This study examines collaborative work between colleagues in the newsroom of local radio stations. Through the framework of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis the overall aim is to explore how backstage work in the newsroom is initiated, established, and negotiated as a collective knowledge-based practice. Based on video ethnographic fieldwork in five local radio stations, the analyses demonstrate how the newsroom is constituted as a collegial knowledge-based practice through the ways in which colleagues contribute to the accomplishment of seemingly individual tasks in the production of news, and through encounters where journalists request assistance from colleagues to carry out work assignments that are typically technical/practical in their character. The analyses highlight the participants’ epistemic orientations as an interactional engine, but emphasize how this orientation is made relevant for professional actions. Examining in detail how members orient to epistemic asymmetries when requesting assistance in individual tasks, it is shown how accounts expressed in those situations are often double barreled in that they also explicate if the current situation is to be met with instructions or a division of labour. When examining the interactional sequences that ensue in response to requests for help, it is shown how those situations can be understood as communicative pedagogical projects, how the tutor in situ must decompose the overall task into relevant steps and formulate these composite actions so they can be recognized and performed by the colleague. It is also shown how embodied action or absence of expected embodied action is treated as expressions of knowledge, that is, epistemic stance. In these everyday pedagogical practices, the participants establish a local rationality and a situation where two professional colleagues interact. The study thus demonstrates how interaction with colleagues contributes to institutional tasks as well as to the development of different professional skills. In highlighting collaborative work between colleagues in newsrooms the study contributes to the field of epistemics in social interaction, collegial work, talk in institutions, and newsroom ethnographies.

Clinical instructors may have a negative or positive effect on student’s clinical practice. The behavioral characteristics of respiratory therapy clinical instructors are vital to the success of student’s clinical learning experience. Therefore, respiratory therapy student’s perception of the effectiveness of the clinical instructor’s behavior is an important indicator to modify and facilitate effective clinical instruction. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to identify the most effective clinical teaching behaviors (ECTB) perceived by undergraduate respiratory therapy (BSRT) and integrated graduate respiratory therapy (MSRT) students and to identify any similarities in their rankings. METHODS: The study used descriptive exploratory design with a self-reporting survey. The survey was administered to a convenience sample of first and second year BSRT and MSRT students attending an accredited respiratory therapy program at an urban university located in the southeastern United States. The survey consisted of 35 teaching behaviors presented on a five-point Likert scale according to importance. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. RESULTS: Seventy-two students were surveyed, more than two-thirds of the respondents were female. Seventy-five percent of respondents studied were BSRT, which females accounted for 78% and males 22%. Graduate MSRT studied were 25% of the total sample with females and males equally split at 50%. Two thirds of MSRT students reported previous education with BSRT students reporting less than one-quarter. The study findings indicate BSRT and MSRT students’ perceptions ranking of the most important behavioral characteristics hold similarities but both perceive the ordered rank of importance differently. Both BSRT and MSRT students ranked “be approachable” as the most important clinical behavioral characteristic with mean scores and S.D respectively (M 4.89, S.D ±0.37, and M 4.94, S.D ±0.24). Additionally, BSRT students rank the characteristic “respect student as an individual” (M 4.87, S.D ±0.34) next significant while MSRT students rank “demonstrate self-control & patience” (M 4.94, S.D ±0.23) the next highest. CONCLUSION: Although BSRT and MSRT students’ perceptions demonstrated similarities, mean scores data between first year and second year show a shift in ranking between characteristics. This may be because student’s perceptions could change as they advance in their clinical course work or their past educational experience. In addition, the results may assist respiratory therapy clinical instructors to appreciate students’ views and acknowledge areas of success as well as areas needing improvement.

Thermally stimulated current measurements are carried out on as-grown TlGaS2, TlGaSe2 and TlInS2 layered single crystals with the current owing perpendiclar to the c-axis in the wide temperature range of 10-300 K with various heating rates. Experimental evidence is found for the presence of three, two and one trapping centers for TlGaS2 , TlGaSe2 and TlInS2 crystals with activation energies 6, 12 and 26 / 98 and 130 / 12 meV respectively. We have determined the trap parameters using varous methods of analyis, and these agree well with each other. The retrapping process is negligible for these levels, as confirmed by good agreement between the experimental results and theoretical predictions of the model that assumes slow retrapping. Also the calculated values of the capture cross sections, attempt to escape frequencies and the concentration of the traps are reported.

Machine emulation allows for the simulation of a real or virtual machine, the source machine, on various host computers. A machine emulator interprets programs that are compiled for the emulated machine, but normally at a much reduced speed. Therefore, in order to increase the executions peed of such interpreted programs, a machine emulator may apply different dynamic optimization techniques. In our research we focus on emulators for real machines, i.e. existing computer architectures, and in particular on dynamic binary translation as the optimization technique. With dynamic binary translation, the machine instructions of the interpreted source program are translated in to machine instructions for the host machine during the interpretation of the program. Both, the machine emulator and its dynamic binary translator a resource and host machine specific, respectively, and are therefore traditionally hand-written. In this thesis we introduce the Walkabout/Yirr-Ma framework. Walkabout, initially developed by Sun Micro systems, allows among other things for the generation of instrumented machine emulators from a certain type of machine specification files. We extended Walkabout with our generic dynamic optimization framework ‘Yirr-Ma’ which defines an interface for the implementation of various dynamic optimizers: by instrumenting a Walkabout emulator’s instruction interpretation functions, Yirr-Ma observes and intercepts the interpretation of a source machine program, and applies dynamic optimizations to selected traces of interpreted instructions on demand. One instance of Yirr-Ma’s interface for dynamic optimizers implements our specification-driven dynamic binary translator, the major contribution of this thesis. At first we establish two things: a formal framework that describes the process of machine emulation by abstracting from real machines, and different classes of applicable dynamic optimizations. We define dynamic optimizations by a set of functions over the abstracted machine, and dynamic binary translation as one particular optimization function. Using this formalism, we then derive the upper bound for quality of dynamically translated machine instructions. Yirr-Ma’s dynamic binary translator implements the optimization functions of our formal framework by modules which are either generated from, or parameterized by, machine specification files. They thus allow for the adaptation of the dynamic binary translator to different source and host machines without hand-writing machine dependent code.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:52:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 MercilLOT.pdf: 2597326 bytes, checksum: c421535fdf1fa029cba3adf477ccb05a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-05-19 / This work aims to present an investigation on the level of understanding in the informative texts enclosed in manuals of instructions of a DVD set, trying to identify what makes consumers use or not manuals of instructions which accompany the products. It analyses factors that affect the motivation to use manuals and, linguistically, to verify whether the language used in the manuals is adapted for the understanding of the information by the consumer. Under an ergonomic approach, the research tries to recognize whether it is accordance in the information contained in manuals. According to the production engineering, it is very important to insert the best production practical and administration of the product in the companies, aiming the best competitiveness, The present study suggests a route to evaluate manuals of instructions of a DVD set, using for that a questionnaire with closed questions and an open one, applied to students, employees and teachers of an agricultural school bonded to Rio Grande do Norte Federal University. The results can contribute to provide helps to industry in presentation quality betterment of its information, and becoming the consumer integral part of that improvement process / O presente trabalho objetiva apresentar uma investiga??o sobre o n?vel de clareza dos textos constantes nos Manuais de Instru??es de um aparelho de DVD Digital V?deo Disc, na tentativa de identificar quais os motivos que possam levar os consumidores a usar ou n?o os manuais de instru??es que acompanham os produtos. Analisa os fatores que afetam a motiva??o para usar os manuais e, ling?isticamente, verifica se a linguagem utilizada nesses manuais ? adequada para a compreens?o das informa??es pelo consumidor. Dentro de uma abordagem ergon?mica, a pesquisa tenta identificar se existe conformidade nas informa??es apostas nos manuais. Levando-se em conta que a Engenharia de Produ??o considera muito importante a inser??o de melhores pr?ticas de produ??o e gest?o de produtos nas empresas, com a finalidade de melhor competirem, o presente estudo prop?e um roteiro para avaliar os manuais de instru??es de um aparelho de DVD, utilizando-se de um question?rio com quest?es fechadas e uma aberta, aplicada aos alunos, funcion?rios e professores de uma escola agr?cola vinculada ? Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. Os resultados apresentados podem contribuir para fornecer subs?dios para a ind?stria na melhoria da qualidade da apresenta??o de suas informa??es, e tornar o consumidor parte integrante desse processo de melhoria

I denna studie uppmärksammas lärares resonemang om bedömning i etik med fokus på moraliska dilemman. Studiens empiriska data består av fyra kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer med lärare som arbetar som So-lärare i skolåren 4-6. Resultatet från analysen presenteras utifrån tre olika delar. Den första delen behandlar lärares syn på etik och bedömning av ett moralisk dilemma. Den andra delen visar att lärarna har olika uppfattningar när det kommer till bedömning av ett moraliskt dilemma där elevsvaret går emot skolans värdegrund. Den tredje delen uppmärksammar de svårigheter lärarna ställs inför när de bedömer elevers etiska förmågor. De resonerar om elevers resonemangsförmåga samt vad som egentligen kan godtas som ett etiskt begrepp. / This study draws attention to how teachers reason when assessing moral dilemmas. The study's empirical data consist of four qualitative semi-structured interviews with teachers working with pupils in primary school years 4-6. The result from the analysis is presented in three parts. The first part is about teachers' view of ethics and the assessment of moral dilemmas. The second part shows that the teacher have slightly different perceptions when it comes to assessing a moral dilemma where the pupil argues against the value of the school. The third part draws attention to the difficulties the teachers experince when assessing the pupils' ethical knowledge. They argue about how developing a reasoning must be for certain grade and what they can accept as an ethical concept.

Structured data has been a major component of web resources since the very beginning of the web. Metadata that was originally mostly meant for display purposes gradually expanded to incorporate the semantic content of a page. Until now semantic data on the web has mostly focused on factual knowledge, namely trying to capture “what humans know”. This thesis instead focuses on procedural knowledge, or in other words, “how humans do things”, and in particular on step-by-step instructions. I will present a semantic framework to capture the meaning of sets of instructions with respect to their potential execution. This framework is based on a logical model which I evaluated in terms of its expressiveness and it compatibility with existing languages. I will show how this type of procedural knowledge can be automatically acquired from human-generated instructions on the web, while at the same time bridging the semantic gap, from unstructured to structured, by mapping these resources into a formal process description language. I will demonstrate how procedural and factual data on the web can be integrated automatically using Linked Data, and how this integration results in an overall richer semantic representation. To validate these claims I have conducted large scale knowledge acquisition and integration experiments on two prominent instructional websites and evaluated the results against a human benchmark. Finally, I will demonstrate how existing web technologies allow for this data to seamlessly enrich existing web resources and to be used on the web without the need for centralisation. I have explored the potential uses of formalised instructions by the implementation and testing of concrete prototypes which enable human users to explore know-how and collaborate with machines in novel ways.

abstract: The discussion board is a facet of online education that continues to confound students, educators, and researchers alike. Currently, the majority of research insists that instructors should structure and control online discussions as well as evaluate such discussions. However, the existing literature has yet to compare the various strategies that instructors have identified and employed to facilitate discussion board participation. How should instructors communicate their expectations online? Should instructors create detailed instructions that outline and model exactly how students should participate, or should generalized instructions be communicated? An experiment was conducted in an online course for undergraduate students at Arizona State University. Three variations of instructional conditions were developed for use in the experiment: (1) detailed, (2) general, and (3) limited. The results of the experiment indentified a pedagogically valuable finding that should positively influence the design of future online courses that utilize discussion boards. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Communication Studies 2012

This thesis deals with the issue of the imperative and its periphrastic forms. It points out the options of expression of this phenomenon and its usage. The theoretical part of the thesis also deals with imperative sayings; they are then compared to the Czech language. Chapters on methodology follow because they are necessary to process the practical part. The work refers to principles of choosing a good textbook and mentions approaches to grammar instruction. The second part analyses nine textbooks for teaching German as a second foreign language. The analysis is divided into three parts; for each of them the criteria for its evaluation were set. The analysis focuses not only on a teacher´s language but also on how the grammar is presented in the textbooks. Moreover, the differences between the books are mentioned.

Esta pesquisa parte da constatação de uma insistente ocorrência de enunciados no modo verbal imperativo no campo da arte contemporânea. Esses comandos se inserem na própria configuração dos trabalhos artísticos, na forma de textos que funcionam como “instruções como arte”. A investigação se desenvolve no sentido de uma projeção anacrônica – da arte mais recente em direção à arte conceitual (anos 1960 e 70), em uma tentativa de apontar o que, no caso dos imperativos artísticos, poderia ser uma atualização de procedimentos e estratégias de um passado mais ou menos recente. Para tanto, a pesquisa recorre a dois estudos de caso: o primeiro sobre a exposição coletiva Located work (Madrid) (2008), concebida pelo norte-americano Joseph Kosuth, e o segundo sobre os três Estudos para espaço e tempo (1969-2001), do brasileiro Cildo Meireles. A análise revisa as disputas discursivas entre o conceitualismo político e o conceitual de viés tautológico, sinalizando para uma precariedade de conceitos e narrativas. / This research rises from the verification of the somewhat frequent use of the imperative form in statements in contemporary art. The commands are inserted in the art work itself in the form of “texts” that function as “instructions as art”. The investigation is developed in an anachronic projection – from the most recent art towards conceptual art (1960’s and 70’s), attempting to point out what, in the case of artistic imperatives, could be an updating of procedures and past strategies. In order to do that, the research seeks two study cases: one regarding the exhibit Located work (Madrid) (2008), conceived by Joseph Kosuth, and the other about Estudos para espaço e tempo (1969-2001), by Cildo Meireles. The analysis discusses the discoursives disputes between political conceptualism and tautological conceptual art, indicating a current precariousness of concepts and narratives.