This dissertation is a tonal modular work for soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and baritone solo voices and large orchestra (3343, 4331, Timp.+4, Hp., Pno., Strings) with an accompanying narrative. The text is drawn from eighteen of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s sonnets. This work consists of four interlocking song cycles, one for each solo voice, and two added songs for the combination of two or more of the solo voices. There are shared tonal and thematic relationships across the work as a whole as well as within and among the individual song cycles. The unique modular nature of the work allows for performance of the whole, but also allows for extracting the individual song cycles—or even individual sonnets from the work as free-standing pieces, complete in themselves. The modular nature of this work makes it attractive as a programming option for orchestras and choirs with featured guest soloists, and also as an addition to singers’ repertoires. Chapters 3–7 of the narrative address the songs in each individual module or cycle, thus providing a useful reference for a singer wishing to program one or more of the songs for her or his voice classification. The complete transposed orchestral score follows the conclusion of the narrative. This dissertation holds potentially helpful information for research on the topics of contemporary classical music, Indiana composers, and/or orchestral song cycles. / School of Music

Grave X was found in 1952 during construction work in Tuna in Badelunda parish, in the province of Västmanland. Objects from this 3rd Century grave were dispersed and the stone grave covering and cist-like wooden burial chamber were cut almost in half as a result of the construction work that unearthed it. The purpose of this dissertation is to create a better understanding of Tuna in Badelunda and to place Grave X and the person buried there in context. Due to my interest in Grave X and the person in this grave, the scope of the study is limited to Tuna during the Late Roman Iron Age. What kind of place may Tuna in Badelunda have been during that time? Which kinds of knowledge may the person in Grave X have possessed and what roles may this person have had in local society? How may this person have acted in Tuna in Badelunda in particular? Why was this person buried in the specific type of structure that was Grave X? To answer these questions, ancient monuments and phenomena in the Tuna area, objects from the grave and construction details of the grave are discussed. Specifically, I examine the name Tuna, stone enclosures, hillforts of Bejby borg-character and travel routes, beads, golden rings in the shape of snakes, vessels and serving utensils, and the stone grave covering and cist-like chamber. Since Grave X was partly ruined when discovered, comparisons are made to about 20 similar graves from other parts of Scandinavia in order to get an idea of what may have been lost from Grave X. A performative-constructive gender perspective is of importance in this dissertation, as well as the concept of creolization. The kinds of knowledge and the societal roles the person in Grave X may have had can be summarized in five categories or contexts of action: production within the (social-political) economy of the farm, ritual performances, physical communication, textile production, and oral performances with the telling of stories and relating of memories. Possible personal strategies in relation to the activities the person in question was involved in are seen as important. One way this dissertation takes up this subject is through the discussion of the role the person may have had in greetings and farewells in the yard of the farm (Sw. tun, gårdsplan). Greetings and farewells were probably of importance, and Tuna is discussed as a crossroads. This means that although a local perspective is advocated in this dissertation, Tuna may not be seen as an isolated community, but rather as a small place that to a great extent partook in the larger world. This can also be seen in Grave X; when the person in this grave was buried, the living made choices that both expressed local traditions and made reference to far-away places. In contrast to the surrounding graves, the person in Grave X was not cremated. One of many possible reasons may have been a desire to emphasize the person’s personality and gender as well as roles in society. / <p>Auktoriserad namnform i LIBRIS: Fernstål, Charlotte, 1974-</p>

The aim of this thesis is to make a contribution to the field of design oriented theory, regarding young children and their way to digital competence. My research question is: How can a preschool with a certain pedagogical ICT-design give the children affordances for media play and for developing a digital competence? The European Parliament points out digital literacy as one of the Key Competences for life long learning. A digital competence is built on basic ICT (Information and Communication technology) skills. Skills you can develop any time during life, weather you are young or old. Recent Swedish research on young children and digital competence points out the preschool teacher’s insecurity regarding the use of ICT in the preschool´s daily activities (Ljung- Djärf, Klerfelt).   There are an amount of new social and cultural gaps in our modern society regarding illiteracies and learning. Fear for the digital gap, or divide, is confirmed by researchers such as Buckingham and Kress. Briefly, if one doesn’t possess digital literacy, the risk of society divides is impending. This could be built on factors such as gender, ethnicity, class, generational and geographical divides, but also about dichotomies in the capacity of learning in a digitalized milieu.   Today’s children are the first generation to grow up in a society characterized by digital media. They are born into it. They are the Digital Natives and they take the new technology for granted. The rest of us are Digital Immigrants and we try to adapt to the new society. Prensky highlights the possibilities of changes in young persons’ brains, or at least in their thinking, as a result of their nursery in the digital world. Where does that leave the teachers of the pre-digital age? The true risk of a digital divide can perhaps be found in the daily melting pot between “the natives” and “the immigrants”.  The act of arranging meaningful communicative meetings could be one education’s most important responsibilities.   From the view of a design orientated perspective, built on a socio-cultural theoretical framework, key words like design, setting and affordance become important in my study. Didactic design is a theoretical perspective which elaborates understanding of learning from semiotic activities. Learning is to be seen as meaning making in social contexts. These contexts are in pedagogical milieus called institutional settings. The teacher and /or the child can be designers of and actors in the setting.   Through the design and settings, the children at the preschool in my study, achieved consistent possibilities for media play and for developing digital competence. They got the opportunity to develop different kinds of literacy. One of the important findings of my study was that the preschool teachers developed digital competence and confidence much in the same way as the children did. Collaborative learning processes, elaboration, curiosity and playfulness stood up as affordances for learning. There have to be milieus designed for flexibility and elaborations and there have to be preschool teachers deliberately setting these kind of designs.   The study confirms previous research at one hand in the area young children and digital competence and on the other hand in research connected to design oriented theories. This study has merged the two fields together.   Further research is to be seen in a wide spread field. An interesting continuation is to study the preschool teachers education. Questions of learning and intertextuality are other important issues.   Key words: Didactic design, digital competence, digital divides, literacy, media play, affordances, settings, tools, preschool, ICT, multimodality, social semiotics, meaningmaking. / Syftet med min uppsats är att bidra till förståelse för hur valet av design och iscensättning i förskolepedagogiska miljöer erbjuder medielek och möjliggör utvecklandet av en digital kompetens. Jag har utgått från frågan: Hur kan en specialdesignad förskolemiljö bidra till utvecklingen av barns medielek och digitala kompetens? En digital kompetens bygger på grundläggande IKT-färdigheter[1]. Det innebär bland annat att man kan hämta fram, bedöma, lagra, producera och kommunicera med och genom digitala medier. Tidigare forskning visar på förskollärares oro för den digitala tekniken. Förutom den rent konkreta osäkerheten vid användningen av de digitala verktygen ges också uttryck för en osäkerhet för hur man balanserar förskoleverksamheten med ny teknologin. Detta kan belysa vad som inom medieforskning beskrivs som digital divides, något som i sin tur kan förstärka klyftor i samhället. Frågan om bruk av IKT i förskolan diskuteras ofta ur ett framåtsyftande nyttoperspektiv. Man talar om inlärningsaspekten, arbetslivsaspekten och demokratiaspekten. Barnen på förskolan i min studie har genom den didaktiska designen möjligheter att få del av dessa tre aspekter.  Men man har dessutom skapat en miljö som erbjuder barnen – och de vuxna – möjligheter för medielek och därigenom utvecklandet av en digital kompetens. I studien blir det tydligt hur vuxna och barn svarar upp mot de förutsättningar som designats och erbjuds. Lärprocesserna sker i en institutionell inramning, där läraren (och barnen) är aktörer och iscensättare. Pedagogen, likväl som barnet, kan aktivt välja vilka teckensystem och vilken gestaltningsform som ska användas.   I den undersökta verksamheten finns även en underliggande kulturell affordance, meningserbjudande, en idé om att IKT är bra för barn, att vuxna kan både leka och lära samtidigt, samt att det är tillåtet att experimentera, för att finna något som man varken vet frågan eller svaret på. Det här skulle ur ett socialsemiotiskt perspektiv, vara tecken på lärande, eftersom en lärandeprocess utmärks av en ökad förmåga att använda skilda teckensystem, eller domäner. Barnen utvecklar sin litteracitet och sin medielitteracitet. De utökar också sin kognitiva, kommunikativa och kulturella och estetiska kompetens. Vi skulle här kunna tala om en multilitteracitet, eftersom de meningsskapande processer som barnen befinner sig i under arbetet med de digitala verktygen, inte bara inbegriper lingvistiska utan också visuella, auditiva och spatiala processer. Min studie visar att design och iscensättning på den undersökta förskolan är betydelsefulla för erbjudandet av medielek och utvecklandet av barnens och de vuxnas digitala kompetens. De vuxna är trygga i sina roller och där fanns en naturlig balansgång mellan de mer traditionella och de digitala verktygen. En avslutande reflektion är att det inte längre är frågan om att diskutera om IKT och medier ska användas i förskolan, det är mer frågan om hur. Det är inte heller längre tid att diskutera om barn och vuxna ska utveckla en digital kompetens i förskolan, snarare hur det ska ske. En fortsatt forskning på området kan handla om en fördjupning i sådant som berör lärande, kommunikativ kompetens, intertextualitet eller textrörlighet. Andra viktiga frågor kan röra sig om hur lärarutbildningen lever upp till kraven på en digital kompetens.

Family conversation between homes is difficult to initiate at mutually agreeable times as neither participant has exact knowledge of the other's activities or intentions. Whether calling to plan an important family gathering or simply to connect with family members, the question is: Is now a good time to call? People expect friends and family to learn their activity patterns and to minimize interruptions when calling. Can technology provide awareness cues to the caller, even prior to the initiation of the call? This research focuses on sampling the everyday activities of home life to determine environmental factors, which may serve as an indicator for availability. These external factors may be effective for identifying household routines of availability and useful in determining when to initiate conversation across homes. Several workplace studies have shown a person's interruptibility can be reliably assessed and modeled from specific environmental cues; this work looks for similar predictive power in the home. Copresence, location, and activity in the home were investigated as correlates to availability and for their effectiveness within the social protocol of family conversation. These studies indicate there are activities that can be sensed, either in real-time or over some time span, that correlate to self-reported availability. However, the type and amount of information shared is dependent upon individual preferences, social accessibility, and patterns of activities. This research shows friends and family can improve their predictions of when to call if provided additional context, and suggests that abstract representations of either routines or explicit availability status is sufficient and may be preferred by providers. Availability prediction is feasible in the home and useful to those outside the home, but the level of detail to provide in particular situations needs further study. This work has implications for the development of groupware systems, the automatic sensing of activity to deal with interruption, and activity recognition in the home.

Background: Prenatal alcohol consumption is one of the leading preventable causes of birth defects, including fetal alcohol syndrome and learning disabilities. Although there is strong evidence of the benefits of screening and alcohol brief interventions (ABIs) in reducing hazardous and harmful drinking among the primary care population, evidence of its effectiveness with the antenatal care population is limited. Nevertheless, the Scottish Government is incorporating an alcohol screening and ABI programme as part of the routine antenatal care provided to women in a bid to protect the health and safety of the unborn child and improve subsequent health and developmental outcomes. This research therefore seeks to increase understanding of the factors that are likely to influence the effectiveness of this recently implemented programme. It also aims to explore the extent to which contemporary issues such as change in guidelines regarding alcohol consumption during pregnancy influences perceptions and attitudes, and the possible implications of these on the screening and ABI delivery. Methods: The study described in this thesis employed a realistic evaluation methodology. Realistic evaluation is a theory-driven approach to investigating social programmes. It is concerned with hypothesising, testing and refining programme theories by exploring the interaction of contexts, mechanisms and outcomes. To identify the relevant screening and ABI programme theories, two separate systematic reviews, a critical review and four face-to-face interviews were undertaken with health policy implementers. The findings were used to construct context, mechanism and outcomes propositions. The propositions were then tested by conducting individual interviews with seventeen pregnant women and fifteen midwives, a further six midwifery team leaders were involved in a focus group discussion. A thematic approach using a hybrid of inductive and deductive coding and theme development informed the qualitative analysis. Results: In the context of uncertainties regarding the threshold of drinking that causes fetal harm, pregnant women reported that screening assessment helped them to reflect on their drinking behaviour and facilitate behaviour change. For women who drank at hazardous and harmful levels before attending the booking appointment, screening and ABI may be helpful in terms of eliciting behaviour change. However, they may not be very beneficial in terms of reducing harm to the fetus as it has been found that drinking during the first trimester poses the most risk to the fetus. Training and resources provided to midwives as part of the screening and ABI programme were found to be facilitating mechanisms that midwives indicated improved their skills and confidence. However, most of the midwives had not subsequently employed the motivational interviewing skills required for the ABI delivery, as many of the pregnant women reported that they reduced or abstained from alcohol consumption once pregnancy was confirmed. The outcome noted was that midwives confidence decreased leading to missed opportunities to appropriately deliver the ABI to eligible women. The small numbers of women being identified for ABI meant midwives rarely delivered the ABI. This negatively influenced midwives attitudes as they then accorded ABI low priority in their workload. Other disenabling mechanisms noted to be hampering the implementation of the screening and ABI initiative included midwives contending with competing priorities at the booking appointments, and the lack of adequate rapport between midwives and pregnant women at the booking appointment to discuss alcohol issues appropriately, leading to women providing socially desirable responses to screening questions. Conclusions: The findings of this study has generated greater explanations of the working of the screening and ABI programme in antenatal care setting and has provided transferable lessons that can be used by others intending to implement similar programmes in other settings.

No description available.

For his first work composed without Schoenberg's supervision, Berg chose to set five short poems by his friend and intellectual idol, the controversial poet Peter Altenberg. Carrying the title Filnf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg (1912), the cycle is at once aphoristic (with respect to the songs' duration) and titanic (with respect to their orchestration and motivic density). But the title invites the question: what imagery might the composer have hoped to illustrate with these musical postcards? This thesis investigates text-music relations in Berg's opus 4 with the objective of showing that the music's structure, far from being semantically neutral, participates actively in the création of rich poetic imagery anchored in the socio-cultural context of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Previous studies focus on the work's cyclic motives its interval-cycle substructure. The present study focuses on text-music relations and voice leading - the contrapuntal and harmonie procedures which govern the music's surface and determine its deep structure. It is shown that the voice-leading structures of the individual lieder - in both local detail and at a more broadly conceptual level - give form, meaning, and nuance to the poetic image that emerges in each song, and help define the different facets—physical, emotional, and spiritual — of the protagonist that inhabits them.

Language, Translation and Law The main objective of this thesis is to explore the interconnection of law and language with a special focus on legal translation. The author of the thesis analyses the history of legal translation together with multilingualism in European Union. The thesis is divided into three major parts: "Language in law", "Translation in law" and "Language(s) and multilingualism in the European Union". The author explains the term legal language in the first part. The attention is directed to indeterminacy and incomprehensibility of the legal language as well as to legal vocabulary and stylistics of legal discourse. The author furthermore analyses the role and legal regulation of the legal language in Czech legislation. The plain language movement is noted as well. The second part of the thesis examines in detail various aspects of legal translation. The author summarises legal translation history worldwide as well as the historical development within the Czech territory. Legal translation is addressed on the basis of the specific use of translation (legislation, international treaties, certified translation and interpretation). In the certified translation and interpretation history the author introduces the sworn interpreters cabinet decree of 22 December 1835 (Hofdecret 109....

This dissertation is a participant observer’s account of implementing a multisite, randomised controlled trial within Her Majesty’s Prison Service. It adds to a scarce literature detailing the steps involved in implementing experiments in custodial settings by providing a candid account of the route from planning to successful implementation. The randomised controlled trial was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the Sycamore Tree Programme. This programme’s goal is to teach prisoners the wider harm of crime and includes a face-to-face meeting between a victim of crime and the participating offenders. It derives its rehabilitative potential from restorative justice and seeks to foster hope that change is possible for offenders, thus aiding them to desist from crime. Its development and theoretical basis are described for the first time. In an in-depth narrative the dissertation details how at every stage strategies were developed to manage participant procurement, random assignment, maintaining treatment integrity, and preparing for final outcome measurements. The randomised controlled trial was designed to produce an individual experiment in eight prisons. These will be combined in a meta-analysis as well as analysed as a pooled sample. Overall the implementation process took close to two years and involved a charitable body, Her Majesty’s Prison Service, the National Offender Management Service, and two police forces. This work has demonstrated how the unstable nature of English prison populations and the risk-averse climate must be addressed when conducting experiments in that environment. It has also illustrated the gap between the rhetoric of evidence-based policy and the facilitation of research designed to seek that evidence. Nevertheless, developing trusting relationships and combining rapidly learnt skills with inherent abilities ensured that the evaluation methodology was supported and protected through the various challenges it met. Finally, the dissertation suggests conditions for closer collaboration between government executive bodies and researchers that might increase the number of experiments undertaken in prisons. It also aims to encourage researchers that prison experiments, although not easy, are feasible, defendable, and, above all, worthwhile.

This research study acquired a consumer response centred approach to visual merchandising stimuli, in an attempt to holistically consider this area of the retail industry. Consumers‟ perceptions towards visual merchandising displays and the effect these displays have on consumer behaviour were exposed. The primary research question that pended from the preliminary literature was to determine the effect of visual merchandising displays on consumer perceptions. Explorative research was performed and qualitative data were collected by means of focus groups and naïve sketches. The data was analysed by means of a thematic analysis process. Perceptions of visual merchandising displays that were identified were subliminal in creating an interest and desire to further peruse the merchandise and aesthetically to beautify the store. Consumers expressed that the impact that visual merchandising displays had on their buying decisions depended on their personal preferences. / Business Management / M. Com. (Business Management)