A QUALITATIVE EXAMINATION OF THE AGENCY OF WOMEN IN THEIR 30S AND 40S WHO USE DATING APPLICATIONS

The use of dating applications (apps) to find romantic and sexual partners is widespread across age groups, however, there is a paucity of research on dating apps with those in middle adulthood. Sexual script theory suggests that women’s agency (i.e. the ability to act in one’s own best interest) may be impacted by expectations from an inherently sexualized context, such as dating apps. Feminist theory contends that women’s agency is complicated by gender socialization due to the imbalance of power in society that greatly favors men. In this study seventeen women aged 30 to 49 completed in-depth semi-structured interviews, and their responses were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Data analysis resulted in identifying themes related to how dating apps pose challenges to women’s agency, the casual nature of apps, positive aspects of dating apps in general and specific to women’s agency, differences and similarities to meeting in-person, and how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting dating app experiences. These results highlight the complicated process of navigating dating app use for women aged 30 to 49 and call for cultural changes relating to gender socialization

Urban infrastructure

These documents have been reviewed by Safe Assignment.This thesis project, Urban Infrastructure, provides answers to the question, How can a city’s systems and infrastructure influence its architecture? The building typology used to examine this question is a 75,000 sq. ft. city hall located in downtown Fargo, ND. The unifying idea of this thesis is to strengthen the sense of place through design by examining the basic components of the city. This project is justified because creating a sense of place based upon the urban environment ensures that the building will be designed specifically for the city

The discipline and disciplining of Margaret Sanger: US birth control rhetoric in the early twentieth century

Margaret Sanger\u27s rhetoric in the US birth control movement demonstrates the social forces that act upon rhetors and women\u27s bodies, conforming both to established gender norms even as they attempt to violate those standards. This project studies Sanger\u27s birth control rhetoric to understand how her arguments for women\u27s right to contraception conformed women\u27s bodies to traditional feminine notions despite her early efforts to contradict such dictates of domesticity. Research on nineteenth-century feminist rhetors demonstrates a pattern of women challenging feminine ideals by speaking publicly but replicating the familiar themes that women must care for others. To explain such a pattern, this study combines the theories of interpretation and genealogy to analyze texts\u27 meanings with a respect for the ways that social forces conform speakers to already established norms and themes. This project follows genealogical demands for a complex history by discussing the discourses that challenge and support early twentieth century birth control rhetoric . Early themes in Sanger\u27s rhetoric focus on issues of class and women\u27s personal liberation. Analysis shows that Sanger begins by addressing the class oppression working class experience before engaging in class maternalism in which she condescends to lower class women setting upper class women as examples of bodily discipline. Sanger\u27s early themes of birth control as women\u27s liberation give way to an emphasis upon women using birth control to better serve their families, thereby fulfilling their maternal duties. Later themes in Sanger\u27s rhetoric emphasize birth control\u27s utility to the state for managing the rate and quality of women\u27s reproduction. The movement from earlier to later themes in Sanger\u27s rhetoric shifts from speaking about women as subject with control of their bodies to objects whose bodies must be controlled. Employing capitalistic themes, Sanger argues that women\u27s rate of reproduction must be controlled to safeguard national security. Using notions of social evolution, Sanger engages in eugenic discourse to demand the control of women\u27s bodies who produce unfit offspring. The sweep of Sanger\u27s rhetoric proves the utility of genealogical interpretation to understand the dynamics of power and discourse that conform feminist speakers to accepted gender definitions

Towards a Reference Architecture for Context-Aware Services

This Chapter describes an infrastructure for multi-modal perceptual systems which aims at developing and realizing computer services that are delivered to humans in an implicit and unobtrusive way. The framework presented here supports the implementation of humancentric context-aware applications providing non-obtrusive assistance to participants in events such as meetings, lectures, conferences and presentations taking place in indoor "smart spaces". We emphasize on the design and implementation of an agent-based framework that supports "pluggable" service logic in the sense that the service developer can concentrate on the service logic independently of the underlying middleware. Furthermore, we give an example of the architecture’s ability to support the cooperation of multiple services in a meeting scenario using an intelligent connector service and a semantic web oriented travel service. The framework was developed as part of the project CHIL (Computers in the Human Interaction Loop). The vision of CHIL was to be able to provide context-aware human centric services which will operate in the background, provide assistance to the participants in the CHIL spaces and undertake tedious tasks in an unobtrusive way. To achieve this, significant effort had to be put in designing efficient context extraction components so that the CHIL system can acquire an accurate perspective of the current state of the CHIL space. However, the CHIL services required a much more sophisticated modelling of the actual event, rather than simple and fluctuating impressions of it. Furthermore, by nature the CHIL spaces are highly dynamic and heterogeneous; people join or leave, sensors fail or are restarted, user devices connect to the network, etc. To manage this diverse infrastructure, sophisticated techniques were necessary that can map all entities present in the CHIL system and provide information to all components which may require it. From these facts, one can easily understand that in addition to highly sophisticated components at an individual level, another mechanism (or a combination of mechanisms) should be present which can handle this infrastructure. The CHIL Reference Architecture for Multi Modal Systems lies in the background, and provides the solid, high performance and robust backbone for the CHIL services. Each individual need is assigned to a specially designed and integrated layer which is docked to the individual component, and provides all the necessary actions to enable the component to be plugged in the CHIL framework

Unexpected ancestry of Populus seedlings from a hybrid zone implies a large role for postzygotic selection in the maintenance of species

In the context of potential interspecific gene flow, the integrity of species will be maintained by reproductive barriers that reduce genetic exchange, including traits associated with prezygotic isolation or poor performance of hybrids. Hybrid zones can be used to study the importance of different reproductive barriers, particularly when both parental species and hybrids occur in close spatial proximity. We investigated the importance of barriers to gene flow that act early versus late in the life cycle of European Populus by quantifying the prevalence of homospecific and hybrid matings within a mosaic hybrid zone. We obtained genotypic data for 11,976 loci from progeny and their maternal parents and constructed a Bayesian model to estimate individual admixture proportions and hybrid classes for sampled trees, and for the unsampled pollen parent. Matings that included one or two hybrid parents were common, resulting in admixture proportions of progeny that spanned the whole range of potential ancestries between the two parental species. This result contrasts strongly with the distribution of admixture proportions in adult trees, where intermediate hybrids and each of the parental species are separated into three discrete ancestry clusters. The existence of the full range of hybrids in seedlings is consistent with weak reproductive isolation early in the life cycle of Populus. Instead, a considerable amount of selection must take place between the seedling stage and maturity to remove many hybrid seedlings. Our results highlight that high hybridization rates and appreciable hybrid fitness do not necessarily conflict with the maintenance of species integrity