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Background: Previous studies on anthroposophic lifestyle and allergy show that the children have less risk of developing allergies. All studies so far have been retrospective and have included children in school age. In view of the facts that this lifestyle seems to protect children from allergies and that different symptoms of atopy have increased dramatically during the last decades it is of general interest to study this group of children more in detail. The earlier findings have now been followed up in a prospective research program ALADDIN (Assessment of Life style and Allergic Disease During Infancy), applying different approaches. One of these is to focus on stress (as measured by cortisol) as a factor that may underlie the decreased risk of allergy in children from anthroposophic families.   Aim: This thesis is based on data from the ALADDIN study focusing on influence of family lifestyle on allergy sensitization early in children’s life in relation to psychosocial factors and salivary cortisol as an indicator of stress. Methods: A total of 552 families were recruited during pregnancy or during the first month of the child´s life in two recruitment waves, 330 families between September 2004 and November 2007 and another 222 families between March 2008 and January 2011. They were recruited at anthroposophic maternal and child health care centers (MCHC) and from conventional MCHCs.  Data on demographics and exposures were obtained by questionnaires and interviews. Parental capacity to adapt to stressors was evaluated by means of the questionnaire “Sense of Coherence” (SOC; Antonovsky). Salivary samples were collected at home from the infants and both parents for analyzes of cortisol. Blood samples were obtained from the parents and from the children for analyzes of IgE. Results: Many family related characteristics differed markedly between the groups before and during pregnancy, during delivery and the first 12 months of age. Children from anthroposophic families had lower levels of salivary cortisol compared to peers from families with a more conventional lifestyle on all sampling occasions at 6 months of age and on some of the occasions at 12 and 24 months of age. There were no differences concerning cortisol between parents with different lifestyle and no significant differences concerning SOC-scores between the three lifestyle groups. An anthroposophic lifestyle was associated with a lower risk of allergic sensitization up to five years of age. This risk was partially explained by lower cortisol levels during infancy. Children in families with a partly anthroposophic lifestyle also had substantially lower risk of sensitization. Conclusion: An anthroposophic lifestyle protects from development of allergy during childhood, at least up to five years of age. This protective capacity is partly mediated by low cortisol levels during infancy but is also dependent on unknown characteristics of this lifestyle.  These results call for further studies on health related effects of an anthroposophic lifestyle.

<p>The licentiate thesis explored the relationship between working conditions and wage income, and the relationship between working conditions and sense of coherence in relation to ill health, focusing on cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal pain, and psychological distress among the working population in Sweden. The studies were based on cross-sectional and longitudinal survey data (ULF and LNU), and on the Swedish census (FoB90) linked to the national cause of death registry. The samples included employed men and women residing in Sweden, aged 18-64.</p><p>The main results show that working conditions contributed to income differences in CVD prevalence as well as CVD mortality irrespective of study design or way of assessing working conditions. Further, sense of coherence moderated, yet not consistently, the impact of working conditions on musculoskeletal pain and psychological distress. The moderating role seemed to vary by work exposure, gender and health outcome. Hence, the results do not support the hypothesis that sense of coherence is a global health-protective factor.</p><p>The findings stress that future research into working conditions and employees’ health would benefit from including income in the analyses since wages are closely related to working conditions and to people’s position on the labour market. In addition, focusing on individual resources such as sense of coherence increases our undertanding of how individual differences in coping with adverse working conditions may affect health. Since the results also revealed considerable gender differences, suggesting that the factors that determine future work-related health are different for men and women, it is important to study men and women separately.</p>

The importance of touch-related sensations as a kinesthetic perceptual system through the observation of the subject/object phenomenon is explored through defining aspects of movement learning experiences associated with dance training.

Making computers automatically find the appropriate meaning of words in context is an interesting problem that has proven to be one of the most challenging tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Widespread potential applications of a possible solution to the problem could be envisaged in several NLP tasks such as text simplification, language learning, machine translation, query expansion, information retrieval and text summarization. Ambiguity of words has always been a challenge in these applications, and the traditional endeavor to solve the problem of this ambiguity, namely doing word sense disambiguation using resources like WordNet, has been fraught with debate about the feasibility of the granularity that exists in WordNet senses. The recent trend has therefore been to move away from enforcing any given lexical resource upon automated systems from which to pick potential candidate senses,and to instead encourage them to pick and choose their own resources. Given a sentence with a target ambiguous word, an alternative solution consists of picking potential candidate substitutes for the target, filtering the list of the candidates to a much shorter list using various heuristics, and trying to match these system predictions against a human generated gold standard, with a view to ensuring that the meaning of the sentence does not change after the substitutions. This solution has manifested itself in the SemEval 2007 task of lexical substitution and the more recent SemEval 2010 task of cross-lingual lexical substitution (which I helped organize), where given an English context and a target word within that context, the systems are required to provide between one and ten appropriate substitutes (in English) or translations (in Spanish) for the target word. In this dissertation, I present a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research and describe new experiments to tackle the tasks of lexical substitution and cross-lingual lexical substitution. In particular I attempt to answer some research questions pertinent to the tasks, mostly focusing on completely unsupervised approaches. I present a new framework for unsupervised lexical substitution using graphs and centrality algorithms. An additional novelty in this approach is the use of directional similarity rather than the traditional, symmetric word similarity. Additionally, the thesis also explores the extension of the monolingual framework into a cross-lingual one, and examines how well this cross-lingual framework can work for the monolingual lexical substitution and cross-lingual lexical substitution tasks. A comprehensive set of comparative investigations are presented amongst supervised and unsupervised methods, several graph based methods, and the use of monolingual and multilingual information.

In philosophy the 'free will question' viz., "do we have free will by which we can freely perform an action of our own?" has been the cause and interest of one of the oldest debates of philosophy. The historical background of the 'free will debate' and of its participants can be traced back to the philosophy of Hellenistic (era) that covers the Peripatetic, Epicurean and Stoics schools. Then, it is extended from the Medieval tradition (St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and so on) through the Modern (era) philosophy (the Cartesian, the Empiricists and the Common Sense Schools) to the Contemporary philosophy of action. Almost all philosophers of these schools have either directly or indirectly been involved in the debate. Today what we have inherited from this debate, which still continues, is three main doctrines. These are: 'libertarianism', 'determinism', 'compatibilism' (or 'soft determinism'). In fact all these doctrines give rise to the idea that today "there is no single philosophical problem that is the problem of free will. There are rather a great many philosophical problems about free will." (01). This thesis, in the historical frame that has been given above, shall undertake the evaluation of the free will question in "Thomas Reid's (1710-1796) philosophy of action' in the eighteenth century 'Scottish School of Common Sense'. Thus it aims to show the dimensions of Reid's contributions to the free will debate as regards his 'approach', 'method', 'suggestions', 'solutions', 'originality' and his 'influence' on other philosophers.

Thesis advisor: Rebecca Lowenhaupt / This single case study examines how stakeholders of a local education agency (LEA) understand and implement state turnaround policy for its chronically underperforming schools. While there is ample research on how to improve chronically underperforming schools, that research becomes limited when looking at turnaround implementation actions that are in response to policy mandates. This qualitative study uses the theory frame of policy sense-making to identify how implementers come to understand turnaround policy and to explore how that sense-making impacts their implementation decisions. The study findings were that teachers recognized three main stages of turnaround. In the first stage building principals used directive leadership to build a unified vision. Implementers reported that this unified vision was partly brought about by the removal of any teaching staff not in line with the principal's turnaround plan. The second stage of turnaround centered on building teacher capacity through internal and external professional development. Internal professional development meant creating multiple meeting configurations where teachers could stay in touch with the turnaround process, offer input, and continually learn from each other. External professional development involved developing teacher skills to more effectively and more rapidly raise student achievement. Findings from across four different implementer groups pointed to the importance of building teachers' ability to understand and use data to improve their instruction as well as student learning. Time for both types of professional development came largely from the introduction of extended learning time (ELT) that was paid for through state and federal grant monies. In the third stage teachers worried about the sustainability of turnaround once the resources from state and federal grants were gone. Hope for sustainability was found most present within the bonds formed by teachers who grew to rely on and trust one another during the arduous work of school turnaround. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Few research studies have examined the panoramic landscape of family caregivers from dementia diagnosis to the final bereavement of the person with dementia for whom they are caring. The route and pathways of care undertaken during a caregiver's journey will be individual to each person, yet invariably there will be some similarities as to how they anticipate, approach and mange this journey. From the caregiver's perspective, caring for someone with dementia is related to more than the cognitive loss experienced by their family member, there are many losses involved, This research study aims to explore the complex emotional experiences of thirty caregivers in relation to sense of self. change, grief, loss and bereavement, to elucidate a deeper understanding of the lived experience, the perceived and understood reality of the experiential journey of caregivers. To explore the experiences of caregiving, this research study uses a hermeneutic phenomenological approach and draws on an adaptation of the theoretical framework of anticipatory grief and loss by Fulton and Fulton (1971) and Fulton and Gottesman (1980). The study uses a convenience sample and semi structured interview format and involves two non-comparative participant groups of family caregivers living in urban and rural communities within the North East of England. Group one comprises of twenty bereaved participants, nineteen of whom are spousal caregivers and one adult-caregiving daughter, who were interviewed once to explicated a retrospective perspective of the caring experience. Group two comprises of ten participants, nine spousal caregivers and one adult-caregiving daughter, who are currently caring for a family member living with an advanced stage experience of dementia. Group two participants were interviewed on three occasions across an eighteen-month time period to explore the retrospective and prospective experience of their caregiving role. The analysis of data reveals expressions of change, grief and loss within a complex and tri-dimensional landscape. Within this landscape, participants highlight defined periods of their journey, particularly with regard to their experience of a protracted middle period, which they referred to as being "the long road". However, intersecting with this layered landscape, the analysis of data also reveals a key aspect of caregiving - the emergence of a conceptual framework involving three interconnected yet fluctuating schemas of self experienced by participants. the first scheme, the individual 'me-self'. related to the participant's perception of their core self and envisaged sense of self. the second schema, the 'relationship-self', illustrates participant's physical and psychological experiences and bonded connection between themselves and the cared-for spousal partner or parent, as well as other family members and care workers. The third schema, the 'caregiving-self', is associated with the acquisition and undertaking of their role of familial caregiver. The findings of this study highlight the 'lived-world' experience of family caregivers as being a journey which subjects them to a cyclical maelstrom of emotion and fluctuating perception of their schemas of self.

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Sense of community, social capital, and emerging adulthood are all topics of increasing interest in multiple fields over the past three decades. Both sense of community and social capital are predictors of overall well-being for individuals and communities. As emerging adults begin to establish a sense of person and place, many have begun to look to young professionals groups as an outlet for networking and identity exploration. There is limited research on the impact of these organizations related to sense of community and social capital. This case study is meant to be a starting point to expand the research on this topic. A survey of 97 members of the Young Professionals Networking Group in San Luis Obispo assessed level of participation within the group as well as sense of community utilizing the Sense of Community Index (SCI-2). A one-way ANOVA compared mean differences between established participation levels (low, medium, high). It was determined the more active a member is within the YPNG, the higher sense of community they displayed. Six active members were then recruited to participate in a focus group to discover if active participation in YPNG impacts one’s sense of perceived social capital. Open and axial coding of the focus group data indicated that membership within YPNG increases relational qualities that are consistent with the literature on social capital. The results from this case study indicate that active membership in networking groups may lead to a higher sense of community and enhanced perceptions of social capital. More research is necessary to determine how one’s sense of community and social capital are impacted before and after joining such groups.