Interrogating the nature, process and politics of female headed dance collaborations: the growth project (Scenkonst Sӧrmland, Sweden & Baxter Theatre Centre, Cape Town, South Africa) 2012-2016

This dissertation seeks to investigate the nature of Contemporary Dance collaborations between some South African dancers in the Western Cape and Swedish musicians and dancers and their directors and producers. My study focusses on the impact of choreographic processes in such collaborations when these are led by women. In particular, I will examine a collaboration herein referred to as the Growth Project that was undertaken between the Baxter Theatre Centre in Cape Town, South Africa and Scenkonst Sörmland Theatre in Sweden between 2012-2016. The study aims to provide insight into such collaborative dance practices in order to highlight gendered practices in Dance in the Western Cape. It will outline all three parts of the Growth Project but focuses on the dance work I hit the ground running (2013), in which I performed. This dissertation considered the historical context, and political legacy of key individuals associated with the Growth Project in order to examine their views of the artistic world, their relationship to one another and what inform choreographic processes when working in Contemporary Dance in the Western Cape. When artist collaborate, there is an interplay between identity, culture and politics and issues of power and gender all add to the complexity of dance collaborations. This dissertation problematises the birth of Contemporary Dance in South Africa and focusses on the region of the Western Cape arguing that in the 2000s, colonial and apartheid history continues to support a gender inequality in South African Dance as well as in society in general. Chapter One positions myself as an emic and etic researcher and provides an overview of the influences that impacted the development of Contemporary Dance in South Africa especially in the Western Cape. With this as background, I discuss my rationale for an interrogation of collaborative dance practices between some South Africans and certain foreigners. I highlight certain gaps such as analysis of contemporary dance works by women in South African Dance Literature. Chapters Two and Three discuss the concept of collaboration and draw some distinctions between the genders, for example, when women collaborate. It focuses on economic and patriarchal modes of power in society and the manner in which these are perpetuated in dance. It acknowledges feminist theories found in Social Sciences and Humanities that are also extended in Dance Studies such as the work of Katrak (2006), Butler (1999) and Daly (2002). I reflect on the response of some South African dancing bodies to collaborative practices in Contemporary Dance and add my comments to the views on this topic already expressed by Loots (2012), Craighead (2007) amongst others. Chapter Four highlights the research methods used during this study and explains how the process of the interview was engaged with to collect data. This sourcing of data included my own reflections as a participant and observer, as well as an analysis of journalistic material (press reviews), and programme notes. I also critically unpack my own reflective journals. My unique etic and emic perspectives, as I am simultaneously the researcher as well as one of the dancers in I hit the ground running (2013), will be discussed. This research also gave rise to a number of findings which have been framed as challenges encountered by dancers, musicians, the choreographer and management teams involved in I hit the ground running (2013). The study reflects on the notion of femaleness in Contemporary Dance itself, and the impact that such femaleness has on dance making/Contemporary Dance choreography. The connections between femaleness as a form of discrimination and other forms of marginalisation such as race and cultural groups is explored. This is contested within South African and Swedish world views in the 21st century. This dissertation suggests that a feminist notion of dance making is a useful tool to understand South African and Swedish Contemporary Dance. It may extend the work of other dance researchers wanting to write about other marginalised groups for example disability dance in South Africa and Sweden

Models of higher-order, type-safe, distributed computation over autonomous persistent object stores

A remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism permits the calling of procedures in another address space. RPC is a simple but highly effective mechanism for interprocess communication and enjoys nowadays a great popularity as a tool for building distributed applications. This popularity is partly a result of their overall simplicity but also partly a consequence of more than 20 years of research in transpaxent distribution that have failed to deliver systems that meet the expectations of real-world application programmers. During the same 20 years, persistent systems have proved their suitability for building complex database applications by seamlessly integrating features traditionally found in database management systems into the programming language itself. Some research. effort has been invested on distributed persistent systems, but the outcomes commonly suffer from the same problems found with transparent distribution. In this thesis I claim that a higher-order persistent RPC is useful for building distributed persistent applications. The proposed mechanism is: realistic in the sense that it uses current technology and tolerates partial failures; understandable by application programmers; and general to support the development of many classes of distributed persistent applications. In order to demonstrate the validity of these claims, I propose and have implemented three models for distributed higher-order computation over autonomous persistent stores. Each model has successively exposed new problems which have then been overcome by the next model. Together, the three models provide a general yet simple higher-order persistent RPC that is able to operate in realistic environments with partial failures. The real strength of this thesis is the demonstration of realism and simplicity. A higherorder persistent RPC was not only implemented but also used by programmers without experience of programming distributed applications. Furthermore, a distributed persistent application has been built using these models which would not have been feasible with a traditional (non-persistent) programming language

A tangible programming environment model informed by principles of perception and meaning

It is a fundamental Human-Computer Interaction problem to design a tangible programming environment for use by multiple persons that can also be individualised. This problem has its origin in the phenomenon that the meaning an object holds can vary across individuals. The Semiotics Research Domain studies the meaning objects hold. This research investigated a solution based on the user designing aspects of the environment at a time after it has been made operational and when the development team is no longer available to implement the user’s design requirements. Also considered is how objects can be positioned so that the collection of objects is interpreted as a program. I therefore explored how some of the principles of relative positioning of objects, as researched in the domains of Psychology and Art, could be applied to tangible programming environments. This study applied the Gestalt principle of perceptual grouping by proximity to the design of tangible programming environments to determine if a tangible programming environment is possible in which the relative positions of personally meaningful objects define the program. I did this by applying the Design Science Research methodology with five iterations and evaluations involving children. The outcome is a model of a Tangible Programming Environment that includes Gestalt principles and Semiotic theory; Semiotic theory explains that the user can choose a physical representation of the program element that carries personal meaning whereas the Gestalt principle of grouping by proximity predicts that objects can be arranged to appear as if linked to each other.School of ComputingPh. D. (Computer Science

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2009

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems and Engineering Management, Operational Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics and Engineering Physics

Presence 2005: the eighth annual international workshop on presence, 21-23 September, 2005 University College London (Conference proceedings)

OVERVIEW (taken from the CALL FOR PAPERS) Academics and practitioners with an interest in the concept of (tele)presence are invited to submit their work for presentation at PRESENCE 2005 at University College London in London, England, September 21-23, 2005. The eighth in a series of highly successful international workshops, PRESENCE 2005 will provide an open discussion forum to share ideas regarding concepts and theories, measurement techniques, technology, and applications related to presence, the psychological state or subjective perception in which a person fails to accurately and completely acknowledge the role of technology in an experience, including the sense of 'being there' experienced by users of advanced media such as virtual reality. The concept of presence in virtual environments has been around for at least 15 years, and the earlier idea of telepresence at least since Minsky's seminal paper in 1980. Recently there has been a burst of funded research activity in this area for the first time with the European FET Presence Research initiative. What do we really know about presence and its determinants? How can presence be successfully delivered with today's technology? This conference invites papers that are based on empirical results from studies of presence and related issues and/or which contribute to the technology for the delivery of presence. Papers that make substantial advances in theoretical understanding of presence are also welcome. The interest is not solely in virtual environments but in mixed reality environments. Submissions will be reviewed more rigorously than in previous conferences. High quality papers are therefore sought which make substantial contributions to the field. Approximately 20 papers will be selected for two successive special issues for the journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. PRESENCE 2005 takes place in London and is hosted by University College London. The conference is organized by ISPR, the International Society for Presence Research and is supported by the European Commission's FET Presence Research Initiative through the Presencia and IST OMNIPRES projects and by University College London

Factors impacting on tacit knowledge transfer within Scrum software development teams

Over time, there has been a high failure rate of information systems development (ISD) projects, although Agile development has brought recent improvements. Knowledge management is also known to be one of the critical factors to Agile and project success; however, there are some knowledge transfer studies in Agile development. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to present a theoretical model examining what makes individuals successful at transferring knowledge in teams using Scrum, Agile’s most popular methodology. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted at two Scrum companies in Cape Town. Participants interviewed ranged from project managers and Scrum masters to software developers, business analyst and testers. The interviews were all transcribed, then analysed using thematic analysis. The findings produced new relationships between characteristics already well known to impact knowledge transfer as well as newly defined characteristics impacting knowledge transfer in Scrum teams: empathy and articulation skills of the source. The results have shown that the recipient should perceive the person wanting to transfer knowledge as having these characteristics to enable successful knowledge transfer: empathy, motivation, capability, credibility, articulate and ability to communicate enough. The contribution of this study to practice is a list of attributes for HR managers to help improve the knowledge transfer of Scrum team members. The contribution to Scrum research is a new theoretical model that suggests which characteristics a person needs to transfer knowledge successfully in Scrum teams, adapted from Joshi, Sarker and Sarker’s (2007) knowledge transfer model. This model can also be extended in the future by looking more deeply into the new relationships between constructs, such as how motivation together with capability of the source affect knowledge transfer in Scrum teams

The role of school safety and security committees in the welfare of learners in combined schools.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.This study is focused on the role of school safety and security committees (SSSCs) in the welfare of learners. A case study was conducted in two combined schools in the King Cetshwayo District of Northern KwaZulu-Natal. The aim of the study was to investigate SSSCs to understand the factors influencing them in executing their roles and strategies for improving their performance. A qualitative study within an interpretive paradigm was conducted. The data-generation instruments included focus group interviews and document analysis. Research participants were purposefully selected. Data were analysed through a thematic approach. The findings indicate that the majority of SSSC members understood their roles but challenges remained. Some of the challenges included financial constraints to buy security facilities such as metal and drug detectors. Participants were of the opinion that SSSC members must be compensated for the work they do. Another view was that private security companies must be hired. Based on the findings, continuous support workshops, employment of private security companies, and the production of isiZulu versions of policy documents are recommended

A framework for the analysis and evaluation of enterprise models

Bibliography: leaves 264-288.The purpose of this study is the development and validation of a comprehensive framework for the analysis and evaluation of enterprise models. The study starts with an extensive literature review of modelling concepts and an overview of the various reference disciplines concerned with enterprise modelling. This overview is more extensive than usual in order to accommodate readers from different backgrounds. The proposed framework is based on the distinction between the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic model aspects and populated with evaluation criteria drawn from an extensive literature survey. In order to operationalize and empirically validate the framework, an exhaustive survey of enterprise models was conducted. From this survey, an XML database of more than twenty relatively large, publicly available enterprise models was constructed. A strong emphasis was placed on the interdisciplinary nature of this database and models were drawn from ontology research, linguistics, analysis patterns as well as the traditional fields of data modelling, data warehousing and enterprise systems. The resultant database forms the test bed for the detailed framework-based analysis and its public availability should constitute a useful contribution to the modelling research community. The bulk of the research is dedicated to implementing and validating specific analysis techniques to quantify the various model evaluation criteria of the framework. The aim for each of the analysis techniques is that it can, where possible, be automated and generalised to other modelling domains. The syntactic measures and analysis techniques originate largely from the disciplines of systems engineering, graph theory and computer science. Various metrics to measure model hierarchy, architecture and complexity are tested and discussed. It is found that many are not particularly useful or valid for enterprise models. Hence some new measures are proposed to assist with model visualization and an original "model signature" consisting of three key metrics is proposed.Perhaps the most significant contribution ofthe research lies in the development and validation of a significant number of semantic analysis techniques, drawing heavily on current developments in lexicography, linguistics and ontology research. Some novel and interesting techniques are proposed to measure, inter alia, domain coverage, model genericity, quality of documentation, perspicuity and model similarity. Especially model similarity is explored in depth by means of various similarity and clustering algorithms as well as ways to visualize the similarity between models. Finally, a number of pragmatic analyses techniques are applied to the models. These include face validity, degree of use, authority of model author, availability, cost, flexibility, adaptability, model currency, maturity and degree of support. This analysis relies mostly on the searching for and ranking of certain specific information details, often involving a degree of subjective interpretation, although more specific quantitative procedures are suggested for some of the criteria. To aid future researchers, a separate chapter lists some promising analysis techniques that were investigated but found to be problematic from methodological perspective. More interestingly, this chapter also presents a very strong conceptual case on how the proposed framework and the analysis techniques associated vrith its various criteria can be applied to many other information systems research areas. The case is presented on the grounds of the underlying isomorphism between the various research areas and illustrated by suggesting the application of the framework to evaluate web sites, algorithms, software applications, programming languages, system development methodologies and user interfaces