Stuttgart, Univ., Diss., 2008.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [264]-299).

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from title page (Digital Archive@GSU, viewed June 21, 2010) Pearl McHaney, Renée Schatteman, committee chairs; Audrey Goodman, committee member. Includes bibliographical references (p. 80-81).

Since 1992, most US transnational adoptions have occurred between White American parents and female babies born in China. Many of these adopted girls grow up in the US as a racial minority, but when visiting their birth country they become the racial majority. I collected both qualitative and quantitative data from Mandarin language learners during a summer language program in China to find the similarities and differences among six adopted and 11 non-adopted American adolescents. The data reveal that adoptees are initially perceived to be insiders for racially belonging in China, but cultural and linguistic differences place them as outsiders. Most adoptees fit in-between belonging and not belonging in Chinese society by attempting to "pass" as Chinese citizens in public spaces. Their accounts emphasize how race, nationality, and adoptivity contribute to larger themes for identity development and belonging in "third spaces" across globalized contexts.

Imagine for a moment waking up one morning to find that what or with whom you had come to identify racially was built on a foundation of ambiguities, silences, deceptions and sacred secrets. This scenario offers snapshot of Effa Louisa Brooks Manley’s life on the color line. Manley, former co-owner of the Negro League Baseball franchise (1935-1948), the Newark Eagles, disrupts American notions about what it means to be Black or white. A white mother and two black stepfathers raised her with her siblings as a Negro. However, it was not until Manley was a teenager that her mother revealed to her that her biological father also racially identified as white. This study examines the way Effa Manley performed identity at the boundaries of blackness and whiteness from the turn of the 20th century through 1945. I argue that Manley was more than a white woman who simply passed for Black. She reconciled being Black and becoming white, by exploiting the American mythology of race and culturally identified as a Negro. I explore how her self-identification complicates racial and ethnic belonging, by analyzing the identity choices she made while traversing the fault lines of race in her early life as well as the way she performed identity in the interviews she gave before her death in 1981.

The literature on compressive parameter estimation has been mostly focused on the use of sparsity dictionaries that encode a discretized sampling of the parameter space; these dictionaries, however, suffer from coherence issues that must be controlled for successful estimation. To bypass such issues with discretization, we propose the use of statistical parameter estimation methods within the Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithm for signal recovery. Our method leverages the recently proposed use of custom denoisers in place of the usual thresholding steps (which act as denoisers for sparse signals) in AMP. We introduce the design of analog denoisers that are based on statistical parameter estimation algorithms, and we focus on two commonly used examples: frequency estimation and bearing estimation, coupled with the Root MUSIC estimation algorithm. We first analyze the performance of the proposed analog denoiser for signal recovery, and then link the performance in signal estimation to that of parameter estimation. Numerical experiments show significant improvements in estimation performance versus previously proposed approaches for compressive parameter estimation.

In this thesis, I expand considerations of diaspora as not only a migration of people and cultures but a migration of thought. Specifically, I demonstrate that literary representations of diaspora produce what I consider to be an epistemological migration, challenging the idea that race and culture are stable and impermeable and offering instead racial and cultural fluidity. I assert that this causal relationship is best exemplified by narratives of racial passing written by diasporic writers. Using Homi Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and ambivalence, I analyze Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, arguing that Boy, Snow, Bird’s narrative form is a form of mimicry that repeats European and African literary traditions and subverts Eurocentrism, while Playing in the Light is a “Third Space” in which to accept notions of the non-categorical fluidity of race. Through this analysis, I draw particular attention to Oyeyemi’s and Wicomb’s unique abilities to refract notions of race, rather than presumably reflect a system of strict categories, and, ultimately, I argue that these novels transcend the realm of literature, existing as empowering calls for society’s modifications of its racial perceptions.

Continuation marks are a programming language feature which generalize stack inspection. Despite its usefulness, this feature has not been adopted by languages which rely on stack inspection, e.g., for dynamic security checks. One reason for this neglect may be that continuation marks do not yet enjoy a transformation to the plain λ-calculus which would allow higher-order languages to provide continuation marks at little cost. We present a CPS-like transformation from the call-by-value λ-calculus augmented with continuation marks to the pure call-by-value λ-calculus. We discuss how this transformation simplifies the construction of compilers which treat continuation marks correctly. We document an iterative, feedback-based approach using Redex. We accompany the transformation with a meaning-preservation theorem.

This thesis addresses the problem of unit testing components in message-passing systems. A message-passing system is one that comprises components communicating with each other solely via the exchange of messages. Testing aids developers in detecting and fixing potential errors and with unit testing in particular, the focus is on independently verifying the correctness of single components, such as functions and methods, in a system whose behavior is well understood. With the aid of unit testing frameworks such as those of the xUnit family, this process can not only be automated and done iteratively, but easily interleaved with the development process, facilitating rapid feedback and early detection of errors in the system. However, such frameworks work in an imperative manner and as such, are unsuitable for verifying message-passing systems where the behavior of a component is encoded in its stream of exchanged messages. In this work, we recognise that similar to streams of symbols in the field of formal languages and abstract machines, one can specify properties of a component’s message stream such that they form a language. Unit testing a component thus becomes the description of an automaton that recognizes such a specified language. We propose a platform-independent, language-recognition approach to creating unit testing frameworks for describing and verifying the behavior of message-passing components, and use this approach in creating a prototype implementation for the Kompics component model. We show that this approach can be used to perform both black box and white box testing of components, and that it is easy to work with while preventing common mistakes in practice.

Gustafsson, Carina. (2005). PRIV – en möjlig studieväg för motiverade elever. (Program aiming individual choice – a manageable way of learning for motivated pupils). Skolutveckling och ledarskap, Lärarutbildningen 60 poäng, Lärarutbildningen, Malmö högskola.Syftet med detta examensarbete är att undersöka om det är möjligt för elever med studiemisslyckanden i grundskolans kärnämnen att genomföra en gymnasial omvårdnadsutbildning med godkända betyg som resultat. Intervjuer med fem före detta elever från Omvårdnadsprogrammets PRIV-klass genomförs och kompletteras med intervjuer av fyra lärare vilka ansvarar för undervisning i den aktuella klassen. Resultatet visar att eleverna inte alltid är medvetna om vilka undervisningsinsatser som är speciellt anpassade för deras behov. Dessutom visar resultatet att de aktuella lärarna lyckas arbeta med elevgruppen utan specialpedagog i arbetslaget under en stor del av utbildningstiden. Studieresultaten visar att studiemotivation underlättar för eleverna i den undersökta PRIV-klassen att klara sin utbildning väl, med hjälp av genomtänkta lärarinsatser. De intervjuade eleverna är sysselsatta inom vårdyrken sex månader efter avslutad utbildning.Nyckelord: anpassad undervisning, godkänt betyg, motivation, PRIV, sysselsättningCarinaGustafsson AllansroÖsterleden 1301-45270 21 GlemmingebroHandledare: Elna JohanssonExaminator: Lotta Anderson / Gustafsson, Carina. (2005). PRIV – en möjlig studieväg för motiverade elever. (Program aiming individual choice – a manageable way of learning for motivated pupils). Skolutveckling och ledarskap, Lärarutbildningen 60 poäng, Lärarutbildningen, Malmö högskola.The aim of this essay is to investigate if it is possible for pupils, who failed in essential subjects in nine-year compulsory school, to pass examination in nursing education. Five ex-pupils from nursing education’s PRIV-class (program aiming individual choice) were interviewed. So were four teachers who had been responsible for the teaching in the class spoken of. The result of the investigation shows that the pupils not always are aware of how teaching methods are specially composed to cover their needs. In addition the result shows that the teachers in question are successful in working with this group of pupils, although a pedagogue specialist not is part of the teaching team during a big part of the time of education. The result of the investigation shows that motivation for studying makes it easier for pupils in the PRIV-class spoken of to end their education with fine grades, if helped with carefully prepared teaching methods. Six months after graduation the ex-pupils are working in nursing or social service.Keywords: adjusted teaching, motivation, occupation, passing examination, PRIV.Carina GustafssonAllansroÖsterleden 1301-45270 21 Glemmingebro Supervisor: Elna JohanssonExaminer: Lotta Anderson