This thesis theoretically investigated the psychoanalytic process working through with the purpose of clarifying and refining the concept. The literature on working through and its elements, resistance and interpretation was examined. The concepts of working through of the school of ego psychology, the school of object relations and the school of self psychology were compared. Theoretical analysis involved explaining the working through process by simple analogy. My findings were that working through decreases the patient's defensive anxieties through the medium of words. This explanation applies to all three schools. In addition, a model of psychic development was derived, which integrates the theories of the ego school, the object relations school, and the school of self psychology.

In early childhood, planning provides a basis for organizational skills that are useful for future school performance (Perez & Gauvain, 2009). However, research shows that preschoolers’ planning abilities are limited because they often fail to consider task demands, are inefficient at self-monitoring, and are unlikely to use strategies to their advantage (Gardner & Rogoff, 1990). The present study examined whether preschoolers could improve their planning skills by consciously drawing connections between objects and events through the use of verbal self-explanations. A microgenetic design was used in order to repeatedly measure preschoolers’ performance on the Tower of Hanoi (ToH) task over a period of 6 to 8 weeks. Forty-five children between the ages of 4 and 6 years were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: self-explanation, no self-explanation, and control. Each child was administered a pretest, 3 micro sessions based on condition, and a posttest. In addition to ToH performance, children also were measured on inhibitory control, working memory, short-term memory, and verbal ability at pretest, and on a novel planning task, the Box-ToH, at posttest. Multilevel models were used to analyze the data at the between- and within-person levels. Although no differences were found in ToH performance over time between conditions, preschoolers’ use of self-explanations and strategies were independently related to individual improvements in ToH performance over time. Moreover, preschoolers’ improvements in ToH performance were not reducible to age-related increases, inhibitory control demands, working memory, short-term memory, or verbal ability. Lastly, findings did not support preschoolers’ ability to transfer their knowledge of strategies on the ToH to the Box-ToH. Overall, the present study demonstrated that self-explanations and strategy use are both important predictors of understanding individual changes in planning performance during the preschool years. These findings have important implications in terms of improving preschoolers’ executive function skills and preparing children for early academic success. / Graduate

This critical edition presents to the reader, for the first time, a definitive text of Charles Dickens's short story, "George Silverman's explanation". This edition presents a critical unmodernized text. Besides the text of the story, this edition includes historical and textual introductions; lists of substantive and accidental variants; word-division; and of collated editions. / Graduate / 0593

This research has shown that a knowledge-based system is an effective tool to help novice simulation users interpret and understand simulation output. The thesis describes the development and empirical evaluation of the prototype. A simulation program which adopts the discrete-event simulation approach simulates the behaviour of a local area network protocol, i.e., the Ethernet, with different sets of parameter values. The knowledge-based system carries out the 'analysis' of the simulation output covering the protocol efficiency and throughput. The knowledge-based system summarises the simulation output and upon request from the user, provides explanations to a conclusion arrived at. The summary is the relationship between any pair of variables; and the explanation is the justification as to how the pair are related. The strategy for building the knowledge base using production rules is also elaborated. There are different functions performed by the different sets of rules (or rule-sets). Their major functions, In parallel with the development objective, are interpreting numerical data, presenting output to users and providing explanations interactively. The rules are grouped accordingly to make the knowledge bases easier to maintain. In the explanation aspect, the few approaches attempted by other researchers to improve expert system explanation is discussed. It is argued that a mere regurgitation of 'fired' rules to explain the Ethernet behaviour is not adequate in this case. To circumvent this problem, a 'constructive' approach to explanation is employed. The explanation procedure rewrites the 'fired' rules in a more understandable form than the if-then rules. Unnecessary parts of the rules are ommitted to make the explanations clearer. Finally, an experiment carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the prototype is described in detail. The effectiveness is measured from a few different perspectives. These are test scores, completion time for the test and the users' degree of confidence, both in the interpretation and explanation tasks. The results show that although some responses are mixed, there is evidence to suggest that the knowledge-based simulation system environment is beneficial to the target users.

This research suggests that to model the complex dynamics of the organisational change in a firm evolving as it implements internet technologies requires capturing diverse independent and interdependent processes across multiple temporal and spatial context both within and external to the firm. This presents both an ontological and epistemological challenge as dominant research methods are either atemporal in nature and attribute action to disembodied variables or are simply storytelling. To provide explanatory legitimacy requires going deeper to capture the action of actors 'acting' within multiple levels of context and to pinpoint deeper 'rock-bottom' causal mechanisms that drive the higher order processes that give rise to the 'organisational life' we observe. To accomplish explanatory legitimacy I develop an analytical method that makes processuality fundamental and allows for the examination and theorising about mechanisms. The first essential element of this method is a framework that guides the researcher in the systematic gathering together of what we already know from the multidisciplinary and eclectic research in e-business, and in the intensive work of gathering empirical evidence. I apply a new methodology I call narrative sequence analysis, that combines process tracing and sequence analyses to make processes intelligible and help illustrate how mechanisms drive these processes. I use this method to develop an explanatory account of the process of e-business development covering three episodes of change within the Commonwealth Bank of Australia from 1995 to 2006. The research finds that the firm evolves over time as it develops new capabilities and identifies and pursues development opportunities by assembling and committing resources to e-business though both technology development and business application. It draws on past experience and gradually learns to develop, integrate and implement technology into existing business operations, discovers new innovative opportunities in which to apply the technology or is drawn into new areas by others who identify opportunities in which to apply the firm's knowledge, resources and technology. The path to development depends on the firms starting position and the timing of the sequence of events encountered along the way. It is a coevolutionary process where the firm interacts, cooperates, adapts and responds to the actions and interactions of other actors, balanced by the uncertainty of e-business and business operation risk.

Thesis (M. ), Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1999. / Bibliography: p. 100-105.

On Why in Philosophy Examples Matter”. The purpose of the article is to show the need of using examples in philosophy, associating to them four functions: to illustrate, explain, argue and show. Among other assertions, we attempt to justify the following: a) Examples are, as well as illustrations, evidences;such that what may be seen as an act of didactic generosity may be considered properly as the response to an always possible demand. b) The introduction of philosophical concepts requires frequently a mutual cooperation between definition and example; the need of the latter in conceptual explanation is condoned by a reflection on the following of rules. c) A certain overrating of the counterexample and underrating of the example are tokens of a notion of philosophy put hereinto question. d) In Wittgenstein and other authors, a little heeded function of some examples is detected: of showing an alternative way of viewing the matter, of re-describing ancient philosophical themes. Towards the end, the issue of theexample is assumed –this time– as an example of a more general issue: that of the relation between rhetoric and philosophy. / El objetivo es mostrar la necesidad del uso de ejemplos en filosofía, a partir de cuatro funciones que con ellos cabe asociar: ilustrar, explicar, argumentar y mostrar. Entre otros planteamientos, se busca justificar los siguientes: a) Los ejemplos son, a la vez que ilustraciones, evidencias; así, lo que suele ser visto como un acto de generosidad didáctica, puede considerarse más propiamente la respuesta a una siempre posible exigencia. b) La introducción de conceptos filosóficos requiere muchas veces de una mutua cooperación entre  definición y ejemplo; la necesidad de este último en la explicación conceptual es avalada por una reflexión sobre el seguimiento de reglas. c) Una cierta sobreestimación delcontraejemplo y subestimación del ejemplo son muestras de una concepción de filosofía que aquí se pone en cuestión. d) En Wittgenstein y otros autores se detecta una función poco estudiada de algunos ejemplos: la de mostrar un modoalternativo de ver un asunto, la de redescribir antiguos temas filosóficos. Hacia el final, el tema del ejemplo es tomado, a su vez, como ejemplo de un tema más general: el de la relación entre retórica y filosofía.

Transparency in HRI describes the method of making the current state of a robotor intelligent agent understandable to a human user. Applying transparencymechanisms to robots improves the quality of interaction as well as the userexperience. Explanations are an effective way to make a robot’s decision making transparent. We introduce a framework that uses natural language labels attached to a region inthe continuous state space of the robot to automatically generate local explanationsof a robot’s policy. We conducted a pilot study and investigated how the generated explanations helpedusers to understand and reproduce a robot policy in a debugging scenario.

The purpose of this thesis has been to evaluate if a new instance based explanation method, called Automatic Instance Text Classification Explanator (AITCE), could provide researchers with insights about the predictions of automatic text classification and decision support about documents requiring human classification. Making it possible for researchers, that normally use manual classification, to cut time and money in their research, with the maintained quality. In the study, AITCE was implemented and applied to the predictions of a black box classifier. The evaluation was performed at two levels: at instance level, where a group of 3 senior researchers, that use human classification in their research, evaluated the results from AITCE from an expert view; and at model level, where a group of 24 non experts evaluated the characteristics of the classes. The evaluations indicate that AITCE produces insights about which words that most strongly affect the prediction. The research also suggests that the quality of an automatic text classification may increase through an interaction between the user and the classifier in situations with unsure predictions.

Autores neopiagetianos como, por exemplo, Stambak et al. (1990), Verba (1999), Gardner (1994), Flavell (1999), Astington (2003) não têm medido esforços para mostrar o percurso e a importância do jogo simbólico para o desenvolvimento integral da criança. Nesta linha de raciocínio, o presente trabalho enfatiza o papel do jogo de ficção (Stambak et al. e Verba) nas produções discursivas infantis (Veneziano e Hudelot, 2002), reiterando a tese da força motriz do imaginário no e para o desenvolvimento da linguagem na criança. Considerando, portanto, que é pela manifestação de suas ações, sentimentos e emoções que o indivíduo atua sobre o outro, estamos admitindo que a linguagem assume um papel de destaque no processo de comunicação, pois garante diferentes operações intelectuais, e possibilita a criação de mundos e, conseqüentemente, de perspectivas. É ainda por meio da linguagem que o pensamento se organiza, que a criança se identifica como pessoa, argumenta, explica e/ou justifica, quando interage com o meio em que vive. Logo, seu estudo não pode estar desvinculado de suas condições de produção. Com este propósito, e no quadro de uma abordagem funcional e interacional, observamos as condutas explicativas e justificativas (CEJs), que aparecem durante o jogo de ficção com fantoches, onde os espectadores da animação são a própria criança, o boneco e o adulto, na construção do imaginário, na prática do “querer-fazer” e do “fazer-fazer”. Assim, os resultados apontam para um número significativo de CEJs motivado pela linguagem e pelo prazer lúdico. O real e o imaginário aliam-se e criam um cenário onde a criança conquista, forma e domina novos territórios, promovendo o seu crescimento individual e coletivo. / Authors as Stambak et al. (1990), Verba (1999), Gardner (1994), Flavell (1999), Astington (2003) they have not been measuring efforts to show the course and the importance of the symbolic game for integral child development. For this reason, the present work emphasizes the paper of the fiction game (Stambak et al. and Verba) in the child discursive productions (Veneziano and Hudelot, 2002), reiterating the thesis of the imaginary force for the language development. Considering it is for the manifestation of actions, feelings and emotions that the person acts to the other, we are admitting that the language assumes a prominence paper in the communication process because it guarantees different intellectual operations, and it makes possible the creation of worlds and consequently perspectives. It is still through the language that the thought is organized, that the child identifies as person, she argues, she explains and/or she justifies, when she interacts with the environment she lives. Therefore, the investigation cannot be disentailed of the production conditions. With this purpose, and in the picture of a functional approach and interacional, we observed the explanation and justification conducts (EJCs), that appear during the fiction game with puppets, where the spectators of the animation are the own child, the puppet and the adult in the imaginary construction. The results appear for a significant number of EJCs motivate by the language and by the pleasure to play. The real and the imaginary ally and they create a scenery where the child conquers, she forms and she dominates new territories and she promote her individual and collective growth.