Proceedings of the Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC) 2011

These proceedings bring together a selection of papers from the 2011 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference(SPARC). It includes papers from PhD students in the arts and social sciences, business, computing, science and engineering, education, environment, built environment and health sciences. Contributions from Salford researchers are published here alongside papers from students at the Universities of Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham City, Chester,De Montfort, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores and Manchester

The Effectiveness of Teacher Resource Centre Strategy

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Latin America 2060: consolidation or crisis?

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Center Task Force Reports, a publication series that began publishing in 2009 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.Latin America has produced vigorous ideas throughout its history, expressed in narratives about its struggles and successes, or its weaknesses and failures. Together, these have shaped a multi-faceted vision of the region and its peoples. Some of its expositors, finding the story to be neither complete nor precise, work toward reformulations, some quite radical. Such generation of knowledge in different fields seems destined to yield a variety of distinct outcomes, at least in part because some of the emerging social and cultural movements are not yet very well structured. This Task Force Report project seeks to harness ideas about the region’s future into a coherent and policy useful discourse. A Workshop and a Task Force meeting was held at Boston University on November 18-19, 2010. A select group of invited experts – a mix of academic scholars and practitioners – were asked to turn their ideas into short ‘Think Pieces’ essays. Each Think Piece focuses on a specific topical issue for the region as a whole, instead of looking only at particular countries. These Think Piece essays are compiled and edited by the Task Force coordinator and published by the Pardee Center as a Task Force Report

Text complexity and text simplification in the crisis management domain

Due to the fact that emergency situations can lead to substantial losses, both financial and in terms of human lives, it is essential that texts used in a crisis situation be clearly understandable. This thesis is concerned with the study of the complexity of the crisis management sub-language and with methods to produce new, clear texts and to rewrite pre-existing crisis management documents which are too complex to be understood. By doing this, this interdisciplinary study makes several contributions to the crisis management field. First, it contributes to the knowledge of the complexity of the texts used in the domain, by analysing the presence of a set of written language complexity issues derived from the psycholinguistic literature in a novel corpus of crisis management documents. Second, since the text complexity analysis shows that crisis management documents indeed exhibit high numbers of text complexity issues, the thesis adapts to the English language controlled language writing guidelines which, when applied to the crisis management language, reduce its complexity and ambiguity, leading to clear text documents. Third, since low quality of communication can have fatal consequences in emergency situations, the proposed controlled language guidelines and a set of texts which were re-written according to them are evaluated from multiple points of view. In order to achieve that, the thesis both applies existing evaluation approaches and develops new methods which are more appropriate for the task. These are used in two evaluation experiments – evaluation on extrinsic tasks and evaluation of users’ acceptability. The evaluations on extrinsic tasks (evaluating the impact of the controlled language on text complexity, reading comprehension under stress, manual translation, and machine translation tasks) Text Complexity and Text Simplification in the Crisis Management domain 4 show a positive impact of the controlled language on simplified documents and thus ensure the quality of the resource. The evaluation of users’ acceptability contributes additional findings about manual simplification and helps to determine directions for future implementation. The thesis also gives insight into reading comprehension, machine translation, and cross-language adaptability, and provides original contributions to machine translation, controlled languages, and natural language generation evaluation techniques, which make it valuable for several scientific fields, including Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and a number of different sub-fields of NLP.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Incarnational ministry : a program for spiritual formation and renewal

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1224/thumbnail.jp

Islamist state: Various visions?

This thesis analyzes original texts produced by ideologues and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qaeda and Islamic State to deduce their vision for the Islamist State. The thesis reveals the positions of the three movements from the institutions of Caliphate, Sharia, and Democracy, in addition to their tolerance of using violence as a strategy to install the Islamist State. The thesis concludes that the three movements are willing to install the Islamist Caliphate and apply Sharia law. Yet, they disagree on the strategy that has to be applied to achieve this end. The thesis explains the reasons behind the disagreement between the three movements either through their conditions of foundation, which affected the primary objective that the movement was founded for, or through the deficiencies in the knowledge base on Islamic political regime. The thesis starts with a literature review that sheds the light on the Muslim and Islamist visions for the state in Islam. The review also briefly tackles the Islamist movements. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 introduce the Muslim Brotherhood, Qaeda and Islamic State texts. Each chapter starts with introducing a general overview of the movement’s history and ends in a conclusion and summary of the movement’s vision through the studied institutions of the Islamist State. Each text analyzed is associated with a brief introduction on the author (if known) and the context in which the text is released

Discourse Analysis of Public Debate over U.S. Government Faith-Based Initiative of 2001

This thesis uses the discourse analysis methods developed by T. Van Dijk and J. P. Gee to examine public debate over the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001 as it arose in testimony before the U. S. House of Representatives and related news articles published in the New York Times and Washington Post. In analyzing the language used in the congressional hearings and news articles printed between January 2001 and December 2004, Van Dijk‘s categories and related questions were methodologically combined with Gee‘s approach to provide a framework and method for analyzing the underlying discourse. While debate participants expressed strong beliefs in complex social ideals, many see America‘s social problems as intractable in nature, where key decisions about distributions of funds are based on political considerations, as opposed to merit or need

The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies: A Case Study in Sustaining a Single Author Archive

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies (cited also as the “Bradbury Center” or the “Center”) is a single author archive, museum, and outreach center housed in the Institute for American Thought, located in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI. This dissertation employs a case study methodology to explore the complex issue of single author archive management and sustainability as it applies to the Bradbury Center by extending the research process beyond working with primary sources and published materials. The applied research project unfolded in two phases. The first involved an intensive four-day on-site consultation in which five professional archivists and preservation experts from across the Midwest visited the Bradbury Center and examined its collections and policies. Following their visit, the consultants prepared recommendations concerning artifacts, manuscripts, correspondence, physical layout, access, operational procedures, processing priorities, and environmental/climate control for artifacts. The on-site consultation team also informed objectives, goals, and strategies for addressing the preservation needs of the Center’s vast and varied collections, aiding in systematically moving forward with curatorial initiatives, and planning for general organizational development. The second research phase involved site visits to five peer institutions to tour facilities, interview directors and archivists about best practices, and established a plan for adapting these practices to the Bradbury Center. Findings from both research phases inform the Bradbury Center’s immediate and long-term plans for center staff, fundraising, spatial expansion and renovation, and the Center’s strategy for identifying key constituencies as it endeavors to serve a broad spectrum of public and academic audiences through various outreach and programming initiatives. Upon completion of the case study field research, a formal report was prepared. That report serves as the cornerstone for this applied dissertation. Additional chapters cast a vision for the Bradbury Center and address potential opportunities to serve the Indianapolis region by tapping into tourism markets, conventions, and local cultural festivals and celebrations while also developing into an international research hub as the sole entity that preserves the material legacy of Ray Bradbury. The introductory chapter situates the Bradbury Center within the legacy of the central figure of the Center—Ray Bradbury

Reconciling Irreconcilables? The British Government's Comprehensive Approach to Post-Conflict Peacebuilding

A wide number of contributions to the peacebuilding literature have decried the limitations and constraints of liberal peacebuilding, to such an extent that the very term has begun to assume vaguely pejorative overtones. Concerns for the health and well-being of liberal peacebuilding have accumulated to the extent that Roland Paris has issued a plaintive call for liberal peacebuilding to be ‘saved’ (2010). In this thesis, I critically engage with the comprehensive approach, one of the central mechanisms that has enabled liberal peacebuilding to redefine and rearticulate its terms of reference. I begin from the assumption that the comprehensive approach does not anticipate the post-liberal peace that has been heralded by some observers (see Richmond, 2011); quite the contrary, it instead provides the basis for reformulation or adaptation within the terms that have been established by liberal peacebuilding. In continuing to hold out this tantalising possibility, the comprehensive approach continues, more than 20 years after its first articulation, to cast a seductive spell over its adherents. In this thesis, I critically assess how the comprehensive approach framework has been engaged and developed by one of its leading proponents (the British Government). I break the approach down into three dimensions of comprehensiveness (deepening, contextuality and complementarity), with a view to illustrating how the textual reproduction of each dimension has been accompanied by a set of contradictions and tensions. In doing so, I propose to explore how discursive ‘broadening’ and ‘deepening’ has been accompanied by a range of contradictions and tensions. In unravelling these contradictions, I then draw upon Foucauldian concepts and themes to argue that each and every advancement of freedom (whether through the form of empowerment, participation or contextual engagement) has been considerably more ambiguous than the standard narrative of the comprehensive approach – which reproduces the impression of an incremental progression – would have us believe. In questioning and probing the proposition that the comprehensive approach overcomes or reconciles the contradictions and tensions of liberal peacebuilding, I instead suggest a disconcerting reversion to prior points of reference