The 10 most recently published documents
Student misbehavior and its treatment is a major challenge for teachers and a threat to their well-being. Indeed, teachers are obliged to punish student misbehavior on a regular basis. Additionally, teachers’ punishment decisions are among the most frequently reported situations when it comes to students’ experiences of injustice in school. By implication, it is crucial to understand teachers’ treatment of student misbehavior vis-à-vis students’ perceptions. One key dimension of punishment behavior reflects its underlying motivation and goals. People generally intend to achieve three goals when punishing misbehavior, namely, retribution (i.e., evening out the harm caused), special prevention (i.e., preventing recidivism of the offender), and general prevention (i.e., preventing imitation of others). Importantly, people’s support of these punishment goals is subject to hierarchy and power, implying that teachers’ and students’ punishment goal preferences differ. In this dissertation, I present three research projects that shed first light on teachers’ punishment and its goals along with the students’ perception of classroom intervention strategies pursuing these goals. More specifically, I first examined students’ (i.e., children’s) general support of each of the three punishment goals sketched above. Furthermore, I applied an attributional approach to understand and study the goals teachers intend to achieve when punishing student misbehavior. Finally, I investigated teachers’ and students’ support of the punishment goals regarding the same student misbehavior to directly compare their views on these goals and reactions pursuing them. In sum, the findings show that students generally prefer retribution and special prevention to general prevention, whereas teachers prefer general prevention and special prevention to retribution. This ultimately translates into a "mismatch" of teachers and students in their preferences for specific punishment goals, and the findings suggest that this may indeed enhance students’ perception of injustice. Overall, the results of the present research program may be valuable for the development of classroom intervention strategies that may reduce rather than enhance conflicts in student-teacher-interactions.
This work describes a novel software tool for visualizing anatomical segmentations of medical images. It was developed as part of a bachelor's thesis project, with a view to supporting research into automatic anatomical brain image segmentation. The tool builds on a widely-used visualization approach for 3D image volumes, where sections in orthogonal directions are rendered on screen as 2D images. It implements novel display modes that solve common problems with conventional viewer programs. In particular, it features a double-contour display mode to aid the user's spatial orientation in the image, as well as modes for comparing two competing segmentation labels pertaining to one and the same anatomical region. The tool was developed as an extension to an existing open-source software suite for medical image processing. The visualization modes are, however, suitable for implementation in the context of other viewer programs that follow a similar rendering approach.
The modified code can be found here: soundray.org/mm-segmentation-visualization.tar.gz.
Die didaktische Konzeption der Schreibkonferenz ist soweit etabliert, dass sie bereits in den rheinland-pfälzischen Rahmenplan für die Grundschule für das Fach Deutsch übernommen wurde. Bisher liegt eine Reihe von Erfahrungsberichten zur Schreibkonferenz vor, jedoch wurden dazu bislang kaum systematisch empirische Untersuchungen durchgeführt. Die empirische Studie dieser Arbeit, welche an die VERA-Studie angeschlossen ist, untersucht, ob im Grundschulunterricht (in der dritten und vierten Klasse) der Einsatz von Schreibkonferenzen im Vergleich zur konventionellen Aufsatzdidaktik zu einer Verbesserung der Schreibleistungen, des eigenen Lernens, zu positiven Veränderungen des eigenen Verhaltens sowie zur Förderung der Motivation der Schüler beim Schreiben führt. Dabei wird von folgenden Überlegungen ausgegangen: Zum einen sollte die Schreibkonferenz im Gegensatz zur traditionellen Aufsatzdidaktik das selbstständige Arbeiten der Schüler mit Texten im Deutschunterricht fördern, zum anderen sollte sie zu einer intensiveren Auseinandersetzung mit Texten und damit zu einer Verbesserung des Aufsatzschreibens führen.
Our work finds the fine grained edits in context of neighbouring tokens in Wikipedia articles. We cluster those edits according to similar neighbouring context. We encode neighbouring context into vector space using word vectors. We evaluate clusters returned by our algorithm on extrinsic and intrinsic metric and compare it with previous work. We analyse the relation between extrinsic and intrinsic measurements of fine grained edit tokens.
Engineering criminal agents
(2019)
This PhD thesis with the title "Engineering Criminal Agents" demonstrates the interplay of three different research fields captured in the title: In the centre are Engineering and Simulation, both set in relation with the application field of Criminology - and the social science aspect of the latter. More precisely,
this work intends to show how specific agent-based simulation models can be created using common methods from software engineering.
Agent-based simulation has proven to be a valuable method for social science since decades, and the trend to increasingly complex simulation models is apparent, not at least due to advancing computational and simulation techniques. An important cause of complexity is the inclusion of 'evidence' as basis of simulation models. Evidence can be provided by various stakeholders, reflecting their different viewpoints on the topic to model.
This poses a particular burden by interrelating the two relevant perspectives on the topic of simulation: on the one hand the user of the simulation model who provides the requirements and is interested in the simulation results, on the other hand the developer of the simulation model who has to program a verified and validated formal model. In order to methodically link these two perspectives, substantial efforts in research and development are needed, where this PhD thesis aims to make a contribution.
The practical results - in terms of software - were achieved by using the multi-faceted approach mentioned above: using methods from software engineering, in order to become able to apply methods from computational social sciences, in order to gain insights into social systems, such as in the internal dynamics of criminal networks.
The PhD thesis shows the research involved to create these practical results, and gives technical details and specifications of the developed software.
The frame for research and development to achieve these results was provided mainly by two research projects: OCOPOMO and GLODERS.
Over the past few decades society’s dependence on software systems has grown significantly. These systems are utilized in nearly every matter of life today and often handle sensitive, private data. This situation has turned software security analysis into an essential and widely researched topic in the field of computer science. Researchers in this field tend to make the assumption that the quality of the software systems' code directly affects the possibility for security gaps to arise in it. Because this assumption is based on properties of the code, proving it true would mean that security assessments can be performed on software, even before a certain version of it is released. A study based on this implication has already attempted to mathematically assess the existence of such a correlation, studying it based on quality and security metric calculations. The present study builds upon that study in finding an automatic method for choosing well-fitted software projects as a sample for this correlation analysis and extends the variety of projects considered for the it. In this thesis, the automatic generation of graphical representations both for the correlations between the metrics as well as for their evolution is also introduced. With these improvements, this thesis verifies the results of the previous study with a different and broader project input. It also focuses on analyzing the correlations between the quality and security metrics to real-world vulnerability data metrics. The data is extracted and evaluated from dedicated software vulnerability information sources and serves to represent the existence of proven security weaknesses in the studied software. The study discusses some of the difficulties that arise when trying to gather such information and link it to the difference in the information contained in the repositories of the studied projects. This thesis confirms the significant influence that quality metrics have on each other. It also shows that it is important to view them together as a whole and suppose that their correlation could influence the appearance of unwanted vulnerabilities as well. One of the important conclusions I can draw from this thesis is that the visualization of metric evolution graphs, helps the understanding of the values as well as their connection to each other in a more meaningful way. It allows for better grasp of their influence on each other as opposed to only studying their correlation values. This study confirms that studying metric correlations and evolution trends can help developers improve their projects and prevent them from becoming difficult to extend and maintain, increasing the potential for good quality as well as more secure software code.
The mitral valve is one of four human heart valves. It is located in the left heart and acts as a unidirectional passageway for blood between the left atrium and the left ventricle. A correctly functioning mitral valve prevents a backflow of blood into the pulmonary circulation (lungs) and thus constitutes a vital part of the cardiac cycle. Pathologies of the mitral valve can manifest in a variety of symptoms with severity ranging from chest pain and fatigue to pulmonary edema (fluid accumulation in the tissue and air space of lungs), which may ultimately cause respiratory failure.
Malfunctioning mitral valves can be restored through complex surgical interventions, which greatly benefit from intensive planning and pre-operative analysis. Visualization techniques provide a possibility to enhance such preparation processes and can also facilitate post-operative evaluation. The work at hand extends current research in this field, building upon patient-specific mitral valve segmentations developed at the German Cancer Research Center, which result in triangulated 3D models of the valve surface. The core of this work will be the construction of a 2D-view of these models through global parameterization, a method that can be used to establish a bijective mapping between a planar parameter domain and a surface embedded in higher dimensions.
A flat representation of the mitral valve provides physicians with a view of the whole surface at once, similar to a map. This allows assessment of the valve's area and shape without the need for different viewing angles. Parts of the valve that are occluded by geometry in 3D become visible in 2D.
An additional contribution of this work will be the exploration of different visualizations of the 3D and 2D mitral valve representations. Features of the valve can be highlighted by associating them with specified colors, which can for instance directly convey pathology indicators.
Quality and effectiveness of the proposed methods were evaluated through a survey conducted at the Heidelberg University Hospital.
Zum Inhalt:
Die Dissertation ist in einem empirisch-qualitativen Forschungssetting eingebettet, bei der das Team-Teaching als Unterrichtsmethode im Forschungsfokus steht. Die Erhebung des empirischen Datenmaterials erfolgt einerseits mittels teilnehmender Beobachtung im Forschungsfeld und andererseits durch ein Gruppeninterview, das mit Lehrkräften geführt wird, die über einen gewissen Beobachtungszeitraum Erfahrungen mit der Unterrichtsmethode des Team-Teaching gesammelt haben. Für die hier zu Grunde gelegte Feldforschung wird das „theoretical sampling“ zum Einsatz kommen, das 1967 von Glaser und Strauss im Rahmen einer empirischen Untersuchung begründet worden ist.
Zum Aufbau:
In der Einleitung wird das Forschungsinteresse, der Forschungsstand und die zentrale Forschungsfrage der Dissertation beschrieben. Im zweiten Kapitel folgt der theoretische Teil mit einer differenzierten Definition des Team-Teachings als Unterrichtsmethode. Es folgt eine allgemeine Definition zum Unterricht, um die spezifischen Merkmale des Team-Teachings differenziert herausarbeiten zu können. Die empirischen Daten werden im Rahmen einer teilnehmenden Beobachtung im Unterricht der Oberstufe einer Förderschule mit dem Förderschwerpunkt Lernen und sozial-emotionale Entwicklung erhoben. Deshalb sind im Theorieteil der Förderschwerpunkt und die curricularen Aspekte zum Förderschwerpunkt dargestellt. Die Bedeutung der Unterrichtsmethode des Team-Teachings für das Unterrichtssetting in einer Förderschule mit dem sozial-emotionalem Förderschwerpunkt ist ebenfalls im Theorieteil verortet.
Im dritten Kapitel werden die qualitativen und quantitativen Erhebungsinstrumente beschrieben und Hypothesen formuliert. Die Darstellung der Methoden zur Aufbereitung des Datenmaterials ist im vierten Kapitel verortet. Die Interpretation der Forschungsergebnisse erfolgt im fünften Kapitel. Die qualitative und quantitative Datenauswertung des empirischen Datenmaterials ist im sechsten Kapitel dargestellt. Die Dissertation schließt im siebten Kapitel mit einen Fazit und Ausblick.
