5,224 research outputs found

    Graduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    Multilingualism and the Public Sector in South Africa

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    This book contributes to the discourse on language in South Africa with a specific focus on multilingualism and the public sector

    A Closer Look into Recent Video-based Learning Research: A Comprehensive Review of Video Characteristics, Tools, Technologies, and Learning Effectiveness

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    People increasingly use videos on the Web as a source for learning. To support this way of learning, researchers and developers are continuously developing tools, proposing guidelines, analyzing data, and conducting experiments. However, it is still not clear what characteristics a video should have to be an effective learning medium. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of 257 articles on video-based learning for the period from 2016 to 2021. One of the aims of the review is to identify the video characteristics that have been explored by previous work. Based on our analysis, we suggest a taxonomy which organizes the video characteristics and contextual aspects into eight categories: (1) audio features, (2) visual features, (3) textual features, (4) instructor behavior, (5) learners activities, (6) interactive features (quizzes, etc.), (7) production style, and (8) instructional design. Also, we identify four representative research directions: (1) proposals of tools to support video-based learning, (2) studies with controlled experiments, (3) data analysis studies, and (4) proposals of design guidelines for learning videos. We find that the most explored characteristics are textual features followed by visual features, learner activities, and interactive features. Text of transcripts, video frames, and images (figures and illustrations) are most frequently used by tools that support learning through videos. The learner activity is heavily explored through log files in data analysis studies, and interactive features have been frequently scrutinized in controlled experiments. We complement our review by contrasting research findings that investigate the impact of video characteristics on the learning effectiveness, report on tasks and technologies used to develop tools that support learning, and summarize trends of design guidelines to produce learning video

    Specificity of the innate immune responses to different classes of non-tuberculous mycobacteria

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    Mycobacterium avium is the most common nontuberculous mycobacterium (NTM) species causing infectious disease. Here, we characterized a M. avium infection model in zebrafish larvae, and compared it to M. marinum infection, a model of tuberculosis. M. avium bacteria are efficiently phagocytosed and frequently induce granuloma-like structures in zebrafish larvae. Although macrophages can respond to both mycobacterial infections, their migration speed is faster in infections caused by M. marinum. Tlr2 is conservatively involved in most aspects of the defense against both mycobacterial infections. However, Tlr2 has a function in the migration speed of macrophages and neutrophils to infection sites with M. marinum that is not observed with M. avium. Using RNAseq analysis, we found a distinct transcriptome response in cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction for M. avium and M. marinum infection. In addition, we found differences in gene expression in metabolic pathways, phagosome formation, matrix remodeling, and apoptosis in response to these mycobacterial infections. In conclusion, we characterized a new M. avium infection model in zebrafish that can be further used in studying pathological mechanisms for NTM-caused diseases

    Visualization of Crash Channel Assignments in a Tabular Form

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    Passive safety systems try to lessen the effects of an accident. Airbags are a passive safety feature. They are designed to protect occupants of a vehicle during a crash. These systems have to be configured correctly in order to deploy airbags at the right time in case of a collision. Airbag application tools are used to simulate and interpret crashes. Some factors influence when an airbag should deploy. Based on different parameters, the logic for firing airbags is also different. Under every circumstance, an airbag has to be deployed at the right time in order to prevent injuries and fatalities. During the process of simulation, the data which is simulated is written to a database. During interpretation, this data is extracted from the database. Then, the required information can be analyzed and interpreted for further use. This data contains crash related information. For example, the type of crash, crash code and crash channel assignments. For every crash present in the airbag project, crash channels are assigned to the sensors. Each sensor present has a crash channel assigned to it. This is called the crash channel assignment. An airbag application tool is developed to show the crash channel assignments. This tool should handle the information extraction, and visualization of crash channel assignments. The final output should be in a tabular format, which includes user specific customizations

    Digital solutions for self-monitoring physical health and wellbeing during pregnancy

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    Perinatal disorders were among the top ten causes of global burden of disease in 2019. Better access to perinatal healthcare would help to reduce preventable morbidity. The increase in access to and use of smartphones presents a unique opportunity to transform and improve how women monitor their own health during pregnancy. This thesis aims to investigate the quality and usage of currently available pregnancy digital health tools for self-monitoring and to validate a newly developed, custom-built pregnancy self-monitoring tool. In Chapter 2, the most popular, commercially available pregnancy apps and their monitoring tools were evaluated for their quality by conducting a pregnancy app scoping review. In Chapters 3 and 4, pregnant women and healthcare professionals were surveyed and interviewed to better understand their usage of and attitudes towards digital health, as well as their thoughts about two hypothetical app features (a direct patient-to-healthcare professional communication tool and a novel body measurement tool). In Chapter 5, we test the performance of a first generation, custom-built body measurement tool (which we called BMT-1) by comparing the digital measurements extracted from photos taken on smartphones to physical measurements taken with measuring tape. The performance of BMT-1 was also assessed on a longitudinal set of digitally constructed pregnancy models. Collectively, the findings from Chapters 2, 3 and 4 provide evidence that there is both opportunity and scope for the development of new digital health tools to support and enhance the quality of care during pregnancy. The results from Chapter 5 indicate that BMT-1 successfully extracted body measurements from both photos and digitally constructed pregnancy models, though would require refinement before it could be launched. To finalise, in Chapter 6, I outline how these findings could help to guide the design, development and implementation of new pregnancy digital health tools

    Aspect and Meaning in the Russian Future Tense: Corpus and Experimental Investigations

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    This dissertation is a study of the Russian future tense within the framework of cognitive linguistics. In this dissertation I focus on the distribution of the perfective and imperfective future forms, their future and non-future meanings, and the use of the future tense verb forms by both native and non-native speakers. In the Russian tense-aspect system, it is reasonable to operate with markedness on a local level of tense, rather than the level of the verb. Via local markedness it is possible to see that the perfective future is the unmarked member of the opposition, and the imperfective future is the marked one. The perfective future tense forms are approximately fourteen times more frequent than imperfective future tense forms in the Russian National Corpus. Both perfective and imperfective future tense forms express not only future meanings but also gnomic, directive etc. The (non-)future meanings form a radial category with the future meaning as a prototype and other meanings as extensions. Native speakers operate with frequency when they use future tense forms. Non-native speakers are not sensitive to frequency, and instruction in the use of the future tense forms in Russian could be improved

    Examining Political Discourse on Online 8Kun and Reddit Forums

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    A recent example of political violence in the United States was that of the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack in connection with the certification of Joseph R. Biden’s victory over Donald J. Trump in the 2020 US presidential election. This thesis analyzes the events of January 6, 2021, through the lens of social media discourse. This thesis presents a workflow that acquired over 5 million 8kun and Reddit posts from various apolitical and political forums in the three months preceding and following the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. Techniques from text analysis are then used to group forums according to the similarities of their posting patterns. Five main groups of forums are identified. Finally, this thesis analyzes these forums for feelings of isolation and displacement from society in connection with the events of January 6, 2021. Such feelings were not clearly identified. This thesis demonstrates the challenges and opportunities of scraping and analyzing social media data

    Muscling Through: Athletic Women in Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915

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    “Muscling Through” reconstructs an overlooked history of strong female bodies in the nineteenth century. It argues that popular representations of athletic women introduced a new category of identity that was distinct from women’s traditional relational and social roles. The project’s central figure is the hyper-able “Sportswoman,” who bridges the gap between two familiar versions of the Victorian woman’s body: the mid-century ideal of docile, domesticated femininity and the sturdy, capable women who enter universities, professions, and public spaces en masse just before the turn of the century. Representationally, the Sportswoman figures a range of attitudes, from anxious to aspirational, toward the unruly forms of embodiment that were newly public in England during this period. The richness of athleticism as a representational site is reflected in the broad scope of the project: its claims extend from the past to the present; its critical reach encompasses depictions in popular literary works as well as imagery from mainstream visual culture, analyzed in analog and digital ways, using formal as well as experimental methods. “Muscling Through” enacts a practice for somatic reading that is akin to “surface reading” in seeing descriptions of the muscular body and its power as a meaningfully evident feature of the text. Reading somatically in Sportswoman narratives reveals a constellation of affects, sensations, desires, ambitions, and responses to conspicuous physicality that don’t track back to sex, conform to binary logic, or center a masculinist standpoint. Although she has been overlooked previously, many well-studied nineteenth-century genres contain a version of the Sportswoman; chapters on sensation and realist novels, New Woman literature, and finally Decadent and modernist fiction bring her back into view. Tracing athleticism’s representational arc across the period sheds new light on conventional themes of marriage, reproduction, and femininity, and turns our attention to other themes that have been under-discussed in relation to women, such as self-oriented development, marital competition, and vocational desire. Visual Vixens, the dissertation’s companion website, adds an essential element of experiential exploration to the project. This digital component translates the Sportswoman themes of embodiment, fitness, and activity into a playful, interactive tool that trains people to build visual literacy by decoding the representational conventions in images of female bodies. A brief epilogue on contemporary culture shows that the issues that the Sportswoman raises are confoundingly and harmfully still with us. In the end, “Muscling Through” is both a historicist account of the muscular body’s power in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination and a presentist interrogation of how the representation and policing of current athletes is informed by an earlier Victorian model of the Sportswoman
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