The thesis is focused on diagnosing selected pre-concepts (raw materials, plasticines, textile materials, energy, technology) within the pupils of the 4th and 5th class at a primary school and it is trying to propose a new teaching strategy of Practical skills so the teaching can get more effective. The theoretical part is focused on education, different types of learning methods, teacher{\crq}s role, pre-concept characteristics and diagnosis of those pre-concepts in the Framing educational program. In the practical part there are results of the research and its conclusions.

abstract: Creative design lies at the intersection of novelty and technical feasibility. These objectives can be achieved through cycles of divergence (idea generation) and convergence (idea evaluation) in conceptual design. The focus of this thesis is on the latter aspect. The evaluation may involve any aspect of technical feasibility and may be desired at component, sub-system or full system level. Two issues that are considered in this work are: 1. Information about design ideas is incomplete, informal and sketchy 2. Designers often work at multiple levels; different aspects or subsystems may be at different levels of abstraction Thus, high fidelity analysis and simulation tools are not appropriate for this purpose. This thesis looks at the requirements for a simulation tool and how it could facilitate concept evaluation. The specific tasks reported in this thesis are: 1. The typical types of information available after an ideation session 2. The typical types of technical evaluations done in early stages 3. How to conduct low fidelity design evaluation given a well-defined feasibility question A computational tool for supporting idea evaluation was designed and implemented. It was assumed that the results of the ideation session are represented as a morphological chart and each entry is expressed as some combination of a sketch, text and references to physical effects and machine components. Approximately 110 physical effects were identified and represented in terms of algebraic equations, physical variables and a textual description. A common ontology of physical variables was created so that physical effects could be networked together when variables are shared. This allows users to synthesize complex behaviors from simple ones, without assuming any solution sequence. A library of 16 machine elements was also created and users were given instructions about incorporating them. To support quick analysis, differential equations are transformed to algebraic equations by replacing differential terms with steady state differences), only steady state behavior is considered and interval arithmetic was used for modeling. The tool implementation is done by MATLAB; and a number of case studies are also done to show how the tool works. textual description. A common ontology of physical variables was created so that physical effects could be networked together when variables are shared. This allows users to synthesize complex behaviors from simple ones, without assuming any solution sequence. A library of 15 machine elements was also created and users were given instructions about incorporating them. To support quick analysis, differential equations are transformed to algebraic equations by replacing differential terms with steady state differences), only steady state behavior is considered and interval arithmetic was used for modeling. The tool implementation is done by MATLAB; and a number of case studies are also done to show how the tool works. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Mechanical Engineering 2014

Cette thèse en arts plastiques s'appuie sur les œuvres d'artistes palestiniens contemporains (Mona Hatoum, Taysir Batnijl, Ruia Halawani, Emily Jacir, Laila Shawa), ainsi que sur une pratique personnelle, pour interroger le concept de frontière. Une telle lecture se fait à travers un événement historique majeur : la Nakba. Elle démontre l'hypothèse selon laquelle l'expulsion des Palestiniens de leurs terres a fait émerger, dans les travaux des artistes, une nouvelle forme de frontière. La première partie présente les différents dispositifs de la frontière (vidéosurveillance. miradors, mur, checkpoints) qui imprègnent la création contemporaine et témoignent d'une souffrance qui laisse sa trace dans le paysage, par l'intermédiaire de la mémoire conçue comme un point d'ancrage dans le passé pour mieux comprendre le présent. La deuxième partie, axée sur la mémoire de la Nakba, que nous appelons « mémoire collective expulsée », permet une relecture de cette frontière du point de vue de l'art - grâce auquel la douleur de l'exilé se transforme en force créatrice. Nous aboutissons ainsi, dans un troisième temps, à l'« identité-résilience» qui traduit, chez les artistes palestiniens, leur survie par l'art à l'issue d'une prise de conscience du déracinement originel lié à la e; noyade» de leur patrie et de ses frontières. La frontière devient une blessure inscrite dans le passé sous laquelle l'histoire, la mémoire et l'identité se stratifient, dessinant les contours de nos propres travaux et des œuvres étudiées. Notre thèse, c'est que la Nakba est une fissure qui s'enracine viscéralement dans l'artiste et évolue avec son œuvre pour donner naissance à la « frontière-diaclase », / This PhD dissertation in the field of visual arts builds on the artworks of contemporary Palestinian artists (Mona Hatoum, Taysir Batniji, Ruia Halawani, Emily Jacir, Laila Shawa) as well as on a personal practice, in order to question the border as a concept. The approach chosen draws upon a major historical event: the Nakba. It alms to demonstrate the hypothesis according to which the eviction of Palestinians from their land has allowed their different arts to express a new form of border. Part l exposes the multiple dimensions of the border (video monitoring, watchtowers, wall, checkpoints) which nurture the contemporary creation, while unveiling the trace of a suffering left in the landscape through memory. Memory is conceived as an anchor in the past, for a better understanding of the present. Part II of the dissertation centers on the Nakba as an "expelled collective memory" and provides a retrospective reading of borders, seen through art. By the medium of art, the pain of the exiled becomes his creative power. Hence part III focuses on the "resilience-identity" which expresses the survival of Palestinian artists after a realization of the original uprooting due to the "drowning" of their homeland and its borders. Borders become a wound in the past under which can be found memory, history and identity, which serve the understanding of both my personal work and the pieces studied. The thesis purports to show that the Nakba appears as a fissure deeply rooted in the artist's being and evolving with his work, eventually giving birth to "joint border".

Formal concept analysis is increasingly applied to query expansion and data mining problems. In this paper I analyze and compare the current concept lattice construction algorithm, and choose iPred and Border algorithms to adapt for query expansion. After I adapt two concept lattice construction algorithms, I apply these four algorithms on one query expansion prototype system. The calculation time for four algorithms are recorded and analyzed. The result of adapted algorithms is good. Moreover I find the efficiency of concept lattice construction is not consistent with complex analysis result. In stead, it is high depend on the structure of data set, which is data source of concept lattice.

Background: Traditionally text mention normalization corpora have normalized concepts to single ontology identifiers ("pre-coordinated concepts"). Less frequently, normalization corpora have used concepts with multiple identifiers ("post-coordinated concepts") but the additional identifiers have been restricted to a defined set of relationships to the core concept. This approach limits the ability of the normalization process to express semantic meaning. We generated a freely available corpus using post-coordinated concepts without a defined set of relationships that we term "compositional concepts" to evaluate their use in clinical text. Methods: We annotated 5397 disorder mentions from the ShARe corpus to SNOMED CT that were previously normalized as "CUI-less" in the "SemEval-2015 Task 14" shared task because they lacked a pre-coordinated mapping. Unlike the previous normalization method, we do not restrict concept mappings to a particular set of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) semantic types and allow normalization to occur to multiple UMLS Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs). We computed annotator agreement and assessed semantic coverage with this method. Results: We generated the largest clinical text normalization corpus to date with mappings to multiple identifiers and made it freely available. All but 8 of the 5397 disorder mentions were normalized using this methodology. Annotator agreement ranged from 52.4% using the strictest metric (exact matching) to 78.2% using a hierarchical agreement that measures the overlap of shared ancestral nodes. Conclusion: Our results provide evidence that compositional concepts can increase semantic coverage in clinical text. To our knowledge we provide the first freely available corpus of compositional concept annotation in clinical text.

The aim of this research is describe the development of artistic concepts for visual artists and to evaluate aspects which augments the art experience for audiences. Competition and increased attention for the art form demands greater art to be produced, studying psychological aspects increases the probability of the art being perceived in line with the visions of artists. This research project uses a review of literature for its theoretical research, which is then used to underline decisions within practical experiments in order to give examples of the development of concepts. Findings include a description of the artistic process as well as aspects to augment experiences for audiences. The main conclusion from this work is the importance of combing innovative expressions with theoretical knowledge, in order to create spectacular art which audiences perceives in line with the vision of the artist.

Nous ignorons ce qu’est l’Afrique, d’une ignorance qui a eu et continue d’avoir des conséquences insoutenables pour les Africain-e-s. Pour contribuer à y remédier, nous entreprenons de poser la question « Qu’est-ce que l’Afrique ? » comme une question philosophique et, pour y répondre, d’élaborer un concept d’Afrique. L’étude de l’histoire de l’Afrique, de la fin du XVe siècle aux indépendances, fait apparaître la productivité unificatrice et libératrice de la négation africaine de la négation coloniale de ce qui, de ce fait, devenait l’Afrique. Ce que nous proposons d’appeler « la négativité africaine » se caractérise par la contingence de son commencement, la relative circonscription de ses périodes et de ses espaces, l’hétérogénéité de ses processus. Sa connaissance requiert ainsi un concept singulier et empirique d’Afrique, dont l’ancrage dans le réel dépend d’un agencement épistémologique cohérent des différentes sciences humaines pour l’analyse, dans tous les domaines possibles (politique, droit, économie, art, etc.), des dispositifs de la domination de l’Afrique. La connaissance des modes d’accomplissement de la négativité africaine requiert aussi de la considérer dans l’horizon du monde. L’inadéquation entre le concept de monde (qui suppose son unité) et sa réalité (sa division, révélée par l’asymétrie des frontières) permet à la fois d’affirmer son inexistence et d’étudier l’intensité de sa scission en Afrique.Posant ainsi le problème philosophique de l’Afrique comme celui de l’inexistence du monde, nous élaborons son concept comme celui de l’u-topie de l’existence du monde, et nous soutenons la nécessité et la liaison des unifications politiques de l’Afrique et du monde. / We do not know what Africa is, and that ignorance has long had and still has unbearable consequences for African men and women. To bring a healing contribution to that, we undertake to raise the question: what is Africa? as a philosophical question and, in order to answer it, to put together a concept of Africa.Studying the history of Africa, from the end of the 15th century to the independencies, brings out the unifying and liberating productivity of the African negation of the colonial negation of what, thereby, became Africa. What we suggest to call “African negativity” is characterized by its contingent beginning, the relative circumscription of its periods and spaces, the heterogeneous nature of its processes. Its knowledge requires a singular empirical concept of Africa, whose rooting in reality depends on a coherent epistemological organizing of various human sciences in order to analyse, in all possible fields (politics, law, economics, art, and so on), the “dispositifs” of domination of Africa.The knowledge of the ways in which African negativity reaches completion also requires to take into consideration its worldwide dimension. The inadequacy between the concept of world (implying its unity) and its reality (its division, revealed by its asymmetrical frontiers) makes it possible at the same time to assert its inexistence and to fathom the intensity of its splitting apart in Africa.Thus raising the philosophical problem of Africa as that of the inexistence of the world, we further develop its concept as that of the u-topia of the existence of the world, and we maintain the need and radical interdependence of political unifying processes of Africa and the world.

Doctorat en sciences psychologiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Concept drift refers to a problem that is caused by a change in the data distribution in data mining. This leads to reduction in the accuracy of the current model that is used to examine the underlying data distribution of the concept to be discovered. A number of techniques have been introduced to address this issue, in a supervised learning (or classification) setting. In a classification setting, the target concept (or class) to be learned is known. One of these techniques is called “Ensemble learning”, which refers to using multiple trained classifiers in order to get better predictions by using some voting scheme. In a traditional ensemble, the underlying base classifiers are all of the same type. Recent research extends the idea of ensemble learning to the idea of using committees, where a committee consists of diverse classifiers. This is the main difference between the regular ensemble classifiers and the committee learning algorithms. Committees are able to use diverse learning methods simultaneously and dynamically take advantage of the most accurate classifiers as the data change. In addition, some committees are able to replace their members when they perform poorly. This thesis presents two new algorithms that address concept drifts. The first algorithm has been designed to systematically introduce gradual and sudden concept drift scenarios into datasets. In order to save time and avoid memory consumption, the Concept Drift Introducer (CDI) algorithm divides the number of drift scenarios into phases. The main advantage of using phases is that it allows us to produce a highly scalable concept drift detector that evaluates each phase, instead of evaluating each individual drift scenario. We further designed a novel algorithm to handle concept drift. Our Dynamic Committee for Concept Drift (DCCD) algorithm uses a voted committee of hypotheses that vote on the best base classifier, based on its predictive accuracy. The novelty of DCCD lies in the fact that we employ diverse heterogeneous classifiers in one committee in an attempt to maximize diversity. DCCD detects concept drifts by using the accuracy and by weighing the committee members by adding one point to the most accurate member. The total loss in accuracy for each member is calculated at the end of each point of measurement, or phase. The performance of the committee members are evaluated to decide whether a member needs to be replaced or not. Moreover, DCCD detects the worst member in the committee and then eliminates this member by using a weighting mechanism. Our experimental evaluation centers on evaluating the performance of DCCD on various datasets of different sizes, with different levels of gradual and sudden concept drift. We further compare our algorithm to another state-of-the-art algorithm, namely the MultiScheme approach. The experiments indicate the effectiveness of our DCCD method under a number of diverse circumstances. The DCCD algorithm generally generates high performance results, especially when the number of concept drifts is large in a dataset. For the size of the datasets used, our results showed that DCCD produced a steady improvement in performance when applied to small datasets. Further, in large and medium datasets, our DCCD method has a comparable, and often slightly higher, performance than the MultiScheme technique. The experimental results also show that the DCCD algorithm limits the loss in accuracy over time, regardless of the size of the dataset.

Learning difficulties resulting from students holding conceptions of scientific concepts which are at variance with those presented in curricular materials have been identified in the literature in a number of areas of science. In this study a number of student learning difficulties related to the concepts of growth and the cell were identified. More specifically, this study was designed to investigate whether alternative conceptions held by students prior to instruction were, in part, responsible for these learning difficulties. The study also investigated whether omissions in instruction contributed to these learning difficulties. Finally, the study examined changes in student conceptions after formal instruction. Through concept analyses of growth and the cell, two semi-structured interview protocols were developed. The Growth Protocol was used to interview students in Grades 3, 5, and 7 and the Cell Protocol was used to interview students in Grade 10. The students in Grades 3 and 10 were interviewed both before and after instruction. The conceptions of the students identified in the transcripts were classified into a number of categories specific to the constituent concepts of growth and the cell. Students at all grade levels were found to hold a wide variety of alternative conceptions regarding the concepts in question. The majority of these alternative conceptions were identified in more than one student and did not reflect current scientific or curricular understandings of growth or the cell. Rather, it seemed that these alternative conceptions reflected student attempts to make sense of concrete experiences with phenomena in their surroundings. After instruction at both the elementary and secondary level, the majority of students did not incorporate most of the scientific concepts as they were presented during instruction. The older students did not hold a conception of cell differentiation nor did the majority of students link the microscopic phenomena of cell division with the macroscopic phenomena of growth in organisms other than humans. The variability of alternative conceptions of mitosis and meiosis after instruction strongly suggested that the students experienced learning difficulties with respect to these concepts. The results of this study imply that in order to effectively move the learner from alternative conceptions to scientific conceptions both curricular and instructional strategies must shift their emphasis from one of presenting only disciplinary knowledge to one of considering also the prior knowledge that the learner brings to the instructional setting. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate