8,397 research outputs found

    Technical Dimensions of Programming Systems

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    Programming requires much more than just writing code in a programming language. It is usually done in the context of a stateful environment, by interacting with a system through a graphical user interface. Yet, this wide space of possibilities lacks a common structure for navigation. Work on programming systems fails to form a coherent body of research, making it hard to improve on past work and advance the state of the art. In computer science, much has been said and done to allow comparison of programming languages, yet no similar theory exists for programming systems; we believe that programming systems deserve a theory too. We present a framework of technical dimensions which capture the underlying characteristics of programming systems and provide a means for conceptualizing and comparing them. We identify technical dimensions by examining past influential programming systems and reviewing their design principles, technical capabilities, and styles of user interaction. Technical dimensions capture characteristics that may be studied, compared and advanced independently. This makes it possible to talk about programming systems in a way that can be shared and constructively debated rather than relying solely on personal impressions. Our framework is derived using a qualitative analysis of past programming systems. We outline two concrete ways of using our framework. First, we show how it can analyze a recently developed novel programming system. Then, we use it to identify an interesting unexplored point in the design space of programming systems. Much research effort focuses on building programming systems that are easier to use, accessible to non-experts, moldable and/or powerful, but such efforts are disconnected. They are informal, guided by the personal vision of their authors and thus are only evaluable and comparable on the basis of individual experience using them. By providing foundations for more systematic research, we can help programming systems researchers to stand, at last, on the shoulders of giants

    The developing maternal-infant relationship: a qualitative longitudinal study

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    Aim The study aimed to explore maternal perceptions and the use of knowledge relating to their infant’s mental health over time using qualitative longitudinal research. Background There has been a growing interest in infant mental health over recent years. Much of this interest is directed through the lens of infant determinism, through knowledge regarding neurological development resulting in biological determinism. Research and policy in this field are directed toward individual parenting behaviours, usually focused on the mother. Despite this, there is little attention given to maternal perspectives of infant mental health, indicating that a more innovative approach to methodology is required. Methods This study took a qualitative longitudinal approach, and interviews were undertaken with seven mothers from the third trimester of pregnancy and then throughout the first year of the infant’s life. Interviews were conducted at 34 weeks of pregnancy, and then when the infant was 6 and 12 weeks, 6, 9, and 12 months, alongside the collection of researcher field notes—a total of 41 interviews. Data were analysed by creating case profiles, memos, and summaries, and then cross-comparison of the emerging narratives. A psycho-socially informed approach was taken to the analysis of data. Findings Three interrelated themes emerged from the data: evolving maternal identity, growing a person, and creating a safe space. The theme of evolving maternal identity dominated the other themes of growing a person and creating a safe space in a way that met perceived socio-cultural requirements for mothering and childcare practices. Participants’ personal stories give voice to their perceptions of the developing maternal-infant relationship in the context of their socio-cultural setting, relationships with others, and experiences over time. Conclusions This study adds new knowledge by giving mothers a voice to express how the maternal-infant relationship develops over time. The findings demonstrate how the developing maternal-infant relationship grows in response to their mutual needs as the mother works to create and sustain identities for herself and the infant that will fit within their socio-cultural context and individual situations. Additionally, the findings illustrate the importance of temporal considerations, social networks, and intergenerational relationships to this evolving process. Recommendations for practice, policy, and education are made that reflect the unique relationship between mother and infant and the need to conceptualise this using an ecological approach

    The Adirondack Chronology

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    The Adirondack Chronology is intended to be a useful resource for researchers and others interested in the Adirondacks and Adirondack history.https://digitalworks.union.edu/arlpublications/1000/thumbnail.jp

    Foundations for programming and implementing effect handlers

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    First-class control operators provide programmers with an expressive and efficient means for manipulating control through reification of the current control state as a first-class object, enabling programmers to implement their own computational effects and control idioms as shareable libraries. Effect handlers provide a particularly structured approach to programming with first-class control by naming control reifying operations and separating from their handling. This thesis is composed of three strands of work in which I develop operational foundations for programming and implementing effect handlers as well as exploring the expressive power of effect handlers. The first strand develops a fine-grain call-by-value core calculus of a statically typed programming language with a structural notion of effect types, as opposed to the nominal notion of effect types that dominates the literature. With the structural approach, effects need not be declared before use. The usual safety properties of statically typed programming are retained by making crucial use of row polymorphism to build and track effect signatures. The calculus features three forms of handlers: deep, shallow, and parameterised. They each offer a different approach to manipulate the control state of programs. Traditional deep handlers are defined by folds over computation trees, and are the original con-struct proposed by Plotkin and Pretnar. Shallow handlers are defined by case splits (rather than folds) over computation trees. Parameterised handlers are deep handlers extended with a state value that is threaded through the folds over computation trees. To demonstrate the usefulness of effects and handlers as a practical programming abstraction I implement the essence of a small UNIX-style operating system complete with multi-user environment, time-sharing, and file I/O. The second strand studies continuation passing style (CPS) and abstract machine semantics, which are foundational techniques that admit a unified basis for implementing deep, shallow, and parameterised effect handlers in the same environment. The CPS translation is obtained through a series of refinements of a basic first-order CPS translation for a fine-grain call-by-value language into an untyped language. Each refinement moves toward a more intensional representation of continuations eventually arriving at the notion of generalised continuation, which admit simultaneous support for deep, shallow, and parameterised handlers. The initial refinement adds support for deep handlers by representing stacks of continuations and handlers as a curried sequence of arguments. The image of the resulting translation is not properly tail-recursive, meaning some function application terms do not appear in tail position. To rectify this the CPS translation is refined once more to obtain an uncurried representation of stacks of continuations and handlers. Finally, the translation is made higher-order in order to contract administrative redexes at translation time. The generalised continuation representation is used to construct an abstract machine that provide simultaneous support for deep, shallow, and parameterised effect handlers. kinds of effect handlers. The third strand explores the expressiveness of effect handlers. First, I show that deep, shallow, and parameterised notions of handlers are interdefinable by way of typed macro-expressiveness, which provides a syntactic notion of expressiveness that affirms the existence of encodings between handlers, but it provides no information about the computational content of the encodings. Second, using the semantic notion of expressiveness I show that for a class of programs a programming language with first-class control (e.g. effect handlers) admits asymptotically faster implementations than possible in a language without first-class control

    Conscience and Consciousness: British Theatre and Human Rights.

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    This research project investigates a paradigm of human rights theatre. Through the lens of performance and theatre-making, this thesis explores how we came to represent, speak about, discuss, and own human rights in Britain. My framework of ‘human rights theatre’ proposes three distinctive features: firstly, such works dramatise real-world issues and highlights the role of the state in endangering its citizens; secondly, ethical ruptures are encountered within and without the drama, and finally, these performances characteristically aspire to produce an activist effect on the collective behaviours of the audience. This thesis interrogates the strategies theatre-makers use to articulate human rights concerns or to animate human rights intent. The selected case-studies for this investigation are ice&fire’s testimonial project, Actors for Human Rights; Badac Theatre; Jonathan Holmes’ work as director of Jericho House; Cardboard Citizens’ youth participation programme, ACT NOW; and Tony Cealy’s Black Men’s Consortium. Deliberately selecting companies and performance events that have received limited critical attention, my methodology constellates case-studies through original interviews, durational observation of creative working methods and proximate descriptions of practice. The thesis is interested in the experience of coming to ‘consciousness’ through human rights theatre, an awakening to the impacts of rights infringements and rights claiming. I explore consciousness as a processual, procedural, and durational happening in these performance events. I explore the ‘éffect’ of activist art and examine the ways in which makers of human rights theatre aim to amplify both affective and effective qualities in their work. My thesis also considers the articulation of activist purpose and the campaigning intent of the selected theatre-makers and explores how their activism is animated in their productions. Through the rich seam of discussion generated by the identification and exploration of the traits of a distinctive human rights theatre, I affirm the generative value of this typological enquiry

    Validation of a Novel Screening Tool for Obstructive Sleep Apnoea in Bariatric Surgery Candidates

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    Undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is increasingly recognised as a serious post-operative risk with bariatric surgery. Demand for pre-operative screening for OSA in bariatric surgery candidates is rising and there is a need for simple, cost-effective screening methods to mitigate the stain on Sleep Services. WatchPAT is a relatively new device, which uses peripheral arterial tonometry rather than airflow to estimate the apnoea hypopnoea index (AHI). While WatchPAT use is increasing in the general sleep clinic population it has not yet been validated in patients with a BMI >35, i.e. the target population in bariatric surgery. The studies described in this thesis aim to validate WatchPAT against the clinical gold-standard in patients on the bariatric pathway and to assess patient acceptability of WatchPAT. 28 bariatric surgery candidates (22 female/6 male, mean ± SD age 44.1 ± 11.6 years, BMI 45.7 ± 7.5 kg/m2) wore WatchPAT 300 and Embletta MPR simultaneously for one night and the outcome measure, AHI was compared in the two devices. AHI was higher in WatchPAT than Embletta (Median (range) 23.5 (3.9-70.6) versus 11.7 (0.7-46.5) events per hour; z=-4.623, p=0.000). There was a strong positive correlation between WatchPAT and Embletta AHI measurements (r=0.849; p=0.000). Bland Altman plots revealed a systematic bias; differences diverging at higher AHI values. ROC plots were constructed for a range of AHI cut-offs; AUC was highest for an AHI ≄20 (0.986), ≄15 (0.947) and AHI ≄30 (0.979), while for AHI ≄5 the AUC was 0.850. 97% of respondents reported that WatchPAT would be acceptable to them if introduced into the bariatric surgery pathway. These results are similar to those in the non-bariatric sleep clinic population and suggest that WatchPAT may suitable for use in bariatric surgery patients requiring screening for OSA though further larger scale studies are needed to confirm these findings before incorporating into clinical guidelines

    Science Fiction, Radical Democracy, and World Building: A Pedagogy of Unknowable Futures

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    The unknowability of the future implicates everyone, yet the narratives of mastery which shape pedagogical approaches to the future do not allow students the opportunity to explore the uncertainty that comes from ultimately unknowable futures. This dissertation therefore foregrounds the exploration of uncertainty by envisioning science fictional, collaborative world building as a space in which students can imagine contested views of the future that move beyond predicting future problems. This study occurred in two stages: first, a reflexive ethnography framed within participatory action research in one secondary-level English classroom over three months, which involved exploring science fiction (SF) with students who then mobilized science fictional storytelling to collaboratively imagine the future of Toronto; and second, a world building assignment that was designed and informed by findings from stage one and used with pre-service teachers in order to facilitate speculative pedagogical explorations as they imagined myriad potential futures of society and schooling through SF. In stage one, various qualitative methods were used to explore students engagement with SF, the future, and storytelling, including observations and fieldnotes, a questionnaire on students thoughts on the future, semi-structured group interviews, in-class discussions, and contributions to the collaborative world building project. Data is analyzed through thematic analysis, discourse analysis, and critical theories to gain a deeper understanding of issues of representation, power, and intersectionality in students engagement with one another throughout the project, in pursuit of understanding how students envisioned a collective, contested future together. In stage two, pre-service teachers world building work is analyzed through thematic analysis, with particular attention to the development of speculative pedagogies which centre futures that are open and uncertain. Informed by thinking on radically democratic pedagogy, poststructuralism, and critical theory, in addition to genre studies within SF scholarship, this study contributes to a reframing of the future within education by moving away from the goal of mastering unknowable futures, and instead towards engaging in a collectively constructed exploration of uncertainty, and further positions SF as a promising and largely untapped resource integral to narratively navigating challenge and change

    Large‐scale collaboration in ENIGMA‐EEG: A perspective on the meta‐analytic approach to link neurological and psychiatric liability genes to electrophysiological brain activity.

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    Background and purpose The ENIGMA-EEG working group was established to enable large-scale international collaborations among cohorts that investigate the genetics of brain function measured with electroencephalography (EEG). In this perspective, we will discuss why analyzing the genetics of functional brain activity may be crucial for understanding how neurological and psychiatric liability genes affect the brain. Methods We summarize how we have performed our currently largest genome-wide association study of oscillatory brain activity in EEG recordings by meta-analyzing the results across five participating cohorts, resulting in the first genome-wide significant hits for oscillatory brain function located in/near genes that were previously associated with psychiatric disorders. We describe how we have tackled methodological issues surrounding genetic meta-analysis of EEG features. We discuss the importance of harmonizing EEG signal processing, cleaning, and feature extraction. Finally, we explain our selection of EEG features currently being investigated, including the temporal dynamics of oscillations and the connectivity network based on synchronization of oscillations. Results We present data that show how to perform systematic quality control and evaluate how choices in reference electrode and montage affect individual differences in EEG parameters. Conclusion The long list of potential challenges to our large-scale meta-analytic approach requires extensive effort and organization between participating cohorts; however, our perspective shows that these challenges are surmountable. Our perspective argues that elucidating the genetic of EEG oscillatory activity is a worthwhile effort in order to elucidate the pathway from gene to disease liability

    The social and psychological work of metaphor: a corpus linguistic investigation

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    This thesis investigates the triangular relationship between metaphor use, community, and state of mind, to ask the question: what social and psychological work does metaphor do, in the computer-mediated discourse setting of an online forum. The thesis goes beyond the finding and grouping of metaphors for analysis to consider the pattern of metaphor use over time in terms of (i) surrounding language style; (ii) density of use; and (iii) use by different participant groups. In achieving its aim the thesis provides insights into (i) the effect of metaphor use in terms of state of mind; (ii) the role of metaphor in the characterisation of a community; and (iii) methods for considering linguistic metaphor in naturally occurring discourse in terms of its psychological effect, which also creates insights into metaphor theory. The primary novel contribution of the thesis is to combine an analysis of metaphor use with an analysis of the language style that surrounds it, using established research relating language style to state of mind to consider the social and psychological work that metaphor does. The primary prediction of the investigation is that where metaphor is used to characterise a concept, the surrounding language will be of a style that has been found to be associated with better mental health. This is related to and supported by the second novel contribution of the thesis, which is to consider the role of metaphor in the formation and evolution of a community over time, by considering change in density of metaphor and other key variables in the data as a whole, and for comparative participant groups. The third novel contribution of the thesis is that, alongside more established corpus linguistic techniques, new techniques from the fast-evolving areas of data science and natural language processing are explored and evaluated in terms of (i) finding metaphors in the corpora; (ii) analysing language style; and (iii) diachronic analysis. It is shown that use of the identified dominant metaphor themes in each community co-occurs with specific language styles associated with mental health, and that this work of metaphor evolves over time as a consensus which becomes normative within the group for a period, such that it shapes community members as well as being shaped by them, while the flexibility of metaphor still leaves that work open to further evolution. The adaptation and prominence of particular metaphor themes over time to do particular work in each forum also underpins the characterisation of it as a particular community
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