The energy crisis of 2001, high prices for gas and electricity and worries of climate change have caused a growing awareness about energy issues in California. The problems are clear. This paper looks at the next step of finding and implementing solutions. In this case the contribution that solar photovoltaic and solar thermal generation could make toward solving the problem. This paper looks at technological change, the current state of solar energy research, current government policies on solar energy, and finally makes policy recommendations to meet the stated problem.

À l’époque d’internet, de la littéracie en ligne, des relations faciles sur le plan documentaire et international, comment peut s’expliquer, en Occident, en Europe et particulièrement en France, l’existence et la survivance d’une pratique didactique aussi ancienne que le cours magistral ?On peut penser qu’au-delà de sa fonction première qui est de transmettre du savoir, il a d’autres fonctions et d’autres utilités, qui en justifient l’existence, à côté des autres formes sociales de transmission du savoir, souvent plus commodes et ouvertes. Quelles sont-elles ? Le CM serait finalement un grand inconnu, avec des dimensions explicites connues mais aussi implicites à découvrir, à savoir un canal de la transmission des savoir-penser, un réservoir des valeurs éthiques et morales et enfin une source de repères en vue d’établir un modèle de société.Reste, entre autres, une dernière question sur le plan didactique : Comment préparer ou aider les étudiants à accéder à cette part « sociale » du CM ? C’est à éclaircir ces questions que s’attache cette recherche, par l’étude détaillée de trois CM de disciplines diverses, à savoir la Psychologie de l’adolescence, la Macroéconomie et le Droit civil, enregistrés à l’UJM de St Etienne, transcrits et soumis à une macro puis micro-analyse du discours. / In this era of Internet, of online literacy, of easy linkage via documentation globally, how can we explain an interesting phenomenon in the West, in Europe continent and especially in France, the existence and the persistence of a didactic practice as old as the lecture? We propose that beyond its primary function, which is to transmit knowledge, it has other functions and other utilities. These functions and utilities justify its existence, alongside with other social forms of transmission of knowledge which are often more convenient and open. So what are those functions and utilities? Although the lectures (CM – cours magistral) as a whole would still be a great unknown, there are some known but implicit aspects waiting to be discovered, namely a channel of transmission of knowledge and way of thinking, a reservoir of ethical-moral values and finally a source of benchmarks for a model of society.Among other important questions, there is a particular interesting and useful question on the sociodidactic plan: how to prepare or to help students access this “social” aspect of the lectures?The objective of this research is to clarify the above issues, by the method of detailed study of three lectures from various disciplines, which are Psychology of adolescence, Macroeconomy and Civil Law, recorded at University of Jean-Monnet, Saint-Etienne. These lectures are then transcribed and subjected to macro-analysis and after that also micro-analysis of speech.

M.Ed. / Academic staff development is seen as a vehicle of empowerment that focuses on assisting individual members of staff to acquire knowledge, understanding and skills needed to teaceffectively. A great number of South African Higher Education institutions have made inroads and advances with regard to academic staff development programmes. However many such programmes are usually general to all staff members including administrators and professionals and do not address the specific needs of academics. Managers often plan these programmes without consulting the envisaged participants or conducting any needs assessment despite the literature on academic staff development emphasising the importance of conducting a proper needs assessment. As a result academic staff members in these institutions still feel left behind when it comes to academic issues affecting them directly, such as an absence of continuous staff development and the development of their research and academic writing skills. Many academics feel that such programmes are irrelevant and boring and do not attend. Based on the above the aim of this study was to explore the needs of academics within the Education Department of Vista University Soweto Campus in order to arrive at an informed understanding of such needs for the purpose of informing future academic staff development programme planning. For the purposes of this study qualitative research was conducted using semi-structured interviews with a purposefully selected sample of eleven academics within the Education Department in order to ascertain their academic staff development needs. Data were analysed using the constant comparative method. The findings of the research reveal that the majority of the academics were dissatisfied about the manner in which academic staff development activities are planned and conducted. Among the factors mentioned, the following feature prominently: the need for continuous staff development; the necessity of conducting a proper needs assessment prior to planning academic staff developmental programmes, the needs of the academics in acquiring the skills for research and academic writing, and the availability of more funding for staff development activities. This report concludes with a number of recommendations for planning with regard to academic staff development programmes.

Studies show that the use of narratives enhances the lecture method of teaching. The model and manual developed in this study focus on the needs of lecturers who require creative guidance in all aspects of creating and using didactic narratives. This study suggests that the subject content of a lecture has a deep structure that can be used to generate the surface structure of a didactic narrative. The model and manual are informed by theories and models from a variety of disciplines that have been adapted for analyzing subject content, transforming subject content structure into a parallel narrative structure, and integrating the narrative into lecture.

This dissertation investigates William Henry Jackson’s photographs for an international scouting and fact-finding mission, the World’s Transportation Commission, and the multivalent meaning the images possessed for period patrons and audiences in four contexts. I argue that Jackson visually constructed a homogenous global frontier of economic imperialism that channeled and advanced burgeoning expansionist ideologies in American cultural and political realms during the 1890s. Organized under the auspices of the Field Columbian Museum, the World’s Transportation Commission consisted of five members, including Jackson, who traveled the world between October 1894 and March 1896 seeking information and artifacts regarding railroad history for display at the museum. The Commission also received funding from five major American railroad tycoons, as well as from Harper’s Weekly, which published forty-five articles between February 1895 and August 1897 that featured 372 Jackson photographs. After returning, Jackson presented these pictures as colored lantern slides in a stereopticon lecture series in Colorado throughout spring 1897. Each chapter of this dissertation focuses on one of the four patrons and contexts for which Jackson intended his images and in which they were seen. Chapter One investigates the intended function of these images as didactic objects within a public context for the Field Columbian Museum. The second chapter positions Jackson’s work for five industrialist patrons as an imperial scouting report that studied existing colonial railway systems as models for possible future deployment of corporate interventions throughout Latin America. Chapter Three analyzes the popular cultural dissemination of Jackson’s photographs in Harpers Weekly and the complicated intersections between photographer and editors working to captivate armchair tourists while forwarding notions of ostensible American moral superiority and global hegemony. Chapter Four examines Jackson’s stereopticon lecture tour and his presentation of a hand-colored spectacle within the context of personal entrepreneurial gain. In this final, unmediated venue, Jackson shifted his photographic focus towards a seemingly candid, snapshot approach. My analysis of these four contexts and applications demonstrate how Jackson pictorially destroyed existing worlds of indigenous customs and perspectives, and replaced them with a new, unified vision of an international commercial frontier ripe for exploitation.

Depuis leur émergence autour de 2006, les technologies de séquençage haut débit ont révolutionné la recherche biologique et médicale. Obtenir instantanément une grande quantité de courtes ou longues lectures de presque tout échantillon biologique permet de détecter des variantes génomiques, révéler la composition en espèces d’un métagénome, déchiffrer la biologie du cancer, décoder l'évolution d’espèces vivantes ou disparues, ou mieux comprendre les schémas de la migration humaine et l'histoire humaine en général. La vitesse à laquelle augmente le débit des technologies de séquençage dépasse la croissance des capacités de calcul et de stockage, ce qui crée de nouveaux défis informatiques dans le traitement de données de séquençage haut débit. Dans cette thèse, nous présentons de nouvelles techniques informatiques pour la localisation (mapping) de lectures dans un génome de référence et pour la classification taxonomique. Avec plus d'une centaine d’outils de localisation publiés, ce problème peut être considéré comme entièrement résolu. Cependant, une grande majorité de programmes suivent le même paradigme et trop peu d'attention a été accordée à des approches non-standards. Ici, nous introduisons la localisation dynamique dont nous montrons qu’elle améliore significativement les alignements obtenus, par comparaison avec les approches traditionnelles. La localisation dynamique est basée sur l'exploitation de l'information fournie par les alignements calculés précédemment, afin d’améliorer les alignements des lectures suivantes. Nous faisons une première étude systématique de cette approche et démontrons ses qualités à l'aide de Dynamic Mapping Simulator, une pipeline pour comparer les différents scénarios de la localisation dynamique avec la localisation statique et le “référencement itératif”. Une composante importante de la localisation dynamique est un calculateur du consensus online, c’est-à-dire un programme qui collecte des statistiques des alignements pour guider, à la volée, les mises à jour de la référence. Nous présentons OCOCO, calculateur du consensus online qui maintient des statistiques des positions génomiques individuelles à l’aide de compteurs de bits compacts. Au-delà de son application à la localisation dynamique, OCOCO peut être utilisé comme un calculateur de SNP online dans divers pipelines d'analyse, ce qui permet de prédire des SNP à partir d'un flux sans avoir à enregistrer les alignements sur disque. Classification métagénomique de lectures d’ADN est un autre problème majeur étudié dans la thèse. Etant donné des milliers de génomes de référence placés sur un arbre taxonomique, le problème consiste à affecter rapidement aux nœuds de l'arbre une énorme quantité de lectures NGS, et éventuellement estimer l'abondance relative des espèces concernées. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons des techniques améliorées pour cette tâche. Dans une série d'expériences, nous montrons que les graines espacées améliorent la précision de la classification. Nous présentons Seed-Kraken, extension sur les graines espacées du logiciel populaire Kraken. En outre, nous introduisons une nouvelle stratégie d'indexation basée sur le transformé de Burrows-Wheeler (BWT), qui donne lieu à un indice beaucoup plus compact et plus informatif par rapport à Kraken. Nous présentons une version modifiée du logiciel BWA qui améliore l’index BWT pour la localisation rapide de k-mers / Since their emergence around 2006, Next-Generation Sequencing technologies have been revolutionizing biological and medical research. Obtaining instantly an extensive amount of short or long reads from almost any biological sample enables detecting genomic variants, revealing the composition of species in a metagenome, deciphering cancer biology, decoding the evolution of living or extinct species, or understanding human migration patterns and human history in general. The pace at which the throughput of sequencing technologies is increasing surpasses the growth of storage and computer capacities, which still creates new computational challenges in NGS data processing. In this thesis, we present novel computational techniques for the problems of read mapping and taxonomic classification. With more than a hundred of published mappers, read mapping might be considered fully solved. However, the vast majority of mappers follow the same paradigm and only little attention has been paid to non-standard mapping approaches. Here, we propound the so-called dynamic mapping that we show to significantly improve the resulting alignments compared to traditional mapping approaches. Dynamic mapping is based on exploiting the information from previously computed alignments, helping to improve the mapping of subsequent reads. We provide the first comprehensive overview of this method and demonstrate its qualities using Dynamic Mapping Simulator, a pipeline that compares various dynamic mapping scenarios to static mapping and iterative referencing. An important component of a dynamic mapper is an online consensus caller, i.e., a program collecting alignment statistics and guiding updates of the reference in the online fashion. We provide OCOCO, the first online consensus caller that implements a smart statistics for individual genomic positions using compact bit counters. Beyond its application to dynamic mapping, OCOCO can be employed as an online SNP caller in various analysis pipelines, enabling calling SNPs from a stream without saving the alignments on disk. Metagenomic classification of NGS reads is another major problem studied in the thesis. Having a database of thousands reference genomes placed on a taxonomic tree, the task is to rapidly assign to tree nodes a huge amount of NGS reads, and possibly estimate the relative abundance of involved species. In this thesis, we propose improved computational techniques for this task. In a series of experiments, we show that spaced seeds consistently improve the classification accuracy. We provide Seed-Kraken, a spaced seed extension of Kraken, the most popular classifier at present. Furthermore, we suggest a new indexing strategy based on a BWT-index, obtaining a much smaller and more informative index compared to Kraken. We provide a modified version of BWA that improves the BWT-index for a quick k-mer look-up

E-lectures (recorded lectures) is a modern way of giving lectures to students while freeing time for teachers to do other activities like having workshops where students get to work actively on solving problems. There is a large body of studies that show the positive effects of e-lectures on students' performance, activating them in teacher led work in the classroom as well as enabling them to re-watch a lecture. However, even though the technology and knowledge on how to use e-lectures seems to be available, the use of e-lectures has not been broadly adopted. There may be many reasons for why this is the case and this qualitative study aims to give insight into the teachers attitude towards e-lectures. This study is based on eight interviews with teachers mainly from the department of informatics and one from the department of physics. The result shows that the teachers have an open attitude towards e-lectures and other alternative learning methods. However, the opinion on how much e-lectures can contribute to students' learning varies and might be due to the lack of knowledge or experience. There is also no consensus regarding how well made the e-lectures should be and some respondents feel that high expectations might refrain teachers from pursuing e-lectures.

The problem of this study was to determine the relationship between preference of experienced secondary teachers to instruct by the Group or Lecture method, their subject field, and selected personality traits.

xii, 261 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Jorge Semprun, survivor of Buchenwald, intends to "make testimony a space of creation". The formal inventiveness of the novel allows him to express the truth of his experience by creating a reflexive textual space in which the author is presented in the act of writing, and the reader is called to realize his/her active part in the constitution of narrative meanings. Author and reader thus collaborate on establishing the ethical relationship of testimony. My dissertation examines the formal characteristics of Semprun's novelistic representation of history to describe its relationship to political discourse in particular and to highlight the aesthetic autonomy of the novel, which defines the specificity of literature's approach to history. Semprun develops this aesthetic through multiple narrative innovations and a conception of narration as performance, where Saying is distinct from the Said (Levinas). This performative dimension of the narration is described in this work through a phenomenological notion of reading centered on the interpretative and imaginary activities brought into play by the reading subject. The contrast between narrative aesthetics and ideological discourse defines both Semprun's writing strategies and the function attributed to the reader in these texts. Becoming aware of the author's motivations and rhetorical processes, which explicitly multiply interpretative trajectories within the text, the reader realizes that the stakes of testimony reside in the act of reading, a reading that is engaged, participative, and perpetually renewed. By special agreement, this dissertation was co-directed by Professor Massimo Lollini of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon and Professor Jean-Pierre Martin of Faculté des Lettres, Sciences du Langage et Arts of the Université Lumière-Lyon 2 (France), in partial fulfillment of doctoral degrees from both universities. This dissertation is written in French. / Committee in charge: Massimo Lollini, Chairperson, Romance Languages; Gina Herrmann, Member, Romance Languages; Francoise Calin, Member, Romance Languages; George Sheridan, Outside Member, History

Ce travail prend pour point de départ Leçons sur les hypothèses cosmogoniques de Henri Poincaré, ouvrage qui est issu de son cours à la Sorbonne et l'une de ses dernières publications. L'objectif du travail est de restituer la pensée cosmologique du mathématicien et de l'inscrire dans l'histoire de la cosmologie, proposant une introduction aux Leçons et une grille de lectures historiques et philosophiques de cet ouvrage autour de deux axes : la cosmologie classique et la philosophie poincaréenne. La première partie est consacrée à la science classique qui oscille entre la possibilité d'une cosmogonie mécaniste et l'impossibilité d'une cosmologie en tant que science. L'ambivalence s'observe chez les auteurs des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles notamment Kant et Laplace avec leur hypothèse cosmogonique, jusqu'au XIXe siècle qui reste récitent à s'étendre au-delà du système solaire et développer une cosmologie proprement dite. La seconde partie de la thèse vise une lecture systématique de l'œuvre de Poincaré à partir des trois ouvrages philosophiques composés et édités par lui-même comme La science et l'hypothèse. La lecture procède en trois temps, autour de trois problèmes : 1° la stabilité et le mécanisme, mis en question par la thermodynamique et le probabilisme (avant 1900) ; 2° la loi et le principe en mécanique et en physique, notamment le principe de relativité et le second principe de la thermodynamique, mis en question par le développement de la physique (1900-1905) ; 3° l'espace, mis en lumière par la nouvelle mécanique et la théorie cinétique (après 1905). Chaque problème est ouvert ou dirigé vers la problématique cosmologique, sans pour autant qu'elle soit poursuivie dans le concret ni dépasser le niveau conceptuel. Ainsi Poincaré est amené aux hypothèses cosmogoniques, pour finir par une philosophie plutôt qu'une cosmologie. / This study takes as a primary source Lectures on Cosmogonic Hypotheses of Henri Poincaré, which was originally his course at the Sorbonne and one of his last publications. With the main objective to understand the cosmological thinking of Poincaré and its place in the history of cosmology, I propose an introduction to Lectures and its historical and philosophical reading around two axes: classical cosmology and Poincaré's philosophy. The first part is devoted to Classical Science to show how it seeks both the possibility of a mechanistic cosmogony and the impossibility of a cosmology as a science. This ambivalence can be seen in authors of the 17th and 18th centuries, especially Kant and Laplace with their cosmogonic hypothesis, as well as in the 19th century, when cosmological thinking remained speculative and restricted to the solar system, despite the advance of astronomy and physics, both in theory and observation. The second part suggests a systematic reading of Poincaré's philosophy from three philosophical books composed and edited by himself such as Science and Hypothesis. The reading proceeds in three steps, divided by a chronological order which is also thematic and problematic: (1) stability and mechanism, questioned by thermodynamics and probability theory (before 1900); (2) law and principle of mechanics and physics, especially the principle of relativity and the second principle of thermodynamics (1900-1905); 3 ° space, in the light of the new mechanics and the kinetic theory of gases (after 1905). Each problem shows its own cosmological moment that remains at the conceptual rather than the concrete level. Thus Poincaré is led to cosmogonic hypotheses, ending with a philosophy rather than a cosmology.