The purpose of the study was to investigate, through an experiment, if positive mood promotes creativity and flexible thinking. Participants were a total of 93 college students. The main hypothesis was that subjects induced with positive mood would perform better than subjects induced with negative mood, at a test reflecting creativity. To further explore the implications of priming (subliminal manipulated moods), a neutral control group was included. The cognitive test used in the study was Duncker´s The Candle Problem, a test which aims to get the subjects to apply flexible and creative thinking.

The aim of this thesis was to evaluate the music downloading service Musikwebb regarding its indexing and retrieval effectiveness. This was done by performing various kinds of search in the system. The outcome of these searches were then analysed according to the criteria specificity, precision, recall, exclusivity and authority control. The study showed that Musikwebb had several flaws regarding its retrieval effectiveness. The most prominent cases were the criteria exclusivity and specificity.

Background: According to the Swedish Social Board induced abortions are increasing in the modern day society. Nurses who work with in the gynecological department can come across patients seeking care for an induced abortion.Theoretical framework: The findings of the study will be discussed in relation to Peplau's nursing theory, ethical concepts and nursing concepts.Aim: The aim of the literature review was to illuminate the experiences of nurses working with induced abortion.Method: A systematic literature review with an inductive approach was chosen. The findings are based on seven qualitative and two quantitative studies. The articles were assessed through two different modified templates based on qualitative or quantitative design.Findings: Nurses and midwives experienced their work with induced abortions as emotionally stressful. However, it was highlighted that all women have the right whether to choose abortion or to proceed with the pregnancy.

The aim of this study was to compare the Query-by-Humming systems Midomi, Musicline and Tunebot regarding their retrieval effectiveness. The aim was to see if there were differences between the systems but also between the user groups common users, musicians and singers. Query-by-Humming system means that the user sings a tune that the system then use to find the right melody.To compare the systems and their users, queries where collected from the different user groups and replayed for the systems. Mean Reciprocal Rank and Friedman test was used to do the comparison.The results showed that the system did not achieve equivalent and that there were no difference between the user groups. The Mean Reciprocal Rank showed that the systems had very different retrieval effectiveness, where Midomi was the system with best result and Musicline with the lowest result..

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate 7 different search strategies for content-based image retrieval with respect to retrieval effectiveness. The strategies are based on different levels of resolution implemented by the Haar transformation. The result of the study shows an improvement in both mean average precision and mean recall in strategies based on lower levels of resolution..

Automatic query expansion has long been studied in information retrieval research as a technique that deals with the fundamental issue of word mismatch between query and document. The purpose of this thesis is to compare the retrieval effectiveness of different strategies for automatic query expansion. The strategies are based on local analysis of the corpus and use statistical information from the local document set to extract terms that suppose to adapt themselves to each individual search and therefore appear to be searchonyms to the index terms. The strategies compared are: association clusters, metric cluster and scalar cluster. Baseline queries of 24 topics are expanded using terms from the different clusters and searches are made.

Background: According to the Swedish Social Board induced abortions are increasing in the modern day society. Nurses who work with in the gynecological department can come across patients seeking care for an induced abortion.Theoretical framework: The findings of the study will be discussed in relation to Peplau's nursing theory, ethical concepts and nursing concepts.Aim: The aim of the literature review was to illuminate the experiences of nurses working with induced abortion.Method: A systematic literature review with an inductive approach was chosen. The findings are based on seven qualitative and two quantitative studies. The articles were assessed through two different modified templates based on qualitative or quantitative design.Findings: Nurses and midwives experienced their work with induced abortions as emotionally stressful. However, it was highlighted that all women have the right whether to choose abortion or to proceed with the pregnancy.

The aim of this Masters thesis is, partly, to examine the information needs of lesbians: what discernable information needs they have, how they seek information and which information sources they use. The purpose is also to examine what part fiction plays regarding the information needs mentioned above and how fiction indexing could improve retrieval. The study is conducted through ten qualitative interviews with lesbians as well as through textual analysis. The theoretical framework includes queer theory and theory concerning information needs and uses. The results indicate that lesbians have evident information needs that mostly concern identity.

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to find out how information seeking habits and experiences of people in different generations affects their expectations on information retrieval systems like OPAC. Two OPACs are used, one web-OPAC and one mobile-OPAC. The following questions are asked: how can theories about information seeking behaviors explain why and in which way one seeks information? In which way does information seeking behaviors and habits affect the experience of OPAC? Which differences and/or similarities can be found between the web-OPAC and the mobile-OPAC? How does generational aspects affect experiences and preferences in an information seeking context? The theoretical framework of the thesis is information retrieval with several models about information-seeking/searching needs and behaviors. The empirical data contains interviews with nine people in different generations and protocols about two different OPACs.

Sweden is getting an aging population and with this comes an increase in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer?s disease (AD). Bilingualism is also on the rise and this may result in an increase of bilingual people suffering from AD. Due to the linguistic deterioration associated with the illness people with AD, bilingual and monolingual, will be an increasing patient group with speech and language pathologists (SLPs). Word retrieval difficulty is an early symptom of the disease and several strategies to compensate for this have been observed (e.g.

In query expansion (QE) terms are added to an initial query in order to improve retrieval effectiveness. In this thesis we use QE in the sense that a reformulation of the query is done by deleting the terms in the initial query and instead replacing them with terms from the documents retrieved in the initial run. The aim of this thesis is to, in a experimental full text invironment, study and compare the retrieval result of two different query expansion strategies in relation to each other. The following questions are addressed by the study: How do the two strategies perform in relation to each other regarding recall? What may be causing the result? Are the two strategies retrieving the same relevant documents? Two strategies are designed to simulate a searcher using automatic query expansion (AQE) either with or without relevance feedback.

Image indexing research today is either conducted on a visual attribute level or on a higher semantic level, forming a semantic gap between the two. There is much to gain if research progress from the two fields is combined. Image retrieval using access points in both visual and semantic significations could improve retrieval and bridge the gap. In social media today, images are often the primary communication agent and the number of images on the web is increasing in an uncontrolled way. New and efficient ways to index and retrieve the images are needed.The purpose of this study is to examine if emotions could be a semantic access point for image retrieval and if folksonomy indexing is useful when searching for images that represent emotions.

What is forgetfulness? How does it show? Is it a part of memory or can it be considered on its own? In the philosophical discourse forgetfulness is limited and the phenomenon is mostly portrayed as a pathological or obscure counterpart of memory. This portraying of forgetfulness can be seen as traditional way of describing it, but there is some philosophers who has spoken of forgetfulness in more fruitful ways. These ways are not to be interpreted as aspirations to decouple forgetfulness from memory, rather they are to be seen as attempts to interpret this relation on another basis. This basis has also led this essay towards an interpretation of forgetfulness' relation to truth.

This thesis deals with query formulation in full text retrieval. The variables studied were query expansion and query structur[INS: e :INS , and the aim of the thesis is to study their co-effects on retrieval performance in a probabilistic system. The expansion was made with synonyms, and the structure by expressing facets and phrases. The study was performed using QPA, Query Performance Analyzer, which includes InQuery retrieval system and a sub-collection of TREC documents with its topics. The measurement used was precision at 11 DCV points.

This essay explores to what extent the Swedish language version of Google Images meets the usability requirements of average everyday users. Previously published studies on user behaviour and users? interface and search option preferences define the usability requirements, which are matched against Google Images? actual interface and search options. The retrieval method of Google Images is also briefly discussed, and users? opinions about Google Images too, as they come across in the previously published user studies.The findings are that Google Images lack some of the things that users ask for, but it still seems to be the most used image search engine among average internet users and more appreciated than other search engines.