This dissertation analogically applies a framework of minor literary analysis to uniquely political units of the built environment. As urbanism is conventionally understood to be executed per the greatest utility of established communal objectives, an underlying politicization is inherent as such forms must adhere to dominant norms of development which potentially marginalize those who practice cultural methods outside normative standards. Employing a uniquely architectural method of environmental justice advocacy, select communities facing disenfranchisement react by self-producing urban-architectural forms ("UAFs") to protect threatened cultural values from marginalization. Installed to subvert the existing power dynamic, such UAFs are potential exhibitions of minor architecture. Adopting the analytical standards established by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari for evaluating Franz Kafka's literature, this paper tests six UAFs to discover if a minor architecture is possible under contemporary globalization. Employing an enumerated framework of minor production characteristics, an interpretive-historical analysis is the primary method of judgment regarding each unit's execution of minor architecture. Two secondary tests are undertaken to validate the primary findings, the first of which is a physio-logical evaluation that characterizes and measures urban resource utility as per collective minority aims. Second, a newspaper correlation test is undertaken so as to judge the enunciative effectiveness of each community per issues of minority politics. Of the six cases examined, two have their source in cinema including "Bartertown" of MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985) and the "House on Paper Street" of FIGHT CLUB (1999). The four remaining cases include the Tibetan Government-in-Exile of Dharamsala, India; Student Bonfire of Robertson County, Texas; Isla Vista Recreation & Park District of Santa Barbara County, California; and the Emergent Cannabis Community of Arcata, California. Of all the cases studied, only the Tibetan Government-in-Exile met both the conditions of minor architecture and was validated in terms of practiced urban resource use as well as effective representation in mainstream newsprint. Both cinematic cases failed as minor productions of the built environment. Although they did not find full validation, the three remaining real-world UAFs each were found on a course of minor architectural expression at varying stages of execution.

A foundation of our welfare state is that we have a social safety net. This safety net is designed to pick up individuals who are in need of help and support to manage their way of life. This essay regards people who need help with care or people who need help with an addiction. This essay is a qualitative text analysis, which aims to see whether, and if so how, help-seekers are constructed in 40 social service documents within a municipality in central Sweden. We have endeavored to illustrate the power that the written word possesses and which categories of people are constructed depending on the language and content of the social documents. With our theoretical starting point, which was marginalization and social constructivism we want to illustrate the administrators’ choice of content and language in the social service documents. The main result is that help-seekers in the addiction unit have to give more information about themselves. Addiction is a deviate behavior and therefore more information is needed in order for them to be accepted as opposed to help-seekers in the care unit, where information regarding the help-seeker is in relation to the means of the help-seekers needs.

This thesis investigates the use of an auxiliary sensor, the GEMS device, for improving the quality of noisy speech and designing noise preprocessors to MELP speech coders. Use of auxiliary sensors for noise-robust ASR applications is also investigated to develop speech enhancement algorithms that use acoustic-phonetic properties of the speech signal. A Bayesian risk minimization framework is developed that can incorporate the acoustic-phonetic properties of speech sounds and knowledge of human auditory perception into the speech enhancement framework. Two noise suppression systems are presented using the ideas developed in the mathematical framework. In the first system, an aharmonic comb filter is proposed for voiced speech where low-energy frequencies are severely suppressed while high-energy frequencies are suppressed mildly. The proposed system outperformed an MMSE estimator in subjective listening tests and DRT intelligibility test for MELP-coded noisy speech. The effect of aharmonic comb filtering on the linear predictive coding (LPC) parameters is analyzed using a missing data approach. Suppressing the low-energy frequencies without any modification of the high-energy frequencies is shown to improve the LPC spectrum using the Itakura-Saito distance measure. The second system combines the aharmonic comb filter with the acoustic-phonetic properties of speech to improve the intelligibility of the MELP-coded noisy speech. Noisy speech signal is segmented into broad level sound classes using a multi-sensor automatic segmentation/classification tool, and each sound class is enhanced differently based on its acoustic-phonetic properties. The proposed system is shown to outperform both the MELPe noise preprocessor and the aharmonic comb filter in intelligibility tests when used in concatenation with the MELP coder. Since the second noise suppression system uses an automatic segmentation/classification algorithm, exploiting the GEMS signal in an automatic segmentation/classification task is also addressed using an ASR approach. Current ASR engines can segment and classify speech utterances in a single pass; however, they are sensitive to ambient noise. Features that are extracted from the GEMS signal can be fused with the noisy MFCC features to improve the noise-robustness of the ASR system. In the first phase, a voicing feature is extracted from the clean speech signal and fused with the MFCC features. The actual GEMS signal could not be used in this phase because of insufficient sensor data to train the ASR system. Tests are done using the Aurora2 noisy digits database. The speech-based voicing feature is found to be effective at around 10 dB but, below 10 dB, the effectiveness rapidly drops with decreasing SNR because of the severe distortions in the speech-based features at these SNRs. Hence, a novel system is proposed that treats the MFCC features in a speech frame as missing data if the global SNR is below 10 dB and the speech frame is unvoiced. If the global SNR is above 10 dB of the speech frame is voiced, both MFCC features and voicing feature are used. The proposed system is shown to outperform some of the popular noise-robust techniques at all SNRs. In the second phase, a new isolated monosyllable database is prepared that contains both speech and GEMS data. ASR experiments conducted for clean speech showed that the GEMS-based feature, when fused with the MFCC features, decreases the performance. The reason for this unexpected result is found to be partly related to some of the GEMS data that is severely noisy. The non-acoustic sensor noise exists in all GEMS data but the severe noise happens rarely. A missing data technique is proposed to alleviate the effects of severely noisy sensor data. The GEMS-based feature is treated as missing data when it is detected to be severely noisy. The combined features are shown to outperform the MFCC features for clean speech when the missing data technique is applied.

Why do some people in Halifax, Nova Scotia work collecting recyclables rather than in other—more formal—means of employment? Some scholars argue that informal economic activity is the product of a shift towards flexible work regimes and reductions to the social welfare system (the informalization thesis) and/or that increasingly marginalized people are forced into informal economic activities by economic necessity (the marginalization thesis). Drawing on a close analysis of provincial and municipal recycling policies and ethnographic fieldwork with informal recyclers, I argue that the informalization and marginalization theses are based on overly deterministic models of informal employment. Demand for informal recycling in Halifax is supported by a complex raft of environmental legislation designed to increase the rate of recycling. People willingly choose informal recycling as an alternative to formal employment for various reasons, but above all because it offers a tax-free, honest living, autonomy and a decent income.

This thesis is focused on the role of a pediatric nurse in the care of overweight and obese adolescents. A pediatric nurse plays a key role in promoting the health of children and adolescents in primary care. A nurse is in many cases the first person the family or a child confide their worries and health concerns in. A pediatric nurse is a person whose professional focus is determined by the needs of children; he or she is an expert who should seize every opportunity for consultation on healthy lifestyles of children and parents; he or she is an essential and irreplaceable member of the team caring for a child or an adolescent (Sikorová, 2012). This thesis consists of two parts. The theoretical part is focused on obesity itself, it describes pathogenesis, complications and consequences, as well as prevention and treatment. In the next chapter we focus on the role of the nurse in the pediatrician's office. There we described the role of nurses in the examination of an obese or overweight adolescent, the awareness of a nurse and adolescent in the field of childhood obesity, the principles of communication of nurses with the obese adolescent and his or her education. At the end of the theoretical part the psychosocial impacts on obese adolescents, such as social isolation, discrimination and the risk of developing eating disorders, are described. The second half of the thesis is empirical. Research was carried out in two ways. The first part of the research was realized in the form of a quantitative survey, in which nurses in general pediatricians offices were approached using electronic questionnaires. The questions in the questionnaire were focused on the education of nurses in the field of childhood obesity, education of adolescents, cooperation with families and other professionals. The research group therefore consisted of pediatric nurses who pursue their profession in the Czech Republic. In the second part of the research the method of questioning, namely the interview technique was used. It was a semi-structured interview with obese adolescents. Each interview consisted of 24 questions and lasted an average of 20 - 25 minutes. Interviews with adolescents were focused on the knowledge of the term Body Mass Index, health and psychological consequences, their personal lives, relationships with peers and partners, the possibility of using the services of a nutritional consultant. We contacted 15 respondents aged 16 to 20 years, all were from South Bohemia. In case of minor adolescents parental agreement with the research had to be acquired. The questionnaire was accessible online and its completion was not time consuming; however out of approximately 400 distributed questionnaires only 154 returned fully completed. The return of questionnaires was approximately 40 % and reflects the ratio of completed and mailed questionnaires. At the beginning two goals were set. The purpose of the first objective was to explore the role of nurses in the approach to obese adolescents. The results showed that nurses are trying to educate themselves in the field of child obesity, they are interested in the issue of childhood obesity, what is more they are trying to educate the overweight adolescents in good nutrition. Furthermore, they also aim to cooperate with the child's family and even with other professionals, such as an endocrinologist, cardiologist, nutritionist etc. The second objective was to determine how obese adolescents perceive themselves. Opinions obviously differed, some children did not admit to being overweight/obese, while others saw themselves as the "fatsoes", "whales" ugly and useless, and that nothing suits them". Some suffer from depression, others try not trouble themselves with it. To fulfill the purpose of quantitative research 3 hypotheses were set. H1: Nurse educates adolescents about healthy eating. The hypothesis was statistically confirmed because research showed that nurses really do educate teenager.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:24:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2007-12-14Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:27:25Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 salandim_mem_me_rcla.pdf: 2002489 bytes, checksum: 86696317671a475aa79fb5846d7bd95b (MD5) / See-Sp / Neste trabalho, procuramos trazer para o âmbito acadêmico discussões referentes a uma modalidade de ensino que nele tem ocupado pouco espaço: o técnico agrícola. Utilizamos a História Oral como principal metodologia de pesquisa, além de visitas às escolas agrícolas focadas e consultas a documentos em seus arquivos, como antigos livros ponto e livros de ata. A partir de entrevistas com professores de Matemática que atuaram nesses núcleos de ensino nas décadas de 1950 a 1970, tentamos constituir uma história de sua formação em Matemática, suas formas de atuação, especificidades dessas escolas e inserção do discurso desses professores na história da Educação Matemática Brasileira, assumindo o conceito de marginalização como principal eixo para as análises. / This work intends to bring to academic universe a theme that has been usually neglected by researchers: the Agricultural Technical School system. Although Oral History was the main methodological approach chosen, visits to some of these schools were done and also written documentation was used as guides. Our starting point to this study was interviews with Math teachers who had lead classrooms in these schools from 50´s to 70´s. In these interviews they told us about their initial and in-service formation and about the agricultural technical schooling in general. From this we tried to inscribe Agricultural Technical School and its teachers in the discourse of History of Education in Brazil and, particularly, in the History of Brazilian Mathematics Education, assuming the concept of marginalization as the main axis in our analysis.

Orientador: Antonio Vicente Marafioti Garnica / Banca: Arlete de Jesus Brito / Banca: Maria Ângela Miorim / Resumo: Neste trabalho, procuramos trazer para o âmbito acadêmico discussões referentes a uma modalidade de ensino que nele tem ocupado pouco espaço: o técnico agrícola. Utilizamos a História Oral como principal metodologia de pesquisa, além de visitas às escolas agrícolas focadas e consultas a documentos em seus arquivos, como antigos livros ponto e livros de ata. A partir de entrevistas com professores de Matemática que atuaram nesses núcleos de ensino nas décadas de 1950 a 1970, tentamos constituir uma história de sua formação em Matemática, suas formas de atuação, especificidades dessas escolas e inserção do discurso desses professores na história da Educação Matemática Brasileira, assumindo o conceito de marginalização como principal eixo para as análises. / Abstract: This work intends to bring to academic universe a theme that has been usually neglected by researchers: the Agricultural Technical School system. Although Oral History was the main methodological approach chosen, visits to some of these schools were done and also written documentation was used as guides. Our starting point to this study was interviews with Math teachers who had lead classrooms in these schools from 50's to 70's. In these interviews they told us about their initial and in-service formation and about the agricultural technical schooling in general. From this we tried to inscribe Agricultural Technical School and its teachers in the discourse of History of Education in Brazil and, particularly, in the History of Brazilian Mathematics Education, assuming the concept of marginalization as the main axis in our analysis. / Mestre

This degree paper deals with the long-term unemployment of one of the most risk groups in the labour market {--} the single-parent mothers. It is a very current topic. Recently, the share of babies born to single-parent mothers has had a growing tendency and the divorce rate has been increasing. More often it is a woman rather than a man who heads the incomplete family. Lonely mothers have to face a difficult task. They have to cope with everyday care of their child on one side and to fulfil the duties of a family provider on the other side. For employers, a single-parent mother with a dependent child is problematic labour force with specific demands on working hours and higher probability of more frequent absences due to caring for a sick family member. These women are therefore willing to take ``worse{\crqq} job which does not correspond to their qualification and education. A lonely mother{\crq}s family is dependent on the income of one of the parents only. Although the father of the dependant has a duty to maintain and support his child as stipulated in the Family Act, he does no fulfil it quite often. Unemployment, especially lasting on a long-term basis, represents a significant social problem for a single-parent family. The standard of living is reduced, and the family has to face the threat of poverty, which is more significant as it regards the children as well. Long-term unemployed single-parent mothers are frequent beneficiaries of social benefits which allow them to survive on a subsistence level. Lonely mothers in this situation chose various strategies to secure alternative income, or take various money-saving measures. They often seek and find help in informal social networks which seem to be very important in such situations. Consequences of long-term unemployment can be a cause of social exclusion. Theoretical part of this degree paper maps the life situation of single-parent mothers with regard to their specific chances of assertion on the labour market. It further deals with the offers of child day care services and the system of support from the state. It also informs of the employment policy measures and flexible forms of employment as a means to harmonize the areas of the work and the family. The degree paper also contains information on the pro-family measures being prepared and approved by the government in November 2008. The research part of the degree paper is focused on identification of the attitudes and strategies of long-term unemployed mothers.

Detta är en diskursanalytisk studie med ett antaget genusteoretiskt perspektiv, som undersöker hur kvinnor inom de abrahamitiska religionerna framställs i tre utvalda läromedel för gymnasiekursen religion 1. Samtliga av läromedlen är anpassade för lgy11. Vidare undersöks vilka egenskaper kvinnan tillskrivs, samt var hon synliggörs och marginaliseras i läromedlen. Genom det genusteoretiska perspektivet, vilket nyttjats för analysen av det empiriska resultatet kan vi både visa vad synliggörandet och marginaliseringen beror på, samt se vad det bidrar till. Studiens resultat visar att läromedlen genom ett genusteoretiskt perspektiv framställer kvinnan och mannen utifrån dikotoma föreställningar om vad som är kvinnligt respektive manligt. Kvinnan framställs således som passiv medan mannen framställs som aktiv. Resultatet visar även att kvinnan marginaliseras när det skrivs om religionens historia, medan hon synliggörs i de textsammanhang som berör hennes villkor, samt hem-och familjeliv. Nyckelord: Kvinnan, abrahamitiska religionerna, diskurs, genusteori, genus, läroboksanalys, marginalisering / This is a discourse-analytic study with an adopted gender theoretical perspective regarding how women within the Abrahamic religions are described in three selected teaching materials for upper secondary school (Religion 1). All books are adapted to Lgy11. Furthermore, an analysis is made of what way women are characterized in the material, as well as where they are visible and marginalized. With help from the gender theoretical perspective, which has been utilized to analyze the results of the empirical study, it is possible to understand the reasons for the visibility as well as the marginalization, and see what is contributes to. The result of this study shows that the teaching materials, through a gender theoretical perspective, depict men and women based on the dichotomy of what is considered female or male. Hence, women are described as passive, whereas men are described as active. The result also shows that women are marginalized when the history of religions is being described while they are visible in the textual contexts of home and family life, as well as their conditions. Key words: Women, Abrahamic religions, discourse, gender theory, gender, textbook analysis, marginalization

The aim of this essay is to critically consider Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things from a postcolonial feminist perspective, with a special focus on how she models different representations of women, taking as a background the discussions within postcolonial feminism about subalternity and the representations of women from the so-called Third World in theory and literature, as well as the concept of agency from Cultural Studies. This purpose is reached by studying and comparing three main female characters in the novel: Mammachi, Baby Kochamma and Ammu, centering on their different ways of relating to the male hero of the novel, Velutha, an Untouchable in the lingering caste system of India. The essay argues that Roy has contributed with diverse representations of subaltern women in the ‘Third World’ who—despite their oppressed and marginalized status—display agency and are portrayed as responsible for their own actions.