Denna uppsats ämnar att observera och analysera hur representationen av Alba, den venezuelanska-inmigranten, förändras utifrån hennes migrationsstatus i den satiriska telenovelan (dokusåpan) - och romantisk dramakomedi: Jane The Virgin (2014). Forskningsfrågan är: Vad kan representationen av latinokaraktären som illegal fylla för syfte i Jane the Virgin?  Materialet som har analyserats är nyckelpunkter i Albas narrativ som valts för att illustrera hur huvudsakligen Alba men även hennes omgivning påverkas olika beroende på hennes migrationsstatus. Hennes representation och narrativ visade sig vara negativ så länge hon var illegal, respektive positiv när hon fått sitt amerikanska medborgarskap. Relevanta teorier om telenovelas användes för att tolka denna observation, vilket visade att denna representation kan fylla ett eller flera syften samtidigt. Albas resa kan tolkas som negativt eftersom den grundar sig i stereotyper som vidga gapet mellan vi:et och de:m, eller som hjälpsam för invandrare som bor i USA och använder serier som ett verktyg i sitt assimileringsprocess, eller som utbildande för seriens publik som inte är lika insatt i de illegala invandrares verklighet. Med stöd i Stuart Halls teori om representation är slutsatsen att det inte finns ett rätt eller fel sätt att tolka Albas resa och representation i Jane the Virgin (2014) därmed kan den uppfylla en eller flera olika syften. Dock är det viktigt att vara medveten om hur kontext kan påverka den enskildes tolkning av  produktionen.   Mediaproduktionen har haft som mål att representera det venezuelanska migranten och det venezuelanska köket för att göra reklam till Antojitos en Suecias cateringföretag.

This essay aims to investigate how the representation of visible disability appears in three separate campaigns with different senders. The purpose of the essay is to reveal, through a semiotic analysis, the hidden messages that can be found in these campaigns and thus gain a better understanding of how the representation of visible disabilities can take place in advertising. The question raised in the essay is as follows: In what way is visible disability portrayed in terms of visual representation in the three campaigns - Arbetsförmedlingen's "Gör plats," Teen Vogue's "The New Faces of Fashion," and Fotografiska med Glada Hudiks' "Ikoner"? This question is answered through representation theories and by being analyzed in a semiotic analysis. The result of the analysis shows that the different senders have an impact on the representation of visible disabilities in different ways. Stereotypes surrounding visible disabilities are to some extent diluted, and in some cases, these stereotypes are broken down. However, this depends on the sender, their knowledge, and the differences in graphic elements.

To make decisions, plan, and act appropriately in a complex world, the brain formulates internal models of how the world works. As we change our goals, shift to novel environments, or as the world simply evolves around us, these models must flexibly adapt. Impairments in the formation of such flexible models are present in numerous disorders such as schizophrenia, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s Disease and plague even the most sophisticated artificial agents. Therefore, understanding how the brain structures efficient internal models is of critical importance. Previous findings indicate that the information extracted from past experiences is organized and encoded into relational structured knowledge by the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the medial temporal lobe (MTL). This process requires balancing two complementary computations in response to overlap. The first is to generalize the commonalities shared across overlapping experiences. The second is to separate overlapping experiences that fundamentally differed along a critical dimension, such as their outcomes, required actions, or time. How the brain balances these functions when faced with overlap remains poorly understood. In this thesis, I proposed that the analysis of the geometry of neural representational spaces offers valuable insights into the brain’s solution to optimally disambiguate and generalize overlapping experiences. I tested this proposal through the analysis of three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments leveraging data-driven multivariate techniques to probe the dimensionality, structure, and content of these spaces. The first experiment (chapter 2) explored how PFC subregions respond to partially overlapping spatial environments during goal-directed virtual navigation. Based on previous research conducted in our lab that showed prefrontal activity in response to spatial overlap, we analyzed the dimensionality, structure, and content of prefrontal representations while participants learned a virtual navigation task. These analyses demonstrated compressed and highly orthogonalized codes early in learning that shifted over time towards more integrated and schematic codes. Critically, both prospective and retrospective information was bound to the representations of overlapping routes, with greater weight given to prospective information early in learning to help separate overlap. Based on these results, I advanced the idea that PFC subregions tune the geometry of their representations based on task demands and argued that prefrontal attention acts as a filter to promote both the separation and generalization of overlap. Building on the first experiment, a second study (chapter 3) focused on the re-analysis of a high-resolution fMRI study centered on the MTL that examined how MTL subregions handle prospective spatial overlap when planning routes in the same task. Based on previous research in our lab, we knew that the parahippocampal cortex (PHC) and hippocampal subfields CA1 and CA3/DG likely play a role in disambiguating overlapping routes during planning. We probed the geometry of their representations using the same methods used in experiment 1. The results demonstrated a segregation of roles between compressed schematic codes in PHC and expanded orthogonalized codes in CA3/DG that formed over the course of learning in response to overlap. Importantly, the degree of pattern separation observed in CA3/DG depended on the amount of initial overlap. These findings lead to the conclusion that generalization and separation are balanced in the MTL by distributing these functions to different subregions. Furthermore, the results suggest that MTL integration is supported by compression, whereas its separation is achieved via expansion. The third experiment (chapter 4) further examined how PFC and MTL regions balance generalization and separation processes when faced with abstract overlap between context-dependent rules. An analysis of the geometry of representational spaces in a context-dependent rule learning task found that successful rule learning was characterized by maintaining a balance between high and low dimensional spaces over learning. This equilibrium likely enabled the formation of relational knowledge representations that captured the latent structure of the task rules. Importantly, the only level of abstraction observed was one that perfectly matched the maximal amount of abstraction necessary to perform the task, and this structure only appeared later in learning in the hippocampus relative to extra-hippocampal regions. These results suggest that the brain employs an efficient and flexible coding scheme to respond to task demands. The results also suggest an important interplay between prefrontal and hippocampal codes over the course of learning. These three experiments demonstrate the promise that representational geometries offer in understanding the computations of the brain. Specifically, the results show that the flexible equilibrium between generalization and separation is accompanied by the fine-tuning of the dimensionality, structure, and content of representational spaces across a distributed network of MTL and PFC subregions. In the conclusion chapter, I discuss how these insights fit into existing frameworks regarding efficient and distributed codes.

This dissertation addresses the question of women's descriptive underrepresentation in Canadian politics at the federal level. Previous studies of women's underrepresentation in Canada and elsewhere have largely focused on analysing the results of elections, and studies that do account for earlier factors such as recruitment and candidate selection are limited in their scopes. In this dissertation I analyse women's representation in a holistic manner, accounting for factors from the pre-nomination stage up through election. Conceptually, I approach the path to political office as a three-stage "representation pipeline," comprising candidate emergence, candidate selection, and election. I base my analysis on Elections Canada's records of nomination contests held by federal political parties for the 2004 through 2019 general elections, paired with relevant district-level demographic factors from the Canadian census. I complement this analysis with an original survey of nomination contestants in the 2019 election. I find that women's underrepresentation in Canada is determined chiefly by issues in candidate emergence, rather than by issues in candidate selection or electoral discrimination. Instead, nominations in Canada are in the strong majority of cases acclamations, making candidate emergence and election the only meaningful barriers to women's representation in most cases. Furthermore, women face a small but significant degree of electoral discrimination, with women having slightly lower odds then men of winning election even when controlling for their party's past performance in the district. Finally, I find that urban districts are more conducive to women's representation at all three stages of the representation pipeline.

In the present thesis, we investigate representations of Cuntz algebras coming from dilations of row co-isometries. First, we give some general results about such representations. Next, we show that by labeling a random walk, a row co-isometry appears naturally. We give an explicit form for representations that come from such random walks. Then, we give some conditions relating to the reducibility of these representations, exploring how properties of a random walk relate to the Cuntz algebra representation that comes from it

Veterans’ preference policies in government employment, at all levels, have existed for the intention of providing advantages for veterans who consider employment in public service after military service. While the purpose of these policies is well intended for veterans who have served, there exists the potential that this practice can be perceived as an endorsement to hire from a pool of candidates that consists of mostly white males. From a representation standpoint, for women and minority groups, this creates the potential to undo much of the progress that has been made in terms of better representation within the public workforce. However, overall, veterans have experienced a wage premium in the public sector compared to the private, which creates the challenge that veteran employment can have a negative effect on one area of employment equity while maintaining a positive effect in another. Furthermore, external factors, both market-based and employment-based, may influence these effects as well. This research examines how veteran employment has impacted public-private representation among veteran women and minority groups, overall veteran public-private wage gaps, and the explanatory factors that affect veteran hiring and pay variances. Using public use data from the American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) files this research looks to fill in the gap in the literature related to public-private veteran employment representation and wage variances. The findings of this research first indicate that even though veterans are overrepresented in government service, veteran women and minorities have an even higher likelihood of representation in government service compared to the private sector. The explanatory factors that influence this finding are GSP, per capita income, and the unemployment rate, while union membership illustrates mixed results. Second, this research indicates that veterans are paid a wage premium working in the public sector compared to the private sector. The explanatory factors that influence this finding are per capita income, the unemployment rate, and union membership, while GSP does not. The overall contribution of this research builds upon the literature related both the composition and compensation of veterans and the external factors that influence public-private employment equity.

The purpose of this study was to examine the use of instructional design when considering the principles of cognitive load theory in traditional classroom instruction. The treatment group (N=31) was designed with a focus on two principles of cognitive load theory—multiple representation and contiguity. The multiple representation principle included text and pictures rather than spoken words and contiguity presented words and pictures simultaneously through multimedia video. The control group (N=26) did not focus on cognitive load theory principles and was discussion or text only—no multimedia video. This study was conducted using a pretest and posttest control group design and demographic survey. The participants consisted of students from an undergraduate computer applications class that was used to meet computer literacy requirements. The same instructor taught both instructional design methods in the traditional classroom setting. The major finding that there was a significant difference in achievement based on the instruction mode (integration of video vs. no integration of video) was constant across all variables in favor of the treatment group. Again, the control group had a mean posttest score of 80.58, and the treatment group had a mean posttest score of 84.48. The groups were significantly different based on the posttest exam, t = 3.28, p < .01. The treatment group scored significantly higher than the control group. The research also examined the relationships among the posttest scores and the various demographic variables. No meaningful relationships were identified. All associations were in the very low (less than .20) or low (.20-.39) level.

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