From everyday speech to literary style: The decline of the distant address De in Norwegian during the twentieth century

Change in norms for the use of address forms and change in the actual usage of these forms are an important part of the history of any language. By investigating how certain grammatical features are chosen for specific pragmatic meaning, we deepen our understanding of the relationship between language and society. These changes can be described from several angles by focussing on intralinguistic factors (which linguistic features are used) or on social factors. In this article, we will take both perspectives into consideration by looking at the forms of pronominal address that have been used in Norway, as well as how and why they have changed. The data is drawn primarily from radio and weekly magazines, the popular media of the twentieth century.publishedVersio

Implementing an Adaptive Genetic Algorithm in the Atari Environment

This thesis attempts to implement a genetic algorithm for training agents within the Atari game environments. The training is performed on hardware of a widely available character, and so the results give an indication of how well these models perform on relatively inexpensive equipment available to many people. The Atari environment Space Invaders was chosen to train and test the models in. As a baseline, a Deep Q-Network (DQN) algorithm is implemented within TensorFlow's TF-Agents framework. The DQN is a popular model that has inspired many new algorithms and is often used as a comparison to alternative approaches. An adaptive genetic algorithm called ACROMUSE was implemented and compared with the performance of the DQN within the environment. This algorithm adaptively determines crossover rates, mutation rates and tournament selection size. Using measures for diversity and fitness, two subpopulations are maintained to avoid converging toward a local optimum. Based on the results found here, the algorithm did not seem to converge or produce high-performing agents, and importantly performed worse than the DQN approach. The reasons for why this algorithm fails and why other genetic algorithms have succeeded are discussed. The large number of weight parameters present in the network seem to be a barrier to good performance. It is suggested that a parallel training approach is necessary to reach the number of agents and generations where a good solution could be found. It is also shown how the number of frames skipped in the environment had a significant impact on the performance of the baseline DQN model.2021-09-25T16:27:45

Goals, feedback and motivation in a matrix structured organisation

Organisations are all around us and they control and balance our world. Our lives are tied up in all kinds of organisations, or at least some sort of one. We are born and educated in an organisation. We work in organisations, and in the end, we are buried by an organisation. Organisations want to deliver good results and achieve their goals and visions, and to be able to do this the organisation needs employees. The more motivated the employees are in doing a good job the better the organisational results. The purpose of this study is to understand employee’s motivation in an organisational structure, and how goals and feedback is experienced in this setting. This study is a qualitative single case study performed within the engineering department in DeepOcean. The semi-structured interview guide, which served as the main basis for gathering data, was developed using both organisational and motivational theory. The results from the data analysis verify many of the challenges and opportunities identified in theory. This study shows how important it is for employees to have a plan at work, and how motivating it is to work together with others. The degree to which the department is involved in the engineer's work life when setting objectives and plans, as well as how feedback is given, is found to be a factor for work motivation. Moreover, feedback is found to be more appreciated and valued when it is perceived directly from the projects and from the people where the relationships are closest. This study shows a correlation between the degree of autonomy and frequency of feedback, and how this can have an impact on organisational performance in a matrix organisation. The study concludes with recommendations that can be evaluated to increase motivation and performance in DeepOcean

The Smoke Detector Principle

Defenses, such as flight, cough, stress, and anxiety, should theoretically be expressed to a degree that is near the optimum needed to protect against a given threat. Many defenses seem, however, to be expressed too readily or too intensely. Furthermore, there are remarkably few untoward effects from using drugs to dampen defensive responses. A signal detection analysis of defense regulation can help to resolve this apparent paradox. When the cost of expressing an all-or-none defense is low compared to the potential harm it protects against, the optimal system will express many false alarms. Defenses with graded responses are expressed to the optimal degree when the marginal cost equals the marginal benefit, a point that may vary considerably from the intuitive optimum. Models based on these principles show that the overresponsiveness of many defenses is only apparent, but they also suggest that, in specific instances, defenses can often be dampened without compromising fitness. The smoke detector principle is an essential foundation for making decisions about when drugs can be used safely to relieve suffering and block defenses.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75092/1/j.1749-6632.2001.tb03472.x.pd

Engaged Citizens: A Tale of Status, Satisfaction or Structure? A Study of Citizens’ Willingness to Participate in Mini-Publics

Based on the reported participatory shift from traditional political channels to non-traditional channels, scholars are emphasising the importance of continuously developing the political channels through which individuals are able to act in order to maintain levels of political participation and political satisfaction. In 2017, Bergen municipality formed the Local Democracy Committee to investigate the need for democratic reform in the city, and despite finding stable levels of political participation, they recommended the implementation of mini-publics to ensure that the level of political participation and satisfaction is maintained. Incorporating such democratic innovations necessitates a knowledge of who wants to engage, who does not, and how they should be created to pique citizens' interests. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to uncover the determinants of the wish to participate in mini-publics. Because there is no explicit theoretical framework for this type of participation, the study controls for internal and external levels of political efficiency as potential causes for participatory inclination in regard to mini publics, which have been heavily emphasised as important determinants in classical political participation theory. I use an OLS regression to uncover whether the traditional individual-level determinants of participation in traditional political channels are also important factors for participation in mini-publics, and data from a survey experiment is used to assess patterns of complex, multidimensional structural composition favourability in a conjoint analysis. The findings suggest that predicting the willingness to participate in mini-publics in accordance with internal levels of political efficacy may be insufficient, however, the analysis finds that younger people are more inclined to participate. The structural components of mini-publics, on the other hand, were employed as sources of external efficacy and were found to be influential predictors of the willingness to participate. Individuals were found to value financial compensation for their participation, secret votes, and to receive a formal invitation through the process of random selection. In order to further elaborate on the findings, subsequent conjoint analyses are included, analysing the relationship between the mini-publics’ potential structural composition, but also whether these preferences vary according to subgroup affiliation.MasteroppgaveSAMPOL350MASV-SAP