Thesis advisor: Juliet Schor / As cult, quality, and mainstream television have merged, a new breed of show has evolved; such shows raise complicated themes and incorporate deep meanings. Drawing from Abercrombie and Longhurst’s (1998) audience continuum, this study focuses on the more casual portion of fandom previously overlooked in fan studies. These “everyday fans” differ from their cultist and enthusiast counterparts by limiting television to a hobby, not engaging in creative production, and not seeking out fan networks. The interviews with sixteen everyday fans as well as four cultists/enthusiasts ground Lost fandom in previous fan traditions and also explore the experience of a previously overlooked segment of the audience. Using ABC's LOST, this study shows how mainstream, everyday fans often unconsciously think about practical and profound issues of everyday philosophy simply by following characters and storylines. In effect, viewers of the show become "accidental intellectuals." LOST raises issues of love, redemption, science versus faith and good versus evil. The interviews with everyday fans reflect that viewers were not only using critical thinking in puzzling out the show’s mysteries but also engaging in deep analysis, personal identification, and the pondering of profound moral dilemmas through the medium of the characters, often without realizing it. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology Honors Program. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: Sociology.

Written within an existentialist mode, Nakamura Fuminori’s early fictional works lend themselves to be read as therapeutic technologies reaching out to Japanese youth whose lives are marked by anxiety, isolation, and precariousness. Because English-language scholarship on Nakamura is lacking, this thesis analyzes two of his novels – Child of Dirt and Evil and the Mask – in order to introduce how Nakamura understands the human, how his texts function formally as therapeutic technologies, and how, in the final analysis, they exhibit a nascent sexism that borders on misogyny.

This thesis investigates the impact of transportation — the phenomenon of “being miles away” while receiving a narrative — on audience response. The poetics of narrative reception within the Homeric epics are described and the correspondences with the psychological concept of transportation are used to suggest the appropriateness and utility of this theory to understanding audience responses in and to the Iliad and Odyssey. The ways in which transportation complements and extends some concepts of narrative reception familiar to Homeric studies (the Epic Illusion, Vividness, and Enchantment) are considered, as are the ways in which the psychological theories might be adjusted to accommodate Homeric epic. A major claim is drawn from these theories that transportation fundamentally affects the audience’s interpretation of and responses to the narrative; this claim is tested both theoretically and empirically in terms of ambiguous characterization of Odysseus and the Kyklōps Polyphēmos in the ninth book of the Odyssey. Last, some consideration is given to the ways in which the theory (and its underlying empirical research) might be extended.

<p>The purpose of our study was to examine how missing children are portrayed in media. We wanted to see if there are any recurring story patterns and characters in the texts. We also wanted to examine how the relationship between children and adults are framed and which comprehensive view of children is mediated in journalistic texts.Our questions were: how do Swedish newspapers write about missing children? Which narrative pattern are there in the texts? How are children and adults represented in the texts? What relationship between children and adults are made visible in the texts? What a comprehensive approach to children is constructed in the texts?For this study, we used the media discourse, theories of representation, stereotypes and characters. And theories of narrative, dramatic turns and opposites.We chose to make three case studies in which children suddenly disappeared, the case of Bobby Äikiä, the case of Engla Höglund and the case of Sebastian Hedman. We analyzed 93 news articles from Swedish newspapers, which were published in connection with the events. Our method was discourse analysis. We examined the characters and relationships between them, and looked at the dramaturgical construction of the articles.In our conclusion we established that the children are portrayed as helpless and weak in contrary to the adults, who are portrayed as strong and as they who are in power. The mothers of these children all play a major part in these articles while their fathers are made invisible. These texts contribute to a discourse about the vulnerability for the children.  The texts construction of children mediates an image that says that children are helpless, innocent and unprotected. Children are represented as an inferior group to adults, and without authority in the society.</p>

The two-body problem consists of determining the motion of two gravitationally interacting bodies with given masses and initial velocities. The problem was first solved by Isaac Newton in 1687 using geometric arguments. In this thesis, we present selected parts of Newton's solution together with an alternative geometric solution by Richard Feynman and a modern solution using differential calculus. All three solutions rely on the three laws of Newton and treat the two bodies as point masses; they differ in their approach to the the three laws of Kepler and to the inverse-square force law. Whereas the geometric solutions aim to prove some of these laws, the modern solution provides a method for calculating the positions and velocities given their initial values. It is notable that Newton in his most famous work Principia, where the general law of gravity and the solution to the two-body problem are presented, used mathematics that is not widely studied today. One might ask if today's low emphasis on classical geometry and conic sections affects our understanding of classical mechanics and calculus.

Bakgrund och problem: Under 1980-talet riktades hård kritik mot  konomistyrningen i den såkallade ”Relevance Lost” - debatten. Kritiken styrdes senare mer specifikt mot budgeten, där kritiker som Jan Wallander (1995) samt Hope &amp; Fraser (2003) menade att budgeteringen tillförde lite värde i modern affärsverksamhet och att den borde avskaffas helt. Trots kritiken visar nyare studier av Ekholm &amp; Wallin (2000) samt Libby &amp; Lindsay (2009) att majoriteten av företag fortfarande använder sig av budget som en viktig del av sin ekonomistyrning trots att företagen är medvetna om budgetens nackdelar. Detta fenomen kallar vi för ”budgetparadoxen” och kan sammanfattas i studiens huvudfråga ”Varför lever budgeten och budgetsliknande processer vidare trots all kritik som riktats mot den?” Syfte: Studiens syfte är att beskriva och förklara hur två företag valt att hantera kritiken riktad mot den traditionella budgeteringn samt att konstruera en förklarande modell som visar hur budgeten kan ersättas eller utvecklas. Metod: En kvalitativ metod användes, baserad på semistrukturerade intervjuer med fyra respondenter i två fallföretag. Analys och slutsats: Med hjälp av studiens två fallföretag samlades information in om hur de hanterat kritikpunkter som riktats mot budgeten. Intressant var att se vilka komplement som användes till den traditionella budgeten och vilka anledningar man haft att behålla eller ersätta budgeten. De två fallföretagen ansågs inledningsvis befinna sig på var sin sida i frågan, där det ena företaget använder sig av traditionell budgetering medan det andra valt att överge budgeten helt. Vid en närmare analys av företagen kunde däremot flera likheter utskiljas. Analysen visade att inget av de två fallföretagen hade valt en tydligt ”antingen-eller” ståndpunkt i budgetfrågan, utan att de snarare liknar varandra vad gäller utformning av sina styrmedel. Analysen har mynnat ut i en förklarande modell som visar hur budgeten kan utvecklas eller kompletteras, där tre nya begrepp: ”budgetliknande processer”, ”utvecklad budgetering” samt ”situationsbaserad budgetering” formulerats. I slutsatsen poängteras att det inte finns någon standardutformning för budgetanvändningen i företag utan att företag snarare befinner sig någonstans mellan dessa begrepp beroende på vilka specifika verksamhetsförutsättningar och krav som ställs på ett företag.

The purpose of our study was to examine how missing children are portrayed in media. We wanted to see if there are any recurring story patterns and characters in the texts. We also wanted to examine how the relationship between children and adults are framed and which comprehensive view of children is mediated in journalistic texts.Our questions were: how do Swedish newspapers write about missing children? Which narrative pattern are there in the texts? How are children and adults represented in the texts? What relationship between children and adults are made visible in the texts? What a comprehensive approach to children is constructed in the texts?For this study, we used the media discourse, theories of representation, stereotypes and characters. And theories of narrative, dramatic turns and opposites.We chose to make three case studies in which children suddenly disappeared, the case of Bobby Äikiä, the case of Engla Höglund and the case of Sebastian Hedman. We analyzed 93 news articles from Swedish newspapers, which were published in connection with the events. Our method was discourse analysis. We examined the characters and relationships between them, and looked at the dramaturgical construction of the articles.In our conclusion we established that the children are portrayed as helpless and weak in contrary to the adults, who are portrayed as strong and as they who are in power. The mothers of these children all play a major part in these articles while their fathers are made invisible. These texts contribute to a discourse about the vulnerability for the children.  The texts construction of children mediates an image that says that children are helpless, innocent and unprotected. Children are represented as an inferior group to adults, and without authority in the society.

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On reading the biblical version of the Creation and Fall of Adam and Eve (Genesis ii-iii) we find that the presentation lends itself to two possible interpretations: on the one hand, we may regard the narrative as being a mere history of two lives; or, what is more likely, we may see in the report an attempt to explain the present state of the World through an allegorical account of the entrance of evil into the mind of Man and so into the Macrocosm. [...]

Mental stress resulting from a traumatic event in the workplace has a noteworthy impact on employees. Psychological debriefing is offered to TTC employees as a means of immediate trauma support, however, the usefulness of the intervention is unknown. This thesis explores the debriefing intervention using a mixed methods approach. TTC employees who have experienced a traumatic event were recruited. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptom development and time lost from work were compared between debriefed and not debriefed employees. In addition, purposively selected employees were qualitatively interviewed. The quantitative analysis showed no significant differences in PTSD symptomatology or lost time from work between the groups. Despite these results, however, employees who were debriefed had an overall positive perception of the intervention. Further exploration in this area of study would be beneficial to not only the TTC, but to all workplaces at high risk of exposure to traumatic events.