M.A. / This study started off as a search for the factors that turn the French New Novel into unreadable, unenjoyable, difficult literature. The most obvious keyword that sprang to mind was “doubt”. This was the effect that we as a reader felt when reading the novels mentioned above. There is doubt in two areas: Firstly we doubt our own ability to comprehend, being fully aware that the French New Novel is enjoyed primarily by academics. Secondly we doubt the novelists’ ability to produce what we would call a conventional novel like those developed by novelists such as Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal and Zola in the 19th century. The search for “doubt” in the New Novel was very fruitful. Although some critics are of the opinion that the novels of Robbe-Grillet are to a certain extent understandable, they all agree that the novels of both Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet are in essence difficult to read and inadequately develop the four basic ingredients of the conventional novel, which are: character, plot, setting and time. These four elements should, in the case of a realistic novel, reflect the reader’s reality in order to create the illusion of being real. Our study has shown that Robbe-Grillet’s development of character and description of setting do not convince the reader that they could be real. They are in fact so inadequate and incoherent that the reader struggles to reconstruct a realistic character from the bits of information provided. Robbe-Grillet further breaks all conventional rules of time and space and leaves the reader disoriented. Sarraute appears to have abandoned convention totally as she has completely done away with character and setting in her novel Ici. It requires a great effort from the reader to reconstruct the fleeting abstract conversations that make up her novel. Both Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet have provided works of criticism on their own ideas of the novel in which they clearly state that they broke away deliberately from the form and content of the 19th century novel in a quest for a new authentic novel. This study was further able to point out certain mechanisms that the authors use to create instability in their novels. The many incoherent pieces that make up these novels allow the reader to play at reassembling them and often this leads to interesting new discoveries. One of these discoveries is the simultaneous presence of two or three levels of text. Where the surface text normally contains the story line, here the surface is broken, allowing the reader to penetrate into a second level of text. Here we find the metatext where the text comments on itself. We show that the metatext in both these novels often talks about doubt and about the incoherent nature of their own text. We may thus also say that “doubt” is an important leitmotiv in these novels. We might say that the only real characters in Robbe-Grillet’s and Sarraute’s novels are the reader and the author between whom there is an active interplay, although it is a delayed interplay. The novel becomes a game much like a board game – an interactive playing field that differs with every reading. This is especially true for Sarraute whose reactions to the reader’s initial reactions to the text have been pre-programmed into the novel. The real setting is then this abstract intellectual playing field. However, the reader never reaches the point where he can say that he has successfully unlocked the mysteries of these novels. Any interpretation remains partial and is surrounded by doubt.

<p>This dissertation challenges depictions of witchcraft as a sensational or disruptive phenomenon, presenting witch beliefs instead as organically woven into everyday community life, religious beliefs, and village culture. It argues that witch beliefs were adaptive, normal, and rational in regions that never suffered convulsive witch persecutions. Furthermore, this dissertation, the first to work systematically through Spanish secular court witch trials, upends scholars’ views about the dominance of the Spanish Inquisition in witchcraft prosecutions. Through a serial study of secular court records, this dissertation reveals that the local court of Navarra poached dozens of witch trials from the Spanish Inquisition, and independently prosecuted over one hundred accused witches over one hundred-and-fifty years. These overlooked local sources document witch beliefs in far greater detail than Inquisition records and allow the first reconstruction of village-level witch beliefs in Spain. Drawing from historical, anthropological, and literary methods, this dissertation employs a transdisciplinary approach to examine the reports from villagers, parish priests, and jurists, produced under the specific local and older accusatorial judicial procedure. Free of the Inquisitorial filter that has dominated previous studies of Spanish witchcraft, these sources reveal the way villagers—not Inquisitors—conceived of, created, feared, and survived in a world with witches and sorceresses.</p><p>Using these local sources, this dissertation illuminates the complex social webs of witchcraft accusations, the pathways of village gossip, and the inner logic of witch beliefs. It reveals the central role of Catholic performativity and the grave consequences of being marked as a mala cristiana, the importance of fama and kin ties, and reveals the rationality of the curious and pervasive presence of the common toad (Bufo bufo) in Navarra’s witch trials. By moving away from the prevalent focus given to the more spectacular witch panics and trials, this work demonstrates the value of local trial records. This dissertation argues that far from irrational or absurd, witchcraft beliefs in early modern Navarra were internally coherent and intellectually informed by an amalgamation of religious, social, and legal forces.</p> / Dissertation

Ninety college students served as subjects in research to investigate possible relationships between fear of death, religious doubt, and child-rearing practices. The following hypotheses were tested: 1) contingent childrearing practices would correlate negatively with religious doubt, 2) religious doubt would correlate positively with fear of death, and 3) contingent child-rearing practices would correlate negatively with fear of death. The second hypothesis was supported. Additional analyses revealed that those who changed religious preference from childhood to the present had lower fear of death scores than those who retained the same beliefs. The sample was also divided into religious and nonreligious groups. The religious group as a whole and religious females were found to have scored significantly higher on paternal contingent punishment. Religious individuals in the total sample also scored significantly higher on parental contingent punishment.

China has continued the economic reform and open door policy over 30 years with many great achievements, such as the second largest GDP, the largest import and export economy with the largest infrastructural investment in the world. On the other hand, the conflicts and risks the firms especially for small and medium sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) have faced are extremely serious and more acute due to the economy growth and increasing social wealth, especially in Yangtze River Delta, in the general context of ever increasing cost such as labour, land and higher customers’ expectations such as the quality of product. These serious problems are challenges for the competitiveness of SMEs in Yangtze River Delta. This research aims to investigate and improve the competitiveness of SMEs by the main variables such as enterprise’s resources, product’s competitive issues and innovation activities related barriers. To achieve the aim, the research employed a mixed method of quantitative and qualitative approaches to build the competitiveness’s belief network model by Bayesian Belief Networks and analyze the factors of the most important variables by the SPSS software. Secondly, 36 entrepreneurs of small and medium sized manufacturing enterprises in Yangtze River Delta have been carefully selected to participate in the questionnaire survey and face to face interviews. All participants are entrepreneurs who have run enterprise for at least three years. Five kinds of resources, competitive issues and innovation have been identified as the variables of competitiveness. The findings of research are mainly related to the three aspects which are general view of variables; barriers to innovation activity and importance of variables for improving the competitiveness; and the factor analysis of quality management practices. Firstly, the general condition of financial resource is the worst in resource sector of SMEs; Dependability is the best performance in competitive issues of SMEs; Lack of finance is generally identified the biggest barrier to innovation of SMEs. Secondly, the Physical resource in resource sector and Quality in competitive issues sector are the most important variables for improving the competitiveness of SMEs after BBN assessment; Lack of technical experts is the most serious barrier when the SMEs are really focusing on the innovation according to the BBN assessments. Thirdly, the factor analyses have identified the key independent factors explaining the quality management practices in these SMEs. Finally, these findings can help the SMEs build variables’ impact tables based on the outputs from the conditional assessment of BBNs to make more efficient and effective decisions when they try to improve the enterprise competitiveness, with detailed recommendations. At the same time, the importance and factors of good quality management practices have also been argued to help the entrepreneurs improve the quality performance and their enterprise competitiveness.

Religiousness is one potential, understudied psychosocial correlate of eating disorders. To assess associations between religiousness and eating disorders, this study developed the Religious Attendance and Belief Scale (Rel-AB), and examined its psychometric properties. Women from a large population-based sample (N = 1510; M(age) = 42.5) completed subscales measuring (1) belief in a personal and loving God, and (2) attendance at religion-related activities, as well as eating disorder measures. Belief was negatively associated with eating disorder symptomatology among women meeting broadly defined criteria for bulimia nervosa. Eating disorders and religiousness were not associated in the overall sample, and associations were largely nonsignificant among participants meeting criteria for other eating disorders. Overall, results indicated that the Rel-AB Scale has good psychometric properties and is useful for the assessment of religiousness in both research and treatment settings. The utility of including religiousness in the conceptualization of an individual and potential treatment options is discussed.

OBJECTIVES: To identify the types of patients who talk with their physicians as a result of Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) advertising. METHODS: Data were taken from a national survey, "Public Health Impact of Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Prescription Drugs, July 2001- January 2002", conducted by researchers from Harvard Medical School. Participants (n = 3000) were interviewed by telephone. We constructed a conceptual framework consisting of outcomes (3 types of physician visits), intervention (DTC experience) and five groups of explanatory factors (health beliefs, demographics, health status, socioeconomic status and market factors). Data were analyzed with three multivariate stepwise logistic regressions. The three dependent variables were whether an advertisement for a prescription drug had ever prompted the patient to: 1) visit to discuss prescription drug, 2) visit to discuss new condition, and 3) visit to discuss treatment change. RESULTS: Out of all independent variables, only six variables consistently showed significant effects on the three dependent variables after adjusting for other variables. They were: 1) taking medication on regular basis, 2) having anxiety, 3) having high advertisement attentiveness, 4) viewing media as the most important source prompting one to talk with physician, 5) believing that DTC advertisements increased awareness of new treatment, and 6) believing that DTC advertisements improved discussion with health professionals. The six variables were the strongest predictors for DTC-prompted physician visits.CONCLUSIONS: Our nationally representative study found multiple factors were associated with different types of physician visits prompted by DTC advertisements. This information could be used to target those patients most likely to talk to their physicians as a result of DTC advertisements.

Les codes Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) sont au coeur de larecherche des codes correcteurs d'erreurs en raison de leur excellenteperformance de décodage en utilisant un algorithme de décodageitératif de type propagation de croyances (Belief Propagation - BP).Cet algorithme utilise la représentation graphique d'un code, ditgraphe de Tanner, et calcule les fonctions marginales sur le graphe.Même si l'inférence calculée n'est exacte que sur un graphe acyclique(arbre), l'algorithme BP estime de manière très proche les marginalessur les graphes cycliques, et les codes LDPC peuvent asymptotiquementapprocher la capacité de Shannon avec cet algorithme.Cependant, sur des codes de longueurs finies dont la représentationgraphique contient des cycles, l'algorithme BP est sous-optimal etdonne lieu à l'apparition du phénomène dit de plancher d'erreur. Leplancher d'erreur se manifeste par la dégradation soudaine de la pentedu taux d'erreur dans la zone de fort rapport signal à bruit où lesstructures néfastes au décodage sont connues en termes de TrappingSets présents dans le graphe de Tanner du code, entraînant un échec dudécodage. De plus, les effets de la quantification introduite parl'implémentation en hardware de l'algorithme BP peuvent amplifier ceproblème de plancher d'erreur.Dans cette thèse nous introduisons un nouveau paradigme pour ledécodage itératif à précision finie des codes LDPC sur le canalbinaire symétrique. Ces nouveaux décodeurs, appelés décodeursitératifs à alphabet fini (Finite Alphabet Iterative Decoders – FAID)pour préciser que les messages appartiennent à un alphabet fini, sontcapables de surpasser l'algorithme BP dans la région du plancherd'erreur. Les messages échangés par les FAID ne sont pas desprobabilités ou vraisemblances quantifiées, et les fonctions de miseà jour des noeuds de variable ne copient en rien le décodage par BP cequi contraste avec les décodeurs BP quantifiés traditionnels. Eneffet, les fonctions de mise à jour sont de simples tables de véritéconçues pour assurer une plus grande capacité de correction d'erreuren utilisant la connaissance de topologies potentiellement néfastes audécodage présentes dans un code donné. Nous montrons que sur demultiples codes ayant un poids colonne de trois, il existe des FAIDutilisant 3 bits de précision pouvant surpasser l'algorithme BP(implémenté en précision flottante) dans la zone de plancher d'erreursans aucun compromis dans la latence de décodage. C'est pourquoi lesFAID obtiennent des performances supérieures comparées au BP avecseulement une fraction de sa complexité.Par ailleurs, nous proposons dans cette thèse une décimation amélioréedes FAID pour les codes LDPC dans le traitement de la mise à jour desnoeuds de variable. La décimation implique de fixer certains bits ducode à une valeur particulière pendant le décodage et peut réduire demanière significative le nombre d'itérations requises pour corriger uncertain nombre d'erreurs fixé tout en maintenant de bonnesperformances d'un FAID, le rendant plus à même d'être analysé. Nousillustrons cette technique pour des FAID utilisant 3 bits de précisioncodes de poids colonne trois. Nous montrons également comment cettedécimation peut être utilisée de manière adaptative pour améliorer lescapacités de correction d'erreur des FAID. Le nouveau modèle proposéde décimation adaptative a, certes, une complexité un peu plus élevée,mais améliore significativement la pente du plancher d'erreur pour unFAID donné. Sur certains codes à haut rendement, nous montrons que ladécimation adaptative des FAID permet d'atteindre des capacités decorrection d'erreur proches de la limite théorique du décodage au sensdu maximum de vraisemblance. / At the heart of modern coding theory lies the fact that low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can be efficiently decoded by message-passing algorithms which are traditionally based on the belief propagation (BP) algorithm. The BP algorithm operates on a graphical model of a code known as the Tanner graph, and computes marginals of functions on the graph. While inference using BP is exact only on loop-free graphs (trees), the BP still provides surprisingly close approximations to exact marginals on loopy graphs, and LDPC codes can asymptotically approach Shannon's capacity under BP decoding.However, on finite-length codes whose corresponding graphs are loopy, BP is sub-optimal and therefore gives rise to the error floor phenomenon. The error floor is an abrupt degradation in the slope of the error-rate performance of the code in the high signal-to-noise regime, where certain harmful structures generically termed as trapping sets present in the Tanner graph of the code, cause the decoder to fail. Moreover, the effects of finite precision that are introduced during hardware realizations of BP can further contribute to the error floor problem.In this dissertation, we introduce a new paradigm for finite precision iterative decoding of LDPC codes over the Binary Symmetric channel (BSC). These novel decoders, referred to as finite alphabet iterative decoders (FAIDs) to signify that the message values belong to a finite alphabet, are capable of surpassing the BP in the error floor region. The messages propagated by FAIDs are not quantized probabilities or log-likelihoods, and the variable node update functions do not mimic the BP decoder, which is in contrast to traditional quantized BP decoders. Rather, the update functions are simple maps designed to ensure a higher guaranteed error correction capability by using the knowledge of potentially harmful topologies that could be present in a given code. We show that on several column-weight-three codes of practical interest, there exist 3-bit precision FAIDs that can surpass the BP (floating-point) in the error floor without any compromise in decoding latency. Hence, they are able to achieve a superior performance compared to BP with only a fraction of its complexity.Additionally in this dissertation, we propose decimation-enhanced FAIDs for LDPC codes, where the technique of decimation is incorporated into the variable node update function of FAIDs. Decimation, which involves fixing certain bits of the code to a particular value during the decoding process, can significantly reduce the number of iterations required to correct a fixed number of errors while maintaining the good performance of a FAID, thereby making such decoders more amenable to analysis. We illustrate this for 3-bit precision FAIDs on column-weight-three codes. We also show how decimation can be used adaptively to further enhance the guaranteed error correction capability of FAIDs that are already good on a given code. The new adaptive decimation scheme proposed has marginally added complexity but can significantly improve the slope of the error floor performance of a particular FAID. On certain high-rate column-weight-three codes of practical interest, we show that adaptive decimation-enhanced FAIDs can achieve a guaranteed error-correction capability that is close to the theoretical limit achieved by maximum-likelihood decoding.

TITLE: The impact of Teen Challenge International on individuals endangered by an addiction or fighting with an addiction, or God as Hope KEY WORDS: Drugs Addiction Prevention Cure Teen Challenge International Belief in God ANNOTATION: In my diploma I observe how cognition of God and belief in Him influences the process of prevention of addiction and the help provided for drug addicts. The theoretical part deals with the issue of drug addiction in the Czech Republic, with strategies fighting this phenomenon, and with various types of help which works, at least to a certain extent, with the spiritual dimension of a man. I focus on the Teen Challenge International Organization (TCI). In the practical part I examine how TCI works with the spiritual dimension of an individual, who TCI works with, what methods TCI uses, and why. The purpose of this examination is to discover how the people in our atheistic country respond to this offered form of help and what they can recieve from being open for God. I use interviews, questionnaires and narrations of those who come to TCI for help and of TCI workers, too. At the end of my work I present new facts that arise from the examination results and I suggest how educationalists, especially those working with children and youngsters with special needs, can use them in...

(in English): The aim of this thesis is to clarify the normative character of language, that is, how we are bound by a certain set of rules in every speech. We will look into this normative character of language by articulating two essential questions: in what is this normativity grounded and which aspects constitute language as an institution. In the first part of the paper we interpret the work of three authors, Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles S. Peirce and Pierre Bourdieu, in order to answer the question on what the normative character of language is founded. In this part we mainly look into the relationship between language and social consensus, habit/acting and institutions. In the second part of the paper we give a definition of language institution which is inspired by the work of Peirce and Bourdieu. Further on we clarify in systematic way those aspects of language which can be considered as normative. Firstly, we point out those which are clearly part of language, such as lexicon, pronunciation and intonation, official language and institution symbolized by language. The last aspects that we will analyse are speech genres, belief, habit/acting and power.

In todays complicated world global Education brings a new approach towards a man. Theoretical part of thesis introduces its philosophical bases, characteristics, teaching principles, environmental aspect and main objectives. It emphasises close connnection to other education areas and areas in the Czech educational system where global Education should be practised. Theses describes teaching methods for global Education suitable for primary school children. Work describes connection between development of self-belief and global responsibility of a child. Empiric part uses methods of interview, observation and educational artefact analysis. Results approve importance of the artefact supporting self-belief in educational process.