Konstanz, Universiẗat, Diss., 2002.

Techn. Universiẗat, Diplomarbeit--Ilmenau, 2007. / Parallel als Online-Ausg. erschienen unter der Adresse http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=10122.

The purpose of this study was to determine if there had been a significant change in the academic achievement, as measured by Grade XII grade-point averages, of Alberta's matriculation graduates since the accreditation of Alberta high schools in 1973. The experimental population consisted of 100, 1971-72 and of 100, 1976-77 matriculation graduates who had graduated from schools in the rural school jurisdictions in Education zone 6; and of 100, 1971-72, and of 100, 1976-77 matriculation graduates who had graduated from schools in the Medicine Hat urban school jurisdiction. All of the students in the experimental population had completed their freshman year at the Medicine Hat College the year following their graduation from high school. The variables analyzed in this study were: (1) Departmental Examination Grade XII grade-point averages, (2) Teacher-assigned Grade XII grade-point averages, (3) college freshmen grade-point averages, and (4) zones (rural and urban). Correlation coefficients were calculated between Grade XII grade-point averages before and after the accreditation of Alberta high schools. Results indicated that the correlation coefficients ranged from .36 to 50. The Grade XII grade-point averages which showed the highest correlations with college freshmen grade-point averages were those which had been obtained on Departmental Examinations. The Fisher's Zr transformation statistical test indicated, at the .05 level of significance, that there was no significant difference between the zones' correlation coefficients before and after accreditation. The two way analysis of variance test results indicated that there was no significant mean difference between Departmental Examinations Grade XII grade-point averages and teacher-assigned grades. There was, however, a significant difference at the .01 level, between the rural and urban zones' matriculation graduates' Grade XII grade-point averages. The t test showed that there was no significant mean difference between the rural and urban zone's matriculation graduates' Grades XII grade-point averages before accreditation, but after accreditation there was a significant mean difference at the .01 level. The two-way analysis of variance statistical test results showed no significant mean difference in the Medicine Hat College's freshmen grade-point averages prior to or after accreditation.

In this thesis, I am concerned with the language of advertising. By analyzing advertising from a discourse perspective, this paper further examines the context of communication and the participants’ roles in the context. This study focuses on commercial advertising, based on the assumption that the intended meaning of the advertiser is to persuade the viewer to perform a purchase. Therefore this study observes persuasive messages and how they are presented in advertising. To analyze and compare real texts from a discourse perspective present an opportunityto examine social changes that might have taken place in a society due to different temporal settings. The social changes are examined by comparing assigned gender roles in advertisements published in 1956 and advertisements published in 2014. The material consists of a total of eleven transcripts description of printed advertisements collected from The New Yorker. The examples used for this study have been hand picked to illustrate theories described in the background, such as those provided by Leech (1966), Hermerén (1999), Romaine (1999), Cronin (2000) and Hillier (2004). The framework for the analysis is based on Leech’s (1966) concept of primary and secondary situations with corresponding primary and secondary participants. The findings suggest that advertisers can persuade the viewer by addressing the viewer directly and by using exophoric references, or by inserting secondary participants to convey the message. In addition, the assigned role of women seems to have changed more than the assigned role of men in advertising discourse.

This study aims to explore students’ use of study guide websites when assigned novels and similar literary works in the EFL classroom in Swedish upper secondary schools. The study is based on the mixed-method approach and the findings reveal that all students that participated in the questionnaire and the interviews used study guide websites in a sense. By further exploring the reasons behind the use of these websites, three categories were discovered based on the conducted interviews: time, comprehension and interest. The findings also reveal that a few students used the study guide websites as an aid, other students used them to substitute reading the assigned literary work, while a few students used the study guide websites both as an aid and as a substitute. Finally, the study concludes that all the participants from the interviews acknowledge that study guide websites cannot substitute literary works entirely and even though they acknowledge the use of them, they do not believe that these websites include enough detailed information about the literary work.

This thesis is a study of assigned male convict labour in rural Van Diemen’s Land in the period 1820-40. Throughout this period agriculture and pastoralism were centxal to the colonial economy, and this sector was the largest private employer of convict labour, yet there has been no prior sustained investigation of the nature and experience of rural convict employment in Van Diemen’s Land. Research has involved use of records of convict transportation, the records of the convict department, colonial court records, and the correspondence of the colonial secretary’s office. Extensive use has also been made of the colonial press, published contemporary accounts, and unpublished journals of colonists. The thesis begins with a discussion of two oppositional representations of rural convict labour: John Glover’s painting ‘My Harvest Home’, and the ballad ‘Van Diemen’s Land’. These representations demonstrate the polarised debate on the nature of convict labour. Rural convicts have been largely neglected in the recent historiography of convict transportation; this thesis argues that this neglect is unwarranted, and that rural convict labour resists reductionist understanding of convict labour. Chapter 1 examines farming in the colony, demonstrating the importance and vitality of this sector of the economy. Chapters 2-4 discuss convict assignment, management, and convict responses. It is argued that assignment effectively placed those with experience of farm work with rural employers. Convicts’ skills are seen to have been relevant and useful to the rural economy. The management of convict servants operated both formally at the level of the Convict Department regulations and the magistrates bench, and informally on individual properties. Informal management best utilised incentives rather than force. Thus convicts were able to negotiate the authority of their employers through various means, including resistance. Chapters 5-7 discuss the convict experience of rural labour. Material conditions of diet, housing and clothing are examined in chapter 5. Convict recreational culture is investigated in chapter 6; it is argued that convicts created an important site of autonomy in this form. The intimate lives of convict men are discussed in chapter 7. Often seen as brutal and brutalising, it is argued that these relationships were important and meaningful sites in male convict experience.

Domain names constitute a valuable key element in electronic commerce. However, some intend to benefit from this fact by registering identical or similar trademarks as domain names, thereby depriving the legitimate owners from obtaining the domain name. This thesis aims to evaluate the protection provided for domain names, by illustrating several models that are under civil, common and international jurisdiction, namely, Jordan, the United Kingdom, the United States and by ICANN. In the first model there are no special regulations. In the second model alternative regulations are applied while, in the third model, a special act is provided; the fourth model constitutes a global protection for specific types of domain name disputes. It is concluded that the absence of a unified legal identity for domain names is the reason why diverse positions are required to protect them; concomitantly, domain name disputes have not been sufficiently addressed, and there is a necessity to provide domain names with a globally comprehensive protection mechanism.

Based on a time-use model with a sound theoretical basis and carefully collected data for Austria, the value of leisure (VoL) for different population segments has been estimated. Through the combination of these results with mode-specific values of travel time savings from a related study based on the same data, the first mode-specific values of time assigned to travel (VTAT) were calculated. Data was collected using a Mobility-Activity-Expenditure Diary, a novel survey format which gathers all activities, expenditures, and travel decisions from the same individuals for 1 week in a diary-based format. The average VoL is 8.17 Euro/h, which is below the mean wage of 12.14 Euro/h, indicating that the value of work is, on average, negative. Regarding the reliability of the VoL, we show its sensitivity to the variance of working time in a sample, something that has been ignored in previous studies and could be used to avoid inadequate segmentation. We controlled this effect in the analysis of the heterogeneity of the VoL across the population by estimating the parameters from the total (unsegmented) dataset with single interaction terms. We find that the VTAT is strictly negative for walking, predominantly negative for cycling and car, and predominantly positive for public transport with 0.27 Euro/h on average. The positive VTAT for public transport is a strong indication for the importance of travel conditions, in turn suggesting that improvements in travel conditions of public transport might be as important as investing in shorter travel times.

Ce mémoire est une revue historique critique de la formation d'ICANN, dont l'aspect critique a trait à l'identification des normativités agissantes dans les processus d'institutionnalisation. En refusant de considérer la gouvernance d'Internet comme un mode de coordination spécifique -base sur la continuité du dialogue entre agents indépendants, l'allocation des ressources pour le développement de projets mutuels bénéfiques, et la gestion des conflits qui y sont inévitables -l'on découvre dans la sphère politique conflictuelle autour de la formation de ICANN que les systèmes de justification liés aux institutions possibles sont les protagonistes véritables de l'histoire. Bien que les sciences sociales ne disposent d'aucune théorie politique générale des normativités qui expliquerait quelques-unes des continuités et transformations de la société politique en représentant la manière dont les principes normatifs influent sur (ou sont instrumentalisés par) les agents, la revue historique découvre à travers la littérature que des visions normatives, concurrentes sur plusieurs dimensions, informent les conflits et tensions de la négociation globale (permanente) pour l'établissement d'un arrangement institutionnel pour Internet. Puisant support dans les positions ontologiques des institutionnalismes dits « hybride » (rationaliste/cognitiviste), cette revue historique concentre son attention sur les éléments constitutifs des visions normatives concurrentes. C'est-à-dire que les principes normatifs promus et contestés par les agents de même que par la technologie informent la recherche et la narration historique. Le parcours est thématique ce qui permet de rendre compte de la globalité de l'espace social et politique Internet. Internet comme objet technologique, objet d'économie politique et objet légal suscite diverses dimensions normatives conflictuelles qui témoignent de l'élargissement des parties prenantes impliquées et informent les luttes qui s'y déploient en tant qu'objet politique. Bien que la narration ne soit pas analytique, elle éclaire la période conflictuelle de formation de ICANN sous un angle novateur, tout en contribuant à la mise sur pied de données normatives desquelles pourront se développer des avenues d'agrégation au sein d'une théorie générale. Elle ouvre notamment la possibilité de lier analytiquement les principes normatifs aux processus dynamiques et stratégiques de formation de coalitions dans un modèle spatial multidimensionnel caractérisé par l'incertitude cognitive. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Visions normatives de gouvernance, Institutionnalisation, Principes normatifs, Gouvernance d'Internet, Politique globale, ICANN, DNS.

Whose internet regime? ¡§Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.¡¨ Although its purposes are nonprofit and to be the global representation, ICANN was criticized that it has been controlled by United State unilaterally since it was built for ten years. The United Nations empowered International Telecommunication Union to establish the World Summit of Information Society (WSIS), and tried to make sovereign states to co-govern the internet regime in 2003 and 2005. However, it was failed. Hence, this thesis retrospects the causes of WSIS failure with neo-realism¡¦s perspective and analyses the historical events and relative documents. The study finds that the core reason of WSIS failure is because ICANN is the institutional product of hegemony in the historical context. On the other hand, the material inferiority of WSIS and the structural constriction lead to the total failure of anti-hegemony power.