Weightless Segments - A phonetic and phonological study concerning the metrical irrelevance of syllable onsets

ULFonetische correlaten en communicatieve functies van linguïstische structuu

The Dynamics of Influencer Marketing

YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter, etc. have their own logics, dynamics and different audiences. This book analyses how the users of these social networks, especially those of YouTube and Instagram, become content prescribers, opinion leaders and, by extension, people of influence. What influence capacity do they have? Why are intimate or personal aspects shared with unknown people? Who are the big beneficiaries? How much is vanity and how much altruism? What business is behind these social networks? What dangers do they contain? What volume of business can we estimate they generate? How are they transforming cultural industries? What legislation is applied? How does the legislation affect these communications when they are sponsored? Is the privacy of users violated with the data obtained? Who is the owner of the content? Are they to blame for ""fake news""? In this changing, challenging and intriguing environment, The Dynamics of Influencer Marketing discusses all of these questions and more. Considering this complexity from different perspectives: technological, economic, sociological, psychological and legal, the book combines the visions of several experts from the academic world and provides a structured framework with a wide approach to understand the new era of influencing, including the dark sides of it. It will be of direct interest to marketing scholars and researchers while also relevant to many other areas affected by the phenomenon of social media influence

Making Sense of Smell: Classifications and Model Thinking in Olfaction Theory

This thesis addresses key issues of scientific realism in the philosophy of biology and chemistry through investigation of an underexplored research domain: olfaction theory, or the science of smell. It also provides the first systematic overview of the development of olfactory practices and research into the molecular basis of odours across the 19th and 20th century. Historical and contemporary explanations and modelling techniques for understanding the material basis of odours are analysed with a specific focus on the entrenchment of technological process, research tradition and the definitions of materiality for understanding scientific advancement. The thesis seeks to make sense of the explanatory and problem solving strategies, different ways of reasoning and the construction of facts by drawing attention to the role and application of scientific representations in olfactory practices. Scientific representations such as models, classifications, maps, diagrams, lists etc. serve a variety of purposes that range from the stipulation of relevant properties and correlations of the research materials and the systematic formation of research questions, to the design of experiments that explore or test particular hypotheses. By examining a variety of modelling strategies in olfactory research, I elaborate on how I understand the relation between representations and the world and why this relation requires a pluralist perspective on scientific models, methods and practices. Through this work I will show how a plurality of representations does not pose a problem for realism about scientific entities and their theoretical contexts but, on the contrary, that this plurality serves as the most reliable grounding for a realistic interpretation of scientific representations of the world and the entities it contains. The thesis concludes that scientific judgement has to be understood through its disciplinary trajectory, and that scientific pluralism is a direct consequence of the historicity of scientific development

The cinematic mode in twentieth-century fiction a comparative approach

This study deals with the influence of film form in fiction in terms of narrative discourse, focusing on issues of genre, narration, temporality, and the imitation of cinematic techniques. It provides a theoretical analysis of different methodologies (intermediality theory, semiotics, narratology, genre theory) which are useful to assess how a cinematic dimension has found a place in literary writing. This research, in particular, puts forth the idea of a 'para-cinematic narrator', a 'flattening of the narrative relief', and a 'para-cinematic narrative contract' as constitutive items of strongly cinematised fiction. These three theoretical items are subsumed in the concept of 'cinematic mode in fiction', which describes a distillation of characteristics of the film form on the written page. This research therefore represents a theoretical attempt to demonstrate how the cinematic component integrates the stylistic and generic traits of novels and short stories relating to different periods, styles and genres of the twentieth century. The proposed theoretical model is tested on a corpus of American, French, and, especially, Italian case studies. The remediation of film that emerges from these texts points to a complex interconnection between cinema and literature which still requires full acknowledgment in literary history

Sandton: a linguistic ethnography of small stories in a site of luxury

Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2018This is a linguistic ethnography that focuses on small stories (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008, De Fina 2009, De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2015, Georgakopoulou 2006a and 2006b, 2008, 2014) within Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) approach to identity and interaction. These two intersecting theoretical scaffoldings are completed by a geosemiotic approach (Scollon and Scollon 2003) to the discursive environment. The research therefore studies narrative interactions within communities of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992, 2007) across the spaces and fields of the research site of Sandton, Johannesburg; investigating both participant behaviour and discursive environment, in particular with respect to the semiotic landscape. It is a ‘new’ ethnography in that its aim is to better understand the new spaces of South Africa’s cities (Duff 2014). Methodologically the narrative interactions of participants are plotted onto the space of Sandton using GIS technology. This allows attention to be brought to the trajectories of participants and thus to change in interactive style, role and behaviour as participants enter, remain within and leave the site. Three principles of identity and interaction are explored and unpacked in depth for this linguistic ethnography: emergence, positionality and relationality. In addition to a focus on the site itself and its socio-historic processes, this thesis examines the trajectories across the space of the site, institutional discourse and practice through four emblematic companies and, finally, the ‘Born Free’ or ‘millenial’ participants. Through the different participants the research seeks to give an account of the subjectivities and understandings that will be relevant to the present, and future, of the site, and of the country. Axes of investigation are emergence of identity work, masculinity, religion, modernity, codeswitching, positionality with respect to macro, meso and micro discourses and interaction, and tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz and Hall 2004b).MT 201

Surrogate Models Coupled with Machine Learning to Approximate Complex Physical Phenomena Involving Aerodynamic and Aerothermal Simulations

Numerical simulations provide a key element in aircraft design process, complementing physical tests and flight tests. They could take advantage of innovative methods, such as artificial intelligence technologies spreading in aviation. Simulating the full flight mission for various disciplines pose important problems due to significant computational cost coupled to varying operating conditions. Moreover, complex physical phenomena can occur. For instance, the aerodynamic field on the wing takes different shapes and can encounter shocks, while aerothermal simulations around nacelle and pylon are sensitive to the interaction between engine flows and external flows. Surrogate models can be used to substitute expensive high-fidelitysimulations by mathematical and statistical approximations in order to reduce overall computation cost and to provide a data-driven approach. In this thesis, we propose two developments: (i) machine learning-based surrogate models capable of approximating aerodynamic experiments and (ii) integrating more classical surrogate models into industrial aerothermal process. The first approach mitigates aerodynamic issues by separating solutions with very different shapes into several subsets using machine learning algorithms. Moreover, a resampling technique takes advantage of the subdomain decomposition by adding extra information in relevant regions. The second development focuses on pylon sizing by building surrogate models substitutingaerothermal simulations. The two approaches are applied to aircraft configurations in order to bridge the gap between academic methods and real-world applications. Significant improvements are highlighted in terms of accuracy and cost gain

(Mis)trusting Health Research Synthesis Studies: Exploring Transformations of 'Evidence'

This thesis explores the transformations of evidence in health research synthesis studies – studies that bring together evidence from a number of research reports on the same/ similar topic. It argues that health research synthesis is a broad and intriguing field in a state of pre-formation, in spite of the fact that it may appear well established if equated with its exemplar method – the systematic review inclusive of meta-analysis. Transformations of evidence are processes by which pieces of evidence are modified from what they are in the primary study report into what is needed in the synthesis study while, supposedly, having their integrity fully preserved. Such processes have received no focused attention in the literature. Yet they are key to the validity and reliability of synthesis studies. This work begins to describe them and explore their frequency, scope and drivers. A ‘meta-scientific’ perspective is taken, where ‘meta-scientific’ is understood to include primarily ideas from the philosophy of science and methodological texts in health research, and, to a lesser extent, social studies of science and psychology of science thinking. A range of meta-scientific ideas on evidence and factors that shape it guide the analysis of processes of “data extraction” and “coding” during which much evidence is transformed. The core of the analysis involves the application of an extensive Analysis Framework to 17 highly heterogeneous research papers on cancer. Five non-standard ‘injunctions’ complement the Analysis Framework – for comprehensiveness, extensive multiple coding, extreme transparency, combination of critical appraisal and critique, and for first coding as close as possible to the original and then extending towards larger transformations. Findings suggest even lower credibility of the current overall model of health research synthesis than initially expected. Implications are discussed and a radical vision for the future proposed.Economic and Social Research Conci

'Makings of the self and of the sun': Modernist Poetics of Climate Change

This thesis aims to formulate a critical methodology and a poetics that engage with climate change. It critiques the Romantic and social justice premises of literary ecocriticism, arguing that a modernist poetics more capably articulates the complexities exacerbated in anthropogenic climate change. Analysing the form of a range of modernist work, I assess its expression of the human–climate relations at the root of the planet's present state, and trace this work's influence on contemporary climate change poetry. Ecocriticism's topical approaches to nature and the environment have been constitutively unable to grapple with climate change until the discipline's recent synthesis of literary theory, and the emergence of a 'material ecocriticism' informed by developments in environmental sociology, ethics and philosophy. Modernist aesthetics has an array of concerns in common with this critical thinking on climate change, and the reciprocity of the two prompts my rereading here of key modernist texts. T. S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' is seen to reveal civilisation's inability to suppress or surpass its environment; Wallace Stevens's opus exposes the necessarily fictive quality of our relations with nature; Basil Bunting extends Stevens's reconsideration of Romanticism with the diminishment of selfhood and breakdown of order in his poetry; while David Jones's 'The Anathemata' employs the scope of modernist poetics to understand the prehistoric climate change that enabled the emergence of civilisation. By being conscious of modernist traditions, new work – as exemplified here by Jorie Graham's 'Sea Change' – acknowledges the role of human culture in creating the world imaginatively and phenomenally. As contemporary climate change poetry moves away from using culturally familiar elegiac modes, it benefits from a fuller range of resources to articulate the entanglement and hybridity of nature and culture in the twenty-first century

URBAN CORPORIS X - UNEXPECTED

Starting from the emergency provoked by the Sars-Cov2 that affected the whole world, the book brings the contributions of researchers and artists from all over the world discussing the theme of the \u201cunexpected\u201d, its implication, and inter-action with everyday life. The book presents a series of essays divided into three parts: Living unexpectedly, Missing interactions, and Different sociality. These three categories bring together authors who have had a reading of the unexpected emergency that occurred, pointing out different perspectives upon dynamics and relation caused by this situation, underlining how the isolation period has affected both the domestic and the urban sphere. Moreover, through drawings, photomontages and photographs, several authors gave a visual interpretation of the changed lives, spaces, and routines. All these contributions don\u2019t want to answer to the enormous problems brought by the pandemic. Rather they synthesize an interpretation of the shifting condition that occurred, showing both the great reactive capacity and the fragility of the no longer present reality

Keys to futures: societal reflections on developing key technologies and their impacts on human qualifications

The study was aimed at defining and drawing up the most important future trends as regards the development of technology (key technologies) and analysing their societal impacts and impacts on human qualifications. The key technologies to be studied in the survey have been limited to information and communication technology, biotechnology and material and nano technology. In addition, combinations of these technologies, i.e. so-called fusion technologies, are also subjected to an analysis. The methodology of the study is based on the Delphi method. The study was carried out in three phases. The preliminary phase comprised a theoretical-empirical study of the essential trends in the development of technology and a systematisation of the most important future key technologies. The first Delphi round comprised collection and analysis, based on the evaluation by experts, of the material on the future key technologies as defined in the study. The main results comprise the analyses of the technological phenomena and technological theses, and the plausibility and the timing of theses. The following technologies and relating theses were deemed to be the most important ones: highly selective drugs, sensors, integrated technology, biomedical materials, photonic materials, 3G technology, intelligent materials, diagnostics and virtual reality. The main objective of the second Delphi round was to make an analysis of the societal impacts of the technologiesdeemed to be crucial during the first round on the basis of the evaluations by experts. The first main resultcomprises linking of the most important technological theses with the classes of professions and areas ofeducation identified so that it is possible to study the change in professions and areas of education, technology by technology and thesis by thesis. The second main result is an analysis of the plausibility andtiming of the new future professions created during the study.</p