Orientador: Rony Farto Pereira / Banca: Maria Lúcia da Cunha Victório de Oliveira / Banca: Renilson José Menegassi / Banca: Alessandra Del Ré / Banca: Marco Antônio Domingues Sant'Anna / Resumo: O trabalho procura investigar os mecanismos de referenciação usados em produções de alunos de Ensino Médio para deixar pistas para que seu leitor faça inferências durante a leitura para produzir sentidos ao que lê. A reconstrução por inferenciação permite estabelecer o elo entre as informações explícitas e as implícitas no co-texto, em um determinado contexto. A inferência é uma estratégia muito importante para que se tome um texto como coeso e coerente, em termos de progressão referencial, colaborando de maneira decisiva para a produção de sentidos.A partir dos pressupostos da Lingüística textual e das teorias sobre leitura, apresenta a relação autor-texto-leitor no processo de produção e recepção do texto. Analisaram-se quantitativa e qualitativamente produções de textos de alunos de Ensino Médio nas quais se verificou o uso de seqüências pronominais, de repetições lexicais, das expressões nominais definidas, anáforas indiretas no texto ou referentes ao contexto, as quais permitem ao leitor fazer inferências e aturar como co-autor na produção dos sentidos. / Abstract: The work investigates the mechanisms of reference used in High School student’s productions in order to leave hints so that the reader com make inferences during the reading to produce meanings of what is being read. The reconstructions through inference permits to stablish the link among the explicit and implicit pieces of information in the co-text, in a determined context. The inference is a very important strategy to make a text cohesive and coherent, in terms of reference progression, contributing in a essencial way in the meaning production. From the textual linguistic and the theories about reading. The work presents the relationship author-text-reader in the process of text production and reception. It was analysed High School student’s productions in quality and amount in which it was verified the use of pronominal sequences, of lexical repetitions, of defined nominal expressions, indirect anaphora in the text or referred to the context, wich allow the reader to make inferences and act as co-author in the production of meanings. / Doutor

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / The collection of biological information has a long history, motivated by a variety of reasons and in more recent years is largely being driven for research and academic purposes. As a result biological information is often linked to a specific species or ecosystem management and is discipline specific, not relating to general management actions at a specific conservation site. The biological data that exists is often not consolidated in a central place to allow for effective management of conservation sites. Different databases and formats are often used to cover biological, infrastructural, heritage and management information. Biological information has traditionally not influenced real-time site-specific conservation management, with long term data sets being used to draw conclusions before they can influence management actions. In order to overcome this problem of scattered and unfocused data a biodiversity database related to specific site management was developed. This study focuses on the development of this database and its links to the management of spatially defined sites. Included in the solution of scattered data are the applications of information management tools which interpret data and convert it into management actions, both in terms of long term trends and immediate real- time management actions as the information is received and processed. Information systems are always difficult to describe in words as much of the layout and information is visual and hence difficult to convey I just the text of this document. A breakdown of the resultant information system is outlined in detail in the conclusion section. During the development of a Biodiversity Database it was found that management tools had to be developed to integrated data with management. Furthermore it was found that human error was a significant factor in poor data quality; as a result an observer training programme was developed.

Recent years have witnessed many significant changes in the global technology landscape. An interesting change we have observed is that some traditional technology late-coming countries such as China and Korea have started to emerge as influential players in the international arena of technology innovation. Historically, developed countries, holding incomparable advantages in financial markets and technologically intensive industries, have naturally taken the lead in technology innovation; while severe deficiencies and challenges are normally faced for developing, or late-coming countries, in innovation. In the literature, strong support from the government has been proven to be crucial for late-coming countries to overcome the deficiencies and to catch up in technology innovation. Based on innovation system perspective, this dissertation aims to understand how the government intervention in technological innovation system (TIS) promotes technology innovation, especially that in the catching-up context. This dissertation examines two technology innovation cases in China, namely the TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE mobile system innovations. A theoretical framework is developed based on institutional theory to structure the case studies. Qualitative methods including documentary research and semi-structured interviews are applied for data collection. This research concludes that, in the stages of technology development and technology diffusion, different TIS functions need to be achieved and different challenges are faced, which require government intervention. The government could analyse how TIS functions are achieved and how challenges are formed in relation to the TIS structural components, in order to determine the intervention strategy. Government can take both direct intervention on TIS actors, and indirect intervention through impacting TIS institutional environment, with regulative, normative and cognitive instruments. In the catching-up context, government interventions contribute more to path-breaking type technology innovations than path-dependent ones in terms of ensuring the success of innovation. Practical implications for the government to effectively intervene in innovation initiatives are given.

The suggestion that bilinguals show enhanced cognitive control compared to monolinguals in certain aspects of executive function has received much contention. While this has been explained as a result of the extensive training in bilinguals having to manage the conflict that arises from their concurrently active langauges, others have argued that the superiority in executive control is attenuated when background variables such as immigration status, education and general cognitive ability is taken into account. This thesis was motivated by the general question: How is executive control influenced by differing bilingualism experiences? To this end, we compared attentional control performance in bilinguals and monolinguals on the Attention Network Test, the auditory Elevator task (Test of Everyday Attention), and the number Stroop task. The main aim of the thesis was to examine the role of two bilingualism factors: (i) interactional context (defined in the Adaptive Control Hypothesis, Green & Abutalebi, 2013), which pertains to how bilinguals switch between their languages, and (ii) linguistic distance, which refers to the extent of similarity between the bilingual's languages. The comparison between Edinburgh monolinguals, Edinburgh late bilinguals, Edinburgh early bilinguals, and Singapore early bilinguals as differentiated by their interactional context revealed better performance in bilinguals on two specific test components. Singapore bilinguals, who came from a dual-language and dense code-switching context, showed enhanced conflict resolution on the Attention Network Test, whilst Edinburgh late bilinguals, who were from a single-language context, were better on the Elevator reversal subtest tapping on attentional switching. The results thus suggest differential effects of interactional context on attentional control. We further compared task performance of bilinguals with related or distant L1-L2 combinations as defined by the linguistic and orthography overlap between their two languages. The data did not support a role of linguistic distance on attentional control. Edinburgh bilinguals studying an Indo-European language performed similarly to those studying the non Indo-European languages of Chinese and Japanese. In Singapore bilinguals, English-Chinese bilinguals also did not differ from English-Malay bilinguals on any of the test components. We supplemented the investigation by further examining if the factors of test-order and age could impact on how differences between monolinguals and bilinguals are exhibited. Our results suggest that monolinguals may show an improvement in attentional control after relatively short periods of engagement in experimental tasks, whilst bilinguals did not receive this boost. Test order may therefore partly explain the inconsistencies in literature regarding the claimed bilingual advantage. The comparison between older and younger adults also implied an effect of age. In young adults, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on the Elevator reversal subtest of auditory switching, whereas the advantage shown in older bilinguals was on visual attentional orienting. The results across the various themes are reviewed and discussed with relevance to the current standing in the field, and suggestions for future research directions are put forth.

Este trabalho visa estabelecer um confronto entre o romance Conversa na SicÃlia de Elio Vittorni e o poema Auto de Natal Pernambucano Morte e Vida severina de JoÃo Cabral de Melo Neto, tentando identificar os elementos que caracterizaram as afinidades e as diferenÃas entre ambos, vez que duas obras tÃm como pano de fundo a regiÃo de origem dos escritores, ou seja, a SicÃlia, no sul italiano e o nordeste brasileiro (Pernambucano) respectivamente, na tentativa de trazer à baila suas caracterÃsticas sÃcio-culturais e o modus vivendi de sua gente massacrada pela ideologia dominante. Na tentativa de analisar as aproximaÃÃes e as diferenÃas entre os dois autores em questÃo, procedeu-se ao exame da linguagem, das questÃes temÃticas e ideolÃgicas que possibilitaram a observÃncia da estratificaÃÃo social e cultural presente nas duas obras em apreÃo. Para tal, tomou-se por base a proposta teÃrica do tcheco Dionys Durisin por ser ele, entre os teÃricos modernos, aquele que considera que a literatura comparada tem por objetivo a comparaÃÃo do fenÃmeno literÃrio versus fenÃmeno histÃrico sem levar em conta sua histÃria especÃfica. Tal estudo possibilitou uma visÃo profunda do poema Auto de Natal Pernambucano Morte e vida severina de JoÃo Cabral de Melo Neto, do ponto de vista comparativo, levando em conta as contingÃncias culturais, econÃmicas, sociais e polÃticas nordestinas versus aquelas de Vittorini na SicÃlia, o que poderà despertar a curiosidade pela leitura da obra traduzida de Vittorini, e tambÃm contribuir para o acesso ao mundo de outra cultura, o que nÃo deixa de ser uma funÃÃo humanÃstica da literatura comparada, alÃm de ajudar a compreender os processos de construÃÃo de identidade entre as duas Literaturas: a brasileira e a italiana, tomando, como ponto de partida, a literatura regionalista, de acordo com o pensamento de Ana Pizarro.

Esse estudo teve como objetivo comparar duas formas de manejo de cultivos de banana em relação ao seu potencial de abrigar espécies florestais. Nós assumimos que o registro de espécies florestais utilizando um elemento da matriz mostra que a espécie não evita a matriz totalmente e pode ser capaz de cruzá-la, indicando a importância dessas estruturas para a manutenção de conectividade funcional entre as áreas de hábitat. Foram amostrados 30 cultivos incluindo áreas sob manejo convencional e agroflorestal. Em cada unidade amostral foram realizadas transecções para acessar a proporção de aves florestais, generalistas e de áreas abertas. Variáveis descritoras da estrutura interna e da estrutura da paisagem do entorno dos cultivos foram consideradas para verificar se a avifauna responde à características intrínsecas dos cultivos ou ao contexto de paisagem em que os cultivos estão inseridos. A proporção de espécies florestais foi maior em cultivos agroflorestais (F28;0,001=19,29; p<0,0004), enquanto a proporção de generalistas não apresentou diferença significativa (F28;0,001=0,22; p<0,22) e a de espécies de áreas abertas foi maior em cultivos convencionais (F28;0,001=8,92; p<0,006). Os dois conjuntos de variáveis considerados, isto é, a estrutura interna do cultivo e do entorno deste foram importantes para predizer a proporção de espécies florestais. Embora tenhamos observado o efeito da paisagem na proporção de espécies florestais, salientamos aqui que sistemas convencionais, mesmo em contextos de paisagem similares à sistemas agroflorestais, não apresentaram a mesma proporção de espécies florestais. Esse resultado indica um diferencial de cultivos agroflorestais de banana para a ocorrência de espécies florestais. Em nível de paisagem, a proporção de florestas e consequentemente a diminuição do isolamento entre manchas é o responsável pela presença potencial de espécies em fragmentos. No entanto, em nível de mancha, mesmo esta apresentando um contexto de paisagem favorável para que seja ocupada por espécies de áreas fonte, o mecanismo que influencia a presença das espécies é a elevada estrutura interna dos bananais. / This study aimed to compare two management of banana crops in relation to its potential to host forest bird species. We assume that the record of forest bird species using a matrix element shows that the species does not entirely avoid this area and may be able to cross it, indicating the importance of these structures for the maintenance of functional connectivity between areas of habitat. We sampled 30 areas including crops under conventional and agroforestry management. In each sampling unit we used transects to access the composition and abundance of bird species. Descriptive variables of the internal structure and the structure of the surrounding landscape of crops were considered to determine whether the bird responds to the intrinsic characteristics of the crops or the landscape context in which crops are inserted. The proportion of forest species was higher in agroforestry crops (F28, 0,001 = 19.29, p <0.0004), while the proportion of generalists showed no significant difference (F28, 0,001 = 0.22, p <0.22) and species of open areas was greater in conventional crops (F28, 0,001 = 8.92, p <0.006). The two sets of variables considered, i.e. the internal structure of the crop and of surroundings, were important to predict the proportion of forest birds species. Although we observed the effect of landscape in the proportion of forest species, we note here that conventional systems, even in contexts similar to the landscape agroforestry systems, did not show the same proportion of forest species. This result indicates a upper value of agroforestry crops for the occurrence of forest bird species. At landscape level, the proportion of forests and consequently the lower isolation between patches is responsible for the potential presence of species in fragments. However, at patch level, even it is presenting a landscape context favorable to be occupied by a species of source areas, the mechanism that influences the presence of the species is the high internal structure of the banana plantations.

In the current study, structural equation modeling is used to explore the complex relationships between environmental and individual factors as they influence multidimensional indices of adjustment among a sample of Chilean adolescents. The first aim was to examine the direct relationships between school contextual factors and both educational and socioemotional outcomes. The second aim was to determine the mediational effect of academic self-efficacy and school connectedness on these relationships. Invariance testing was then applied to the full structural model to determine whether demographic variables such as sex or school placement had significant moderating effects on path coefficients. Participants in this study included 893 (428 male and 465 female) 9th through 12th grade students sampled from four distinct high school settings in and around Santiago, Chile. The Chilean Ministry of Education identified three of the four schools as "priority" (meaning "high risk") public high schools based on academic achievement, area poverty, local economic prospects, and school demographics (e.g., drop-out rate). The fourth school is a private Catholic school that is partially subsidized by the government and located in central urban Santiago. Overall, findings from this study highlight that school contextual assets and stressors have a significant impact on the multidimensional adjustment of Chilean adolescents, both directly and by influencing individual academic self-efficacy and school connectedness. Direct relationships were found between school contextual factors and both educational and socioemotional outcomes. In addition, results highlighted the significant mediating effect of both school connectedness and academic self-efficacy in these relationships, reinforcing the central protective role of such factors in the school engagement and adjustment of youth. Lastly, invariance testing revealed significant differences in model fit between groups based on school type but not sex. Culturally embedded implications for intervention and future research are discussed.

Kwan, Lok Yin. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-83). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter CHAPTER ONE: --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / The basic mediation model --- p.1 / General approaches in mediation analysis --- p.2 / Resampling methods --- p.8 / Comparing indirect effects --- p.9 / A sequential model fitting method --- p.10 / Current interest of study --- p.13 / Chapter CHAPTER TWO: --- STANDARDIZATION OF PATH COEFFICIENTS --- p.15 / Chapter CHAPTER THREE: --- COMPARING STANDARDIZED INDIRECT EFFECTS --- p.19 / Chapter CHAPTER FOUR: --- REAL EXAMPLES --- p.28 / Chapter CHAPTER FIVE: --- DISCUSSION --- p.55 / Chapter CHAPTER SIX: --- CONCLUSION --- p.57 / APPENDICES --- p.58 / REFERENCES --- p.80

L'informatique sensible au contexte vise à réduire la quantité d'informations explicites qu'un utilisateur doit fournir pour que le système accomplisse la tâche souhaitée. Ceci est particulièrement vrai dans le domaine récent de l'intelligence ambiante où les objets de la vie courante deviennent capables de déclencher une action ou un échange spontané d'informations, sans interaction avec l'utilisateur. Les progrès techniques en matière de réseaux de communication sans fil, d'équipements mobiles individuels, de capteurs et de logiciels embarqués, rendent aujourd'hui possibles des services aux usagers dépendants du contexte, mais les applications concrètes demeurent encore très limitées. Les travaux existants dans la littérature décomposent la gestion de contexte en quatre fonctionnalités: la collecte, l'interprétation, la détection de situations et l'utilisation pour l'adaptation. L'élément discriminant des solutions existantes est la qualité des informations abstraites obtenues par inférence et devant caractériser les situations de l'utilisateur. Les limites de ces solutions sont le manque de composition aisée des informations de contexte, le passage à l'échelle, tant en termes de quantité d'informations de contexte que de nombre d'applications clientes, l'absence de garantie sur la cohérence et la qualité des informations de contexte, et le manque de solutions intergicielles permettant de libérer le concepteur d'applications des aspects liés à la gestion de contexte. Nous nous intéressons dans cette thèse à la gestion de la qualité de contexte (QoC) dans un environnement ambiant. Les problématiques de gestion de la qualité de contexte sont multiples: choisir la méthode adéquate pour la gestion du contexte, extraire la qualité associée au contexte, interpréter et analyser la qualité de contexte pour les applications sensibles au contexte. Nous proposons de répondre à ces problématiques en intégrant la qualité de contexte au sein de la plateforme de gestion de contexte COSMOS (http://picoforge.lntevrv.fr/proiects/svn/cosmos) de l'équipe MARGE (http://www-inf.itsudparis.eu/MARGE) de Télécom SudParis. Afin d'effectuer cette intégration, nous avons conçu des éléments spécifiques à la qualité de contexte et avons mis en place une gestion fine et efficiente de cette qualité en limitant le surcoût associé. Nous proposons également un processus de conception basé sur l'ingénierie dirigée par les modèles afin de générer les éléments requis à la gestion de la qualité de contexte. Nous avons validé nos contributions à l'aide de deux applications fonctionnant sur téléphone mobile : une application de "vente flash" dans un centre commercial et une application de détection de localisation sur un campus. Les tests de performances que nous avons effectués permettent de comparer les résultats avec et sans la prise en compte de la QoC et montrent le faible coût de la gestion de la qualité par rapport aux améliorations apportées aux applications sensibles au contexte / Context-aware computing aims to reduce the amount of explicit information required from a user for a system to perform a task. This is particularly true in the recent domain of ambient intelligence where everyday life objects are able to trigger an action or a spontaneous information exchange, without any interaction with the user. Technical advances in wireless communication, personal mobile devices, sensors and embedded software make context-aware services possible, but concrete applications are still very limited. The solutions proposed in the literature decompose context management into four functions: acquisition, interpretation, situation detection and application adaptation. The differentiating element in these proposals is the quality of the high-level context information obtained by inference and characterising the situation of the user. The limits of these solutions are the difficulty for composing context information scalability in terms of the quantity of context information and of the number of client applications, the absence of guarantee on the consistency of context information and the lack of middleware solutions able to free the designer of context-aware applications from the management of context data. In this thesis, we are interested in the management of the quality of context information (QoC) in an ambient environment. There are several key issues in QoC management: choosing the adequate method for context management, extracting the quality associated to the context, analysing and interpreting the quality of the context with regard to the requirements of context-aware applications. We propose to answer these questions by integrating QoC management into the COSMOS context management framework (http://picoforge.int-evry.fr/projects/svn/cosmos) developed by the MARGE team (http://www-inf.itsudparis.eu/MARGE) of Télécom SudParis.For this purpose, we have designed the necessary components dedicated to QoC management and we have implemented the mechanisms allowing a fine-grain manipulation of the QoC together with a limitation of the associated overhead. We also propose a design process based on model-driven engineering in order to automatically generate the elements responsible of QoC management. We validate our contributions through the development of two prototype applications running on mobile phones: a Flash sale offer application to be used in malls and a location detection application proposed to the students of a campus. The performance tests we have conducted allow to compare the results obtained with and without taking into account the QoC and show the low overhead associated to QoC manaqement with regard to the benefits brought to context-aware applications and services

This study examined the effect of context on the association between formant trajectories and tongue and lip kinematics in the American English diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/. Seventeen native speakers of American English had electromagnetic sensors placed on their tongue and lips to record kinematic signals that were time-aligned with the corresponding acoustic recording. Speakers produced the diphthongs in isolation, in a single word rVl context, in a phrase hVd context, and in a sentence context. Kinematic data and the F1 and F2 trajectories were extracted from the middle 50% of each diphthong production. To allow direct comparison of signals with different units of measurement, all data were converted to z-scores. The z-score records were plotted together on common axes. For each tracked sensor from each diphthong production, an absolute difference between the kinematic and acoustic variables was calculated. Average z-score difference sums were calculated for each speaker's /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ production in each context, and this measure was called the Acoustic Kinematic Disparity Index (AKDI). A repeated measures ANOVA was used to test for main context effects on the AKDI, with concurrent contrasts to test for differences between the baseline (isolated diphthong) condition and the more complex phonetic contexts. The results revealed that context has a significant impact on acoustic and kinematic relationships. The sentence context resulted in the highest number of significantly different AKDI values when compared to the isolated condition, the single word rVl context resulted in the second highest number, and the phrase level hVd context resulted in the least differences. These findings suggest, therefore, that more complex phonetic contexts have a greater effect on the acoustic and kinematic relationship. These findings imply that caution is warranted in relying on acoustics to draw inferences about articulator movements in complex phonetic contexts. These results further indicate that the investigation of sounds produced in one context does not necessarily allow a straightforward generalization to other contexts.