This report details the development of an application for personal safety for the Android operating system. Android is a relatively new platform, primarily used on mobile phones.The purpose of the developed application is to give the user the possibility to easily and quickly alert a number of contacts by phone in case of emergencies, and to show the user?s location on a map. This is not only used during emergencies, but for other purposes as well ? for example to monitor a jogging round.The project was carried out in co-operation with the company D-Safety, the developer of the "SoftAlarm" ? the product on which the developed application is based..

The purpose of this media scientific study is to contribute to a better understanding about how blind people?s empowerment and participation may affect their role in the digital society.Earlier international studies in this area have shown that blind people not only need more knowledge then the seeing population about the computer, but also about the technology behind their tools for using Internet. The results from these studies have also shown that Internet increases the blind people?s independents and that those who use Internet feel more involved in the society.A qualitative method was chosen to study the three most common categories from the earlier studies: knowledge of technology, empowerment and participation. Are there differences in the results compared to our study in Sweden 2014?Interviews with eight blind, experienced computer users have shown that knowledge of technology is essential for their use of Internet and that the Internet increases their empowerment and their participation.

Our aim in this work has been to redesign ModernFamilies and make a user-friendly interface for people with aphasia. The focus has been to identify general issues they might face while using different technology and applications, in order to find better alternative design for ModernFamilies, with a focus on usability. To approach this issue, we used a qualitative method. Our study includes several interviews and observations preformed in conjunction with the AGNES project (AGeing in a NEtworked Society) and speech therapists. Aphasia requires simple design that in the same time gives them support to understand and use technology and different applications.

The purpose of the study has been to recognise good development and the factors behind this development. We have chosen an aid-project co-financed first by the Swedish government and later by the government of Great Britain for our study. One of the conditions for good development, according to our chosen theory Another development, is peoples participation. To study good development and peoples participation we conducted a Minor Field Study (MFS) in Rajasthan in the north-west of India in June-August 2001. We had a hermeneutic approach and consequently accomplished interviews and participant observations in the Lok Jumbish project in Rajasthan.

The function of budgetary controls is to control the resource allocation within companies. It can also be an instrument for measure and control subordinates and/or business units? performance (Van der Stede 2001). This paper concerns the latter; when the budgetary control function is used to measure and control subordinates performance based on budget. Previous research in this area has not yet accomplished to explain the effects of tight budgetary control which Hartman (2000) considers as the main issue to be concerned about in management accounting research.Previous research has presented contradictory findings regarding tight budgetary control explained by positive effects as well as negative effects during the last decades.

Begreppet brukarsamverkan lyftes fram i Sverige i samband med WHO ?s Sundsvalls-konferens 1991 som ?essensen i det demokratiska folkhälsoarbetet?. Samverkan, där handikapp- och patientorganisationer är delaktiga i planering av hälso- och sjukvård har varit aktuellt i mer än 35 år, man utvecklade former för handikappråd redan 1970. Ändå finns det mycket lite empirisk forskning på området. Syftet med uppsatsen är att få en fördjupad kunskap om brukarsamverkan samt att erhålla ett vidare perspektiv genom att jämföra utvecklingen i Sverige med Storbritannien utifrån frågeställningarna: Vilka motiv finns för samverkan, vilka faktorer påverkar och vilka former finns för samverkan och hur stämmer dessa med existerande teorier? Arbetet är upplagt i tre delar, en litteraturstudie med material från Storbritannien, en dokumentanalys av material från Stockholms läns landsting och en intervjuundersökning som gjordes 1999 med representanter för förvaltning, sjukhus och handikapporganisationer inom SLL.

In today's society it is important to easily and smoothly get accurate information. Withthe help of the application VasaSvahn it is possible to get expert help for Crosscountry ski waxing. The application VasaSvahn has been ported from an existingversion for iOS to a new version for Android. The application uses a third-party Webservices to obtain necessary information and support distribution of information. Theapplication is also connected to a database.

The theoretical focus in this master is information retrieval (IR), and especially the part of IR that includes interactivity. This research is by some researchers called IIR. Our principal aim was to examine if search engines on the WWW are taking advantage of research results from IIR research. A way to do this is to look at the application of special features, in this case query expansion (QE) and relevance feedback (RF). Both these methods aim for a better matching of documents and the searchers information need.

This master thesis deals with events, dynamics and problems of mediated information seeking within the context of a new information service called "Book a librarian". The study, based on a survey and interviews both in academic and public libraries and participant observations in academic libraries, has its theoretical base in the cognitive theory of information retrieval interaction. The cognitive view is used to throw light upon the need of an ongoing dialogue during the session in order to detect the information needs of the user and to conduct a successful retrieval of information. The communicative interaction is seen as threepart interaction between the intermediary, the user and the information system, where the current cognitive states of all three participants are involved. The study shows that the cognitive obstacles for a successful mediation and information retrieval are mostly connected to participants current knowledge of the subject and of the retrieval techniques.

What role should science play in democracy? Political scientists often assume that it is possible to demarcate between ?instrumental? and ?moral? knowledge, and argue that citizens and/or politicians should use their moral knowledge to agree upon political goals and then apply the instrumental knowledge of scientists to achieve them. This straightforward view is challenged by writers in science studies, who identify three major problems in the use of science in democracy: uncertainty, risk and hidden values. They suggest that these problems could be solved through citizen participation.In this essay I perform an analysis of the internal logic of their suggestion. Is it likely that citizen participation enhances the democratic decision making process so as to reduce the problems? The internal analysis shows that it is rational to advocate citizen participation by reasons of legitimacy.

In this paper we analyze a social network specifically designed for the elderly, people with Dementia and people with generally low computer experience. This is a relatively unexplored use for such software, and our goal is to find out whether the technique to be used is simple enough to use for the intended user group, and generally how the whole situation is experienced by the users. To achieve this we conducted an expert evaluation and interviewed a number of users at two separate occasions during their first weeks with Modernfamilies. We came to the conclusion that this software generally is simple enough to use for the intended target group. Some of the users we came in contact with experienced the software as a positive addition to their daily lives, while some could not see any reason for a further use.

Mobile technology is developing quickly and becomming a part of daily life and communication. Bluetooth Low Energy is presented as a new way of mobile interaction. However there are not enough studies in this field on the interaction between mobile devices and the physical world. In order to understand user needs, and to encourage users to interact, we simulated an interaction process through designing and testing a prototype in a specific indoor environment. Prototype effectiveness and main characteristics for future mobile application was evaluated through a qualitative user study with 20 participants who interacted with our prototype..

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.

This Master's thesis aims to investigate the reference interview using the discourse analytical method discourse psychology. The reference interview has been studied thoroughly, and its importance has been proven repeatedly within the field of Library and Information Science (LIS). However, it has never been studied from a discourse analytical point of view before.The material for our study was gathered at Malmö public library, and consists of 10 tape-recorded and then transcribed reference interviews. Our study shows that there are several discourses within the reference situation. The dominating discourse, the reference interview discourse, is found within all the reference interviews.

In 1974 the three municipalities of Åsele, Dorotea and Fredrika were amalgamated despite of hunger strikes, mass protests and a serious threat of violence. But after six years the marriage shattered as Dorotea left the other two after years of continued struggle. In 2005 the idea of an amalgamation of Åsele, Dorotea and Vilhelmina municipalities was brought to life by an older and ever declining population.By creating a democratic ideal type consisting of the three variables ? legitimacy, participation and identity ? this study assesses what impact an amalgamation of the three municipalities might have on local democracy.Combining a qualitative and a quantitative approach this study concludes that amalgamating the municipalities today could create a democratic unit lacking legitimacy, having a weak identity and impeding participation. But the study also brings forth that the impact of an amalgamation upon the variables of the ideal type as defined is not written in stone.