Although previous research has examined how dependent and self-critical people recall their parents, there has been little investigation of the influence of Dependency and Self-Criticism on parental attitudes and behavior. The present research examined these relationships in mothers of adolescent children. In Studies 1, 2, and 3, mothers completed measures of Dependency and Self-Criticism and of baseline affect, then were given experimentally manipulated feedback about the child's competence and autonomy. Affect was assessed again, and mothers "coached" children on computer problem-solving puzzles. Studies 1 and 2 examined mothers of adolescent girls, and Study 3 examined mothers of adolescent boys. In mothers of adolescent girls, Dependency was associated with punitive and controlling reactions to daughter autonomy. This was also true of mothers of less competent adolescent sons. In mothers of highly competent sons, however, Dependency was associated with punitive and controlling reactions to low autonomy. Dependency was also associated with increases in depressed affect in response to daughter, but not son, autonomy. In mothers of adolescent girls, Self-Criticism was associated with punitive behavior, regardless of the manipulated characteristics of the daughters. This was true even when, in Study 2, the highly competent performance of daughters was made extremely salient. Self-Criticism had no discernible impact on the parental behavior of mothers of adolescent sons. These results were interpreted as indicating that, especially in mothers of adolescent daughters, parents high in Dependency and Self-Criticism interact with their children in ways that are likely to foster the development of Self-criticism and Dependency in their children. Study 4 examined the relationship between parent and child Dependency and Self-Criticism in the combined data collected from the first three studies. Contrary to expectations, there was no relationship between parent and child

Keeping a learner interested-and therefore engaged-in content to be mastered generally improves learning. One way to keep a learner interested is using seductive augmentation, which refers to the addition of entertaining text, graphics, sound, music, video or animation that is either irrelevant or only tangentially relevant to the learning objectives. Learner cognitive styles impact how individuals approach learning and problem-solving situations. With recent advances in technology, there has been an increased interest in the way such individual differences influence performance while learning. Research on the effects of cognitive styles has mainly focused on the role of field-dependence/independence. One of the recent advances in technology is the availability of virtual worlds as learning environments. This study investigated whether seductive augmentation in Second Life, a commonly used virtual world, affects the learning performance of field-dependent and field-independent education majors in an undergraduate class unit. A second focus of this study was to examine whether the computer self-efficacy of these learners changed after their two-month experience with the virtual world of Second Life. To determine if seductive augmentation in Second Life affects the achievement of field-dependent and field-independent learners differently, two different settings were designed in two different regions of Second Life. One setting was free of seductive augmentation, but the other setting included seductive augmentation in the forms of music, animation, text, videos and games. Thirty-six participants self-selected to the seductive setting and 48 to the non-seductive setting. The participants were pre- and post-tested on the instructional content presented both in Second Life and in real life classes; furthermore, to examine the influence on learners' computer self-efficacy, pre- and post-computer self-efficacy surveys were administered. The results of the study were obtained through two independent mixed-model factorial analyses of variance with repeats on the third factor (time) for achievement and computer self-efficacy scores. For the main effects, results indicated no significance for the between-group factors of field-dependency and seductiveness or for their interaction with either achievement scores or computer self-efficacy scores. The only significant factor was time as the main within-group factor for achievement scores. Therefore, the study did not find seductive augmentation effect in Second Life. In addition, there was no detectable change in the participants' computer self-efficacy as a result of their experience in this virtual world. The results of the present study contradict the findings of some previous research and support others.

Emerging consensus tends to suggest there is overwhelming American dominance of New Zealand radio in music. This study sets out to investigate such claims by looking at music, and incorporating a study of technology, announcing and programming as well. There is evidence emerging that instead of overwhelming dominance, there is a mixture of American as well as British influence. Foreign influence in the radio scene has been apparent since the time it became a popular addition to the New Zealand household in the 1920’s. Over the following decades, the radio industry has turned to the dominant Anglo-American players for guidance and inspiration. Now with a maturing local industry that is becoming more confident in its own skin, this reliance on foreign industry is coming under question regarding its effect on indigenous culture. The cultural cringe is slowly disappearing, but what is replacing it has been the centre of cultural debate. Utilising methods of content analysis and interviews, we set out to question which theory best describes the new landscape that the radio industry finds itself in, and how this is affecting the production of content received by the listening public. Working within a framework of cultural imperialism and hybridity, the findings indicate a complex mixture of the local and the global that could not be explained by simplistic notions of hybridity.

Investigating maternal investment (Ml) and mother-offspring relationships during the period of infant dependency is critically important to furthering the understanding of female reproductive strategies in primates. Infant primates are completely dependent upon their mothers. The way in which a mother allocates her resources therefore is crucial for infant survival, but is balanced Against her need to invest in subsequent offspring. One approach to examining how mothers might invest in their offspring stems from the Trivers & Willard hypothesis (TWH, 1973), which predicts that mothers in good condition should bias their investment towards sons and whereas mothers in poorer condition should bias investment toward daughters. Long-term demographic records on birth sex ratio and inter-birth interval suggest that female mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) do not bias investment prenatally, but they may adjust postnatal Ml according to the TWH. This study investigated Ml and mother-offspring relationships in wild mountain gorillas, using behavioural correlates of Ml, including suckling, weaned age, physical contact, "transport, and grooming to redress the lack of understanding about Ml in this species. The appropriateness of TWH was investigated, integrating different indicators of maternal condition. Important determinants of Ml and mother-offspring relationships were considered, such as offspring age, parity, presence of siblings and maternal relatives, group size and lastly, personality, which has been largely neglected in nonhuman primates. The extent, to which the offspring influenced Ml patterns, was examined using the parent-offspring conflict theory (Trivers, 1972) as a theoretical framework. During 2006-2007, 38 mother-offspring dyads were observed in the Virunga massif, resulting in 1210 hours of direct behavioural observation. Additional field data from the previous four decades were integrated into the dataset for the analysis of suckling and weaned age. Gorilla personality was assessed through the Hominoid Personality Questionnaire. Findings relating to suckling frequency, weaned age, and maternal feeding activities were consistent with the TWH: sons suckled more often than daughters when they had mothers in good condition, whereas the reverse sex-pattern occurred in offspring with mothers in poorer condition. In addition, daughters were weaned at an earlier age than sons when mothers were in better condition, although this sex-difference reduced in older mothers that were categorised as being in good condition. Maternal feeding time and feeding efficiency revealed that mothers in poorer condition spent more time ingesting food when they had daughters, whereas mothers in better .condition spent more time ingesting food when they had sons. Furthermore, group size affected lactation duration with offspring in small groups being weaned earlier than offspring in large groups. Behavioural conflicts over Ml showed that the mother and offspring influenced Ml patterns during the period of dependency. Finally, six personality dimensions were identified, of which five revealed effects maternal behaviour, such as maternal retrieval, responsiveness and rejection, although their relative importance varied between those behaviours. In general, mother and offspring personality effects were complex due to their interactions with the developmental stage of offspring. In conclusion, my thesis research has made several novel contributions to furthering the understanding of female reproductive strategies in the highly endangered mountain gorilla. I presented the first evidence using behavioural data that females bias their postnatal investment towards the sex with the greatest fitness return as predicted by the TWH. My findings are discussed in the light of alternative Ml strategies, such as the local resource competition and enhancement model. My research has highlighted the importance of integrating anthropometric and physiological measures and demographic long-term data into future Ml studies to assess direct costs and benefits of Ml. The examination of mother-offspring behavioural conflicts showed that offspring have a strong impact on the level of Ml they receive. I have also examined the personality of a wild mountain gorilla population for the first time. My findings demonstrate that personality-parenting links are evident in several respects and I have demonstrated the great potential of personality as a determinant of maternal behaviour and mother-offspring relationships.

Software testing has been integrated within software development life cycle due to its importance in assuring software quality, software safety, and customers' satisfaction. However, problems in software testing are prominent among software developers as system grows in size and complexity. Dependency injection becomes an appealing solution for developers with its practicality to improve software design, improve testability, and enable mock testing technique. The study aims to discover the extent to which the dependency injection facilitates software design and software testing. In addition, the effect of mock practice on testing is also assessed. Metrics for investigation are defined and measured on various aspects of two systems. The two systems are selected and developed based on the same user requirements, development technologies, and methodologies. By comparing the two systems against the investigated metrics, we aim to reveal whether the dependency injection improve the code design. Then four test suites from both systems are evaluated in relation to testability. The results demonstrate that the dependency injection does not seem to improve the code design if comparing on the selected metrics. Even though it does not score better, its effect is evident in other software aspects. The testability of the two systems is similar and suffers from the same problem. Meanwhile, mock helps assist software testing and improve testability. The effect of mock technique can be witnessed, especially when it is applied with other test techniques. Explanations and discussions on these findings are addressed in the paper.

The organization of software systems into subsystems is usually based on the constructs of packages or modules and has a major impact on the maintainability of the software. However, during software evolution, the organization of the system is subject to continual modification, which can cause it to drift away from the original design, often with the effect of reducing its quality. A number of techniques for evaluating a system's maintainability and for controlling the effort required to conduct maintenance activities involve software clustering. Software clustering refers to the partitioning of software system components into clusters in order to obtain both exterior and interior connectivity between these components. It helps maintainers enhance the quality of software modularization and improve its maintainability. Research in this area has produced numerous algorithms with a variety of methodologies and parameters. This thesis presents a novel ensemble approach that synthesizes a new solution from the outcomes of multiple constituent clustering algorithms. The main principle behind this approach derived from machine learning, as applied to document clustering, but it has been modified, both conceptually and empirically, for use in software clustering. The conceptual modifications include working with a variable number of clusters produced by the input algorithms and employing graph structures rather than feature vectors. The empirical modifications include experiments directed at the selection of the optimal cluster merging criteria. Case studies based on open source software systems show that establishing cooperation between leading state-of-the-art algorithms produces better clustering results compared with those achieved using only one of any of the algorithms considered.

In November 2013, the Islamic Republic of Iran reached an interim agreement with six world powers, including the United States. After the agreement was implemented in January 2014, Iran froze uranium enrichment in exchange for limited sanctions relief from the United States. This was the first diplomatic exchange between the United States and Iran in over thirty years. Keeping Iran from the Bomb analyzes how each country’s respective domestic politics and stereotypes of the other have, until recently, impeded diplomacy between the two nations. This study examines American-Iranian relations during the hostage crisis, the Bush administration, and the Obama administration to do the following: analyze what has prevented diplomacy in the past, explain the circumstances that made the interim agreement possible, and show what factors threaten this diplomatic progress. The primary argument of this thesis is that the leaders of both the United States and Iran are encouraged, and often rewarded, by various entities to demonize the other nation. If the leaders of the United States and Iran can convince their domestic constituents that continued cooperation with the other country will be beneficial, diplomacy can move forward.

Software reuse is prevalent in software development. It is not uncommon that one software product may depend on numerous libraries/products in order to build, install, or run. Software reuse is difficult due to the complex interdependency relationships between software packages. In this work, we presented four approaches to retrieve such dependency information, each technique focuses on retrieving software dependency from a specific source, including source code, build scripts, binary files, and Debian spec. The presented techniques were realized by a prototype tool, DEx, which is applied to a large collection of Debian projects in a comprehensive evaluation. Through the comprehensive analysis, we evaluate the presented techniques, and compare them from various aspects. / Graduate

This qualitative research seeks to improve our understanding of the relatively under-researched phenomenon of repeat teenage pregnancies, by exploring the underlying factors and meanings that teenagers ascribe to their pregnancies. The study uses a comparative approach to provide a comprehensive psychosocial and economic understanding of the factors leading to repeat teenage pregnancies. This is achieved by exploring both the diverse and similar experiences of two groups of teenagers within different socio-economic environments - one group of 26 respondents from the Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Barbados and the other group of 26 respondents from London. The research also capitalises on a unique opportunity to contextualize the welfare dependency/teenage pregnancy discourse. The behaviours, motivations, values and attitudes of young women who become repeatedly pregnant in a Welfare state such as England, are compared with those living in countries with limited state resources and few state benefits. The comparison shows that in the latter case, the lack of state intervention can have the disempowering impact of fostering dependency in many insidious forms. The findings demonstrate the very powerful influence that both intentional and hidden or masked factors can have on a young woman's decision to repeat a pregnancy. The intrinsic relationship between the personal driving forces of the young women and their repeated pregnancies is convincingly highlighted. These driving forces are accompanied by very strong and deep-rooted beliefs in the importance of motherhood and fertility, as well as anti-abortion views. When these factors are added to economic stringency, they provide the fuel for a young woman's journey into repeat pregnancies. The findings therefore caution against a reliance on a mechanistic understanding of both single and repeat teenage pregnancies and emphasise the fact that social, psychological, and emotional processes, as well as the economic influences, are also crucial to our understanding of repeat teenage pregnancies.

Recovery is a time-consuming and computationally expensive operation. If an attacker can affect heavily-shared objects on the machine, then many other processes and files can be compromised from accessing them. This would greatly increase the recovery effort. Since intrusions start with a network connection, we argue that the integrity of heavily-shared objects should be protected from the network, in order to minimize the recovery effort. We discuss our prototype Rosie, which is designed with incident response and post-intrusion recovery in mind. Rosie predicts how heavily-shared each file or process is, based on the previous system activities observed. Rosie enforces appropriate mandatory access control and uses techniques such as sandboxing, in order to protect heavily-shared objects’ integrity. Rosie provides an important recovery guarantee that the maximum number of files need to be recovered is at most equal to the dependency threshold, a value that can be adjusted by a system administrator.