The main purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine how Braille users needs are satisfied by The Library of Talking Books and Braille TPB. The other issues are: How do some of the library workers at TPB experience that the needs of Braille users are satisfied? Is it possible to make the service better in the future for Braille users and in that case, how? The study is based upon interviews with five persons, who have defective vision and read Braille. I have also interviewed two employees at TPB who have defective vision. To build up a complete background presentation of the subject I have chosen a book about hermeneutic interpretation to understand how historic facts influence the function of the subject today and in the future.

The Swedish government has made the decision to transform the talking book system from an analogue system to a digital system called DAISY by the end of 2004. The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine how public libraries are affected by this system change. This is carried out by studying the current situation in public libraries concerning the transition to DAISY. This qualitative oriented study is primarily based on interviews with four librarians and three library managers at six public libraries. Management by objectives is here seen as a suitably theoretical framework since public municipal libraries are partly regulated by the governments goals and laws.

Tropical rain forests only cover around six percent of the world?s land area and contain around 70 % of the world´s animals and plants. Tropical rainforests have been, and still are, negatively affected by human activities. These activities lead to forest degradation which has negative impacts on production and biodiversity. Between 1970-1980 forests in Borneo, Sabah, Malaysia, was subjected to intense logging.

Carbon sequestration through restoration of degraded pastoral soils is an advocated way of mitigating global warming, and simultaneously alleviating poverty. An often proposed rehabilitation strategy is fencing of pastures, a method that was introduced to the farmers of Chepareria by the Vi-Agroforestry organization in 1987. The landscape of Chepareria changed from eroded, over-grazed grasslands, to a mixture of open-grazed commons, pastoral enclosures and cultivations. The aim of this study was to investigate (1) if the soil organic carbon (SOC) is higher inside the enclosures than on the open-grazed commons, (2) if SOC is affected by duration of fencing and (3) what effect cultivation of pastures has on the SOC. Estimations of vegetation cover and deep profile (100cm) soil sampling was performed on six clusters containing; (1) open-grazing (OG) (2) 1-5 years of fencing (FENCED(1)), (3) 7-10 years of fencing (FENCED(2)), (4) 15-23 years of fencing (FENCED(3)), (5) maize from OG (A(OG)), (6) maize from fenced pasture (A(FENCED)).

There have previously been very few studies of forests on Seram Island in the Eastern Indonesian archipelago and none before on lowland limestone primary forests. The COLUPSIA project on collaborative land use planning has therefore chosen Seram as one of two project sites. The objective of the COLUPSIA project is to establish collaborative and equitable land use planning. In order to achieve its objective the COLUPSIA project aims to improve understanding of traditional resource management and how it interacts with governmental systems, as well as enhancing knowledge about tropical landscapes and ecosystem services.The aim of this study was to contribute to the COLUPSIA project through describing lowland limestone forest on Seram Island in respect to (1) forest structure, (2) tree species richness and (3) tree species composition. We set up 5 plots, each of 0.2 ha, at one site, Mawalai, and collected data on tree variables (tree diameter ?10 cm) as well as for some other life forms and environmental data.

Denna kvalitativa fallstudie undersöker hur svenskämnet på IB-programmet regleras i styrdokumenten, hur styrdokumenten kan omsättas till undervisningspraktik samt vilka fördelar och nackdelar lärare som undervisar i både IB-svenskan och de nationella svenskkurserna Svenska A och Svenska B upplever med IB-svenskan. Fallstudiens metoder är en hermeneutisk styrdokumentsanalys av IB-svenskans styrdokument i relation till kursplanen för Svenska B, en halvstrukturerad observation av en lektion i IB-svenska och halvstrukturerade intervjuer med de två lärare som undervisar i IB-svenska på den undersökta gymnasieskolan. Som analysverktyg nyttjas ramfaktor- samt frirumsmodellen. De slutsatser som kan dras utifrån fallstudien är att de yttre ramarna för IB-svenskan i form av styrdokumenten är snävare än för kursen Svenska B. Kursplanen, betygssystemet, ?Prescribed Book List?, den tillgängliga tiden, elevunderlaget och gruppstorleken utgör alla ramfaktorer som inskränker lärarnas frirum, både det upplevda och reella, i utformningen av och undervisningen i IB-svenska.

The aim with my master thesis is to develop and test the applicability of methods to quantify and map solute advective travel times and pollutant transport at the catchment scale. Such quantification and mapping can increase the understanding of catchment-scale pollutant transport in general and contribute to the identification of the main sources of water pollution and the most efficient measures to reduce such pollution. The study area is the catchment of Oxundaån, about 20 km north of Stockholm. For detailed GIS modeling of water flow and catchment-scale contaminant transport in water, I´ve used new high-resolution elevation maps, land cover maps and soil maps combined with other available relevant data..

The purpose of this essay is to analyse and understand how students, as consumers, choose brands from the aspects of the concept of CSR, the economic, social and environmental. The essay is based on a qualitative method with three focus groups, with five respondents in each of them. The respondents are all studying at Kalmar University and they have all studied some kind of economic-course. We have used a lot of different sources for our theory chapter, this because of the fact that we wanted to have different angles, so that we would be able to cover all of the questions we wanted to discuss in the focus groups. In our two final chapters we discuss the issues similar to the theory section and we highlight our own thoughts.

In my paper I have compared popular science and neutral science regarding language and construction. My task was to find out if there are differences between the language of popular science and that of scientific science. The purpose of my paper is to answer four questions1.How do the authors present the bogbodies and the mummies in the two categories?2.What does the popular science imagine that you want to read about?3.Is there a difference between the target groups of the two categories?4. Does the presentation of the subject have consequenses when it comes to contents and readers?I have studied how often the authors use drawings, photos, diagrams, maps, and if the titles of the chapters can tell you something about the nature of books.

This study focuses on the integrity of students at Uppsala University that has used the university?s network, UpUnet. We?ve studied their opinions with the use of questionnaires that cover questions related to privacy and awareness about logging of data traffic.The results showed that more students than our hypothesis suggested were unaware of the surveillance on the network, and the majority of these also had a negative opinion towards logging of data traffic. However, we found that there were several relations between how the students responded on our questionnaire, and we?ve presented these in the analysis chapter towards the end of the essay..

This essay aims to describe and problematize gender roles and master suppression techniques in Stephenie Meyer?s Twilight Saga. This is done in order to enable me, in my future profession as a teacher, to start an emancipatory discussion in class where pupils can become conscious of different ways of reading the love story. I will use the following two research questions to fulfil the purpose: 1) investigate which gender roles that appears in the book?s main characters Bella and Edward and 2) which master suppression techniques that colours their relationship.To answer the questions gender theory and ideology-critics are used.

Syftet med min studie är att undersöka om det finns ett samband mellan högläsning, boksamtal och den individuella skrivutvecklingen. Det grundar sig i min tro att den skönlitteratur eleverna läser påverkar hur de uttrycker sig i skrift. För att ta reda på om det finns något sådant samband valde jag göra en kvalitativ undersökning utifrån experimentell design. Undersökningen genomfördes på en mindre grupp elever i år 3 vid fyra tillfällen under vårterminen 2007. Vid varje tillfälle läste jag högt ur av mig vald bok.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine how gender patterns are described in the modern picture book. Focus is on the description of men and women and their emotions and living conditions. Do the descriptions follow stereotypes in the form of binary opposites strong/weak, active/passive etc. in which one component of the pair, often associated with masculinity, is privileged or are there examples of breach of normative gender? The analysis is based upon forty of 149 picture books that are presented in a children's book catalogue published by The Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs Statens kulturråd, in the year of 2000.

This report aims to describing the work behind the development of a masonry heater.The masonry heater is developed in collaboration with the company Transient Design KB that is a product development company located in Alingsås. The company sees a possibility to cover a market segment where modern technology and design are missing.The report presents those methods and approaches that have been used and gives an overview to how the project has been carried out. It describes how the ideas behind the final results have produced and how they have been developed during the project's time. In the report you can also read about the final concept with its choices of construction and materials.The report is completed with a presentation of a final concept and a ground for possible future production..

The usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for several applications has in-creased during the past years. One of the possible applications are aerial imagecapturing for detection and surveillance purposes. In order to make the captur-ing process more efficient, multiple, cameraequipped UAV:s could fly in a for-mation and as a result cover a larger area. To be able to receive several imagesequences and stitch those together, resulting in a panoramavideo, a softwareapplication has been developed and tested for this purpose.All functionality are developed in the language C++ by using the software li-brary OpenCV. All implementations of different techniques and methods hasbeen done as generic as possible to be able to add functionality in the future.Common methods in computervision and object recognition such as SIFT, SURF and RANSAC have been tested..