studies the issues on the existence of pure and behavioral strategy equilibria in games with incomplete information and discontinuous payoffs. We consider the standard setting with Bayesian preferences as well as the case in which players may face ambiguity. Chapter 3 extends the classical results on the Walras-core existence and equivalence to an ambiguous asymmetric information economy, where agents maximize maximin expected utilities (MEU). These results are based on the papers He and Yannelis (2014, 2015a,b,c, 2016a,b). In the first chapter, we propose the condition of "continuous inclusion property" to handle the difficulty of discontinuous payoffs in various general equilibrium and game theory models. Such discontinuities arise naturally in economic situations, including auction, price competition of firms and also patent races. Based on the continuous inclusion property, we establish the equilibrium existence result in a very general framework with discontinuous payoffs. On one hand, this condition is sufficiently general from the methodological point of view, as it unifies almost all special conditions proposed in the literature. On the other hand, our condition is also potentially useful from the realistic point of view, as it could be applied to deal with many economic models which cannot be studied before because of the presence of the discontinuity. In the second chapter, I study the existence problem of pure and behavioral strategy equilibria in discontinuous games with incomplete information. The framework of games with incomplete information is standard as in the literature, except for that we allow players' payoffs to be discontinuous. We illustrate by examples that the Bayesian equilibria may not exist in such games and the previous results are not applicable to handle this problem. We propose some general conditions to retain the existence of both pure strategy and behavioral strategy Bayesian equilibrium, and show that our condition is tight. In addition, we study the equilibrium existence problem in discontinuous games under incomplete information and ambiguity, and show that the maximin framework solves the equilibrium existence issue without introducing any additional condition. In the last chapter, I study a general equilibrium model with incomplete information by adopting the maximin expected utilities. The model is powerful enough to describe the behaviors of risk averse agents that cannot be explained by the standard assumption of subjective expected utilities. I use this new formulation to extend many classical results in general equilibrium theory by incorporating ambiguity into the model. In addition, the desirable incentive compatibility property is shown in our model with maximin expected utilities, while this property will typically fail in the traditional setup. Specifically, the existence results are shown for various equilibrium notions in a general equilibrium model, and the incentives can be guaranteed when all agents use the maximin expected utilities.

The exegesis accompanies a thesis, the latter being the portfolio of work consisting of two parts, each being a completed first draft of a novel written during the Masters of Creative Writing course: Part 1: ‘Sandcastles’ - a 'closed' text novel Part 2: ‘The Postmodern Rules For Family Living’ - an 'open' text novel These two works are separately bound with a thesis cover sheet and numbered. They are embargoed until 30 June 2011. The exegesis covers the writer’s motivation for writing these works, reflections on the course of development and changes in thinking that occurred during research and the act of writing. It shows the changing perspectives of the writer’s two thesis works in context and in contra-distinction to each other. It includes the writer’s academic and creative goals as they developed and the result achieved in terms of those goals. It highlights the writer’s developing interest in literary theory including suggesting an ephemeral adjunct to Reader-Response theory which is described as 'Collapse'. It shows the development of the writer’s deep interest in reality in fiction versus the lie in fiction and in the differences between writing and reading a creative work produced primarily for entertainment versus work of a literary nature, identifying some of the differences in features the writer has perceived.