Written for the School of Nursing, Faculty of Medicine. Includes bibliographical references.

Diss. med. dent. Zürich. / Literaturverz.

The presence of asylum seekers within the UK and their claims to social welfare and employment rights presents one of the greatest challenges to sovereignty and the traditional constructs of Marshallian citizenship. Yet in an increasingly cosmopolitan world the UK’s obligations stretch beyond responsibility for its own citizens, as evidenced by the case of asylum seekers whom upon the declaration of seeking refuge must be admitted to the State and provided with subsistence to avoid destitution. Accordingly, the UK is bound by a number of international instruments that provide rights outside the legal constructs of UK citizenship which results in conflict between the traditional boundaries of social inclusion centred on citizenship, and those based on universal human rights. Drawing upon a number of primary and secondary sources, including international human rights law and cosmopolitan theory, this thesis analyses the welfare and employment arrangements for asylum seekers in the UK using NGO data to ascertain the impact of policies in practise. It argues that the withdrawal of social rights from the asylum seeking community over the last two decades has resulted in a significant imbalance between the rights and interests of the State and those of asylum seekers. In light of these conclusions, the thesis recommends that the Government adopt a cosmopolitan approach to welfare provision which prioritises human need over immigration status and suggests a number of reforms which will better respect the asylum seeking community. In doing so, it is hoped that the study will contribute to the development of an ethical asylum support system which reflects the humanity of its subjects. Within the current political climate such an exploration is considered crucial as the specific policies of the asylum support system and their impact upon human rights remain relatively unexplored within academic literature.

abstract: Source selection is one of the foremost challenges for searching deep-web. For a user query, source selection involves selecting a subset of deep-web sources expected to provide relevant answers to the user query. Existing source selection models employ query-similarity based local measures for assessing source quality. These local measures are necessary but not sufficient as they are agnostic to source trustworthiness and result importance, which, given the autonomous and uncurated nature of deep-web, have become indispensible for searching deep-web. SourceRank provides a global measure for assessing source quality based on source trustworthiness and result importance. SourceRank's effectiveness has been evaluated in single-topic deep-web environments. The goal of the thesis is to extend sourcerank to a multi-topic deep-web environment. Topic-sensitive sourcerank is introduced as an effective way of extending sourcerank to a deep-web environment containing a set of representative topics. In topic-sensitive sourcerank, multiple sourcerank vectors are created, each biased towards a representative topic. At query time, using the topic of query keywords, a query-topic sensitive, composite sourcerank vector is computed as a linear combination of these pre-computed biased sourcerank vectors. Extensive experiments on more than a thousand sources in multiple domains show 18-85% improvements in result quality over Google Product Search and other existing methods. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2011

‘To require old heads upon young shoulders is inconsistent with the law’s compassion to human infirmity’ (Lord Diplock in Director of Public Prosecutions v Camplin Appellant [1978] AC 717)’. For young people in England and Wales who offend, diversion from formal proceedings has historically been a principle constituent of youth justice policy and practice, and presently accounts for over a third of all outcomes for detected youth offending (Youth Justice Board for England and Wales, 2015). Although attitudes concerning diversion have often oscillated between favour and criticism, and there has rarely been a period of sustained consensus or constancy of processes (Bernard, 1992; Goldson, 2010), eligibility for an out of court disposal has traditionally been dependent on an admission of some form being made by a young person. This thesis seeks to place the evolution of diversionary measures for young people who commit low level offences or engage in nuisance behaviours into a contextual and historical context, and explore why an admission has become, in the absence of any discernible political, academic or professional considerations, a central tenet of diversionary policies in England and Wales. Potential barriers which may prevent some young people making an admission and unnecessarily losing eligibility for an out of court disposal are considered, as well as the nature and standard of admission expected from young people, and the circumstances in which admissions are usually sought from them. This thesis also explores whether the mandatory admission criterion is compatible with other statutory and international obligations to consider the welfare of a young person when determining a suitable disposal, and whether it sufficiently distinguishes between young people unwilling to make an admission and those who may feel unable to. The thesis seeks to identify the gaps in current academic and professional knowledge concerning whether some young people may unnecessarily forfeit eligibility for a diversionary outcome for the sole reason that they do not make an admission. The research undertaken with relevant professionals’ endeavours to fill these gaps by exploring the practical application of the admission criterion, as well considering any suitable alternatives within the existing statutory regime.

This thesis examines the presentation and functions of Protestant Christianity in cinematic depictions of the American South, focusing primarily on Hollywood’s civil rights narratives, from the 1960s to the present. It argues that religion is an understudied signifier of the South on film, used to define the region’s presumed exceptionalism. Rooted in close textual analysis and primary research into the production and reception of over a dozen films, the thesis deploys methodologies drawn from history, film, literary, and cultural studies. It questions why scholars have seldom acknowledged the role of religion in popular, especially cinematic, constructions of the South, before providing detailed case studies of specific films that utilize southern religiosity to negotiate regional and national anxieties around race, class, and gender. Though scholars have recognized the intersections of race, class, and gender evident in the media’s construction of southern white segregationist, this thesis contends that religion adds further interrogative value to existing analyses of civil rights cinema in particular, and of Hollywood’s representations of southern race, class, and gender identities more generally. The thesis argues that the perceived religious zealotry of many segregationists supports Hollywood’s recurring presentation of the South as an irrational region, where religiosity and rabid racism cloud all judgment. The perceived ‘southernization’ of America through the culture wars of the late twentieth-century encouraged many Americans to reconsider the legacy of the civil rights era, a movement that was being concurrently reshaped in the popular imagination by Hollywood dramas such as Mississippi Burning, A Time to Kill, and Ghosts of Mississippi among many other films. Examining the presentation of both white and black Christianity in these films, the thesis illuminates how cinema has routinely fabricated a simplistic binary of good and evil that pits a noble, yet reductive and static, religious African American community against zealous white trash and fundamentalists operating on the margins of society. So often to blame for the incendiary racial violence that marks such movies, these white villains are often associated with fundamentalism, in both rhetoric and actions, enabling filmmakers to offer a clear culprit for the South’s, and therefore the nation’s, legacy of racial intolerance and violence.

abstract: The purpose of this study is to explore the syntax and pragmatics of subject doubling in spoken French. Many prescriptivists have considered it a redundant and ungrammatical form, but over the years, it has gained more interest from syntacticians. It is widely acknowledged that dislocations involve topics, but the position of these structures is very disputed. Some linguists believe in base generation while others state there is movement. The status of subject clitics also comes into play and their role as arguments or agreement markers is crucial to understanding the issues at stake with a topic analysis. It is often argued that the clitics are undergoing a linguistic cycle whereby they lose their function of argument, and need to be reinforced by disjunct pronouns. In this study, I examined which analyses support my data and I attempted to determine what structures tend to be most dislocated by looking at the environment of the discourse in a corpus of spoken French. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. French 2012

The women’s antinuclear protest group Women Strike for Peace (WSP) formed a visible part of the US peace movement during the Cold War, recording several successes and receiving a positive historical assessment for its maternal, respectable image. This study provides a revised history of WSP, querying the identity of the group in order to produce a more comprehensive and problematic historical narrative. It is the first study to examine WSP from its founding in 1961 through to the closure of its National Office in 1990. The thesis examines key events in the group’s history and challenges established historical understandings of the group, positing that existing perceptions offer an image of uniformity that overlooks the differing experiences of WSP activists and the complexity of their memories. This study draws on aspects of memory theory to inform its examination of WSP’s historical record. It contends that social influences and personal identity had a significant impact on the way in which former members recalled their experiences, while assessing the relationship between collective and individual identity within WSP. By placing the group into the changing cultural and societal environment of Cold War America, this thesis is the first to demonstrate the importance of contextual background to understanding the development of WSP activists’ memory and identity. Whereas existing examinations of Women Strike for Peace apply its maternal image to the entirety of its history, this study finds such interpretations of identity and historical understanding to be static and argues that the transformation in activist identities informed changing perceptions of the group’s past successes. The thesis makes extensive use of branch records and the recollections of individuals recorded through oral interviews and memoirs to query established understandings of WSP. It finds that the desire of leading figures to project a moderate, maternal image resulted in the establishment of a framework within which WSP activists understood their identity and activism. This framework resulted in an historical narrative that overlooks the diversity within the group, the tensions between members that emerged over issues such as hierarchical structure, civil disobedience, and feminist activism, and the regional disparity of the national organisation. The perspectives of leading figures have often been consulted to the detriment of grassroots voices that can offer a more complex, contentious depiction of WSP’s history. Accounting for the construction of WSP’s history, memory, and identity, this thesis challenges our view of the experience of peace activism in the 20th century United States.

Esta pesquisa tem por finalidade analisar as construções sentenciais de tópico-comentário, de tópico marcado e de tópico não marcado, em produções textuais de estudantes do sexto ao nono anos do segundo segmento do ensino fundamental de escola pública localizada em comunidade da Zona Oeste do Rio de Janeiro, tendo sido analisadas 316 produções de um universo de 1040. O aporte teórico é o Funcionalismo, com ênfase na teoria dos três diferentes tipos de sujeito Sujeito Lógico, Sujeito Psicológico e Sujeito gramatical de Halliday (1994) e na teoria da Estrutura Informacional (Information Structure) de Lambrecht (1994). Partindo de análise quantitativa e qualitativa de corpus, investigou-se, de um lado, o percentual de aparecimento de construções de tópico marcado e não marcado e, de outro, os diferentes tipos de tópico não marcado e as motivações sintáticas e pragmático-discursivas de sua utilização. A análise foi feita em duas etapas. Primeiramente, para a identificação e a quantificação das construções sentenciais de tópico marcado, procedeu-se à investigação das seguintes variáveis: 1) tipo de tópico marcado mais recorrente, segundo categorização específica referente ao tópico e suas relações argumentais com o verbo 2) Posição mais frequente, considerando a estrutura textual e a ambiência sintática de favorecimento do uso do pronome correferente (presença/ausência de sintagma ou oração intercalada entre tópico sentencial e pronome correferente). A fim de investigar os contextos favorecedores de uso dos tópicos não marcados sujeito pronominal pleno de 3 pessoa e sujeito pronominal nulo de 3 pessoa, consideraram-se as seguintes variáveis: 1) tipo de oração e 2) conexão discursiva cf. Paredes Silva (2003). Os resultados obtidos permitem sistematizar as condições de uso das estruturas estudadas. Com relação às construções sentenciais de tópico marcado, verificou-se que se constitui em estratégia de ativar no discurso o elemento sobre o qual informações novas serão transmitidas, marcando-o como o tópico sentencial. Relativamente aos tópicos não marcados, as estratégias de uso estão relacionadas ao tipo de oração e ao grau de conexão discursiva da sentença. O uso do sujeito nulo está diretamente relacionado à conexão discursiva de grau 1, denominado ótimo. Uma breve análise de tais construções em autores consagrados da literatura brasileira e demais autores brasileiros contemporâneos permite afirmar que as construções de tópico, principalmente as que contêm tópico marcado, merecem uma atenção maior no ensino de Língua Portuguesa, uma vez que constituem uma estratégia pragmático-discursiva de uso corrente e de função relevante nos processos interacionais. O estudo das construções de tópico, portanto, merece uma atenção especial, uma vez que refletem a riqueza de nosso idioma, ao representar uma estratégia pragmático-discursiva que, se bem desenvolvida, constituir-se-á em uma ferramenta a mais para o usuário da língua no que concerne ao uso consciente e competente do idioma materno / The present study aims at analyzing sentence constructions of commentary topic, marked-topic and unmarked topic in textual productions of students attending the last four years of elementary education in a public school located in a poor community in the West zone of Rio de Janeiro. 316 out of 1040 productions have been analyzed. Functionalism has been used as the theoretical background with special emphasis on three different types of subject the Logical Subject, the Psychological Subject and the Grammatical Subject - Halliday (1994) and on Lambrechts information structure (1994). Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus, we have investigated, on the one hand, the percentage of marked and non-marked topic construction appearances and, on the other hand, the different types of non-marked topics and the syntactic and pragmatic discursive motivations of their usage. The analysis has been done in two stages. Firstly, for the identification and quantification of sentence constructions of marked topics, the investigation of the following variables has been made: 1st) most recurrent marked topic, according to specific categorization referring to the topic and its argumentative relationship with the verb, 2nd) most frequent position, taking into account the textual structure and the syntactic ambience of favoring the use of the coreferent pronoun (presence / absence of the syntagma or intercalated clause between sentence topic and coreferent pronoun). In order to investigate favoring contexts of the use of non-marked topics of 3rd person full pronominal subject and 3rd person null pronominal subject, the following variables have been considered: 1st) type of clause and 2nd) discursive connection, Paredes Silva (2003). The results obtained allow us to systematize the use conditions of the studied structures. When it comes to the sentence constructions of marked topic, we could perceive that it is a strategy of activating in the discourse the element about which the new information will be transmitted, marking it as the sentence topic. When it comes to non-marked topics, the strategies of use are related to the type of clause and to the degree of discursive connection of the sentence. The use of the null subject is directly related to the discursive connection degree 1, which is considered great. A brief analysis of such constructions in works of renowned authors in the field of Brazilian literature and other contemporary Brazilian authors allow us to say that topic constructions, especially the ones that contain marked topics, deserve greater attention in the education of Portuguese language, since they represent a pragmatic discursive strategy which is relevant and commonly used in interactional processes. Therefore, the study of topic construction deserves special attention since it reflects the richness of our language when it represents a pragmatic discursive strategy that, if well developed, can be one more tool for the language user when it comes to the conscientious and competent use of the mother tongue

Esta pesquisa tem por finalidade analisar as construções sentenciais de tópico-comentário, de tópico marcado e de tópico não marcado, em produções textuais de estudantes do sexto ao nono anos do segundo segmento do ensino fundamental de escola pública localizada em comunidade da Zona Oeste do Rio de Janeiro, tendo sido analisadas 316 produções de um universo de 1040. O aporte teórico é o Funcionalismo, com ênfase na teoria dos três diferentes tipos de sujeito Sujeito Lógico, Sujeito Psicológico e Sujeito gramatical de Halliday (1994) e na teoria da Estrutura Informacional (Information Structure) de Lambrecht (1994). Partindo de análise quantitativa e qualitativa de corpus, investigou-se, de um lado, o percentual de aparecimento de construções de tópico marcado e não marcado e, de outro, os diferentes tipos de tópico não marcado e as motivações sintáticas e pragmático-discursivas de sua utilização. A análise foi feita em duas etapas. Primeiramente, para a identificação e a quantificação das construções sentenciais de tópico marcado, procedeu-se à investigação das seguintes variáveis: 1) tipo de tópico marcado mais recorrente, segundo categorização específica referente ao tópico e suas relações argumentais com o verbo 2) Posição mais frequente, considerando a estrutura textual e a ambiência sintática de favorecimento do uso do pronome correferente (presença/ausência de sintagma ou oração intercalada entre tópico sentencial e pronome correferente). A fim de investigar os contextos favorecedores de uso dos tópicos não marcados sujeito pronominal pleno de 3 pessoa e sujeito pronominal nulo de 3 pessoa, consideraram-se as seguintes variáveis: 1) tipo de oração e 2) conexão discursiva cf. Paredes Silva (2003). Os resultados obtidos permitem sistematizar as condições de uso das estruturas estudadas. Com relação às construções sentenciais de tópico marcado, verificou-se que se constitui em estratégia de ativar no discurso o elemento sobre o qual informações novas serão transmitidas, marcando-o como o tópico sentencial. Relativamente aos tópicos não marcados, as estratégias de uso estão relacionadas ao tipo de oração e ao grau de conexão discursiva da sentença. O uso do sujeito nulo está diretamente relacionado à conexão discursiva de grau 1, denominado ótimo. Uma breve análise de tais construções em autores consagrados da literatura brasileira e demais autores brasileiros contemporâneos permite afirmar que as construções de tópico, principalmente as que contêm tópico marcado, merecem uma atenção maior no ensino de Língua Portuguesa, uma vez que constituem uma estratégia pragmático-discursiva de uso corrente e de função relevante nos processos interacionais. O estudo das construções de tópico, portanto, merece uma atenção especial, uma vez que refletem a riqueza de nosso idioma, ao representar uma estratégia pragmático-discursiva que, se bem desenvolvida, constituir-se-á em uma ferramenta a mais para o usuário da língua no que concerne ao uso consciente e competente do idioma materno / The present study aims at analyzing sentence constructions of commentary topic, marked-topic and unmarked topic in textual productions of students attending the last four years of elementary education in a public school located in a poor community in the West zone of Rio de Janeiro. 316 out of 1040 productions have been analyzed. Functionalism has been used as the theoretical background with special emphasis on three different types of subject the Logical Subject, the Psychological Subject and the Grammatical Subject - Halliday (1994) and on Lambrechts information structure (1994). Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus, we have investigated, on the one hand, the percentage of marked and non-marked topic construction appearances and, on the other hand, the different types of non-marked topics and the syntactic and pragmatic discursive motivations of their usage. The analysis has been done in two stages. Firstly, for the identification and quantification of sentence constructions of marked topics, the investigation of the following variables has been made: 1st) most recurrent marked topic, according to specific categorization referring to the topic and its argumentative relationship with the verb, 2nd) most frequent position, taking into account the textual structure and the syntactic ambience of favoring the use of the coreferent pronoun (presence / absence of the syntagma or intercalated clause between sentence topic and coreferent pronoun). In order to investigate favoring contexts of the use of non-marked topics of 3rd person full pronominal subject and 3rd person null pronominal subject, the following variables have been considered: 1st) type of clause and 2nd) discursive connection, Paredes Silva (2003). The results obtained allow us to systematize the use conditions of the studied structures. When it comes to the sentence constructions of marked topic, we could perceive that it is a strategy of activating in the discourse the element about which the new information will be transmitted, marking it as the sentence topic. When it comes to non-marked topics, the strategies of use are related to the type of clause and to the degree of discursive connection of the sentence. The use of the null subject is directly related to the discursive connection degree 1, which is considered great. A brief analysis of such constructions in works of renowned authors in the field of Brazilian literature and other contemporary Brazilian authors allow us to say that topic constructions, especially the ones that contain marked topics, deserve greater attention in the education of Portuguese language, since they represent a pragmatic discursive strategy which is relevant and commonly used in interactional processes. Therefore, the study of topic construction deserves special attention since it reflects the richness of our language when it represents a pragmatic discursive strategy that, if well developed, can be one more tool for the language user when it comes to the conscientious and competent use of the mother tongue