This thesis is concerned with electronic prescription of drugs in the Czech republic. The objective is to find a proper standard for electronic medical data exchange and use it for building a new data communication interface for the e-prescription system. This work attends to the evolution and actual situation of the national e-prescription system. The system is based on one central storage for e-prescriptions, however, currently it isn't being used. On basis of valid legislation, electronic prescription and drug dispense processes are analyzed. Furthermore, present central storage data interface is explored. Considering advantages, that are bound to utilization of electronic data exchange standards, main objective of this thesis is given, to design a new interface for transmission of e-prescriptions and drug dispense notifications. New interface shall adhere to standards. Czech standard DASTA and europian norm EN13606 were examined. After all, set of specifications HL7 (Health Level Seven) has been chosen, which suits the requirements best. Data interface design, with HL7 standards, is based on exchange of documents. Documents (prescription, dispense notification) are expressed in the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) format, and exchanged between applications by means of the Medical Records domain messages. The structure of wrappers, forming a message, results from common HL7 Specification Infrastructure. Presented design has been inspired by Finnish solution eResepti. The design tries to transform present interface of central storage to format, which is defined by selected HL7 specifications. It can be used in both local and central e-prescription systems. It may also support the development of systems for electronic health(care) records exchange.

Do Afghan women need saving? This study focuses on the discourse of the USA’s First Lady Mrs. Laura Bush in the years (2001-2009) and how she represents the women in Afghanistan in the context of the USA-led intervention in Afghanistan. My aim is to understand how the USA intervention can be legitimized through Mrs. Bush’s argumentation of bringing human rights to Afghan women. In the analysis in this thesis, Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis is used in combination with feminist and postcolonial theory to understand her discourse about the women in Afghanistan and how her resulting discourse functions in connection with the USA-led intervention in Afghanistan. The study concludes that Mrs. Bush constructs the Afghan women as in need of help and in connection the USA as the helping hand who have an obligation to save the women in Afghanistan. In combination with strategic use of ‘embedded feminism’ and an oriental discourse Mrs. Bush’s discourse functions to make the USA-led intervention in Afghanistan seem legitimate.

As social media has emerged to become a key site for contemporary communications and cultural production, the internet meme has penetrated every level of social networking online. Albeit being a global phenomenon with pervasive discursive power in a number of fields ranging from humour to international politics and cyber warfare, comparatively little research has been made into how internet memes work on the discursive level of identity formation and their influence on the formation of internet-based social movements. Using Reddit stock market anarchists r/WallStreetBets as case study, this thesis will use Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze how internet memes work on the level of socio-political formations and how their function can be understood in relation to entropic social environments online. This thesis investigates how internet memes are used as a tool for creation of motifs for action, identity markers, connective action, and social narrativization within an ambivalent social movement online. Introducing the novel term ”memetic discourse” as a way to understand memes as transferable units of memetically programmed content, this study shows the potential of memes to act as effective yet unstable modes of communication within networked environments.

The present study analyses turn-taking in spoken discourse in seminar settings of higher education. The aim of the study is two-fold, (i) to explore how teachers organize their classroom discourse in terms of turn-taking structure, discursive organization and the subject positions of teachers and students and (ii) to further explore how power asymmetry in the teacher-student relationship may be realized in institutional discourse settings such as classrooms. Through the frameworks of institutional discourse, conversation analysis (CA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA), the study encompasses analyses of seminar data culled from The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. The study analyses the discourse organization of two different seminars in social studies and sciences by their turn-taking structure, turn-distribution and activity types to discuss the institutional properties of the interactions and the power asymmetry between participants. The analysis shows that the discursive subject roles of “teacher” and “student” have different claims to power and that the participants are more or less restricted by both the structure of the turn-taking systems and the activity types of the seminars. The teachers of the two seminars are further shown to restrict their students’ speaking rights and discursive mobility, using different discursive strategies to achieve their goals and to exercise control over the discourse, but that some students more or less effectively resist this control by utilizing the discourse structure and its resources to their advantage.

Education in the Swedish school system should aim to assist pupils in the development of fundamental values. This study investigates to what extent different groups of people are represented within two textbooks for English language teaching (ELT), produced in Sweden and commonly used in Swedish schools and how these representations correlate with the values indicated in the curriculum. Additionally, this study explores if textbooks designed for ELT can be adapted and used as a resource in the Arts classroom for multimodal representation analysis. The study used a multimodal critical discourse analysis with a social semiotic approach to address these questions, looking at the textbooks' textual and visual elements. The result is addressed both quantitatively and qualitatively and showed that, while women were shown in active roles, white men were overrepresented in both the visual and textual representations and people of colour of both genders were underrepresented. The results imply that ELT textbooks have some ways to go in order to meet the representation demands that the curriculum sets and that more research needs to address how to more accurately and frequently represent different groups of people within ELT teaching materials.

Educational textbooks have the power to influence pupils’ perception of the world. In the subject of English, this specifically concerns learning about cultures in different parts of the world where English is used. The purpose of this study is to identify the characteristics of cultural representation in two English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks with the aim to make the hidden curriculum visible and to raise awareness among publishing houses and teachers. Using a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) based on Fairclough’s (2001) three-dimensional model in combination with Barthes’ (1977) Visual Semiotics methodology, we investigated which regions and countries were presented and how their cultures were constructed through texts and images. These findings were further compared to the cultural values and content of the Swedish curriculum, the genre of textbooks, and existing hegemonic discourses in society. In the analysis, Kachru’s (1986) Circles of World Englishes, Machin and Mayr’s (2012) toolkit for CDA, McKay’s (2010) interpretation of Anderson’s (1983) imagined communities, and Said’s (2003) concept of Orientalism were applied. Our findings show that the inner circle dominates and is depicted as superior in contrast to the outer and expanding circles. Although the textbooks include a variation of different cultures which is in line with the curriculum, representation of the outer and expanding circles is often stereotypical and underdeveloped which reinforces hegemonic discourses instead of acting to restructure them. This corresponds to previous studies in the genre, and hence, educators must work to ensure that the hidden curriculum in ELT textbooks is continuously made visible and challenged.

The present thesis compares media representations of Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (YPJ or the Women’s Protection Units), an all-female Kurdish military organisation, in British media versus the organisation’s own media outlets, with the aim to see how they differ, more specifically in terms of representations of their ideological agency. By utilizing critical discourse analysis (CDA) in combination with postcolonial theory, the media construction of four soldiers’ deaths have been scrutinized in 30 media texts in order to provide a deeper understanding of the hegemonic discourses and sociocultural practices which underpin these constructions. The result shows a discrepancy in terms of representations of YPJ’s ideological agency. On the one hand, YPJ adopts an explicit effort to assert their ideology through a propagandistic discourse that emphasises their values of resistance, freedom, egalitarianism, gender emancipation and democratic confederalism, portraying their fighters as fearless martyrs and heroines that are determined to die for their cause. On the other hand, the UK media represent YPJ’s ideology in generic ways in which hidden ideological ‘us vs. them’ representations are deeply rooted in a broader naturalised Western hegemonic discourse, with portrayals of YPJ’s fallen soldiers mostly characterised by sensationalism and victimisation. One part of such hidden ideological agenda is the way in which YPJ constantly gets included in, and excluded from, ‘us’ (the West), depending on who the enemy is, in addition to mainly receiving media coverage in direct relation to ISIS, a common Western enemy. The result is a representation that endorses YPJ’s fight within a hegemonic Western discourse, neglecting their ideological agency. This has sociocultural implications since such hegemonic discourse misrepresents YPJ’s struggle, constructing their fight mostly as part of a Western counterterrorist strategy, which further legitimises the Western power to construct history based on its own premises and claims of truth.

L'imagerie par résonance magnétique de diffusion (IRMD) est une technique d'imagerie qui teste les propriétés diffusives d'un échantillon en le soumettant aux impulsions d'un gradient de champ magnétique. Plus précisément, elle détecte le mouvement de l'eau dû à la diffusion et s'avère donc être un outil puissant pour obtenir des informations sur la microstructure des tissus. Le signal acquis par le scanner IRM est une mesure moyennée sur un volume physique appelé voxel, dont la taille, pour des raisons techniques, est bien plus grande que l'échelle de variations microscopiques de la structure cellulaire. Ceci implique que les composants microscopiques des tissus ne sont pas visibles à la résolution spatiale de l'IRM et que les caractéristiques géométriques se trouvent agréger dans le signal macroscopique provenant du voxel. Une importante quantité mesurée par l'IRMD dans chaque voxel est le Coefficient de Diffusion Apparent (CDA) dont la dépendance au temps de diffusion est actée par de nombreuses expériences d'imagerie effectuées in vivo. Il existe dans la littérature un nombre important de modèles macroscopiques décrivant le CDA allant du plus simple au plus complexe (modèles phénoménologiques, stochastiques, géométriques, fondés sur des EDP, etc.), chacun étant valide sous certaines hypothèses techniques bien précises. Le but de cette thèse est de construire des modèles simples, disposant d'une bonne validité applicative, en se fondant sur une modélisation de la diffusion à l'échelle microscopique à l'aide d'EDP et de techniques d'homogénéisation.Dans un article antérieur, le modèle homogénéisé FPK a été déduit de l’EDP de Bloch-Torrey sous l'hypothèse que la perméabilité de la membrane soit petite et le temps de diffusion long. Nous effectuons tout d'abord une analyse de ce modèle et établissons sa convergence vers le modèle classique de Kärger lorsque la durée des impulsions magnétiques tend vers 0. Notre analyse montre que le modèle FPK peut être vu comme une généralisation de celui de Kärger, permettant la prise en compte de durées d'impulsions magnétiques arbitraires. Nous donnons aussi une nouvelle définition, motivée par des raisons mathématiques, du temps de diffusion pour le modèle de Kärger (celle impliquant la plus grande vitesse de convergence).Le CDA du modèle FPK est indépendant du temps ce qui entre en contradiction avec nombreuses observations expérimentales. Par conséquent, notre objectif suivant est de corriger ce modèle pour de petites valeurs de ce que l'on appelle des b-valeurs afin que le CDA homogénéisé qui en résulte soit sensible à la fois à la durée des impulsions et à la fois au temps de diffusion. Pour atteindre cet objectif, nous utilisons une technique d'homogénéisation similaire à celle utilisée pour le FPK, tout en proposant un redimensionnement adapté de l'échelle de temps et de l'intensité du gradient pour la gamme de b-valeurs considérées. Nous montrons, à l'aide de simulations numériques, l'excellente qualité de l'approximation du signal IRMD par ce nouveau modèle asymptotique pour de faibles b-valeurs. Nous établissons aussi (grâce à des développements en temps court des potentiels de surface associés à l'équation de la chaleur ou grâce à une décomposition de sa solution selon les fonctions propres) des résultats analytiques d'approximation du modèle asymptotique qui fournissent des formules explicites de la dépendance temporelle du CDA. Nos résultats sont en accord avec les résultats classiques présents dans la littérature et nous améliorons certains d'entre eux grâce à la prise en compte de la durée des impulsions. Enfin nous étudions le problème inverse consistant en la détermination d'information qualitative se rapportant à la fraction volumique des cellules à partir de signaux IRMD mesurés. Si trouver la distribution de sphères semble possible à partir de la mesure du signal IRMD complet, il nous est apparu que la mesure du seul CDA ne serait pas suffisante. / Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) is an imaging modality that probes the diffusion characteristics of a sample via the application of magnetic field gradient pulses. More specifically, it encodes water displacement due to diffusion and is then a powerful tool to obtain information on the tissue microstructure. The signal measured by the MRI scanner is a mean-value measurement in a physical volume, called a voxel, whose size, due to technical reasons, is much larger than the scale of the microscopic variations of the cellular structure. It follows that the microscopic components of the tissues are not visible at the spatial resolution of dMRI. Rather, their geometric features are aggregated into the macroscopic signal coming from the voxels. An important quantity measured in dMRI in each voxel is the Apparent Diffusion Coefficient (ADC) and it is well-established from imaging experiments that, in the brain, in-vivo, the ADC is dependent on the diffusion time. There is a large variety (phenomenological, probabilistic, geometrical, PDE based model, etc.) of macroscopic models for ADC in the literature, ranging from simple to complicated. Indeed, each of these models is valid under a certain set of assumptions. The goal of this thesis is to derive simple (but sufficiently sound for applications) models starting from fine PDE modelling of diffusion at microscopic scale using homogenization techniques.In a previous work, the homogenized FPK model was derived starting from the Bloch-Torrey PDE equation under the assumption that membrane's permeability is small and diffusion time is large. We first analyse this model and establish a convergence result to the well known K{"a}rger model as the magnetic pulse duration goes to 0. In that sense, our analysis shows that the FPK model is a generalisation of the K{"a}rger one for the case of arbitrary duration of the magnetic pulses. We also give a mathematically justified new definition of the diffusion time for the K{"a}rger model (the one that provides the highest rate of convergence).The ADC for the FPK model is time-independent which is not compatible with some experimental observations. Our goal next is to correct this model for small so called $b$-values so that the resulting homogenised ADC is sensitive to both the pulses duration and the diffusion time. To achieve this goal, we employed a similar homogenization technique as for FPK, but we include a suitable time and gradient intensity scalings for the range of considered $b$-values. Numerical simulations show that the derived asymptotic new model provides a very accurate approximation of the dMRI signal at low $b$-values. We also obtain some analytical approximations (using short time expansion of surface potentials for the heat equation and eigenvalue decompositions) of the asymptotic model that yield explicit formulas of the time dependency of ADC. Our results are in concordance with classical ones in the literature and we improved some of them by accounting for the pulses duration.Finally we explored the inverse problem of determining qualitative information on the cells volume fractions from measured dMRI signals. While finding sphere distributions seems feasible from measurement of the whole dMRI signal, we show that ADC alone would not be sufficient to obtain this information.

Les interfaces cerveau-machine (ICMs) nous offrent un moyen de fermer la boucle entre notre cerveau et le monde de la technologie numérique. Cela ouvre la porte à une pléthore de nouvelles applications où nous utilisons directement le cerveau comme entrée. S’il est facile de voir le potentiel, il est moins facile de trouver la bonne application avec les bons corrélats neuronaux pour construire un tel système en boucle fermée. Ici, nous explorons une tâche de suivi d’objets multiples en 3D, dans un contexte d’entraînement cognitif (3D-MOT). Notre capacité à suivre plusieurs objets dans un environnement dynamique nous permet d’effectuer des tâches quotidiennes telles que conduire, pratiquer des sports d’équipe et marcher dans un centre commercial achalandé. Malgré plus de trois décennies de littérature sur les tâches MOT, les mécanismes neuronaux sous- jacents restent mal compris. Ici, nous avons examiné les corrélats neuronaux via l’électroencéphalographie (EEG) et leurs changements au cours des trois phases d’une tâche de 3D-MOT, à savoir l’identification, le suivi et le rappel. Nous avons observé ce qui semble être un transfert entre l’attention et la de mémoire de travail lors du passage entre le suivi et le rappel. Nos résultats ont révélé une forte inhibition des fréquences delta et thêta de la région frontale lors du suivi, suivie d’une forte (ré)activation de ces mêmes fréquences lors du rappel. Nos résultats ont également montré une activité de retard contralatérale (CDA en anglais), une activité négative soutenue dans l’hémisphère contralatérale aux positions des éléments visuels à suivre. Afin de déterminer si le CDA est un corrélat neuronal robuste pour les tâches de mémoire de travail visuelle, nous avons reproduit huit études liées au CDA avec un ensemble de données EEG accessible au public. Nous avons utilisé les données EEG brutes de ces huit études et les avons analysées avec le même pipeline de base pour extraire le CDA. Nous avons pu reproduire les résultats de chaque étude et montrer qu’avec un pipeline automatisé de base, nous pouvons extraire le CDA. Récemment, l’apprentissage profond (deep learning / DL en anglais) s’est révélé très prometteur pour aider à donner un sens aux signaux EEG en raison de sa capacité à apprendre de bonnes représentations à partir des données brutes. La question à savoir si l’apprentissage profond présente vraiment un avantage par rapport aux approches plus traditionnelles reste une question ouverte. Afin de répondre à cette question, nous avons examiné 154 articles appliquant le DL à l’EEG, publiés entre janvier 2010 et juillet 2018, et couvrant différents domaines d’application tels que l’épilepsie, le sommeil, les interfaces cerveau-machine et la surveillance cognitive et affective. Enfin, nous explorons la possibilité de fermer la boucle et de créer un ICM passif avec une tâche 3D-MOT. Nous classifions l’activité EEG pour prédire si une telle activité se produit pendant la phase de suivi ou de rappel de la tâche 3D-MOT. Nous avons également formé un classificateur pour les essais latéralisés afin de prédire si les cibles étaient présentées dans l’hémichamp gauche ou droit en utilisant l’activité EEG. Pour la classification de phase entre le suivi et le rappel, nous avons obtenu un 80% lors de l’entraînement d’un SVM sur plusieurs sujets en utilisant la puissance des bandes de fréquences thêta et delta des électrodes frontales. / Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer us a way to close the loop between our brain and the digital world of technology. It opens the door for a plethora of new applications where we use the brain directly as an input. While it is easy to see the disruptive potential, it is less so easy to find the right application with the right neural correlates to build such closed-loop system. Here we explore closing the loop during a cognitive training 3D multiple object tracking task (3D-MOT). Our ability to track multiple objects in a dynamic environment enables us to perform everyday tasks such as driving, playing team sports, and walking in a crowded mall. Despite more than three decades of literature on MOT tasks, the underlying and intertwined neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here we looked at the electroencephalography (EEG) neural correlates and their changes across the three phases of a 3D-MOT task, namely identification, tracking and recall. We observed what seems to be a handoff between focused attention and working memory processes when going from tracking to recall. Our findings revealed a strong inhibition in delta and theta frequencies from the frontal region during tracking, followed by a strong (re)activation of these same frequencies during recall. Our results also showed contralateral delay activity (CDA), a sustained negativity over the hemisphere contralateral to the positions of visual items to be remembered. In order to investigate if the CDA is a robust neural correlate for visual working memory (VWM) tasks, we reproduced eight CDA-related studies with a publicly accessible EEG dataset. We used the raw EEG data from these eight studies and analysed all of them with the same basic pipeline to extract CDA. We were able to reproduce the results from all the studies and show that with a basic automated EEG pipeline we can extract a clear CDA signal. Recently, deep learning (DL) has shown great promise in helping make sense of EEG signals due to its capacity to learn good feature representations from raw data. Whether DL truly presents advantages as compared to more traditional EEG processing approaches, however, remains an open question. In order to address such question, we reviewed 154 papers that apply DL to EEG, published between January 2010 and July 2018, and spanning different application domains such as epilepsy, sleep, brain-computer interfacing, and cognitive and affective monitoring. Finally, we explore the potential for closing the loop and creating a passive BCI with a 3D-MOT task. We classify EEG activity to predict if such activity is happening during the tracking or the recall phase of the 3D-MOT task. We also trained a classifier for lateralized trials to predict if the targets were presented on the left or right hemifield using EEG brain activity. For the phase classification between tracking and recall, we obtained 80% accuracy when training a SVM across subjects using the theta and delta frequency band power from the frontal electrodes and 83% accuracy when training within subjects.

Federal and state policies affecting higher education, like the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1832, Brown vs. Board of Education, and Higher Education Act of 1965 have posited change regarding the proliferation of diversity and expansion of access (Thelin, 2011). I analyzed BOT policies for enrollment and conducted a socio-diagnostic CDA on the implementation of admission policy to understand the impact of the policies’ implementation. I focused on 1) exploring how open enrollment (OE) policies were constructed, 2) how institutions adopt and interpret these policies, and 3) how individuals at the institution enact these policies, by conducting a discourse-historical analysis (DHA). Open enrollment has been extensively studied at junior colleges. However, the impact of open admissions (OA) at 4-year institutions has not been intensely engaged despite its use at these types of institutions. This has left professionals to draw implications for practice from universities and colleges that are different than the ones in which they work. There are conditions that could inhibit the effectiveness of education policy implementation to include: “a lack of focus on the implementation processes when defining policies at the system level; a lack of recognition that the core of change processes require engaging people; and the fact that implementation processes need to be revised to adapt to new complex governance systems” (Viennet & Pont, 2017, p. 6). I conducted a case study investigation of open enrollment policy at a 4-year public university to understand its implementation and impact on the student experience. I used discourse-historical analysis to guide my analysis of the data. Implications were creation of a student profile, resource support matrix, and rethink of policy implementation.