I Sverige finns en lång historia av invandring, vilket har lett till att ett ämne som fått allt större samhällsbetydelse är integration och mötet mellan olika kulturer i landet. Syftet med denna uppsats är därför att undersöka hur personer med invandrarbakgrund i Sverige representeras inom svensk media, samt huruvida sådan representation grundas i stigmatisering av personer med utomeuropeisk bakgrund. Detta gjordes genom en kvalitativ innehållsanalys av dagspressartiklar publicerade i Expressen och Aftonbladet. Valet av dessa tidningar ämnade till att synliggöra om representationen av målgruppen varierade beroende på tidningens politiska inriktning. Vi valde att analysera 38 stycken artiklar som var baserade på debatt samt nyhetsartiklar för att fånga medias framställning av invandrare med utomeuropeisk bakgrund. Analysen genomfördes med hjälp av Goffmans teori om stigma samt Berger och Luckmanns teori om socialkonstruktivism för att undersöka hur representation i media kan leda till marginalisering av minoriteter i Sverige.  Studien visade inledningsvis att personer med invandrarbakgrund i svensk media i hög grad framställdes som en syndabock för integrationen där ansvar för en lyckad integration läggs på enskilda individer. På det sättet har medias representationer av personer med utomeuropeisk bakgrund en avgörande roll i konstrueringen av “invandrare” samt för upprätthållning av stigmatisering av denna grupp. Vidare visade studien att personer med invandrarbakgrund representeras gällande ekonomiska frågor, vilka berör deras roll på arbetsmarknaden samt deras betydelse för välfärden. Slutligen visade undersökningen att personer med invandrarbakgrund främst associerades till kriminalitet och gängaktivitet. Sådan representation grundades i stigmatisering av främmande kulturer vilka gestaltades som patriarkala och främjande till kriminalitet. Resultatet visade därigenom att det inte fanns någon markant skillnad mellan Expressen och Aftonbladet med hänsyn till hur de framställde invandrare trots skillnaderna i tidningarnas ideologiska och politiska inriktningar. Tidningarna använde sig istället övervägande av liknande stigmatiserande representationer som samtliga personer med utomeuropeisk bakgrund i ett negativt ljus.

"I would like to - sometime - build a theater which has natural light..." Louis I. Kahn "Space and the Inspirations" 1967 Titled "On Dancing with Architecture" and in reference to Merce Cunningham's choreography, this thesis project is the notion of overlaying architecture as a third autonomous layer to the existing ones in the performance arts that are dancing and music. Since the project is equally concerned with the performers and the audience as well as with the general public, it shall contain a nonstandard performance stage for modern dance as well as general public space. However, what does it mean to give shape to the notion of "Dancing with Architecture" in actual physicality? In order to investigate an appropriate answer to this problem, the project offers a unique opportunity of applying architecture's power of representation in rich analogies and metaphors. Therefore more than designing just a theater that serves for dance, this space shall be a place that, in its appearance as a whole and in detail, represents the tale of its initial challenge and investigation. In addition, and as part of being a nonstandard stage for modern dance, the project shall critically review conventions in stage space and offers the opportunity to investigate it under a different scope, for instance through the question of how to increase the spectator's spatial experiences and interactivity with the performers, or through exploiting natural phenomena such as daylight, wind, water, landscape, time and gravity as stimulating factors to introduce new facilities in modern dance. / Master of Architecture

This study aimed to map how much space is given to the five world religions in two textbooks used to teach history 1b at high school in Sweden, as well as how these are presented based on Jackson's theoretical perspective of representation. Part of the questions discussed had a descriptive nature and were used to investigated how much space was given to religions in the study material. With a deductive approach, Jackson's model describing concepts of religious tradition, group, individual, bounded systems of belief and personal and flexible model was used to see similarities and differences in how different religions were presented in the textbooks. Through a qualitative content analysis, the material was analyzed based on the categories controlling and developing, which had been derived from the coded material based on an inductive working method. The results show that there is little variation in the context in which the religions are presented, and that there is an imbalance in how much space is given to them. Comparing the results against the background of Jackson's theoretical perspective of representation, the results further shows that it is only Christianity that is presented based on all of Jackson’s three levels (religious tradition, group and individual). The overall picture of how the five largest world religions are presented in the material therefore, cannot be understood based on a personal flexible model for teaching.

Current unsupervised approaches for keyphrase extraction compute a single importance score for each candidate word by considering the number and quality of its associated words in the graph and they are not flexible enough to incorporate multiple types of information. For instance, nodes in a network may exhibit diverse connectivity patterns which are not captured by the graph-based ranking methods. To address this, we present a new approach to keyphrase extraction that represents the document as a word graph and exploits its structure in order to reveal underlying explanatory factors hidden in the data that may distinguish keyphrases from non-keyphrases. Experimental results show that our model, which uses phrase graph representations in a supervised probabilistic framework, obtains remarkable improvements in performance over previous supervised and unsupervised keyphrase extraction systems.

This study seeks to investigate factors influencing gender representation patterns in educational leadership positions in high schools around Phokeng. In South Africa and some other countries, teaching in schools remains a profession where women are highly represented, but women continue to be under-represented in educational leadership p9sitions. Male over-representation in the leadership and management of educational institutions is internationally known and documented and persists despite the availability and implementation of gender equity acts and policies. The study used the case study approach, underpinned by feminist theory to investigate factors that influence gender representation patterns in high schools around Phokeng. Semi-structured interviews and open-ended, qualitative questionnaires were used to collect data. A total of 12 purposefully selected participants were included in the study: four principals, four deputy principals and four heads of departments. Data was collected on the following areas: The nature and extent of gender representation patterns in educational leadership positions; possible reasons for the current gender representation patterns in educational leadership positions in high schools in areas around Phokeng; strategies that can be applied to address the current gender representation patterns in order to suit gender equity concerns in education. The findings reveal that women represent a high percentage of employees of the education system, but women continue to be under-represented in educational leadership positions. Furthermore, the study found that gender stereotypes, family responsibilities, low self-image and self-esteem as well as lack of confidence are some of the reasons for under-representation of women in educational leadership positions. The investigation also established that the implementation of the Employment Equity Act and similar policies should be intensified in all educational institutions as one of the strategies to close the gap of under-representation of women in educational leadership positions. The main recommendations emanating from the study are that women teachers need training to equip them with appropriate knowledge and skills; therefore they should be capacitated to improve their self-image, self-esteem and should acquire strategies to balance their family responsibilities with their work life. In that case, society can improve its perception about women, practical affirmative action strategies could be employed to improve the representation of women in educational leadership and to promote non-discriminatory working relationships and respect for diversity in a job situation. / Thesis (M.Ed) North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, 2013

The purpose of this essay is to study the role and function of literature and literary texts in Dragon Age, the fictive world experienced through computer games, novels, comics, movies and other media, created by the video game developer company BioWare. My starting point is the question of how history of literature and literary canon are created and depicted in the games and the novels. From there, I examine what the concepts of ‘history of literature’ and ‘canon’ implicate in the real world, and how they can be translated into the fictive world of Dragon Age, and the different media of computer games and novels. The width and depth of the fictive world’s literature is shown through a study of different types of texts and how they appear in the games and novels respectively, but also through an examination of how real world genres are represented in the games. The issue of representation is also brought up in a discussion about how the in-world literary canon excludes socio-economical classes, as well as the issue of religion restricting the availability of literature free from religious or political bias. Nearing a conclusion, I argue that given the parallels between the literature of the real world and fictive world respectively, the literature and literary texts in the Dragon Age games and novels should be understood as canonical representations of the history of literature of the real world. I also suggest that the literature and literary texts of Dragon Age can be used as prompters of memory: while we explore a fictive world, we also have a chance to reexamine our knowledge of the real world.

Who gets represented in America? How does representation change over time? This thesis attempts to answer both questions, which are necessarily linked to one another. I investigate long-term trends in representation and temporary fluctuations in group influence by using a probit model to examine the link between socioeconomic groups’ policy preferences and outcomes in year-groups roughly corresponding to presidential terms. I find evidence for the suggestion in the literature that American policymaking contains a strong bias in favor of the status quo, but I depart from the literature in finding little evidence for a suggested link between income and political influence. I find evidence of declining policy activity in the 1990s and 2000s relative to the 1980s but little evidence of a long-term trend towards less policy output. In general, I find little evidence of long-term trends in representation, including the idea that our policy outcomes are becoming more correlated with the views of minority groups such as African-Americans and Hispanics.

Planning for teaching imposes a significant burden on teachers, as teachers need to prepare different lesson plans for different classes according to various constraints. Statistical evidence shows that lesson planning in the Malaysian context is done in isolation and lesson plan sharing is limited. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether a case-based system can reduce the time teachers spend on constructing lesson plans. A case-based system was designed SmartLP. In this system, a case consists of a problem description and solution pair and an attributevalue representation for the case is used. SmartLP is a synthesis type of CBR system which attempts to create a new solution by combining parts of previous solutions in the adaptation. Five activities in the CBR cycle retrieve, reuse, revise, review and retain are created via three types of design: application, architectural and user interface. The inputs are the requirements and constraints of the curriculum and the student facilities available, and the output is the solution, i.e. appropriate elements of a lesson plan. The retrieval module consists of five types of search advanced search, hierarchical, Boolean, basic and browsing. Solving a problem in this system involves obtaining a problem description, measuring the similarity of the current problem to previous problems stored in a database, retrieving one or more similar cases and attempting to reuse the solution of the retrieved cases, possibly after adaptation. Case adaptation for multiple lesson plans helps teachers to customise the retrieved plan to suit their constraints. This is followed by case revision, which allows users to access and revise their constructed lesson plans in the system. Validation mechanisms, through case verification, ensure that the retained cases are of quality. A formative study was conducted to investigate the effects of SmartLP on performance. The study revealed that all the lesson plans constructed with SmartLP assistance took significantly less time than the control lesson plans constructed without SmartLP assistance, although they might have access to computers and other tools. No significant difference in writing quality, measured by a scoring system, was noticed for the control group, who constructed lesson plans on the same tasks without receiving any assistance. The limitations of SmartLP are indicated and the focus of further research is proposed. Keywords: Case-based system, CBR approach, knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, case representation, evaluation, lesson planning.

Gender equality is important for a country´s development. Turkey want to be a full member of the EU, gender equality is therefore an important factor to investigate. This research paper aims to address the reasons for women´s low representation in the decision-making positions, mainly in the Turkish Parliament. The purpose is to understand what casual mechanisms that impact the women representation at the national level in the Turkish Parliament.  The research methods is carried out with in-depth interviews namely, semi-structured interviews in Turkey with four Members of Parliament, a gender-expert lawyer and three women´s organizations namely, Kadin Adaylari Destekleme Dernegi and Ucan Süpürge, while the interview with Türk Üniversiteli Kadinlar Dernegi consists of group interview. Furthermore relevant literature was used in order to complement the interviews. The overreaching theoretical framework used in the thesis consists of gender theory and complementary different concept definitions, namely, Culture Matters, Low representation of Women, Modernization and Patriarchy. These concepts have been the foundation of the analysis and have added understanding of the reasons for women´s low representation in the Turkish Parliament. The common perception of the interviewees to solutions were quotas, increase the education, to start with democracy first in the family, make the society aware of the problem of gender inequality. The main conclusions drawn from this research were that the government and the NGOs are aware of the problems on gender equality; they are working together to combat the inequality between sexes. The government is also aware of that they have reached a certain level of gender equality in the Parliament compared to the last decades. The process of gender equality is slowly developing but there is a will to achieve gender equality in the Turkish Parliament.

Two highly effective content-adaptive methods for generating Delaunay mesh models of images, known as IID1 and IID2, are proposed. The methods repeatedly alternate between mesh simplification and refinement, based on the incremental/decremental mesh-generation framework of Adams, which has several free parameters. The effect of different choices of the framework's free parameters is studied, and the results are used to derive two mesh-generation methods that differ in computational complexity. The higher complexity IID2 method generates mesh models of superior reconstruction quality, while the lower complexity IID1 method trades mesh quality in return for a decrease in computational cost. Some of the contributions of our work include the recommendation of a better choice for the growth-schedule parameter of the framework, as well as the use of Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion for the initial-mesh selection. As part of our work, we evaluated the performance of the proposed methods using a data set of 50 images varying in type (e.g., photographic, computer generated, and medical), size and bit depth with multiple target mesh densities ranging from 0.125% to 4%. The experimental results show that our proposed methods perform extremely well, yielding high-quality image approximations in terms of peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and subjective visual quality, at an equivalent or lower computational cost compared to other well known approaches such as the ID1, ID2, and IDDT methods of Adams, and the greedy point removal (GPR) scheme of Demaret and Iske. More specifically, the IID2 method outperforms the GPR scheme in terms of mesh quality by 0.2-1.0 dB with a 62-93% decrease in computational cost. Furthermore, the IID2 method yields meshes of similar quality to the ID2 method at a computational cost that is lower by 9-41%. The IID1 method provides improvements in mesh quality in 93% of the test cases by margins of 0.04-1.31 dB compared to the IDDT scheme, while having a similar complexity. Moreover, reductions in execution time of 4-59% are achieved compared to the ID1 method in 86% of the test cases. / Graduate / 0544, 0984, 0537 / marzouki@uvic.ca