No description available.

The ability to communicate effectively requires individuals to possess knowledge in a number of areas as well as the skill to apply this knowledge in a wide range of practical communication contexts. Understanding the syntactic and semantic systems, and the ability to put this knowledge into practice are necessary, but not sufficient, to be a competent communicator. In order to be considered a competent communicator it is necessary also to be able to apply pragmatic rules appropriately in the variety of interactional contexts which occur in person to person interaction. / It has been shown (e.g., Bench, 1992; Luetke-Stahlman & Luckner, 1991) that profoundly deaf children have difficulty in understanding and applying syntactic and semantic rules at the same levels of proficiency as their normally hearing peers. Major causes underlying this difference are the greatly reduced amount of linguistic input typically received by profoundly deaf children and the imperfect quality of that input, even when appropriate amplification is used. These conditions, in association with greatly reduced opportunity for profoundly deaf children to interact with more mature communicators, negatively affect the acquisition and application of syntactic and semantic rules. / The hypotheses of this study are: (a) that these same conditions also result in difficulties for profoundly deaf children in understanding and applying pragmatic rules and strategies in various interactional contexts, and, (b)that the nature and extent of this difficulty has a negative impact on profoundly deaf children’s face-to-face interactions through the use of inappropriate or unproductive responses to the demands of the communicative context, to the demands of the listener, and to the demands of the interaction process. / A referential communication task paradigm was employed to elicit face-to-face interactions between pairs of normally hearing students and profoundly deaf students, both from oral educational settings and educational settings in which sign is used. The tasks employed to elicit these interactions were designed to necessitate the use of pragmatic skills in order for the interactions to be completed successfully. Transcripts of the interactions were analysed for their effectiveness. A number of pragmatic skills were considered; these included the appropriateness and effectiveness of speakers’ responses to the contextual requirements of the different communication tasks, the appropriateness and effectiveness of speakers’ responses to the requirements of their listener, and the appropriateness and effectiveness of speaker and listener responses of the interactional process. / Since the participants’ performances are an overt expression of the speakers’ and listeners’ conceptions of their role in face-to-face interaction, the interactions provide insights into the metacommunication knowledge of profoundly deaf children and normally hearing children. It is predicted that because of the reduction in the quantity and quality of interactions in which profoundly deaf children are involved, their capacity to apply pragmatic rules appropriately in face-to-face interactions will be less effective than that of their normally hearing peers. / Other areas considered were the degree to which there was improvement with age in the use of pragmatic skills, and the degree to which the communicative performance of the students from oral settings resembled that of the normally hearing students, given that all the orally educated students were enrolled in integrated educational settings and, thus, had daily interaction with normally hearing students. It is predicted that there will be improvement with age in the skills being considered. It is further predicted that because of the day to day contact the oral students have with normally hearing and normally communicating peers, the performance of the oral students will more closely resemble the performance of the normally hearing group than the profoundly deaf group who sign. / The results of the study showed there were significant differences between the normally hearing group and the profoundly deaf group in the overall effectiveness of the interactions, with the normally hearing group being more effective than either the oral group or the sign group. Similarly, there were significant differences between the normally hearing students and the two groups of profoundly deaf students in their ability to apply appropriately pragmatic knowledge to their interactions, suggesting that there are also differences between the normally hearing and the profoundly deaf groups in metacommunication knowledge. Some differences in pragmatic use between the oral group and the sign group were also found. / Reasons for the difference in metacommunication knowledge and poor pragmatic performance, which are likely to originate in the early communicative environment and the early educational management of the profoundly deaf children, are suggested. The implications these findings have on current pragmatic acquisition theory for both normally hearing and profoundly deaf children are discussed, as is the significance of the findings on current practice in the education of profoundly deaf children. Areas for subsequent research arising from this study are suggested.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 272-280). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3055725.

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Abstract Not Provided. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The metabolism of iodide was investigated in the adult amphibian, Amphiuma means using an adaptation of a standard clinical radio-iodine technique. The thyroid uptake of I131 after intraperitoneal injection of a tracer does was linear on arithmetic plotting for seven days. The uptake then increased to a pronounced peak at seven days. / Thesis / Master of Science (MS)

Dimploma thesis deals with the optimization of operation distribution in company Vodárenská akciová společnost, a.s. Aim of the thesis is to determine achievement standards of companies branches and to state the capacity reserves for every one of them. Next, using methods of cluster analysis and graph theory, proposing recommendation leading to effective utilization of operation capacity. This is done by optimizing total number of business branches and subsequent creation of new regions. Thesis consists of theoretical and practical part. In this papers theoretical part, hierarchical and nonhierarchical clustering algorithms, minimal spanning tree and water management sector are described. Practical part addresses optimization of layout of company operation distribution. Based on comparison of outputs of chosen methods, recommendations for company, will be proposed.

For massive data analysis, the computational bottlenecks exist in two ways. Firstly, the data could be too large that it is not easy to store and read. Secondly, the computation time could be too long. To tackle these problems, parallel computing algorithms like Divide-and-Conquer were proposed, while one of its drawbacks is that some correlations may be lost when the data is divided into chunks. Subsampling is another way to simultaneously solve the problems of the massive data analysis while taking correlation into consideration. The uniform sampling is simple and fast, but it is inefficient, see detailed discussions in Mahoney (2011) and Peng and Tan (2018). The bootstrap approach uses uniform sampling and is computing time intensive, which will be enormously challenged when data size is massive. <i>k</i>-means clustering is standard method in data analysis. This method does iterations to find centroids, which would encounter difficulty when data size is massive. In this thesis, we propose the approach of optimal subsampling for massive data bootstrapping and massive data <i>k</i>-means clustering. We seek the sampling distribution which minimize the trace of the variance co-variance matrix of the resulting subsampling estimators. This is referred to as A-optimal in the literature. We define the optimal sampling distribution by minimizing the sum of the component variances of the subsampling estimators. We show the subsampling<i> k</i>-means centroids consistently approximates the full data centroids, and prove the asymptotic normality using the empirical process theory. We perform extensive simulation to evaluate the numerical performance of the proposed optimal subsampling approach through the empirical MSE and the running times. We also applied the subsampling approach to real data. For massive data bootstrap, we conducted a large simulation study in the framework of the linear regression based on the A-optimal theory proposed by Peng and Tan (2018). We focus on the performance of confidence intervals computed from A-optimal subsampling, including coverage probabilities, interval lengths and running times. In both bootstrap and clustering we compared the A-optimal subsampling with uniform subsampling.

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Master-Arbeit Univ. St. Gallen, 2008.