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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
321

As transformações arquitetônicas e urbanas nos séculos XVIII e XIX na cidade de Paranaguá, Paraná / Architectural and urban transformations during the 18th and 19th centuries in the city of Paranaguá, State of Paraná

Jabur, Rodrigo Sartori 17 December 2010 (has links)
Estuda as transformações urbanas e arquitetônicas na cidade de Paranaguá, no litoral do Paraná, durante os séculos XVIII e XIX, analisando desde a ocupação do continente, ainda no século XVII, passando pelas provisões do ouvidor Rafael Pires Pardinho nos anos de 1720, continuando com o desenvolvimento de seu porto, o impacto da economia da erva-mate, as mudanças nas edificações e em seus métodos construtivos, assim como nos códigos de posturas, na chegada da ferrovia, nas preocupações de higiene e salubridade e por fim na mudança do porto para a baía de Paranaguá. A partir da consulta a documentos primários como jornais, leis provinciais, relatórios, manuscritos, relatos de viajantes, fotografias, mapas e aquarelas, compreende como se deu o desenvolvimento da vila e depois cidade de Paranaguá. Também analisa as características de seu Centro Histórico e as leis vigentes neste local atualmente, finalizando com a proposta de um roteiro de visitas para a cidade. / This dissertation studies the urban and architectural transformations occurred in the city of Paranaguá, located on the coast of the Paranaguá state, during the 18th and 19th centuries. It analyses the occupation of the continent, starting from the 17th century, going through Ouvidor Rafael Pires Pardinho\'s provisions during the decade of 1720 and continuing with the development of its harbour, the impact of the erva-mate\'s economy, the changes in the buildings and in the methods of construction, as well as in the codes of practice, the advent of the railway, the preoccupations with hygiene and salubriousness and finally the harbour\'s move to the bay of Paranaguá. These analyses are based mainly on primary documents such as newspapers, provincial laws, reports, manuscripts, travellers\' account, photographs, maps and watercolours, understand how the development of the town and later of the city of Paranaguá occurred and subsequently, to analyse the characteristics of its historical centre and the laws that are still into effect today, offering new proposals and suggesting a visitors\' route.
322

Fitness-based mating: A systematic analysis of a new preference model

Schindler, Susanne 04 January 2011 (has links)
Natural populations exhibit a non-random mating behavior and it is assumed that mate preferences causing the non-random mating behavior play a role in sympatric speciation. In my thesis, I have proposed a new model of a mate preference that is based on ecological performance and I have named it fitness-based mating. Individuals that express this mate preference choose primarily fit partners. Fitness-based mating is modelled for haploid, diallelic populations. Individuals are distributed across two niches, and genomes are simplified to two loci. The first locus is subject to natural selection, and the second-locus genotype gives the strength of the mate preference. The population is separated into females and males, among which only females exhibit the mate preference. Ecological selection acts on both sexes alike. With the model I have investigated how female choosiness based on direct advantages offered by their partners can cause and maintain a polymorphic population. Fitness-based mating is an evolutionary successful mating strategy. It spreads in a population due to its amplifying effect on the reproductive success and on the attractiveness of its carriers. A polymorphism arises naturally in the model. The emergence of a stable polymorphism of traits underlying ecological selection is of special interest, because a polymorphism can be a precursor of speciation.
323

Sexual Selection in the American Goldfinch (Spinus tristis): Context-Dependent Variation in Female Preference

Bolen, Donella S. 29 August 2019 (has links)
No description available.
324

Contextual musicality : vocal modulation and its perception in human social interaction

Leongomez, Juan David January 2014 (has links)
Music and language are both deeply rooted in our biology, but scientists have given far more attention to the neurological, biological and evolutionary roots of language than those of music. Because of this, and probably partially due to this, the purpose of music, in evolutionary terms, remains a mystery. Our brain, physiology and psychology make us capable of producing and listening to music since early infancy; therefore, our biology and behaviour are carrying some of the clues that need to be revealed to understand what music is “for”. Furthermore, music and language have a deep relationship, particularly in terms of cognitive processing, that can provide clues about the origins of music. Non-verbal behaviours, including voice characteristics during speech, are an important form of communication that enables individual recognition and assessment of the speaker’s physical characteristics (including sex, femininity/masculinity, body size, physical strength, and attractiveness). Vocal parameters, however, can be intentionally varied, for example altering the intensity (loudness), rhythm and pitch during speech. This is classically demonstrated in infant directed speech (IDS), in which adults alter vocal characteristics such as pitch, cadence and intonation contours when speaking to infants. In this thesis, I analyse vocal modulation and its perception in human social interaction, in different social contexts such as courtship and authority ranking relationships. Results show that specific vocal modulations, akin to those of IDS, and perhaps music, play a role in communicating courtship intent. Based on these results, as well the body of current knowledge, I then propose a model for the evolution of musicality, the human capacity to process musical information, in relation to human vocal communication. I suggest that musicality may not be limited to specifically musical contexts, and can have a role in other domains such as language, which would provide further support for a common origin of language and music. This model supports the hypothesis of a stage in human evolution in which individuals communicated using a music-like protolanguage, a hypothesis first suggested by Darwin.
325

The Reproductive Ecology and Biology of the Pill-box Crab: Halicarcinus cookii (Brachyura: Hymenosomatidae) Filhol, 1885

van den Brink, Anneke Maria January 2006 (has links)
This study investigates the reproductive strategies of the pill-box crab, Halicarcinus cookii on the Kaikoura Peninsula, New Zealand. Various aspects essential to understanding reproductive strategies were examined including growth, population dynamics, reproductive biology and mating behaviour. H. cookii exhibits obvious sexual dimorphism such that females develop wide abdomens forming brood chambers, and males tend to grow larger than females and have larger chelipeds in relation to body size. H. cookii allocates energy into growth and reproduction in separate phases of its life cycle where growth ceases as reproductive maturity begins due to a terminal/pubertal moult. Despite the presence of ovigerous females throughout the 15 month sampling period, the population was highly seasonal, with peaks in recruitment and growth occurring primarily during the winter months and peaks in numbers of mature individuals during the summer months. Reproductive output increased with body size in H. cookii, as larger females produced more eggs and larger males transferred more sperm than their smaller counterparts. Ovaries matured prior to the terminal/pubertal moult (anecdysis) and, in multiparous females, in synchrony with brood development, allowing females to produce broods in quick succession, maximising their reproductive output in their short life span (approximately 12-18 months, 6 months as an adult). Incubation duration of broods decreased as seawater temperature increased, suggesting that temperature is the primary cause of the seasonal population cycling. Sperm storage allowed females to produce at least 4 fertilised broods without re-mating. Some sperm mixing in the spermathecae appeared to occur and the ventral-type structure implies last male sperm precedence. Males therefore preferentially mated with females closest to laying a new brood and guarded them longer than other females to ensure their paternity. Guarding duration varied according to the sex ratio allowing males to maximise their reproductive output.
326

Fishing for Females : Sensory Exploitation in the Swordtail Characin

Amcoff, Mirjam January 2013 (has links)
Mate choice plays an important role in sexual selection and speciation. The evolution of mate choice is intriguing in cases where choosy individuals gain little except for genetic material from the mate and where the trait used as a criterion for the choice is costly to its bearer. The sensory exploitation hypothesis is an interesting idea that applies to such cases because it suggests that sexual preferences may arise as side-effects of preferences that are under selection in other contexts. The role of mate choice in speciation is strong but is debated because the reasons for population divergence in mate preferences and sexual traits are sometimes hard to explain. Also in this context sensory exploitation offers a potential explanation in that a link between natural and sexual selection may result in divergence in sexual selection whenever populations differ in natural selection. In this thesis, I test several aspects of this hypothesis in a species of fish, the swordtail characin (Corynopoma riisei). In this species males display a flag-like ornament that grows from the operculum. Because females respond to this ornament by biting at it, it has been proposed to act as a food-mimic. By manipulating female food type and quantity, and testing the resulting female preference for the male ornament, I find support for the theory that the preference has evolved through sensory exploitation and that females indeed appear to relate the ornament to a food item. Furthermore, I show that sensory exploitation can lead to morphological divergence among natural populations in this species. Apart from the flag-ornament, other courtship signals are also investigated. The results show that the relative importance of different signals may vary depending on receiver motivation. This suggests that various aspects of both male courtship signals and the conditions during which they are being signalled should be considered to gain a full understanding of mate choice and its role in sexual selection and speciation.
327

The effects of female status on sex differentiated mate preferences

Moore, Fhionna R. January 2007 (has links)
Mate preferences provide an opportunity to explore the validity of evolutionary and social role origin theories of sex differences in human behaviour. In evolutionary models, preferences are sex-specific adaptive responses to constraints to reproductive success. In social role models, sex differences arise from the allocation of men and women to different gender roles. I explored the effects of the status of women on preferences to assess the validity of the origin theories. I developed an adequate measure of female status (i.e. resource control), and explored its effects on female preferences in an online survey (Chapter 3), a mail-shot survey (Chapter 4), and a sample of non-industrial societies (Chapter 5). Results implicated a role of constraints on women in the expression of female-typical preferences. In an experimental manipulation of female perceptions of their status, results enabled greater confidence in the attribution of causal direction to relationships (Chapter 6). In Chapter 7, I explored the conditions under which the relationships of interest occurred. In Chapter 8, to further explore the origin models I investigated the effects of resource control on the magnitudes of sex differences in preferences. In Chapter 9, I explored relationships between a characteristic more closely related to the male gender role (i.e. apparent intelligence) and femininity in female faces. Women who were considered to look more intelligent were perceived as less feminine. In Chapter 10, I investigated the effects of reproductive strategy on mate preferences. Results were consistent with evolutionary models of behaviour. I argue that “status” is a multidimensional construct, and that its effects on mate preferences are complex, that while results were generally more consistent with an evolutionary than the biosocial model, integration of models would provide greater insight into human mate preferences.
328

Three essays on the economic theory of mating and parental choice

Antrup, Andreas Hermann January 2012 (has links)
Chapter 1: Relative Concerns and the Choice of Fertility Empirical research has shown that people exhibit relative concerns, they value social status. If they value their children's status as well, what effect will that have on their decisions as parents? This paper argues that parents and potential parents are in competition for status and rank in the generation of their children; as a consequence richer agents may cut back on the number of children they have and invest more in each child to prevent children of lower income agents from mimicking their own children. This effect need not be uniform so that equilibrium fertility may e.g. be a U-shaped function of income, even when agents would privately like to increase fertility when they receive greater income. These findings have wide ramifications: they may contribute to our understanding of the working of the demographic transition; they also suggest that the low fertility traps seen in some developed countries are rather strongly entrenched phenomena; and they o er a new explanation for voluntary childlessness. Chapter 2: Relative Concerns and Primogeniture While pervasive in the past, differential treatment of children, i.e. different levels of attention and parental investments into children of the same parent, has become rare in modern societies. This paper offers an explanation based on technological change which has rendered the success of a child more uncertain for a parent who is deciding on how much to invest into each of his children. Within a framework of concerns for social status (or relative concerns), agents decide on how many children to have and how much to invest in each child. When their altruism towards each child is decreasing in the total number of children, it is shown that they may solve the trade-off between low investment, high marginal return children (that come in large numbers and hence hurt parental altruism) and high investment, low marginal return children (that come in low numbers) by demanding both types and hence practice differential treatment. Uncertainty over status or rank outcomes of children reduces the range of equilibrium investment levels intro children so that the difference in the numbers they come in is reduced. Eventually the concern for return dominates and differential treatment disappears. Chapter 3: Co-Evolution of Institutions and Preferences: the case of the (human) mating market This paper explores the institutions that may emerge in response to mating preferences being constrained in their complexity in that they can only be conditioned on gender not other characteristics of the carrier of the preferences. When the cognitive capacity of the species allows a sophisticated institutional setup of one gender proposing and the other accepting or rejecting to be adopted, this setup is shown to be able to structure the mating allocation process such that preferences evolve to forms that, conditional on the setup, are optimal despite the constraint on complexity. Nature can be thought of as delegating information processing to the institutional setup. In an application to humans it is shown that the mechanism of the model can help explain why men and women may exhibit opposed preferences in traits such as looks and cleverness. The anecdotal fact that women do not marry down while men do can be interpreted as a maladaptation of female preferences to modern marriage markets.
329

There's nothing funny about the evolution of humour : the impact of sex, style, and status on humour production and appreciation

Cowan, Mary Louise January 2014 (has links)
The sense of humour is a uniquely human skill and understanding humour is an important and rewarding part of social interaction. This thesis begins by discussing the definition of humour, followed by a review of the evidence we have that humour is an evolved and adaptive behaviour. Humour may play an important role in helping individuals to bond and signal cooperation, which may be further communicated by the humour style which is used to communicate. Research has also demonstrated that humour is an attractive quality in a mate, though the precise reasons for this are currently debated (Chapter 1). Empirical work in the first section of the thesis is consistent with evidence demonstrating that humour is attractive and sexually selected for. Chapter 2 tests the influence of modality and relationship context in an effort to further our understanding of why humour is attractive and provides evidence that more attractive people are rated as being funnier than less attractive people. Humour was also found to be more attractive for short-term relationships than long-term relationships, possibly due to the similarity between funniness and flirtatiousness. In Chapter 3, attractiveness ratings of vignettes in the style of personal advertisements, which contained either aggressive or affiliative humour, demonstrated the importance of humour style. An affiliative humour style was more attractive for long-term relationships whereas an aggressive humour style was more attractive for short-term relationships. Further testing provided evidence that humour styles were associated with personality traits which are highly relevant in a mating context, helping to explain the functions of different humour styles. The second section of the thesis examines the relationship between humour, cooperation, and dominance as an alternative explanation for the evolution of humour. Chapter 4 contains an extended introduction to the physical, verbal, and nonverbal cues to dominance and the sex differences that exist in expressive behaviours. Chapter 5 continues this theme and elaborates further on the function of humour in group situations, before providing empirical evidence of how humour is used in the context of a competitive ‘desert-island’ style conversation between same-sex dyads. Chapter 6 further expands on this line of research as empirical evidence presented in this chapter demonstrates that males may be using humour as a way of communicating the desire to cooperate with other males who are of a similar level of dominance. The communication of dominance is further examined in Chapter 7, where ethological evidence showed that males who were more physically dominant tended to knock doors with greater frequency than males who were less physically dominant. In the final chapter of the thesis (Chapter 8), the evolution of humour is discussed in light of the evidence presented in Chapters 2-7. The thesis presents evidence to suggest that humour production is an important skill for males for two reasons. Firstly, a good sense of humour is a highly attractive quality to females and may be a cue to genetic quality or good partner qualities, depending on the humour style used. Secondly, it may be important for males to use humour to signal cooperation to other males in order to form alliances. In females, the evidence presented in the thesis suggests that humour production may be a way for females to demonstrate romantic interest or flirtatiousness but the function of humour use between females remains largely inconclusive.
330

Relationship Adjustment in Marriage as Influenced by Psychological Temperament and Family-of-Origin Socialization Experiences

Germann, Heinrich Peter 05 1900 (has links)
This research examined the influence of psychological temperament and family-of-origin socialization influences on relationship adjustment in marriage. The major goals were to determine: (a) if there was a relationship between the temperament of one mate in the marriage and the temperament of his or her spouse, and (b) if there was a relationship between the marital adjustment scores of a mate relative to either personal temperament or that of his or her spouse. A secondary purpose was to determine if certain family-of-origin socialization experiences influenced adjustment in marriage. One hundred seventy-nine couples (H = 358) completed three test instruments including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1962), Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spanier, 1976), and the Socialization Background Questionnaire (Church, unpublished), along with a demographic questionnaire. The subjects, volunteers from 12 churches in a large metropolitan area, had mean ages of 35.3 and 33.6 years for husbands and wives, respectively, and had been married for an average of 10.1 years. Five hypotheses and two research questions were tested at the .05 level of significance. The results gathered did not support the hypothesis that there was a relationship between temperament type and mate selection. Similarly, no support was evidenced for any specific relationship between temperament and marital adjustment. On the Socialization Background Questionnaire, one relationship at the prescribed level of significance was present between husbands' self-concept and their marital adjustment scores. At the .10 significance level, there was also indication that husbands' marital adjustment was related to the acceptance they did or did not receive as children., regardless of the expectations held for them. Neither of these relationships was present with regard to wives' marital adjustment scores. The overall conclusions are that couples do not choose mates based on temperaments, that no relationship exists between temperament combinations and marital adjustment, and that socialization experiences affect marital adjustment differently for husbands and wives.

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