A study of management communication with agents of New England Mutual Life Insurance Company.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Book review of 'Developing writers: teaching and learning in the digital age'

Review of 'Developing writers: teaching and learning in the digital age' by Richard Andrews and Anna Smith. I have a feeling this book will become a key text for those wishing to reflect on their practice as teachers of writing or as teachers as writers

Comforting the People: The Contribution of Chapters 51-52 to the Overall Structure and Rhetoric of Deutero-Isaiah

This thesis is concerned with the way that structures are identified in a biblical poetic book, using Deutero-Isaiah as a reference text. Typically, Formgeschichte (or some variant of it) has been used to identify units of text which are then related together into larger structures. Whilst being a suitable understanding of the way that one poem leads to another, it is not satisfactory for describing the overall shaping. Though a structure can be presented, it lacks criteria by which a focus/climax might be determined. There needs to be the addition of a 'top-downwards' methodology: the identification of rhetorical trajectories in the text. Noting the limited range of subject matters used by Deutero Isaiah-the vast majority of texts can be subsumed within four complex groupings: the character and uniqueness of Yahweh; the fates of Babylon and Zion; the journey; servanthood-the progression within each complex can be traced. This development can be likened to a trajectory, since it displays overall shaping and focusing and can be used to locate climactic structural points in the writing. Having outlined the current scholarship on the methods used to determine structure, and general attitudes to Deutero-Isaiah, in chapters 1 and 2, chapter 3 begins by describing the method to be used herein. The method is then applied to two sections of Deutero-Isaiah: the prologue and the eschatological hymns. These point to the role of 52:7-10 as a major rhetorical climax in Deutero-Isaiah. In chapter 4, Isaiah 51-52 is studied to discover the rhetorical structures contained within it, which will demonstrate that the large- and small-scale structures coincide. The conclusion considers the implications of this structure, not least for the implied importance of the final 'servant song' and the 'epilogue' of chapters 54-55

Aboriginal student engagement and success in Kimberley tertiary education

Over recent years, considerable effort has been put into increasing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (First Nations) participation in higher education. While there are signs that enrolments are increasing, the sustained engagement and successful completion of higher education remains challenging, particularly in remote locations. With this in mind, a collaborative research project among researchers from three northern Australian tertiary education institutions was designed to understand student perspectives, particularly from remote contexts, about their engagement and success towards completion in higher education. Based on a qualitative research design situating Indigenist/interpretive research within a critical realism metatheory, we present findings from the study, based in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and unpack implications for higher education provision in remote contexts. The findings point to the unique challenges faced by students who live in the Kimberley—and perhaps in other remote locations around Australia. In order to meet these needs, we suggest that tertiary education providers must tailor provision to ensure that engagement with Aboriginal students is relational and culturally safe

Promoting Aboriginal Student Engagement and Success in Tertiary Education in Remote Locations

Research was conducted with 40 students and staff who live, work and study in tertiary education in remote locations in the West Kimberley region. Using interviews and focus groups, the project addressed three overarching questions: How do remote Aboriginal students experience studying at or via a university campus? What are the key enablers and constraints to West Kimberley students’ successful participation and engagement with tertiary education? What strategies might assist Aboriginal students living and studying in communities and towns in remote locations, to transition successfully through VET, into tertiary and/or through post graduate education

POLYMETALLIC MINERAL DEPOSITS OF THE SYKESVILLE DISTRICT, MARYLAND: ORE-FORMING PROCESSES IN THE APPALACHIAN OROGEN

Questions remain concerning the genesis and geological setting of the ultramafic rock-associated mineralization of the Sykesville District, Maryland, USA, which is located in the mid-Atlantic Appalachians. Best described as a mafic-ultramafic VMS deposit, the ores are polymetallic Fe-Cu-Co-Ni-Zn sulfides hosted within an iron oxide-quartz rock and tectonic mélange that is everywhere in close proximity to ultramafic rocks. Optical microscopy, EDS, and WDS analyses of minerals in thin sections and epoxy mounts of rocks from drill core were performed to aid in understanding the deposit’s formation and defining exploration vectors relevant to similar deposits. Monazite dating has been performed by WDS yielding dates broadly consistent with the Taconian orogeny. The mineralization of the Sykesville District contains textures possibly indicative of seafloor deposition in an environment analogous to an oceanic core complex. These markers may hold promise for identifying the timing, paragenesis, and lithological and mineralogical associations of other Appalachian VMS deposits

The analysis of a computer music network and the implementation of essential subsystems

The inability to share resources in commercial and institutional computer music studios results in non-optimal resource utilisation. The use of computers to process, store and communicate data can be extended within these studios, to provide the capability of sharing resources amongst their users. This thesis describes a computer music network which was designed for this purpose. Certain devices had to be custom built for the implementation of the network. The thesis discusses the design and construction of these devices

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Belief ascription, metaphor, and intensional identification

This paper discusses the extension of ViewGen, an algorithm derived for belief ascription, to the areas of speech acts, intensional object representation and metaphor. ViewGen represents the beliefs of agents as explicit, partitioned proposition-sets known as environments. Environments are convenient, even essential, for addressing important pragmatic issues of rea-soning. The paper concentrates on showing that the transfer of information in metaphors, intensional object representation, and ordinary, non-metaphorical belief ascription can all be seen as different manifestations of a single environment-amalgamation process. The paper also briefly discusses the addition of a heuristic-based relevance-determination procedure to ViewGen, and justifies the partitioning approach to belief ascription. 1