The diploma thesis Czech media and public euroscepticism examines frames of public euroscepticism in Czech media agenda and public agenda. The thesis is framed in agenda- setting and framing theory which explains processes of shifting themes between public agenda, media agenda and political agenda. Plethora of studies set in agenda-setting and framing theory has proved correlations between media agenda and public agenda. The goal of this diploma thesis is to examine what is the correlation between Czech media agenda and public agenda in terms of public euroscepticism, which eurosceptic frames are brought in public agenda by media agenda and how pervasive those frames are. For the comparison of agendas is used the typology of public euroscepticism by Catharine Sørensen which consists of economic euroscepticism, euroscepticism based on sovereignty, democratic euroscepticism and social euroscepticism. Author postulates positive correlation between media agenda and public agenda and presence of pervasive frames in media agenda. The first part describes the theoretical frame of the thesis, the agenda-setting and framing theory. The second chapter presents existing research about euroscepticism on EU and Czech level. The third part describes the Czech public agenda based on the public opinion research,...

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Home Planet is a collection of travel essays about climate change. Like most works in the personal essay tradition, these essays reveal the mind as it works its way through a problem or question, all while inviting writer and readers to foster empathy as a mode of being. Also, like most works in the travel essay subgenre, these essays blend narrative, setting, and thought, suggesting important parallels between interior reflection and exterior displacement. Finally, since the essays in this collection take on climate change as their theme, they attempt to make meaning of climate-related subjects like extreme heat, mass extinction, and ice patch archaeology. Ultimately, the force that unites these essays is love. By describing, hinting at, and plainly stating love for people, landscapes, and more-than-human beings, the essays invite readers to consider their own relationship to the Earth, especially during a time of environmental crisis.

<p>  </p> <p>How did the issue of child marriage go from relative obscurity in the United States to occupy a prominent place on the agendas of the majority of state legislatures in the span of a few years? The marriage of minors is internationally recognized as a human rights abuse – yet, until recently, it has remained legal under state law. This issue has just in the last six years ascended to legislative agendas even without public attention or the backing of powerful lobbying groups. I argue that social movements were integral in heightening legislative attention to this low salience issue. The movement to end child marriage engaged in both outsider tactics like theatrical public protests and insider tactics like testifying in committee to engage legislators on this issue. Communications from social movement organizations framed underage marriage around survivor experiences and child protection. I complete two case studies of efforts to ban underage marriage in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Pennsylvania became the third state to ban child marriage in 2020 while Massachusetts could not get a vote in both houses on marriage age reform. Evidence in this study includes analysis of traditional and social media campaigns and other archival materials as well as in-depth interviews with social movement actors and legislators. I also conduct a 50-state statistical analysis of those factors relevant to agenda setting and policy adoption on marriage age reforms. In case studies, I find social movement actors caught the interest of legislators even amongst an ambivalent public through their framing of child marriage and the centrality of child marriage survivors to their advocacy. I find a low salience issue like marriage age reform is less likely to reach policy adoption when those frames conflict with more salient issues like abortion. My findings in the longitudinal 50-state study support my hypotheses on the centrality of social movement actors at both the agenda setting and policy adoption phases. The existence of outsider tactics and online campaigns were both positively and statistically significantly related to a higher likelihood of agenda setting on marriage age reforms. In the policy adoption phase, the use of insider tactics is positively and statistically significantly related to a higher likelihood of adoption. This project increases our understanding of how social movements can drive policy change even in the absence of public attention through direct appeals to legislators. </p>

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), which is a smart combination of pre-existing cruise control and time gap control, plays a major role in rendering driving comfort for the drivers. Currently available ACC system allows the vehicle to maintain the set speed and to automatically adjust the speed to keep up the fixed distance to the vehicle ahead. Here, the speed and the distance are set as per user preferences. Each individual user has their own perceptions and preferences but the existing ACC system lacks the property of user adaption. Hence, this thesis focuses on automatizing the distance settings of the ACC system, which can be adapted to each individual users. In order to incorporate the property of user specific distance setting for ACC, the most relevant contexts in which a change in ACC distance needed is sorted out and a standard distance setting is assigned. Reinforcement-Learning strategies are handled where by the pre-existing distance settings can be modified and adapted to the user once they start driving.

Hispanic youth and families, although they comprise a sizeable portion of the population, are underrepresented in mental health settings within the United States and face significant barriers to receiving adequate treatment. Specifically, the lack of availability of Spanish assessment tools for application in treatment prohibits Hispanic clients from accessing the full extent of available therapeutic resources. The Treatment Support Measure (TSM) is a valid and reliable instrument that allows clinicians and researchers to collect information to better understand change processes and relevant client characteristics in therapy. The present study created a Spanish-translated version of the parent and youth TSM (TSM-SP) and assessed its psychometric properties in a Spanish-speaking community sample of 177 youth and 214 adult caregivers. The internal consistency reliability of all domains of the parent and youth versions of the TSM-SP was good, aside from the Youth Motivation domain. In contrast, the test-retest reliability of all domains of the parent and youth versions of the TSM-SP were generally poor. The construct validity of all domains of the parent and youth versions of the TSM-SP as examined by confirmatory factor analysis was excellent, aside from the Youth Motivation domain. Overall, these results laid the foundation for future research examining the utility and properties of the TSM-SP. The TSM-SP has potential to provide clinicians treating Spanish-speaking youth and families with a useful tool to help better serve these populations in therapy and broaden the scope of research into change processes in youth therapy to involve more diverse populations.

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Thesis (M. A.(English Studies)) --University of Limpopo, 2019 / This study explores a literary comparative examination of crime between Africa and Scandinavia, with special attention to Botswana and Norway. Smith’s and Nesbo’s selected novels are used as primary texts for analysis. The novels are, therefore, set in two different areas. These writers depict crime from the African and European perspectives. Chapter One deals with a brief introduction, and the aim and objectives of the study. It also expands on the theoretical background and provides definitions of terms that are used in this paper. Chapter Two presents views from various scholars on crime. This study is based on an Afro-Western approach of literary analysis. In other words, there are thoughts by both African and Western writers which assist in determining possible and noticeable similarities and differences, on the issue of crime. Chapter Three analyses crime from an African perspective while Chapter Four discusses crime from a Western point of view. Each of these chapters reflects on crime through character portrayal and depiction within its context. Chapter Five is a comparative analysis of both novels. The chapter identifies possible similarities and differences, mainly of the depiction of crime in different settings – Africa and Scandinavia, committed by blacks and whites. However, the structural and linguistic approaches of both the novels are also reviewed, assisting in discovering the life, in comparison, of the authors. The last chapter (Chapter Six), is a conclusion of the study and future suggestions. Basically, the study argues that blacks only should not be portrayed as perpetrators, but that whites too can be culprits. Again, there should be an equal of measurement on the weight and honour of the two races. Lastly, the moral is that without considering skin colour, financial and social backgrounds, justice must be served equally. Hence, whoever is caught in any form of wrongdoing, they must be given the appropriate punishment – regardless of race, colour, religious creed, gender, financial and social background. Key Words: Crime, Afro-Western, Marxism, suspense, detective, identity, puzzle, fix, accumulation, class, characterisation and setting

The increasing presence of sustainability in multiple contexts of today’s societies has led to the phe- nomenon of proliferating representations of the term. A lack of consensus towards the terminology within theory and media representations formed the base for uncertain understandings in public. Corre- spondingly, this supports the argument for investigating the public’s representation of sustainability to contribute knowledge about the current understanding of the term in public. As a platform for open and globalized communication, social media, Instagram in specific, is considered as the research field for investigation. In detail, this analysis aims to investigate large-scale user-generated data with the ‘#sus- tainability’ on Instagram as the research context, to provide knowledge on the users’ representation of the phenomenon. A mixed-method approach of computational and human-driven qualitative and quan- titative content analysis enriched the scope of the analysis to an amount of 50.000 Instagram posts. Correspondingly, the analysis of over 770.000 co-occurred hashtags within the posts allowed a contex- tualization of the phenomenon to key themes represented by the platform’s users. According to framing and agenda-setting theory as theoretical frameworks of this thesis, the findings reveal a dominant fram- ing of sustainability from an environmental perspective, in correlation to the current media agenda. Moreover, the results disclose four key meta-frames, indicating dominant patterns of representing sus- tainability in the context of Eco-Efficiency, Accountability, Consumerism, and Identity. In addition to that, the findings revealed primarily positive framing towards sustainability by the public.The theoretical contribution is an analytical investigation of sustainability representation on Insta- gram, whereby co-occurred themes help to guide further initiatives to improve behavior change and the shift towards a sustainable future.