Thesis. 1977. M.C.P.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography : leaves 134-136. / M.C.P.

This study examined questions embedded in four high school world geography textbooks to evaluate the degree to which the three components of spatial thinking were incorporated: concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning. A three-dimensional taxonomy of spatial thinking to assess the questions was developed and validated via a survey of a group of spatial thinking experts. The spatiality of the concepts featured in 3,010 questions sampled from the textbooks was analyzed. The degree to which spatial representations and stimuli for reasoning were presented was also measured. Every question was compared against the taxonomy and coded. Inter-coder reliability was measured on about one percent of the sample questions. The results indicated that most questions that required knowledge about spatial concepts could be answered by knowing only simple concepts, such as location and place-specific identity, rather than complex concepts that require the identification of spatial patterns and associations. Not many questions asked students to incorporate spatial representations to answer the questions. Few questions did require creating a new representation. Students were asked to recall memorized geographic knowledge and terms rather than to infer, hypothesize, and generalize. Little difference was found among the four textbooks in that they rarely integrated the three components of spatial thinking into the questions. The research found that page-margin questions involved aspects of spatial thinking more than section- and chapter-assessment questions. Relatively simple concepts and lower level cognitive processes, however, were required in most questions that integrated the three components. The development of questions to help students practice complex processes of spatial thinking is necessary. The taxonomy developed in this research can be used as a guide to design curricular, instructional materials, and questions that incorporate aspects of spatial thinking.

Although traditional search engines can retrieval thousands or millions of web links related to input keywords, users still need to manually locate answers to their information needs from multiple returned documents or initiate further searches. Question Answering (QA) is an effective paradigm to address this problem, which automatically finds one or more accurate and concise answers to natural language questions. Existing QA systems often rely on off-the-shelf Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources and tools that are not optimized for the QA task. Additionally, they tend to require hand-crafted rules to extract properties from input questions which, in turn, means that it would be time and manpower consuming to build comprehensive QA systems. In this thesis, we study the potentials of using the Community Question Answering (cQA) archives as a central building block of QA systems. To that end, this thesis proposes two cQA-based query expansion and structured query generation approaches, one employed in Text-based QA and the other in Ontology-based QA. In addition, based on above structured query generation method, an end-to-end open-domain Ontology-based QA is developed and evaluated on a standard factoid QA benchmark.

Under upplysningstiden tog den systematiska undervisningen av dövstumma fart. Detta väckte uppmärksamhet och många av deras lärare i både Frankrike och Tyskland blev kända och hyllade för sina prestationer. Dessutom blev den dövstumme ett alltmer vanligt inslag i filosofisk och pedagogisk debatt. Man ställde sig frågor vad de dövstumma kunde lära sig, vilka kunskaper de besatt utan utbildning och man debatterade flitigt vilken undervisningsmetod som var den bästa.    Dessutom dök de dövstumma upp i mer utpräglat filosofiskt tänkande. Denna figur utan talspråk blev till ett dynamiskt inslag och en utmaning i den samtida debatten och europeiska tankeutbytet. I och med att de dövstummas inre liv inte var tillgängligt och möjligt att undersöka kom en mängd föreställningar att projiceras på dem och de användes som medel i filosofiska debatter av epistemologiskt, antropologiskt och psykologiskt slag.   Den här undersökningen vill med hjälp av samtida tyskt tidskriftsmaterial och tre filosofiska texter titta närmare på hur man förstod de dövstummas väsen och i vilken mån den dövstumme var ett sant mänskligt väsen. Till tre figurer (det vilda barnet och skogsmänniskan) fogas den dövstumme som en tredje gestalt, vars närvaro ställde trängande frågor om människans väsen. Vem var den dövstumme och vad var det som gjorde att många av samtidens tänkare ställde sig tveksamma till om den dövstumme var en verklig människa? Vad skulle tillkomma för att han skulle räknas som en sådan?   De dövstumma kom att kopplas samman med vildhet, djuriskhet och beskrivas som ofullbordade människor vars realiserande ålåg dövstumlärarna. Men trots detta tänkte man sig att de kunde bli verkliga människor i och med att de omfattades av föreställningen om en för människan typisk perfectibilité. I undersökingen argumenteras det för att några central aspekter av att göra människor av de dövstumma bestod i att ge dem språk och därmed ett förnuft, att skapa ordning i deras inre och att skapa ett jag. Conrad Amman (1669–1724), Abbé L'Epée (1712-1789), Samuel Heinicke (1727-1790), K. P. Moritz (1756-1793)

This study examined questions embedded in four high school world geography textbooks to evaluate the degree to which the three components of spatial thinking were incorporated: concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning. A three-dimensional taxonomy of spatial thinking to assess the questions was developed and validated via a survey of a group of spatial thinking experts. The spatiality of the concepts featured in 3,010 questions sampled from the textbooks was analyzed. The degree to which spatial representations and stimuli for reasoning were presented was also measured. Every question was compared against the taxonomy and coded. Inter-coder reliability was measured on about one percent of the sample questions. The results indicated that most questions that required knowledge about spatial concepts could be answered by knowing only simple concepts, such as location and place-specific identity, rather than complex concepts that require the identification of spatial patterns and associations. Not many questions asked students to incorporate spatial representations to answer the questions. Few questions did require creating a new representation. Students were asked to recall memorized geographic knowledge and terms rather than to infer, hypothesize, and generalize. Little difference was found among the four textbooks in that they rarely integrated the three components of spatial thinking into the questions. The research found that page-margin questions involved aspects of spatial thinking more than section- and chapter-assessment questions. Relatively simple concepts and lower level cognitive processes, however, were required in most questions that integrated the three components. The development of questions to help students practice complex processes of spatial thinking is necessary. The taxonomy developed in this research can be used as a guide to design curricular, instructional materials, and questions that incorporate aspects of spatial thinking.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Philosophische Fakultät I--Berlin--Humboldt-Universität, 1999. / Bibliogr. p. 229-256.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ball State University, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Nov. 12, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. [299]-306).

Habilitation à diriger des recherches--Histoire--Montpellier, 2001. / Notes bibliogr. Glossaire. Index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 131-134). Print copy also available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Naval Postgraduate School, 2002. / Thesis advisor(s): Lyman Miller, Robert Looney. Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-101). Also available online.