This exegesis examines the landscape of heaven depicted in the contemporary novel, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. I examine the various characteristics of the heaven (or 'afterlife') depicted in Sebold's novel, with the aim of ascertaining the narrative effects of using this device. Using Ingrid Daemmrich's analysis of the paradisiacal motif in literature as a framework (Daemmrich, I 1997, Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature: Enigmatic Bliss, The Paradise Motif in Literature, Peter Lang, New York), I reveal characteristics in The Lovely Bones that are both consistent with and challenge traditional literary representations of heaven and which therefore demonstrate that the text utilises the established literary motif of heaven for symbolism and meaning, but in a contemporary context. I explore the growing trend of contemporary literary heavens by reviewing two other literary heavens that are relevant to this scholarship. I examine where as writers and readers, we ascertain our concept of heaven (in society's religious foundations and from prior literature), and for the relevance of the key text, I briefly discuss the author's likely cultural influences. Having established the novel's lack of alignment with a religious version of heaven, I then examine the nature of and the narrative effect of, the personalised heaven depicted in the novel, The Lovely Bones. In doing so, I explore one of the new portraits of heaven in literature, an example which represents a growing trend away from portraying a classic edenic heaven shared by all humanity (and traditional to literary representations of heaven), toward a contemporary, personalised heaven that seeks to meet the wants and desires of the individual in our modern society. With reference to literature's ability to reflect back to us, our society's beliefs and values, I examine what this new portrait of heaven reveals about society. Access to the project examined in conjunction with this exegesis has been restricted due to copyright.

This thesis consists of three essays, which all concern the dynamics of pension reform. The first essay evaluates the financial balance and the demographic adjustability of the reformed Swedish pay-as-you-go pension system. The main findings are that the demographic adjustability of the system is poor. Furthermore, the financial balance and pension levels are, to a large degree, dependent on the pension fund and its returns. Making some alterations to the system's benefit formula may improve the adjustability of the system, as well as decreasing its pension fund dependency. It is also shown that the new public system imposes an age-dependent implicit tax on labor earnings that is falling with age. Within the pay-as-you-go system, this tax is large for younger workers for whom almost the whole contribution is regarded as a tax. By introducing a public defined contribution system, the total implicit tax may be reduced since the defined contribution system implies a negative implicit tax because savings are subsidized within the defined contribution system. In the second essay a three-generation OLG model for analyzing a privatization of PAYG old-age social security is developed. Furthermore, it proposes an explicit reform for how the privatization transition may be undertaken. The set of government policy instruments is limited to debt issuing and proportional labor income taxation. The possibilities of a Pareto-improving privatization, given the proposed reform, are then analyzed. Contrary to models where a two-generation OLG framework is used, the three-generation framework creates possibilities for a Pareto-improving privatization of old-age social security, since the PAYG system induces a non-optimal implicit tax over the life cycle. By shifting to an optimal tax policy cannot only the pension claims accrued under the PAYG system be financed, but the shift will also be Pareto-improving. In the third essay the performance of the reformed Latvian pay-as-you-go pension system is evaluated against the background of an exceptional projected decrease in the Latvian labor force. The pension system is designed to handle the upcoming difficulties, and special attention has been given in the design to keep the expenditures low relative to the revenues, by introducing rules dampening the increase in the pension expenditures. In the light of the pessimistic projection of the Latvian demography, the newly reformed PAYG system performs remarkably well. The expenditure reducing rules introduced have significant effects on the system's financial balance. The pension reform also includes the launch of a publicly run defined contributions pension system. It is shown that the resulting implicit tax imposed by the public pension system imposes on labor earnings is negative and increasing with age. That is, savings are subsidized in the public pension system. It is also shown that private savings are fully crowded out as individuals try to offset their savings in the pension system. Since individuals are capital constrained, they will have no private assets at all. From a welfare perspective, this suggests the overall contribution rate to the public pension system to be too high. / <p>Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2002</p>

This essay argues that Sara Ahmed’s methodology for reading the emotionality of texts, through its focus on the relationships between emotions, language and bodies, can be applied to the emotional responses of Australians to refugees and asylum seekers. This essay specifically focuses on the emotions of disgust and pain in the participants of Go Back To Where You Came From, a three-part Australian documentary/realia TV series, because these two emotions’ preoccupation with surface and proximity provide a useful metaphor for what can be observed in the participants’ emotionality. Sensuous proximity in the form of sight, taste, smell, touch and hearing underlies the disgust experienced by the Go Back participants, while shared surfaces enable the participants to feel the pain of others. The essay concludes that Ahmed’s methodology is indeed an effective tool for analysing the emotions of people “affected” by the transnational movements of others.

Information technology (IT) in the recent decades has showcased immense evolution. This evolution has impacted not only the technological sector of the society but also the socio-political and economic sectors. One such archetype that has gained popular momentum in the recent years is cloud computing. Still in its developmental stages, cloud computing is the latest offspring of computing services and has invariably challenged the traditional aspects of computing services across the IT Organizations in the world. Thus, adopted by a number of developed as well as developing countries, cloud computing has played a crucial role in decreasing the overall cost pertinent to hardware, software and other services in organizations. However, issues such as data security and confidentiality, data availability, legal issues and unintelligent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have questioned the reliability and credibility of cloud computing. This has resulted in lack of potential investments from major companies. The main aim of this research is to provide concrete reasons for the actively implementing cloud computing in IT Organizations. Qualitative approach and exploratory design are extensively used for data collection and analysis. Primary data is collected based on the views and opinions of IT experts and secondary data is collected from literary sources which invariably supports the primary data and maintains the credibility of the research.

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Syftet med denna uppsats var att studera sportfilmen som genre och se hur denna genre konstruerar nationell identitet på nationell och lokal nivå. Ytterligare ett syfte var att undersöka hur en sporthändelse televiseras, dokumenteras respektive fiktionaliseras. Jag har genomfört en jämförande analys av likheter och skillnader mellan mer dokumenterande genrer och fiktion. Jag har analyserat skillnaderna mellan den TV-sända hockeymatchen vid OS 1980 mellan USA och Sovjet (även kallad ”Miracle on Ice” eftersom USA vann matchen mot de på förhand tippade som helt överlägsna Sovjet), dokumentären om matchen, Do You Believe in Miracles från 2001, och fiktionsfilmen Miracle från 2004 som bygger på nämnda match.   Det resultat jag kommit fram till är att både dokumentären och filmen om matchen är uppbyggda för att förstärka den amerikanska patriotismen. Genom att spela på nostalgi och gamla minnen ämnar båda filmerna, som kom i en för USA orolig tid att få det amerikanska folket att känna stolthet igen, på samma sätt som de gjorde efter att de vann mot Sovjet. För att ytterligare förstärka stolthetskänslorna har fiktionsfilmen Miracle även ändrat på en hel del i skildringen av själva matchen för att få USA att framstå som mer hårt arbetande, ärligare och bättre än de egentligen var. Även händelser utanför isen är ändrade eller tillagda för att ge filmens tittare ännu mer att känna stolthet för.

In its introduction and four chapters, this project demonstrates that Shakespeare responded to—and powerfully shaped—the early modern English literary marketplace. Against the longstanding critical limitation of the category “Literature” that restricts it to the printed book, this dissertation argues that the literary is not so much a quality of texts as a mode of exchange encompassing not merely printed books but many other forms of representation. Whether writing for the stage, the page, or both, Shakespeare borrowed from and influenced other writers, and it is these specifically formal transactions that make his works literary. Thus, we can understand Shakespeare’s literariness only by scrutinizing the formal features of his works and showing how they circulated in an economy of imaginative writing. Shakespeare self-consciously refashioned words, styles, metrical forms, and figures of speech even as he traded in them, quickly cornering the literary market between 1595 and 1600. Shakespeare’s practice as a writer thus preceded and made possible his reputation both in the theater and in print. / text

Abstract Title: When book becomes film... – a comparative analysis of the book and film Catch me if you can (När bok blir till film…En jämförande analys av boken och filmen Catch me if you can) Number of pages: 46 Author: Majlinda Juniku Tutor: Amelie Hössjer Course: Media and Communication Studies C Period: Autumn term 2007 University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University. Purpose/Aim: To study what model of dramaturgy belongs to the film Catch me if you can and to see what has been crossed out, altered and added from the book so the narrative will fit this model. Material/Method: The film Catch me if you can and the book with the same name has been used to analyze the differences between them. I have divided the differences into three categories: Crossed out, Altered and Added. In the analysis section these have been presented in each section of the film. Main results: Catch me if you can is definetly a film made with the design of the Anglosaxon model, mostly because of its timestructure and that it portrays an action and not just a condition which is normal in the epic-lyric model. Big parts of the story have been crossed out, altered and added to make the film more acceptabel to the audience. Most of the changeshad been done to make the story shorter to fit the timeframe of a film. Events had been joinedtogether to save time but not miss anything. A character, Hanratty, has been reinforced to create a cat-and-mouse story and add excitement to the film. Other changes have been made to make the main character seem more likeable to the audience. Keywords: book, film, dramaturgy, Catch me if you can, anglo-saxon, epic-lyric

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It is still recognized as a challenge task while blind and visually impaired people travel outdoor independently, even if there are a number of assistive mobility aids available. In addition to building universal facilities in urban and rural environments for them, it is essential to develop novel mobility assistive technologies and systems to satisfy their increasing demands for mobility. To investigate those demands, an international survey with 106 blind and visually impaired people from 13 countries is undertaken within this work, with regarding to outdoor mobility experiences, usages of mobile devices and collaborative approaches. From the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Accessibility, the dissertation focuses on enhancing blind people’s capabilities of acquisition of spatial environmental information from tactile displays. The spatial environmental information, in this study, is in terms of clusters of surrounding obstacles, geographic information on city maps, and information on environmental accessibility. In order to non-visual representation of the clusters of surroundings obstacles detected by a 3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) infrared camera, a portable pin-matrix display with a matrix of 30 x 32 pins is employed and a pre-designed set of tactile obstacle symbols is used to render the properties of obstacles (e.g., type, size). Additionally, aiming at helping blind people access geographic information, a desktop based pin-matrix display (an array of 60 x 120 pins) and a mobile pin-matrix display (an array of 30 x 32 pins) are used to represent a large-scale city map and a location-aware city map, respectively. A set of tactile map symbols rendered with the raised and lowered pins, has been designed for rendering various map features. To allow blind and visually impaired people to acquire information on environmental accessibility, besides a traditional web browser client and a popular smart phone client, an audio-haptic client on a tactile display with 7200 pins is developed. Users are able to create and share collaborative annotations on environmental accessibility across the 3 clients. The proposed approaches about non-visual representation of obstacles and map features by tactile symbols on pin-matrix displays, will contribute to the fields of accessible tactile graphic well, especially in the coming era of affordable pin-matrix displays. Meanwhile, the collaborative approach for improving environmental accessibility will encourage the society to raise the floor of accessibility for all. A number of further studies can be continued based on the current findings within this work, aiming at enhancing mobility aids for blind and visually impaired people gradually.