A Large part of the education provided at colleges and universities of today requires for thestudent to be more independent in their studies. This demands that the physical space,where the students choose to study, is designed in a way that can encourage and supportlearning. It seems as though that many of the learning spaces of today don?t always meetthe students? needs. The university library at the University of Umeå is currently planningto design new learning spaces for the students.

A case study was done of Sthlm Policy Group, a consulting agency that mainly targets NGOs and government agencies in the peace and security sector. The goal of the case study was to explore the tendency of NGOs in Sweden to hire commercial consulting companies. The main interest was to see what the key reasons are for NGOs to hire private consulting agencies, but also to explore what problems that might be associated with such relationships. Interviews were carried out with representatives of the consulting agency, with its clients as well as with other NGOs that were identified as potential clients. The interviewed NGOs and government agencies were found to approve of the use of commercial consultants.

The aim of this study is to investigate how five boys in grade 3 of compulsory school structure and use language when they write narrative texts retelling and assessing personally experienced events. This is studied by interpreting how the boys use genre steps that are typical of the structure of personal narrative texts and by detecting and naming different linguistic features in the texts. The material in the study consists of five boys?personal reports and the method, which is based on the theories of genre pedagogy (see Johansson & Sandell Ring 2012:28ff, 223f), comes from systemic functional linguistics. A central finding of the study is that the boys structure their texts in varying combinations of genre steps which commonly occur in texts of a narrative kind.

The company Microshop is interested in implementing new features in their product-website, and would like to examine the possibility and usefulness of introducing such functionality. When designing interaction for commercial websites, it is important to make the menus easy to use, and refrain from using deep hierarchies in order to avoid causing unnecessary burden for the users. There is an interest among users for adaptive functionality, but this requires great amounts of trust in the website from the user. Something which can be created by refraining from using implicit information, and provide detailed explanations throughout the website. A usability test was conducted in order to complement the data gathered from the theoretical study, the interviews and the expert evaluations.

I studien tas måttlistor fram för tre barnplagg med funktionsdetaljer. Plaggen graderas för att kontrollera att skillnadsintervallerna är rimliga att skicka vidare till produktion. Studien genomförs mot ett företag som uppgiften utformas tillsammans med och som bidrar med material i form av tyg, provplagg att utgå ifrån, samt handledning.Metoden för studien är huvudsakligen experimentell forskning i form av avmätning, konstruktion, gradering och sömnad. Underlag för den experimentella forskningen består av litteratur. Huvudfokus ligger på gradering då plaggen i studien omfattar ett stort storleksspann innehållande 12 storlekar vilka är 86-152 centilong.

More and more people today manage their social relationships through social networking sites. A social networking site is a virtual place where people can meet and interact with each other. On such sites, one can use the various features and attributes to present ourselves to the friends we have online. The central question of this report is what characteristics of relationships show on social networking sites. With the features and attributes that are represented and whether the architect for a social networking site affects the relationship between friends.

The project investigates features of Romani Architecture.

The aim of this master thesis is to evaluate the performance of the content-based image retrieval system ImBrowse from a semantic point of view. Evaluation of retrieval performance is a problem in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). There are many different methods for measuring the performance of content-based image retrieval systems, but no common way for performing the evaluation. The main focus is on image retrieval regarding the extraction of the visual features in the image, from three semantic levels. The thesis tries to elucidate the semantic gap, which is the problem when the systems extraction of the visual features from the image and the user?s interpretation of that same information do not correspond.

The project has involved the development of two kinds of shooting targets in partnership with Marcus Bergkvist and Christopher Åkerblom. The project from the client was divided into two parts. This thesis discusses solutions for hands-on transport, development of tripods and an overall design. The second thesis affect resetting systems for the products.The work was done with a process and methodology based on design perspectives. This process has involved the search of relevant data which has provided the platform and opportunity for appropriate and purposeful design work.Concept development has been done using hand sketches and Photoshop, where a simple visualization of different concepts for the tripods has been produced.

The project has involved the development of two kinds of shooting targets in partnership with Marcus Bergkvist and Christopher Åkerblom. The project from the client was divided into two parts. This thesis discusses solutions for hands-on transport, development of tripods and an overall design. The second thesis affect resetting systems for the products.The work was done with a process and methodology based on design perspectives. This process has involved the search of relevant data which has provided the platform and opportunity for appropriate and purposeful design work.Concept development has been done using hand sketches and Photoshop, where a simple visualization of different concepts for the tripods has been produced.

The purpose of this essay is to analyse and compare pneumatology in Eftertanke in Kyrkans Tidning, in a Swedish evangelical Lutheran context, with pneumatology in Luthers Small Catechism and Luther's Large Catechism. Through a descriptive, inductive and hermenutical approach the essay intends to answer two main questions regarding how these sources 1) describe the character features and 2) the function of the Spirit. The conclusions of this essay show that the character features of the Spirit in Eftertanke differ from the catechisms in describing the Spirit with words connected to nature and life, while the catechisms only describe the Spirit as holy. The discussion that follows implies that the Spirit in the catechisms is depicted as more personal whereas Eftertanke depicts the Spirit more as an impersonal force. There are similarities in how both the catechisms and Eftertanke depict a dialectic relationship between human beings and the Spirit. However, they differ in function: in Eftertanke the Spirit is foremost a giver of life and a creator of positive emotions as well as a giver of guidance, while in the catechisms the Spirit is foremost a sanctifier.

Ett verktyg för datorstödd interaktiv utbildning, Web-based Training, har utvecklats på Sigma Information Design. Två olika utvärderingsmetoder har använts för att öka dess användbarhet: heuristisk utvärdering och användartestning. Heuristisk utvärdering är en analytisk metod där expertutvärderare inspekterar gränssnittet för att predicera (förutse) användbarhetsproblem. Användartestning är en empirisk metod där tänkbara reella användare deltar och användbarhetsproblem observeras. Föreliggande studie fokuserar på användbarhets-problem som både prediceras med den analytiska metoden och observeras med den empiriska, så kallade ?träffar?.Analytiska metoder predicerar användbarhetsproblem genom att utpeka bristande ?intrinsic features?(gränssnittsegenskaper).

Underlättar kongruens mellan sinnestillstånd och påstående (vad gäller dess värdeladdning) vid bedömning av ett påståendes sanningshalt? Denna fråga uppkom via studier av embodiment och lögner, forskning från de båda områdena påvisar nämligen att olika ?kroppsliga signaler? kan hjälpa oss att avslöja om andra människor ljuger. Frågan har undersökts via en faktoriell design med repeterade mätningar där deltagarna försattes i olika sinnestillstånd varpå de utsattes för olika stimuli och fick göra olika bedömningar. Resultatet visade att kongruenta betingelser varken underlättar eller påskyndar vid bedömning av ett påståendes sanningshalt, däremot erhölls ett signifikant resultat som indikerade att kongruenta betingelser ökar människans konfidensnivå (högre grad av säkerhet vad gäller att en korrekt bedömning gjorts) vid bedömning av falska påståenden..

By conducting a text analysis this study analyzes possible similarities in the portrayal of story characters between historical Norse myths and contemporary film productions. The chosen historical texts are two stories from Norse mythology which render a myth about Thor and a giant named Hrunge as well as the myth Trymskvädet. The selected movies are two of the comic company Marvel?s productions about super heroes ? Thor and The Avengers. Different categories that this study compares are how the characters are defined by their possessions or artefacts, the actions and the choices which the characters make, and also how their relations, roles and origins are being portrayed.

With the advance of the modern information society, the importance of reliable identity authentication has increased dramatically. Using biometrics as a means for verifying the identity of a person increases both the security and the convenience of the systems. By using yourself to verify your identity such risks as lost keys and misplaced passwords are removed and by virtue of this, convenience is also increased. The most mature and well-developed biometric technique is fingerprint recognition. Fingerprints are unique for each individual and they do not change over time, which is very desirable in this application.