<p>ABSTRACT</p><p>Purpose/aim: Are there any differences between how “old” and “young” groups within social movements in Sweden view (value) and use alternative and mainstream media?</p><p>Material/method: The answer to the research problem is sought by conducting qualitative research interviews with representatives of four different groups: Alternativ Stad, Folkkampanjen mot Kärnkraft-Kärnvapen, Attac Sverige and Ingen Människa är Illegal. The theoretical framework consists of research on social movements, especially on their relation to media, and on alternative media.</p><p>Main results: There exist some, but not great, differences between how “old” and “young” groups view and use mainstream and alternative media. The differences are relatively small when it comes to views on media and somewhat larger concerning media use. These differences in media use stem mostly from the differences in organizational structure. </p><p>Keywords: Social movements, alternative media, mainstream media, media views, media usage.</p>

The purpose of this thesis is the development of an interactive computer-generated rendering system that provides artists with the ability to create abstract paintings simply and intuitively. This system allows the user to distort a computer-generated environment using image manipulation techniques that are derived from fundamentals of expressionistic art. The primary method by which these images will be abstracted stems from the idea of several small images assembled into a collage that represents multiple viewing points rendered simultaneously. This idea has its roots in the multiple-perspective and collage techniques used by many cubist and futurist artists of the early twentieth century.

ABSTRACT Purpose/aim: Are there any differences between how “old” and “young” groups within social movements in Sweden view (value) and use alternative and mainstream media? Material/method: The answer to the research problem is sought by conducting qualitative research interviews with representatives of four different groups: Alternativ Stad, Folkkampanjen mot Kärnkraft-Kärnvapen, Attac Sverige and Ingen Människa är Illegal. The theoretical framework consists of research on social movements, especially on their relation to media, and on alternative media. Main results: There exist some, but not great, differences between how “old” and “young” groups view and use mainstream and alternative media. The differences are relatively small when it comes to views on media and somewhat larger concerning media use. These differences in media use stem mostly from the differences in organizational structure. Keywords: Social movements, alternative media, mainstream media, media views, media usage.

The aim of this thesis was to describe and analyse principals´ views of collaboration forms, staff development and leadership, as critical internal capacities for school improvement, in five more successful and four less successful Swedish secondary schools, and compare the qualitative similarities and/or differences in the principals´ views at the level of schools. A successful school is understood to be a school where pupils accomplish both the academic objectives and the social/civic objectives in the National Curriculum. The empirical materials used were collected through semi-structured interviews with the principals and deputy principals, and through general school observations in the nine schools. The perspective of principals´ views was used as the unit for analysis, in order to reflect the principals´ way of thinking about the internal capacities, as principals´ views were expected to be an important indication of how principals act and interact with teachers in their specific context. To create such a model for analysis meant creating views, generated from empirical text, that deepened the understanding of the meaning of collaboration forms, staff development, and leadership, as critical internal capacities for school improvement. These views were then interpreted with the help of two theoretical concepts; structure and culture. The creation of the model made it possible to analyse and describe the school observations and the principals´ views of the three critical internal capacities, in the same usage. The question of what is decided helped to describe and understand the structure in a school, which in educational sociology is understood as the division of labour. The question of how the decisions are realised helped to describe and understand the culture in a school, the distribution of work. By using the theoretical concepts of structure and culture it was possible to unfold the power relations and the modes of control in the schools, regarding the three internal capacities for school improvement. One part of the result was the constructed view types for collaboration forms, staff development and leadership. It was possible to construct three qualitatively different view types: A principal distributed and team-based/involving view type, a principal distributed and teacher-based/traditional view type, and a politically distributed and principal-based view type. The last view type only appears in relation to staff development. When connecting the principals´ views of the three internal capacities in the different schools to the different view types, the results show that the ´team-based` view type dominates in all of the more successful schools, as well as in one of the less successful schools. In two of the less successful schools the ´team-based´ view type has become a vision for the principals to strive for in relation to the experienced reality of the ´teacher-based´ view type. The remaining less successful school is dominated by the ´teacher-based´ view type. Principals´ views of external collaboration forms, the connections with the world outside the school-house, are interesting, as all schools no matter the level of success, are ´teacher-based´.

This research paper was aimed at analysing the influence of culture and communication practices in team functioning.  The scope of the study was limited to the project teams in the financial sector in Japan and the Philippines. The study was a qualitative research through the application of case studies whilst the primary data were gathered from semi-structured interviews. The findings of the study revealed that the project teams were collectivist with a noticeable degree of power distance, bestowment of status through ascription and the strong need for harmony in the project team environment. The communication practices were also affected by the hierarchical, relational, societal and regulatory dictates and expectations. However, there were some differences noted in Japanese and Philippine project teams as the latter exhibited more flexibility towards hierarchical relationship where position was not seen as hindrance in developing convivial and professional relationships. In so doing, culture and communication practices influenced team functioning in the aforementioned research context. Finally, the results of the study will allow project members, leaders and other key stakeholders in understanding the influence of culture and communication practices to team functioning in a more in-depth manner. This will lead to better policies and practices in helping them realise their goals and objectives.

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In this project, a prototype visual data mining tool was developed, allowing users to interactively investigate large multi-dimensional datasets visually (using 2D visualization techniques) using so called drill-down, roll-up and slicing operations. The project included all steps of the development, from writing specifications and designing the program to implementing and evaluating it. Using ideas from data warehousing, custom methods for storing pre-computed aggregations of data (commonly referred to as materialized views) and retrieving data from these were developed and implemented in order to achieve higher performance on large datasets. View materialization enables the program to easily fetch or calculate a view using other views, something which can yield significant performance gains if view sizes are much smaller than the underlying raw dataset. The choice of which views to materialize was done in an automated manner using a well-known algorithm - the greedy algorithm for view materialization - which selects the fraction of all possible views that is likely (but not guaranteed) to yield the best performance gain. The use of materialized views was shown to have good potential to increase performance for large datasets, with an average speedup (compared to on-the-fly queries) between 20 and 70 for a test dataset containing 500~000 rows. The end result was a program combining flexibility with good performance, which was also reflected by good scores in a user-acceptance test, with participants from the company where this project was carried out.

In this qualitative study of students’ methods of calculating subtractions, I have used interviews, subtraction exercises and analysis of teaching material. The purpose of my study was to explore which methods students in grade three uses when calculating subtractions. I also wanted to highlight which strategies the students use and their comprehension of the concept of subtraction. In the study, I also highlight the different pedagogical ideas on which the teaching material is based on and the students’ choice of methods.  The study shows that the students choose to use the methods”deduct” and “kind of number” independently. Further it also shows that the students choose to switch from the method “deduct” to “kind of number” when the numbers in the exercises are further up on the number axis. When asked, the students answered that subtraction means “minus” which they in turn explained as removing something, an explanation confirmed by the Swedish Academy dictionary. The students’ choice of methods and teaching material is based on different fundamental pedagogical view.

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe elementary and mathematics teachers&rsquo / views about the new elementary school mathematics curriculum (NC). A total of 22 elementary teachers (grades 1-5) and mathematics teachers (grades 6-8) Alaca district of &Ccedil / orum participated. The data were collected through one-to-one interviews with some of the participants and written responses for the interview questions provided by the rest of the participants. The findings indicated that the participants had positive views about the impact of the NC. Participants reported that the NC helped students reach meaningful learning through the instructional activities, new content, curriculum materials, and new assessment techniques. Participants had positive views about the new roles for the teachers and the students and the increased student motivation that the NC brought. They also expressed challenges in teaching due to the lack of materials, physical facilities, and time. Local differences impacted the implementation of the NC negatively in rural contexts. The intensity of the NC made instructional activities and the assessment processes difficult to implement in multi-grade and crowded classrooms. Participants did not feel efficient enough to implement the NC since they lacked adequate training and support. While teachers adopted the ideas that the NC brought, they adapted these practices to their existing practices. They reported performing a combination of NC practices and previous practices. Participants claimed that content of Ministry support should be more practice oriented, the curriculum materials should be sufficient in number, and the duration of mathematics lesson should be increased.

<p>In the research of developing arbitrary and unique virtual views from a real- world scene, a prototype of an interactive relief texture mapping system capable of processing video using dynamic image-based rendering, is developed in this master thesis. The process of deriving depth from recorded video using binocular stereopsis is presented, together with how the depth information is adjusted to be able to manipulate the orientation of the original scene. When the scene depth is known, the recorded organic and dynamic objects can be seen from viewpoints not available in the original video.</p>