The National Curriculum Statement (NCS) for Mathematical Literacy (Maths Lit) states that the approach to Maths Lit teaching has to be contextualized – focusing on context-driven problems that relate to everyday lives. In this report I attempt to identify how teachers select and use context–oriented tasks for their grade 10 Mathematical Literacy classrooms. Data was gathered using a case study of four teachers, using interviews and analysis of various documents (work schedule and sample of learners‟ workbooks). Vygotsky‟s theory of mediation was used to analyze the findings in relation to the Maths Lit goals and principle of contextualization. The agendas from Graven and Venkat (2007) were used as the tool to analyze the tasks in the learners‟ books. A continuum based on these agendas was used as a descriptive tool of where teachers fit in relation to the context/content spectrum. The study concluded that teachers mainly used the work schedule and text books to select the context-oriented tasks for their learners. Teachers‟ selections of tasks were guided by the mathematical content to be taught. Most of the tasks‟ contexts lacked authenticity and the tasks consisted of pure mathematical content. The teachers mainly used the context to introduce the content to be learned. The tasks that were used promoted mathematical goals and were not context-driven. The level of authenticity promoted within the Maths Lit curriculum and its disseminated support documents such as work schedules, therefore needs to be investigated further.

This thesis explores whether and how the substantive representation of women has been enabled or constrained by specific features of the gendered institutional context during domestic abuse policy development in two new regional legislatures, in Wales and in Tuscany. The thesis uses a sociological institutionalist approach to explore the involvement of civil society women’s organisations in the everyday processes of domestic abuse policy development across the case study regions. Both regions are structured by uniquely advanced formal rules committing to the inclusion of civil society organisations and to the value of gender equality. A critical discourse analytic approach is used to investigate how pre-existing informal norms and discursive frames interact with these formal rules in shaping actors’ behaviour and the policy solutions proposed to tackle domestic abuse. Feminist political science scholars have hypothesised that changes in the political environment across the European Union, including decentralisation and the devolution of power to the sub-national level, have generated new institutions which may provide greater opportunities for actors making claims for women to participate in the policy process and to influence its outputs, thus improving the substantive representation of women. However, this thesis argues that in the case of domestic abuse policy development, new formal rules making a symbolic commitment to the inclusion of new actors in governing processes were often undermined by tenacious informal norms. Women’s organisations that were better equipped to play by pre-existing informal rules were more likely to be included. This thesis makes a contribution to theory-building in the field of feminist political science through an exploration of the nuanced effects of new governing structures on the participation of value-driven women’s organisations in policy development. It shows how gendered, culturally dominant discursive frames and wider, pre-existing norms shaping perceptions of appropriate behaviour can affect women’s organisations’ opportunities for action in the policy process, and their capacity to influence outputs.

Context is an important driver in decision-making processes and problem-solving. It provides opportunities and constraints that must be considered when decisions are made. However, context is also difficult to define due to limits to knowledge and understanding of previous, current and future conditions. Context is dynamic, emergent, subjective and specific to individuals or groups at a particular place and time. However, context is often relegated to static representations of environmental properties with little consideration for the relationships between an actor (or actors), their task and the environments in which they are situated. This research introduces a new perspective for context in spatial decision-making in Geographical Information Science (GIScience). In addition, this research contributes to GIScience by 1) introducing a theoretical definition of context, 2) the development of methods to bound context into relevant and non-relevent categories, 3) introducing graph-based context models to capture and store relevant context, and 4) demonstrating how context models can be used in spatial decision-support systems.

Web aggregation has been available regionally for several years, but this service has not been offered globally. As an example, using multiple regional comparison aggregators, we analyze the global prices for a Sony camcorder, which differ by more than three times. We further explain that lack of global comparison aggregation services partially contribute to such huge price dispersion. We also discuss difficulties encountered in the manual integration of global web sources. Motivated by this example, we propose a context mediation architecture for global aggregation to address semantic disparities of global information sources. Global aggregation services can bring efficiency to the global market and can be useful for market research and other business uses. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

The web provides a lot of fluid information but this information changes, moves, and even disappears over time. Bookmark lists, portals, and paths are collections where the building blocks are web pages, which are susceptible to these changes. A lot of research, both in industry and in academia, focuses on organizing this vast amount of data. In this thesis, I present context-based algorithms for measuring changes to a document. The methods proposed use other documents in a collection as the context for evaluating changes in the web pages. These metrics will be used in maintaining paths as the individual pages in paths change. This approach will enhance the evaluations of change made by the currently existing Path Manager, in the Walden's Paths project that is being developed in the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University.

It has been proofed that Reconfigurable Computing System possesses the potential to promote system efficiency. Fine-Grain Reconfigurable Computing System, which integrates the co-design of software and hardware, is the prevailing current in system designing with low clock rate and high efficiency. The thesis focuses on computing-oriented Fine-Grain Reconfigurable Computing System of software-hardware interwork, and setting up invoking working model for software program and hardware module as well. The designing of software and hardware can be integrated into one program, which deals with the hardware as a function. By quick computing of hardware, it can promote system efficiency. This interwork mechanism can be combined into traditional instruction execute pipeline. It composes manageable Fine-Grain for Reconfigurable Computing System as a new processor architecture, which brings up new command to support execution of software-hardware interwork mechanism. The model architecture is verified by algorithms of multimedia application, such as Motion Estimation and DCT. In addition, it presents the optimizing model by analysis and comparison of software and hardware efficiency.

At present the scale of multimedia and communication systems has become more and more complicated due to the fast development of them. In order to improve the capability of real-time processing and shorten system development time, the ability to reconfigure system architecture becomes an important and flexible design consideration. In this thesis, we propose a reconfigurable processing unit, FMRPU, which is a fine-grain multi-context reconfigurable processing unit targeting at high-throughput and data-parallel applications. It contains 64 reconfigurable logic arrays, 16 switch boxes, and connects with each other via three hierarchical-level connectivities. To avoid the excessive routing path to be the bottleneck of mapped circuits, we design the data stream switch to rearrange data streams. According to the simulation results, the longest routing path of FMRPU only takes 6.5 ns at 0.35 processes, which is able to construct the required logic circuit efficiently. Compare with same kind devices in dealing with Motion Estimation operations, the performance is raise to 17% and is excellent to other same kind architectures in executing other DSP algorithms.

The following experiments looked at how encoding information and available cues at test can influence context effects. More specifically, the present experiments investigated the overshadowing and outshining hypotheses. Experiment 1 established a new method for attaining robust reinstatement effects by using movie scenes. Experiment 2 found support for the outshining hypothesis. So, if verbal and contextual cues were encoded and verbal cues were present at test, then context reinstatement through the reinstatement of the movie scenes would have little effect on memory. However, in the absence of verbal cues at test, significant context effects were found showing that the verbal cues were able to outshine the context (i.e., the movie scenes). Experiment 3 extended the outshining hypothesis by showing that strengthening the association between the verbal cues and the target items led to greater outshining of the movie scenes by the verbal cues. Experiment 4 looked at the overshadowing hypothesis and showed that if the context (i.e., the movie scenes) was not encoded well, but the verbal cues were then the context was overshadowed by the verbal cues. Further, if the association between the verbal cue and target items was encoded, then the overshadowing effect was greater as compared to cases where the association between the two items was not encoded. Finally, Experiment 5 found that if context was well encoded but verbal cues were not well encoded then the verbal cues were overshadowed by the context. It was also found that encoding the association between the context and target led to a more robust overshadowing effect as compared to cases where the association was not encoded.

The methods of improving the cache performance are multiform and advanced of nowadays. We are concerned about the cache and TLB utility. To reduce the context switch cost on system, we utilize an address-space switching hardware of ARMS3C2410 processor to realize the fast address switching mechanism. The Fast Context Switch can help to improve cache and TLB utility and performance. Fast Context Switch is a method that can help to improve the cache performance. The key feature of Fast Context Switch is without any cache and TLB flush on process context switching. To implement Fast Context Switch, we address the different processes to different address space by process ID. When context switch occurs, we can just change the working space without the cache and TLB flush. This thesis emphasizes on the performance measure for improvement on the cache and TLB. We use a high dependable microkernel architecture for message passing between processes, this microkernel called MinixARM. Rely on the microkernel, we can more easily understand and analyze the system performance and additional cost of the cache scheme. We provide more complete performance tests by benchmarks, fast context switch can increase the system performance about 65% at most.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Rolf A. Zwaan, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Psychology. Title and description from dissertation home page (June 18, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.