The purpose of this research is to identify how bridging the online gender divide can accelerate the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. At present 200 million fewer women are online than their male counterparts, highlighting the gender inequality that exists online. The disparity in the number of women online is having a detrimental effect on the ability to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations target date of 2030. The research first endeavours to understand the current discourse of what is understood by the term "digital gender divide" within contemporary literature. Drawing knowledge from existing literature, the reasons for the digital gender divide are critically assessed and conceptualised within an empirical framework before offering an insight into how such barriers can be addressed and overcome. The removal of such obstacles therefore paves the way for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to flourish. The evidence collated throughout the study details the intricate connection between sustainable development and gender equality, concluding that considerable advancements towards sustainable development can be made if more women are online.

The concepts learning processes, gestalting and digital technology are closely associated with most people’s personal experiences in life and thus constitute significant ideas about their hopes, dreams and life content. The concepts are context-dependent and ought therefore to be studied from several interdisciplinary perspectives. To this end and to limit the scope of my thesis, I have chosen to study them from two vantage points – from the perspective of the Blekinge region of Sweden and from a third-world perspective. The reason I have chosen these two angles is that studying these concepts on the local level provides the necessary closeness, while considering them in a third-world perspective provides the necessary distance. In order to illustrate the complexity of the concepts, I have chosen to study both the rhetorical level – the narratives, the dreams and the hopes – and people’s actual experiences, i.e. the realities, hence the dialectical title of the thesis. “The educative moment” is the rare moment when rhetorics and realities coincide. When traditions and changes together cause renewal on an individual or collective level, the conditions are created for human beings to be able to see themselves and their relations in a new light. / Begreppen läroprocess, gestaltning och digital teknik är starkt förknippade med de flesta människors egna livserfarenheter och utgör därför medvetna eller omedvetna betydelsebärande föreställningar om förhoppningar, drömmar och livsinnehåll. Dessa är kontextberoende och bör därför undersökas ur flera interdisciplinära perspektiv. För att göra detta möjligt och samtidigt begränsa omfattningen av denna licentiatuppsats har jag valt att se begreppen ur två perspektiv – dels ur ett Blekingeperspektiv, dels ur ett tredje världenperspektiv. Anledningen till att jag valt dessa är att Blekinge ger en tillräcklig närhet och tredje världen ger en nödvändig distans. För att visa på begreppens komplexitet har jag valt att undersöka den retoriska nivån – berättelserna, drömmarna och förhoppningarna – och människors erfarenheter och verkligheter, därav den dialektiska titeln på licentiatuppsatsen. Det pedagogiska ögonblicket är det ögonblick då retorik och verkligheter sammanfaller. När tradition och förändring tillsammans ger en förnyelse på ett individuellt eller kollektivt plan, skapas förutsättningar för människan att se sig själv och sina sammanhang i ett helt nytt ljus. Begreppen läroprocess, gestaltning och digital teknik är starkt förknippade med de flesta människors egna livserfarenheter och utgör därför medvetna eller omedvetna betydelsebärande föreställningar om förhoppningar, drömmar och livsinnehåll. Dessa är kontextberoende och bör därför undersökas ur flera interdisciplinära perspektiv. För att göra detta möjligt och samtidigt begränsa omfattningen av denna licentiatuppsats har jag valt att se begreppen ur två perspektiv – dels ur ett Blekingeperspektiv, dels ur ett tredje världenperspektiv. Anledningen till att jag valt dessa är att Blekinge ger en tillräcklig närhet och tredje världen ger en nödvändig distans. För att visa på begreppens komplexitet har jag valt att undersöka den retoriska nivån – berättelserna, drömmarna och förhoppningarna – och människors erfarenheter och verkligheter, därav den dialektiska titeln på licentiatuppsatsen. The educative moment är det ögonblick då retorik och verkligheter sammanfaller. När tradition och förändring tillsammans ger en förnyelse på ett individuellt eller kollektivt plan, skapas förutsättningar för människan att se sig själv och sina sammanhang i ett helt nytt ljus. Begreppen läroprocess, gestaltning och digital teknik är starkt förknippade med de flesta människors egna livserfarenheter och utgör därför medvetna eller omedvetna betydelsebärande föreställningar om förhoppningar, drömmar och livsinnehåll. Dessa är kontextberoende och bör därför undersökas ur flera interdisciplinära perspektiv. För att göra detta möjligt och samtidigt begränsa omfattningen av denna licentiatuppsats har jag valt att se begreppen ur två perspektiv – dels ur ett Blekingeperspektiv, dels ur ett tredje världenperspektiv. Anledningen till att jag valt dessa är att Blekinge ger en tillräcklig närhet och tredje världen ger en nödvändig distans. För att visa på begreppens komplexitet har jag valt att undersöka den retoriska nivån – berättelserna, drömmarna och förhoppningarna – och människors erfarenheter och verkligheter, därav den dialektiska titeln på licentiatuppsatsen. The educative moment är det ögonblick då retorik och verkligheter sammanfaller. När tradition och förändring tillsammans ger en förnyelse på ett individuellt eller kollektivt plan, skapas förutsättningar för människan att se sig själv och sina sammanhang i ett helt nytt ljus. läroprocess, gestaltning, digital teknik / <p>Educative Moments: Rhetorics and Realities</p>

Digital technologies allow people with disabilities to participate independently in society in ways they never could before. The full realization of these new opportunities remains elusive, though, because working professionals in the information and communication technology (ICT) field rarely receive adequate training in how to make digital ICT accessible to people with disabilities. Adding accessibility to the university ICT curriculum can help create a critical mass of ICT professionals with accessibility awareness and expertise to finally realize the full accessibility potential of digital technologies. This dissertation provides a rich informational context from which ICT curriculum leaders can decide how to best infuse accessibility into their own curriculum.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Background. People with psychotic disorders tend to die earlier than the general population, primarily due to preventable cardiovascular disease. Behavioral risk factors, such as poor diet, have been identified as major contributors. Given the importance of prevention, the early stages of psychosis have been described as a “critical” time to intervene on health behaviors. As such, a mobile-based intervention, Nutrition Enhancement in Early Psychosis (NEEP) was created to improve diet quality in persons with early psychosis. This study has three aims: (1) assess the feasibility of the intervention, (2) examine preliminary outcomes, and (3) investigate mechanisms associated with dietary change. Methods. NEEP incorporates a combination of nutrition education, goal setting, and mobile technology (i.e., a mobile application for dietary tracking, as well both automated and personalized text-messages). Given the pilot nature of the study, all participants (N=15) received the intervention. Feasibility was assessed through different metrics related to recruitment and adherence to the dietary tracking application, as well as self-report responses regarding acceptability. Preliminary outcomes (i.e., two measures of diet quality) and potential mechanisms of change (i.e., self-efficacy and motivation) were also evaluated using paired sample t-tests. Qualitative interviews were conducted following study participation. Given the emphasis on feasibility with a small sample, all significance tests were set at p <.10, and Hedges g was used to examine effects over time. Results. 15 participants were enrolled in the study and 12 participants completed follow-up assessments. Evaluative measures of feasibility suggest that the majority of those who were screened enrolled in this intervention and regularly engaged with the mobile tracking device to record their dietary consumption. In addition, participants enjoyed the intervention and found it to be useful in improving their diet. Preliminary evidence also suggests this intervention may improve diet quality. As such, one indicator of improvement in diet quality was considered significant (Rapid Eating Assessment for Participants- Shortened; p=.084), and both measures of diet quality suggested improvement in diet at the end of the 28-day intervention with small to medium effect sizes (REAP-S g=.44; Heathy Eating Index-2015 g=.69). Contrary to hypotheses, self-efficacy significantly decreased after the intervention (p=.028) and motivation remained relatively stable. Conclusion. Results suggest that NEEP is feasible as a low-cost, low-resource mobile intervention that is well-tolerated and may improve diet quality in people with early psychosis; however, mechanisms of change require further exploration.

Yes / The use of digital technology in health and social care is developing rapidly. It is promoted in UK policy and research which suggests varied results surrounding its implementation and outcomes. This article aimed to test the implementation and outcomes of a short messaging service sent to a dedicated phone. The target cohort were drug treatment clients in two sites in Northern England. Materials and methods: Through staff focus groups and interviews with a small cohort of clients, the implementation and perceptions of the system were examined. Results: Nineteen participants were recruited to site 1 (15 male, 4 female, average age=37.7 years) and 12 participants were recruited to site 2 (9 male, 3 female, average age=40.3 years). One outcome that was of interest was well-being in treatment which, in this study, was described as an overall sense of feeling better rather than just focusing on the rehabilitation aspect of the programme. Other outcomes included: the successful completion of treatment and any relapse or associated reported drug use. Discussion: The system shows some evidence of its ‘social actor’ role; however, its implementation was hindered by staff citing that it called for increased resources. For future implementation the use of client’s own phones may be considered which may help to embed the system more fully in recovery planning and targeting clients at a different treatment stage. Conclusions: Despite some indications of positive results for clients and a perception that the system may have value as an addition to existing clinical interventions, more evaluation is required to determine whether this system can be implemented in a drug treatment setting.

A radical transformation is taking place in today’s society with the rapid developments in digital technology. The digital dispersion of information occurs globally at an unprecedented speed, altering innumerable aspects of cultural memory to the extent that the experience of cyclical time of ritual culture is gradually replaced by the prevalence of linear time of progress and chaotic time of computerized processes. As a result, both formation and experience of meaning are changed. With that, an important question arises with regards to music: how does musical meaning transpire in contemporary culture? As a theoretical companion to my compositional work, this doctoral dissertation addresses this question from the perspective of memory. Based on the idea that musical meaning is informed through its contextualization within the manifold intersections of memory, cultural memory, and digital technology, its first three chapters explore the relationships between memory and identity, externalized memory and culture, time and meaning in music, and how these relationships can inform musical analysis. The fourth chapter provides analytical approaches to compositions by Luciano Berio, Helmut Lachenmann, John Cage, and Pierluigi Billone informed by the conclusions gained from the previous chapters. The last three chapters focus on the added complexity of the relationships between musical memory and cultural memory as impacted by digital technologies. It will be explored how digital processes affect various aspects of musical memory and musical time. Correspondingly, the final chapter offers musical analyses of compositions with live electronics by composers Brian Ferneyhough and Jonathan Harvey, and the dissertation will be concluded by an analysis of my dissertation composition #ffffff which is appended. Central to the investigation are the post-structuralist ideas of philosophers Bernard Stiegler, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as theories regarding cultural memory brought forth by Jan and Aleida Assmann. In order to apply these concepts to an examination of music, they will be reconciled with the musical philosophy of Gunnar Hindrichs, the musical semiotics of Jean-Jacques Nattiez, the cultural semiotics of Roland Posner, and the critical media studies of Wolfgang Ernst. / Graduate / 0413 / annette.mailbox@gmx.net

This Creative Writing thesis argues for the need to rethink our understanding of climate change and focuses on the response of creative writers to this phenomenon, whilst also offering its own creative contribution. The critical component aims at articulating a post-climate change poetics. It reviews the mainstream literature in popular science writing, fiction and poetry from the point of view of a political frame-analysis of climate change, to demonstrate how a certain understanding of climate change maps onto conventions of literary genre. The thesis takes the view that many mainstream literary attempts to negotiate climate change are compromised by the teleological way in which they conceive of the phenomenon. As an alternative position, it draws on the work of climatologist Mike Hulme and physicist and cultural theorist Karen Barad to encourage participation in climate change as a condition for negotiating its meaning. Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass is proposed as a model for literary production informed by this poetics and as a model for the author’s own creative practice. The creative component of this thesis is an intra-generic text presenting the fictionalised narrative of a cycle expedition the author made from Salford to the Greek island of Ikaria in the summer of 2010. This substantial work aims to interrogate, imagine, and enquire into the epistemology of a post-climate change world.

This thesis analyzes the emergence, presence, and use of digital reproductions in the scholarship of art history and how these reproductions impact individual encounters with art. It will address matters related to the authenticity of reproductions, the development of modern technologies, and the rise of new media, reflecting on issues related to integrating technology into the discipline and proposing how to deal with the digital reproductions in the study of art history.

In this thesis, I attempt to explore the development of migrant literature in an era of digitalcommunication. The latest developments in communication technology have certainlydestabilized patterns of content creation and dissemination. While many use it uncritically,mostly as a means of information and keeping in contact, there are new avenues open forthose who wish to engage actively and create a space for new dialogue. And though theseonline platforms have not completely overturned hierarchies between literatures from theWest versus the global South, they have certainly altered both the content and form of workoriginating from African countries. By doing so, digital technology has boosted the creationof an African identity that moves away from victimhood by reimagining ideas of what itmeans to be and write from an African perspective where a multiplicity and hybridity ofvoices exist. I have chosen three “digital migrant novels” (Caren Irr’s term): ChimamandaNgozi Adichihe’s Americanah, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, and Open Cityby Teju Cole. I begin by situating these novels in a technologically sophisticated, mediaoriented space, where the geography of nations is challenged by overlapping spaces of digitalcommunication. My aim is threefold – to identify new patterns in migrant identity and to seehow they are affected by technology use; to see whether these patterns correspond to theemergence of an Afropolitan identity (and to understand what permutations this Afropolitanidentity can take on). And and finally, to analyse how digital media communication shapes amigrant’s relationship to homeland and language.

Classification is one of the primary tasks of data mining and aims to assign a class label to unseen examples by using a model learned from a training dataset. Most of the accepted classifiers are designed to minimize the error rate but in practice data mining involves costs such as the cost of getting the data, and cost of making an error. Hence the following question arises: Among all the available classification algorithms, and in considering a specific type of data and cost, which is the best algorithm for my problem? It is well known to the machine learning community that there is no single algorithm that performs best for all domains. This observation motivates the need to develop an “algorithm selector” which is the work of automating the process of choosing between different algorithms given a specific domain of application. Thus, this research develops a new meta-learning system for recommending cost-sensitive classification methods. The system is based on the idea of applying machine learning to discover knowledge about the performance of different data mining algorithms. It includes components that repeatedly apply different classification methods on data sets and measuring their performance. The characteristics of the data sets, combined with the algorithm and the performance provide the training examples. A decision tree algorithm is applied on the training examples to induce the knowledge which can then be applied to recommend algorithms for new data sets, and then active learning is used to automate the ability to choose the most informative data set that should enter the learning process. This thesis makes contributions to both the fields of meta-learning, and cost sensitive learning in that it develops a new meta-learning approach for recommending cost-sensitive methods. Although, meta-learning is not new, the task of accelerating the learning process remains an open problem, and the thesis develops a novel active learning strategy based on clustering that gives the learner the ability to choose which data to learn from and accordingly, speed up the meta-learning process. Both the meta-learning system and use of active learning are implemented in the WEKA system and evaluated by applying them on different datasets and comparing the results with existing studies available in the literature. The results show that the meta-learning system developed produces better results than METAL, a well-known meta-learning system and that the use of clustering and active learning has a positive effect on accelerating the meta-learning process, where all tested datasets show a decrement of error rate prediction by 75 %.