A Case Study of the Developing Literacy of African -American Learners Attending a Tutoring Program at an Urban African -American Church.

This study describes the literate abilities of a group of upper level elementary African-American school children who participated in an urban, African-American, church-sponsored, after-school tutorial program. Using an ethnographic research method, I relied on field notes, audio-taped interviews, and writing samples to collect and analyze the data. The participants in the study were six subjects (five females and one male, ages 10 to 12) who were enrolled in the tutorial program. Over the course of seven months (October, 1997 to May, 1998), I observed all activities in which writing literacy took place at the tutorial program. From this observation three themes emerged: (1) the Black church as literacy mentor, (2) the tutors as agents of change, and (3) the subjects, constructed existence as a little community. That is, despite having diverse personalities and character traits, they each shared common goals and interests. Certain factors peculiar to the traditions and customs of the Black church---its ritual and performance helped upper elementary children increase their literate abilities. The findings of this study expand the body of research literature on non-school writing development in African-American children; thus, the study should interest literacy researchers and writing instructors who seek to understand the nature of literacy in African-American school children

Some sociological issues of live music performance

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This research seeks to explore some of the sociological aspects of live music performance contexts. Research into the impact of contemporary mechanical means of musical reproduction has tended to divert attention away from the study of live performance. But the two major music traditions in western Industrial societies, Western European Art Music (WEAM) and Afro-American have their origins in the pre-recording era. Consideration of the development of their forms must take into account the changing contexts within which they were performed. The development of notation coupled with the emphasis on composition within WEAM facilitated the rise of an aesthetic autonomy for the 'work' giving rise to the most appropriate context for its performance: the purpose built modern concert hall celebrating in its rituals and relations a particular form of aesthetic address. The Afro-American tradition with its roots in disadvantaged and dominated black culture, and its emphasis on improvisation rather than formal composition, is less autonomous and is mediated more closely by the social relations of the contexts within which it is performed. Observations of various performance venues was undertaken, using a comparative frame developed from that used by Qureshi (1987) modified to take into account the comrnodification of music in an economic market. Observations were supported by interviews of jazz musicians about attitudes to performance and preferred settings. Two venues have been selected for detailed consideration: The Royal Festival Hall (a classical concert) and The Pontalba Cafe (a Jazz cafe in New Orleans). On the basis of the observations, the Interviews and consideration of the current literature, models of aesthetic ideology are constructed. It is suggested that there is an homology between 'fixed' forms and 'tight' contexts and 'flexible' forms and 'loose' contexts

A Language-centered Approach to support environmental modeling with Cellular Automata

Die Anwendung von Methodiken und Technologien aus dem Bereich der Softwaretechnik auf den Bereich der Umweltmodellierung ist eine gemeinhin akzeptierte Vorgehensweise. Im Rahmen der "modellgetriebenen Entwicklung"(MDE, model-driven engineering) werden Technologien entwickelt, die darauf abzielen, Softwaresysteme vorwiegend auf Basis von im Vergleich zu Programmquelltexten relativ abstrakten Modellen zu entwickeln. Ein wesentlicher Bestandteil von MDE sind Techniken zur effizienten Entwicklung von "domänenspezifischen Sprachen"( DSL, domain-specific language), die auf Sprachmetamodellen beruhen. Die vorliegende Arbeit zeigt, wie modellgetriebene Entwicklung, und insbesondere die metamodellbasierte Beschreibung von DSLs, darüber hinaus Aspekte der Pragmatik unterstützen kann, deren Relevanz im erkenntnistheoretischen und kognitiven Hintergrund wissenschaftlichen Forschens begründet wird. Hierzu wird vor dem Hintergrund der Erkenntnisse des "modellbasierten Forschens"(model-based science und model-based reasoning) gezeigt, wie insbesondere durch Metamodelle beschriebene DSLs Möglichkeiten bieten, entsprechende pragmatische Aspekte besonders zu berücksichtigen, indem sie als Werkzeug zur Erkenntnisgewinnung aufgefasst werden. Dies ist v.a. im Kontext großer Unsicherheiten, wie sie für weite Teile der Umweltmodellierung charakterisierend sind, von grundsätzlicher Bedeutung. Die Formulierung eines sprachzentrierten Ansatzes (LCA, language-centered approach) für die Werkzeugunterstützung konkretisiert die genannten Aspekte und bildet die Basis für eine beispielhafte Implementierung eines Werkzeuges mit einer DSL für die Beschreibung von Zellulären Automaten (ZA) für die Umweltmodellierung. Anwendungsfälle belegen die Verwendbarkeit von ECAL und der entsprechenden metamodellbasierten Werkzeugimplementierung.The application of methods and technologies of software engineering to environmental modeling and simulation (EMS) is common, since both areas share basic issues of software development and digital simulation. Recent developments within the context of "Model-driven Engineering" (MDE) aim at supporting the development of software systems at the base of relatively abstract models as opposed to programming language code. A basic ingredient of MDE is the development of methods that allow the efficient development of "domain-specific languages" (DSL), in particular at the base of language metamodels. This thesis shows how MDE and language metamodeling in particular, may support pragmatic aspects that reflect epistemic and cognitive aspects of scientific investigations. For this, DSLs and language metamodeling in particular are set into the context of "model-based science" and "model-based reasoning". It is shown that the specific properties of metamodel-based DSLs may be used to support those properties, in particular transparency, which are of particular relevance against the background of uncertainty, that is a characterizing property of EMS. The findings are the base for the formulation of an corresponding specific metamodel- based approach for the provision of modeling tools for EMS (Language-centered Approach, LCA), which has been implemented (modeling tool ECA-EMS), including a new DSL for CA modeling for EMS (ECAL). At the base of this implementation, the applicability of this approach is shown

Sound and Image: Experimental Music and the Popular Horror Film (1960 to the present day)

This study investigates the functional relationship between sound and image within a particular generic and historical context - experimental music and the popular horror film, from 1960 to the present day. The study responds to a significant gap in the literature that requires sustained and in-depth academic attention. Despite recent expansion, the field of film music studies has yet to deal with alternative functional models that challenge the overall applicability of the dominant narrative-based theoretical framework. Recent scholarship suggests that a proper theoretical comprehension of horror film music's primary function requires a refocusing of the hermeneutic emphasis upon dimensions of the cinematic (or audio-visual) sign that can be described as `nonrepresentational.' This study applies a relatively new psychoanalytical framework to explain how the post-1960 horror film deploys these non-representational elements, incorporating them into an overall cinematic strategy which indexes the transition towards a post-classical cinematic aesthetics. More specifically, this study assessesju st how efficiently experimental musical styles and techniques aid the reconfiguration of the syntactical components of horror film to these very ends. Using three case study directors, this study focuses upon major developments in musical style and cinematic technology, describing the ways in which these have facilitated this cinematic strategy. A particularly useful contribution to the knowledge is made here via the study's explanation as to how the particular psychoanalytical framework applied can illuminate the functional and theoretical relationships often posited between both the formal and subjective dimensions of the post-1960 horror film experience. The conclusions reached suggest this theoretical explication of post-1960 horror film music's function can now take its place alongside previously dominant narrative frameworks. Given the influential status of the horror genre, the findings of this investigation prove useful for comprehending the increasing heterogeneity of postclassical film music in general, and the functional relationship(s) of sound and image in particular

PicShark: mitigating metadata scarcity through large-scale P2P collaboration

With the commoditization of digital devices, personal information and media sharing is becoming a key application on the pervasive Web. In such a context, data annotation rather than data production is the main bottleneck. Metadata scarcity represents a major obstacle preventing efficient information processing in large and heterogeneous communities. However, social communities also open the door to new possibilities for addressing local metadata scarcity by taking advantage of global collections of resources. We propose to tackle the lack of metadata in large-scale distributed systems through a collaborative process leveraging on both content and metadata. We develop a community-based and self-organizing system called PicShark in which information entropy—in terms of missing metadata—is gradually alleviated through decentralized instance and schema matching. Our approach focuses on semi-structured metadata and confines computationally expensive operations to the edge of the network, while keeping distributed operations as simple as possible to ensure scalability. PicShark builds on structured Peer-to-Peer networks for distributed look-up operations, but extends the application of self-organization principles to the propagation of metadata and the creation of schema mappings. We demonstrate the practical applicability of our method in an image sharing scenario and provide experimental evidences illustrating the validity of our approac

Foundations of a Theory of Social Forms

In the early transition era in Russia entry barriers for commercial banks were about absent. It resulted in the mushrooming of hundreds of small, poorly-endowed and inexperienced banks. In this paper we address the question whether the claimed benefits of low entry barriers - competition and market dynamics - have resulted. We use a sample of commercial saving banks for the 1994-97 period. We conclude that there were important mobility barriers and that the removal of entry barriers did not lead to intensified competition

Writings, Readings and Not Writing: poems, prose fiction and essays

This submission of published work consists of a number of different modes of writing that interrelate as the concerns of a poet, essayist and teacher. There are twenty-seven separate publications, presented under six categories headings: (A) poems, including prose-poems, written for the page; (B) prose-fiction, represented through a single work; (C) visual poems; (D) enquiries into aspects of a general poetics, including questions about 'situatedness' or 'implicatedness', genres of discourse and their related modalities, poetics and grammar, and a poetics of reading; (E) critical and celebratory readings, mostly of contemporary poets and poems; (F) meditations on institutionalised divisions and modalities of knowledge and practice and their implications for arts pedagogy. These six categories are intended to open out on to each other, to constitute an exploration of writing and reading that is always more than the sum of its parts. With the exception of one article published in 1992 all work was published- or will have been - between 1996 and 2005, a period that coincides with the consolidation and development of a field of study and practice at Dartington College of Arts named Performance Writing. The poems and prose fiction exemplify specific practices within this field and the articles are attempts to develop theoretical and critical instruments within it, especially as they apply to poetry. The articles move between close readings of poetic texts and broad enquiries into reading, writing and the operation of texts within their social, spatial and temporal contexts, such as domestic settings or bereavements. Three articles address 'grammar for performance writers'; three others focus on reading and its relation to knowledge, form and setting; another three, including a review, are enquiries into discipline and interdisciplinarity