In this thesis I analyze detective Sherlock Holmes method based on the semiotics of Ch. S. Peirce. I would like to show that although Holmes detective about his method claim that it is deductive, in-depth analysis shows that this method is far more complex and involves induction and abduction, and that each of these methods has its own importance in the detective's reasoning. The work is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the Sherlock Holmes detective in terms of logical methods. The second part is focused on methods of reasoning by Ch. S. Peirce emphasizing abduction, a hypothesis. The third part is practical and includes analysis of the process of detective Sherlock Holmes based on the thesis of Ch. S. Peirce, as outlined in the second part.`

This thesis focuses on the basic delimiting of the issue of play within the framework C. S. Peirce's semiotics. Its objective is to expound and explicate the role of the phenomena of play in Peirce's philosophy using selected Peirce's texts and secondary literature, whereas our main starting-point is Peirce's identification of play with the inferential form of abduction. As such play is connected to Peirce's theories of sign and inference, as well as to the concepts of synechism, evolutionary cosmology and pragmatism. This finding sets Peirce's theory of inference within critical logic as one of the key themes of the thesis. In relation to this finding we give a basic explanation of Peirce's phaneroscopy and speculative grammar which in dependency on Peirce's classification of sciences set the ground for our analysis of play as a process of inference as well as a significant function. Within the framework of critical logic we focus primarily on abduction, especially on the question of the validity of abduction as a form of logical reasoning as well as on Peirce's transition from understanding different forms of inference as separate processes to understanding them as a continuous and interdependent whole of the scientific method. We develop Peirce's brief conception of play through an excursion...

The diploma thesis is entitled "Protection of a child as a subject of human rights within the scope of international and European Union regulation of international abductions" and deals with the position of a child within the legal norms governing human rights, children's rights and international child abductions. The thesis examines how a child is viewed, whereas as an object or as a subject of rights. The thesis is divided into three chapters, which gradually move from a general explanation of the basic concepts to the specific regulation of the child's position within the framework of international child abductions. The first chapter defines the basic concepts of the object and subject of human rights, generally analyses the position of a man as a subject of international human rights regulation and subsequently the position of a child as a specific category of human rights protection. Finally, the first chapter answers the question of how the concepts of object and subject of human rights differ. The second chapter deals with the legal standards governing the protection of human rights with the emphasis on the protection of the child as a human rights subject. The presented legal standards are analysed from the perspective of the regulation of children's rights and international child...

Purpose: To explore the influence of marketing AI on marketing managers' attention allocation to leverage customer relationships in different business-to-business contexts. Method: Abductive approach and multiple case study, data collection was made by qualitative semi-structured interviews and secondary data collection. Conclusion: The study identified both similarities and differences within three main categories across two industrial clusters where marketing AI effect marketing managers’ attention allocation in B2B relationships. Marketing AI is shown to affect B2B relationships through marketing managers’ attentional selection towards efficiencies and/or new opportunities. Marketing AI is shown to influence marketing managers’ attention allocation by distorting the focus of attention on relational dynamics by introducing automated or augmented marketing AI solutions into the relationship.

In September 2014, forty-three students were attacked and forcibly disappeared by police in the town of Iguala, Mexico. The Ayotzinapa Case, as it is known, caused international outcry and a domestic political crisis. In the following weeks, the surrounding countryside was discovered to be saturated with clandestine individual and mass graves, and a crisis emerged around bodily remains and their improper burial. As the willingness of the Mexican State to investigate became less and less credible, families of the disappeared —not just families of the students, but families of hundreds of other disappeared people across the country— took on the role of searching for their loved ones and caring for the name-less and unidentified dead they began to find. No longer waiting for authorities to act, kin of the disappeared began to symbolically and materially enact attributes of the State. What started as groups of people getting together on Sundays in the town of Iguala, to go to the hills in search of bodies in clandestine burials, grew in the following years into a nation-wide social movement. What does it mean to find a murdered body in Mexico today? What does it mean for it to become evidence? What work is done through the discovery by searching families of such bodies? The result of 32 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico, between 2015 and 2021, this dissertation builds on anthropological scholarship on bureaucracy and forensic evidentiary practices to examine the encounters of relatives of the disappeared and State authorities. It analyses current regimes of justice and forensic expertise, interrogating how bodies in the ground are translated into terms legible to the law. This project investigates social processes of public truth production, forms of violence exerted by the State —through physical violence, forced disappearance, and bureaucratic violence— by bringing into conversation forensics alongside recent critical perspectives on bureaucracy, bearing in mind longstanding approaches to the anthropology of death and the anthropology of the State, to address how dead bodies become evidence and how truth claims circulate around and through them.

This Master Thesis is an interdisciplinary case study that examines physical sexual violence in the form of female displacement in Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh-century Japanese masterpiece, The Tale of Genji. By investigating several cases ranging from spatial relocation to abduction and kidnapping involving four major Genji heroines, Utsusemi, Yūgao, Murasaki and Ukifune, I define violent displacement as an autonomous act of sexual violence by which a male character removes a female character from her initial location to a place of his choice. The man’s motivations are predominantly related to gaining sexual access to the woman’s body or ensuring control over her. Often such cases of displacement occur in the same context as other cases of physical sexual violence, such as forced sexual intercourse, which they may precede and facilitate, but rarely do they constitute mere preludes to more severe acts of sexual violence. I have posited several hypotheses about displacement, such as differences in rank and status between the protagonists, the man’s violation of standard courtship procedures, and the reactions by the woman and her female entourage. With these criteria, I have interpreted episodes of displacement in the female author’s tale, with particular emphasis on her choice of words and narrative techniques. I have supplemented textual analysis by examining the history of motifs in Genji illustrations by artists who interpreted these displacement episodes very differently or not at all. I conclude that the discourse on sexual violence in The Tale of Genji cannot be limited to the incidents involving forced sexual intercourse. The presence of female displacement indicates that sexual violence in the tale is not an accidental occurrence, but a topos carefully constructed by Murasaki Shikibu and strategically placed within the context of the tale.

This dissertation provides a critical and constructive interpretation of “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” [NA], the sole primarily theological essay written by the logician, scientist, and philosopher C. S. Peirce (1839-1914). Despite recent scholarly attention, NA has confused its readers from its publication in 1908 until today. This dissertation interprets NA in light of: (a) Peirce’s philosophy of science and his theory of signs (semeiotic); and (b) a close reading of the published essays and unpublished manuscripts Peirce composed during the decade before NA’s publication and the six years he lived post-publication. These primary materials suggest that the key to understanding the so-called humble argument at the heart of NA is Peirce’s conviction that the universe is a divine sign. The humble argument is a recommendation that one make musement, or the playful contemplation of the universe, a daily habit. Since Peirce believed that the universe is a divine sign, he predicted that anyone who mused for forty to fifty minutes daily would eventually come to believe in God’s reality. Peirce describes the humble argument as the innermost of three nested arguments, the latter two defending the reasonableness of the humble argument. The second argument, which Peirce accuses theologians of neglecting, appeals to the instinctiveness of the idea that God is real as evidence of the truth of that idea. As stated, that argument is flawed, but it can be reformulated as an empirical prediction that intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms will tend to develop conceptions of God or Ultimate Reality. The third argument defends the reasonableness of the humble argument by construing the idea of God as arising, like scientific hypotheses, through abductive inference. Contra Peirce, this dissertation argues that, although analogous to certain abstractions that play important roles in science, the idea of God is not a valid scientific hypothesis because it entails no testable predictions. Given this lack of testable consequences, Peirce’s pragmatic defense of the meaningfulness of the idea of God is inconsistent with his pragmaticism, having more in common with William James’s individualistic interpretation of pragmatism, which Peirce had previously opposed.

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The life expectancy of the elderly population is expected to increase with 22 % by 2050. As one grows older, the body starts to deteriorate, which can lead to a higher risk for diseases and accidents. During recent years shoulder surgeries have increased dramatically, and to assess the shoulder function the most common technique is the use of camera-based motion capture systems. However, this is very time consuming and does not completely represent the real shoulder performance. Therefore, this study was aimed to validate a new technique, the force range monitor (FRM). Thirteen volunteers participated in this study, which was divided into two sessions. Session one included abduction and flexion strength measurements using the FRM, as well as six mobility measurements with the inertial measurement unit (IMU) of the FRM. The second session was conducted in the same manner, with the addition of the Vicon system (motion capture system). In this study a control session for FRM and the Vicon system was also performed for abduction and flexion movements with two participants, where the placement of the IMU was modified. As indicated by the results, FRM and the Vicon system do not measure the same parameters. Even if the FRM does not measure the same shoulder joint angles as the Vicon System, the FRM can still be of clinical importance when evaluating position deviation during strength and mobility measurements. Moreover, the FRM had a high repeatability for a number of participants, and most of the mobility measurements presented a distinct patterns for various activities. Hence, it can be concluded that the FRM is a potential technique to evaluate shoulder strength and mobility.

Patients suffering from brachial plexus injury or other spinal cord related injuries often lose their hand functionality. They need a device which can help them to perform day to day activities by restoring some form of functionality to their hands. A popular solution to this problem are robotic exoskeletons, mechanical devices that help in actuating the fingers of the patients, enabling them to grasp objects and perform other daily life activities. This thesis presents the design of a novel exoskeleton glove which is controlled by a neural network-based controller. The novel design of the glove consists of rigid double four-bar linkage mechanisms actuated through series elastic actuators (SEAs) by DC motors. It also contains a novel rotary series elastic actuator (RSEA) which uses a torsion spring to measure torque, passive abduction and adduction mechanisms, and an adjustable base. To make the exoskeleton glove grasp objects, it also needs to have a robust controller which can compute forces that needs to be applied through each finger to successfully grasp an object. The neural network is inspired from the way human hands can grasp a wide variety of objects with ease. Fingertip forces were recorded from a normal human grasping objects at different orientations. This data was used to train the neural network with a R2 value of 0.81. Once the grasp is initiated by the user, the neural network takes inputs like orientation, weight, and size of the object to estimate the force required in each of the five digits to grasp an object. These forces are then applied by the motors through the SEA and linkage mechanisms to successfully grasp an object autonomously. / Master of Science / Humans are one of the few species to have an opposable thumb which allows them to not only perform tasks which require power, but also tasks which require precision. However, unfortunately, thousands of people in the United States suffer from hand disabilities which hinder them in performing basic tasks. The RML glove v3 is a robotic exoskeleton glove which can help these patients in performing day to day activities like grasping semi-autonomously. The glove is lightweight and comfortable to use. The RML glove v3 uses a neural network based controller to predict the grasp force required to successfully grasp objects. After the user provides the required input, the glove estimates the object size and uses other inputs like object orientation and weight to estimate the grasp force in each finger linkage mechanism. The motors then drive the linkages till the required force is achieved on the fingertips and the grasp is completed.