The aim of this master´s thesis is to explore how a library through it´s spatial distribution expresses, and is an expression for, a view of knowledge. This is done by an analysis of the Orkanen library at Malmö Högskola. Questions posed in this study are: What view of knowledge is mediated through the spatial system and in the shelving of books? What view of learning is expressed in the spatial distribution of functions and artefacts?The theoretical framework of this thesis has two fundamental features. One, which focuses on theories of social space, a part that is mainly influenced by the theories of space syntax.

The aim of this study is, from a norm-critical approach, to find, investigate and analyse human representation in the visual culture of one preschool in order to understand if the children enrolled are represented or not. The research questions are: In what ways is there imagery of human representations in images and materials designed for play? What skin-colors and origins are dominant in the data collected?We carried out a qualitative study in the form of visual ethnography. This method allowed us to use a combination of different data collection tools such as photography and ethnographic field notes to collect our data. The photographs we took of images and material used for play, was then analysed through semiotic picture analysis.

 The aim of this thesis is to examine men's attitudes towards literature, and how social norms affect their book reading, in order to contribute to the knowledge of why men's book reading is decreasing. This is realized through a discourse analysis of literature recommendations in men's lifestyle magazines.Two magazines, King of Sweden and Magazine Café, are examined through critical discourse analysis. Theories of discourse are combined with theories of gender to explore how gender stereotypes affect men's reading habits.The analysis shows that ideals of masculinity have a great influence on the book recommendations. Social norms, associated with gender, also seem to have significance to whether or not a book is considered suitable for men to read. These are, inter alia, norms of heterosexuality and violence.

During several years we have been able to follow the victories and disappointments of Ludmila Engqvist through the scrutinising eye of the media. This essay will deal with how media?s picture perception of Ludmila Engqvist has changed by analysing articles from the Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet and Expressen from 1996 to 2001. Why and how the media?s picture has changed will be analysed through the perspectives of Ludmila Engqvist being an elite athlete, immigrant and woman.

This thesis explores the position of book blogs in the literary system through Robert Escarpit's socio-literary model of the book market. Simultaneously the thesis serves as a test for Escarpit's theory: by actively applying his theory and model to a very new and contemporary actor on the book market I hoped to reach or confirm new insights into the usefulness and validity of Escarpit's work for contemporary socio-literary studies.Three book blogs were selected for the analysis and interviews were carried out with the authors. The interview questions were formulated specifically for the purpose of extracting the kind of information necessary for an analysis using Escarpit?s theory. As a complement to the interviews, statistics on the type of books reviewed on the blogs were also compiled.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate librarians views on reading and reading promotion for young people. The main issue is if activities in reading promotion for people between the ages of 13-19 years can result in inspiring non-readers to actually become readers. To find the answers, qualitative interviews were held with eight librarians. The literature review covers research on the reasoning of young people on reading, a historical review of fiction and reading, a review of arguments on the benefits of reading and finally a chapter which concerns reading promotion activities. The result of this study showed that the conceptions of reading promotion and book talk are very complex and that they each can have different meanings.

The subject of this thesis is the application of Support Vector Machines on two totally different applications, facial expressions recognition and remote sensing.The basic idea of kernel algorithms is to transpose input data in a higher dimensional space, the feature space, in which linear operations on the data can be processed more easily. These operations in the feature space can be expressed in terms of input data thanks to the kernel functions. Support Vector Machines is a classifier using this kernel method by computing, in the feature space and on basis of examples of the different classes, hyperplanes that separate the classes. The hyperplanes in the feature space correspond to non linear surfaces in the input space.Concerning facial expressions, the aim is to train and test a classifier able to recognise, on basis of some pictures of faces, which emotion (among these six ones: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sad, and surprise) that is expressed by the person in the picture. In this application, each picture has to be seen has a point in an N-dimensional space where N is the number of pixels in the image.The second application is the detection of camouflage nets hidden in vegetation using a hyperspectral image taken by an aircraft.

This essay investigates and compares the readability in two different schoolbooks: Eko Historia (the primary school grade 4-6) and Epos Historia (the upper secondary school). The questions of the survey are:- Which differences in linguistic and layout can be found between books meant for the primary school and books meant for the upper secondary school?- Are the texts easy to read according to the former research in readability?In order to answer the questions structural dimensions as lexicon, syntax, bounds between sentences and narrative voices have been studied. Also the texts disposition and typography have been examined.The results demonstrate that the book designed for the primary school has a verbal structure with an explicit vocabulary, lots of verbs and short sentences. A clear narrative voice gives an impression of spoken language.

Aim: Many people react negatively when they find out that I work as an estate agent. They believe that estate agents earn more money then they should. What many do not know is how hard we must work and that it doesn´t suit someone who is looking for an 8-17 work. As an estate agent I thought it would be interesting to found out why the estate agents have such a bad reputation.Method: This essay is based on the interviews with estate agents and branch organizations but also on newspaper articles about real estate agents. Theory is collected marketing, where I have concentrate on concepts of branding, positioning, communication and image.Result & Conclusions: The factors, which I found in my investigation, that have an effect to the bad reputation are; media, commission, the customers and the bidding.

The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of women who have been abused by their partners. The study also examines how violence takes shape in a relationship. Based on a qualitative text analysis of three autobiographies and one novel, we have obtained the material for this study. The three selected autobiographies are; "I have not told you everything" by Jessie Andersson, "The nightmare" by Maria Dahlén and "It would be a pleasure to kill you" by Magdalena Graaf and the novel "Hidden" by Liza Marklund. To gain a better understanding of this topic, we have used the following theories; the process of normalization of violence, gender and masculinity.

Denna fallstudie bygger på och är ett fall av en gränsöverskridande operativ funktion mellan Sverige och Norge. Utbyte av och idéer kring en gemensam Recognized Air Picture (RAP) har under ett decennium pågått mellan de nordiska länderna Sverige, Norge och Finland. Arbetet har varit en osammanhängande följetong. Trots detta är utbyte av RAP ett av mycket få nordiska militära samarbetsprojekt som genomförts från idé till operativ drift sedan initiativet till Nordic Defence Cooperation (NORDEFCO). Det är därför intressant att lära mer om de drivande faktorerna bakom detta lyckade samarbetsprojekt.

Audit is a service of society that takes place in the public interest. To guarantee the quality of auditing a quality control is done with predetermined time intervals. The purpose of this paper is to investigate and analyze the concept quality and the procedure of the quality control and further to tie concepts like trust and ethics to the audit profession. To make the picture complete the paper also provides an insight regarding what deficiencies in quality, in other words failures, means to the audit profession. By performing semi-structured interviews with seven qualified auditors, active on different auditing firms in Skåne, substantial information was collected.

It's not a secret that most companies strive to get such a high economic return as possible. To successfully engage in a profitable enterprise, there are many elements that come into play. An important element is the motivation of the employees and their work performance. Work motivation is a key factor for the employees to improve their performance and therefore determinant for the successes of the company.This work is a case study in the production at Fresenius Kabi, Uppsala. The work is based on an employee survey that they fill out once a year and the aim is to develop a deeper understanding for these questions and how the employees see on leadership, communication and goal-setting as motivators and how these factors works in the company today.To get this deeper understanding I have used a qualitative approach.

This paper aims to describe and elaborate on a recent discursive change within the new-age movement. Since the seventies and the publishing of speculative popular science books like The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and The self-aware Universe by Amit Goswami, the idea that quantum physics resonates with spirituality has become the topic of hundreds of books and movies.The quantum-spiritual discourse has three distinct ways to approach quantum physics in its discussion on spirituality: The parallelistic approach which emphasizes the similarities between eastern philosophies and modern physics, the monistic-idealistic approach which tells us that mind is the foundation of matter and the scientific spiritual approach which tries to explain spiritual claims scientifically. In the quantum-spiritual discourse, quantum physical phenomena (e.g. non-locality and entanglement) are being called upon to validate metaphysical statements. The primary assumption of the discourse is that the shift of paradigm due to the establishment of modern physics also is a shift of paradigm of spirituality.With the object to examine the common claims made in the discourse, cross-references between spiritual arguments and facts of quantum physics are being made.

The Internet has developed into a marketplace for national and international companies. With relatively small means, a company can reach out to millions of people on a daily basis by placing itself on the Internet. With this report, we wish to suggest how e-businesses can change its strategy to adapt to the new market. Focus is on the Swedish Internet market where Swedes, resident in Sweden, trades with Swedish e-companies active within the Swedish borders. To be able to make suggestions, we will first paint a picture of the Swedish e-commerce market from statistics collected from public sources.