L’image comme outil de la communication scientifique : Diversité et spécificités

Dans leurs activités de communication, les scientifiques ont recours à un nombre important d’images d’une remarquable diversité. Leur étude est rendue difficile du fait, entre autres, de la confusion causée par la polysémie des dénominations, à laquelle on peut remédier en développant une véritable taxonomie, fondée sur les principes établis par Linné, qui se complète par une nomenclature systématique. Cette opération permet de faire ressortir les affordances spécifiques de chaque catégorie d’images. L’utilisation de cette taxonomie dans l’étude de l’utilisation des types d’images, dans des genres d’articles scientifiques définis fonctionnellement, montre la spécificité effective de chaque type d’image.In the course of their communication activities, scientists use an important number of greatly diversified visuals. Analysing these visuals is difficult partly due to the confusion caused by a considerable polysemy in denominations. This can be overcome by developing a truly Linnean taxonomy followed by a systematic nomenclature. This operation in turn allows one to specify the affordances of all categories of visuals. The use of this taxonomy, in a study of visuals offered in functionally defined genres of scientific articles, reveals the effective specificity of each type of visual

INVESTIGATING THE ROLE THAT COGNITIVE DEFUSION PLAYS WITHIN MINDFULNESS

Mindfulness has been shown to lead to reductions in psychological distress and improved well-being, but there is limited research on the mechanism of change. A cognitive shift in perspective has been suggested as a possible mechanism of change. Three different terms appear to refer to this shift in perspective: 1.Decentering, developed from cognitive behavioural therapy, involves the ability to observe one\u27s thoughts and feelings as solely being events of the mind. 2. Defusion, developed from acceptance and commitment therapy, focuses on the ability to separate or distance from one’s thoughts, and 3. Metacognitive awareness, developed frommindfulness-based cognitive therapy, involves experiencing negative thoughts as mental events rather than as fact. This dissertation empirically examines this cognitive shift in perspective over three studies. In Study 1, we found a modest association between trait measures of decentering and fusion (the counter process to defusion) although neither was found to be associated with metacognitive awareness. There were some similarities with regards to the strength of correlations with variables such as depression and social anxiety, but differences also emerged with variables such as mindfulness and cognitive reappraisal, suggesting that perhaps the measurement tools are capturing constructs more differently than expected. In Study 2, we examined whether it was possible to induce state changes in decentering and defusion. To do this,an exercise from each of the aforementioned research traditions was selected. We found that the defusion and metacognitive awareness exercises led individuals to be less fused with their thoughts compared to the decentering exercise. There were no significant differences found on our decentering outcome measure. These findings suggested that being fused in thoughts may be easier for individuals to report. Finally, for Study 3 we experimentallymanipulated defusion after individuals received one of three audio interventions (mindfulness, relaxation, or control). Against what was expected, results suggest that when combined mindfulness + defusion led to more fusion and more post-event rumination for individuals with high social anxiety. Collectively, these three studies provide insight into three constructs that are used interchangeably in the literature. Study 3 also helps to contribute to our understanding about whether cognitive defusion is one of the mechanisms through which mindfulness is leading to favourable outcomes

Parents’ Concerns about their Gay and Lesbian Children: An Attachment Perspective

The purpose of this study was to explore the concerns of parents upon learning about their children’s gay or lesbian sexual orientation from the conceptual framework of attachment theory. Personal and contextual factors such as parents’ attachment anxiety and avoidance, parent and child gender, length of time since disclosure, and parents’ prior interpersonal contact with gay and lesbian person(s) were examined to see how they influence parents’ concerns. Members of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) support groups were electronically surveyed using the Experiences in Close Relationships - Short Form (ECR-S; Wei, Russell, Mallinckrodt & Vogel, 2007) and the Concerns of Parents of Lesbians (COPLAG; Conley, 2011b). A total of 296 parents met the criteria to be considered participants. The results of this study indicated that parental concerns are correlated with attachment anxiety, but not attachment avoidance. There were significant differences in concern levels between parents who reported high levels of interpersonal contact with gay or lesbian people and those who reported low levels. Parents’ concerns were significantly higher for gay sons than for lesbian daughters. Amount of time since disclosure was not found to be a significant factor in parental concerns; however, attachment anxiety and amount of time since disclosure were negatively correlated. Additionally, parents who were aware of their child’s sexual orientation for more than five years reported lower levels of attachment anxiety than parents who were aware of their child’s gay or lesbian sexual orientation for less than five years. Although parent gender was a variable in this study, too few fathers participated, precluding analyses using parent gender. Overall, the results indicate that parents’ concerns about having gay and lesbian children are influenced by both intrapsychic and contextual factors

INVESTIGATING THE ROLE THAT COGNITIVE DEFUSION PLAYS WITHIN MINDFULNESS

Mindfulness has been shown to lead to reductions in psychological distress and improved well-being, but there is limited research on the mechanism of change. A cognitive shift in perspective has been suggested as a possible mechanism of change. Three different terms appear to refer to this shift in perspective: 1.Decentering, developed from cognitive behavioural therapy, involves the ability to observe one\u27s thoughts and feelings as solely being events of the mind. 2. Defusion, developed from acceptance and commitment therapy, focuses on the ability to separate or distance from one’s thoughts, and 3. Metacognitive awareness, developed frommindfulness-based cognitive therapy, involves experiencing negative thoughts as mental events rather than as fact. This dissertation empirically examines this cognitive shift in perspective over three studies. In Study 1, we found a modest association between trait measures of decentering and fusion (the counter process to defusion) although neither was found to be associated with metacognitive awareness. There were some similarities with regards to the strength of correlations with variables such as depression and social anxiety, but differences also emerged with variables such as mindfulness and cognitive reappraisal, suggesting that perhaps the measurement tools are capturing constructs more differently than expected. In Study 2, we examined whether it was possible to induce state changes in decentering and defusion. To do this,an exercise from each of the aforementioned research traditions was selected. We found that the defusion and metacognitive awareness exercises led individuals to be less fused with their thoughts compared to the decentering exercise. There were no significant differences found on our decentering outcome measure. These findings suggested that being fused in thoughts may be easier for individuals to report. Finally, for Study 3 we experimentallymanipulated defusion after individuals received one of three audio interventions (mindfulness, relaxation, or control). Against what was expected, results suggest that when combined mindfulness + defusion led to more fusion and more post-event rumination for individuals with high social anxiety. Collectively, these three studies provide insight into three constructs that are used interchangeably in the literature. Study 3 also helps to contribute to our understanding about whether cognitive defusion is one of the mechanisms through which mindfulness is leading to favourable outcomes

PRESTO: A Predictive Storage Architecture for Sensor Networks

We describe PRESTO, a predictive storage architecture for emerging large-scale, hierarchical sensor networks. In contrast to existing techniques, PRESTO is a proxycentric architecture, where tethered proxies balance the need for interactive querying from users with the energy optimization needs of the remote sensors. The main novelty in this work lies in extensive use of predictive techniques that are a natural fit to the correlated behavior of the physical world. PRESTO exploits technology trends in storage to build an architecture that emphasizes archival at remote sensors and intelligent caching at proxies. The system also addresses user needs for querying such sensor networks by exposing a unified, easy to use data abstraction across numerous proxies and remote sensors

Using Open Stack for an Open Cloud Exchange(OCX)

We are developing a new public cloud, the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) based on the model of an Open Cloud eXchange (OCX). We discuss in this paper the vision of an OCX and how we intend to realize it using the OpenStack open-source cloud platform in the MOC. A limited form of an OCX can be achieved today by layering new services on top of OpenStack. We have performed an analysis of OpenStack to determine the changes needed in order to fully realize the OCX model. We describe these proposed changes, which although significant and requiring broad community involvement will provide functionality of value to both existing single-provider clouds as well as future multi-provider ones

Hardware as a service - enabling dynamic, user-level bare metal provisioning of pools of data center resources.

We describe a “Hardware as a Service (HaaS)” tool for isolating pools of compute, storage and networking resources. The goal of HaaS is to enable dynamic and flexible, user-level provisioning of pools of resources at the so-called “bare-metal” layer. It allows experimental or untrusted services to co-exist alongside trusted services. By functioning only as a resource isolation system, users are free to choose between different system scheduling and provisioning systems and to manage isolated resources as they see fit. We describe key HaaS use cases and features. We show how HaaS can provide a valuable, and somehwat overlooked, layer in the software architecture of modern data center management. Documentation and source code for HaaS software are available at: https://github.com/CCI-MOC/haasPartial support for this work was provided by the MassTech Collaborative Research Matching Grant Program, National Science Foundation award #1347525 and several commercial partners of the Mass Open Cloud who may be found at http://www.massopencloud.org.http://www.ieee-hpec.org/2014/CD/index_htm_files/FinalPapers/116.pd

An Experiment on Bare-Metal BigData Provisioning

Many BigData customers use on-demand platforms in the cloud, where they can get a dedicated virtual cluster in a couple of minutes and pay only for the time they use. Increasingly, there is a demand for bare-metal bigdata solutions for applications that cannot tolerate the unpredictability and performance degradation of virtualized systems. Existing bare-metal solutions can introduce delays of 10s of minutes to provision a cluster by installing operating systems and applications on the local disks of servers. This has motivated recent research developing sophisticated mechanisms to optimize this installation. These approaches assume that using network mounted boot disks incur unacceptable run-time overhead. Our analysis suggest that while this assumption is true for application data, it is incorrect for operating systems and applications, and network mounting the boot disk and applications result in negligible run-time impact while leading to faster provisioning time.This research was supported in part by the MassTech Collaborative Research Matching Grant Program, NSF awards 1347525 and 1414119 and several commercial partners of the Massachusetts Open Cloud who may be found at http://www.massopencloud.or

Interview of Charles A. Desnoyers, Ph.D.

Dr. Charles Albert Desnoyers (b. 1952) was born and raised in North Plainfield, New Jersey with his parents and five younger siblings. He attended St. Joseph’s Parochial School and North Plainfield High School for the duration of his primary school education; it was in North Plainfield High School where he began showing an interest in history, due to the influences of his history teachers. He later attended Villanova University, changing to a sociology major after a year of general sciences. His graduation from Villanova University with a minor in history led him down the path to getting a Ph.D. and teaching at Temple University. In 1988, he graduated from Temple University with a Ph.D. in Modern Chinese History, at the same time finding employment with La Salle University. For the next twenty or so years, Dr. Desnoyers would work in La Salle’s history department, rising to chair the History Department for nine years and continuing to serve La Salle in a mentoring and organizational capacity. Dr. Desnoyers is involved in La Salle’s Travel Studies program, and in his spare time, he plays with the band Boris Garcia