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In public spaces, we constantly interact with each other - whether we are aware of it or not. Most of these interactions are indirect and subtle, ranging from flâneurial people-watching, over negotiation of turns in urban traffic, to passive aggression. This is not only true for pedestrians, but equally so for bicyclists.Bicycling is an embodied and social practice. When designing for cycle-based experiences, interaction designers face many problems while conducting research: mobility is always on the move and therefore hard to capture; the fleeting moments of interaction are almost imperceptible to the eye; and verbal accounts of bicyclists cannot represent the experiential qualities of a ride properly.While there exists a history of ethnographic studies into bicyclists' behaviour, it proves to be difficult to enquire into these more subtle interactions. More conventional representations of experience, such as video, fail to capture many of the qualities inherent in taking a ride and being 'out there'. It would be naive to neglect these qualities in our research when designing for cycle-based interaction.This thesis builds on the work of ethnographers and designers engaged in bicycling research. It explores new ways of enquiry that help researchers find out what really happens on the saddle and beyond.

TMS can be used to generate representational maps by delivering pulses at throughout a grid, centered over the most sensitive spot to elicit a resulting MEP called the motor hotspot. The areas of these maps are modulated by muscle contraction and have been shown to increase in area with increasing contraction intensity. Both intracortical inhibition (SICI), and intracortical facilitation (ICF) are paired pulse paradigms in which contraction causes a reduction in magnitude. The present study aimed to categorize changes in the above circuits and representational maps as well as expose a possible relationship between both metrics in the context of graded contraction. To study these questions 15 healthy, right-handed volunteers participated in a study measuring SICI, ICF and cortical maps under conditions of REST, 10, 20 and 30% of MVC of the right FDI muscle. SICI and ICF showed significant reduction between REST and no differences amongst contraction levels. However, SICI displayed a graded reduction through contraction levels when analyzed on a trial-by-trial basis sorted by actual contraction level. Cortical representational area increased from REST to all contraction states and between 10 and 30% MVC confirming the graded growth observed in previous studies. Further, analysis shows that SICI, ICF and area all exhibited the majority of their modulation within the first 10% of contraction. Both SICI and ICF were not significantly correlated to the growth in representational area. This may be in part due to participants’ variability in the level of contraction sustained during measures, which also made it unfeasible to conduct a correlation of trial-by-trial data between map area and circuit magnitudes. We present evidence to corroborate previous findings for the effects of contraction on intracortical circuits and representational area during graded contraction as well as contribute to the methodology of such investigations concerning the control of varied contraction. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

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yes / Quantum systems with variables in Z(d) are considered, and three different structures are studied. The first is weak mutually unbiased bases, ... The second is maximal lines through the origin in the Z(d)×Z(d) phase space. The third is an analytic representation in the complex plane based on Theta functions, and their zeros. It is shown that there is a correspondence (triality) that links strongly these three apparently different structures. For simplicity, the case where d=p1×p2, where p1,p2 are odd prime numbers different from each other, is considered. / The full text will be available 12 months after publication

No / This chapter discusses important aspects of visual representations and interaction techniques necessary to support visual analytics. It covers five primary topics. First, it addresses the need for scientific principles for depicting information. Next, it focuses on methods for interacting with visualizations and considers the opportunities available given recent developments in input and display technologies. Third, it addresses the research and technology needed to develop new visual paradigms that support analytical reasoning. Then, it discusses the impact of scale issues on the creation of effective visual representations and interactions. Finally, it considers alternative ways to construct visualization systems more efficiently

Learning fractions is the focus for much of elementary school mathematics instruction because it is important and can be difficult. Fractions constitute a system of thinking about numbers and representations that differs in important ways from counting numbers. To understand fractions requires, for example, perceiving that a symbol such as 6 is not automatically associated with a larger quantity than 5 if they are denominators. In the system that constitutes fractions, 1/5 is bigger than 1/6. When students fail to master the system of fractions by a certain age, the inherent difficulty of the concepts can become confounded with discouragement, boredom, and humiliation. Music, especially percussion, not only provides an engaging context for many students but musical patterning can also provide deep analogic experiences to fractions at embodied and representational levels. Reasonable questions about musical patterns can both motivate and guide students towards understanding the properties of systems of fractions and their representations. We utilize this possibility in a new tool and associated curriculum called Sound of Fractions (SoF). SoF incorporates three main ideas to leverage musical interest and skill to provide an alternative approach to teaching fractions: Experiencing the whole and the part at the same time is crucial to learning fractions; Drumming is a compelling, embodied, culturally-relevant activity that allows students to experience the wholes, the parts, and the relationships between them at the same time; A new computer-based representational infrastructure utilizing aural, visual, physical, and temporal components that scaffolds classroom-based activities that bridge the relationship between percussion-related and mathematics activities in such a way as to gradually bring the student towards more standard mathematical representations and usages. We conducted preliminary testing of this approach in two series of after school programs with 5th-8th grade children who were significantly behind in learning fractions. Preliminary indications are that the approach is promising and ready to be tried in more formal contexts. This work illustrates that instruction rich in representational infrastructure and domains continues to be an important component of how technology can have positive impact. / Master of Science

This thesis project had the overall aim of investigating older adults (OA) representation of real-world objects through different cognitive paradigms probing visual working memory (vWM) and attention. OAs are known to demonstrate difficulties in these two cognitive domains, however, an under-researched in the aging field is the possible influence of the quality of representations in conjunction with the amount of representations in determining OA’s performances. Moreover, a majority of research in the aging field has utilized geometrical shapes, therefore I was interested to investigate whether the previous findings extend when real-world objects are used. Accordingly, the main questions accordingly probed in this study were 1) whether the content of object representations influence OAs’ performances when vWM and attention are probed, or whether effects are solely due to the amount, and 2) whether age-effects found in previous vWM and attention studies in aging, extend when real-world objects are used. To this aim, Chapter 3 describes two experiments where I manipulated the perceptual and conceptual similarity amongst objects presented to OAs and young adults (YAs) when performing a change detection task taxing vWM. Results indicated both age groups had significantly lower performances when there 3 objects to retain and recall, but no age-related differences in the maintenance and recall of these types of objects. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 report three experiments addressing the impact of object numerosity and/or nature in OAs’ attention deployment during a visual search task. Results of two experiments in Chapter 4 with manual responses found that OAs’ performance was detrimentally impacted by the amount of object representations, irrespective of the relation amongst the items. Chapter 5 illustrates an eye movement study, aimed at exploring more in detail the visual exploratory behavior of older and young individuals. Overall, OAs were slower and showed a larger tendency to get distracted than YAs, regardless of the perceptual or conceptual target-distractor similarity. Overall, the studies presented in this thesis indicated that aging negatively affects the ability to ignore distracting information. However, little evidence was provided as to whether aging negatively influences the content representation of an object. This result confirms previous research indicating that some, but not all aspects, decline in late adulthood.

Yes / The Self-Regulation Model (SRM) identifies that the beliefs people hold about an illness can influence their responses to that illness. Although there are generic measures of illness representations, there is a need for a brief tailored measure to use with people with dementia. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a brief measure called the Representations and Adjustment to Dementia Index (RADIX). The RADIX contains questions on the SRM elements: Identity, Cause, Timeline, Control, and Consequences. The RADIX validation was conducted with a sample of 385 community-dwelling people with mild to moderate dementia who were taking part in the IDEAL cohort study. Test-retest reliability was conducted over a 4-week period with a separate sample of 20 people with dementia. The validation process resulted in a reduction in the number of items in the Timeline, Control, and Consequences items. The resulting RADIX demonstrated good acceptability, internal reliability, and test-retest reliability. All the RADIX items had low missing data, indicating good acceptability. The factor analysis confirmed that the Consequences items formed two subscales (practical and emotional consequences) that had Cronbach's α of 8 and 0.91 respectively. Test-retest reliability indicated that the Identity, Timeline, and Control items had moderate reliability and the practical and emotional consequences scales had good reliability. The RADIX demonstrates acceptable psychometric properties, proves to be a useful measure for exploring people's beliefs about dementia, and could aid the provision of tailored information and support to people with dementia.

In this dissertation we employ stack and queue layouts of graphs to explore the relative power of stacks and queues. Stack layout and queue layouts of graphs can be examined from several points of view. A stack or a queue layout of a graph can be thought of as an embedding of the graph in a plane satisfying certain constraints, or as a graph linearization that optimizes certain cost measures, or as a scheme to process the edges of the graph using the fewest number of stacks or queues. All three points of view permeate this research, though the third point of view dominates. Specific problems in stack and queue layouts of graphs have their origin in the areas of VLSI, fault-tolerant computing, scheduling parallel processes, sorting with a network of stacks and queues, and matrix computations. We first present two tools that are useful in the combinatorial and algorithmic analysis of stack and queue layouts as well as in determining bounds on the stacknumber and the queuenumber for a variety of graphs. The first tool is a formulation of a queue layout of a graph as a covering of its adjacent matrix with staircases. Not only does this formulation serve as a tool for analyzing stack and queue layouts, it also leads to efficient algorithms for several problems related to sequences, graph theory, and computational geometry. The connection between queue layouts and matrix covers also forms the basis of a new scheme for performing matrix computations on a data driven network. Our analysis reveals that this scheme uses less hardware and is faster than existing schemes. The second tool is obtained by considering separated and mingled layouts of graphs. This tool allows us to obtain lower bounds on the stacknumber and the queuenumber of a graph by partitioning the graph into subgraphs and simply concentrating on the interaction of the subgraphs. These tools are used to obtain results in three areas. The first area is stack and queue layouts of directed acyclic graphs (dags). This area is motivated by problems of scheduling parallel processes. We establish the stacknumber and the queuenumber of classes of dags such as trees, unicylic graphs, outerplanar graphs, and planar graphs. We then present linear time algorithms to recognize 1-stack dags and leveled-planar dags. In contrast, we show that the problem of recognizing 9-stack dags and the problem of recognizing 4-queue dags are both NP-complete. The second area is stack and queue layouts of partially ordered sets (posets). We establish upper bounds on the queuenumber of a poset in terms of other measures such as length, width, and jumpnumber. We also present lower bounds on the stacknumber and on the queuenumber of certain classes of posets. We conclude by showing that the problem of recognizing a 4-queue poset is NP-complete. The third area is queue layouts of planar graphs. While it has been shown that the stacknumber of the family of planar graphs is 4, the queuenumber of planar graphs is unknown. We conjecture that a family of planar graphs—the stellated triangles—has unbounded queuenumber; using separated and mingled layouts, we demonstrate significant progress towards that result. / Ph. D.