Global ETD Search

81	Evolving Information Technology: A Case Study of the Effects of Constant Change on Information Technology Instructional Design Architecture Helps, C. Richard G. 02 December 2010 (has links) (PDF) A major challenge for Information Technology (IT) programs is that the rapid pace of evolution of computing technology leads to frequent redesign of IT courses. The problem is exacerbated by several factors. Firstly, the changing technology is the subject matter of the discipline and is also frequently used to support instruction; secondly, this discipline has only been formalized as a four-year university program within recent years and there is a lack of established textbooks and curriculum models; finally, updating courses is seldom rewarded in a higher education system that favors research and teaching for promotion and tenure. Thus, continuously updating their courses place a significant burden on the faculty. A case study approach was used to describe and explain the change processes in updating IT courses. Several faculty members at two institutions were interviewed and course changes were identified and analyzed. The analysis revealed a set of recurrent themes in change processes. An instructional design architecture approach also revealed a set of design domains representing the structure of the change processes. The design domains were analyzed in terms of the design decisions they represented, and also in terms of structures, functions and activities, which are related to Structures-Behaviors-Functions (SBF) analysis. The design domains model helped to explain both negative and positive outcomes that were observed in the data. When design efforts impact multiple domains the design is likely to be more difficult. Understanding the design domain architecture will assist future designers in this discipline. Instructional Design Architecture Instructional Design Layers Structures Behaviors Functions Analysis Design decisions Design Domains Evolving Technology Information Technology Course Design Rate of Change of Information Technology Instructional Design Theory Educational Psychology
82	<b>AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EFFECT OF LIGAND STRUCTURE ON CATALYTIC ACTIVITY IN WATER OXIDATION CATALYSIS MECHANISMS</b> Gabriel S Bury (18403716) 20 April 2024 (has links) <p dir="ltr">Insights from research into the natural photosynthetic processes are applied to inform the rational design of inorganic catalysts. The study of these synthetic systems – artificial photosynthesis – will lead towards the development of a device able to absorb light, convert and store the energy in the form of chemical bonds. The water-splitting reaction, a bottleneck of the photosynthetic process, is a key barrier to overcome in this endeavor. Thus, the focused study of water-oxidation catalysts able to facilitate this difficult reaction is performed, in order to develop a green-energy solution in the form of an artificial photosynthesis system.</p> Catalysis and mechanisms of reactions Chemical thermodynamics and energetics Electrochemistry Biological physics water oxidation catalysis (WOC) oxygen evolving complex (OEC) ruthenium water oxidation catalysts Water Splitting Reaction Photosynthesis Physical Chemistry Biophysics XAS DFT EPR Oxygen Evolution Reaction
83	Non-equilibrium strongly-correlated dynamics Johnson, Tomi Harry January 2013 (has links) We study non-equilibrium and strongly-correlated dynamics in two contexts. We begin by analysing quantum many-body systems out of equilibrium through the lens of cold atomic impurities in Bose gases. Such highly-imbalanced mixtures provide a controlled arena for the study of interactions, dissipation, decoherence and transport in a many-body quantum environment. Specifically we investigate the oscillatory dynamics of a trapped and initially highly-localised impurity interacting with a weakly-interacting trapped quasi low-dimensional Bose gas. This relates to and goes beyond a recent experiment by the Inguscio group in Florence. We witness a delicate interplay between the self-trapping of the impurity and the inhomogeneity of the Bose gas, and describe the dissipation of the energy of the impurity through phononic excitations of the Bose gas. We then study the transport of a driven, periodically-trapped impurity through a quasi one-dimensional Bose gas. We show that placing the weakly-interacting Bose gas in a separate periodic potential leads to a phononic excitation spectrum that closely mimics those in solid state systems. As a result we show that the impurity-Bose gas system exhibits phonon-induced resonances in the impurity current that were predicted to occur in solids decades ago but never clearly observed. Following this, allowing the bosons to interact strongly, we predict the effect of different strongly-correlated phases of the Bose gas on the motion of the impurity. We show that, by observing the impurity, properties of the excitation spectrum of the Bose gas, e.g., gap and bandwidth, may be inferred along with the filling of the bosonic lattice. In other words the impurity acts as a probe of its environment. To describe the dynamics of such a strongly-correlated system we use the powerful and near-exact time-evolving block decimation (TEBD) method, which we describe in detail. The second part of this thesis then analyses, for the first time, the performance of this method when applied to simulate non-equilibrium classical stochastic processes. We study its efficacy for a well-understood model of transport, the totally-asymmetric exclusion process, and find it to be accurate. Next, motivated by the inefficiency of sampling-based numerical methods for high variance observables we adapt and apply TEBD to simulate a path-dependent observable whose variance increases exponentially with system size. Specifically we calculate the expected value of the exponential of the work done by a varying magnetic field on a one-dimensional Ising model undergoing Glauber dynamics. We confirm using Jarzynski's equality that the TEBD method remains accurate and efficient. Therefore TEBD and related methods complement and challenge the usual Monte Carlo-based simulators of non-equilibrium stochastic processes. 530.41
84	Réalisation d'un réseau de neurones "SOM" sur une architecture matérielle adaptable et extensible à base de réseaux sur puce "NoC" / Neural Network Implementation on an Adaptable and Scalable Hardware Architecture based-on Network-on-Chip Abadi, Mehdi 07 July 2018 (has links) Depuis son introduction en 1982, la carte auto-organisatrice de Kohonen (Self-Organizing Map : SOM) a prouvé ses capacités de classification et visualisation des données multidimensionnelles dans différents domaines d’application. Les implémentations matérielles de la carte SOM, en exploitant le taux de parallélisme élevé de l’algorithme de Kohonen, permettent d’augmenter les performances de ce modèle neuronal souvent au détriment de la flexibilité. D’autre part, la flexibilité est offerte par les implémentations logicielles qui quant à elles ne sont pas adaptées pour les applications temps réel à cause de leurs performances temporelles limitées. Dans cette thèse nous avons proposé une architecture matérielle distribuée, adaptable, flexible et extensible de la carte SOM à base de NoC dédiée pour une implantation matérielle sur FPGA. A base de cette approche, nous avons également proposé une architecture matérielle innovante d’une carte SOM à structure croissante au cours de la phase d’apprentissage / Since its introduction in 1982, Kohonen’s Self-Organizing Map (SOM) showed its ability to classify and visualize multidimensional data in various application fields. Hardware implementations of SOM, by exploiting the inherent parallelism of the Kohonen algorithm, allow to increase the overall performances of this neuronal network, often at the expense of the flexibility. On the other hand, the flexibility is offered by software implementations which on their side are not suited for real-time applications due to the limited time performances. In this thesis we proposed a distributed, adaptable, flexible and scalable hardware architecture of SOM based on Network-on-Chip (NoC) designed for FPGA implementation. Moreover, based on this approach we also proposed a novel hardware architecture of a growing SOM able to evolve its own structure during the learning phase Réseau de neurones artificiels (RNA) Carte auto-organisatrice (SOM) Réseau sur puce (NoC) Architecture auto-adaptable Réseau de neurones évolutif Artificial neural network (ANN) Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) Network-on-Chip (NoC) Multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) Self-adaptive architecture Evolving Artificial Neural Networks 621.381 5 006.32
85	Distributed Immersive Participation : Realising Multi-Criteria Context-Centric Relationships on an Internet of Things Walters, Jamie January 2014 (has links) Advances in Internet-of-Things integrate sensors and actuators in everyday items or even people transforming our society at an accelerated pace. This occurs in areas such as agriculture, logistics, transport, healthcare, and smart cities and has created new ways to interact with and experience entertainment, (serious) games, education, etc. Common to these domains is the challenge to realize and maintain complex relations with any object or individual globally, with the requirement for immediacy in maintaining relations of varying complexity. Existing architectures for maintaining relations on the Internet, e.g., DNS and search engines are insufficient in meeting these challenges. Their deficiencies mandate the research presented in this dissertation enabling the maintenance of dynamic and multi-criteria relationships among entities in real-time in an Internet-of-Things while minimizing the overall cost for maintaining such context-centric relationships. A second challenge is the need to represent nearness in context-centric relationships, since solutions need to build on what is closely related. The dissertation shows that the proximity on relations can be used to bring about the scalability of maintaining relationships across the IoT. It successfully demonstrates the concept and feasibility of self-organizing context-centric overlay networks for maintaining scalable and real-time relationships between endpoints co-located with associated physical entities. This is complemented by an object model for annotating objects and their relationships as derived and defined over the underpinning context interactions. Complementing measures of nearness are added through a non-metric multi-criteria approach to evaluating the notion of context proximity. A query language and an extension to the publish-subscribe approaches achieves distributed support for discovering such relationships; locating entities relative to a defined hyper-sphere of interest. Furthermore, it introduces adaptive algorithms for maintaining such relationships at minimal overall costs. The results demonstrate the feasibility of moving towards context-centric approaches to immersion and that such approaches are realizable over vast and distributed heterogeneous collections of user and their associated context information. pervasive computing ubiquitous computing mediasense context context awareness context centric peer-to-peer immersive participation multi-criteria context context proximity context distance evolving context context-aware query languages publish.subscribe distributed context awareness sensor information context information context models context relationships context relations
86	Automatic classification of dynamic graphs / Classification automatique de graphes dynamiques Neggaz, Mohammed Yessin 24 October 2016 (has links) Les réseaux dynamiques sont constitués d’entités établissant des contacts les unes avec les autres dans le temps. Un défi majeur dans les réseaux dynamiques est de prédire les modèles de mobilité et de décider si l’évolution de la topologie satisfait aux exigences du succès d’un algorithme donné. Les types de dynamique résultant de ces réseaux sont variés en échelle et en nature. Par exemple,certains de ces réseaux restent connexes tout le temps; d’autres sont toujours déconnectés mais offrent toujours une sorte de connexité dans le temps et dans l’espace(connexité temporelle); d’autres sont connexes de manière récurrente, périodique,etc. Tous ces contextes peuvent être représentés sous forme de classes de graphes dynamiques correspondant à des conditions nécessaires et/ou suffisantes pour des problèmes ou algorithmes distribués donnés. Étant donné un graphe dynamique,une question naturelle est de savoir à quelles classes appartient ce graphe. Dans ce travail, nous apportons une contribution à l’automatisation de la classification de graphes dynamiques. Nous proposons des stratégies pour tester l’appartenance d’un graphe dynamique à une classe donnée et nous définissons un cadre générique pour le test de propriétés dans les graphes dynamiques. Nous explorons également le cas où aucune propriété sur le graphe n’est garantie, à travers l’étude du problème de maintien d’une forêt d’arbres couvrants dans un graphe dynamique. / Dynamic networks consist of entities making contact over time with one another. A major challenge in dynamic networks is to predict mobility patterns and decide whether the evolution of the topology satisfies requirements for the successof a given algorithm. The types of dynamics resulting from these networks are varied in scale and nature. For instance, some of these networks remain connected at all times; others are always disconnected but still offer some kind of connectivity over time and space (temporal connectivity); others are recurrently connected,periodic, etc. All of these contexts can be represented as dynamic graph classes corresponding to necessary or sufficient conditions for given distributed problems or algorithms. Given a dynamic graph, a natural question to ask is to which of the classes this graph belongs. In this work we provide a contribution to the automation of dynamic graphs classification. We provide strategies for testing membership of a dynamic graph to a given class and a generic framework to test properties in dynamic graphs. We also attempt to understand what can still be done in a context where no property on the graph is guaranteed through the distributed problem of maintaining a spanning forest in highly dynamic graphs. Graphes dynamiques Réseaux dynamiques Réseaux mobiles Systèmes répartis dynamiques Graphes évolutifs Graphes variants dans le temps Graphes Trajets Classes Classification Connexité Algorithmes sur les graphes Algorithmes distribués. Dynamic graphs Dynamic networks Delay-tolerant networks Mobile networks Evolving graphs Time-varying graphs Graphs Journeys Classes Classification Connectivity Graph algorithms Distributed algorithms
87	Structural analysis of extrinsic proteins from the oxygen-evolving complex of photosystem II from higher plants / Structural analysis of extrinsic proteins from the oxygen-evolving complex of photosystem II from higher plants KOHOUTOVÁ, Jaroslava January 2010 (has links) All life on earth depends mainly on the presence of oxygen. Largest producers of oxygen are green plants, cyanobacteria and algae. Oxygen is released from the oxygenevolving complex of photosystem II during photosynthesis and it is used in cellular respiration of all life complexes. The oxygen-evolving complex of photosystem II has the same function in each photosynthetic organism, but it has a different composition and organization of extrinsic proteins; only PsbO protein is ubiquitous in all known oxyphototrophs. Until now only low resolution electron microscopy structural models of plant PSII and crystal structures of cyanobacterial PSII are available. Higher plant extrinsic proteins (PsbP, PsbQ and PsbR) are structurally unrelated, non-homologues to the cyanobacterial extrinsic proteins (PsbO, PsbU and PsbV) and this is the reason why it is not possible to predict arrangement of these proteins on the lumenal site of higher plant PSII. Recently, models differ mainly in the structure of the oxygen-evolving complex, which could be resolved by determination of the exact binding sites for extrinsic proteins. An other question evolves: if the difference in the oxygen-evolving complex composition is the result of evolution or adaptation of photosynthetic organisms to their environment. Structural knowledge of extrinsic proteins that could help to resolve the location and subsequently the function of extrinsic proteins is still incomplete. From this case,structural analysis, interactions and probably arrangement of proteins PsbP and PsbQ was studied and is described in detail in this thesis.
88	Paradigma ontleding van en paradigma beskrywing vir deelnemende werkswyses Schenck, Catherina Johanna 11 1900 (has links) Community development and in particular participatory development is about people. This means that the person who studies or practices participatory development or any other of the participatory pratices should have a particular way of thinking about people. The main aim motivating this study was to investigate the paradigm/s about people on which participatory practices are based. This included a literature research on five participatory practices namely participatory development; participatory communication; participatory learning; participatory research; and participatory management. A guideline for paradigm analysis was developed by using Schriver's (1995) and Capra's (1996) descriptions of a paradigm as well as ideas of hermeneutics. From the paradigm analysis on the participatory practices two themes emerged: A shift from modernism to post modernism in the thinking processes and participatory practices. From the participatory practices the same concepts repeatedly emerged indicating a similar paradigm for all the participatory practices. Three post modern theories were therefore applied to enhance the description of the different concepts. The end result of this study is the development of an evolving paradigm for participatory practices in order to give enhanced meaning to concepts in the participatory vocabulary. Finally a critical reflection was done on the post modern research process. / Text in Afrikaans / Social Work / D.Phil. (Social Work) Community development Participation; Participatory practices Participatory development Participatory communication Participatory learning Participatory action research Participatory management Paradigm Paradigm analysis Evolving paradigm Theory Modernism Post-modernism Person-centred approach Second cybernetics Social constructionism Values Assumptions Relationships Dialogue Collective constructions Hermeneutics Implicit Explicit 302 Social psychology Social systems Participant observation Cooperative societies Human services -- Administration Social work administration Mass media in community development Social participation Paradigms (Social sciences) Social service Social interaction Behavioral assessment Social sciences -- Philosophy Postmodernism -- Social aspects Constructivism (Philosophy) Community development
89	Paradigma ontleding van en paradigma beskrywing vir deelnemende werkswyses Schenck, Catherina Johanna 11 1900 (has links) Community development and in particular participatory development is about people. This means that the person who studies or practices participatory development or any other of the participatory pratices should have a particular way of thinking about people. The main aim motivating this study was to investigate the paradigm/s about people on which participatory practices are based. This included a literature research on five participatory practices namely participatory development; participatory communication; participatory learning; participatory research; and participatory management. A guideline for paradigm analysis was developed by using Schriver's (1995) and Capra's (1996) descriptions of a paradigm as well as ideas of hermeneutics. From the paradigm analysis on the participatory practices two themes emerged: A shift from modernism to post modernism in the thinking processes and participatory practices. From the participatory practices the same concepts repeatedly emerged indicating a similar paradigm for all the participatory practices. Three post modern theories were therefore applied to enhance the description of the different concepts. The end result of this study is the development of an evolving paradigm for participatory practices in order to give enhanced meaning to concepts in the participatory vocabulary. Finally a critical reflection was done on the post modern research process. / Text in Afrikaans / Social Work / D.Phil. (Social Work) Community development Participation; Participatory practices Participatory development Participatory communication Participatory learning Participatory action research Participatory management Paradigm Paradigm analysis Evolving paradigm Theory Modernism Post-modernism Person-centred approach Second cybernetics Social constructionism Values Assumptions Relationships Dialogue Collective constructions Hermeneutics Implicit Explicit 302 Social psychology Social systems Participant observation Cooperative societies Human services -- Administration Social work administration Mass media in community development Social participation Paradigms (Social sciences) Social service Social interaction Behavioral assessment Social sciences -- Philosophy Postmodernism -- Social aspects Constructivism (Philosophy) Community development
90	Administrator Perceptions of the Community College Mission in the State of Mississippi and How it may be Influenced by the Addition of Community College Baccalaureate Programs Grizzell, Scharvin S 07 May 2016 (has links) For many years, community colleges that chose to offer community college baccalaureate (CCB) programs were looked upon in a negative light (Rice, 2015). However, as the need for specialized baccalaureates within specific fields and job markets have continued to grow (McKee, 2005), CCB programs are becoming more widely accepted throughout the United States. In spite of this paradigm shift, Mississippi is one of the remaining states that have not embraced the idea of CCB programs, in spite of its statistical deficiency in regards to baccalaureate degree holding citizens (Williams, 2010). The focus of this study was to explore the perceptions of community college administrators in Mississippi with regards to the influence of CCB programs to the community college mission of institutions in their state. This study indicates that administrators in Mississippi recognize the benefits of offering CCB programs, but do not want CCB programs to take away from the well-established statewide higher education system through mission creep. Many of the strong position statements received overwhelmingly neutral responses. In contrast, Administrators who chose to give their opinion indicated that they are not familiar with how CCB programs are implemented, and do not believe that Mississippi is ready for CCB programs across the state. However, respondents felt that the community college mission is always evolving, should meet students’ needs, and varies from location to location. The findings also show that administrators are favorable to the piloting of CCB programs at a few (1-2) institutions, even though they believe the programs will take funding away from current programs and do not want community colleges evolving into 4-year institutions. The study also concludes that there is a significant difference between institution size and survey questions #18 and #20. There is also a significant difference between length of time in the community college sector and survey questions #15, #17, and #18. For many years 2015). However 2005) should meet students’ needs #17 and #18.

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