In the arena of software development, implementing a software design (no matter how perfect the design) is rarely done right the first time. Consequently, debugging one's own (or someone else's) software is inevitable, and tools that assist in this often-arduous task become very important with respect to reducing the cost of debugging as well as the cost of the software life cycle as a whole. Many tools exist with this aim, but all are lacking in a key area: information visualization. Applying information visualization techniques such as zooming, focus and context, or graphical representation of numeric data may enhance the visual debugging experience. To this end, drawing data structures as graphs is potentially a step in the right direction, but more must be done to maximize the value of time spent debugging and to minimize the actual amount of time spent debugging. This thesis will address some information visualization techniques that may be helpful in debugging (specifically with respect to visual debugging) and will present the results of a small pilot study intended to illustrate the potential value of such techniques. / Master of Science

A crucial step in assessing the scientific basis of a psychotherapeutic intervention is examining the individual components of the treatment to determine if they are additive or important to treatment outcomes. The construct of self-as-context (S-A-C), a central process in the acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) approach, has not yet been studied in a component analysis. A previous dismantling trial, however, has shown this process has an additive effect as part of an ACT package (Williams, 2006). The current study is a preliminary trial of feasibility and efficacy to determine a) the practicality of assessing S-A-C in isolation in a laboratory setting, and b) the impact of manipulating S-A-C on theoretically related variables, including theorized mechanisms of change in various clinical approaches. 68 participants (55 female, 13 male) were randomly assigned to receive either a brief S-A-C intervention employing a common therapeutic metaphor (the chessboard metaphor), or the control condition, which involved discussing a mildly positive topic with the researcher. Results from the main analyses showed that there was no group-by-time interaction on measures to assess immediate impact on the construct, previously validated therapeutic mediation measures, or symptom measures. Several possible explanations for the failure to identify significant findings are discussed, including limitations of construct measurement. When analyses were repeated using only those participants whose scores were in the mild range or higher for stress, anxiety, or depression, time by condition interactions were significant for stress and approached significance for depression, with participants in the S-A-C group doing better than those in the control group, offering tentative support for the utility of this process among individuals with clinical difficulties. Implications for future studies are reported. / Ph. D.

Temporal context memory is memory for the timing of events. People can make temporal judgments based on strategies such as assessing the relative familiarity of events or inferring temporal order from the semantic associations among events. The purpose of present study is to investigate the brain regions that support temporal context retrieval in the absence of such non-temporal strategies (i.e. pure temporal context memory). We used three word familiar phrases (triplets) as stimuli. In study phase, three words were presented quickly one after another in either familiar or scrambled order. Participants were instructed to read aloud each word and try to remember the order of the words. Then they were tested on their memory for the order of the words in each triplet. We propose that memory for the scrambled triplets reflects primarily temporal retrieval for two reasons. First, participants were prevented from using semantic strategies during encoding. Second, the relative familiarity of the words in each triplet was similar and not diagnostic of the order of the words during encoding. Neuroimaging results indicate that temporal context retrieval, memory for the order of words in scrambled triplets, was associated with the hippocampus, parahippocampal cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, retrosplenial cortex, and posterior cingulate, which are consistent with the retrieval of non-temporal context in episodic memory. The results also suggest that temporal context retrieval could rely on familiarity, which was demonstrated by the higher accuracy and greater activation of PRc in familiar phrases and scrambled triplets presented in studied order in the test phase. / Master of Science

This study seeks to understand how horror urban legends undergo changes over time and the possible reasons for their alterations. Past researchers have yet to analyze the shifts that have occurred within the retellings of these dark tales, and through this analysis, light will be shed onto what truly affects the media's storytelling behavior. Building upon meme theory, this study will use narrative and historical context analyses to uncover the objectives, narrative elements and temporal environments surrounding 10 replications of three horror urban legend memes over the past century. This research will uncover how these memes have mutated over time and inform the world as to how context plays a role. A total of 30 horror urban legend artifacts (10 per meme) were analyzed using qualitative research methods in order to uncover the similarities and differences that appeared in the replications of each of the memes. Also, the contemporary thoughts, attitudes and values of the various time periods in which each of the retellings existed were analyzed to understand how historical events and movements may have led to a change in the story. The findings revealed that social movements played a large role in the alteration of horror urban legend memes, particularly in regards to the second wave of Feminism. Additionally, the findings showed that memes that heavily portrayed racism were altered in more recent decades to include leading actors and characters of various ethnic backgrounds. Because of these findings, this research aligns with and expands upon the work completed by Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi (1985). / Master of Arts / This study looks at how three icon horror urban legends have changed over the past century. Specifically, this study analyzes "Bloody Mary," "Sleepy Hollow" and the "Wendigo" in order to track the changes each tale has gone through, in addition to uncovering what might influence their change. Researchers have yet to understand this occurrence, and this study will serve as a way to answer why the media would be interested in revisiting and reviving older stories. Remakes of movies and TV shows are found in abundance within society, so this research will help assign a reason as to why ancient tales are dug back up from the grave. Using meme theory, this study examines how a story is able to be retold, remade and eventually changed by analyzing 10 remakes per urban legend, with each remake coming from a different decade between the 1920s and the 2010s. The findings reveal that history plays a role in the remaking and altering of previous tales, mainly due to the older versions of horror urban legends no longer being relevant or culturally appropriate. Occasionally, the older adaptation of a story will have material or revolve around a subject matter that is no longer acceptable within a more modern society, such as women being shown only as a damsel in distress. Because of this, in order for the story to not be forgotten, it must be remade and altered to align with where the world is today.

Technological advancements in sensor miniaturization, processing power and faster networks has broadened the scope of our contemporary compute-infrastructure to an extent that Context-Aware Intelligent Environment (CAIE)--physical spaces with computing systems embedded in it--are increasingly commonplace. With the widespread adoption of intelligent personal agents proliferating as close to us as our living rooms, there is a need to rethink the human-computer interface to accommodate some of their inherent properties such as multiple focus of interaction with a dynamic set of devices and limitations such as lack of a continuous coherent medium of interaction. A CAIE provides context-aware services to aid in achieving user's goals by inferring their instantaneous context. However, often due to lack of complete understanding of a user's context and goals, these services may be inappropriate or at times even pose hindrance in achieving user's goals. Determining service appropriateness is a critical step in implementing a reliable and robust CAIE. Explicitly querying the user to gather such feedback comes at the cost of user's cognitive resources in addition to defeating the purpose of designing a CAIE to provide automated services. The CAIE may, however, infer this appropriateness implicitly from the user, by observing and sensing various behavioral cues and affective reactions from the user, thereby seamlessly gathering such user-feedback. In this dissertation, we have studied the design space for incorporating user's affective reactions to the intelligent services, as a mode of implicit communication between the user and the CAIE. As a result, we have introduced a framework named CAfFEINE, acronym for Context-aware Affective Feedback in Engineering Intelligent Naturalistic Environments. The CAfFEINE framework encompasses models, methods and algorithms establishing the validity of the idea of using a physiological-signal based affective feedback loop in conveying service appropriateness in a CAIE. In doing so, we have identified methods of learning ground-truth about an individual user's affective reactions as well as introducing a novel algorithm of estimating a physiological signal based quality-metric for our inferences. To evaluate the models and methods presented in the CAfFEINE framework, we have designed a set of experiments in laboratory-mockups and virtual-reality setup, providing context aware services to the users, while collecting their physiological signals from wearable sensors. Our results provide empirical validation for our CAfFEINE framework, as well as point towards certain guidelines for conducting future research extending this novel idea. Overall, this dissertation contributes by highlighting the symbiotic nature of the subfields of Affective Computing and Context-aware Computing and by identifying models, proposing methods and designing algorithms that may help accentuate this relationship making future intelligent environments more human-centric. / Ph. D. / Physical spaces containing intelligent computing agents have become an increasingly commonplace concept. These systems when populating a physical space, provides intelligent services by inferring user’s immediate needs, they are called intelligent environments. With this widespread adoption of intelligent systems, there is a need to design computer interfaces that focuses on the human user’s responses. In order for this service-delivery interaction to feel natural, these interfaces need to sense a user’s disapproval of a wrong service, without the user actively indicating so. It is imperative that implicitly inferring a user’s disapproval of a service by observing and sensing various behavioral cues from the user, will help in making the computing system cognitively disappear into the background. In this dissertation, we have studied the design space for incorporating user’s affective reactions to the intelligent services, as a mode of implicit communication between the user and the intelligent system. As a result, we have introduced an interaction framework named CAfFEINE, acronym for Context-aware Affective Feedback in Engineering Intelligent Naturalistic Environments. The CAfFEINE framework encompasses models, methods and algorithms exploring the validity of the idea of using physiological signal based affective feedback in intelligent environments. To evaluate the models and algorithms, we have designed a set of experimental protocols and conducted user studies in virtual-reality setup. The results from these user studies demonstrate the feasibility of this novel idea, in addition to proposing new methods of evaluating the quality of underlying physiological signals. Overall, this dissertation contributes by highlighting the symbiotic nature of the subfields of Affective Computing and Context-aware Computing and by identifying models, proposing methods and designing algorithms that may help accentuate this relationship making future intelligent environments more human-centric.

The inevitable changes to the built environment over time presents the question of what contemporary design is appropriate for existing historical context. This is inherently a wicked problem that is becoming increasingly important to designers in the 21st century. Wicked problems, as the connotation implies, are those that are multi-faceted, unique, and with innumerable possible solutions (Rittel, Webber 1973). Each individual architectural project is a cog in a city’s evolving machine, therefore no one project should ever be considered unimportant. As Robert Venturi said in his “Gentle Manifesto”, a designer should strive towards “messy vitality over obvious unity” (Venturi, 1966). Finding a simple design resolution is difficult if not impossible in a complex urban city layered with centuries of architecture. It is not necessary to copy the historic building next door, nor is it appropriate to design as if a site has no neighbors. The surrounding context should be evaluated for its mass, scale, program, history, and materials, among others, to inform and inspire a contemporary designer’s work. This thesis offers no “solution”; rather a series of design considerations. These considerations are by no means prescriptive, however. My aspiration is that this thesis can be used by future designers as a tool to prompt discussion and discovery about their own site specific project. / Master of Architecture

Bridging is considered as a formal, spatial, referential, and tectonic articulation of connectedness between architecture and context. The question is probed through a mixed architectural program situated in the interstice of an urban downtown and residential neighborhood. The architecture originates from singular or hybridized combinations of these characteristics: whereas formal defines the compositional relationships through, for example, orientation, grids, scales, proportions, and contrast or balance among the parts; whereas spatial indicates a gradient of boundaries established through anchoring, intersecting, overlapping, projecting, interlocking, and parallel elements; whereas referential draws connections through an interpretation of distinct characteristics from the present, past, and future environmental context; and whereas tectonic consists of the underlying structure, frame or mass, and materiality without which the formal, spatial, and referential concepts cannot become physical. / Master of Architecture / Bridging is considered as a formal, spatial, referential, and tectonic articulation of connectedness between architecture and context. The question is probed through a mixed architectural program situated in the interstice of an urban downtown and residential neighborhood.

Transfer-appropriate processing (TAP) proposes that retrieval success is based on the match between processing at encoding and retrieval. We propose that the processing described by TAP determines the contextual cues that are encoded with an event. At retrieval, the presence or absence of contextual cues matching the encoding cues will influence success. To implement these principles as a strategy to improve memory, the nature of future retrieval processing or cues must be known during encoding. As this is unlikely in real-world memory function, we propose that increased encoding variability – increasing the range of encoded cues – increases the likelihood of TAP when the retrieval scenario is unknown. The larger the set of encoded cues, the more likely those cues will recur during retrieval and therefore achieve TAP. Preliminary research in our lab (Diana, unpublished data) has found that increased encoding variability improves memory for item information in a novel retrieval context. To test whether this benefit to memory is due to the increased likelihood of TAP, the current experiment compared the effects of encoding variability under conditions that emphasize TAP to conditions that reduce TAP. We found main effects of encoding variability and TAP, but no interaction between the two. Planned comparisons between high and low variability encoding contexts within matching and non-matching retrieval contexts did not produce a significant difference between high and low variability when encoding-retrieval processing matched. We conclude that further studies are necessary to determine whether encoding variability has mechanisms that benefit memory beyond TAP. / M.S. / It is well accepted within the episodic memory literature that successful memory retrieval is often driven by context cues. Specifically, the cues that are stored with the memory of the event. To develop a better understanding of how episodic memory works, we must understand how manipulating context cues changes memory performance. One way to investigate the effects of context manipulation is using encoding variability, which refers to the amount of variability (i.e., change) in context cues from one repetition of an item or event, to the next. Preliminary research in our lab (Diana, unpublished data) has found that increased encoding variability improves memory retrieval in a novel context, but it is unclear why this is the case. We proposed that the mental processing described by transfer-appropriate processing (TAP) – a principle stating that memory retrieval success is determined by the match, or overlap, between the mental processing at encoding (i.e., memory formation) and memory retrieval – determines the contextual cues that are stored with the memory at encoding. We hypothesized that encoding variability works even when TAP has already been achieved by matching the processing and cues at encoding to those at retrieval. Alternatively, we hypothesized that encoding variability works by specifically achieving TAP, so that encoding variability is only helpful when the encoding and retrieval contexts do not match. Results indicated partial support for the alternative hypothesis, suggesting that encoding variability works by achieving TAP. However, these results were not sufficiently conclusive, and it is likely that there are other mechanisms that allow for encoding variability to improve memory. This study establishes the groundwork for future work examining encoding variability and its effects on memory.

China is a high speed developing country during the past 40 years. However, when China became better and better, there were a lot of issues being left, such as boomed populations, urban village emerging, social media issues and lack of human spirit. All of these issues occurred in the modern urban context, which made the "Loci Genius" lose. So how could architects reconstruct and conserve the "Genius Loci." I try to build the temple for people in the high dense city, which help people to find and think for themselves, to keep peaceful. I believe people and space could build the journey to the pilgrimage. The Buddha joss will not be made in the temple, but be established in every visitor's mind finally. / Master of Architecture

Novice principals leading rural schools experience unique challenges that define their leadership practices. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine how novice principals interpret and understand the challenges they experience as developing leaders within a rural school setting in Virginia. The research question for the study was, what challenges do novice principals situated in a rural setting in Virginia experience as leaders of their schools? This study adds to the existing body of research on the challenges novice principals face as leaders of schools situated within a rural community. For this study, six novice principals working in Rural-Remote (Code 43) schools (as defined by the National Center for Education Statistics) in Virginia participated in a 45-minute, one-on-one interview. The findings revealed that the novice rural principals experienced unique challenges with hiring staff, managing limited budgets, wearing multiple hats, distributed leadership, meeting their community's expectations for accessibility and visibility, readily available collaboration opportunities with professionals in similar roles, and intense feelings of ultimate responsibility. Participants hired with previous administrative experience within the district reported smooth transitions to the principalship. Although the participants reported limited activities from their districts to assist with understanding the rural setting, they expressed satisfaction with the overall support provided by their school district. The implications could help school districts, policymakers, and principal preparation programs effectively manage rural principal successions by establishing mentorship programs; providing field experience to aspiring principals; creating robust principal induction programs; and finding creative solutions to attract, hire, and retain rural school staff. / Doctor of Education / Novice principals leading rural schools experience unique challenges that define their leadership practices. This research focused on how novice principals interpret and understand the challenges they experience as developing leaders within a rural school setting in Virginia. The research question for the study was, what challenges do novice principals situated in a rural setting in Virginia experience as leaders of their schools? For this study, six novice principals working in Rural-Remote (Code 43) schools (as defined by the National Center for Education Statistics) in Virginia participated in a 45-minute, one-on-one interview. The implications could help school districts, policymakers, and principal preparation programs effectively manage rural principal successions by establishing mentorship programs; providing field experience to aspiring principals; creating robust principal induction programs; and finding creative solutions to attract, hire, and retain rural school staff.