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This thesis is about learning at a residential outdoor education centre [pseudonym:- Wild Country Hall]. It poses and answers three questions: • How useful might discursive positioning be as a perspective on learning? • What are the discourses at Wild Country Hall and how are they different to schooling discourses? • How might neo-Liberal discursive practices, including performativity and current schooling orthodoxies have affected the pedagogic practices at this centre? The review of literature provides an overview of the key literature on outdoor, adventure and experiential learning, considering these through the lenses of learning as acquisition, participation and transformation, before discussing the literature on the discursive positioning of identity. Literature on the discursive practices of outdoor centres is then considered in relation to literature on neo-Liberalism and performativity in schools. The methodology is ethnographic. Participant observations were conducted over a period of five years whilst children were participating in both the organised adventure activities and the residential life of the centre. Searches of the centre’s documentary archives, and follow up interviews with 22 children (aged eight to 11) and three adults were used to add richness to the observational data, and especially to better understand reported participant gains. Analysis was undertaken by coding themes in the data using QSR NVivo N6. The findings suggest that acquisitional and participatory perspectives on learning are not totally adequate for explaining the reported changes in outlook and behaviour of the children who took part in the research. These benefits may be more usefully conceptualised as discursively re-positioned identity. It is suggested that the perspective on learning as discursive positioning may be usefully employed by those studying residential outdoor education in the future. The findings show a number of over-arching discourses that dominate the life of Wild Country Hall. These include place - including the appreciation, care of and respect for nature, the sense of awe and wonder, understanding and protecting the environment – risk, challenge and adventure; and consequent confidence and resilience building by children through facing and over-coming their fears. Whilst some of these fears are linked to the adventure activities of the centre (such as fears of heights, water), other fears are associated with the residential nature of the centre; encountering and coping with homesickness, living with new people, encountering strange customs and unfamiliar social practices. So important were these unfamiliar discourses to the participating children that they may be looked upon as ‘rites of passage’. The findings suggest that encountering unfamiliar discourses may explain the efficacy of learning at Wild Country Hall. Some of the pedagogic practices at Wild Country Hall were found to valorise what may be described as ‘classroom discourses’, and these have tended to formalise learning at the centre. It is suggested, therefore, that this outdoor centre has been influenced by performativity and classroom orthodoxy, themselves shaped by neo-Liberal agenda. These influences may be narrowing the range of discourses available and limiting the centre’s continuing ability to provide unfamiliar discourses, possibly to the detriment of children’s learning. The conclusion makes a number of recommendations for policy practice and research. Recommendations for policy and practice focus on the narrowing tendencies observed at this centre, suggesting shifts in policy to retain the distinctiveness of outdoor education centres. Recommendations for research suggest that follow-up studies would be useful to test the findings in other outdoor centres and other areas of learning, whilst more methodological work could be done on memory and data research sites where contemporaneous notation and digital recording may be difficult or impossible.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / Future U.S. Navy at-sea and littoral battle group training range instrumentation requires a new, secure, high data rate link This link must be capable of providing the ranges with the capacity to increase the number of players, increase the amount of threat simulation, and allow an improved Global Positioning System (GPS) based position tracking system to be implemented This paper describes a Dual Function Transponder (DFT) capable of operating on any R-CUBED (Relay, Reporter, Responder) based range as well as any TACTS/ACMI range without modification of either range type. In addition, the DFT provides a new increased data rate capability for use by planned future ranges, enabling a dramatic increase in the number of participants as well as significantly increasing the quantity of data that can be communicated by each player. Miniaturization and programmability are the keys to this development and many of the methods used are described.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / Measurements of a 1230-km baseline were made during an eight-week period in the fall of 1987 using Trimble 4000SX single-frequency, five channel Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers. Twenty-eight days of carrier phase data were processed using correlated triple differences with fixed satellite orbits, the broadcast ephemerides, a modified Hopfield tropospheric model, and without ionospheric correction to determine the accuracies and precisions of the slope distance and baseline components. The data were processed in ever increasing observing sessions to determine the optimized observation periods required to achieve various orders of geodetic accuracies. The accuracies of the slope distances were better than 1.0 ppm for any observing period. The day-to-day repeatabilities of the slope distance measurements were better than 1.0 ppm (2) sigma after 20 minutes of observations. Accuracies and repeat-abilities (2 sigma) of the baseline components were better than 10.0 ppm after 20 minutes of observations. The correlated triple difference results were on the order of previous GPS surveys that used higher resolution differencing or external timing aids. Discussions include the effect of ephemeris, tropospheric and ionospheric errors, and dilution of precision. Observation periods and mean slope distance errors were reduced when observations started close to and included the infinite peak of the Position Dilution of Precision (PDOP). The smallest variances were associated with observations about the infinite PDOP peak / http://archive.org/details/optimizedobserva00bouc / Lieutenant, United States Navy

Magister Artium - MA / This study aims to add to the rich body of work which explores our understanding of identity performances in narratives. It explores how a close knit group of five female friends use narrative structure and strategies to fashion alternative gender identities for themselves as black women who are agentive, and who actively push back against the stereotypes used to judge and evaluate their behavior. Using an interactional approach to narrative and identity (De Fina, 2003; De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2008, 2012), this study explores how participants, in their everyday conversations, exploit story form and narrative strategies to orient to, constitute, legitimize or resist gender ideologies. Drawing on data which consist of twenty-one hours of naturally occurring casual conversation between the five friends, I identify and group the stories in their conversations, and propose generic structures to describe them: reports, hypothetical stories and projections. With a flexible approach to structure, I show how these stories create a space for the negotiation of difference or for constructing presentations of ‘self’ versus ‘the other’. I argue that through structure and other evaluative devices, praise and blame are ascribed within stories, allowing participants to take certain positions in relation to the themes explored and relevant identity options. I also show the ways in which stories enable the participants to quite literally imagine possibilities for self and others within circumstances that have not and and may never happen. This creates a space for the affirmation of dreams and ambitions, and an exploration of the type of women they see themselves becoming: successful, rich, famous, strong, and admired African women.

Thesis (S.M. in Transportation)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-103). / The pervasive location-based technologies, such as GPS and cell phone, help us find the pattern of geographical information of human behavior and also help dig opportunities in real world. In transportation field, they help people better understand the transportation behavior and at the same time collect necessary information for us. One important aspect of its application is how people choose the route given the existing urban network. However, dealing with the excessive amount of data and the modeling of route choice behavior are two major challenges in the route choice analysis.This thesis discusses the general process in the route choice analysis, from GPS data processing, map matching to the generation of route choice sets. Besides, the Path-Size logit model is implemented to address the modeling issue. In this thesis, I develop a new effective method, which I called Point-Based Local Search Map Matching, to match the consecutive GPS data to the network data. Also, I develop a new model, which I called Random Weight Choice Set Generation Model to deal with the choice set generation problem in the route choice analysis. The data comes from two major sources. One is the Boston car GPS data. It tells when and where a specific car is. The other is the Boston urban network data, which contains all types of roads in GIS format. / by Anyang Hou. / S.M.in Transportation

The principal objectives of this research are: to investigate the performance of different fingerprint-based WiFi Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS), analyse historical long-term data signals, detection of signal change points and outliers; then present an enhanced method that generates temporal based fingerprints. The proposed method consists of analysing signal strength profiles over time and detecting points at which the profile behaviour changes. This methodology can be used to dynamically adjust the fingerprint based on environmental factors, and with this select the relevant Wireless Access Points (WAPs) to be used for fingerprinting. The use of an Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) Control Chart is investigated for this purpose. A long-term analysis of the WiFi scenery is presented and used as a test-bed for evaluation of state-of-the-art fingerprinting techniques. Data was collected and analysed over a period of 18 months, with over 840 different WAPs detected in over 77,000 observations covering 47 different locations of varying characteristics. A fully functional IPS has been developed and the design and implementation is described in this thesis. The system allows the scanning and recording of WiFi signals in order to define the generation of temporal fingerprints that can create radio-maps, which then allow indoor positioning to occur. This thesis presents the theory behind the concept and develops the technology to create a testable implementation. Experiments and their evaluation are also included. Based on the timestamp experiments the proposed system shows there is still room level accuracy, with a reduction in radio-map size.

Diplomová práce ?Marketingová strategie Renaultu: výzvy střednědobého plánu? si klade za cíl analyzovat marketingovou strategii společnosti Renault. Práce nejdříve popisuje společnost Renault jako takovou. Zaměřuje se na historii společnosti, firemní strategii a aktuální střednědobé cíle. Následující část popisuje přístup firmy Renault k výzkumu trhu. Zde je popsán jak kontinuální, tak jednorázový výzkum. Poté práce detailně rozebírá segmentaci, targeting a positioning. Všechny tři strategické marketingové přístupy jsou analyzovány teoreticky i prakticky, tedy z pohledu firmy Renault.