Les tombes royales et les tombes de prestige sont spécifiques d’une partie de la communauté détenant un pouvoir régional ou local. Dans le contexte du Bronze Ancien en Mésopotamie et en Syrie, l’étude archéologique a permis de distinguer les tombes de prestige des autres tombes selon trois critères principaux : l’architecture monumentale, la localisation topographique et le matériel funéraire déposés dans les tombes. Ces traits constituent un ensemble de signes complexes intégré dans un discours idéologique. L’étude a eu pour objectif de replacer les pratiques funéraires dans la société et les pratiques rituelles et sociales du pouvoir. Une perspective anthropologique apportée au sujet des tombes royales et de prestige a permis de mettre en évidence comment les pratiques funéraires sont un instrument institutionnel de manipulation idéologique, intégrées dans un discours social et politique structuré. Comme d’autres moments centraux de la société, les pratiques funéraires sont des pratiques rituelles et sociales qui jouent un rôle dans la représentation du pouvoir des élites et la structuration de la communauté. Elles permettent de reproduire et de maintenir l’équilibre social et de justifier le pouvoir des dites élites. / The royal tombs and the tombs of prestige are specific of a group detaining a regional power or local power. We have identified archaeological traits in the Syrian and Mesopotamian Early Bronze Age context which could distinguish the prestige tombs from the others. These formal features are the monumental architecture, the specific location of the prestige tombs and the group of graves associated, and the grave goods. The wealth of the deposition and the structure are characteristics of the prestige tombs and it constitutes complex signs integrated in an ideological discourse. Thus, an anthropological perspective has been essential to appreciate the social implication of the elite funerary practices. As others main events in the society, funerary practices of prestige are rituals and social practices which play a role in the representation of the elite power and in the structure of the society. The royal tombs and the tombs of prestige are social instruments of ideological manipulation; the funerary practices are integrated in social discourse through rituals in order to reproduce and maintain social structure and justify the elite power.

Thesis advisor: John Michalczyk / Why do we eat the foods that we do? This question is one that is not often considered by individuals as they go about their daily lives, but can have large implications on public health – for, there is a strong, physiological connection between food consumption and one’s health and wellbeing. Accordingly, when reflecting upon the health of a nation it is often important to consider its nutritional status. Ultimately, many determinants can contribute to how and why an individual eats certain foods, as can be seen in Ecuador. In this Latin American country, for instance, historical, socioeconomic, cultural, behavioral, socioeconomic, and environmental factors (among others) can be seen to influence the different diets – and by extension, the nutritional statuses – of different ethnic, regional, and geographic populations. Though common across Ecuador, discrepancies among these groups are particularly noticeable in the highland region, the Sierra. Overall, this paper examines the different forms of malnutrition, their implications on one’s health, and their prevalence across Ecuador. Additionally, it considers how the Ecuadorian diet was shaped, and how different subcuisines lend themselves to varying forms of malnutrition. Specifically, this paper focuses on the Sierra, given that levels of malnutrition are noticeably higher in this region, and that this highland area is home to large rural and indigenous communities who are most significantly impacted by the region’s nutritional conditions. / Thesis (BS) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Arts and Sciences Honors Program. / Discipline: .

Ausgehend vom Rahmenmodell zur Persönlichkeitsentwicklung von Schüler/inne/n nach Pekrun/Helmke (1991), der „Eingrenzungs- und Kompromisstheorie der Berufswahl“ von Gottfredson (2005) und der Typologie des Aufbaus von Berufsidentitäten Fends (1991) wird der Berufsfindungsprozess von Schüler/inne/n der Grundschule (Kl. 5) bis in die Sekundarstufe (Kl. 9) untersucht. Analysiert werden die Berufswünsche von 600 bis 3000 Befragten und ausgewählte Variablen des längsschnittlichen Datensatzes der DFG-Projekte NOVARA, SABA und AIDA (geleitet von Prof. Dr. Renate Valtin). Es werden zwei Fragestellungen verfolgt: (1) Ist die Berufswahltheorie von Gottfredson geeignet, empirisch verifiziert die früh zu beobachtende geschlechtsspezifische Weichenstellungen in der beruflichen Orientierung fundiert zu erklären? (2) Lassen sich Zusammenhänge zwischen einer krisenhaften Bewältigung der Entwicklungsaufgabe „Berufswahl“ und der Entwicklung ausgewählter schulleistungsrelevanter Persönlichkeitsmerkmale nachweisen? Wenn ja, ab wann? Die Analysen bestätigten die Forschungsbefunde zur Geschlechtstypik der beruflichen Interessenorientierung, zum Wandel vom „Traumberuf“ zum realistischen Berufswunsch sowie zu Schwankungen der Häufigkeit geäußerter Berufswünsche in Abhängigkeit von Klassenstufe und Schulform. Des Weiteren bestätigte sich die in der Berufswahltheorie von Gottfredson beschriebene Bedeutung der Kategorie „Geschlecht“ für die Präferenz bestimmter Berufswünsche, des noch akzeptierten Prestiges der Berufswünsche und des mit der Realisierung und Ausübung des gewünschten Berufs verbundenen noch zu bewältigenden kognitiven Anspruchs. Zusammenhänge zwischen der Entwicklung schulleistungsrelevanter Persönlichkeitsmerkmale ab dem Grundschulalter und einer krisenhaften Bewältigung der Entwicklungsaufgabe „Entwicklung einer beruflichen Orientierung“ in der Sekundarstufe I konnten in Bezug auf die allgemeine Schulfreude der männlichen Befragten nachgewiesen werden. / Based on Rahmenmodell zur Persönlichkeitsentwicklung von Schüler/inne/n by Pekrun and Helmke (1991), "Eingrenzungs- und Kompromisstheorie der Berufswahl" Gottfredson (2005) and Typologie des Aufbaus von Berufsidentitäten Fends (1991), the career choice process of primary school students (Class 5) to secondary school (Class 9) is examined longitudinally. The career desires of 600 to 3000 subjects are examined longitudinally, along with selected variables of the longitudinal dataset from the DFG projects NOVARA, SABA and AIDA (led by Prof. Dr. Renate Valtin). Two questions are considered: (1) is the ''Circumscription und Compromise Theory'' according to Gottfredson suitable for explaining the empirically verified gender-specific directions in career orientation, which can be observed early, on a theoretical basis? (2) Can interconnections between a critical mastering of the development task "career selection" and the development of selected school performance-related personality attributes be demonstrated? If yes, from when? Analyses confirm the gender-specification of career orientation, about the change from "dream job" to realistic career choice and about the fluctuations in frequency of stated career desires depending on school year and type of school. Moreover, the importance of the category "gender" described in the "circumscription and compromise theory" of career choice by Gottfredson is confirmed for the preference of certain career desires, of the still accepted prestige of the career desires and of the cognitive requirement yet to be mastered in conjunction with the realisation and exercise of the desired profession. Connections between the development of school performance-relevant personality attributes from primary school age and a critical mastering of the development task "development of a career orientation" in Sekundarstufe I (equivalent to Key Stage 3) could be demonstrated with regard to general happiness at school of the male subjects.

Today, assessment of the health of coastal waters is recognized as being important for both the conservation of nature and well-being of humans. Anthropogenic pollution has been the focus of extensive research for some time and a variety of programs for the monitoring and assessment of environmental pollution have been developed. Determination of the levels of pollution in sensitive ‘sentinels’ such as mussels, allows monitoring of these levels in a given area over a prolonged period of time. Furthermore, the biological effects of pollution are reflected in a series of biomarkers, none of which provides a general picture of the sentinel’s state of health and all of which are individually specific for certain pollutants and influenced by both biotic and abiotic factors. In an attempt to improve biomonitoring of marine pollution, we have developed two proteomic approaches here. In the first portion of the thesis, a proteomic analysis was performed on peroxisomes isolated from mussels exposed either to one of three model anthropogenic pollutants, or two different types of crude oil, or from mussels exposed to the Prestige oil spill. Application of two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) provided protein expression signatures (PES) for exposure to these different pollutants.Furthermore, several individual protein components of these PES could be putatively identified. In the second portion of this work, such analysis of subproteomes was developed further in order to improve the applicability of this approach to biomonitoring. A simple fractionation procedure in combination with liquid chromatography and 2-DE provided samples from mussels residing in different regions of a pollution gradient around the harbor of Gothenburg, as well as from mussels exposed to two types of fuel oil similar to that of the Prestige that were suitable for environmental proteomics. In addition, we constructed a model for this approach that can be cross-validated in the future and applied to assess sources of fuel oil pollution in connection with biomonitoring programs.

The World Wide Web has become a medium for people to share information. People use Web-based collaborative tools such as question answering (QA) portals, blogs/forums, email and instant messaging to acquire information and to form online-based communities. In an online QA portal, a user asks a question and other users can provide answers based on their knowledge, with the question usually being answered by many users. It can become overwhelming and/or time/resource consuming for a user to read all of the answers provided for a given question. Thus, there exists a need for a mechanism to rank the provided answers so users can focus on only reading good quality answers. The majority of online QA systems use user feedback to rank users’ answers and the user who asked the question can decide on the best answer. Other users who didn’t participate in answering the question can also vote to determine the best answer. However, ranking the best answer via this collaborative method is time consuming and requires an ongoing continuous involvement of users to provide the needed feedback. The objective of this research is to discover a way to recommend the best answer as part of a ranked list of answers for a posted question automatically, without the need for user feedback. The proposed approach combines both a non-content-based reputation method and a content-based method to solve the problem of recommending the best answer to the user who posted the question. The non-content method assigns a score to each user which reflects the users’ reputation level in using the QA portal system. Each user is assigned two types of non-content-based reputations cores: a local reputation score and a global reputation score. The local reputation score plays an important role in deciding the reputation level of a user for the category in which the question is asked. The global reputation score indicates the prestige of a user across all of the categories in the QA system. Due to the possibility of user cheating, such as awarding the best answer to a friend regardless of the answer quality, a content-based method for determining the quality of a given answer is proposed, alongside the non-content-based reputation method. Answers for a question from different users are compared with an ideal (or expert) answer using traditional Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing techniques. Each answer provided for a question is assigned a content score according to how well it matched the ideal answer. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods, each recommended best answer is compared with the best answer determined by one of the most popular link analysis methods, Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS). The proposed methods are able to yield high accuracy, as shown by correlation scores: Kendall correlation and Spearman correlation. The reputation method outperforms the HITS method in terms of recommending the best answer. The inclusion of the reputation score with the content score improves the overall performance, which is measured through the use of Top-n match scores.

Univ., Diss.--Hamburg, 2004.

This essay describes a case study of textual communication on the online social mediaplatform Tumblr. The aim of the research was to analyse the communicative functions and thestylistic, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic characteristics of textual discourse on Tumblr. Usingdata gathered on Tumblr, this essay analyses discursive aspects such as function, style, andpragmatics, relating the findings to literature on topics including relevance theory and theoriesof computer-mediated communication and cyberpragmatics. The research found thatdiscourse on Tumblr is largely phatic in nature, with an overwhelming focus on the discussionof shared interests. Such discussion on Tumblr appears to heavily depend on sharedbackground knowledge, which works as a barrier of in-group discursive solidarity andprovides and furthers feelings of connectedness. This study further found that alternative useof style and grammar on Tumblr appears to be largely uniform, suggesting that divergencesfrom standard norms are a way of displaying membership of a group and obtaining covertprestige, rather than a display of linguistic innovation.

My diploma thesis deals with problems of viewing of teachers who work in primary school on their profession. There are elaborated facts, which deals with an activity, problems, competences, roles, prestige, a salary and a social status of this profession in the theoretical part. There are elaborated interviews with teachers in the practical part who responded how they perceive their occupation, what they think about it from the view of working content, professional problems, etc.

Up to now, adolescent speakers have been the primary focus when researching contemporary variation in the language of Sweden’s urban areas. This study contributes to the growing body of research on the topic by examining and reporting on adult speakers of what is here referred to as förortssvenska (English: Suburban Swedish). This study focuses specifically on formal speech registers of eight young working-class men from Stockholm along with the perception and reception of their speech by two independent native-listener groups. The paper is the first to present quantifiable data on what has been previously referred to as a “staccato” rhythm in Suburban Swedish. Strong correlations are shown between prosodic rhythm as measured by the normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) and speech speed to mean listener attitudes (R2=0.9). A strong correlation is also shown for nPVI’s influence on mean listener-projected ethnicity (R2=0.8). Alongside variation in rhythm, we also see phonemic variation that trends toward specific indexes of social identity as revealed by speaker interviews and native-listener assessments. Alongside linguistic variation among speakers, there is also significant variation within speaker peer groups. In addition to identifying specific linguistic features, the study examines social mechanisms revealed in interviews with and qualitative observations of speaker and listener participants. In exploratory fashion, ideas on variation, register ranges, meta-pragmatic stereotyping, and ethnic boundary-making are presented to make a case for treating contemporary urban variation in Swedish as a habitual semiotic extension of speaker identity. Indicators that contemporary urban variation in Swedish may be heading in the direction of sociolectal entrenchment are also discussed. / Hittills har unga talare varit det primära fokus för forskning av aktuell språklig variation i urbana Sverige. Denna studie bidrar till den växande mängden forskning i detta ämne genom att undersöka och rapportera om vuxna talare av det som här kallas för förortssvenska. Studien fokuserar specifikt på formella talregister bland åtta unga män från Stockholms arbetarklass, samt perception och mottagande av deras tal av två oberoende grupper av infödda lyssnare. Denna studie är den första som presenterar kvantifierbar data rörande den i tidigare forskning så kallade stackato-rytmen i förortssvenska. Starka korrelationer finns mellan, å ena sidan, prosodisk rytm mätt med the normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) och talhastighet och, å den andra, de genomsnittliga lyssnarattityderna (R2=0,9). Det finns också en stark korrelation för nPVIs påverkan på genomsnittlig lyssnarprojicerad etnicitet (R2=0,8). Vid sidan av variation i rytm ser vi också fonemisk variation som trender mot specifika index för social identitet. Och vid sidan av variation i rytm bland talarna, finns också en stor variation inom kamratgrupperna. Förutom att den identifierar specifika lingvistiska drag, undersöker studien sociala mekanismer som framkommer i intervjuer med och kvalitativa observationer av talardeltagarna och lyssnardeltagarna. På ett explorativt sätt, lägger studien fram idéer om variation, registeromfång, meta-pragmatiska stereotyper och etniska gränsskapande för att framhäva argumentet för att behandla den aktuella förortsvariationen i svenska som en habituell avsiktlig utbyggnad av talarens identitet. Det diskuteras också indikatorer till att den aktuella urbana variationen i svenska kan vara på väg mot sociolektal stabilisering.

Cette thèse a pour objet d’étude le choix du lieu d’implantation des élites rurales médiévales et modernes. Elle s’inscrit d’une part, dans la tendance actuelle de réexamen des estimateurs archéologiques de niveau social et, d’autre part, dans le « tournant spatial » des SHS qui invite à prendre en compte la dimension spatiale des sociétés. L’espace est ici appréhendé comme un produit culturel et social, ce qui amène à analyser le choix du site comme un objet archéologique à part entière, révélateur de pratiques sociales. L’approche archéogéographique conduit à recomposer l’espace des élites à l’aide de critères décrivant toutes les dimensions socio-environnementales de l’interaction élite/espace (milieu, paysage, territoire). L’objectif de cette thèse repose en effet sur l’expérimentation d’une grille d’analyse (critères) et d’une méthodologie fondée sur des variations d’échelles de temps (temps long / court) et d’espace (site / réseau de sites). Deux fenêtres d’étude situées dans le Bassin parisien ont été ouvertes : une dans la vallée de Touques, au coeur du Pays d’Auge (Calvados), avec un corpus de sites (manoirs) datant des XVe-XIXe siècles et une seconde, autour d’un site archéologique fouillé (La « Ferme du Colombier ») daté du début du XVIe siècle, dans la plaine confluente de la Seine et l’Yonne (Seine-et-Marne). Les modélisations révèlent la spatialité des élites rurales – tout particulièrement celles des XVe-XVIe siècles – et permettent finalement de discuter des pratiques de distinction enregistrées dans le choix du site, dans un contexte historique marqué par un profond renouvellement des élites / This PhD seeks to study the choice of location of medieval and modern rural elites. Fully in line with the current trend for reviewing archaeological estimators of social scale ; it also fits into the "spatial turn" of human and social sciences, inviting to take into account the spatial dimension of societies. Space, regarded as a cultural and social production, aims at analyzing the choice of location as a fully fledged archaeological object, revealing social practices.The archaeogeographical approach leads to reconstitute the space of elites with criteria describing all the social and environmental dimensions of interactions between space and elite (environment, landscape, territory). The purpose of the PhD relies on the experimentation of an evaluation grid and a methodology based on variations of time and space scales ( sites and networks of sites).Two observation windows located in the Paris Basin were picked: the first one, in the Touques Valley (Calvados), around a site corpus (manor houses) from the 15th-19th centuries, the second one around an archaeological site from the 16th century (La “Ferme du Colombier”) located in the confluent plain of the Seine and the Yonne rivers. Modelling reveals spatiality of rural elites, particularly those of the 15th-16th centuries, and eventually entitles to discuss the practices of social distinction recorded into the choice of location, in a historical context characterised by deep renewal process of elites