When SKL (Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science) gets images to analyse, the task often is to identify a person or an object. In that work it?s important to find features. Unfortunately images from camera surveillances often contain a lot of noise, so details can be hard to discern.A simple method to improve an image from a sequence is to compute the mean of some of the images. However, the part of interest in the image has to be in the same position in all images.

AbstractDuring the last five years there has been a considerable immigration from the Netherlands to Värmland in Sweden. INVA, Invest in Värmland, wanted to highlight this phenomenon and therefore contacted Karlstad University to make a survey about how extensive the immigration is and what consequences it brings for the business life and municipalities in Värmland. We were luckily chosen to perform this research and the main focus in this study has been the following questions:? Why do the Dutchmen choose to buy their house in Värmland?? What are the main reasons for leaving the Netherlands?? What consequences does the immigration cause for the business life in Värmland?? How do the Dutchmen experience the contact with Swedish authorities?To answer the questions we designed a questionnaire that was sent to 200 Dutch house purchasers. The ambition was to survey all the Dutch house purchasers in Värmland, but with the time constrains and the municipalities having problem to find complete data, we limited the survey to 200 households.

This Master?s thesis is one of two parts of a combined project called Sustainable development around the Lake Victoria, the purpose of which is to investigate the importance of local anchoring and active participation in the work towards sustainable development. The present study aims to investigate whether men and women are empowered by the participatory rural appraisal (PRA) process promoted in their villages by the VI Agroforestry Project Masaka/Rakai. The study is primarily based on interviews with farmers within the project area and brings up a local perspective on the concepts sustainable development, active participation and empowerment. The study shows that to improve the farmers? livelihood and to create a sustainable development in the community, the farmers have to be actively involved in, and in control of, the process.

This thesis has its focuson media portrayal of a large political institution; the European Union. Articles from two nations daily newspapers have been analyzed in order to examine how the European Union is described and framed for their readers. The newspapers that was chosen for this study and from which the material was collected, were the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet the American newspaper The New York Times. The material was taken from three periods of time, and by this the results did not only serve a presentiment on how the media reports about the subject, but also an idea over the media?s coverage character over time.

Care and solicitude about Swedish documentary heritage has varied substantially throughout the years. The main purpose of this essay has been to investigate what efforts have been made to preserve rare book collections at public libraries. These cultural policies have been studied from both a national as well as local perspective. What we have tried to explore can be condensed into three questions: What national initiatives have been taken in the past century to preserve the municipal documentary heritage?What initiatives have been taken in the past century to preserve thedocumentary heritage of what is presently the municipality of Jönköping? What value do rare book collections at public libraries represent? The results indicate few national efforts were initially made to preserve rare book collections in the timeframe we studied.

This essay deals with the question of lines of development within the politics in the rural municipality of Nyed 1950-1962. The aim is to explore how local politics and policies were handled from two perspectives. Firstly the issue of conflict and consensus or majority rule and consensus. Here Arend Lijphard's theory of majority and consensus provides a theoretical base for the essay. Secondly the aim is to explore the actions of the local politicians with regards to leisure time policies to find out whether or not they ideologically belonged to the concept of ?folkhemmets kommun? by Ulla Ekström von Essen.The source material for this essay has been the minutes from the two major bodies of local politics in Nyed, kommunalfullmäktige and kommunalnämnden.

This bachelor thesis is based on interviews with staff from three Egyptian NGOs in Cairo during the spring of 2013. The study examines how three Egyptian NGOs discuss the woman?s situation within the Islamic legal discourse in the contemporary Egypt. The empiric material was analysed through a theoretical framework of gender in Islam, and a discussion of the concept of human rights laws in a local context.The respondents emphasize the societies gender stereotypes as obstacles in the discussion regarding women?s rights.

This is a master thesis on how to develop the central area of Norra Fäladen, a suburban housing area in the town of Lund, Sweden. The area is discussed on the basis of literature studies, analysis, and place descriptions, which leads on to a proposal. The starting point for the proposal is to create a more lively local centre and to make the area pleasanter for the visitor. A large part of the thesis is devoted to giving a background about local centres and to describe and analyse the area. Fäladstorget has an important role as a central place for supply and services and as a local meeting place for the inhabitants of Norra Fäladen.

The aim of this study was to analyze how discourses about domestic violence emerges in policy and practice, and to investigate how those discourses may change from a structural, political level to a local, practical level. The research questions focused how the problem of domestic violence is formulated at national and local level, scrutinizing the different discourses framing and reproducing the causes and solutions of the problem, and also to deduce how different context affects formulations. The empirical material consists of policy plans and interviews with social workers. The findings indicates that the issue of domestic violence is articulated differently on different levels. In action plans on the national level, the domestic violence is formulated within a structural discourse, being a problem on a (gender-) political level, whereas professional social workers recognizes domestic violence as a personal problem within an individual oriented discourse.

The present study discusses the political integration of immigrants in local government in the muncipality of Växjö from 1971 to 1991 in the form of representation. The main data source consists of lists of people holding local commissions of trust in the various boards and committés appointed by the municipality council, as well as in the council itself. These data are then compared to population statistics from Statistics Sweden. Main findings of the study are that immigrants are insufficiently represented in relation to their proportion of the population. It is suggested that this is a result of structural discrimination and possibly insufficient socialisation..

The development of solar photovoltaic (PV) is increasing,with declining module prices and with a strongenvironmental profile. Policies are developed around theworld to achieve the targets set for renewable energy.In Helsingborg, the local power company Öresundskraft isworking with solar PV to achieve the goals of the city.With their vision: - Energy for a Better World and Powerfor the Region, their work with developing the local solarPV market is continuing and the next step is to create asolar PV policy. Today their offer is 1 SEK/kWh for theexcess electricity delivered to the grid.It turns out that compensating the customer is a vitalpolicy and it has to be dynamic to follow the decisions ofpolitics. The same survey shows indeed, thatenvironmental and technical part is of interest. Solar PVwill be supported locally to act on environmentalsustainability and locally produced electricity and withthis Öresundskrafts vision will be achieved..

The purpose of this study is to examine the implementation of the Convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, CEDAW, in Uppsala local council and county council. The aim is to examine how the respondents, in their daily work, understand and implement the convention as well as how they consider the prerequisites for a successful implementation. The study was conducted using qualitative interviews with three civil servants and four politicians. The theoretical approach was implementation theory whose concepts willingness, comprehension and capability were used as tools for the analysis. The results portray CEDAW as a well-known treaty amongst the respondents but at the same time absent in local politics and everyday work.

Light pollution in urban areas - How to prevent light pollution at construction Jakob Sjöling Light pollution is a relatively new but rapidly growing form of pollution. Society's increasing demand for light coupled with the pace at which lighting technology evolves is accelerating that growth. The purpose of this study was to analyse how the construction industry plan and design outdoor lighting when erecting new buildings, specifically with regards to the issue of light pollution. It also investigated how local authorities work with these issues during urban planning. In both cases special interest was placed in ways to improve the planning and use of outdoor lighting in order to minimize light pollution.

The market offers more and more products that are claimed to have medicallypositive effects (like increased blood perfusion etc.) due to their magneticproperties. The objective of this study was to investigate if blankets containingpermanent (static) magnets have a greater impact on cutaneous blood circulationthan ordinary blankets without magnets. Eight standard bred horses were used in across-over study. The cutaneous temperature was presumed to reflect blood flowin the skin and therefore thermography and local thermistors were used to indicatechanges in circulation. Baseline values were registered before the blanket wasapplied.

Foreign correspondence is essential for our understanding of the world and therefore it is paramount that we be aware of how it is affected by modern technology and altered economic conditions.In this study we set out to investigate the state of foreign correspondence today, in comparison to twenty years ago. More specifically we compared foreign news articles from a week in 1993 and the same week in 2013, in the Swedish newspapers Expressen and Dagens Nyheter. We chose these newspapers as we felt they each represented a different area of Swedish journalism, DN being a regular morning newspaper and Expressen being a tabloid newspaper.We looked mainly at three things in the articles: who was the writer, i.e. was the article by a correspondent, a news agency or someone else, what source was used and what part of the world was it about. We then made comparisons between both the different years and the different newspapers, as well as current and twenty years old lists of correspondents.According to the material we looked at there were some clear differences between foreign correspondence 1993 and 2013.