Participants for this study were 56 four-year-old children and their parents. All children were enrolled or on a waiting list to be enrolled in a preschool program in the Cache Valley area. A parent questionnaire and environmental assessment were utilized to determine whether a) the physical environment, b) behaviors of parents, and c) birth order of children is related to development of print awareness as measured by a print awareness test. A variety of statistical analyses was used to explore relationships among the above variables. Major findings suggest that the behaviors that reflect parents' attitudes regarding literacy are most important in the development of their children's print awareness. Fathers' use of the library and mothers' education are significantly related to their children's performance on the print Awareness Test. The amount of time that children spend watching videos is also significantly correlated to their print Awareness Test scores. Significant differences were found in what mothers and fathers do to prepare their children for reading, with mothers taking a more active role in reading to the children and teaching them literacy skills. Other notable findings suggest that the reading pleasure of each parent is important to their children's enjoyment in being read to and to creating positive feelings about reading. Parents tend to predict that their children will learn to read at about the same ages as they themselves learned to read.

Prior to 1994 I had little interest in the activities of the police. As a mass media consumer I was aware of the prominence of crime in the daily news agenda and I watched, read and listened to potted summaries of rape, mayhem and murder. Frequent too, were stories of police malpractice, incompetence and corruption. Police stories were also a significant part of television drama with programs like the long running British series The Bill, and a range of Australian productions: The Feds, Halifax f.p, Rafferty's Rules, Blue Heelers, State Coroner, and Water Rats. The police also featured at the cinema with crime genre movies Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, USA), Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, New Zealand) and Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, USA) becoming box office hits. My interest in the portrayal of police change dramatically when on the 7th of October 1994, I was appointed Officer-in-Charge of the Media and Publications Branch of the Australian Federal Police (AFP). I was responsible for all aspects of the communication function including: media liaison, crisis management, media management, publications and internal communication. My branch dealt with media inquiries from local, national and international media across the gamut of issues facing the AFP. These ranged fiom industrial issues about budgets and overtime, allegations of corruption and incompetence, and operational matters as diverse as burglaries, alleged Nazi war criminals, peace-keeping operations and drug 'busts'. Needless to say my police stakeholders did not always see things the same way as my media colleagues. I was seeing at a practical day-to-day level the complex taxonomy of police/media relations outlined by Putnis (1996). Putnis noted the ubiquity of the police and the media as social institutions and observed that their daily operations involved a complex, dynamic, relationship constructed out of many thousands of interactions, across all levels of the organisations, in many different settings. My experiences in dealing with the media became the genesis of this study. My aim is to expand our understanding of the police/media relationship by exploring characteristic forms of print news-media reports about policing, the impact these reports have on police, and on law and order policy. The possibility of bias towards police in this study is acknowledged given I was a member of a police service fiom 1994 until 2002 and the research relies heavily on 'participant observer' techniques (Kay 1997; Potter1 996; Schofield 1993). Every effort has been made to maintain a critical perspective on the subject matters raised and it should be noted my association with police ended prior to the writing-up phase of the research. In addition to comments fiom my supervisory panel, ongoing discussions with media colleagues were another strategy adopted to ensure balance in the writing-up of this study. This is a unique study in that it offers an insider's perspective of police/media relations and at a time that represented a watershed for police. The early 90s was a period of straightened finances for public sector agencies and police, like other agencies, were under pressure fiom governments to demonstrate the efficient use of public monies (AFP 1995; Grieve 2000). Reform programs swept through policing with many, like the AFP, being organised along business lines (Palmer 1995; Etter 1995; Rohl 1999; WAPOL 1999). The 90s were also a watershed for criminal organisations with the emergence of transnational criminal syndicates, such as drug traffickers, that had the potential to impact on crime at a local level without even entering the country, let alone the jurisdiction, in which the crime took place (Bliss and Harfield 1998; Palmer 1995; McFarlane 1999). In order to combat these syndicates, police began to work in a more cooperative fashion and formed loose coalitions, often across countries, in a manner similar to the criminal syndicates they were trying to combat (Palmer 1995). The 90s also saw the continuation of committees of inquiry and royal commissions into police malpractice (Landa and Dillon 1995) and the inevitable bad press for police (Wood 1996; Munday 1995). The media and police have a symbiotic relationship and it is a critical one as most members of society have little direct contact with the criminal justice system. Information about crime, and the efforts of police to combat it, is obtained second hand through fictional accounts from such vehicles as television dramas, and from the news media. As aptly described by Hall et al. (1975), nearly thirty years ago, the media is the link between crime and the public. The police are therefore heavily reliant on the media to provide a balanced account of the panoply of issues surrounding the criminal justice system (Cowdery 2001). At its most fundamental, police require the support of the communities they serve in order to be effective, and the news media can have a major impact on perceptions about police performance (Reiner 1997; Surette 1992). As organisational entities, police need to compete with other bureaucracies for public hnding, and the media is an essential tool in generating positive publicity about successful operations and policies. The media is, therefore, critical to the maintenance of positive relationships with the two most important stakeholders in the policing function: the community and the government. McGregor (1993) provides a useful summary of the literature relating to print media coverage of policing issues: there are substantial discrepancies between official accounts of criminal activity and press reports of crime; the media tends to homogenise crime by concentrating on a limited range of crimes (mainly violent crime) and drawing facts from a limited range of sources (police/court reports); the media over-report serious crimes, especially murder and crimes with a sexual element; and, the press concentrates crime reportage on events rather than issues, so crime incidents and specific crimes form the bulk of crime news as opposed to analyses of the causes of crime or remedies, trends or issues. McQuail (1994, p.256) reminds us that assessing media performance on the basis of media content, measured against the extent to which content relates to reality, is open to question. He argues that there is no general answer to questions of meaning construction, but media research has pointed to several elements in a more general framework of social and personal meanings including clues as to what is more or less important, salient or relevant in many different contexts (1994, p. 379). An important research question concerns the impact of news media practices, particularly given the significant costs to the community flowing from the commission of crime, its investigation by police, and the processing of offenders through the criminal justice system. The Australian Institute of Criminology estimates the cost of crime in Australia is approximately $19 billion, while the cost of dealing with crime is another $13 billion (Mayhew 2003). The news media, articulated through radio talk-back hosts, are seen as having undue influence on how public funds on crime control are spent (ABC, The Media Report, 1 August 2002; Chan 1995; Cowdery 2001; Dixon 2002; Weatherbum 2002). These commentators have pointed to the serious public policy issues arising from the contribution made by the media towards what Weatherburn describes as an irrational public debate about law and order (2002, p. 12) and Hogg and Brown have coined 'the uncivil politics of law and order' (1998, p. 4). As Hogg and Brown (1998, p. 4) observe: crime is depicted as a problem of ever-increasing gravity set to overwhelm society unless urgent, typically punitive measures are taken to control and suppress it. The influence of the media on public policy has long been recognised. As Paletz and Entmann (l981, p. 6) observe: they influence the decisions and actions of politicians; they are open to manipulation by the powerful which insulates the powerful fiom accountability to the public; they reallocate power amongst the already powerful; they decreased to a marked extent the ability of ordinary citizens to judge events; they foment discontent among the public; and they preserve the legitimacy of the political, economic and social system. Ethnomethodological approaches (Ericson and Haggerty 1997) underpin the research in this study. The ethnomethodological approach was used because of its wider scope, employing as it does, observation, interviewing, and document-analysis techniques (Ericson et al. 1987, p. 77) and its ability to provide meaning and context to the phenomena under observation (Hall 1978; Willis l981). Ethnomethodological approaches are complemented by news framing analyses (Barkin and Gurevitch 1987; Blood, Putnis and Pirkis 2002; Capella and Jamieson 1996; Coleman 1995; Entman 1993; Kitzinger 2000; Keely 1999; Darling-Wolf 1997; London 1993; Pan and Kosicki 2001; Miller and Riechert 2001; Pirkis and Blood 2001; Reese, Gandy and Grant 2003; Scheufele 1999) to explore the news media frames employed in the genre of print crime reporting. What emerges from the study is evidence of a one-sided, highly negative, discourse about policing implemented through a range of media frames centred on conflict and broader xenophobic and egalitarian narratives. Despite the advantages police have as information gatekeepers, their attempts to manage the media environment have met with little success (Hughes 2004; Williams 2002) and the need for police to restrict access to police communications is being challenged (Crime and Misconduct Commission 2004, Inquiry into the effects of a Queensland Police Service decision to adopt digital technology for radio communications). There are exceptions, of course: the news media are not all bad. Routine reporting of crimes, where details of offenders are publicised, greatly assists the work of police as reflected in the case of 43-year-old Mr Colin George Dunstan which is discussed in Chapter Eight. Dunstan sent a series of explosive devices through the mail system in Canberra and police provided the media with photographs of the devices, Mr Dunstan (who was the main suspect), and his vehicle. The media coverage restricted Mr Dunstan's movements and led to his early arrest. Similarly, publication of the details of missing persons, warnings about lethal batches of drugs and crimes such as drink-spiking, enable police to reach a mass audience efficiently and quickly. And at a more abstract level, as noted by McQuail (1994, p. 34), modem communication vehicles can make a positive contribution to cohesion and community. The emergence of the 'yapping pack' form of journalism (Tiffen 1999, p. 207) has resulted in elements of the media exercising a worrying degree of influence over what should be a broader and better informed debate about criminal justice issues. An illustration of this process occurred toward the end of this study with the widely reported spectacle of the Premier of New South Wales presenting his replacement police minister before radio presenter Mr Alan Jones for his endorsement; the subsequent involvement of that minister in operational police matters (Williams 2002); and the departure of the state's police commissioner as a result of sustained media attack (ABC, The Media Report, 1 August 2002; Weatherburn 2002). These incidents say much about the influence of the news media in relation to police matters and makes this study a timely one. What follows is a literature review examining contemporary trends in policing and the media; a detailed analysis of two major case studies involving complex police operations; an analysis of a number of examples of print media reports about policing, to identify typical, or characteristic, media frames; the findings from nearly 50 interviews with senior people involved in the policelmedia interface; and an examination of changes in the milieu in which media reports about policing occur.

Chapter 1 considers culture as a product of communication. The central problem is to understand how an array of influencing factors such as food supply, technology and physical and intellectual environment are represented, stored and shared as 'food culture'. It considers mechanisms by which culture might be transmitted from one location to another including the relevance of historical literature and Louis Hartz's notion of Australia as a 'cultural fragment' cast off from the Old World. Chapter 2 shows that the Australian literature represents a discourse in which information about various aspects of feeding was gathered from local and overseas sources and circulated for instruction, entertainment and use. The discourse and the means of conducting it were products of their age. Public participation was evident in the correspondence columns of weekly newspapers and in 'contributory' cookery books. The discourse drew on various themes that were prominent in other Western discourses and reflected social and moral values of the times. It evidenced beliefs that the manner of a society's feeding demonstrates the extent of its' civilisation and that refinement of food and feeding contributes to the improvement of society. It also reflected nationalist sentiment and demonstrated some attempts to develop a distinctive Australian cuisine. Chapter 3 supports these claims with detailed analysis of recipes published in a sample of journals and cookery books. Chapter 4 describes five instances which illustrate in more depth the influence of print media in culture development. The first two show deliberate use of print media to reform cookery practice. The third shows the role of print in cookery education, suggesting an alternative mechanism by which cookery in Australia retained its British character. The fourth tests the idea that the transmission of food and science cultural influences from the Old World to the New followed broadly similar paths and questions the origins of the domestic science movement. The fifth examines commercial influences exerted through print media and notes that food production, processing and distribution enterprise was to become increasingly influential as Australia (and other countries) turned to industrial feeding. The thesis concludes with some reflections on the processes of culture formation and the role of mass communications. It suggests that food culture is both an expression of conceptions of character and identity and a formative influence on them, that the engine of cultural change has been industrial progress and, finally, that the communication system which supports and enriches food culture may also tend to undermine it.

<p>The print production workflow consists of various disparate systems — from production equipment to management information systems. During the production of a printed product, information regarding the product must be communicated between the systems in the workflow. Job Definition Format (JDF) is an industry standard that specifies this information interchange. It specifies a digital job ticket format for exchanging administrative and technical information related to a print job, and a messaging protocol for communicating information between the systems in the workflow. This licentiate thesis explores different aspects of integrating systems in a JDF-enabled print production workflow.</p><p>Paper III and Paper IV analyze the properties of JDF’s messaging protocol—Job Messaging Format (JMF)—and discuss design solutions for a JMF integration layer.</p><p>Paper I presents a software tool for simulating systems in the print production workflow. The tool is based on an open source software library, called the Elk Framework, which has been developed within the framework of these licentiate studies. The Elk Framework provides the base services required by a piece of JDF-enabled production equipment, called a Device/Worker in JDF parlance.</p><p>Paper II presents a software tool that was developed for testing the simulation tool presented in Paper I. The test tool, named Alces, can be used for testing if JDF-enabled systems conform to the JDF Specification.</p> / Report code: LIU-TEK-LIC-2006:66.

Print Mottle is perhaps one of the most disturbing factors influencing overall Print Quality. Mottle has traditionally been evaluated by estimating the reflectance variation in the print. Although the amplitude of the reflectance variation is probably the most important aspect of print mottle, other aspects may also influence the perceptibility of mottle. Since the human visual system is optimised to fit the conditions prevailing in its surroundings, it is also important to consider aspects such as mean reflectance factor level, spatial frequency content, structure of the mottle, and colour variations. In this thesis, a new evaluation model for the estimation of print mottle is proposed. The model is best explained as a six-step chain. First, a digital RGB image of the print is acquired with a scanner. The digital RGB image is then calibrated and transformed into the L*a*b* colour space. Next, the three colour components are transformed into the frequency domain by a Fourier transform and the power spectra are calculated. The power spectra are thereafter filtered with respect to the contrast sensitivity functions representing the human eye’s sensitivity to spatial variations in the three colour channels. To account for systematic variations in the sample, the spectra are filtered a second time with texture enhancement filters, which are based on local calculations of chi-square measures in the power spectra. The energy within the visually detectable area of the filtered power spectra is then integrated to obtain a single measure of the variation for each colour component. A single mottle estimate is obtained as the square root of the sum of the squared variation measures for the three components. To acknowledge the influence of mean lightness level on perceived print mottle in a way that agrees with the results presented in Paper I, the mottle estimate obtained is finally multiplied by the sixth root of the mean reflectance factor level. The theoretical foundations of the model are consecutively developed through the first five papers of the thesis. The first paper considers the influence of the mean reflectance level on perceived print mottle. The second and third papers describe the contrast sensitivity filter and the texture enhancement filter applied. The fourth paper compares the new model with other models for print mottle evaluation. The fifth paper extends the grey-scale version of the model into colour. The sixth paper presents the unified model that takes all the mentioned factors into account. To test the model, samples from both simulated sets of prints with various degrees of colour and/or systematic mottle and sets of real prints from various conventional presses were analysed a) visually, b) with traditional print mottle evaluation models, and c) with the new model. Results obtained using the different evaluation models were compared with visual assessments of the sets of prints. In each one of the evaluations the new model was found to be as good as or superior to the traditional print mottle evaluation models in its agreement with visual assessment. The new model is particularly promising in cases where the evaluated prints show colour and/or systematic disturbances. / QC 20101012

Eliza Haywood was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the early eighteenth century, and in the 1720s, her output alone accounted for a significant percentage of all writing being published in English by women. Until the late twentieth century, her large and influential body of work was largely ignored by critics and excluded from the current eighteenth-century cannon. Haywoods body of work is immense, and much remains to be done to fully illuminate her involvement in early modern literature. My study focuses on Haywoods very early career, 1719 1726. My goal is to examine how Haywood achieved her early success in an industry that was relatively inhospitable to women, and what reaction her texts garnered from the marketplace, and the reading public.<p>Part One: The Marketplace, focuses on the construction of Haywoods early career in the context of early eighteenth-century print culture. I investigate the cultural reception and influence of Haywood as author within her social milieu. Haywoods writing emerged from a period when women were beginning to write in large numbers; Haywood was one of the first, the most popular, and the most prolific women writers of the eighteenth century. She achieved a high profile presence in the marketplace and became an example that womens writing could be a lucrative product.<p>Part Two: The Works explores the subject material of Haywoods popular early novels; I argue these works not only function as entertaining amatory fiction, but also contain meritorious social criticism and even possess a didactic tone previously exclusively associated with her later work. While her writing often contests the status quo, it also sometimes replicates it. She simultaneously affirms yet challenges mainstream culture.<p>Overall, this dissertation aims to explore and demystify the complexities, tensions, and contradictions involved in Haywoods writing, and Haywood as a cultural figure. We can only achieve a full understanding of the cultural influence of her texts and career by considering the content of her work alongside the marketability she achieved. Additionally, by exploring Haywoods work during her early career, I hope to contribute to a broader, more accurate understanding of Haywoods body of work as a whole.

The discussion about gender and ideals shown in mass media is a subject of great importance for the society in general. Media is playing an essential part when it comes to establish standards and values and we are constantly exposed to all types of impressions, whether we are aware or not. It is therefore of great importance that we understand how stereotypes are built and to gain a deep knowledge that would enrich the area of Media and Communication Studies. The aim and focus of this study was to analyze how male stereotypes is communicated in print advertising and how visual means of expressions helps to construct the masculinities shown. From a semiotic analysis of seven print adverts appearing in the Swedish lifestyle Magazine Café were we able to gain a thorough understanding about how male stereotypes are communicated and built. The result showed that different kinds of stereotypes are in fact used but it is still a hegemonic masculinity that is predominating. Traditional male characteristics are still in use but we were able to see strong indications of effemination, sexualizing and objectifying. Metro sexuality is a recurring feature in the adverts, and one of the factors that indicate that masculinity is something complex and multi layered. Our study also shows that activity is still essential when it comes to form male qualities, but the impression of the same are nowadays of more importance than the actual activity itself. Attributes and surroundings are key components, and something that implicates that the social climate is focusing on material things.

Consider a piece of information printed on paper and scanned in the form of an image. The printer, scanner, and the paper naturally form a communication channel, where the printer is equivalent to the sender, scanner is equivalent to the receiver, and the paper is the medium of communication. The channel created in this way is quite complicated and it maps 2D input patterns to 2D output patterns. Inter-symbol interference is introduced in the channel as a result of printing and scanning. During printing, ink from the neighboring pixels can spread out. The scanning process can introduce interference in the data obtained because of the finite size of each pixel and the fact that the scanner doesn't have infinite resolution. Other degradations in the process can be modeled as noise in the system. The scanner may also introduce some spherical aberration due to the lensing effect. Finally, when the image is scanned, it might not be aligned exactly below the scanner, which may lead to rotation and translation of the image. In this work, we present a coding scheme for the channel, and possible solutions for a few of the distortions stated above. Our solution consists of the structure, encoding and decoding scheme for the code, a scheme to undo the rotational distortion, and an equalization method. The motivation behind this is the question: What is the information capacity of paper. The purpose is to find out how much data can be printed out and retrieved successfully. Of course, this question has potential practical impact on the design of 2D bar codes, which is why encodability is a desired feature. There are also a number of other useful applications however. We could successfully decode 41.435 kB of data printed on a paper of size 6.7 X 6.7 inches using a Xerox Phasor 550 printer and a Canon CanoScan LiDE200 scanner. As described in the last chapter, the capacity of the paper using this channel is clearly greater than 0.9230 kB per square inch. The main contribution of the thesis lies in constructing the entire system and testing its performance. Since the focus is on encodable and practically implementable schemes, the proposed encoding method is compared with another well known and easily encodable code, namely the repeat accumulate code.

<p>Print Mottle is perhaps one of the most disturbing factors influencing overall Print Quality. Mottle has traditionally been evaluated by estimating the reflectance variation in the print. Although the amplitude of the reflectance variation is probably the most important aspect of print mottle, other aspects may also influence the perceptibility of mottle. Since the human visual system is optimised to fit the conditions prevailing in its surroundings, it is also important to consider aspects such as mean reflectance factor level, spatial frequency content, structure of the mottle, and colour variations.</p><p>In this thesis, a new evaluation model for the estimation of print mottle is proposed. The model is best explained as a six-step chain. First, a digital RGB image of the print is acquired with a scanner. The digital RGB image is then calibrated and transformed into the L*a*b* colour space. Next, the three colour components are transformed into the frequency domain by a Fourier transform and the power spectra are calculated. The power spectra are thereafter filtered with respect to the contrast sensitivity functions representing the human eye’s sensitivity to spatial variations in the three colour channels. To account for systematic variations in the sample, the spectra are filtered a second time with texture enhancement filters, which are based on local calculations of chi-square measures in the power spectra. The energy within the visually detectable area of the filtered power spectra is then integrated to obtain a single measure of the variation for each colour component. A single mottle estimate is obtained as the square root of the sum of the squared variation measures for the three components. To acknowledge the influence of mean lightness level on perceived print mottle in a way that agrees with the results presented in Paper I, the mottle estimate obtained is finally multiplied by the sixth root of the mean reflectance factor level.</p><p>The theoretical foundations of the model are consecutively developed through the first five papers of the thesis. The first paper considers the influence of the mean reflectance level on perceived print mottle. The second and third papers describe the contrast sensitivity filter and the texture enhancement filter applied. The fourth paper compares the new model with other models for print mottle evaluation. The fifth paper extends the grey-scale version of the model into colour. The sixth paper presents the unified model that takes all the mentioned factors into account.</p><p>To test the model, samples from both simulated sets of prints with various degrees of colour and/or systematic mottle and sets of real prints from various conventional presses were analysed a) visually, b) with traditional print mottle evaluation models, and c) with the new model. Results obtained using the different evaluation models were compared with visual assessments of the sets of prints. In each one of the evaluations the new model was found to be as good as or superior to the traditional print mottle evaluation models in its agreement with visual assessment. The new model is particularly promising in cases where the evaluated prints show colour and/or systematic disturbances</p>

Vorstellung des allg. Druckkonzeptes unter Linux und Hinweis auf verschiedene Spooling-Systeme, Print-Software und HOWTO