This study focuses on testing the five hermeneutic principles set out by Jakob Klein and two ofmy own. The test consists ofwriting a commentary on Plato's Jon read in accordance with those principles. In summary these principles require paying close attention to the dramatic aspect ofthe dialogue and reading in a very detailed fashion. The success or failure ofthe principles is to be decided on the basis ofthe quality ofthe reading they produce. If following the principles produces a more comprehensive and deeper understanding of the dialogue then they should be deemed successful. The principles require that attention be given to the framing details of the dialogue and that an attempt be made to integrate them into the overall understanding. This interpretation thus reaches a somewhat different understanding of Sokrates' purpose in talking to Ion and Plato's purpose in writing the dialogue. Instead ofan abstract battle between philosophy and poetry, we have a battle between two particular characters over a real city. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Remarkable advancements in the field of Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have led to unprecedented breakthroughs in what machines are able to achieve. In many tasks such as in Image Classification in fact, they are now capable of even surpassing human performance. While this is truly outstanding, there are still many tasks in which machines lag far behind. Walking in a room, driving on an highway, grabbing some food for example. These are all actions that feel natural to us but can be quite unfeasible for them. Such actions require to identify and localize objects in the environment, effectively building a robust understanding of the scene. Humans easily gain this understanding thanks to their binocular vision, which provides an high-resolution and continuous stream of information to our brain that efficiently processes it. Unfortunately, things are much different for machines. With cameras instead of eyes and artificial neural networks instead of a brain, gaining this understanding is still an open problem. In this thesis we will not focus on solving this problem as a whole, but instead delve into a very relevant part of it. We will in fact analyze how to make ma- chines be able to identify and precisely localize objects in the 3D space by relying only on visual input i.e. 3D Object Detection from Images. One of the most complex aspects of Image-based 3D Object Detection is that it inherently requires the solution of many different sub-tasks e.g. the estimation of the object’s distance and its rotation. A first contribution of this thesis is an analysis of how these sub-tasks are usually learned, highlighting a destructivebehavior which limits the overall performance and the proposal of an alternative learning method that avoids it. A second contribution is the discovery of a flaw in the computation of the metric which is widely used in the field, affecting the re-computation of the performance of all published methods and the introduction of a novel un-flawed metric which has now become the official one. A third contribution is focused on one particular sub-task, i.e. estimation of the object’s distance, which is demonstrated to be the most challenging. Thanks to the introduction of a novel approach which normalizes the appearance of objects with respect to their distance, detection performances can be greatly improved. A last contribution of the thesis is the critical analysis of the recently proposed Pseudo-LiDAR methods. Two flaws in their training protocol have been identified and analyzed. On top of this, a novel method able to achieve state-of-the-art in Image-based 3D Object Detection has been developed.

As part of their mathematical knowledge for teaching (Ball et al., 2008), teachers must have a well-connected understanding of the subject matter they teach and must know this content in deeper and different ways than other adults. This is essential for quality teaching and learning, as teachers’ knowledge and understanding impact the nature and effectiveness of instruction (e.g., Hill et al., 2005). Since decimal concepts are part of elementary curriculum (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010), and can be difficult for children and adults (e.g., Jacobson et al., 2020; Kastberg & Morton, 2014; Steinle & Stacey, 1998), mathematics teacher educators must consider how we can strengthen support for prospective teachers of elementary school (PTs), to deepen their mathematical knowledge for teaching decimals. This is of particular importance as existing research provides few rich characterizations of PTs’ decimal understanding and is limited in explorations into connections and mechanisms that may improve that understanding. In this dissertation, I attend to the research question, following engagement with rich conceptually focused decimal instruction, how may PTs’ conceptualizations of decimal place value and magnitude, and factors which have influenced this understanding, be characterized? I address some gaps in current literature by considering how robust decimal understanding for PTs may be connected to and grounded in their broader knowledge of the base-ten place value system, and to the decimal models which they use. Following an introduction to the problem in Chapter One, and a review of relevant literature in Chapter Two, Chapter Three reports on a study in which I examined how PTs characterized the base-ten place value system, distinguishing between responses crafted by PTs who had demonstrated different levels of decimal understanding. This allowed me to identify elements of base-ten place value understanding which likely supported PTs’ thinking about decimal place value and magnitude. In the study in Chapter Four, I explored the nature of PTs’ decimal understanding and its relationships with decimal square or number line models that they used, finding that certain model features facilitated PTs’ ability to think about decimal place value and magnitude in ways that are more likely to be productive and appropriate for teaching. These two empirical studies are both qualitative content analyses (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) carried out in the context of the Elementary Mathematics Project (Chapin et al., 2021). Though implications for teachers and teacher educators are incorporated in Chapters Three and Four, Chapter Five is a practitioner article in which I focus more directly on these implications, making recommendations about important model features and areas of emphasis for decimal instruction. Chapter Six looks across the dissertation, discussing overarching themes and directions for future research. Results of this research may be used to support mathematics teacher educators in carrying out effective decimal instruction with their PT students, since better understanding of PTs’ thinking can help mathematics teacher educators to make informed curricular and pedagogical decisions to foster PT development. This is of high importance, since as PTs increase and enrich their decimal understanding, their students’ opportunities to learn will also expand. / 2027-04-30T00:00:00Z

The purposes of this study were to examine 1) understandings of science expressed in formal salmon recovery policy discourse; 2) rhetorical practices employed to justify or undermine claims about salmon policy 3); and patterns of understandings of science and associated rhetorical practices between social categories of actors. This research contributes to scholarship in public understanding of science, discourse studies, and natural resource policy. A constructivist discourse analysis was conducted using qualitative methods to analyze transcripts from over one hundred congressional hearing witnesses representing a wide diversity of stakeholder groups. Multiple coders organized discourses into analytic categories, achieving a final proportional agreement of 80% or greater for each category, at the finest scale of analysis. Stakeholders employed a collection of prototypical understandings of the nature of science, boundaries of science, and roles of science in decision-making. The process of science was described as impartial and ideal, a way to reduce uncertainty through consensus and peer-review, and subject to changing paradigms. Scientific knowledge was sometimes represented as "truth" and other times as tentative, and scientists were portrayed as independent and objective as well as captured and interest-driven. Witnesses described science as separate from and superior to politics and management. Testimony included descriptions of science?s role in developing decision alternatives, selecting among alternatives, and evaluating and legitimating alternatives. Stakeholders used these understandings of science to construct justifications to support their claims about salmon policy and undermine opposing claims. Science-based justifications included externalizing devices, construction of consensus, category entitlement, and extreme case formulations. Other justifications invoked local control, treaty rights, and local knowledge, or relied on interest management. This study has extended the theory and method of empirical discourse analysis, and produced a taxonomy of understandings that should be transferable to studies of similar policy settings. Additionally, conclusions from this study about differences between social groups in the presence, distribution, and frequency of expression of the discourses might be developed into propositions for further testing. Finally, the study has implications for communication about the role of science in collaborative natural resource decision-making processes. / Ph. D.

In my thesis I ask the epistemological question: If a speaker testifies to some proposition p to some hearer, and the hearer learns that p, must that speaker believe that p? Those who maintain the traditional view in the epistemology of testimony claim that testimony is primarily a way in which speakers transmit beliefs to hearers. If this is the case, then in order to transmit the belief that p, the speaker must be in possession of a belief that p. Other epistemologists reject this view altogether and argue that when speakers stand in the right sort of epistemic relation to the statements they issue they properly testify. My project carves out a position between these two views. I argue that speakers need not believe p, but speakers must be in some appropriate epistemic state with respect to p in order to properly testify to p. On my view, understanding is among the epistemic states that can place a speaker in the right sort of epistemic relation to p. Thus, if p is a consequence of a speaker's understanding of a subject, the speaker is licensed to testify that p. / Master of Arts

Parents teach their children about emotions through a process called emotion socialization and one way that they can do so is through shared discussions about emotions. Research in developmental psychology indicates that parental emotion socialization strategies through discourse such as elaboration and labels and explanations are related to children's emotion understanding and social competence. In the current study, I apply the concept of indirect communication, which has been used in linguistics since the 1970s, to parental emotion socialization with preschool-age children (n= 55; 31 females, 24 males). I define indirect communication as parental speech in which the form and function of a subject-verb phrase do not match and examined relations of parental indirect communication to the previously established strategies in developmental psychology of elaboration and use of labels and explanations. To understand whether this type of communication may influence children's development, I also examined relations of indirect communication to preschoolers' emotion understanding and social competence. Results indicate that parental indirect communication during positive events was related to parental explanations during negative events. Parental indirect communication did not significantly predict children's emotion understanding or social competence, but showed a trend for the association between indirect communication during negative event discussions and children's nonstereotypical emotion understanding. However, the direction for this association was opposite than hypothesized. These results do not suggest consistency of indirect communication across positive and negative event discussions as an emotion socialization strategy. / Master of Science

In this research, I set out to elucidate the relationships that might exist between students' conceptual understanding upon which they draw in their proof activity. I explore these relationships using data from individual interviews with three students from a junior-level Modern Algebra course. Each phase of analysis was iterative, consisting of iterative coding drawing on grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2000, 2006; Glaser and Strauss, 1967). In the first phase, I analyzed the participants' interview responses to model their conceptual understanding by drawing on the form/function framework (Saxe, et al., 1998). I then analyzed the participants proof activity using Aberdein's (2006a, 2006b) extension of Toulmin's (1969) model of argumentation. Finally, I analyzed across participants' proofs to analyze emerging patterns of relationships between the models of participants' understanding of identity and inverse and the participants' proof activity. These analyses contributed to the development of three emerging constructs: form shifts in service of sense-making, re-claiming, and lemma generation. These three constructs provide insight into how conceptual understanding relates to proof activity. / Ph. D.

This study examines associations of emotion language with emotion understanding and emotion regulation during the preschool years. There is evidence that the way parents talk about emotions with their children promotes children's emotion understanding and regulation (e.g. Bird and Reese, 2006; Laible, 2011). However, there has been little attention paid to associations of these outcomes with children's emotion language. In this study, I examined associations of children's emotion language on their emotion understanding and emotion regulation, and tested whether parents' emotion language was indirectly associated with these outcomes through children's emotion language. One hundred fifty-six 3- to 5-year-old children participated with their primary caregiver. Parent-child dyads engaged in an emotion-laden conversation to measure parent and child emotion language. Children also engaged in the locked box task (Cole et al., 2009; Goldsmith et al., 1993) to measure emotion regulation and completed the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (Nowicki and Duke, 1994) to measure emotion understanding. Results differed for younger preschoolers (36 - 53 months) compared with older preschoolers (54 - 69 months) in regard to emotion regulation. For younger preschoolers, path analyses indicated an indirect effect in which parent emotion talk was associated with less attention shifting during the locked box task. There was also a direct effect in which children's greater use of emotion labels was positively associated with emotion understanding. Results may reflect the rapid emotional development occurring during the preschool years and suggest the importance of early emotion socialization. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this study was to better understand associations between acculturation, parental beliefs, mother-child emotion talk, and emotion understanding in Latino preschool-aged children. Research on Latino families may prove to be important given the little research that has focused on emotion understanding strictly in Latino cultures. Forty Latino mother-child dyads were observed throughout a series of naturalistic observations. Mothers self-reported their acculturation and their beliefs about the value and danger of children's emotions, children's emotional development processes, and their role in guiding their children's emotions. Mother-child emotion talk and framing was measured during a 15 minute story-telling task using a Lego house and through a wordless picture book. Children's emotion understanding was measured using two standard tasks. Results showed that mothers' acculturation was related to their beliefs about the danger of emotions, their role in guiding their child's emotions, and their child's readiness to learn about emotions. Mothers' acculturation was also related to children's emotion understanding. Mothers' beliefs about guiding children's emotions were related to mothers' labeling of emotions and to children's emotion understanding. This study confirms and expands several previous findings relating to emotion socialization of children. Overall, results highlight the importance of acculturation for parents' beliefs about emotions and children's emotion understanding. / Master of Science

Yes / Future populations of older adults in the UK, those aged 65+, will demonstrate increased diversity in terms of their ethnic identity resultant from the ageing of the post-war migrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Caribbean. As a consequence, there will be an increase in the numbers of older adults from these communities living with age-related chronic diseases such as dementia. In response to these demographic changes, we need to develop a research, policy and practice agenda that is inclusive and provides evidence for the development of culturally diverse and effective models of service delivery. This requires engagement with three key stakeholder groups: (a) people with dementia; (b) their carers; and (c) the wider community. As part of the IDEAL research programme on living well with dementia, we undertook semi-structured interviews with twelve community leaders, defined as known and trusted individuals active in their respective communities, and six community members (two people living with dementia and four carers). We explored their understandings, experiences, and views of about dementia. Our analysis identified two overarching themes. The migrant lifecourse highlighted issues of not belonging, discrimination and racism. This framed our second theme, the cultural context of dementia, which addressed dementia knowledge and attitudes, service provision and service access, and how being part of a minority ethnic community made a difference to these experiences. Our study highlights how lifecourse experiences of negative hostile social and policy environments and services can be profound and long-lasting and provide a prism through which accessing dementia care is experienced. Our findings argue for the inclusion of diverse views and lifecourse experiences within the context of developing a dementia strategy for research, policy and practice that is appropriate for a multicultural and heterogenous society. / This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, National Institute for Health and Care Research (ES/L001853/2), and Alzheimer’s Society (348, AS-PR2-16-001).