Drawing on the fieldwork in a village community in Eastern Thailand, Ban Noen PutsaPluak Ked, this thesis explores the complex relationships between processes of globaIisation, representations in the mainstream media and activist media; and villagers' responses to change. The research, summarised here has three interrelated objectives: First, to examine how globalisation and industrialisation are represented in the mainstream and activist media. Second, to investigate the role played by the activist media in promoting counter visions of possible futures. Thirdly, to investigate the practices and ideas that local people have developed to resist or accept globalisation. The research employs a multi-method approach combining ethnographic methods, a questionnaire survey; textual analysis; and focus groups. The findings point to a complex relationship between mediated representations and visions of modernity. They also demonstrate that villagers' responses are strongly stratified by age, length of residence, and relation to the pivot of the new industriaIisation- a major chemical plant and that they remain strongly influenced by the crucial nexus of traditional Thai society, the patron client system. Additionally, content analysis and critical discourse analysis suggest that Thai news television programmes reproduced both the ideology of globalism and the celebration of consumerism. Moreover, the voices of marginalized groups and local people are also absent from the activist media.

South Africa has not yet become a nation united in its diversity despite the claim made otherwise in the South African constitution. To grapple with the constitution’s unfulfilled promises, many writers and artists from the country have taken up the incongruity between lived experience and nationalist rhetoric in their works. As part of that efforts by artists and writers in South Africa, Ivan Vladislavić’s 2006 book Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked describes the difficulties of living in a country that does not perfectly match the rhetoric of a nation “united in [its] diversity.” In order to expand on the theme in Portrait with Keys of incongruity between lived life and the national discourse, as well as between lived life and literary representations, it is imperative to identify the discourse surrounding the current situation in South Africa. In this analysis of Vladislavić’s book, the author will describe and decipher moments where the lived experience of residents in Johannesburg belies the inclusionary discourse of South Africa and the literary representation of other cities. After describing moments that highlight the lack of correspondence between life and word, the author will analyze the various strategies for coping with the incongruity in the book. By taking this route of analysis, the author intends to illuminate the South African phenomenon of incongruent experience (in which lived life, discourse, and representation do not correspond) and arrive at a reading of the incongruity in Vladislavić’s book that leaves room for hope. / text

Στην παρούσα εργασία εξετάζεται η αύξηση της ανάλυσης (super resolution) σε θερμικές εικόνες χρησιμοποιώντας τεχνικές συμπιεσμένης καταγραφής (compressed sensing). Οι εικόνες εκφράζονται με αραιό τρόπο ως προς δυο υπερπλήρη λεξικά (ένα χαμηλής και ένα υψηλής ανάλυσης) και επιχειρούμε κατασκευή της εικόνας υψηλής ανάλυσης. Τα αποτελέσματα της μεθόδου αυτής συγκρίνονται με τα αποτελέσματα τεχνικών που χρησιμοποιούν image registration με ακρίβεια subpixel για την επίτευξη του super resolution. / This thesis deals with the problem of resolution enhancement (super resolution) of thermal images using com- pressed sensing methods. We solve the super resolution problem in four stages. First, we seek a sparse representation of a low-resolution image with respect to two statistically-learned overcomplete dictionaries (for high and low resolution images respectively) and then we use the coefficients of this representa- tion to calculate the high resolution image. Then, we calculate the high resolution image using methods requiring multiple low resolution images aligned with subpixel accuracy (conventional approach). We compare the results of each method using broadly acclaimed metrics regarding reconstruction quality standards.

In this dissertation, we study semi-stable representations of G(Q(p)) and their mod p-reductions, which is a part of the problem in which we construct deformation spaces whose characteristic 0 closed points are the semi-stable lifts with Hodge-Tate weights (0, 1, 2) of a fixed absolutely irreducible residual representation ρ : G(Q(p)) → GL₃(F(p)). We first classify the isomorphism classes of semi-stable representations of G(Q(p)) with regular Hodge-Tate weights, by classifying admissible filtered (phi,N)-modules with Hodge-Tate weights (0, r, s) for 0 < r < s. We also construct a Galois stable lattice in some irreducible semi-stable representations with Hodge-Tate weights (0, 1, 2), by constructing strongly divisible modules, which is an analogue of Galois stable lattices on the filtered (ɸ, N)-module side. We compute the reductions mod p of the corresponding Galois representations to the strongly divisible modules we have constructed, by computing Breuil modules, which is, roughly speaking, mod p-reduction of strongly divisible modules. We also determine which Breuil modules corresponds to irreducible mod p representations of G(Q(p)).

- / The research presented in this master thesis is based on two complementary studies conducted in Greece, to the University of Patras, Department of Educational Science and Early Childhood Education and in France, to the University Paris 5, Department of Humain and Social Sciences. The Research question of our study is: How university students perceive mobile technology in relation with the educational process and their everyday lives? Our objectives are: · exploring the attitudes, opinions and representations, of university students concerning mobile technology in general and as an instrument for the educational process and · investigating cultural differences’ influence upon mobile technology usage by university students, The research had four phases: literature review on mobile learning and mobile devices in order to identify the most popular mobile devices and the devices the research community is more concerned with: that is personal digital assistants (PDAs). This is a research study on the attitudes, opinions and representations of second year Greek university students from the Department of Educational Science and Early Childhood Education from the University of Patras, Greece, related to mobile technology (PDAs).The findings of the study: PDAs not popular among Greek students, combined with the fact that we wanted a more diverse, abundant student population, motivated us to continue our exploration with new studies. The third phase consisted of a research study on the attitudes, opinions and representations of the French university students from the Department of Human and Social Sciences, Sorbonne related to mobile technology. The questionnaire allowed subjects to first choose the main mobile device used for learning. This study has not gathered a satisfactory amount of data, however from the gathered data we have been driven towards exploring laptops in relation with their position in the life of Parisian students regarding learning. Also to meet time constraints and the desired number of respondents we enlarged the target group to students from any Parisian university. In the fourth phase we have conducted a research study on the attitudes, opinions and representations of the students of Parisian universities (PU) related to mobile technology: laptops. The obtained results gave us a better view about what students want from mobile technology and how they understand the use of it for educational purposes.

This study was an exploration of what English language content was represented in a classroom in which English was taught as a foreign language (EFL). The purpose of this study was to explore the way EFL teachers represent English language content/constructs in a classroom setting. The motivation behind this exploration is to contribute to the understandings of EFL teachers' practices in classroom settings. Doyle's task framework was employed, specifically with the intention to map what content representations emerged out of the teachers' classroom practices. All in all, the teachers' classroom content representations were found to be entrenched with the idea of high-stakes test preparation in Turkey.

The direct sum decomposition of tensor products for SU(3) has many applications in physics, and the problem has been studied extensively. This has resulted in many decomposition methods, each with its advantages and disadvantages. The description given here is geometric in nature and it describes both the constituents of the direct sum and their multiplicities. In addition to providing decompositions of specific tensor products, this approach is very well suited to studying tensor products as the parameters vary, and drawing general conclusions. After a description and proof of the method, several applications are discussed and proved. The decompositions are also studied further for the special cases of tensor products of an irreducible representation with itself or with its conjugate. In particular, questions regarding multiplicities are considered. As an extension of this diagrammatic method, the repeated tensor product of N copies of the fundamental representation is studied, and a method for its decomposition is provided. Again, questions regarding multiplicities are considered.

Cette thèse investit, d'abord, sur un plan théorique l'enseignant professionnel et la mise enplace des dispositifs censés encourager le développement de cet enseignant, à partir de lalittérature de recherche dans ce domaine. Dans un second temps, elle vise à contextualiser cesenjeux dans le contexte du Kenya et, plus particulièrement, en considérant l'évolution de laprofession enseignante à partir de données historiques mais aussi d'un travail empirique menéauprès des enseignants stagiaires. A cet égard elle traite la naissance et l'évolution de laprofession enseignante au Kenya en mettant un accent particulier sur les représentationssociales et professionnelles. Dans un troisième temps, ce travail analyse le sens donné à lanotion d'enseignant professionnel par les politiques éducatives et par les enseignants enformation initiale.

While many have investigated media constructions of newsworthy crimes, the overwhelming focus of these analyses has been upon violent crime in its myriad forms. In marked contrast, this thesis examines the Canadian print media's construction of art fraud - the offence, its victims and offenders - and, in particular, its response to acclaimed artist Norval Morrisseau's reports of victimization. It finds that, just as art fraud is not thought of as normal crime news and is bracketed away elsewhere, the victims of art fraud tend not to be regarded as ideal victims. The Canadian print media rarely framed art fraud as a crime against culture; more commonly, it was depicted as a low-risk crime that pays, with its perpetrators cast as charming rogues or artful dodgers and the most notorious depicted as heroes. This curious portrayal may promote schadenfreude, have incentive effects for some and discourage others from reporting experiences of criminal victimization.

An end-to-end guarantee of software correctness by formal verification must consider two sources of bugs. First, the verification tool must be correct. Second, programs are often verified at the source level, before being compiled. Hence, compilers should also be trustworthy. Verifiers and compilers' complexity is increasing. To simplify code analysis and manipulation, these tools rely on intermediate representations (IR) of programs, that provide structural and semantic properties. This thesis gives a formal, semantic account on IRs, so that they can also be leveraged in the formal proof of such tools. We first study a register-based IR of Java bytecode used in compilers and verifiers. We specify the IR generation by a semantic theorem stating what the transformation preserves, e.g. object initialization or exceptions, but also what it modifies and how, e.g. object allocation. We implement this IR in Sawja, a Java static analysis toolbench. Then, we study the Static Single Assignment (SSA) form, an IR widely used in modern compilers and verifiers. We implement and prove in Coq an SSA middle-end for the CompCert C compiler. For the proof of SSA optimizations, we identify a key semantic property of SSA, allowing for equational reasoning. Finally, we study the semantics of concurrent Java IRs. Due to instruction reorderings performed by the compiler and the hardware, the current definition of the Java Memory Model (JMM) is complex, and unfortunately formally flawed. Targetting x86 architectures, we identify a subset of the JMM that is intuitive and tractable in formal proofs. We characterize the reorderings it allows, and factor out a proof common to the IRs of a compiler.