Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 137-144).

The present study is an investigation of the relationship between male value systems and male interpersonal conflict, with particular emphasis upon inter-personal violence. The study adopts a naturalistic methodology (Archer 1995) and draws on concepts drawn from a range of disciplines that are integrated using an evolutionary analysis (Daly and Wilson 1988, Archer 1996). The triangulation of methods comprising case studies (study 1), questionnaires (studies 3 and 4) and ethnography (study 2), form the basis for a descriptive phase of research (Archer 1989) that enabled specific hypotheses to be formulated and tested using experimental methods (studies 5 and 6). The research findings from the questionnaires and ethnographic observations suggested that male values may constitute important determinants of male aggression reflected, for instance, in the utility of physical aggression to acquire and defend status and to confirm a masculine identity. The case studies demonstrated that male value systems provide insights into the causation of extreme acts of violence. The Fight Self Report (study 3) highlighted features of fights and that they were more likely to occur in or around pubs and night-dubs, the provocations that were most likely to lead to aggressive ads and how males are expected to behave in conflict situations. The ethnographic observations (study 2) provided insights into how males interpret information about potential opponents' perceived threats and challenges and how age, social support and alcohol consumption influence aggressive responses. The observations also generated data that indicates that inter-male conversations may have ritual elements and may be used to maintain and acquire status. The Masculinity Questionnaire (study 4) provided further insight into the type of provocation that may lead to physical aggression and attitudes to how certain provocations should be responded to. The hypothesis testing stage of the project (studies 5 and 6) used questionnaires to manipulate Resource Holding Potential (RHP) and Provocation and to measure their influence on escalation of aggression. The study 5A demonstrated that young men are much less likely to indicate that they would respond to an insult with physical aggression if their opponent was bigger than them, had more potential allies and had a reputation for being successful in the use of physical aggression, which represented high RHP. Conversely young men were much more likely to use physical aggression against an opponent of low or medium RHP. The Provocation Study (study 5B) demonstrated that incidents involving insults to a sexual partner were the most likely situation to provoke a young man into using physical aggression. The final method used in the project, the Human Conflict Questionnaire (study 6), also manipulated RHP and Provocation and used measured variables that included not only physical aggression (as in study 5) but also a range of immediate and post-incident behavioural and cognitive responses. Principal Components Analyses identified three sub-scales, Direct Aggression, Non-Provocation Behaviour and Negative Impact (post-event negative emotional responses). Scales derived from these factors were used as DVs in an ANOVA The analyses. indicated that a challenge from an opponent of higher RHP than oneself is likely to reduce the chance of reacting with physical aggression but to increase non-aggressive responses Including subsequent negative cognitive reactions. Conversely high provocation from opponents of lower RHP than oneself are more likely to lead to physical aggression, and less likely to lead to nonaggressive responses, and to subsequent negative emotions. The findings of the various methods are interpreted using evolutionary concepts and a case is made for the existence of evaluative mechanisms in males that are used to assess RHP in other males and which may make males sensitive to status interactions with other men.

This thesis examines the influence of spiritual conversion narratives on autobiography and the novel. It traces a lineage from Augustine, to Bunyan, Rousseau, early novels of the eighteenth century, bildungsromans of the nineteenth century, and on to the modern memoir of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It argues that spiritual autobiography was foundational to these other literary genres and that its proto-psychological processes can be seen as having influenced self-life writing from one of its earliest applications with Augustine right through to the present day. It also argues that, even though the classics of spiritual autobiography were seminal texts with original thought and style that this started to be eroded with the more formulaic Puritan texts and that spiritual conversion narratives of the last two centuries have fallen out of favour and the narrative of conversion has become the mainstay of more compelling memoirs of addiction and recovery. In comparing the styles of the classics of spiritual autobiography with contemporary spiritual conversion narratives, it is argued that the latter are formulaic and lack a deep analysis of the self and its relationship to the divine. They rely on a set structure and suggest that the conversion episode is a completion of their faith, unlike the classics that show a continual process of change. It is also argued that modern spiritual conversion narratives should follow the example of the novel as a basis for creating a compelling story with a vibrant narrative if they are ever to be read by the mainstream again. Integral to this is a rigorous selection process of the material to be included in the narrative; a process that will produce a stronger and more unique narrative arc. Drowning, the memoir written as part of this thesis, is a spiritual conversion narrative taking influence from the classics with regard to the psychological processes of analysing the self and the conversion experience. It departs from the contemporary conversion narratives, eschewing their typical shape and prosaic style and instead borrows from the narrative arc, style and voice of the novel in order to create an immersive reading experience. Drowning presents the conversion experience as the first step of spiritual rejuvenation and leaves the narrative open-ended to allow the reader to formulate their own understanding of the events and how they affect their understanding of spiritual epiphany.

abstract: In this thesis multiple approaches are explored to enhance sentiment analysis of tweets. A standard sentiment analysis model with customized features is first trained and tested to establish a baseline. This is compared to an existing topic based mixture model and a new proposed topic based vector model both of which use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling. The proposed topic based vector model has higher accuracies in terms of averaged F scores than the other two models. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2016

Whilst scholarship has shown that conflict between the major churches and the National Socialist regime was inevitable, there has been little written on the relationship between the Nazis and the Christian sects. This work takes five of the largest and most representative sects in Gennany and examines what happened to them during the Third Reich. Two introductory chapters set the scene. Chapter One examines the complex and often contradictory views of the Nazis on religion and summarises the position of the major churches. Chapter Two outlines the history and teaching of the five sects and introduces those Nazi government agencies ith which the sects caine into contact. The central body of the work is devoted to an analysis of the fate of the sects. The Jehovah's Witnesses are accorded two chapters, one discussing their experiences in the Reich and one outlining their life in concentration camps. Christian Science, Seventh Day Adventism, the New Apostolic Church and Mormonism are each discussed in sepaxAate chapters. Of the five sects, one was banned, one survived untouched for eight years and three suffered little or no harassment. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Nazis were suspicious of all sects and only accepted a modus vivendi with reluctance. Those sects who enjoyed a temporary co-existence had more to offer than just a loyal and patriotic membership, for all managed to convince the government that they were useful. This was done by financial or welfare contributions to the state, or by the use of foreign contacts, and all had to implement positive and carefully worked out policies to ensure their survival. Each group's survival strategy was worked out according to its own criteria, based on its own history and theology. To the Witnesses, survival meant the preaching of God's word, whatever the personal costs. To others, it meant the safety of members and of the sect, even at the cost of some compromises. All the sects represented rival claimants to the loyalty and obedience properly due to the Nazi state and even with these compromises, it is likely that, had the war been won, what happened to the Witnesses would have happened to all sects in Germany.

The Western conception of the proper human proposes that there is a potent divide between humans and all other animate creatures. Even though the terms of such a divide have been shown to be indecisive, relationships between humans and animals continue to take place across it, and are conditioned by the ways it is imagined. My thesis asks how twenty-first century fiction engages with and practises the textual politics of animal representation, and the forms these representations take when their positions relative to the many and complex compositions of the human-animal divide are taken into account. My analysis is located in contemporary critical debate about human-animal relationships. Taking the animal work of such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Cary Wolfe as a conceptual starting point, I make a detailed and precise engagement with the conditions and terms of literary animal representation in order to give forceful shape to awkward and uncomfortable ideas about animals. Derrida contends that there is a “plural and repeatedly folded frontier” between human and nonhuman animals, and my study scrutinises the multiple conditions at play in the conceptual and material composition of this frontier as it is invoked in fictional animal representations. I argue that human relationships with animals are conditioned by our imaginative shapings of them, and that the animals we imagine are, therefore, of enormous significance for real animals. Working in the newly established field of Literary Animal Studies, I read representations of ordinary animals in a selection of twenty-first century novels, including Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, E. O. Wilson’s Anthill, Carol Hart’s A History of the Novel in Ants, Aryn Kyle’s The God of Animals, Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil, Mark McNay’s Fresh, James Lever’s Me Cheeta, and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. I interrogate how fictional animal forms and tropes are responding to, participating in or challenging the ways animals’ lives are lived out in consequence of human imaginings of them. There are many folds in the frontier between human and nonhuman animals, and my thesis is structured to address how particular forms of discursive boundary-building are invoked in, shape, or are shaped by, the fictional representations of animals. Each of the four chapters in this study takes spectively, political, metaphorical, material and cognitive – between humans and other animals. Analysis is directed at developing concepts and critical practices which articulate the singular literariness of the human, ant, horse, donkey, chicken and ape representations encountered throughout my study. Understanding the ways we make animals through our imaginative eyes is essential to understanding how we make our ethical relationships with them. A key task for Literary Animal Studies is to make visible how literary animal representations may either reinforce homogeneous and reductive conceptions of animals, or may participate in a re-making of our imaginings of them. My study contributes to clarifications of the terms of this task by evolving ways to read unusual or unacknowledged manifestations of the human-animal divide, by giving form to previously unarticulated questions and conditions about how animals are imagined, and by evaluating literary re-imaginings of them.

Historically, martyrdom and testimony have always been conjoined: martyrdom has always implied some form of witnessing, as testified to by the Greek and Arabic etymologies. Taking the locution ‘I am the martyr (x)’ (popularised in Lebanese martyr video-testimonies of the 1980s) as exemplary testimony, it is argued that in the thought of Jacques Derrida each and every singular instance of testimony implies an act of martyrdom, and that a generalised and constitutive thinking of the testimoniality and passion implicit in any performative event and in each and every instance of the ‘I’ traverses Derrida’s thought. Following Derrida, it is proposed that différance be translatable as passion, albeit in a paleonymic sense that is far from simply passive. In its quasi-suicidal logic, passion is shown to deconstruct the very possibility of the ‘sui-’ of suicide or the telos of sacrifice, instead affirming survival and the event of the other (for better or for worse). By probing the possibility of ‘I am the martyr (x)’, the ‘philosophical reflections’ indicated by the title pose the motifs of passion and testimoniality as philosophy’s deconstructive conditions of possibility. By taking the ‘encounter’ between two historical testimonies – those of Derrida and the Lebanese communist martyr Jamal Satti (d. 1985) – as a starting point, and by demonstrating the sufferances of testimony and the archive, the thesis aims to reconcile Derrida’s philosophical thinking with historical enquiry. By supplementing these testimonies with further ‘performances’ of passion and encounters with other reader-writer-witnesses from the realms of philosophy, literature and art, the scandal that is ‘I am the martyr (x)’ becomes at once both extraordinary and the ordinary story of language. Reading this ‘and’ through the ‘x’ of repeatability and substitutability, the aporias of testimony are folded into the wider context of such tele-mediated martyr-testimonies and their terrifying force and effect.

With the social media platforms leading the internet in terms of user base and the average time spent, significant amount of data is being generated by these platforms every day. This makes social media platforms a go-to place to understand the reviews, trends, and opinions of the people. Any regular search for a popular topic would result in an abundance of information and thus it is impossible to go through these large amounts of data manually to understand the trends. This thesis discusses techniques for the intra-topic clustering of such social media data and discusses how social media noise increases the redundancy of the search results. Our goal is to filter the amount of redundant information an end-user must review from a regular social media search. The research proposes clustering models based on two string similarity measures Jaccard word token and T-Information distance. Evaluation parameters are introduced and the models are evaluated on clustering a set of current and historical topics to determine which techniques are the most effective. / Graduate

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Public Health, in the field of Social and Behaviour Change Communications, in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2012 / The Good Participatory Practice Guidelines recommend that research results are made available to a broad range of stakeholders, including policy makers and trial participants, yet there is little guidance on how this may be achieved. The Microbicides Development Programme (MDP301 trial) was a large scale clinical trial that took place at thirteen clinics in South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia between 2004 and 2009. The results of this trial were released in late 2009 and a comprehensive, multi-method results dissemination plan was implemented to communicate the research findings to policy makers, key stakeholders, research staff, Community Advisory Boards and trial participants between December 2009 and November 2010. This study was a retrospective analysis which included a process evaluation (and costing) of the implementation of the results dissemination plan for the MDP301 trial and an analysis of how the incorporation of telephonic unblinding potentially benefited the research community.

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is widely used for automatic discovery of latent topics in document corpora. However, output from analysis using an LDA topic model suffers from a lack of identifiability between topics not only across corpora, but across runs of the algorithm. The output is also isolated from enriching information from knowledge sources such as Wikipedia and is difficult for humans to interpret due to a lack of meaningful topic labels. This thesis introduces two methods for probabilistic explicit topic modeling that address these issues: Latent Dirichlet Allocation with Static Topic-Word Distributions (LDA-STWD), and Explicit Dirichlet Allocation (EDA). LDA-STWD directly substitutes precomputed counts for LDA topic-word counts, leveraging existing Gibbs sampler inference. EDA defines an entirely new explicit topic model and derives the inference method from first principles. Both of these methods approximate topic-word distributions a priori using word distributions from Wikipedia articles, with each article corresponding to one topic and the article title being used as a topic label. By this means, LDA-STWD and EDA overcome the nonidentifiability, isolation, and unintepretability of LDA output. We assess the effectiveness of LDA-STWD and EDA by means of three tasks: document classification, topic label generation, and document label generation. Label quality is quantified by means of user studies. We show that a competing non-probabilistic explicit topic model handily beats both LDA-STWD and EDA as a dimensionality reduction technique in a document classification task. Surprisingly, we find that topic labels from another approach using LDA and post hoc topic labeling (called LDA+Lau) are on one corpus preferred over topic labels prespecified from Wikipedia. Finally, we show that LDA-STWD improves substantially upon the performance of the state of the art in document labeling.