Virtual Communities is an increasingly common phenomenon on the Internet. Most of the Virtual Communities are operated and maintained on a non-profit basis with a direction towards entertainment. However, as more state administrated and commercial services become web-based, we believe that the number of Virtual Communities with a community-based or commercial direction will increase in a near future. In this thesis, we describe our participation in, and studies of, a number of Virtual Communities with focus on the IRC-channel ?3dfxsweden?. On the basis of our experiences, we describe the social elements that form the foundation on which the Virtual Community rely on.

The information market is constantly changing. With new and improved information technology more people get access to more information faster. However, the number of people educated to handle information also increases. Business intelligence has for a long time been a well-known tool for companies to be competitive. Because of the increased access to information the competition between companies has intensified and more people have become aware of the advantages of business intelligence and how it can help them compete.

The purpose of this study is to characterize the research in the field of Knowledge Organization, during the period of 1990-2002, focusing on the subject and the epistemology of these studies. The result shows that studies concerning representation, e.g. subjects such as classification, indexing and bibliographic description, are the most frequently researched areas throughout the period. Classification was more popular in the beginning of the period, but later bibliographic description, mostly with studies on metadata, became more visible, together with a growing interest in information retrieval. The theoretical discussions in the studies focused primarily on document analysis and the organization of digital documents.

Humanity has always dreamed about a better world. These dreams has manifested themselves in the vision of Utopia - the good place, but also the non-existing place. Up until World War II man still wrote optimistic descriptions of this ideal world, and spread the idea through literature. In the aftermath of the atomic bomb and under the influence of the cold war, these publications seized to surface in literary surroundings. Despite this utopia did not die - it has only changed.

In this Bachelor thesis I explore sound and room as elements in design of user interfaces, both theoretical and practical in a specific application domain, to identify some of the advantages and disadvantage associated with these elements. As application domain I studied email clients and their usage at home amongst students at Blekinge Institute of Technology. In the study I found an activity, which seems to be highly distributed in the physical room where the user is located. The activity was notification of email and could take place in an arbitrary location of the home. I then augmented this activity with ideas from my theoretical assumption about room and sound. The result was a rule-based agent for notification of email, which primarily uses sound as interaction style..

Increasing the use of biofuels is an important part of achieving the EU?s target of 10 percent renewable energy in the transport sector. However, the competition between biofuels and food production is an ongoing concern. Also, several studies have indicated a significantly higher climate impact than was earlier estimated, due to emissions from land use. In Sweden, both the use and production of biofuels from crops have increased substantially during the last decade. The purpose of this project is first to present an overview of the Swedish land use in all sectors.

Teaching in pre-school usually takes its starting-point in children?s reality and curiosity. Apart from that it has also been important to take contains of a special subject under consideration, for example development of language and communication or mathematics development. The purpose of this study was to investigate how natural science as a special subject in pre-school education is expressed by five trainee teachers when they teach children at the age of 2-7. Generally the study focuses on the students? teaching actions as well as their line of argument about their teaching and the choices they have to make.

This master's thesis is about alternative career opportunities for library and information science graduates. Ever since the beginning of our education we have been interested in working outside of the traditional libraries. Now that we are about to receive our degrees in library and information science we are doubtful if the competence we have obtained is enough to meet the demands of the labour market. The employment field we have been studying in this master's thesis is information management, since this is a field that we find comparable to library and information science. Our study involves a qualitative survey amongst recruiting companies to investigate how the recruiters value different educations, competences and personal skills when they employ staff within the field of information management.

Detta arbete behandlar de tilläggsprogram som, på senaste tid, börjat spridas med bland annat peer2peerverktyg. Dessa tilläggsprogram, som brukar benämnas spyware alternativt adware, misstänks för att samla in personlig information, så som e-mailadresser och lösenord. Det föreligger en risk att informationen sedan säljs vidare eller används för att exempelvis rikta reklam....

Den här rapporten är ett resultat av ett kandidatarbete på 20-poäng. Projektet som rapporten handlar om, beskriver hur utvecklingen av ett webbutikssystem åt ett flertal företag gått till. De har i sin tur köpt webbsystemet från företaget Opti Use som givit oss uppgiften. I rapporten diskuteras hur utvecklingsprocessen gått till och hur ett arbete med ett befintligt system upplevts. Rapporten beskriver även hur lösningen på uppgiften har tagit form och hur utvecklingsprocessen påverkat den.

Utveckling av planeringssystem är ett komplext designproblem som kräver både en hög grad av flexibilitet men även struktur. I samband med planering är det ett flertal aktörer, aktiviteter och resurser som måste beaktas. Kunnandet när det gäller planering finns ofta koncentrerad till ett fåtal nyckelpersoner. Det är därför ingen tillfällighet att många företag, organisationer och även universitet idag bedriver sin planering i beprövade enanvändarsystem som Excel fast att det finns starkt behov för standardiserat fleranvändarsystem. Uppsala universitet är inget undantag trots dess storlek med över 40 000 studenter, 6 200 anställda, 130 utbildningsprogram och 2000 fristående kurser.

The purpose of the study was firstly to describe the use of news articles from the largest Swedish news agency, TT Nyhetsbyrån, in four Swedish newspapers. Secondly, the purpose was to see if there was a homogenization of which TT-articles that was used. This was carried out by examining articles on the newspapers? local, domestic and foreign pages. The newspapers that was chosen were Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Göteborgs-Posten and Nerikes Allehanda.

As the western society gradually turns into a knowledge- and risk society, where science and scientific innovations increasingly both promise to save the world and destroy it, a shift in the relation between the scientific community and the rest of society has emerged. A shift from a top-down one-way transfer view regarding communication, to a dialogue-based interactive co-production model, where the public are part of setting the agenda for research and contribute to the knowledge production. Or at least in theory, in EU documents and in many different country's policy documents. In practical application however, one might have a hard time see the implementation of such model.As a more comprehensive and dialogue-based science communication is depending on the possibility for scientist themselves to engage and fell the need to engage, we have focused on their thoughts.In this thesis we have examined six scientists view on, and work with, science communication, as well as their perceived social and structural conditions. We have also examined action plans and strategy documents from three Swedish universities that in different ways mention science communication and interaction with the broader society.

Secondary schools have for decades debated whether they promote social reproduction which is considered to generate the homogeneous student compositions. The gap between the academic programs and vocational education programs is considered to increase. What in recent years has appeared in research is that the gap is increasing most tend to be in the specific academic program, particularly in science. This paper's intention is to describe the science program at a local level and the pupils who were admitted to the science program autumn 2009 on the basis of an educational sociological perspective. The survey consisted of a census in which all students were given the opportunity to answer a questionnaire.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse the Chinese destination of Hainan, with background in a globalizing tourism destination development, for tourism from Finland and Sweden. The questions at issue are regarding what kind of an impact the status as a special economic zone have had upon Hainan, what kind of conditions there are for tourism on the island, in what form participants of the tourism industry want the development to proceed, what the prevailing trend is for distant destinations for Nordic markets and also regarding what kind of potential there is for organized tourism to Hainan from Finland and Sweden.As a foundation for the paper, I?ve composed a theoretical reference for knowledge of China, Hainan and the study of destinations. The sources of secondary kind are literature related to the subject. The primary sources are mainly interviews, field work done at Hainan has given a concrete and personal knowledge of the place.