Contextual Sensitivity in Grounded Theory: The Role of Pilot Studies

Grounded Theory is an established methodological approach for context specific inductive theory building. The grounded nature of the methodology refers to these specific contexts from which emergent propositions are drawn. Thus, any grounded theory study requires not only theoretical sensitivity, but also a good insight on how to design the research in the human activity systems to be studied. The lack of this insight may result in inefficient theoretical sampling or even erroneous purposeful sampling. These problems would not necessarily be critical, as it could be argued that through the elliptical process that characterizes grounded theory, remedial loops would always bring the researcher to the core of the theory. However, these elliptical remedial processes can take very long periods of time and result in catastrophic delays in research projects. As a strategy, this paper discusses, contrasts and compares the use of pilot studies in four different grounded theory projects. Each pilot brought different insights about the context, resulting in changes of focus, guidance to improve data collection instruments and informing theoretical sampling. Additionally, as all four projects were undertaken by researchers with little experience of inductive approaches in general and grounded theory in particular, the pilot studies also served the purpose of training in interviewing, relating to interviewees, memoing, constant comparison and coding. This last outcome of the pilot study was actually not planned initially, but revealed itself to be a crucial success factor in the running of the projects. The paper concludes with a theoretical proposition for the concept of contextual sensitivity and for the inclusion of the pilot study in grounded theory research designs

Temperature dependence of the coercive field in single-domain particle systems

The magnetic properties of Cu97Co3 and Cu90Co10 granular alloys were measured over a wide temperature range (2 to 300K). The measurements show an unusual temperature dependence of the coercive field. A generalized model is proposed and explains well the experimental behavior over a wide temperature range. The coexistence of blocked and unblocked particles for a given temperature rises difficulties that are solved here by introducing a temperature dependent blocking temperature. An empirical factor gamma arise from the model and is directly related to the particle interactions. The proposed generalized model describes well the experimental results and can be applied to other single-domain particle system.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, revised version, accepted to Physical Review B on 29/04/200

Produção de raízes finas em floresta sucessional no Nordeste paraense.

Este trabalho foi realizado no município de Castanhal, Apeú, onde está localizada a área de pesquisa do Projeto MANFLORA, situada na Estação Experimental da Universidade Federal Rural da Amazônia, e objetivou avaliar a resposta da produção de raízes finas à irrigação durante a época seca. Para a quantificação da produção de raízes finas utilizou-se o método ingrowth technique que consiste na captura de raízes através armadilhas cilíndricas de polietileno. Foram avaliadas duas frequências de coleta das armadilhas: bimensal (frequência F1) e quadrimensal (frequência F2). Os resultados obtidos de produção bimensal e quadrimensal de raízes indicaram que não houve influência significativa do tratamento (irrigação), mas sim da sazonalidade da precipitação pluviométrica.PIBIC-2011

Comportamento de cultivares de morango em cultivo orgânico na região sul do Estado de Sergipe.

O presente trabalho teve como objetivo verificar o comportamento das cultivares de morango nas condições edafoclimáticas de Umbaúba, SE, visando à recomendação de cultivares para cultivo orgânico em Sergipe. O experimento foi conduzido no campo experimental da Embrapa Tabuleiros Costeiros localizado no Município de Umbaúba, SE no período de 27 de junho a 09 de dezembro de 2013. Foram avaliadas oito cultivares (Ara, Aromas, Camarosa, Camino Real, Monterrey, Nina, Portola e San Andréas), em delineamento experimental de blocos casualizados com oito tratamentos, quatro repetições e parcela com 30 plantas no espaçamento de 35 cm x 35 cm. Na adubação utilizou como fontes de nutrientes a torta de mamona, hiperfosfato de gafsa, sulfato de potássio, bórax, sulfato de zinco e húmus de minhoca. Irrigação por gotejamento, ?mulching? nos canteiros com plástico preto dupla face, retiradas de folhas secas e doentes e dos estolões semanalmente. Para controle de pragas e doenças foram utilizados Fortneen para o controle de pulgão, calda sulfocálcica a 1% para controle do ácaro e calda viçosa para controle de doença

Automatic human activity segmentation and labeling in RGBD videos

Human activity recognition has become one of the most active research topics in image processing and pattern recognition. Manual analysis of video is labour intensive, fatiguing, and error prone. Solving the problem of recognizing human activities from video can lead to improvements in several application fields like surveillance systems, human computer interfaces, sports video analysis, digital shopping assistants, video retrieval, gaming and health-care. This paper aims to recognize an action performed in a sequence of continuous actions recorded with a Kinect sensor based on the information about the position of the main skeleton joints. The typical approach is to use manually labeled data to perform supervised training. In this paper we propose a method to perform automatic temporal segmentation in order to separate the sequence in a set of actions. By measuring the amount of movement that occurs in each joint of the skeleton we are able to find temporal segments that represent the singular actions.We also proposed an automatic labeling method of human actions using a clustering algorithm on a subset of the available features.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio