Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-90).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of North Texas, Dec., 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2006. / Includes bibliography.

abstract: This study utilized targeted messages and expert and referent sources in an effort to promote physical activity behavior in college students. College students aged 18-25, excluding collegiate athletes, were randomized into three conditions using their current physical activity level. Two of the conditions received targeted messages highlighting three primary components of social cognitive theory - self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and goals - while the third condition received no messages. In addition, the experimental conditions received the messages from either an expert (i.e., a personal trainer) or a referent (i.e., a close friend). In this way, this experiment analyzed whether receiving social cognitive theory messages increased physical activity indicators compared to the control condition, as well as if the message source caused differences in the physical activity indicators. Moreover, participants completed Time 1 and Time 2 measures to determine if receiving messages or not caused changes over a one week time period. Seven physical activity indicators were assessed: self-efficacy, positive outcome expectations, negative outcome expectations, attitudes, response-efficacy, intentions, and physical activity behavior. Results revealed that both the personal trainer and close friend conditions had significantly higher scores than the control condition for intentions at Time 1 and Time 2, as well as physical activity behavior at Time 2. Moreover, the personal trainer condition had significantly higher positive outcome expectations compared to both the friend and control conditions. No other significant differences were found across conditions for Time 1 attitudes, response-efficacy, negative outcome expectations, self-efficacy, and Time 2 attitudes, and self-efficacy. Overall, targeted messages were effective in increasing physical activity intentions and behavior regardless of the message source. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Communication 2012

Satellite channels were introduced in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s by limited elite wealthy Saudis. The new communication technologies during the 1990s made it possible for a large number of Saudis to switch to different kinds of direct broadcasting satellite channels using low cost equipment to receive hundreds of uncensored television programmes. Before the spread of satellite dishes throughout the country, Saudis were only able to view two government controlled TV channels offering limited types of programmes compared to what is offered on satellite. Satellite channels and programmes contain cultural messages and images from the originating countries that, it may be argued, are incompatible with Saudi Arabia's Islamic cultural values. No qualitative study, to-date, has investigated the satellite channel viewing habits of the Saudi community in general, in spite of the existence of strong concerns about the influence of such habits on Saudi culture. The present research then, is a study of the relationship between audiences and satellite in Saudi Arabia and an analysis of the implications of this relationship for local culture. The research is placed within the context of current scholarship on satellite audiences and of debates about global media and culture, and media and cultural imperialism. It uses quantitative and qualitative data to answer questions about young Saudi adults' use of satellite TV and their beliefs about its influences, and the effect of viewing satellite television on the usage of other media, particularly the two Saudi local TV channels. The researcher draws upon aspects of the uses and gratifications approach which focuses on the audience as the primary element in understanding the mass communication process. This approach also focuses on how people utilise media content. Whilst there have been a number of studies of TV and satellite audiences, these have neither systematically examined the qualitative dimensions of satellite usage in relation to quantitative data, nor have they discussed their findings in relation to wider debates about the cultural impact of satellite communications in Saudi Arabia. The present study is therefore useful for providing the basis for further cross-cultural comparisons between the media in Western and Arab worlds. Two key primary data collecting techniques, a quantitative survey of 438 male and female university students, and a series of eight in-depth focus group sessions involving 51 individuals, were used to obtain information about young adults' uses of the media in general, and satellite TV in particular, in Saudi Arabia . This combination of these quantitative and qualitative methods was relatively new in the field context. Survey and focus group questions were piloted between mid December 2000 and mid February 2001 at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. After slight amendments and modifications, the main fieldwork was undertaken from March 2001 to July 2001. The study found young Saudi adults watched satellite channels quite extensively, and the most preferred channels they chose to view were Arab channels, whose programmes depend on entertainment that is presented in a Western manner. Research findings indicated that the image of the Saudi media working within the country's borders was low. The extent of the study sample's exposure to satellite channels was greater than their exposure to local Saudi television. Most of the findings support the 'glocalisation' thesis where the global is heavily mediated through Arab versions of the global or Western culture. The study also highlighted possible influences of conflicting cultural messages from external media on the local culture.

A crescente complexidade dos programas de computador e o crescimento da carga de trabalho a qual eles são submetidos têm sido tendências recorrentes nos sistemas computacionais, em especial para sistemas distribuídos como aplicações web e sistemas corporativos. O aumento da carga de trabalho gera uma demanda por sistemas que façam melhor uso dos recursos computacionais disponíveis, enquanto a maior complexidade gera uma demanda por sistemas que se preocupem em minimizar o número de erros. Portanto, podem-se identificar dois objetivos a serem perseguidos pelos desenvolvedores de sistemas de software: melhorar o desempenho e aumentar a confiabilidade dos sistemas. A fim de alcançar os objetivos expostos, são desenvolvidos sistemas de monitoramento para automatizar a coleta e análise de dados sobre os sistemas computacionais alvo. O presente trabalho visa contribuir nos seguintes aspectos: na identificação dos dados relevantes para o monitoramento de aplicações distribuídas desenvolvidas para a plataforma Java; e na criação de uma ferramenta de monitoramento de aplicações distribuídas, explorando os novos recursos do JDK 1.5, bem como os recursos já disponíveis em Java, como carga dinâmica de classes e transformação de bytecodes A fim de avaliar a ferramenta proposta foram elaborados três estudos de caso: um utiliza uma aplicação existente sem necessidade de sua adaptação; outro avalia a sobrecarga da ferramenta frente a diferentes parâmetros; e o terceiro avalia o monitoramento de um sistema distribuído. Entende-se que a ferramenta atinge o objetivo de monitoramento de aplicações distribuídas, por meio da incorporação de técnicas e APIs distintas, ao permitir: o monitoramento de uma aplicação distribuída por meio do monitoramento de diversos nodos de tal aplicação concomitantemente; e a visualização das informações coletadas de forma online. Adicionalmente, a coleta simultânea de dados de diferentes nodos de uma aplicação distribuída pode ser útil para a descoberta de relações entre eventos que ocorrem durante a execução de tal aplicação. / The growing complexity of software and the increasing workload to which systems have been submitted are known trends in the computing system field, especially when distributed and web systems are considered. The increasing workload generates demand for systems that can make a better use of computing resources, while the increment of system complexity demands specific actions to prevent design faults. Therefore, software engineers have two main objectives to be concerned with: optimization and dependability. In order to accomplish these objectives, monitoring systems have been proposed to gather data from running systems so that their behavior can be analyzed. The present dissertation intends to contribute in the following domains: identifying relevant metrics for monitoring distributed Java applications; and developing a tool to monitor and profile distributed applications, using the new resources available in JDK 1 .5 as well as some already known techniques like dynamic classloading and bytecode instrumentation. In order to evaluate the proposed tool, three test cases have been developed: one with a well known application running without modification; another for evaluating the tools’ overhead in different scenarios; and a third one to evaluate a distributed application been monitored. We understand that the proposed tool is successful in monitoring distributed applications by the use of distinct APIs and techniques because: Nprof can monitor a distributed application by monitoring different nodes of the application simultaneously; and Nprof allows the online visualization of the collected data. Also, simultaneous collection of data from different nodes of a distributed application can be useful for discovering relations among events that occur during the execution of the application.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:29:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 5047.pdf: 7174607 bytes, checksum: 837e7cc228e4843dda4ee2007b2c7c55 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-03-21 / The present work aims at showing the development and implementation of a Didactic Engineering on the use of encrypted messages in teaching matrices to students who are attending the second high school year at Esmeralda Soares Ferraz School in the City of Ourinhos-SP. This work begins with a question related to the discouragement and apathy of students in studying mathematics and suggests, taking the teaching of matrices through encrypted messages by transposition of letters, a different approach from those commonly applied, through which, the student eager to solve them, will get engaged and interested in learning, in a simple way, the concepts of matrices and transposed matrices, being protagonist of his/her search for knowledge. / O presente trabalho tem como objetivo mostrar a elaboração e realização de uma Engenharia Didática sobre o uso de mensagens criptografadas no ensino de matrizes com alunos do 2o ano do Ensino Médio da Escola Esmeralda Soares Ferraz na Cidade de Ourinhos-SP. Esse trabalho inicia-se com um questionamento sobre o desânimo e a apatia dos alunos em estudar Matemática e sugere, abordando o ensino de matrizes através de mensagens criptografadas por transposição de letras, uma abordagem diferente daquela aplicada no cotidiano, através da qual, o aluno, no anseio de solucioná-las, se empenhe e se interesse em aprender de forma simples os conceitos de matrizes e matrizes transpostas, sendo protagonista de sua busca pelo conhecimento.

Dans cette thèse nous proposons de nouveaux algorithmes d'analyse vidéo. La première contribution de cette thèse concerne le domaine de la segmentation de vidéos avec pour objectif d'obtenir une segmentation dense et spatio-temporellement cohérente. Nous proposons de combiner les aspects spatiaux et temporels d'une vidéo en une seule notion, celle de Fibre. Une fibre est un ensemble de trajectoires qui sont spatialement connectées par un maillage. Les fibres sont construites en évaluant simultanément les aspects spatiaux et temporels. Par rapport a l’état de l'art une segmentation de vidéo a base de fibres présente comme avantages d’accéder naturellement au voisinage grâce au maillage et aux correspondances temporelles pour la plupart des pixels de la vidéo. De plus, cette segmentation à base de fibres a une complexité quasi linéaire par rapport au nombre de pixels. La deuxième contribution de cette thèse concerne le suivi d'objets multiples. Nous proposons une approche de suivi qui utilise des caractéristiques des points suivis, la cinématique des objets suivis et l'apparence globale des détections. L'unification de toutes ces caractéristiques est effectuée avec un champ conditionnel aléatoire. Ensuite ce modèle est optimisé en combinant les techniques de passage de message et une variante de processus ICM (Iterated Conditional Modes) pour inférer les trajectoires d'objet. Une troisième contribution mineure consiste dans le développement d'un descripteur pour la mise en correspondance d'apparences de personne. Toutes les approches proposées obtiennent des résultats compétitifs ou meilleurs (qualitativement et quantitativement) que l’état de l'art sur des base de données. / In this thesis we propose novel algorithms for video analysis. The first contribution of this thesis is in the domain of video segmentation wherein the objective is to obtain a dense and coherent spatio-temporal segmentation. We propose joining both spatial and temporal aspects of a video into a single notion Fiber. A fiber is a set of trajectories which are spatially connected by a mesh. Fibers are built by jointly assessing spatial and temporal aspects of the video. Compared to the state-of-the-art, a fiber based video segmentation presents advantages such as a natural spatio-temporal neighborhood accessor by a mesh, and temporal correspondences for most pixels in the video. Furthermore, this fiber-based segmentation is of quasi-linear complexity w.r.t. the number of pixels. The second contribution is in the realm of multiple object tracking. We proposed a tracking approach which utilizes cues from point tracks, kinematics of moving objects and global appearance of detections. Unification of all these cues is performed on a Conditional Random Field. Subsequently this model is optimized by a combination of message passing and an Iterated Conditional Modes (ICM) variant to infer object-trajectories. A third, minor, contribution relates to the development of suitable feature descriptor for appearance matching of persons. All of our proposed approaches achieve competitive and better results (both qualitatively and quantitatively) than state-of-the-art on open source datasets.

A crescente complexidade dos programas de computador e o crescimento da carga de trabalho a qual eles são submetidos têm sido tendências recorrentes nos sistemas computacionais, em especial para sistemas distribuídos como aplicações web e sistemas corporativos. O aumento da carga de trabalho gera uma demanda por sistemas que façam melhor uso dos recursos computacionais disponíveis, enquanto a maior complexidade gera uma demanda por sistemas que se preocupem em minimizar o número de erros. Portanto, podem-se identificar dois objetivos a serem perseguidos pelos desenvolvedores de sistemas de software: melhorar o desempenho e aumentar a confiabilidade dos sistemas. A fim de alcançar os objetivos expostos, são desenvolvidos sistemas de monitoramento para automatizar a coleta e análise de dados sobre os sistemas computacionais alvo. O presente trabalho visa contribuir nos seguintes aspectos: na identificação dos dados relevantes para o monitoramento de aplicações distribuídas desenvolvidas para a plataforma Java; e na criação de uma ferramenta de monitoramento de aplicações distribuídas, explorando os novos recursos do JDK 1.5, bem como os recursos já disponíveis em Java, como carga dinâmica de classes e transformação de bytecodes A fim de avaliar a ferramenta proposta foram elaborados três estudos de caso: um utiliza uma aplicação existente sem necessidade de sua adaptação; outro avalia a sobrecarga da ferramenta frente a diferentes parâmetros; e o terceiro avalia o monitoramento de um sistema distribuído. Entende-se que a ferramenta atinge o objetivo de monitoramento de aplicações distribuídas, por meio da incorporação de técnicas e APIs distintas, ao permitir: o monitoramento de uma aplicação distribuída por meio do monitoramento de diversos nodos de tal aplicação concomitantemente; e a visualização das informações coletadas de forma online. Adicionalmente, a coleta simultânea de dados de diferentes nodos de uma aplicação distribuída pode ser útil para a descoberta de relações entre eventos que ocorrem durante a execução de tal aplicação. / The growing complexity of software and the increasing workload to which systems have been submitted are known trends in the computing system field, especially when distributed and web systems are considered. The increasing workload generates demand for systems that can make a better use of computing resources, while the increment of system complexity demands specific actions to prevent design faults. Therefore, software engineers have two main objectives to be concerned with: optimization and dependability. In order to accomplish these objectives, monitoring systems have been proposed to gather data from running systems so that their behavior can be analyzed. The present dissertation intends to contribute in the following domains: identifying relevant metrics for monitoring distributed Java applications; and developing a tool to monitor and profile distributed applications, using the new resources available in JDK 1 .5 as well as some already known techniques like dynamic classloading and bytecode instrumentation. In order to evaluate the proposed tool, three test cases have been developed: one with a well known application running without modification; another for evaluating the tools’ overhead in different scenarios; and a third one to evaluate a distributed application been monitored. We understand that the proposed tool is successful in monitoring distributed applications by the use of distinct APIs and techniques because: Nprof can monitor a distributed application by monitoring different nodes of the application simultaneously; and Nprof allows the online visualization of the collected data. Also, simultaneous collection of data from different nodes of a distributed application can be useful for discovering relations among events that occur during the execution of the application.

abstract: The present study explored memorable messages that professional female athletes have recalled throughout their careers. This study sought to understand what types of memorable messages are recalled by female athletes that have made it to the top of their sports at the professional level and to understand whether the recalled memorable messages were gendered or not. Respondents were asked via a survey questionnaire to recall a memorable message, describe the meaning and context of the message and finally what effect, if any, the message had on them. Qualitative survey questionnaire responses were analyzed using thematic analysis. Results indicated that memorable messages were not gendered in any way but there were several relevant themes, which included: wisdom, performance, instruction, motivation, dedication and identity. These results are new to the field of memorable messages within the field of sport and hold significance for future research. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Communication Studies 2016