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The aim of our study is to research what the future help-needs and expectations on the civilian society are among Swedish soldiers before they are sent on their first deployment abroad, especially to Afghanistan. The fact that Sweden sends soldiers to a warzone is something that is new nd research according the help-needs from the returning soldiers are missing. This study is based on a qualitative method where the data consists of four focus group interviews with at least two participants in each focus group from three different military bases in Sweden. The results indicate that the soldiers´expectations on the civilian society are low but that they would like to have more support from the civilian society. An important notice during the study, we encountered the fact that the participants in some way feel stigmatized. The results also show that they want the Swedish armed forces to be in charge and provide the care for the soldiers where health professionals involved have som military background. In the results found we also see that they are in different extent thinking and aware of the risks with deployment in Afghanistan and that they are thinking more on the physical risks rather than the psychological. One of the final conclusions is that if they really are stigmatized this might be a new group of people for the Swedish social services to work with.

The silence and invisibility of Puerto Rican soldiers in fictional and non-fictional representations of U.S. Wars has motivated me to look for alternative spaces in which these unaccounted voices and images are currently being produced, stored, circulated, and memorialized. Within this framework, my dissertation explores the self-representation of Puerto Rican servicemen and women in social networking sites (SNS), (i.e. as MySpace and Facebook), in user-generated content (UGC) platforms, (i.e. YouTube), and also in web memorials. I am interested in understanding how Puerto Rican soldiers self-represent their ethnonational identity online within the overlapping of second-class citizenship. The theoretical framework proposed for this research will apply theories such as 1) articulation; 2) the notion of contact zone; and 3) colonial/racial subjectivities. To complete this goal, my research method draws on online ethnography, textual, and critical discourse analysis. Firstly, I will discuss the limited repertoire of images of Puerto Rican soldiers in TV and film. My argument is that, besides the massive omission of this history, the images and motifs that do escape de facto social censorship will be in conversation with the self-representations. The second chapter is the result of four years of the process of online ethnography on which I analyze the instances of self-representation of Puerto Rican soldiers in SNS. My interest was seeing how those spaces were inflected by an ethnonational subjectivity. The third chapter explores the ways Puerto Rican soldiers, embedded in mash-up cultures, uses UGCs platforms to upload videos that transform the soldiers from passive consumers of images to active producers of content, which tend to disrupt dominant narratives of power. The last chapter explores the emergence of web memorials dedicated to the Puerto Rican soldiers. My main argument is that these instances of self- representation in online spaces are in conversation with the moments of silences and misrepresentations of Puerto Rican soldiers in traditional media, but also have become acts of enunciation in which the particular Puerto Ricanness of the Puerto Rican soldier is affirmed within complex, layered histories of imperialism, racism, heterosexism, and second-class citizenship. / text

This thesis is concerned with recursive partitioning of models of a generalized linear model type (GLM-type), i.e., maximum likelihood models with a linear predictor for the linked mean, a topic that has received constant interest over the last twenty years. The resulting tree (a ''model tree'') can be seen as an extension of classic trees, to allow for a GLM-type model in the partitions. In this work, the focus lies on applied and computational aspects of model trees with GLM-type node models to work out different areas where application of the combination of parametric models and trees will be beneficial and to build a computational scaffold for future application of model trees. In the first part, model trees are defined and some algorithms for fitting model trees with GLM-type node model are reviewed and compared in terms of their properties of tree induction and node model fitting. Additionally, the design of a particularly versatile algorithm, the MOB algorithm (Zeileis et al. 2008) in R is described and an in-depth discussion of how the functionality offered can be extended to various GLM-type models is provided. This is highlighted by an example of using partitioned negative binomial models for investigating the effect of health care incentives. Part 2 consists of three research articles where model trees are applied to different problems that frequently occur in the social sciences. The first uses trees with GLM-type node models and applies it to a data set of voters, who show a non-monotone relationship between the frequency of attending past elections and the turnout in 2004. Three different type of model tree algorithms are used to investigate this phenomenon and for two the resulting trees can explain the counter-intuitive finding. Here model tress are used to learn a nonlinear relationship between a target model and a big number of candidate variables to provide more insight into a data set. A second application area is also discussed, namely using model trees to detect ill-fitting subsets in the data. The second article uses model trees to model the number of fatalities in Afghanistan war, based on the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war diary. Data pre-processing with a topic model generates predictors that are used as explanatory variables in a model tree for overdispersed count data. Here the combination of model trees and topic models allows to flexibly analyse database data, frequently encountered in data journalism, and provides a coherent description of fatalities in the Afghanistan war. The third paper uses a new framework built around model trees to approach the classic problem of segmentation, frequently encountered in marketing and management science. Here, the framework is used for segmentation of a sample of the US electorate for identifying likely and unlikely voters. It is shown that the framework's model trees enable accurate identification which in turn allows efficient targeted mobilisation of eligible voters. (author's abstract)

Les " cultures à céramique modelée peinte " se sont développées dans la seconde moitié du IIe millénaire av. J.-C. (âge du Fer ancien) sur un vaste territoire couvrant les actuelles républiques d'Ouzbékistan, du Turkménistan, du Tadjikistan, du Kirghizstan, ainsi que le nord de l'Afghanistan et le nord-est de l'Iran. Connues depuis presque un siècle, grâce aux nombreuses recherches menées par les archéologues soviétiques, l'apparition de ces cultures est considérée comme une " régression " matérielle, culturelle et socio-économique qui contribuerait à la disparition de la brillante civilisation de la fin de l'âge du Bronze. Mais si leurs productions matérielles ont été bien étudiées, leur structuration et leur place au sein de la protohistoire centrasiatique n'étaient connues que superficiellement, et notre étude vise donc à renouveler la perception que nous en avons. Grâce à l'analyse d'un abondant complexe céramique inédit issu de fouilles françaises et italiennes récentes (Koktepe, Dzharkutan, Dzham-53 en Ouzbékistan ; Ulug-depe au Turkménistan) et soviétiques plus anciennes et grâce aussi à un nouvel examen de l'ensemble des données publiées ou inédites disponibles, nous avons pu affiner et caractériser la production matérielle de ces cultures et en déterminer la base socio-économique, proposant ainsi de nouvelles définitions de leurs faciès culturels. Nous discutons également les modalités et les circonstances de la transition de l'âge du Bronze final à l'âge du Fer ancien, puis celles du passage vers l'âge du Fer moyen-récent, tout en les replaçant dans un contexte chronologique et géographique large, dans une optique méthodologique et thématique qui s'inscrit pleinement dans les perspectives de recherche qui prévalent actuellement en Asie centrale et au Proche-Orient.

Thesis (Master of Military Studies)-Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 2008. / Title from title page of PDF document (viewed on: Feb 11, 2010).

Thesis (Master of Military Studies)-Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 2008. / Title from title page of PDF document (viewed on: Dec 29, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.

In this thesis, I argue that twenty-first century American war films are constructed in dialogue with the past, repurposing earlier forms of war representation by evoking the visual and narrative memory of the past that is embedded in genre form—what Mikhail Bakhtin calls 'genre memory.' Comparing post-9/11 war films with Vietnam War films, my project examines how contemporary war films envision war's impact on culture and social space, explore how war refashions ideas about race and national identity, and re-imagine war's rewriting of the human psyche. My research expands on earlier research and departs from traditional approaches to the war film genre by locating the American Civil War at the origin of this genre memory, and, in doing so, argues that nineteenth century documentation of the Civil War serves as a rehearsal for the twentieth and twenty-first century war film. Constructed in explicit relation to the Vietnam film, I argue that post-9/11 war films rehearse the history of war representation in American culture while also emphasizing the radically different culture of the present day. Rather than representing a departure from past forms of war representation, as has been argued by many theorists, I show that contemporary American war films can be seen as the latest chapter in a long history of reimagining American military and cultural history in pictorial and narrative form.

Submitted by Maria Dulce (mdulce@ndc.uff.br) on 2014-05-14T20:03:09Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Trigueiro, Gabriel-Dissert-2013.pdf: 1230993 bytes, checksum: f54fb670fa26a260acf423b0f8c19fb6 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2014-05-14T20:03:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Trigueiro, Gabriel-Dissert-2013.pdf: 1230993 bytes, checksum: f54fb670fa26a260acf423b0f8c19fb6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Este trabalho aborda as reações às guerras do Afeganistão e Iraque de diversos intelectuais envolvidos com a revista norte-americana de esquerda Dissent Magazine. Afinados com aquilo que chamo de campo liberal-left, parte substantiva desses intelectuais não hesitou em prover apoio às medidas militares adotadas pelo governo de George W. Bush. As causas originárias desse apoio são examinadas na presente pesquisa, bem como os argumentos daqueles que, no mesmo periódico, membros da mesma cultura política em questão, se puseram a criticar as ações de política externa do governo Republicano – bem como, por conseguinte, seus colegas de revista. A natureza desses embates e as consequências intelectuais para a cultura política liberal-left são investigadas a seguir. / This paper discusses the reactions to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for many intellectuals involved with the U. S. left-wing magazine Dissent. Attuned to what I call the liberal-left field, a substantial part of these intellectuals did not hesitate to support the military measures taken by the George W. Bush government. The primary causes of this support are examined in this study, as well as the arguments of those who, in the same journal, members of the same political culture in question, began the criticize the foreign policy of the Republican government – and, therefore, their magazine colleagues.The nature of these conflicts and its intellectual consequences to the liberal-left political culture are investigated below.

An Abstract The text focuses on the aim of the state politics to gain the position of the first global hegemony after the end of the Cold War. It observes, with the regard to the wide-ranging influence of the USA at that time, and to the important American visions about its character, especially their particular decisions. It tries to describe the way, which the other influential participants of the global politics, the states as well as those of other kind, used to express their reactions to this activity, and their relation to the USA, the strongest contender in the effort to acquire the first global hegemony. The power contest is here mainly introduced by the insight into the course of the conflicts, which they, after the end of the Cold War, faced and influenced. The text concentrates on those political and security challenges with, apart from the policies of the USA, the strong presence of the intervention of the international organizations, above all the UN, the NATO and the EU, or of the occassionally created alliances. The prospects of hegemonial possibilities is presented in the conclusion.