Choreographic assemblages : an archaeology of movement and space

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-111).Time and movement always played a vital role in architecture, and it also takes significance in my work. This interest leads me to the investigation of choreography and dance notation in relation to space. By using notation, choreographers develop a general structure to document the accommodation of music, movements and patterns of a dance composition. A dance composition is an aesthetic entity existing in the four dimensions of space-time. Different styles of dance have different degrees of concern for the spatiotemporal symmetry of the body movements and the manipulation of abstract patterns. With Labanotation, choreographers are able to reduce a four-dimensional manifold to two dimensions - compression of the dimensionality by quantization. Notation structures movement in space, and divides the spatial hierarchy in sequences inducing the notion of time. It orchestrates the movement of body and senses through space. In essence, notation establishes a relationship among architecture, space and time as an entity. It becomes a narrative or form of memory that offers "the heterotopic space various past, multiple presents ... diverse future." (Michel Foucault: Heterotopic Space) Henceforth, it leads architecture to the realm of poetry (unconscious imagery). Architecture transfigures itself into the theater of memory, a sheer presence within space. "After the visual recognition of forms (body), one's mind struggles and attempts to reconstruct the vel}' meaning of space." (Maxine Sheets: The Phenomenology of Dance) This fusion of meaningful and meaningless, significant and accidental reinforces one's spatial experience and intimacy with architecture. Architects have always sought ways to express the similar notions. The architecture of kinaesthetic (Labanotation) offers the opportunity to mend the rupture between the theorization of architecture and its actualization. It allows vast latitude of experimentation and makes possible to conceive a more corresponding architecture. This engagement would make architecture more relevant to the bodily movement and the conceptions of space and time. It is possible to understand buildings as a resultant of a discourse possessing a structured system of representation. In its materiality, it is also a means of combining and preserving perceptions arising from within dissimilar ontological conditions. The method of analysis entails an identification of the kinaesthetic order of typological spatial conditions through a built object, using a composite protocol of analysis (e.g. Labanotation). This descriptive order prescribes the very meaning of spatio-temporality, and an insidious investigation allows a critique of conventional unities of spatial representation.by Chiu-Fai CanS.M

A metacognitive feedback scaffolding system for pedagogical apprenticeship

This thesis addresses the issue of how to help staff in Universities learn to give feedback with the main focus on helping teaching assistants (TAs) learn to give feedback while marking programming assignments. The result is an innovative approach which has been implemented in a novel computer support system called McFeSPA. The design of McFeSPA is based on an extensive review of the research literature on feedback. McFeSPA has been developed based on relevant work in educational psychology and Artificial Intelligence in EDucation (AIED) e.g. scaffolding the learner, ideas about andragogy, feedback patterns, research into the nature and quality of feedback and cognitive apprenticeship. McFeSPA draws on work on feedback patterns that have been proposed within the Pedagogical Patterns Project (PPP) to provide guidance on structuring the feedback report given to the student by the TA. The design also draws on the notion of andragogy to support the TA. McFeSPA is the first Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that supports adults learning to help students by giving quality feedback. The approach taken is more than a synthesis of these key ideas: the scaffolding framework has been implemented both for the domain of programming and the feedback domain itself; the programming domain has been structured for training TAs to give better feedback and as a framework for the analysis of students’ performance. The construction of feedback was validated by a small group of TAs. The TAs employed McFeSPA in a realistic situation that was supported by McFeSPA which uses scaffolding to support the TA and then fade. The approach to helping TAs become better feedback givers, which is instantiated in McFeSPA, has been validated through an experimental study with a small group of TAs using a triangulation approach. We found that our participants learned differently by using McFeSPA. The evaluation indicates that 1) providing content scaffolding (i.e. detailed feedback about the content using contingent hints) in McFeSPA can help almost all TAs increase their knowledge/understanding of the issues of learning to give feedback; 2) providing metacognitive scaffolding (i.e. each level of detailed feedback in contingent hint, this can also be general pop-up messages in using the system apart from feedback that encourage the participants to give good feedback) in McFeSPA helped all TAs reflect on/rethink their skills in giving feedback; and 3) when the TAs obtained knowledge about giving quality feedback, providing adaptable fading of TAs using McFeSPA allowed the TAs to learn alone without any support

Managing the Evolution of Dependability Cases for Systems of Systems

. Dependability is a composite property consisting of attributes such as reliability, availability, safety and security. The achievement of these attri~utes is often essential for the operational success of systems undertaking critical and complex tasks. .Assurance that the fmal system will demonstrate the required dependability qualities, can be crucial to the acceptance of the system into service. Safety cases are a well established c,oncept used to establish assurance about the safety properties of a system. However, safety cases focus only on one attribute of dependability. The principles and processes ofcreating an integrated dependability case - that assures all aspects of dependable system behaviour - are less well understood. A number of challenges are faced when attempting to support dependability case development. These include the systematic elicitation of dependability goals, the management and justification of trade-offs, and the evolution of multi-attribute arguments in step with the design process. This thesis addresses these challenges by defming a rigorous framework, accompanied by a set of methods, for establishing dependability cases. Firstly, a method for eliciting dependability requirements is defmed by extending existing safety deviational analysis techniques. Secondly, a method for systematically identifying and managing justified trade-offs is presented. Thirdly, the thesis describes the co-evolution of depen~bility . case arguments alongside system development - using a dependability case architecture that corresponds to system structures. Finally, the thesis unifies these contributions by defming a metamodel that captures and interrelates the 'concepts underlying the proposed methods. Evaluation of the work is presented by means of peer review, pilot studies and industrial examples

Enabling the Development and Implementation of Digital Twins : Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality

Welcome to the 20th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality (CONVR 2020). This year we are meeting on-line due to the current Coronavirus pandemic. The overarching theme for CONVR2020 is "Enabling the development and implementation of Digital Twins". CONVR is one of the world-leading conferences in the areas of virtual reality, augmented reality and building information modelling. Each year, more than 100 participants from all around the globe meet to discuss and exchange the latest developments and applications of virtual technologies in the architectural, engineering, construction and operation industry (AECO). The conference is also known for having a unique blend of participants from both academia and industry. This year, with all the difficulties of replicating a real face to face meetings, we are carefully planning the conference to ensure that all participants have a perfect experience. We have a group of leading keynote speakers from industry and academia who are covering up to date hot topics and are enthusiastic and keen to share their knowledge with you. CONVR participants are very loyal to the conference and have attended most of the editions over the last eighteen editions. This year we are welcoming numerous first timers and we aim to help them make the most of the conference by introducing them to other participants

Talk brokers : an analysis of the work of counsellors at a New Zealand secondary school

The guidance counsellor position has become a feature of New Zealand secondary schools since the mid-1960s. This thesis is concerned with issues of power and control within a school and, in particular, with the form of power and control exercised by its guidance counsellors. Guidance counsellors have presented their work as 'helping teachers to teach and students to learn', while appealing to discourses of equal opportunity and 'at riskness' among the student body. A consequence of guidance counsellor work is a trade-off between therapy and discipline in some schools, creating new points of tension within the school organisation. Another consequence of counsellor work has been the redrawing of the boundaries of 'schooling' In regard to 'family' and 'community'. While there is ongoing debate within the sociology of education concerning forms of power and control which operate in schools, there is a definite gap in British, American and Australasian sociology of education literatures in regard to analyses of guidance counselling practices, and the forms of control set up through counsellors' work with students in schools. Many debates have focused on curriculum issues, or relationships between teachers and students in the school. In order to address the gap in the literature, this thesis has adopted an ethnographic approach and incorporated analytical concepts from the work of Michel Foucault. Within the sociology of education, ethnographic research documents the problems of controlling students and securing their commitment to schooling. However, despite the interactionist understanding of classroom events as 'negotiated process', much ethnography ultimately presents a repressive narrative of power relations. In contrast with these narratives, Michel Foucault's work is used in the thesis to argue that power may be seen in terms of coercion, constraint and enablement. This thesis adopts Foucault's emphasis on 'micropolitics', focusing on the way power may be seen to inscribe identities such as 'at risk' on the student body through the 'pastoral power' work and confessional techniques of school guidance counsellors. Education texts which have used Foucault's concepts tend to emphasise issues of disciplinary, rather than pastoral, power relations in schools, directed towards the control and subjugation of students. It is implied that forms of disciplinary power secure themselves with no, or few, problems and obliterate all tensions within the school. My own material on guidance counselling indicates that this is an oversimplification. There are many more dimensions to power relations. The fieldwork for this thesis was conducted with a particular emphasis on guidance counsellors' work at a large, urban, New Zealand high school. Difficulties and tensions related by counsellors are used to raise issues concerning theoretical understandings of control, both in the sociology of education and Foucault-inspired literatures

A Lexical Description of English for Architecture: A Corpus-based Approach

Every knowledge community has a distinct type of discourse and a linguistic identity which brings together the ideas of that discipline. These are expressed through characteristic linguistic realizations which are of considerable interest in the study of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) from many different perspectives. Despite the fact that ESP is a recent area of linguistic research, there is already a varied literature on academic and professional languages: English for law, business, computer and technology, advertising, marketing and engineering, just to mention a few. According to Dudley-Evans (1998:19), the development of ESP arose as a result of general improvements in the world economy in the 1960’s, along with the expansion of science and technology. Other relevant factors were the growing use of English as the international language of science, technology and business, and the increasing flow of exchange students to and from the UK, US and Australia