In this thesis we present an incremental learning algorithm for learning and classifying the pattern of movement of multiple objects in a dynamic scene. The method that we describe is based on symbolic representations of the patterns. The typical representation has a spatial component that describes the relationships of the objects and a temporal component that describes the ordering of the actions of the objects in the scene. The incremental learning algorithm (ILF) uses evidence based forgetting, generates compact concept structures and can track concept drift.We also present two novel algorithms that combine incremental learning and image analysis. The first algorithm is used in an American Football application and shows how natural language parsing can be combined with image processing and expert background knowledge to address the difficult problem of classifying and learning American Football plays. We present in detail the model developed to representAmerican Football plays, the parser used to process the transcript of the American Football commentary and the algorithms developed to label the players and classify the queries. The second algorithm is used in a cricket application. It combines incremental machine learning and camera motion estimation to classify and learn common cricket shots. We describe the method used to extract and convert the camera motion parameter values to symbolic form and the processing involved in learning the shots.Finally, we explore the issues that arise from combining incremental learning with incremental recognition. Two methods that combine incremental recognition and incremental learning are presented along with a comparison between the algorithms.

It became very obvious, during my research, that alchemy was much more than just aspects of practical metallurgy and much more relevant in terms of symbolic and psychic investigations into the significance of the unconscious mind, the individual and the journey to discover the 'centre.' I use the concept of alchemy as a means to explore the unknown mystery of existence, being and the inner self. 'One Square Inch Between the Eyes' is a phrase used by Taosists to describe that area of the body that contains the highest form of energy and is the centre of spiritual development and transformations. Important aspects of true alchemy appear through Taosist manifestations and is expressed by the unity of nature and humankind. It is seen as a principle of universal understanding and a means to get behind or within appearances. This thesis begins to inquire into aspects of how alchemical notions have developed, both on a practical and symbolic level and how both have impacted on our lives. In the research process, several definitions of alchemy have been identified together with how these definitions have been adopted culturally. I begin to look at areas of art and creativity, science and chemistry, medicine and illness and how people see these aspects of cultural necessities through alchemical concepts and notions. / Master of Arts (Hons) (Visual Arts)

In recent years research has recognised that notions of body image, body image ideals and body dissatisfaction develop much earlier than was once thought. However, the growing body of evidence in this area of research is predominantly quantitative. This study was designed to engage children in the five to six year age group using qualitative methods and present their notions of body image through the looking glass of the children's own eyes. Children's voices have not often found their way into research. Concerns about their powers of communication, cognitive abilities and the ethical difficulties inherent when working with children have restricted their participation. Objective, empirical evidence suggests that if one engages children in research appropriately they are able to make a significant contribution. Forty-seven children (25=m; 22=f) aged between five and six years were interviewed on three occasions over 12 months regarding their perceptions of body image. Seven schools from the Independent school system were involved. Interviews were conducted on school sites in public, easily observable locations. The study focused on three aspects. That is, how these children perceived their own body, the bodies of other people and their notions of health in respect to body image. These interviews revealed that the girls in this age group had developed an understanding of body image that valued thinness. However, their preference for a thinner body did not negatively impact on their sense of identity or self-worth. Boys preferred larger bodies and correlated increased body size with competence and physical aptitude. The concept of 'large' was linked to height for some or to a mesomorphic body for other boys. By the final interview all the children revealed strong negative perceptions of fatness. These perceptions were more apparent at each successive interview. An obese or extremely thin body was not always correlated with being unhealthy. Depending on the perspective of the child, even the largest of images was nominated the 'healthiest body' by some children. Health was overwhelmingly linked to food intake with few children associating health with exercise. The playground and the home, where most notably mothers, were important in the development of body image conceptions. Children were acutely aware of the dietary practices of their parents and associated diets with losing weight. / PhD Doctorate

In this thesis we propose the use of Dijkstra's concept of a predicate transformer [Dij75] for the determination of database transaction safety [SS89] and the generation of simple conditions to check that a transaction will not violate the integrity constraints in the case that it is not safe. The generation of this simple condition is something that can be done statically, thus providing a mechanism for generating safe transactions. Our approach treats a database as state, a database transaction as a program, and the database's integrity constraints as a postcondition in order to use a predicate transformer [Dij75] to generate a weakest precondition. We begin by introducing a set-oriented update language for relational databases for which a predicate transformer is then defined. Subsequently, we introduce a more powerful update language for deductive databases and define a new predicate transformer to deal with this language and the more powerful integrity constraints that can be expressed using recursive rules. Next we introduce a data model with object-oriented features including methods, inheritance and dynamic overriding. We then extend the predicate transformer to handle these new features. For each of the predicate transformers, we prove that they do indeed generate a weakest precondition for a transaction and the database integrity constraints. However, the weakest precondition generated by a predicate transformer still involves much redundant checking. For several general classes of integrity constraint, including referential integrity and functional dependencies, we prove that the weakest precondition can be substantially further simplified to avoid checking things we already know to be true under the assumption that the database currently satisfies its integrity con-straints. In addition, we propose the use of the predicate transformer in combination with meta-rules that capture the exact incremental change to the database of a particular transaction. This provides a more general approach to generating simple checks for enforcing transaction safety. We show that this approach is superior to known existing previous approaches to the problem of efficient integrity constraint checking and transaction safety for relational, deductive, and deductive object-oriented databases. Finally we demonstrate several further applications of the predicate transformer to the problems of schema constraints, dynamic integrity constraints, and determining the correctness of methods for view updates. We also show how to support transactions embedded in procedural languages such as C.

ABSTRACT Notions of quality of life dictate philosophies and policies for services for people with developmental disabilities. There is an abundance of research on quality of life, much of which has influenced the significant amount of study of quality of life for people with developmental disabilities. According to specialist developmental disability nurses, however, this research has little meaning for one group of people with developmental disabilities with whom they work - people with severe multiple impairments. Nevertheless, judgements and decisions about the lives of this group continue to be driven by the idea of quality of life. While the literature review found that researchers are urged to seek the perceptions of people regarding their own quality of life by asking them, some authors have noted the difficulty in pursuing such a method with people, such as people with severe multiple impairments, who are unable to communicate in the usual ways. Given, then, that it is difficult to directly determine the views of people with severe multiple impairments, this study sought the perceptions of nurses about the quality of life of the people with whom they work. In order to discover and conceptualise nurses' views, a symbolic interaction perspective was chosen to guide this study and data were analysed using the grounded theory approach. The study was conducted in two stages. Stage One consisted of semi-structured indepth interviews with expert nurses to explore their perceptions of quality of life for the people with whom they worked. A significant finding in these interviews was that perceptions of quality of life are mediated by interaction. Consequently, Stage Two involved a participant observation study in which the interactions of nurses and people with severe multiple impairments were examined. Specialist developmental disability nurses have a unique view of quality of life for people with severe multiple impairments. They refer to it as 'just little things', a phrase which masks complex nursing knowledge and skills, and which can be described by four interrelated categories which emerged from the data: humans being, supporting, becoming intimate, and situated belonging. As nurses become more intimate with individuals, they perceive that people with severe multiple impairments are humans being as they wish, and that quality resides in supporting their everyday lives in a context of situated belonging. This thesis represents a new conceptualisation of quality of life for people with severe multiple impairments, a conceptualisation which may have significance for other groups and, indeed, for the whole quality of life enterprise. This conceptualisation draws on knowledge not usually related to quality of life, that is, knowledge of the body, of the emotions, of identity and of humanness. Such findings demonstrate the power of an interpretive approach in explicating the meanings nurses have regarding quality of life. Further, these findings have implications for how the question of quality of life is approached, for how different ways of thinking about people impact on quality of life, and for the importance of the life in quality of life.

This thesis aimed to investigate the changing nature, expression and measurement of contemporary racist attitudes, discriminatory behaviours and racial stereotypes in an Australian context. The first principal aim of this thesis was to further establish the psychometric properties of the Symbolic Racism Extended Scale (Fraser & Islam, 1997b). Study 1 revealed good psychometric properties for the Symbolic Racism Extended Scale as a measure of symbolic (modern) racist attitudes in Australian populations. The study also found support for incorporating modern racism items within a 'social issues' questionnaire format to reduce reactivity concerns associated with self-report measures. The second principal aim of this thesis (Studies 2 and 3) was to explore the nature, prevalence and potential sources of contemporary racist attitudes, and associated discriminatory behaviours, in an Australian context. Study 2 detected a sizeable proportion of modern racist attitudes in both the University and ACT Secondary College student samples. The nature of modern racist attitudes in the population samples maintained clear consistencies with key tenets of contemporary theories of racial prejudice. Overall the study provided further empirical evidence of the nature, tenets and potential socio-demographic sources of modern racist attitudes in Australian populations. Study 3 explored modern racists' discriminatory behaviours in conditions of low racial salience. In an employment-hiring task, high and low prejudiced participants (university undergraduates) revealed significantly different employment hiring preferences for an Aboriginal applicant. In providing Australian empirical evidence of modern racists' discriminatory behaviours, the study also discussed methodological implications for future Australian research investigating the discriminatory behaviours of modern racists. The third principal aim of this thesis was to provide further analysis of the measurement of contemporary racist attitudes, specifically to examine concerns pertaining to the measurement of racial attitudes through implicit techniques. Implicit free-response measurement of Australian racial stereotypes in Study 4 revealed that high and low prejudiced participants (as measured by the SR-E) were equally knowledgable of the cultural stereotypes of Aboriginals, Asians and immigrants. Cultural knowledge of the implicit stereotypes was found to be predominantly independent of prejudicial beliefs, lending support to concerns (Devine, 1989; Devine & Elliot, 1995) that implicit measures of racial prejudice may actually be measuring an individual's cultural knowledge of the primed racial group, rather than his or her prejudicial beliefs. The fourth principal aim of this thesis was to investigate the content of Australian racial stereotypes. Study 4 revealed the implicit content of the cultural stereotypes of Aborigines, Asians and immigrants to be predominantly negative in nature. In response to the predominantly negative content of the Aboriginal cultural stereotype, Study 5 investigated whether the recategorising of ingroup boundaries and disconfirming information, relating to Aboriginal Australians, observed in the recent Sydney Olympic Games would result in changes to the content of the cultural stereotype. The study found significant decreases and increases in the negative and positive traits respectively reported as being part of the cultural stereotype of Aborigines, two weeks following the Sydney Olympic Games. Together, the five studies contributed to empirical research on the changing nature, expression and measurement of contemporary racist attitudes, discriminatory behaviours and racial stereotypes in Australian populations. A number of theoretical and practical implications of the present findings for Australian prejudice research are addressed and discussed. Furthermore, a number of practical recommendations for future research are identified to further investigate the modern nature of racist attitudes in Australian populations.

<p>The combination of the socio-political changes following 1989 and the current status ofEnglish as the language of international communication promoted dynamic transformations ofthe attitude and usages of English in Bulgaria. The purpose of this study is to investigate theforms, functions and symbolic value of English in the Bulgarian advertising and journalisticdiscourse. The emphasis is on non-established words as opposed to established borrowings.Two hypotheses encapsulating the possible relation between English usages in advertising andjournalistic discourses are in the centre of investigation:</p><p>Hypothesis 1 The use of the English language remains on the symbolic and visual level in theBulgarian advertising and journalistic discourses.</p><p>Hypothesis 2 The symbolic value of English usage in advertising discourse is the same as thatof journalistic discourse.</p><p>Prior to the analyses, the study introduces an overview of the Bulgarian linguistic situationand a summary of studies in the area of contact phenomena between English and Bulgarian.Special attention is paid to publications discussing advertising and journalistic discourse.On the base of two principles – genre and readership – six magazines have been selectedto provide the data for the study: Маниджър(Manager); Story, НашДом(Our Home),ЖенатаДнес(The Woman Today), ЖурналзаЖената(Women’s Journal), and Top GearБългария(Top Gear Bulgaria). Using a set of criteria the process of collecting data hasextracted the occurrences of English from all advertisements, section and column headings,article titles, and the featured article of each issue. English occurrences have been classifiedfirst according to their generic function and position in the textual unity, and then, accordingto symbolic value ascribed by English.The statistical data confirms that the use of English in advertising discourse is common;on average 66% of the advertisements contain English words. Cross-reference with the type offunction reveals, however, that only 17% of the English used in advertisements adds semanticvalue to the Bulgarian-English mixing. Therefore, in advertising discourse English remainsmainly a tool for adding symbolic value. As far as the journalistic discourse is concernedEnglish usages are not as frequent; nevertheless, great variations are exemplified. Suchvariation is observed in the heading data where one of the magazines contains no English inthe headings while another uses English in all but four of its headings. The findings of thestudy reject both of the hypotheses although variations are observed and have been describedin this study. The analyses demonstrate that advertising discourse uses English in order toexploit the value of English as the lingua franca of the world, while the journalistic discoursedraws on the symbolic associations of English as the language of popular culture.The results of this study provide a comparison between advertising and journalisticdiscourses. Furthermore, it offers a picture of the situation in Bulgaria twenty years after thepolitical changes and a good intermediate point in the process of spread of English, whichcontinues to modify the linguistic situation of the country.</p>

<p>Using a symbolic interactionistic analytical approach, this essay aims to study the socialisation of young women’s sexuality in treatment institutions for young women. Through qualitative interviews with staff members at said institutions, concerning their views on young female sexuality, and how they discuss sexuality with the young women in the institutions, my aim was to identify the socialisation of young women’s sexuality. I have also investigated how the staff experiences their own sex as an important factor in conversations about sexuality with young women, as well as the possible effect sexually mixed or sexually segregated institutions exert upon conversations about sexuality. I have therefore interviewed both male and female staff, as well as staff of both sexually mixed and sexually segregated treatment institutions.</p><p>The results indicate that the staff does talk about sexuality with the young women, but in varying degree and form. Treatment ideology seems to have an impact on the conversations of sexuality. The staff perceives their sex to be of importance for the conversations about sexuality but they also emphasise the importance of trusting relationships. They believe that sexuality as a subject arises more often in sexually mixed treatment institutions than in sexually segregated institutions. The staffs’ view on young female sexuality is not characterized by a discourse of desire, but rather by concern for the young women’s vulnerability, triggered by their own behaviour, as well as doubts about the young women’s own sexual desire.</p>

<p>The main aim of the study is to generate increased knowledge about young people’s leisure time sporting habits in a contextual perspective. The intention is to highlight the circumstances in which young people pursue and participate in different activities, with a particular focus on sport in terms of one’s own life circumstances. An essential point of departure of the study is regarding sport as an important pedagogic environment of norms and values.</p><p>The perspective of the study is mainly cultural-sociological. In the analyses, Pierre Bourdieu’s key concepts habitus and capital have been used as research tools together with gender. The data on which the thesis is based is collected from young people from school year 9 living in four different milieus and comes from three different collections, conducted in 1996, 2002 and 2007. In each data collection about 1200-1500 pupils replied to a questionnaire.</p><p>Sport occupies a central position in young people’s life on the recreational field. The results show that sport culture can best be understood in the local perspective. Young people’s sporting habit development can be said to be a result of a complex interplay between personal preferences, the home environment, local traditions, what is on offer, living conditions and the prevailing laws of gender and status.</p><p>For the group of teenagers as a whole the proportion of members, as well as those who pursue personal sports, increases with higher educational capital and higher economic capital. When it comes to organised sport outside the sports club milieu no such connection can be determined.</p><p>The thesis has shown that sport is not accessible for all and opportunities for participation are curtailed for large groups of young people in our society. This is especially true for sport organised in sport clubs, i.e. sport mainly supported by public funds.</p>

<p>This doctoral thesis examines how modernisation affects and is affected by existing local culture and identity. It is about the relation between the social and mental barriers experienced, expressed and manifested in the social culture of local community, and modernisation’s dynamic powers over time. The thesis deals with different time periods from the 1800’s until today with regard to expressions and consequences of modernity. People during the societal transformation of Sweden in the 19th and 20th centuries are culturally depicted from a micro-perspective.</p><p>An overall perspective for the analysis of modernity uses the concepts of basal and variable modernity, borrowed from the historian of ideas Sven-Eric Liedman. The perspective makes possible the separation between on the one hand the structural modernisation within the fields of economy, technology and natural sciences, and on the other hand the cultural modernity manifested in conceptions of the world, politics, existential viewpoints, aesthetic expressions and social culture. Within the first-mentioned fields, where basal modernity dominates, a uniform and cumulative developmental pattern emerges as well as an almost self-propelled continuity toward the next innovation or stage of development. Within the latter fields, however, a non-uniform pattern emerges, where modernisation is constantly the object of alternative interpretations and attitudes. This variable modernity is characterised by a cultural struggle between conflicting ideologies and strategies in relation to ongoing modernisation. Different individuals and groups position themselves between acceptance and resistance, progressiveness and the critique of civilisation, the preservation of traditions and the will to change. In this course of events new affinities and identifications, but also new dissociations and antagonisms are created in local social contexts. Modernity leads both to the obliteration of boundaries and to the emergence of new social and mental boundaries. This process can also lead to existing geographical borders being charged with a new ideological content so their importance is revitalised.</p>