The late nineteenth century British stage was hopelessly confused. It couldn’t decide whether it was London’s principle source of entertainment—mainstream and respectable enoughfor Queen Victoria herself to patronize—or the seedbed of all corruption and deviance in Victorian society. At the center of this split identity was the actress, a figure both well-beloved (in the case of stars like Ellen Terry) and the literal embodiment of everything a Victorian women shouldn’t be—loose, sexualized, and working (in the case of her contemporary, Olga Nethersole). Because of this liminal position, Victorian actresses thus create a fascinatingmicrocosm in which to study the implications of performativity and performance in late nineteenth century society. I argue that stars like Terry and Nethersole, though they did so by opposite means, deliberately performed multiple roles, both on stage and in society, in order to enjoy the autonomy they craved—one unavailable to the majority of Victorian women.The biographies of both actresses reveal compelling paradoxes. Terry, though respectedenough to be compared to the “ideal” Victorian woman (the proverbial “Angel in the House”), was in reality a fallen woman. Olga Nethersole, on the other hand, built her career on playing fallen woman roles, yet lived an upright and unremarkable private life. Despite these differences, however, both women rose to great heights of fame and earned careers, funds, and power overtheir lives and relationships that most women of the century would never dream of. This thesis investigates the anomaly of autonomous Victorian actresses through the lens of performance theory. Drawing upon the concepts of liminality and social performativity, introduced largely by performance studies scholars like Richard Schechner and Marvin Carlson, I work toward a practical connection between performance on the stage and performativity in society that remainslargely unexplored in the field of Victorian theatrical studies. Ultimately, I am shedding light onthe paradoxical, dual function of performance; as demonstrated in the lives of these two actresses, it has the potential to simultaneously reinforce societal norms and to protest against them.

The following dissertation presents a new paradigm for improving the training of machine learning algorithms, oracle learning. The main idea in oracle learning is that instead of training directly on a set of data, a learning model is trained to approximate a given oracle's behavior on a set of data. This can be beneficial in situations where it is easier to obtain an oracle than it is to use it at application time. It is shown that oracle learning can be applied to more effectively reduce the size of artificial neural networks, to more efficiently take advantage of domain experts by approximating them, and to adapt a problem more effectively to a machine learning algorithm.

This study analyzed moral psychology's “moral judgment-moral action gap” research and found that morality was being described as a secondary phenomenon produced by underlying substrates (such as identity and self constructs, “brain modules,” and “evolved emotional systems”) which are themselves non-moral. Deriving morality from “the non-moral” presents a kind of ontological gap in the moral psychology research. Researchers implicitly close this gap assuming it is possible to get moral judgments and actions out of non-moral substrates. But the difficulty remains how the moral as “moral” becomes infused into any moral psychology models. Morality is not a secondary phenomenon arising out of something else. This study argues that there is a need to shift our understanding of what it means to be human, to a view in which the moral is fundamental. An alternative foundation for assessing the moral is found in the work of Emmanuel Levinas who sees ethics as a metaphysical concern. This means that he sees the essential moral character of human life and the reality of human agency as ontologically fundamental, or constitutive of human nature itself. In other words, the ethical is the “first cause” in regards to understanding the nature and action of the self. Thus morality is not merely epiphenomenal to some more fundamental reality. Levinas holds that as humans, we are called to the Other. This call of obligation to the Other comes before all other human endeavors. After presenting Levinas's alternative foundation of obligation to the Other which herein is labeled Felt Moral Obligation (FMO), C. Terry Warner's conceptualizations of FMO in relation to the moral judgment-action gap are presented. In light of these conceptualizations, this study argues that there is actually no moral judgment-moral action gap, but only holistic events of moral self-betrayal. Warner illustrates that rejecting FMO is a single moral event, a holistic act performed by a moral agent that involves moral responses of self-justification, offense-taking, and rationalization. The person finds him or herself in a state of self-betrayal. Levinas and Warner implicitly assert that such self-betraying responses are not fundamentally biological or rational, but rather, fundamentally moral.

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The aim of this study is to study how the themes of loss, hope and place attachment is presented in relation to the concept of ecoglobalist affects in the contemporary nature writing of Swedish author Kerstin Ekman and American author Terry Tempest Williams. I have performed a comparative close reading of three works per author and discussed them in relation to the definitions of nature writing and ecoglobalist affects by Lawrence Buell and the definition of place attachment as a psychological process by Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford. I have found that all of the texts are clear cases of environmentally oriented literature, that the depictions of loss, hope and place attachment are very similar and that while Ekman focuses on the lack of general public knowledge and mostly refrains from dissolving boundaries between the self and the environment, Williams focuses more on the latter. I also found that while examples of ecoglobalist affects could be read in works by both authors in different ways, they were not present in all of the texts. / Syftet med denna studie är att studera hur förlust, hopp och platsbundenhet presenteras som teman i relation till begreppet ecoglobalist affects i Kerstin Ekmans och Terry Tempest Williams naturessäer. Jag har genomfört en komparativ närläsning av tre verk per författare och diskuterat dem i relation till Lawrence Buells definition av nature writing och ecoglobalist affects, samt Leila Scannells och Robert Giffords definition av platsbundenhet som psykologisk process. Studien fann att samtliga av texterna är klara exempel på miljöorienterad litteratur, att skildringarna av förlust, hopp och platsbundenhet har många likheter samt att Ekmans essäer fokuserar på allmän kunskapsbrist och mestadels avstår från att upplösa gränser mellan jaget och den icke-mänskliga naturen, medan Williams fokuserar mer på det sistnämnda. Jag fann även att ecoglobalist affects kunde läsas i verk av båda författarna, men inte i samtliga av de undersökta texterna.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate, explain, compare and to a degree criticize the two theories Global Stakeholder Democracy by Terry Macdonald and Transnational Discursive Democracy by John Dryzek and their respective arguments for a global democracy, by using the method of an internal idea analysis. The two main questions of the thesis are: -  With what arguments do Macdonald and Dryzek legitimize their respective form of global democracy? -  What similarities as well as differences can be found in their argumentation for their respective theory and is it possible to see any potential internal problems in their argumentation? The results show that both Global Stakeholder Democracy and Transnational Discursive Democracy can be interpreted to share the same basic way of legitimizing democracy through a liberal value and notion of autonomy. Because of the current democratic deficit on a global level, this value is threatened. Both theories therefore try to solve this problem by promoting a pragmatic theory to democratize the global political system. The study recognizes some potential problems regarding the way both Macdonald and Dryzek argue for a global democracy. In MacDonald’s theory, the potential problem concerns mainly the lack of a clear definition of the theory’s fundamental part, what a stakeholder is. The potential problems with Dryzek’s theory derive from the fact that he might put to much trust in the concept of reflexive modernization, whether his theory will be able to actually influence discourses despite a lack of formal institutions, and finally if the theory will be able to guarantee political equality in the decision making process.

This thesis is the result of two years of study in archival science at the Department of ABM (archive, library, museum) at Uppsala University, Sweden. The purpose of the thesis is to highlight community archives, specifically how the community archive "Archive for the Unexplained" in Norrköping operates as a community archive and handles received documents and records of ufo-reports from UFO-Sweden. Our focus has been to study record- keeping and how the documents are made available to promote the possibility of transparency, research, and ar- chival retrieval. The analysis is divided into two parts: the archive and its internal archival structure, as well as the records. The analysis of the archival structure is focused on how the archive operates as a community archive based on the theory of Terry Cook's four paradigms, which aims to show how archives have gone from closed archives to open places for knowledge. The results of this thesis show how the Archive for the Unexplained as a community archive in contrasts to archives that operate in the official authority and fulfill a vital role in the paranormal field and how its material is primarily used for investigating Unexplained phenomena while it is providing a creative space for a narrative of a fictional and folkloristic nature. This is a two years master's thesis in Archival science.

National soccer teams are currently ranked by soccer's governing body, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Although the system used by FIFA is thorough, taking into account many different factors, many of the weights used in the system's calculations are somewhat arbitrary. It is investigated here how the use of a statistical model might better compare the teams for ranking purposes. By treating each game played as a pairwise comparison experiment and by using the Bradley-Terry model as a starting point some suitable models are presented. A key component of the final model introduced here its ability to differentiate between friendly matches and competitive matches when determining the impact of a match on a teams ranking. Posterior distributions of the rating parameters are obtained, and the rankings and results obtained from each model are compared to FIFA's rankings and each other.

Terry Tempest Williams, in Finding Beauty in a Broken World employs literary techniques that suggest dislocations and relocations of the human subject in ethical modes of being. Through narrative techniques, multidisciplinary language, and themes of conversation, gift-exchange, listening and response, Williams reflects ecological humanist mosaics, suggesting cooperative regeneration—an intersection of material beings facilitated by an ethical human imagination that listens, receives, and gives toward patterns of beauty, including, but not limited to, being human in a collective world. This eco-critical analysis of Williams’s work affirms the human being in post-humanist philosophy and repositions relational Romanticism for the 21st century.