<p>This study constitutes an attempt to bring the notion of stupidity into relation with ethics and creativity, through a reading of Samuel Beckett's Endgame. Employing Emmanuel Lévinas' theories on ethics - the responsible responsiveness in regard to the Other and the concept of the Face - the objective is to demonstrate how stupidity, conceived as lack of control and knowledge, functions as a precondition for the ethical relation between humans, as well as that of the individual to her creativity.</p>

<p>The aim of the present thesis was to study sex differences in memory and other cognitive bilities in healthy adults. In Study I, participants performed a number of episodic memory tasks that were more or less verbal in nature. Results showed that women performed on a higher level than did men in the episodic memory tasks where it was possible to use verbal labels, whereas men performed on a higher level than did women in a visuospatial episodic memory task. In Study II, women’s advantage in face recognition was investigated.Results showed that women performed at a higher level than did men only in the recognition of other women’s faces. In Study III, sex differences in cognitive tasks as well as brain measures were investigated in healthy older adults. Results showed that only the sex differences in a motor task could, to some extent, be explained by sex differences in one of the brain measures. The findings, as well as possible explanations for these patterns of results, are discussed in a theoretical context.</p>

The focus of this dissertation is the theatrical representation of both the individual and war in a time of disintegrating national states and the dramatisation of destruction versus survival as the driving forces on stage. In a study on the future of empire it has been observed that instead of progressing into a peaceful future, the 21st century has slipped back in time into the nightmare of perpetual and indeterminate state of warfare: ceasing to be the exceptional state, war has become 'the primary organising principle of society', thus echoing Giorgio Agamben's declaration that the state of exception has become the status quo. Seminal studies on contemporary warfare and society such as Mary Kaldor's New & Old Wars (2005) and Ulrich Beck's World at Risk (2008 [2007]) trace how the face of war has changed over the past fifteen years. The dramatic texts examined in this thesis reach from plays depicting inner-state conflict, civil war and the politics of fear, for example Caryl Churchill's Far Away (2000), Sarah Kane's Blasted (1995) and Zinnie Harris's war trilogy (2005-2008) over documentary and verbatim-based plays and their attempt to portray the trauma of war by recreating on stage the process of giving testimony and by endorsing public grieving (e.g. various Tricycle productions and Gregory Burke's Black Watch [2006]), to adaptations of Greek tragedies (like Martin Crimp's Cruel and Tender [2004]) and a Shakespearean play. The questions underlying this work are: how can war be represented on stage? and, how do the plays replicate the sociological structures leading to violence and war and explore their transformation of societies? Springing from the discussion about 'New Wars' in the age of globalisation, it will be demonstrated here how these 'New Wars' also bring forth new plays about war.

Målet med vår uppsats är att undersöka och analysera ungdomars användning av Facebook. Genom intervjuer med 10 gymnasieelever från Stockholm kommer vi granska om Facebook skapar ett narcissistiskt beteende. För att förklara detta utgår vi från teorier om narcissismens kultur, svaga bands styrka, symbolisk interaktionism och dramaturgiska perspektiv. Vi har i denna uppsats kommit fram till att det existerar narcissistiskt beteende, i form av respondenternas attityder och deras syn på andra medlemmar. / The goal with this paper is to examine and analyze the way that the youth look at their use of Facebook. A survey was conducted on 10 high school students in Stockholm to review if Facebook reveal narcissistic behavior. To explain this, we gathered information about narcissistic culture, weak band strength, symbolic interactionism and the dramaturgical perspective. To our conclusion, the narcissism dominates on the social network level, as result of their attitudes and view of other members.

The present study investigates the use of hedging devices in the readers’ comment section of the newspaper The Guardian Online. Two comment sections were chosen for the contrastive study: ‘Politics’ in the subsection ‘Comment is free’ and the series ‘Problem solved’ in the subsection ‘Life and style’. The corpus-based analysis of the frequency of hedges has revealed that the incidence of hedging devices in comments on personal issues is higher (by 19.2%) than on political articles. Three of the most frequently occurring hedging devices, namely, might, SEEM and I (don’t) think underwent further contextual analysis: the utterances containing these items were classified according to their illocutionary force, applying Bach’s (2003) classification of illocutionary acts. The most commonly hedged speech act types, characteristic of each section, were revealed.  Subsequently, an attempt was made to account for these findings from the perspective of ‘face’ and ‘facework’ as represented by Brown and Levinson (1987), Lim and Bowers (1991), MacGeorge, Lichtman and Pressey (2002), Ting-Toomey and Kurogi (1998). Since hedging is considered to be an effective strategy in minimizing ‘threats’ to the face of the addressee, it has  been possible to conclude that in discussions of personal issues participants are more concerned to ‘save’ the addressee’s face than in the case of political matters where the comment writers’ ‘self-face seems to be in the forefront.

The aim of the present study was to evaluate measurements, proportions, growth patterns of the face and jaws and to provide the emergence time and sequence of permanent teeth of Lithuanian children 4 to 16 years of age. Body height, over 40 craniofacial measurements, 59 proportion indices and erupted permanent teeth were evaluated. The study was carried out in kindergartens and secondary schools of Vilnius city in 2004-2009 and 2010-2011 years. The study sample consisted of 3843 children, examined according to the standard anthropometric methodology. This study presents anthropometrical measurements and proportions of the head, face and jaws as well as their age dynamics, sexual dimorphism, secular trend over past 50 years of Lithuanian children 4 to 16 years of age. Normal variation of the emergence time and sequence, differences between sexes of permanent teeth and correlation between the number of erupted teeth and facial dimensions and body height are analysed. Most of the measurements and all proportion indices, the emergence time of permanent teeth and their correlation with body height and facial dimensions in Lithuanian children are presented for the very first time. The results are significant and have a great value not only for anthropologists, specialists of human biology or public health, but for the dentists, maxillofacial and plastic-reconstructive surgeons, paediatricians, endocrinologists and all other physicians in their clinical practice evaluating general... [to full text] / Darbo tikslas – kompleksiškai ištirti 4–16 metų vaikų veido ir žandikaulių matmenis, proporcijas, jų ribines vertes, augimo tempus bei išaiškinti nuolatinių dantų prasikalimo laiką ir eiliškumą. Tyrimas atliktas Vilniaus miesto ikimokyklinėse ir mokyklinėse įstaigose 2004-2009 ir 2010-2011 metais. Pagal standartine antropometrinę metodika kompleksiškai ištirti 3843 vaikai: išmatuotas ūgis, daugiau nei 40 galvos ir veido matmenų, išskaičiuoti 59 proporcingumo indeksai, įvertinti išdygę nuolatiniai dantys. Darbe pateikiama 4-16 metų lietuvių vaikų galvos ir veido rodiklių ir proporcijų analizė, nušviečiami jų amžiniai ir lytiniai ypatumai, atskleidžiama pagrindinių galvos ir veido rodiklių epochinė tendencija per pastaruosius 50 metų. Lietuvių vaikų galvos ir veido proporcijos, nuolatinių dantų prasikalimo laikas ir dauguma galvos ir veido rodiklių ištirti pirmą kartą. Darbe pateikiami pirmą kartą surinkti ir apibendrinti Vilniaus miesto lietuvių vaikų veido ir žandikaulių antropometriniai duomenys, proporcijos ir nuolatinių dantų prasikalimo laikas, jų ribinės vertės, skirtumai tarp lyčių ir koreliacijos su veido matmenimis ir ūgiu. Tyrimo rezultatai reikšmingi ir vertingi antropologams, odontologams, burnos ir veido chirurgams, plastinės chirurgijos specialistams, pediatrams, endokrinologams, genetikams ir visuomenės sveikatos specialistams, vertinant tiek vaiko bendrą, tiek ir burnos sveikatą pagal veido, žandikaulių ir nuolatinių dantų raidą augimo laikotarpiu. Taip pat... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

This research is a study of purchasing intentions and behaviors in China. Consumers from four key cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Guangzhou were studied and differences in intentions and behavior as well as influences on behavior were analyzed. The results of the study provide greater depth to understanding consumer behavior in China and insight into likely responses to marketing strategies. Interviews with Chinese marketing experts were conducted and surveys were administered to samples of the target populations. Interviews assisted in understanding many of the general stereotypes held with respect to various ethnicities and helped with explaining some of the reasons for differences found. The study’s results are categorized into five areas. First, with respect to general purchasing intentions the study found that Chinese consumers from key cities differ significantly with respect to most of the purchasing intentions measured including inclination to try to new products, brand loyalty, use of discount cards, and willingness to purchase substitute brands. Based on five measures of conservatism, Beijing and Shanghai consumers were found to exhibit more conservative consumption behaviors than Chongqing and Guangzhou consumers. Chongqing and Guangzhou consumers are more likely than consumers in Shanghai and Beijing to wait for a friend's recommendation before buying a new brand. Second, with respect to brand choices, the study found that Beijing consumers tend to be more ethnocentric in their purchasing behavior in comparison to consumers from other key cities. The study also found a moderate association between ethnicity and brand purchase repertoire in most product categories. Third, with respect to reasons for purchases, the study found that generally there was only limited association between ethnicity and the reason for selecting brands. Consumers most often cited quality as the main reason for purchase. Fourth, with respect to actual brand purchase frequencies, the study found that Beijing consumers made more frequent purchases more often than other consumers in half of the categories studied. Chongqing consumers tend to purchase favorite brands less frequently than consumers from other key cities. Fifth, with respect to knowledge of country of origin and country of manufacture and their influences on intentions, the study found that for most product categories (nine of twelve studied) country of origin was an important consideration in the purchase decision. In general, many Chinese consumers are misinformed about brands’ country of origin. The research provides insight into important purchase cues and moderators impacting brand choice behavior.

People use orientation of their faces to convey rich, inter-personal information. For example, a person will direct his face to indicate who the intended target of the conversation is. Similarly in a conversation, face orientation is a non-verbal cue to listener when to switch role and start speaking, and a nod indicates that a person has understands, or agrees with, what is being said. Further more, face pose estimation plays an important role in human-computer interaction, virtual reality applications, human behaviour analysis, pose-independent face recognition, driver s vigilance assessment, gaze estimation, etc. Robust face recognition has been a focus of research in computer vision community for more than two decades. Although substantial research has been done and numerous methods have been proposed for face recognition, there remain challenges in this field. One of these is face recognition under varying poses and that is why face pose estimation is still an important research area. In computer vision, face pose estimation is the process of inferring the face orientation from digital imagery. It requires a serious of image processing steps to transform a pixel-based representation of a human face into a high-level concept of direction. An ideal face pose estimator should be invariant to a variety of image-changing factors such as camera distortion, lighting condition, skin colour, projective geometry, facial hairs, facial expressions, presence of accessories like glasses and hats, etc. Face pose estimation has been a focus of research for about two decades and numerous research contributions have been presented in this field. Face pose estimation techniques in literature have still some shortcomings and limitations in terms of accuracy, applicability to monocular images, being autonomous, identity and lighting variations, image resolution variations, range of face motion, computational expense, presence of facial hairs, presence of accessories like glasses and hats, etc. These shortcomings of existing face pose estimation techniques motivated the research work presented in this thesis. The main focus of this research is to design and develop novel face pose estimation algorithms that improve automatic face pose estimation in terms of processing time, computational expense, and invariance to different conditions.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is recognised as having a significant role to play in tackling climate change and reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. In CCS schemes, CO2 is captured from anthropogenic sources, and transported to suitable sites either for EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) or storage. The transport of such huge amount of CO2 causes new challenges. The main concern is in the difference between natural gas and CO2 transportation pipelines. CO2 phase behaviour during decompression, existence of different impurities and very high operating pressure are some of the new challenges for pipeline designer and operators. This PhD study has taken a systematic approach to understand the mechanics involved in the fracture of pipes containing high pressure flue-gas CO2. The work involved the development of a novel weight function stress intensity factor solution that can be used with complex stress fields induced by residual and/or thermal stresses in addition to applied pressure. In addition, the thesis reports a substantial experimented test programme which involved low temperature fracture toughness tests linked to a detailed finite element based stress analysis. Overall, the thesis presents an integrated engineering criticality means to assess the suitability or otherwise of a pipeline system to transport high pressure flue-gas CO2.

The objective of this bachelor thesis was to examine and analyse the psychological factors that were important in mediation processes on local, regional, national and international levels in Ethiopia. The research questions were what these psychological factors were and how they affected the mediation process. A qualitative, semi-structured method was used and six informants with experience as mediators have been interviewed in Ethiopia. The psychological factors identified were self-esteem, losing face, ability of letting go, and mirroring. The conclusion was that this research confirmed the findings of much of the previous research, in regards to the psychological factors active in the process. The research also revealed that the psychological factors needed to be considered in the light of the Ethiopian culture and it´s collective nature.