Finite state machines are often used for modeling the decision logic for simulated systems. MathWorks’ Stateflow has a graphical user interface that allow users to model finite state machines. A Stateflow model can be added as a block to a Matlab/Simulink model and be executed seamlessly together. Stateflow blocks are developed as “charts” but they are natively stored as XML documents. This research explores the possibility of extracting the behavior of the finite state machines as defined in a Stateflow chart. This is done by parsing the corresponding XML document and reproducing this behavior in a C++ implementation that can be instantiated within a large, C++ based simulation system. Furthermore, the goal of this research is to develop a tool that will automatically generate an equivalent C++ representation, given an arbitrary Stateflow XML model. This research is performed in the context of developing highidelity powertrain simulations to be executed in High-Performance Computing environments.

The descriptive purpose of this study was to explore and describe the manner in which a South African informal settlement community is coping with HIV&AIDS, by relying on existing assets and local resources. The intervention-related purpose was to explore how an activist intervention research approach might facilitate change and empower an informal settlement community in relation to community members’ ways of coping with HIV&AIDS. Theoretically the study conceptualised asset-based coping, thus adding to available literature on the asset-based approach and coping. The practical value lies in documenting an example of one community’s coping with HIV&AIDS, which may inform other communities during future capacity building initiatives. Furthermore, the study provides methodological knowledge concerning the potential value of employing activist intervention research within the context of coping with HIV&AIDS. The conceptual framework of the study constituted the HIV&AIDS pandemic, coping theory and the asset-based approach. I followed a qualitative research approach guided by an interpretivist epistemology. I employed an instrumental case study design, applying PRA (Participatory Reflection and Action) principles. I purposefully selected the case (a South African informal settlement community and primary school through which I entered the community), as well as the participants (educators, community members and other stakeholders of the community). Data collection consisted of an intervention (focus groups combined with workshops that relied on PRA informed techniques), interviews, observation, a field journal and visual data collection techniques. Four prominent themes emerged subsequent to inductive data analysis. The community experienced certain challenges and stressors within the context of HIV&AIDS. Besides general challenges like poverty, unemployment and at-risk sexual behaviour, community members displayed vulnerability with regard to HIV&AIDS and identified challenges when supporting other people living with HIV&AIDS. Various assets and potential assets were identified in and around the community, upon which the community might rely in coping with the challenges associated with HIV&AIDS. Thirdly, the community displayed certain trends in coping with HIV&AIDS, relying on community-based coping to deal with being infected with HIV or living with AIDS, coping with other community members living with HIV&AIDS, or caring for children orphaned due to HIV&AIDS. Finally, participants’ active involvement in the intervention research resulted in unchanged-, as well as changed coping strategies. Based on the findings, I conceptualised the construct asset-based coping, defining it as the ability to deal with challenges, by identifying and mobilising existing assets, as well as external resources available. I proposed asset-based coping as one possibility of coping with HIV&AIDS. In terms of research methodology, I combined research and intervention in an innovative manner, by developing and employing an activist intervention research approach. Active participation and their role as research partners enabled educators to experience increased levels of self-worth, take agency and be empowered in the context of community-based coping with HIV&AIDS. / Thesis (PhD (Educational Psychology))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Educational Psychology / unrestricted

No

This thesis examines the ways in which development actors respond to and interpret a Rights-Based Approach (RBA) to development. It draws on a case study undertaken over a period of more than two years in Pakistan. The central research vehicle is a capacity-building process on RBA involving around 300 development professionals. The thesis examines the different responses to and understandings of RBA emerging in the case study, whether there are indications of changes in thinking and practice, and how the analysis fits with existing ideas about rights and development. Analysis draws on an ethnographic perspective and on participant observation, questionnaires, interviews and a range of tools, within the RBA process and from the wider social development field. It is argued that organisations increasingly aim to operationalise RBA through more inclusive, participatory development which enables the claiming of rights and promotes accountability for their fulfilment. One strand of RBA emphasises implementation of a universalising legal framework; another turns to more consciously political processes of struggle for, and institutional responses to, people's claims. The strands reflect a tension that runs through both the fieldwork and examined literature, between formal, centralist, and pluralist, actor-oriented approaches. Adopting one or the other of the two approaches has profound implications for what is 'seen' in development. The thesis shows that, depending on the approach taken, relations in the private sphere are either shut out or exposed, and the operation of power either hidden or revealed. Actors' responses to RBA are absorbed into, and used within, underlying debates on social relations and social and political change. In a Muslim context, responses lead people to confront sacrosanct certainties about human organisation and relations with authority. This is seen most vividly through gender relations, which are used both as a central expression, and a protector, of a particular construction of power. A formal, centralist treatment of RBA tends to reinforce existing relations through which rights are 'given' and 'received'. The thesis case study shows that, conversely, a pluralist, actor-oriented approach is more process-centred and places more emphasis on rights being 'made'. This, in itself, signals a change in actors' roles. It is argued that the energy of RBA lies in transformations in actors and in development relationships, rather than in achievement of bounded development outputs. Significant impacts, amongst a minority of responses to RBA, grow out of actors seizing more active, politicised roles in development, despite depoliticised donor approaches.

The purposes of this study are: 1.To investigate the effect of web-based English Learning on English teaching 2.To understand the results of practicing the AJET¡¦ Project¡]Advanced Joint English Telecommunication¡^ in Kaohsiung Girls' High School 3.To understand the expectations of the teachers, students and students' parents in the activities of the AJET Project, and 4.To find out the problems in implementing the AJET Project and the ways to solve them. The samples for this study are drawn from the teachers, students and students' parents taking part in the AJET Project in Kaohsiung Girls' High School from 1997.10 to 2002.6. Through careful observations and interviews, the conclusions of this study are as follows: 1.The AJET Project is of much help for the students in learning English because the Project facilitates them to share the living experiences and learning effects with the students of other schools at home and abroad. 2.The students taking part in the AJET Project get many excellent results in the contests held internationally and in the papers contributed to international journals. 3.The teachers participating in the AJET Project also have won the prizes for superb computer application and web-based learning. Despite the the exciting results, there are still many difficulties, such as the program scheduling and the organization of the student participants of the AJET. The teachers of the AJET cannot take part in the Project full time because of being busy in their other routine work and the teaching resources provided by the school are limited. The participant students are divided into so many small learning groups that they cannot be taken good care of. Therefore they have to cooperate with their counterparts of other schools. The students have to spend so much of their time on the regular tests of other subjects that they cannot help themselves from neglecting the AJET. Many students have wrong conceptions of the AJET target. As a result, many students do not devote themselves earnestly to all the activities of the AJET and in the long run some students even abandon the project. The targets of the AJET are not only for students to learn English for the traditional purposes but also to introduce the technique, logic thinking and algorithm of the computer and to train students' leadership. In view of the problems mentioned above, in this study some suggestions are made in the hope that they will be of help for the authorities concerned and all the participants (teachers, students and students' parents) of the AJET.

In recent years, mining data streams has been widely studied. A data streams is a sequence of dynamic, continuous, unbounded and real time data items with a very high data rate that can only be read once. In data mining, clustering is one of use- ful techniques for discovering interesting data in the underlying data objects. The problem of clustering can be defined formally as follows: given n data points in the d- dimensional metric space, partition the data points into k clusters such that the data points within a cluster are more similar to each other than data points in different clusters. In the data streams environment, the difficulties of data streams clustering contain storage overhead, low clustering quality and a low updating efficiency. Cur- rent clustering algorithms can be broadly classified into four categories: partition, hierarchical, density-based and grid-based approaches. The advantage of the grid- based algorithm is that it can handle large databases. Based on the density-based approach, the insertion or deletion of data affects the current clustering only in the neighborhood of this data. Combining the advantages of the grid-based approach and density-based approach, the CDS-Tree algorithm was proposed. Although it can handle large databases, its clustering quality is restricted to the grid partition and the threshold of a dense cell. Therefore, in this thesis, we present a new clustering algo- rithm with high quality, GDense, for data streams. The GDense algorithm has high quality due to two kinds of partition: cells and quadcells, and two kinds of threshold: £_ and (1/4) . Moreover, in our GDense algorithm, in the data insertion part, the 7 cases takes 3 factors about the cell and the quadcell into consideration. In the deletion part, the 10 cases take 5 factors about the cell into consideration. From our simulation results, no matter what condition (including the number of data points, the number of cells, the size of the sliding window, and the threshold of dense cell) is, the clustering purity of our GDense algorithm is always higher than that of the CDS-Tree algorithm. Moreover, we make a comparison of the purity between the our GDense algorithm and the CDS-Tree algorithm with outliers. No matter whether the number of outliers is large or small, the clustering purity of our GDense algorithm is still higher than that of the CDS-Tree and we can improve about 20% the clustering purity as compared to the CDS-Tree algorithm.

Inaugurele rede Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Uitg. onder auspiciën van de Universiteit van Amsterdam. - Op omslag: AMC. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 21-22). Met lit. opg.

With the globalisation and constant changes in the marketplace, enterprises are adapting themselves to face new challenges. Therefore, strategic corporate alliances to share knowledge, expertise and resources represent an advantage in an increasing competitive world. This has led the integration of companies, customers, suppliers and partners using networked environments. This thesis presents three novel solutions in the tooling area, developed for Seco tools Ltd, UK. These approaches implement a proposed distributed computing architecture using Internet technologies to assist geographically dispersed tooling engineers in process planning tasks. The systems are summarised as follows. TTS is a Web-based system to support engineers and technical staff in the task of providing technical advice to clients. Seco sales engineers access the system from remote machining sites and submit/retrieve/update the required tooling data located in databases at the company headquarters. The communication platform used for this system provides an effective mechanism to share information nationwide. This system implements efficient methods, such as data relaxation techniques, confidence score and importance levels of attributes, to help the user in finding the closest solutions when specific requirements are not fully matched In the database. Cluster-F has been developed to assist engineers and clients in the assessment of cutting parameters for the tooling process. In this approach the Internet acts as a vehicle to transport the data between users and the database. Cluster-F is a KD approach that makes use of clustering and fuzzy set techniques. The novel proposal In this system is the implementation of fuzzy set concepts to obtain the proximity matrix that will lead the classification of the data. Then hierarchical clustering methods are applied on these data to link the closest objects. A general KD methodology applying rough set concepts Is proposed In this research. This covers aspects of data redundancy, Identification of relevant attributes, detection of data inconsistency, and generation of knowledge rules. R-sets, the third proposed solution, has been developed using this KD methodology. This system evaluates the variables of the tooling database to analyse known and unknown relationships in the data generated after the execution of technical trials. The aim is to discover cause-effect patterns from selected attributes contained In the database. A fourth system was also developed. It is called DBManager and was conceived to administrate the systems users accounts, sales engineers’ accounts and tool trial monitoring process of the data. This supports the implementation of the proposed distributed architecture and the maintenance of the users' accounts for the access restrictions to the system running under this architecture.

Thesis (M.P.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2005.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Illinois State University, 1987. / Title from title page screen, viewed August 3, 2005. Dissertation Committee: Walter D. Pierce (chair), Fay F. Bowren, F. James Davis, Wayne H. Galler, William D. Zeller. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 279-292) and abstract. Also available in print.