There’s a widespread conviction in the norms of assertion literature that an agent’s asserting something false merits criticism. As Williamson puts it, asserting something false is likened to cheating at the game of assertion. Most writers on the topic have consequently proposed factive norms of assertion – ones on which truth is a necessary condition for the proper performance of an assertion. However, I argue that this view is mistaken. I suggest that we can illuminate the error by introducing a theoretical distinction between the norm of a practice and its goal. In light of this distinction, we can see that proponents of factive norms tend to mistake the goal of a practice for the norm. In making my case, I present an analogy between the norms and goals of placing wagers and the norms and goals of assertion. One may place a bet and lose without being subject to criticism, while one may win and be worthy of criticism. Whether one wins or loses is irrelevant to the normative evaluation of a bet. What is relevant is whether the bet maximizes the bettor's expected value, which is a function of what might be lost, what might be gained, and how likely those prospects are, given the bettor's evidence. Similarly, I argue, whether one's assertion is true or false is not strictly relevant to the normative evaluation of an assertion. What is relevant is whether the speaker has adequate supporting reasons for the assertion, and that the necessary conventional and pragmatic features are present. However, context will determine what count as supportive reasons for a given proposition, what counts as relevant, and what count as conventional and pragmatic elements possessing that relevance. My proposed norm, the Supportive Reasons Norm, is thus sensitive to the context of assertion and shifts from context to context.

Understanding how software developers do their work is an important first step to improving their productivity. Previous research has generally focused either on laboratory experiments or coarsely-grained industrial case studies; however, studies that seek a finegrained understanding of industrial programmers working within a realistic context remain limited. In this work, we propose to use interaction histories — that is, finely detailed records of developers’ interactions with their IDE — as our main source of information for understanding programmer’s work habits. We develop techniques to capture, mine, and analyze interaction histories, and we present two industrial case studies to show how this approach can help to better understand industrial programmers’ work at a detailed level: we explore how the basic characteristics of software maintenance task structures can be better understood, how latent dependence between program artifacts can be detected at interaction time, and show how patterns of interaction coupling can be identified. We also examine the link between programmer interactions and some of the contextual factors of software development, such as the nature of the task being performed, the design of the software system, and the expertise of the developers. In particular, we explore how task boundaries can be automatically detected from interaction histories, how system design and developer expertise may affect interaction coupling, and whether newcomer and expert developers differ in their interaction history patterns. These findings can help us to better reason about the multidimensional nature of software development, to detect potential problems concerning task, design, expertise, and other contextual factors, and to build smarter tools that exploit the inherent patterns within programmer interactions and provide improved support for task-aware and expertise-aware software development.

国立情報学研究所で電子化したコンテンツを使用している。

The aim of the studies included in this thesis has been to develop the knowledge about civil and military leadership processes and the conditions for these in situations characterized by extreme environmental demands. The main part of the thesis is based upon empirical data gathered through semi-structured qualitative interviews with Swedish civil and military leaders. The studies, published in four articles, focused leadership during situations characterized by extreme environmental demands. The fourth article aimed at validating the theoretical model that was developed in study one. The thesis has pursued an integrated view in seeking to understand leadership and environment interactions during the conduct of international humanitarian aid and military peacekeeping operations. Hence it has been a matter of considering the individual leader in relation to the organisational and the external environment in order to study human adaption to meet the challenges and demands of disasters and conflicts. The results show that leadership during international humanitarian aid and military peacekeeping operations is a highly complex and demanding task. Premises for the processes involve a great number of environmental factors. In order to restore system balance within a larger system, there has to be congruence between individual appraisal of the organizational and the external environment to achieve successful task completion. Inconsistency among the environmental factors influencing leadership processes may evoke adaptional struggles characterized by both positive and negative stress responses that may affect performance and task completion. Reappraisal processes are shown to involve continuous assimilation processes of, and accommodation processes to, the environment, illustrating the shifting balances between environmental forces, organizational pressures, and individual initiative.  The findings on stress responses are in line with earlier research, demonstrating that stress reactions exhibit great similarities regardless of hierarchical level while also indicating a double-edged pattern concerning the overall development of stress reactions. However, it does seems that hierarchical differences exist with regard to moral stress, while moral stress appears to lack the double-edged pattern since no positive reactions are reported even at moderate levels of stress impact. Taken together, future civil and military leaders need education in complex person-environment interactions in order to get a holistic picture of the underlying mechanisms, thus promoting the development of their adaptive capabilities. It is suggested that this thesis can be regarded as a context-specific contribution to complex system theory by providing insight into the organizational and external environmental factors/demands that influence civil and military leadership. / Projekt 1. Räddningsverkets internationella insatser: Analys och utveckling av ledningssystemet. Projekt 2. Försvarsmakten FoT 7-område Ledarskap och stress.

This thesis aimed to investigate the unique relationship that exists between music and culture. More specifically, the purpose of the research was to determine to what extent culture is reflected in music teaching and learning. Understanding the effect that culture has on music knowledge transmission processes will assist in developing a framework for current music education practices to address the cultural diversity that is present in contemporary teaching and learning environments. An exploration of how music teachers teach, and how the cultural and social surrounds influence these practices in various contexts provided important information in developing such a framework. As such, a participant observation case study of ten music teachers who taught either the South Indian music tradition known as Karnatic music in Tamil Nadu, India, or Queensland, Australia, or who taught predominantly Western music in the Queensland instrumental music context, was carried out. Through a comparative study of these teachers it was observed that there were more similarities than differences in the methods of teaching used by the teachers. Both aural/oral and written modes of communication were used in each context albeit at varying levels. It was also discovered that the surrounding cultural rules and rituals, that were practised, significantly influenced the meaning attributed to the music teaching process for each of the teachers. In the main, for teachers of Karnatic music a strong spiritual attachment to both the gods and goddesses associated with the Hindu religion and the teachers' own teacher/guru was evident. Conversely, in the Queensland instrumental music teaching context, powerful economic forces affected the approach that these teachers implemented. It is argued that with an awareness of these findings, music teaching and learning practices may more effectively meet the needs of students (a concern consistently raised in the literature) in the contemporary music education context.

Context-awareness in pervasive computing environments can reduce user interactions with computing devices by making applications adaptive and autonomous. Context-aware applications rely on information about user context and user preferences to guide their own behaviour. However, context-aware applications do not always behave as users expect due to imperfection of context information, incorrect user preferences or incorrect adaptation rules. This may cause users to feel loss of control over their applications. To mitigate these problems, context-aware systems must provide mechanisms to strike a suitable balance between user control and software autonomy. Allowing users to scrutinise the system and allowing the system to sometimes include users in the adaptation decision making, can provide a balance of user control. This thesis addresses the shortcoming in development of context-aware pervasive systems with regard to providing balance between user control and software autonomy. The thesis shows that rather than making a context-aware application a complete black box, it is possible to allow user control of application adaptations. The system can reveal to the user what context information the system uses and how it arrives at adaptation decisions if the user requests such information. The user may decide to alter the adaptive behaviour of the system to achieve desired outcomes. Hence, a context-aware application becomes a closed loop system where the user is put into the loop if requested. The proposed approach is developed under an assumption that users differ in the level of their technology expertise and therefore the system has to provide explanations that are suitable for a particular level of user expertise. The thesis makes two important research contributions: design of the architectural framework and development of the platform exposing autonomic behaviour of context-aware applications. The architectural framework supports developers of context aware-applications in providing balance of control between users and software autonomy. The framework describes a set of models that allow revealing the adaptation behaviour of context-aware applications in a way suitable for users with various levels of expertise. The framework consists of: (i) a model for exposing elements that influence the context-aware behaviour, (ii) a generic architecture for providing balance of control, (iii) a user model, and (iv) a context graph based overview of context-aware adaptations. The platform exposing autonomic behaviour of context-aware applications is a proof of concept prototype of a software infrastructure (middleware) providing balance of control. The software infrastructure includes: (i) a Semantic Manager, developed to serve the description of elements required for explanations of the application behaviour; (ii) an extension of the PACE Middleware, to enable the middleware to expose the context information, preferences, adaptation rules and their evaluation traces, respectively. (iii) supporting tools for the application designer to prepare the overview of context-aware adaptations and review the evaluation traces. Finally, this thesis presents a case study that illustrates and evaluates the system supporting balance of control. This evaluation involves the existing application which is developed using the previous version of the PACE middleware. The case study validates the architectural framework and illustrates the process and issues involved in developing context-aware application that are able to expose elements that influence context-aware behaviour.

Cognitive load theory uses the immense size of human long-term memory and the significantly limited capacity of working memory to design instructional methods. Five basic principles: information store principle, borrowing and reorganizing principle, randomness as genesis principle, narrow limits of change principle, and environmental linking and organizing principle explain the cognitive basics of this theory. The theory differentiates between three major types of cognitive load: extraneous load that is caused by instructional strategies, intrinsic cognitive load that results from a high element interactivity material and germane load that is concerned with activities leading to learning. Instructional methods designed in accordance with cognitive load theory rely heavily on the borrowing and reorganizing principle, rather than on the randomness as genesis principle to reduce the imposed cognitive load. As learning fractions incorporates high element interactivity, a high intrinsic cognitive load is imposed. Therefore, learning fractions was studied in the experiments of this thesis. Knowledge held in long-term memory can be used to reduce working memory load via the environmental linking and organizing principle. It can be suggested that if fractions are presented using familiar objects, many of the interacting elements that constitute a fraction might be embedded in stored knowledge and so can be treated as a single element by working memory. Thus, familiar context can be used to reduce cognitive load and so facilitate learning. In a series of randomized, controlled experiments, evidence was found to argue for a contextual effect. The first three experiments of this thesis were designed to test the main hypothesis that presenting students with worked examples concerning fractions would enhance learning if a real-life context was used rather than a geometric context. This hypothesis was tested using both a visual and a word-based format and was supported by the results. The last two experiments were intended to test the context effect using either worked examples or problem solving. The results supported the validity of the previous hypothesis using both instructional methods. Overall, the thesis sheds some light on the advantages of using familiar objects when mastering complex concepts in mathematics.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis investigates the problem of seeking multimodal mid-level representations for semantic analysis of broadcast video. The problem is of interest as humans tend to use high-level semantic concepts when querying and browsing ever increasing multimedia databases, yet generic low-level content metadata available from automated processing deals only with representing perceived content, but not its semantics. Multimodal mid-level representations refer to intermediate representations of multimedia signals that make various kinds of knowledge explicit and that expose various kinds of constraints within the context and knowledge assumed by the analysis system. Semantic multimedia analysis tries to establish the links from the feature descriptors and the syntactic elements to the domain semantics. The goal of this thesis is to devise a mid-level representation framework for detecting semantics from broadcast video, using supervised and data-driven approaches to represent domain knowledge in a manner to facilitate inferencing, i.e., answering the questions asked by higher-level analysis. In our framework, we attempt to address three sub-problems: context-dependent feature extraction, semantic video shot classification, and integration of multimodal cues towards semantic analysis. We propose novel models for the representations of low-level multimedia features. We employ dominant modes in the feature space to characterize color and motion in a nonparametric manner. With the combined use of data-driven mode seeking and supervised learning, we are able to capture contextual information of broadcast video and yield semantic meaningful color and motion features. We present the novel concepts of semantic video shot classes towards an effective approach for reverse engineering of the broadcast video capturing and editing processes. Such concepts link the computational representations of low-level multimedia features with video shot size and the main subject within a shot in the broadcast video stream. The linking, subject to the domain constraints, is achieved by statistical learning. We develop solutions for detecting sports events and classifying commercial spots from broad-cast video streams. This is realized by integrating multiple modalities, in particular the text-based external resources. The alignment across modalities is based on semantic video shot classes. With multimodal mid-level representations, we are able to automatically extract rich semantics from sports programs and commercial spots, with promising accuracies. These findings demonstrate the potential of our framework of constructing mid-level representations to narrow the semantic gap, and it has broad outlook in adapting to new content domains.

Thesis (doctoral)--Ruprecht-Karl-Universität zu Heidelberg. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-212).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.