The purpose of this narrative inquiry was to examine how cooperating teachers’ narrative authority was revealed or strengthened within an intentionally formed knowledge community established to create a safe space for cooperating teachers to story and restory their experiences as music teacher educators. The conceptions of knowledge communities and narrative authority, grounded in Dewey’s theory of experience and narrative knowing, followed the research line of Connelly and Clandinin (1990). Concepts of interest emerging from this framework were cooperating teachers’ personal practical knowledge, continuity of experience between their stories, interaction with others in specific contexts, features of the professional knowledge landscape of music teacher education, and tensions arising from cooperating teachers’ positions on the landscape relative to the conduit. Of particular interest was how the strengthening of narrative authority within the knowledge community would allow cooperating teachers to question taken-for-granted notions of teacher education. The knowledge community, which included three participants and myself, met twice during the course of the study, but maintained continuous communication through conversations and emails. Observations were conducted during the student teaching practicum. Field notes were also an important part of the data collected. Data analysis and representation were situated within the three-dimensional inquiry space described by Clandinin and Connelly (2000) and drew on a variety of methods. Issues of researcher subjectivity and ethics were addressed through enacting the principles of resonant work in narrative inquiry in music education (Stauffer & Barrett, 2009). Four story categories emerged from the data: stories of established practice, stories of influential relationships, stories of tension, and stories of possibility. Laying alongside the stories of each participant created a thematic dialogue that gives readers a seat at the table to experience their stories and a jumping off point to add their own. There is potential for this type of knowledge community to strengthen practice by creating a space for sharing previously untold stories of practice. The process of looking back at past practices, reflecting on current practices, and reimagining future practices within the knowledge community strengthened narrative authority in a way that opened the possibility to trouble certainty.

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The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the effects of the student teaching experience on secondary agricultural education teachers. Eight of the thirteen participants in this study served as a cooperating teacher during the 2012 spring semester for pre-service teachers in agricultural education from a land-grant institution. Three of the participants had served as a cooperating teacher during either the 2010 or 2011 spring semester but had reported a negative student teaching experience with their last student teacher. Two of the participants had served as pilot interviews for the study, but they were added as participants during the analysis of the study. The participants provided interviews, opportunities for professional observations, and teaching documents for analysis. Four major themes emerged in the study 1) The professional identities of secondary agricultural education teachers are affected by their membership in the pre-service teacher community. 2) Secondary agricultural education teachers volunteer as cooperating teachers to help others and themselves professionally. 3) Secondary agricultural education teachers empower themselves and other members of their communities through their leadership due to their strong sense of political efficacy. 4) The professional practices of agriculture teachers are influenced by their service as a cooperating teacher. / Ph. D.

The problem of this study was the extent of the relationship between the classroom verbal behavior of the cooperating teacher and that of the student teacher. The purpose of this study was to determine if the student teacher tends to imitate the verbal classroom behavior of the cooperating teacher.

AND KEY WORDS The purpose of my thesis is to analyze the institute of criminal informant as a legal instrument in the fight against organized crime. I introduce the historical background of cooperation between criminals and state on uncovering criminal activities. Then I follow with the analysis of current Czech legislation of cooperating accused and the so far limited cases of its application and also offer a comparative view of the law and its application in United States, Great Britain and Slovakia. The thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter One is introductory and defines basic terminology used in the thesis: cooperating accused and crown witness. In this chapter I argue that the terms can be used interchangeably In the second chapter I introduce the history of cooperation between criminals and the state. Special subsection deals with the development of Czech legislation on cooperating accused. Chapter Three examines relevant Czech legislation and the limited number of documented cases of application of the institute. Chapter Four offers a comparative view of relevant legislation and approach to decision-making by trial courts in the United States and Great Britain and also the legislation passed in neighboring Slovakia. Chapter Five concentrates on problems resulting from organized crime,...

The aim of the thesis is an analysis of the topical legal form of the cooperating defendant. It is divided into 5 chapters. In the first chapter there are given concepts of the crown witness and the cooperating defendant, added deliberation of de lege ferenda. In the second chapter the author gives particular principles of the prosecution and describes in what way the institution of the cooperating defendant influences them. The third chapter is devoted to the organized crime and the legal means which are applied to its prosecution. In the fourth chapter the modification of the institution of the cooperating defendant is decribed in detail. In this chapter the author points out the importance of the confession of the status of the cooperating defendant , the motivation, the verbal testimony, the protection of the cooperating defendant. Further the author takes a possible application of the institution of the hidden witness for cooperating defendant into consideration. In the last chapter the author gives cases, where an aplication of the institute of cooperating defendant is used. In the case studies the author especially aims at the testimony of cooperating defendent. The admission of the status of the cooperating defendant and what kind of punishment was given to the cooperating defendant in...

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are systems featuring a tight combination of, and coordination between, the system’s computational and physical elements. Cyber-physical systems include systems ranging from critical infrastructure such as a power grid and transportation system to health and biomedical devices. System reliability, i.e., the ability of a system to perform its intended function under a given set of environmental and operational conditions for a given period of time, is a fundamental requirement of cyber-physical systems. An unreliable system often leads to disruption of service, financial cost and even loss of human life. An important and prevalent type of cyber-physical system meets the following criteria: processing large amounts of data; employing software as a system component; running online continuously; having operator-in-the-loop because of human judgment and an accountability requirement for safety critical systems. This thesis aims to improve system reliability for this type of cyber-physical system. To improve system reliability for this type of cyber-physical system, I present a system evaluation approach entitled automated online evaluation (AOE), which is a data-centric runtime monitoring and reliability evaluation approach that works in parallel with the cyber-physical system to conduct automated evaluation along the workflow of the system continuously using computational intelligence and self-tuning techniques and provide operator-in-the-loop feedback on reliability improvement. For example, abnormal input and output data at or between the multiple stages of the system can be detected and flagged through data quality analysis. As a result, alerts can be sent to the operator-in-the-loop. The operator can then take actions and make changes to the system based on the alerts in order to achieve minimal system downtime and increased system reliability. One technique used by the approach is data quality analysis using computational intelligence, which applies computational intelligence in evaluating data quality in an automated and efficient way in order to make sure the running system perform reliably as expected. Another technique used by the approach is self-tuning which automatically self-manages and self-configures the evaluation system to ensure that it adapts itself based on the changes in the system and feedback from the operator. To implement the proposed approach, I further present a system architecture called autonomic reliability improvement system (ARIS). This thesis investigates three hypotheses. First, I claim that the automated online evaluation empowered by data quality analysis using computational intelligence can effectively improve system reliability for cyber-physical systems in the domain of interest as indicated above. In order to prove this hypothesis, a prototype system needs to be developed and deployed in various cyber-physical systems while certain reliability metrics are required to measure the system reliability improvement quantitatively. Second, I claim that the self-tuning can effectively self-manage and self-configure the evaluation system based on the changes in the system and feedback from the operator-in-the-loop to improve system reliability. Third, I claim that the approach is efficient. It should not have a large impact on the overall system performance and introduce only minimal extra overhead to the cyber- physical system. Some performance metrics should be used to measure the efficiency and added overhead quantitatively. Additionally, in order to conduct efficient and cost-effective automated online evaluation for data-intensive CPS, which requires large volumes of data and devotes much of its processing time to I/O and data manipulation, this thesis presents COBRA, a cloud-based reliability assurance framework. COBRA provides automated multi-stage runtime reliability evaluation along the CPS workflow using data relocation services, a cloud data store, data quality analysis and process scheduling with self-tuning to achieve scalability, elasticity and efficiency. Finally, in order to provide a generic way to compare and benchmark system reliability for CPS and to extend the approach described above, this thesis presents FARE, a reliability benchmark framework that employs a CPS reliability model, a set of methods and metrics on evaluation environment selection, failure analysis, and reliability estimation. The main contributions of this thesis include validation of the above hypotheses and empirical studies of ARIS automated online evaluation system, COBRA cloud-based reliability assurance framework for data-intensive CPS, and FARE framework for benchmarking reliability of cyber-physical systems. This work has advanced the state of the art in the CPS reliability research, expanded the body of knowledge in this field, and provided some useful studies for further research.

The purpose of the study was to identify the effects of the influence of cooperating teachers on how student teachers prioritize particular goals of education. This was accomplished by administering a predetermined list of eighteen educational goals to a group of student teachers prior and subsequent to their quarter-long student teaching experience, and to their respective cooperating teachers during their student teaching quarter. The list enabled the teacher groups to rank the goals in order of priority. In this way the cooperating teachers' goal rankings were compared to both the student teachers' pre and post student teaching goal rankings. Twenty-three student teachers and their respective cooperating teachers in secondary and special education served as subjects. The Phi Delta Kappa Goal Setting Instrument was used as the goals list in the study. The questions explored were: 1) are there differences between the relative importance as signed to selected educational goals by student teachers prior to the student teaching experience and the relative importance assigned to the same goals by the cooperating teachers; 2) are there differences in the relative importance assigned to selected educational goals by student teachers before their student teaching experience as compared to their assigned rankings after their student teaching experience; and 3) is there a relationship between any changes in the relative importance assigned by the student teachers prior and subsequent to the student teaching experience and the relative importance assigned by the cooperating teachers. To test the hypotheses under investigation, eighteen one-way analyses of variance with repeated measures were computed. Significant F ratios were found for two of the eighteen goals; the remaining F ratios were not statistically significant. The results suggest some tentative support for student teachers' goal prioritizations of two goals changing after the student teaching experience. Some tentative support was also suggested on these two goals for the student teachers' goal prioritizations changing after the student teaching experience to become more similar to the cooperating teacher' s goal prioritizations. However, the lack of significant change in sixteen of the eighteen goals more strongly suggested that the influence of a) the experience of the student teaching activity and b) the cooperating teachers' own goals prioritization biases upon the student teachers did not markedly affect student teacher goal prioritization behavior. The possibilities that the teacher groups had initial general agreement on goal priorities, that the goals may represent stable educational values, and that instrumentation concerns may have affected the results were then discussed.