As the information society becomes increasingly flooded with digital images, the need for efficient image retrieval systems increases as well. To handle the vast amounts of data involved, the indexing process needs to be run automatically, using content-based descriptors extracted directly from the digital image, such as colour composition, shape and texture features. These content-based image retrieval systems are often slow and cumbersome, and can appear confusing to an ordinary user who does not understand the underlying mechanisms. One step towards more efficient and user-friendly retrieval systems might be to adjust the weight placed on various descriptors depending on which image category is being searched for. The results of this thesis show that certain categories of digital images would benefit from having extra weight assigned to colour, texture or shape features when searching for images of that category..

Introduction: Men who have sex with men (MSM) is a vulnerable group with regard to HIVbecause of biological factors, lifestyle, discrimination and, in some parts of the world,criminalization. From a public health perspective it is important to include MSM in order to securea high-quality HIV prevention but also to safeguard human rights (HR) for this group. However, itis only recently that the Swedish development cooperation agencies have begun to integrate MSMin HIV prevention. Objective: To examine how employees of Swedish institutions responsible fordevelopment cooperation manage the vulnerable group MSM when providing support for HIVprevention programs and human rights programs. Topics relate to challenges and strategies tointegrate MSM in HIV prevention, which achievements have been obtained, and how to practicallydeal with the criminalization of the group.

The emphasize of this study is to evaluate security issues for home users having a personal computer connected to the Internet. It focus on the usage of advantages and disadvantages when using a firewall while connected to the Internet. The hypothesis is that it gives a better protection to install and use a firewall compared not to do so, due to security flaws in the operating system. The prediction was tested on a home user's personal computer. The testwork was divided into two major tests, each of them performed with, respectively without, a firewall. These major tests were divided into five smaller semi­ tests. The first semi­test without a firewall suffered from a virus or worm attack resulting in loss of data and log files.

This study examines use and users of information and records originating in the context of a contemporary police organisation. This area of research has only been of focus for a relatively few researchers. This in contrast to use and users of historical archives which has been in centre for more studies. The study is conducted with a quantitative method structuring data from 120 selected registered matters containing user queries. The research questions addressed are:- what user categories use the records of the authority- which are the ways of contacting the authority preferred by the users- which are the identifiers provided by the users and how well are they matched by the search artefacts available to the staff of the authority- what information and records are sought-after by the users.For comparing the identifiers provided to the search artefacts has been selected the two most frequently used registry systems within the authority.

The emphasize of this study is to evaluate security issues for home users having a personal computer connected to the Internet. It focus on the usage of advantages and disadvantages when using a firewall while connected to the Internet. The hypothesis is that it gives a better protection to install and use a firewall compared not to do so, due to security flaws in the operating system. The prediction was tested on a home user's personal computer. The testwork was divided into two major tests, each of them performed with, respectively without, a firewall.

There is an increasing demand for information literacy, which is mirrored in curriculum throughout the whole educational system. This, in turn, has brought forward a growing need for librarians who can teach. But do librarians possess pedagogical competence, and if they do, how is this ability used in everyday library practice? The aim of this study is to investigate librarians' conceptions of the pedagogical role, as it is expressed in their didactic interaction with the users. The research questions focus on librarians' experiences of teaching information seeking and use and their activities in this respect.

Computational techniques have transformed the journalistic approach. Journalists now have the opportunity to integrate user-statistics from the news website with their work. Singer (2011) argues that journalists seem particularly afraid of items, which they perceive as trivial or otherwise unsavory, will prove popular - potentially creating management pressures to produce more of those stories. She describes this practice as ??traffic whoring??.

Social media on the Web has become more common over the last decade and in recent years it has grown immensely. The social media with the highest amount of members is Facebook, where not only private persons are found - companies started to establish their profiles on the network in 2006. However, little is known about how these companies succeed and reach their audience with information dissemination and interact with them. The aim of this study is to contribute with information to local companies on how they can manage to maintain their activity with different approaches and strategies. This study examines how three different local companies chooses to spread information and maintain relationships with their members on Facebook.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the Swedish public libraries acquisition processes when it comes to fiction for adults. The thesis focus on how the librarians responsible for acquiring view literary quality when they manage their collections and how their views coincide with that of the user?s explicit wishes. Furthermore this thesis looks at the librarians reading habits and how they coincide with that of their perceived users.The study uses literature pedagogic perspective theory to see how the librarians look at fiction and what they value in it. In order to get answers six librarians have been interviewed in this study that uses a qualitative approach to getting answers.

The aim of this thesis is to study how public libraries in Sweden use alternative shelf arrangements that differ from the library?s original classification system, which in Swedish public libraries usually is the SAB-system. I sent out a survey to 169 public libraries, where I received 114 replies. 77 of these stated that they had some kind of alternative shelf arrangement, therefore these are the ones that are included in my study. I wanted to investigate in what way the libraries had changed their shelf arrangement and why this decision was made.

The representative democracy has become weakened during the last decades. At the same time the United Nations declared at the Rio de Janeiro meeting in 1992 that environmental problems can best be solved by involvement of all concerned citizens in decision-making. The main purpose of this study has been to examine if citizens panels is a possible way to involve citizens in environmental decision-making and what the outcomes can be. Furthermore the study has investigated what the participation has contributed to environmental politics and how representative the results have been. This has been carried out by investigating the Piteåpanel in the municipality of Piteå by conducting interviews.The result of the study shows that the involvement of the citizens in the decision-making influenced the environmental politics of the municipality.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to understand public library users' perceptions of librarians' attitudes to users and professional knowledge. The purpose was also to investigate the relative importance to the user of pleasant or a knowledgeable librarian. As a theoretical framework we use theory from business economy where the experience of the user is in focus. Answers were sought to the following questions: How do users perceive librarians attitudes to users? How do users perceive librarians professional knowledge? How do users want to be treated by public librarians? What kind of knowledge should public librarians have, according to users? We interviewed twelve students in university education that are users of public libraries.

In this Bachelor Thesis (20 p.), we present the history and development of "Intelligent Houses", and most important- explore some of the future possibilities in this area. The project has been carried out through an interdisciplinary cooperation between three different educations at the Blekinge Institute of Technology. By conducting a dialogue with various actors with different professions, we have been trying to identify needs within the concept of "Intelligent Houses", were the end user is not only the tenant or homeowner. Through Participatory Design methods, such as a Future Workshop, we have brought the users together to discuss their own and each others needs and hindrances in their respective work practice, and how intelligent house technology could improve their work conditions. We have also been testing a highly sophisticated CO/CO2/Moisture/Temperature/Enthalpy multi-sensor & controller, originally developed for regulating indoor climate systems. Based on the needs we have found in our fieldwork, we have been looking at possibilities to make multi user solutions with the sensor..

Location-based services (LBS) contains of services helping users of finding positions of themselves or other objects. LBS applications can present information in varies types of ways, these could be threw speech, text, geographic symbols, photos etc. Not many studies have been done to examine the aspects of LBS communication and there is a demand for user and context centered mapping.The purpose of this report is to present a model for the development of user and context based services. The model will give guide lines of recommendations when implementing LBS. The different technologies that support LBS will also be noticed.

In this project a simulator has been developed (in C++) with the purpose of illustrating how changes in environmental regulations, tax levels and other policy measures affect the composition of an energy system. The aim of the project was to investigate how energy companies? investment strategies are affected when changes in economic and environmental conditions occur. A standard scenario has been created based on current Swedish conditions, but the user can create new scenarios and set parameters freely. The user is tasked with building power plants to supply the city/region with district heating and electricity during a pre-set number of years. When the simulation is finished the result is graded in the following categories: economy, environment and quality. To evaluate the simulator three scenarios were created (?early 20th century?, ?reduced environmental control? and ?future?) in addition to the standard scenario and these were compared with each other by examining how a select group of power plants perform under the given conditions.