Researchers in the field of composition studies have frequently made allusions to musicians when they’ve discussed the role of practice in gaining skill. In doing so, however, they’ve risked making speculative rather than testable claims and separating composition studies from recent insights on practice from other disciplines such as education and music psychology. These fields, I argue, offer testable frameworks with which composition instructors and scholars can teach and study writing practice. Such frameworks are necessary because composition researchers need to supplement qualitative studies of writers and writing with quantitative data to generate replicable tests of teaching methods that may benefit practicing writers. This thesis draws on prior research in composition studies to illustrate the context of its central argument. It then breaks down some of the key assertions about practice that support this context before introducing frameworks from other disciplines that will allow composition researchers to replicate studies of effective writing practice instruction in the first-year college writing classroom. These frameworks or models of practice instruction include self-regulated strategy development and practice sessions conceived as stages of error and mistake management. Supplementing these models are descriptions of a few key activities built on these frameworks for students to practice writing in and outside the classroom. Students need more than instruction in crafting better writing products to become more effective revisers and more expert writers. They also need explicit instruction that teaches them how to engage effectively in repeated, structured practice that imparts the tools they learn to solve writing problems with staying power and flexibility. This instruction is about more than handy tips or exercises; it’s about changing students’ and teachers’ assumptions about writing’s purpose outside the classroom.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

MCABC 0475 is the first composition generated by MCABC (Music Composition Aided by Computer), a computer program written in PL/1. Its duration is approximately 14 minutes. Using a North Texas State University computer library program, the full score and parts were drawn by the CALCOMP plotter. The text, which discusses processes and procedures in developing MCABC 0475, as well as indeterminacy, aesthetics of computer composition, and pro gr am user information, was printed by the IBM 1403 line printer using an ALA chain which has both upper and lower case characters.

The primary focus of this thesis was to find out what makes workable topic sentences different from inadequate ones. A group of topic sentences was collected from the author's eight grade students and reviewed.

Reuse is not a new concept in software engineering. Ideas, abstractions, and processes have been reused by programmers since the very early days of software development. In the beginning, since storage media was very expensive, software reuse was basically to serve computers and their mechanical resources, as it substantially conserved memory. When the limitations on physical resources started to diminish, software engineers began to invent reuse approaches to save human resources as well. In addition, as the size and complexity of software systems constantly grow, organized and systematic reuse becomes essential in order to develop those systems in timely and cost-effective fashion. That is one main reason why new technologies and approaches for building software systems, such as object-oriented and component-based development, emerged in the last two or three decades. The focus of this thesis is on software components as building blocks of today's software systems. We consider components as software black boxes whose specification and external behavior are known. We assume that this information can somehow be extracted for each deployed software component. The first and basic assumption then would be the availability of a searchable repository of software components and their external behavioral specifications. Web services are a good example of such components. The most important advantage of software components is that they can be reused repeatedly in building different software systems. Reuse presents challenging problems, one of which is studied in this thesis. This problem, the composition problem, simply is creating a composite component from a collection of available components that, by interacting with each other, provide a requested functionality. When there are a large number of components available to be reused, finding a solution to the composition problem manually would require a considerable time and human effort. This could make the search practically impossible or unwieldy. However, performing the search automatically would save a significant amount of development time, cost and human effort. Solving this problem would be a huge step forward in the component-based software development. In this thesis, we concentrate on a subproblem of the composition problem, composition planning or synthesis, which is defined as finding a collection of useful components from the repository and the necessary communications among them to satisfy a requested functionality. For scalability purposes, we study automatic solutions to composition planning and propose two approaches in this regard. In one, we take advantage of graphs to model the repository, which is the collection of available components along with their behavioral specification. Graph search algorithms and a few composition-specific algorithms are used to find solutions for given component requests. In the other approach, we extend a logical reasoning algorithm and come up with algorithms for solving the composition planning problem. In both approaches we provide algorithms for finding the possibility of a composition, as well as finding the composition itself. We propose different types of composition and show how applying each would impact the behavior of a composite component. We provide the necessary formalism for capturing these types of composition through two different models: interface automata and composition algebra. Interface automata is an automaton-based model for representing the behavior of software components. The other model in this regard is composition algebra, which is an algebraic model based on CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes), CCS (Calculus of Communicating Systems), and interface automata. These formal models are used to validate the results returned by the composition approaches. We also compare the two composition approaches and show why each of them is suitable for specific types of the problem according to the repository attributes. We then evaluate the performance of the reasoning-based approach and provide some experimental results. In these experiments, we study how different attributes of the repository components could impact the performance of the reasoning-based approach in solving the composition planning problem.

Reuse is not a new concept in software engineering. Ideas, abstractions, and processes have been reused by programmers since the very early days of software development. In the beginning, since storage media was very expensive, software reuse was basically to serve computers and their mechanical resources, as it substantially conserved memory. When the limitations on physical resources started to diminish, software engineers began to invent reuse approaches to save human resources as well. In addition, as the size and complexity of software systems constantly grow, organized and systematic reuse becomes essential in order to develop those systems in timely and cost-effective fashion. That is one main reason why new technologies and approaches for building software systems, such as object-oriented and component-based development, emerged in the last two or three decades. The focus of this thesis is on software components as building blocks of today's software systems. We consider components as software black boxes whose specification and external behavior are known. We assume that this information can somehow be extracted for each deployed software component. The first and basic assumption then would be the availability of a searchable repository of software components and their external behavioral specifications. Web services are a good example of such components. The most important advantage of software components is that they can be reused repeatedly in building different software systems. Reuse presents challenging problems, one of which is studied in this thesis. This problem, the composition problem, simply is creating a composite component from a collection of available components that, by interacting with each other, provide a requested functionality. When there are a large number of components available to be reused, finding a solution to the composition problem manually would require a considerable time and human effort. This could make the search practically impossible or unwieldy. However, performing the search automatically would save a significant amount of development time, cost and human effort. Solving this problem would be a huge step forward in the component-based software development. In this thesis, we concentrate on a subproblem of the composition problem, composition planning or synthesis, which is defined as finding a collection of useful components from the repository and the necessary communications among them to satisfy a requested functionality. For scalability purposes, we study automatic solutions to composition planning and propose two approaches in this regard. In one, we take advantage of graphs to model the repository, which is the collection of available components along with their behavioral specification. Graph search algorithms and a few composition-specific algorithms are used to find solutions for given component requests. In the other approach, we extend a logical reasoning algorithm and come up with algorithms for solving the composition planning problem. In both approaches we provide algorithms for finding the possibility of a composition, as well as finding the composition itself. We propose different types of composition and show how applying each would impact the behavior of a composite component. We provide the necessary formalism for capturing these types of composition through two different models: interface automata and composition algebra. Interface automata is an automaton-based model for representing the behavior of software components. The other model in this regard is composition algebra, which is an algebraic model based on CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes), CCS (Calculus of Communicating Systems), and interface automata. These formal models are used to validate the results returned by the composition approaches. We also compare the two composition approaches and show why each of them is suitable for specific types of the problem according to the repository attributes. We then evaluate the performance of the reasoning-based approach and provide some experimental results. In these experiments, we study how different attributes of the repository components could impact the performance of the reasoning-based approach in solving the composition planning problem.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Composition of Population, Families and Households in Chodsko at the End of the 19th Century Abstract The knowledge of historical life of population is very important. This thesis is historical-demographic research of Chodsko in the second half of the 19th century. The main aim of this thesis is to compare the composition of population, families and households. The chosen data were for years 1869, 1880, 1890 and 1900. The years when the first censuses were taken in Czech Lands. Population, families and households were analyzed separately using historical-demographic, demographic analysis and statistics methods. The results showed that inhabitants of Chodsko were not so different from the inhabitants from the rest of Czech Lands. The most common were patriarchal nuclear households. Families were mostly about average size with two to four members. Hypothesis that the countryside population had more family members was not confirmed. Keywords: Composition of Population, Composition of Families, Composition of Households, Chodsko, 19th Century

This research identifies what proficient writers know and do by the end of their freshman year in college and raises the kind of questions that improve the articulation of English instruction.

Ce mémoire présentera formellement trois pièces représentatives de mon parcours au programme de maîtrise en composition et création sonore. Le thème de la présentation de ces pièces est Le compositeur-interprète : l’influence de l’interprétation et de l’improvisation sur le procédé de la composition. Les pièces seront présentées dans une forme d’analyse formelle avec explications d’influences retrouvées en dehors de la musique classique. Les pièces ne seront pas présentées dans leurs ordres chronologiques de composition mais dans un ordre qui démontre une évolution vers un style de composition que j’espère personnel et original. / This dissertation will formally present three pieces that best represent my time in the Masters in Instrumental Composition program. The theme presented by the use of these pieces is The composer-performer: the influence of performing and improvising on the process of composing. The pieces will be formally analyzed and contain explanations of the non-classical influences shown in them. They will not be presented in a way that shows their chronological order of composition but in a manner I hope shows the evolution of a personal and original style of composition.