Recently, sexting has gained popularity in both popular press and academic publications. Despite the prevalence of this communicative behavior, there is limited research that focuses on a theoretical explanation as well as how it can potentially enhance relationships. The purpose of this dissertation was threefold: to utilize the multiple goals theoretical perspective to examine sender goals when sexting, to assess if multiple goals within sexting was associated with relational behaviors and outcomes, and to develop a reliable and valid scale for sexting goals. A two-phase study was implemented. In phase 1, participants provided actual sexting messages they had recently sent to another person, and also provided their goal when they sent that particular message. Participants also answered scales related to relationship, communication, and sexual satisfaction, affectionate communication, and relational maintenance behaviors. Analytic coding was utilized for the open-ended responses regarding message content and goals, and the researcher also used the responses to develop participant- and theoretically-driven scales. Nine themes were identified for the type of goal participants had when sending sext messages. For phase 2, the proposed scale for the multiple goals of sexting was added to the preexisting survey. The researcher coded 204 sexting messages provided by participants as instrumental, relational, or identity goals and conducted multiple regressions to assess how the type of goal influenced each of the five relational outcomes. Multiple regressions revealed no significant associations among multiple goals and outcomes. Finally, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the proposed scale for the multiple goals of sexting. The EFA revealed a four-factor solution and the CFA demonstrated factorial validity for the scale. Post hoc analysis revealed significant associations for the goals from the scale and the relational outcomes. The results of this dissertation demonstrate that multiple goals are utilized in the context of sexting, and that specific goals are important for relational outcomes.

The thesis studies the literacy practices of a group of young people in Närpes in southern Ostrobothnia, Finland with focus on SMS (Short Message Service), both in Standard Swedish and in dialect, but for the most part written in dialect. The aim of the investigation is to describe this writing as a social marker (young people against adults) and its function as an identity act. In addition the study investigates the orthographic norms and conventions that the young people use in their writing. The material consists of 520 SMS and such material as was collected through inquiries and interviews. In Närpes, as in many other Finland Swedish dialect areas, the dialect has got widened areas of usage and is well established and accepted in more domains than before. It is used in the new media and is thereby also gaining larger scope in public space. This also applies to writing SMS in dialect. The theoretical points of departure are taken from sociolinguistics and literacy research. A central concept is the new writing, i.e. writing in electronic media such as e.g. SMS and e-mail, which are somewhere between speech and writing. This has given speech and writing new forms with new preconditions, forms that the new media have “triggered” forth and that the language is adapting itself to. In the first investigative chapter (Ch. 3) eleven literacy practices divided into five groups are analysed: I electronic literacy practices (SMS, e-mail, chat), II hand-written slips of paper (reminder slips, purchase lists, slips to parents and friends respectively), III picture postcards and letters, IV diaries and V school assignments. The informants participate with one exception, group V, in all literacy practices in dialect to a greater or lesser extent. The second investigative chapter (Ch. 4) accounts for the dialect features, diphthongs and consonant combinations that were concretely investigated in the SMS material. The young people’s writing in dialect is functional and shows that the dialect is an important identity marker. The lack of shared conventions for spelling is not conceived of as a problem but allows everyone to create their own conventions, which in its turn has resulted in the tolerance level for variations in orthography being high. One group think that they write as it sounds, while another think that they do not follow any rules. The dialect is reserved for everyday matters, while Standard Swedish is used in more formal writing situations. The literacy practice may be the same, but the choice of language variety varies with the aim, content and length.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether or not Public Service Announcements (PSAs) were an effective tool at modifying young adults’ perception of the r-word (the word “retard” or “retarded”). The PSAs included in this study were part of the Special Olympics’ “Spread the Word to End the Word” campaign. This study examined the efficacy of these PSAs by comparing three groups’ perception of the r-word: experimental group 1 who watched a PSA titled “It’s Not Acceptable” (PSA 1 group), experimental group 2 who watched a PSA titled “We Need a New R-word” (PSA 2 group), and a third control group who watched no PSA. The purpose of the control group was to gain a baseline of how today’s young adults perceived the r-word with no influence from PSAs. Six hundred and seventy-five participants were randomly assigned to one of the three groups. The two experimental groups watched their respective PSAs and completed the survey materials comprised of a consent form, their affective and cognitive responses to the PSA, their ratings of the r-word and their demographic information. The control group watched no PSA but completed the survey materials comprised of a consent form, their ratings of the r-word and their demographic information. This study then examined what the differences were between the three groups’ perception of the r-word. It was hypothesized that PSA 1 group would have a more negative perception of the r-word than PSA 2 group and the control group, due to PSA 1’s framing the r-word as similar to other minority slurs, and using affect to facilitate message acceptance. The PSA 1 group participants thought more about the argument within their PSA, and rated higher affective responses to their PSA, when compared to the PSA 2 group; however, PSA 1 group did not have a more negative perception of the r-word than the other two groups. Results found that the PSA 2 group perceived the r-word as significantly less respectful than the participants in the control group. These findings are discussed in terms of message design for future PSAs regarding the r-word

A message oriented middleware inter-process communication library called Nora has been designed, constructed, and validated. The library is written in C++. The middleware is designed to bridge two of the main messaging standards, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and the Data Distribution Service (DDS), by enabling communications for (1) computationally intensive distributed systems that typically follow a master-slave design and (2) general data distribution. The design is original and does not borrow from either specification. The library can be statically linked to application code so that the library is part of each application in a distributed system. The implementation for master-slave messaging has not yet been completed, but the great majority of the work is done; the general data distribution model has been fully implemented. The design is critically evaluated.A key aspect of the library is configurability. Various characteristics of the messaging library, such as the number of message producer and consumer threads, the message types serviced by each thread, the types of communication mechanisms, and others are specified through a configuration file. Consequently, the library has only to be built once for all applications in a distributed system and communications for each application are tailored through a unique configuration file. The library application programmer interface (API) is structured so that communications details can be isolated from the application code and therefore applications are not affected by changes to the IPC configuration.Beyond its use for the two classifications of problems listed above, it is also suited for use by system architects that are investigating resource requirements and designs for new systems because applications can be reconfigured quickly for different communications behavior on different platforms through the configuration file. Thus, it is useful for prototyping and performance evaluation.

Single-Request/Multiple-Response (SRMR) is an important messaging exchange pattern because it can be used to model many real world problems elegantly. However, SRMR messaging is not directly supported by Web services, and, since it requires Callback to function it is hampered by current in-practice security schemes, such as firewalls and proxy servers. In this thesis, a framework will be proposed to support SRMR and Callback in the context of Web services and the realities of network security. The central component of the proposed solution is a Clearinghouse Web service (CWS), which serves as a communication proxy and realizes the correlation of responses with requests. One and only one CWS will be needed per enterprise that wishes to handle any number of SRMR Web services and their respective clients. Using the framework and related code generation utilities, a non-trivial case study, a Purchase Order System, has been implemented.

Background: E-commerce is widespread in today’s shopping routines and conversational commerce (CC) as an expansion, aims at integrating customers and businesses on a whole new level. Through the application of chatbots fueled by artificial intelligence, a more personal and individual way of remote shopping is offered. Purpose: Our research question What potential attributes of AI-fueled CC applications and their possible inherent characteristics are determining the willingness to use them and to what extent, in the context of digital natives living in Sweden and Germany? aims at identifying the demanded attributes of conversational commerce from a consumer perspective. Method: We facilitate a quantitative questionnaire with 118 valid answers to administer a traditional full-profile conjoint analysis. Conclusion: Our results indicate that German digital natives deem a CC application’s behavior as the most important attribute, followed by payment method, personality and communication form (voice or text). The Swedish digital natives however, attach the most importance to the payment method, followed by behavior, communication form and personality. Both have in common that they prefer a rather passive behavior over being actively approached, a personality that is balanced between humor and seriousness and text-based communication over voice. A difference is the Swedish preference for direct in-app payment while German digital natives would select a redirection to a secondary payment provider (e.g. PayPal).

Today’s embedded systems require more and more performance but they are still required to meet power constraints. Single processor systems can deliver high performance but this leads to high power consumption. One solution to this problem is to use a multiprocessor system instead which is able to provide high performance and at the same time meet the power constraints. The reason that such a system can meet the power constraints is that it can have a lower clock frequency than a similar single processor system. The focus of the project is to explore possibilities when developing new multiprocessor systems. The project makes a comparison of asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) systems and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems in terms of task management and communication between the processors. A comparison is made between the Advanced High-performance Bus (AHB) interface and the Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI). The fixed priority and round-robin arbitration algorithms is also compared. The project also contains a practical part where a demo is developed to show that an inter-processor communication using exclusive access is possible to implement. The theoretical part of the project containing the comparisons result in good comparisons that can be used to get an overview of what to use when developing new Multiprocessor System on Chip (MPSoC) designs. The demo developed in this project failed to meet the requirement of having a fully functional spinlock. This problem can be solved in the future if new hardware is developed. / Dagens inbyggda system kräver mer och mer prestanda men de måste fortfarande klara av kraven kring strömförbrukning. System med en processor kan leverera hög prestanda men detta leder till hög strömförbrukning. En lösning till detta problem är att använda ett multiprocessorsystem istället som klarar av att leverera hög prestanda och samtidigt klara av kraven kring strömförbrukning. Anledningen till att denna typ av system klarar av kraven kring strömförbrukning är att de kan använda en lägre klockfrekvens än ett system med en processor. Fokuset på detta projektet ligger på att utforska möjligheterna som finns när nya multiprocessorsystem ska utvecklas. Projektet gör en jämförelse mellan asymmetriska och symmetriska multiprocessorsystem i termer av uppgiftshantering och kommunikation mellan processorerna. En jämförelse har gjorts mellan Advanced High-Performance Bus (AHB) gränssnittet och Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI) gränssnittet. Fixed priority och round-robin algoritmerna för hantering av krockar mellan processorerna har också jämförts. Det finns även en praktisk del i projektet där en demo har utvecklats för att visa en fungerande kommunikation mellan processorer som använder funktionaliteten för exklusiv åtkomst till den gemensamma bussen. Den teoretiska delen av projektet som innehåller jämförelserna resulterar i bra jämförelser som kan användas när nya multiprocessorsystem utvecklas. Demon som har utvecklats i detta projekt misslyckades med att klara av kravet kring att ha ett fullt fungerande lås. Detta problemet kan lösas i framtiden ifall ny hårdvara utvecklas.

The aim of this study was to explore the ranking model TrueSkill™ developed by Microsoft, applying it on various sports and constructing extensions to the model. Two different inference methods for TrueSkill was constructed using Gibbs sampling and message passing. Additionally, the sequential method using Gibbs sampling was successfully extended into a batch method, in order to eliminate game order dependency and creating a fairer, although computationally heavier, ranking system. All methods were further implemented with extensions for taking home team advantage, score difference and finally a combination of the two into consideration. The methods were applied on football (Premier League), ice hockey (NHL), and tennis (ATP Tour) and evaluated on the accuracy of their predictions before each game. On football, the extensions improved the prediction accuracy from 55.79% to 58.95% for the sequential methods, while the vanilla Gibbs batch method reached the accuracy of 57.37%. Altogether, the extensions improved the performance of the vanilla methods when applied on all data sets. The home team advantage performed better than the score difference on both football and ice hockey, while the combination of the two reached the highest accuracy. The Gibbs batch method had the highest prediction accuracy on the vanilla model for all sports. The results of this study imply that TrueSkill could be considered a useful ranking model for other sports as well, especially if tuned and implemented with extensions suitable for the particular sport.

Media usage, as well as media advertising, is growing in tandem with each other. Media users will, regardless of which medium that is in use, encounter a considerable amount of advertising. As we are moving towards a more digitized world, and also a more digitized media sphere, a new communication landscape has been formed. The digitalization has provided new ways to communicate and also new ways to advertise. Now there is not only possible to advertise through traditional offline media channels, such as radio and television, but also possible to advertise through online media, such as Facebook and Instagram. Personalized advertising is an advertising format which has evolved with the growth of online advertising and the ability to collect media users’ data online. Personalized advertisements are formed to comply with the media users’ preferences and have been proven to be effective and in some cases appreciated. Though, this form of advertisements has brought up concerns regarding the media users’ integrity online and previous research does, therefore, claim that personalized advertising is a paradox. Furthermore, a question that can be asked regarding advertising and the new communication landscape that has emerged is: what can be said about media users’ attitudes towards advertising online compared to advertising offline? The purpose of this study is to examine media users’ attitudes towards advertising online, compared to attitudes towards advertising offline, and further investigate whether the mediums themselves seem to have an impact on the receiver’s attitudes towards advertising. The study’s three research questions compose the structure which is followed throughout the study. Furthermore, to answer the research questions, a survey has been implemented. The survey intended to investigate media users’ attitudes towards advertisements online and offline. The theories the study is based on are Marshall McLuhan’s theory The Medium is the Message, The advertising value model by Ducoffe and Personalization. Based on the study’s theory and theoretical framework, the result was analyzed and discussed. The result of the study shows that media users’ attitudes towards advertising are overall rather similar, regardless of age, gender and political position. Further, a pattern that shows connections between media users’ self-reported awareness, their consent of data collection and their appreciation of personalized advertising online was found. The study further examines differences between attitudes towards different mediums, however, we can conclude that the mediums themselves have been proven to not be determinant in media users’ attitudes towards advertising - the experiences of advertising are rather negative regardless of where the media user encounters them. This study contributes with information and insight regarding media users’ attitudes towards advertising in different mediums, further, how media users stand regarding online privacy and concession with data collection in relation to their attitudes towards personalized advertising.

Thesis advisor: Lynn Lyerly / Based in 1960s Detroit, the Motown Record Company established itself and thrived as an independently run and successful African American business. Amidst humble origins in a two-story house outside of which Berry Gordy hung the sign, "Hitsville USA," Motown encouraged America's youth, urging them to look beyond racial divides and to simply sing and dance together in a time where the theme of unity was becoming increasingly important. Producing legends such as Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Martha Reeves, Gladys Knight, and the Jackson Five, Motown truly created a new sound for the youth of America and helped shape the 1960s. Competing with the "British Invasion" and "the Protest Movement," in 1960s music, Motown is often said to have had little or no impact on the political and social revolution of the time because Motown did not produce "message music." The 2006 film, Dreamgirls even depicts Gordy and Motown as hypocrites and race traitors. Yet Motown embodied one of the principles the Civil Rights Movement preached most: black success and independence. Although the founder of Motown, Berry Gordy, never had the intention of proclaiming a message of black independence and empowerment through his actions of establishing an independent record company, he accomplished one of the goals of the Civil Rights Movement: black economic independence. The establishment and success of Motown was an intrinsically political act that served as proof to Civil Rights claims that African Americans could be just as independent and successful as whites. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: History Honors Program.