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.

To United Minds, large-scale surveys are an important offering to clients, not least the public opinion poll Va?ljarbarometern. A risk associated with surveys is satisficing ? sub-optimal response behaviour impairing the possibility of correctly describing the sampled population through its results. The purpose of this study is to ? through the use of multivariate outlier detection methods - identify those observations assumed to be non-representative of the population.

This study is based on a case study of Pilotprojekt Drevfjällen, a project whose ambition is tofind ways to secure nature conservation in a local context. This is promoted at governmentlevel, which says that a local connection is needed to achieve sustainable regionaldevelopment. The study, based on a theoretical background of the concept of governance,intends to evaluate whether Pilotprojekt Drevfjällen can contribute to a sustainable regionaldevelopment.This study is based on meeting documentations, semi-structured interviews with variousstakeholders in the project, field studies and participant observation at an informativemeeting. The region of interest, north Dalarna, was visited twice to obtain the specificconditions that Pilotprojekt Drevfjällen have. The interviews revealed positive attitude to theincreased dialogue and cooperation that Pilotprojekt Drevfjällen has meant for theparticipants.

The history of Banu Umayya has since the collapse of the caliphate occupied a major part in Islamic historiography. The present thesis analyses the presentation of the Umayyads in Ibn Khaldun?s al-Muqaddima and its relation to previous historical traditions. The thesis examines the social and intellectual context in which Ibn Khaldun stood and how it is represented in his historiography, while also providing an overview of the various socio-political, intellectual and historiographical developments in Islam. The theoretical perspectives are based on the concept of agency, examining the intellectual room for manoeuvre that the historian disposed of while composing the works.

Risktaganden görs på daglig basis och vår sinnestämning ligger till grunden för många av de risktaganden vi gör och styr hur vi upplever det ställningstaganden vi ställs inför. Den här studien ämnade att undersöka huruvida det gick att påverka en individs riskbedömning med hjälp av teorin om affect heuristic samt hur mental visualisering kunde påverka en individs affekt i olika riktningar.Försöksdeltagarna bestod av 40 studenter vid Umeå universitet i åldrarna 19-35. De fick i en enkätundersökning ta del av och skatta risken för olika typer av scenarion. Resultatet från studien visade på en signifikant skillnad i förmån för mental visualisering i kontrast till resonerande av de presenterade riskscenarion, vilket stödde hypotesen om att mental visualisering kan påverka individers affekt och beslutsfattande. Studien ämnade att belysa vikten av affekt och dess inverkanöver vårt beslutsfattande och hur det går att påverka en individs affekt i olika riktningar genom att låta personen mentalt visualisera sig ett stimuli..

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.

A webpage can be perfectly usable but if users are unable to find the webpage it will remain unused. Nine out of ten Swedes use a search engine and the most popular one is Google, amongst other search engines. In this report I seek to answer which ranking factors that should be included in an SEO-audit of an existing webpage and also how to optimize a webpage for search engines. Applying the method heuristic evaluation normally used to discover usability issues in an existing interface, on TT News Agency?s campaign site I found issues having a negative impact on the visibility in Search Engines Page Results.

Detta arbete är en jämförande studie mellan mätningar inom användbarhet. Studien jämför en heuristisk utvärdering med ett användartest, med inriktning på ekonomi och resultat. Syftet är att belysa den ekonomiska aspekten mellan de två metoderna. Samtidigt undersöker studien om heuristisk utvärdering är en metod som lämpar sig som beslutsunderlag. Studien är genomförd på ett tryckeri där tryckeriets IT-system har testats och utvärderats utifrån de två metoderna.

Usability is a field within systems development which doesn?t get the attention it might deserve. Above all, it?s considered time consuming and expensive by many people in the industry. The current information regarding low-cost alternatives to achieve a more usable system seems to be almost non-existent.

Within system development users have rarely been involved or received much attention during the development. Most of the times, the primary focus within system development lies on insuring functionality, rather than making the system usable. The literature specifies that a non user-centered approach can contribute to a product with low usability, which can lead to an ineffective and unsatisfactory experience for the end users.The purpose of this thesis is to begin an investigation to see if the use of non user-oriented system development methods is a possible cause of low usability in the final system.To achieve the purpose of this thesis, we have conducted a case study. Within the case study we examined the usability of a time reporting system. The case study included seven minor studies; an investigation concerning the development of the system, an expert evaluation of the system, interviews and observations of users, developed paper prototypes and executable prototypes, both which user testing was performed on.The result of this study shows that by working with user-entered methods, the usability in the time reporting system increased after the design had been revised.

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 thesis is to describe and evaluate the usability of two Swedish systems, Sofie and Carlotta, which are used to organize and present data regarding museum objects on the web. This thesis also presents how objects are described and made accessible to the public in the two systems. To evaluate the usability, a heuristic method combined with Systematic Usability Evaluation has been used. The description and accessibility of object representations in the systems are evaluated using indexing and classification theories from the field of Library and Information Science. Additional theoretical background that has been used is how users search and browse information systems.

Lameness causes suffering and poor performance in sheep, as in other species. The cause of lameness often originates in problems of the claws. Many claw diseases of sheep are described in British and Australian research, but this field has previously not been of special concern in Sweden. This graduate thesis contains the first claw health survey made on Swedish sheep. The chief objective was to give an overview of sheep claw diseases and to assess claw health in adult sheep.

Detta projekt har haft som syfte att producera och grafiskt formge det kommande numret av tidskriftsapplikationen Scandinavian Architectural Review för förlaget It Is Media Svenska AB i Stockholm. Skapandet har utgått från applikationens tidigare grafiska profil och har ämnat att följa tidigare utseende och funktioner utan nya tillägg. Hela produktionen har skapats genom Adobe InDesigns tilläggstjänst Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Efter att produktionen färdigställts har en analys gjorts av den färdiga applikationen enligt en heuristisk utvärdering ur ett människa-datorinteraktionsperspektiv, till vilken David Benyons tolv designprinciper har  tillämpats. Till stöd i analysarbetet har ett aktivitetsdiagram skapats för att ge en god överblick över hela tidskriftens disposition.

Föreliggande studie syftar till att undersöka beslutsfattande, riskbedömningar och skillnader i konsolidering i anslutning till ett medicinskt prioriteringsbeslut (Svenson & Lindholm, 2007). Studien belyser betydelsen av den kognitiva och emotionella komponenten i beslutsfattande (Boyer, 2006) med utgångspunkt från bl.a. Differentiering och Konsolidering, Kognitiv dissonans och Affect heuristic. Dessutom undersöks huruvida det förekommer en könsskillnad mellan hur män och kvinnor fattar beslut och utvärderar risker samt om ångest och prestationsbaserad självkänsla påverkar konsolideringen. Rekryteringen skedde vid Malmö högskola och omfattade 72 studenter.