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Drawing on the Western feminist tradition to analyze modern childcare advice as part of the "institution of motherhood" (Adrienne Rich), this dissertation explores the role played by the advice literature on childcare in the construction of normative motherhood in Russia from the late Imperial period through Soviet times, from 1890 to 1990. The study focuses on the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy (the OMM) movement, launched by medical professionals at the turn of the twentieth century as a philanthropic project aimed at combating high infant mortality in the country, and follows its transformation after 1917 into the state-sponsored and state-regulated system of medical and economic support for Soviet mothers and children. The fragmented notion of femininity in the Soviet Union, which incorporated both the ideology of women's emancipation (constructed primarily as women's participation in the labor force) and the pronatalist emphasis on women's roles as mothers created a complex interplay between the "emancipatory" and the traditionalist discourses of motherhood in childrearing literature. Due to the uneven character of Russian modernization and the lack of cultural homogeneity between urban and rural populaces, childrearing manuals perpetuated cultural hierarchy between medical specialists and mothers, which resulted in the didacticism of Soviet childrearing advice. Childcare manuals constructed the reader not as a peer, but as, essentially, a student, who needed tutoring and disciplining. The "privatization of the modern" ethos that started to characterize family life in the wake of the housing reform of the 1960s reinforced the notion that mothering was a private and highly personalized experience. This emphasis on the individual resulted in the emergence in the 1970s and in the 1980s of the figure of parent-expert and in the reversal of traditional hierarchical expert-parent framework typical of earlier periods.

Much recent attention has been devoted to the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic properties of phrasal verbs--those two-part lexical items like "put on" and "tighten up", along with suggestions regarding effective methods of teaching them to non-native speakers. According to Cornell (1985), phrasal verbs, "have been 'discovered' as an important component in curricula for English as a Foreign Language" (p. 1). However, it is very possible that they have become objects of current research primarily because of their complexity: their polysemy, their idiomaticity, their syntactic restraints, a complexity that means covering phrasal verbs in an ESL/EFL course can be a time-consuming process.

One type of internal diachronic change that has been extensively studied for spoken languages is grammaticalization whereby lexical elements develop into free or bound grammatical elements. Based on a wealth of spoken languages, a large amount of prototypical grammaticalization pathways has been identified. Moreover, it has been shown that desemanticization, decategorialization, and phonetic erosion are typical characteristics of grammaticalization processes. Not surprisingly, grammaticalization is also responsible for diachronic change in sign languages. Drawing data from a fair number of sign languages, we show that grammaticalization in visual-gestural languages – as far as the development from lexical to grammatical element is concerned – follows the same developmental pathways as in spoken languages. That is, the proposed pathways are modalityindependent. Besides these intriguing parallels, however, sign languages have the possibility of developing grammatical markers from manual and non-manual co-speech gestures. We will discuss various instances of grammaticalized gestures and we will also briefly address the issue of the modality-specificity of this phenomenon.

En aquesta tesi es presenta un model biomecànic de la mà orientat al disseny d'eines manuals.S'ha comprovat que una correcta adaptació del disseny de l'eina al treballador i a la tasca a realitzar (disseny ergonòmic) suposa una millora dels processos de producció i una reducció de les baixes laborals derivades de l'ús de les eines, i per tant un benefici per a la salut dels treballadors i per a la millora de les condicions de treball.En l'actualitat l'avaluació i el disseny ergonòmic d'eines manuals es realitza únicament en base a una sèrie de recomanacions experimentals de vegades poc realistes o amb una avaluació pràctica insuficient.En aquest sentit, es proposa com a objectiu d'aquesta tesi el desenvolupament d'un model biomecànic de la mà amb la finalitat última d'ajudar en el procés de disseny d'eines manuals, des del punt de vista ergonòmic.Després d'analitzar els models biomecànics existents a la literatura, i d'acord amb l'anatomia funcional de la mà i l'objectiu perseguit, s'ha desenvolupat un model biomecànic de la mà escalable que permet estimar la distribució d'esforços musculars durant la realització tant d'agarrades estàtiques com dinàmiques. El model permet, així mateix, predir màximes forces de prensió per als distints tipus d'agarrada. L'escalabilitat del model permet analitzar distints percentils i grups de població.El model biomecànic desenvolupat ha estat convenientment validat quant a la predicció de màximes forces d'agarrada i a l'estimació d'esforços musculars, la qual cosa permet assegurar la bondat de les aproximacions considerades durant el procés del seu desenvolupament d'acord amb els objectius perseguits.El model ha estat utilitzat amb una sèrie d'aplicacions senzilles orientades a investigar les seues possibilitats i limitacions. En particular el model pot utilitzar-se per estudiar l'espai disponible d'agarrada per a distints grups de població, per estimar màximes forces d'agarrada, pot ajudar a triar la forma d'agarrada més idònia i per tant a definir la forma i zona d'agarrada, permet comparar la qualitat de dos dissenys distints, i pot emprar-se per generar noves recomanacions de disseny.Així mateix es presenta una classificació sistemàtica d'agarrades desenvolupada com pas previ a l'estudi i aplicació del model a l'agarrada d'eines manuals, així com una tècnica fotogramètrica desenvolupada per mesurar la postura sense entorpir el comportament normal dels subjectes en situacions reals d'ús de les eines.

This item was digitized as part of the Million Books Project led by Carnegie Mellon University and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Cornell University coordinated the participation of land-grant and agricultural libraries in providing historical agricultural information for the digitization project; the University of Arizona Libraries, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Office of Arid Lands Studies collaborated in the selection and provision of material for the digitization project.

Thesis (MTech. degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences)--Tshwane University of Technology, 2008.

The dissertation studies sixteenth-century German artists' manuals (Kunstbüchlein), a new kind of book that addresses certain types of artistic practices. The Kunstbüchlein testify to and shape transformations of knowledge in early modern Europe. Disseminating practical knowledge in printed form, they endowed craft know-how with a form of authority until then reserved for the liberal arts. They aimed also to reconcile theoretical and practical knowledge, what Albrecht Dürer (the crucial forerunner to the authors of the Kunstbüchlein) termed respectively Kunst and Brauch. Authors Sebald Beham, Heinrich Voghterr, Heinrich Lautensack, and Erhard Schön sought to provide accessible, useful knowledge. Focused on a limited set of topics, they pretended to be closer to practice and to respond more effectively to the needs of their apprentices than Dürer and others in their publications. In fact, the Kunstbüchlein did not mediate Brauch, but show instead what their authors understood Brauch to be. Emphasizing the hands-on acquisition of knowledge through looking, reading, and doing, the Kunstbüchlein placed the printed image, whether as schematic diagram or finished illustration, at the core of the didactic process. / History of Art and Architecture

This item was digitized as part of the Million Books Project led by Carnegie Mellon University and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Cornell University coordinated the participation of land-grant and agricultural libraries in providing historical agricultural information for the digitization project; the University of Arizona Libraries, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Office of Arid Lands Studies collaborated in the selection and provision of material for the digitization project.

This item was digitized as part of the Million Books Project led by Carnegie Mellon University and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Cornell University coordinated the participation of land-grant and agricultural libraries in providing historical agricultural information for the digitization project; the University of Arizona Libraries, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Office of Arid Lands Studies collaborated in the selection and provision of material for the digitization project.