The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how city librariesmaintain the intellectual freedom in their Internet service. Thediscussion about Internet filters has been quiet in Sweden forseveral years, so I wanted to see if there had been an increased useof filters. I also wanted to see if the city libraries regulated theInternet service in another way. I sent a survey to 100 libraries andgot answer from 83. To explain what intellectual freedom is, I usedStuart Hamilton?s theory about intellectual freedom in the librarycontext.

This research looks into the modern revival of opera based on the study of two recent productions of Giuseppe Verdi?s Don Carlo; the first is the 2010 production at the Gothenburg Opera in Gothenburg, Sweden and the second is the 2013 production at Großes Festspielhaus in Salzburg, Austria. The goal is to discover what aspects a contemporary audience can relate to and identify with and why opera is still relevant today. This has been done partly through a semiotic analysis of the visual image (e.g. set, costume and lightning) and partly through a hermeneutical analysis of the themes in Don Carlo.

In this Bachelor thesis I explore sound and room as elements in design of user interfaces, both theoretical and practical in a specific application domain, to identify some of the advantages and disadvantage associated with these elements. As application domain I studied email clients and their usage at home amongst students at Blekinge Institute of Technology. In the study I found an activity, which seems to be highly distributed in the physical room where the user is located. The activity was notification of email and could take place in an arbitrary location of the home. I then augmented this activity with ideas from my theoretical assumption about room and sound. The result was a rule-based agent for notification of email, which primarily uses sound as interaction style..

Befintlig litteratur inom visual merchandising online (VMO) indikerar på ökat behov av att utveckla teorier anpassade för VMO. Målet med denna studie är att bidra med uppdaterade teorier och infallsvinklar inom VMO som grundar sig på konsumenters åsikter och beteende. Insamling av data grundar sig i intervjuer och observationer med konsumenter som speglar ett konsumentperspektiv. En intervju har även gjorts med en Digital Manager (DM) på ett svenskt modeföretag, för att generera i data utifrån ett företagsperspektiv. Med övervägande fokus på konsumentperspektiv avser vi med denna studie presentera viktiga aspekter vid utformning av virtuella miljöer, samt verktyg som stimulerar konsumenter till köp.

The ability to handle potentially dangerous and hostile situations on a military vesselrequires that the equipment works effectively with the personnel that use it. It is importantthat this equipment can be used by different people. An operator on a military vesselshall be able to handle information about hostile threats, navigation and the steering ofunmanned vehicles. A operator console should therefore be constructed in such a waythat the operator can handle a large flow of information. And the information given bythe technical system should be displayed correctly to facilitate the operators ability tohandle and interpret the information correctly, in order for the operator to make thecorrect decision at any given moment.

In early January 2010 the authors participated in a meeting with the chief engineer for a company in which a central part is manufacturing of printed circuit boards (PCB). At this meeting it emerged that the machinery and production methods have changed substantially since the early 1990's. The spreadsheet for preliminary production time calculations by the company is today based on conditions from almost 20 years ago. The company has over the years been trying to adjust the spreadsheet template. The result of these adjustments has filled it with historical residue, something which makes the template difficult and time consuming when the primary user tries to handle it.The purpose of this study was to help the company increase its accuracy in the representation of the production times for the different PCB-based products by developing a new costing model based on an already existing but inadequate spreadsheet template. The company also expressed the wish that the new costing model would be less time consuming to work with.The methods used to achieve the goal are interviewing, participatory observations and meetings with relevant persons. The data obtained were analyzed using the theory on PCB production and visualization of data.

Lifestyle magazines portray women in different manners and have an influence on how media consumers create self-images. The importance of knowing how different visual representation of the female acts out in magazines with large target audiences is therefore of weight for the magazines? readers to understand. This thesis analyze how the two lifestyle magazines ELLE and LOVE portrays women in images and how they in turn create ideal images of women.The thesis has been conducted through a qualitative analysis of 5 images from each magazine that represents the magazines artistic styles. The theories used in this study are semiotic image analysis and visual text analysis viewed from a gender- and discourse perspective.The conclusion of this thesis is that ELLE portrays women as strong, happy and feminine, with at tendency towards androgyny, while LOVE describes women as inferior and sexual objects constructed for the male gaze.

Arbetet bygger på att de informationssystem som används idag men som blir allt äldre och därigenom inte klarar de krav som ställs på dem. Detta medför att informationssystemen måste migreras till modernare plattformar, då företagen dels inte klarar sig utan dess nuvarande funktionalitet och dels måste vidareutveckla systemen.Detta arbete tar upp olika sätt som detta kan genomföras på och vilka problem som kan komma att uppstå när detta sker. För att kunna undersöka detta så genomfördes ett antal migrationer. Språken som migrationen kommer att ske mellan är Visual Basic 6 och Visual Basic .net. Migrationerna kommer att ske med hjälp av ett migrationsverktyg, samt ett ramverk som i arbetet skräddarsys för just arbetets typ av migrationer.Det arbetet kommer fram till är att det sker problem vid användande av ett verktyg och även att det inte ger tillräckligt med respons på vad som gått snett under migrationerna..

This report describes the development of an application in collaboration with Designingenjörerna AB. The company has worked for a long time with a community platform and they required an application where users can create their own unique profile representations, called Avatar Creator. An Avatar Creator is computer based application, which makes it possible to create a virtual character. The problem area behind this is that, large websites require a lot of administrative work when people upload profile pictures on different community pages. They can contain abusive material or pictures of other people rather than those who created the profile.The questions in this report are, how can an Avatar Creator help user to get a unique profile of himself? What are the advantages and disadvantages of an Avatar Creator? How to create a user-friendly application?To understand how an Avatar Creator works and get ideas to create an application, exiting Avatar Creators were reviewed on the Web.Collaborative work with Designingenjörerna AB was done to pin down the requirements for the Avatar creator application.

The technological development contributes to an increase in advertising when it comes to media. Those who are working to develop advertising are constantly looking for new ways to reach consumers in unexplored contexts. Web TV is a relatively new technique that involves the distribution of television across the Internet. This study intend to investigate how users perceive advertising appearing on web TV, and contribute to the knowledge about how advertising adapt to new media. To reach the results of this study, we used quantitative data, collected in the form of web-surveys and qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews.

The reason for performing an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is to incorporate environmental concern in different kinds of plans and projects. The purpose of such an assessment is to identify and describe direct, indirect and cumulative environmental impacts.Geographical Information System (GIS) is a tool that can be used to combine spatial extension of both sensitive areas and different environmental impacts in a quick and easy way. Because of that, descriptions of environmental impacts and motivation of different standpoints on a specific issue can be more correct and easier to make if GIS is used as a tool.Hence, GIS can contribute to improve the quality of Environmental Impact Assessments. If the benefits of using GIS are to out weight the costs, geographical information of satisfactory detail, actuality and accuracy need to be available at reasonable prices.In this paper, case studies are carried out for three different geographical analyses to investigate the use of GIS as a tool in EIA. From these case studies, more general conclusions about the benefits and limitations of using GIS for Environmental Impact Assessments are also drawn.

This is a literature study of learning mathematics in general and algebra in particular. The goal is to explore and investigate the learning procedure and the difficulties pupils have with their understanding. Furthermore, to understand what qualities is requested of pupils in their effort to be successful in mathematics and algebra. I have also explored different pupil thinking styles in mathematics and what consequences that has on their learning and understanding. Moreover, I have investigated some different learning styles and how they can be addressed in teaching of mathematics in general and algebra in particular.

The number of smartphones are constantly increasing, 2010 approximately 200 million unitswere sold globally and the figure is predicted to increase to 1 billion in 2016. The increased useof smartphones also carries many risks, for example many smartphones are connected to theInternet. This is a possible way for hackers to gain access to user devices. Smartphones are wellrepresented in research on its safety, while research on its use and users? awareness often leavesmore to be desired.

A large part of the Namibian low income population lack access to grid distributed electricity. This mean they are effectively shut out from basic functions such as lighting, information technologies and hygienic food handling. Hence, finding ways of providing affordable off-grid electricity is an important, not to say critical, task.This master thesis is an innovation and concept development project that has been carried out in cooperation with organisations in Sweden and Namibia. The purpose of the project has been to (1) develop a concept for off-grid electricity supply in Namibia and (2) to gain a deeper knowledge within the area of innovation and product development for the Base of the Pyramid population, i.e. the poorest, but largest, socio-economic part of the global population.Essential in this project has been to acquire user understanding and to identify user needs to create a foundation for developing the concept.

Most swedish newspapers have a homepage where their news are presented. Existing guidelines describing how to write for the web often recommends you to keep it short and stay objective. But how about longer pieces of content presented in the print version? What will become of reports, interviews and essays as we?ve come to know them as the printed newspaper goes digital?Interviews with representatives of five swedish newspapers shows that the extent to wich content is being published on the web is connected to the overall purpose of the web presence. The fact that many newspapers does not publish longer pieces of text on the web rather seems to be an economic issue, than a matter of good readability.Past studies shows that longer pieces of text may well work on the web, if the reader?s interest is big enough.