Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2001. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains xi, 183, 2 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 156-158).

Doktorexamen--Uppsala universitet, 2006. / Bibliogr. p. 553-590. Résumé en anglais.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1581. Adviser: Michael B. Twidale. Includes bibliographical references. Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1985.

There are few doubts about the significance of science and technology for modern human culture and society. But as historians, we are still struggling to find appropriate descriptive terms to capture the broad processes of transformation brought about by “techno-science,” the merging of technical production and modern institutionalized science. This dissertation argues that the term “experience” may serve as such an analytic lens in the specific historical setting of German aviation research from the 1920s through 1945. I reconstruct, on the one hand, the theorization of experience as a concept by the technical physicist Paul von Handel, influenced by the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington’s distinction between "scientific" and "everyday" experience. On the other hand, I use the term as a historian’s analytic concept to investigate practices in the context of flight experiments that I take to be constitutive of my historical actors’ experiences. These are recordings of experimental pilots’ cognitive judgements and bodily actions, some of them—such as in-flight note taking—continuous with older cultural technologies. On both of these levels of analysis, I explore the different resonances of “experience” as a term with a legacy as a central epistemological concept in the modern sciences, and as capturing the changing everyday reality in an increasingly technicized environment. My analysis of the textual theorization and simultaneous practical constitution of "techno-scientific experience" serves to read in a new light the story of the pilot and physicist Melitta Schiller-Stauffenberg. Of Jewish descent, Schiller chose to work for the Luftwaffe, the German air force, until her death in 1945 on a flight searching for her husband, Count Alexander Stauffenberg, who was imprisoned after his brother’s failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. The concept and practical reality of “experience” are key to understanding the two striking choices Schiller made as intrinsically connected: the professional choice of working simultaneously as a pilot and a physicist, and the political choice of supporting the Reich’s war effort. Schiller’s story may be understood as exemplifying the fragile identity of the experiencing and the knowing self in 20th-century techno-scientific modernity. / History of Science

We describe a new file system that provides, at the same time, both name and content based access to files. To make this possible, we introduce the concept of a semantic directory. Every semantic directory has a query associated with it. When a user creates a semantic directory, the file system automatically creates a set of pointers to the files in the file system that satisfy the query associated with the directory. This set of pointers is called the query-result of the directory. To access the files that satisfy the query, users just need to de-reference the appropriate pointers. Users can also create files and sub-directories within semantic directories in the usual way. Hence, users can organize files in a hierarchy and access them by specifying path names, and at the same time, retrieve files by asking queries that describe their content. Our file system also provides facilities for query-refinement and customization. When a user creates a new semantic sub-directory within a semantic directory, the file system ensures that the query-result of the sub-directory is a subset of the query-result of its parent. Hence, users can create a hierarchy of semantic directories to refine their queries. Users can also edit the set of pointers in a semantic directory, and thereby modify its query-result without modifying its query or the files in the file system. In this way, users can customize the results of queries according to their personal tastes, and use customized results to refine queries in the future. Our file system has many other features, including semantic mount-points that allow users to access information in other file systems by content. The file system does not depend on the query language used for content-based access. Hence, it is possible to integrate any content-based access mechanism into our file system.

Scout is a new operating system architecture that is designed specifically to accommodate the needs of communication-centric systems. An important class of such systems is formed by information appliances, which, broadly speaking, are devices whose primary task is to facilitate communication. Appliances are typically relatively small, special-purpose, and often mobile devices such as remote controls, personal information managers, network-attached disks, cameras, displays, or dedicated file-servers. Scout has a modular structure that is complemented by a new abstraction called the path. The modular structure enables the efficient building of systems that are tailored precisely to the requirements of a particular appliance. Paths address issues related to the performance and quality with which a communication service is rendered. A path can be visualized as a vertical slice through a layered system or viewed abstractly as a bidirectional flow of data. As such, a path typically traverses multiple modules in a Scout system. This means that paths provide additional context to the modules that process data that is being communicated through the system. This context often makes it possible to implement data processing more efficiently or to improve the quality with which resource management, such as CPU scheduling or memory allocation, is realized. This dissertation develops the path abstraction from first principles and then introduces the various aspects of the Scout architecture. Aside from the path abstraction, Scout uses a novel approach for network packet classification. With the Scout architecture defined, two studies are presented that provide an in-depth look at how to use Scout and its path abstraction. The first study employs the path abstraction to reduce processing latency in the networking subsystem. Evaluating these path optimizations also provides important insights on the performance behavior of networking subsystems on modern RISC machines. The second study employs the path abstraction to improve resource management for an information appliance that involves a networked TV displaying MPEG encoded video.

This paper analyzes the Web and raises a significant question: "Does the Web save the time of the users?" This question is analyzed in the context of Five Laws of the Web. What do these laws mean? The laws are meant to be elemental, to convey a deep understanding and capture the essential meaning of the World Wide Web. These laws may seem simplistic, but in fact they express a simple, crystal-clear vision of what the Web ought to be. Moreover, we intend to echo the simplicity of Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science which inspired them.