Composed for soprano, tenor, and baritone voices, woodwind, percussion, and string instruments, Three Voices is a polyglotic work that includes German, Chinese, and Spanish texts. The texts are chosen from Brecht Bertolt's Das Schiff, Po Chu I's Lang T'ao Sha, and Frederico Garcia Lorcá's Mar. Significant features of the piece are 1) application of Chinese operatic singing methods to vocal material in the sections that use Chinese text, 2) use of western instruments to emulate the sound of certain Chinese instruments, and 3) employment of Sprechstimme and dramatically inflected speech to create theatrical effects and highlight the sections that use German and Spanish texts.

Increasingly, culturally and ethnically diverse environments provide an abundance of ordinary, everyday intergroup encounters, especially in public settings---often consisting of a conglomeration of positive and negative experiences. Yet few intergroup contact studies have focused on measuring and assessing contact in public settings. Reasons for this include both theoretical and methodological considerations. However, before the impact of mundane, everyday encounters on prejudice reduction can be assessed, it is necessary to examine the following questions: (1) Which situations are perceived as intergroup contact by participants? (2) How do individuals conceptualise where the boundaries for contact lie? (3) How are public and private forms of contact typically experienced? (4) Do they differ in the ways researchers have assumed in the past? and (5) Which methods are most appropriate for assessing public encounters? How can memory bias, temporality and locatedness be taken into account? Using qualitative, quantitative and near-time in-the-field methods, the following research examines these aspects in both public and private settings and provides first insights into how a novel method---the Contact Logger---can be used to assess the effects of public and private contact on attitudes. A three-day diary/interview study (N=17) explored how contact is experienced, understood and conceptualised in a variety of everyday intergroup contexts. This was followed by a survey study (N=525) that examined the boundaries of what is typically perceived as being contact. Insights from both studies fed into the development of a context-aware mobile application, which enabled the capturing of near-time intergroup encounters in situ. The usability of the resulting research tool---the Contact Logger---was tested, leading to further refinements. Following an initial feasibility study (N=104) that explored contact between young and older people, a field experiment (N=112) examined intergenerational contact in public and private contexts. Data collected with the Contact Logger were analysed on aggregate and day-to-day levels, and where possible compared to traditional retrospective survey data. Results from the first two studies indicated that while traditional intergroup encounters, such as contact with family and friends, are clearly conceptualised and viewed as contact, experiences and perceptions of contact in public settings are more disparate. Moreover, effects of such contact on attitudes are dependent on the idiosyncratic meaning attributed to the specific encounter as well as past experiences. Near-time data from a field-experiment (Study 5) provided evidence that intergroup encounters reported in situ compared to retrospective survey data differed in key variables (i.e., contact quality, duration, perceived status and group typicality). Correlational analyses between near-time and retrospective measures showed less correspondence than expected. Further, additional day-to-day analyses revealed that attitudes towards older people were less positive during weekends than weekdays, indicating that attitudes may be more dynamic than previously thought. Findings, as well as the different methodological and theoretical approaches, are critically discussed. Finally, a broad range of further applications for the Contact Logger are presented and important limitations are discussed.

Many archaeologists have been intrigued by how often symbolic houses of varying forms are used on the burialgrounds of the Scandinavian Bronze Age. Some scholars even claim that to deal with the dead did not mean to set them apart from the world of the living during this period. Since several examples show that there seem to be an active connection between the ship-setting and different types of symbolic houses, this study seek to demonstrate and interpret how the ideology behind these symbols vary between three regionally different Swedish areas: Halland, Småland and Gotland. The purpose is to show that the way chosen to shape the symbols materially not only had fundamental impact on the organization of the burialground itself, but also on how the surrounding world came to comprenhend and use them. This study suggests that even though the special shapes of the graves and the gravefield itself can carry meaning, the materialization of the monuments can be interpreted as incorporated in a practice of remembrance in where the individual shaping of the grave most probably formed part of a greater story.

<p>Many archaeologists have been intrigued by how often symbolic houses of varying forms are used on the burialgrounds of the Scandinavian Bronze Age. Some scholars even claim that to deal with the dead did not mean to set them apart from the world of the living during this period. Since several examples show that there seem to be an active connection between the ship-setting and different types of symbolic houses, this study seek to demonstrate and interpret how the ideology behind these symbols vary between three regionally different Swedish areas: Halland, Småland and Gotland. The purpose is to show that the way chosen to shape the symbols materially not only had fundamental impact on the organization of the burialground itself, but also on how the surrounding world came to comprenhend and use them. This study suggests that even though the special shapes of the graves and the gravefield itself can carry meaning, the materialization of the monuments can be interpreted as incorporated in a practice of remembrance in where the individual shaping of the grave most probably formed part of a greater story.</p>

This paper presents a detailed comparative analysis of four important settings of Ophelia's song texts from Shakespeare's Hamlet composed by Brahms, Strauss, Chausson, and Pasatieri. Each of the first three represents a different facet of song composition during the period 1873-1919. The "Five Songs of Ophelia" by Brahms recall the simplicity of Volkslied. Strauss's "Drei Lieder der Ophelia" assume a more complex and formal demeanor, while Chausson's setting, "Chanson d'Ophelie," demonstrates French preoccupation with setting the natural speech rhythms of language. Pasatieri's "Ophelia's Lament," from 1975, uses operatic gestures within the context of piano-accompanied song. An interview with Pasatieri which defines this song as monodrama is transcribed in the appendix.

The swift progression of technology has radically reshaped our lives, becoming a big part of our daily routines and paving the way for advancements in communication, automation, and information processing. OpenAI, a company at the forefront of artificial intelligence since 2015, has made remarkable strides towards making AI accessible and beneficial for all (OpenAI, n.d.). A notable accomplishment in their journey has been the development of Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformers (ChatGPT). This study aims to identify and explore the factors influencing students' acceptance and use of ChatGPT in academic settings. Despite the rising prominence of ChatGPT across various disciplines, understanding its acceptance and utilization, particularly within the sphere of higher education, remains limited. ChatGPT holds immense potential as a valuable asset for both students and educators. Utilizing the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and a quantitative research approach, investigating these factors. The results suggest that student acceptance and use lies in Behavioral Intention, while Behavioral Initiation is influenced by both Effort Expectancy and Performance Expectancy.

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Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Daniel A. Andresen / Present times most of the applications allow users to set profiles and activate them manually. Also, there is no such application to alert the calling person automatically whenever we are busy in a meeting. Auto Profile is an application which addresses these issues. Using this application, a custom profile can be created and activated. The user of this application can create any number of custom profiles with their own timings depending on their requirements from the available set of ringer modes such as vibration, silent, normal modes. All these settings will be changed automatically when they define a profile and set it as active. Every profile can be scheduled according to their wish. Also, users can define how often and how long they would like to activate the selected profile. Auto Profile Switcher will recognize their profile based on the current time and it will apply the right profile at the right time according to the given settings. For instance, they can save a home profile and a work profile, and the application will automatically switch from one to other automatically, without any user action. It's also possible for the users to apply manually saved profile wherever they are. Also, the application allows users not to bother about the calls from important persons when they are in some important meeting or busy. Automatically profile is activated as scheduled and sends a respective alert to the caller according to the profile activated. Auto Profile application is user-friendly and easy to use. The proposed application is developed for the android platform, which is used to create custom profiles and make sure that the tasks are executed as scheduled. This relieves users as they do not need to bother about the calls when they are in some important meeting or busy. As this is a mobile application users can easily organize their action wherever they are with ease.

The main focus of this thesis is the study of the burned bones from Uppgarde, Vallstena, on the island of Gotland. Vallstena is a place where artifacts, graves and other activities are dated from the Stone Age to the Late Iron Age. This indicates that Vallstena was a place humans frequently used for a long period of time and a prominent remain is a Stone Ship Setting that once was placed here but when excavations were carried out in the 1970s only the depressions of the stones became visible. The purpose of this study is toco-analyse osteological and archaeological material found, to obtain a clearer image of the place and contribute to the existing research of this area. The goal study is to determine the nature of the activities seen in relationship to the analysis of the cremated bones found here and how they were connected to the surrounding landscape. The basis for this analysis is a combination of thorough examinations of the osteological material, archaeological features as well as relevant literature.

This thesis reports a research effort that comprises six papers and a cover paper. In essence, the thesis contributes to the understanding of collaborative settings by introducing the perspective of &apos;places of collaboration‘. This perspective is particularly important when designing computer-based technologies that support collaborative settings. The starting point and overall research aim is to understand people‘s efforts to configure their current context for the purposes of collaboration. The cover paper of the thesis comprises a theoretical reflection and examination of four collaborative settings. The settings have been studied in situ through ethnographic inquiry and the results are reported in the six papers enclosed in the thesis. In my theoretical reflection, the concepts of &apos;place‘, &apos;space‘ and &apos;boundary objects‘ are central. The studies revealed that people‘s efforts to configure the current context create and reflect a &apos;place of collaboration‘. In other words, the effort to configure the context results in a practice characterized by an understanding of how to cooperate; a collaborative practice that constitutes a &apos;place of collaboration‘. During this configuration, the space and the use of materiality in this space are important parts in the creation of a place of collaboration. In addition, people configure collaborative contexts of intersecting practices by creating boundary objects. Boundary objects serve as mediators in a place-making process for the integration of places into a &apos;place of collaboration‘ for several practices. What is more, the dynamics of a place of collaboration may affect changes in existing modes of working and in computer-based tools that have been introduced into the workplace. The people and practices that constitute the place will in turn re-configure the place of collaboration, including the space and objects available due to the new circumstances. People‘s configuration of their current context reveals crucial aspects about the place of collaboration that must be considered also when designing to support this setting. However, this configuration may not necessarily equal efficiency and effectiveness, as evaluated by actors external to this context. The conclusion of this thesis is that future research and design should consider how to support people in their own effort to configure their collaborative context.