<p>Vi, två studerande vid Karlstads universitet, har efter önskemål från IBM intervjuat tre representanter från utvalda svenska tillverkningsföretag om hur de ställer sig till Linux på klientsidan och sedan jämfört detta med vad IT-analysföretag anser om Linux och en</p><p>övergång till detta på klientsidan. Vi har även utfört en djupintervju med en anställd på IBM för att ta del av deras syn och åsikter om varför de valt att satsa på Linux på klientsidan och vägt in detta i våra intervjuer med tillverkningsföretagen.</p><p>Vi frågar oss, är det någon skillnad i uppfattning mellan hur olika IT-analysföretag ser och skriver om Linux och hur markanden ser på Linux och vad de egentligen tycker?</p><p>Att Linux kommer gå en ljus framtid till möte är samtliga involverade parter i vår uppsats eniga om. Trots detta skiljer sig deras åsikter om vilket operativsystem som är det mest kostnadseffektiva, IT-analysföretagen säger Linux, tillverkningsföretagen säger Microsoft. En ökad konkurrens på marknaden ser samtliga som positivt men poängterar att det måste finnas ett verkligt skäl till en övergång då det kostar mycket pengar och att det är så pass mycket att tänka på.</p>

<p>Open source software is becoming a credible and realistic alternative to proprietary software in municipalities. The aim of this thesis is to explore the strategies and logical issues that inspire and motivate municipalities to migrate into or integrate use of open source software. The research approach used in the study is an explorative, comparative case study performed in the three Swedish municipalities of Falköping, Alingsås and Kungälv, which considers implementation and use of OpenOffice in administration. The methodologies used in the case study were in-depth interviews with Chief Information Officers in the municipalities and document analysis. The interviews were combined with the tool of SWOTanalysis to further focus on the reasons for choosing OpenOffice as an application program. There is certainly not a unique strategy to migrate into or integrate use of Free/Open Source Software. Since each municipality is autonomous in the process of decision-making, various strategic planning or guidelines are use in different municipalities. In the municipalities of Alingsås and Kungälv the strategic planning is used for leading the processes of implementation of new software applications. However, in Falköping municipality, the procedures are guided by a set of guidelines. The lower Total Cost of Ownership and the Free/Open Source Software’s freedoms besides many other advantages, make the municipalities stimulated to migrate into use of OpenOffice suite. In contrast, there are some drawbacks and barriers, such as shortage of internal and external standardization and lack of user knowledge and familiarity, which demotivate the municipalities to take this decision. To lower costs of IT administration seems to be the most significant factor in motivating municipalities to migrate into use of OpenOffice. More research is needed in order to find out the consequences of implementation of OpenOffice in municipalities as well as to investigate if Total Cost of Ownership really is decreased by the use of Open Office.</p>

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The purpose of this study was to explore the preferred information sources and delivery channels for farm-related information among selected northeast Texas farmers and describe these results in a manner which might enable the Texas AgriLife Extension Service and other agriculture-focused entities better position themselves to address the needs of their clientele. An instrument was developed and mailed to (N = 290) randomly selected farmers from existing Extension mailing lists in four northeast Texas counties: Bowie, Rains, Rusk and Shelby. Participants had the option of responding online or via return mail. The highest ranking interpersonal information sources were other farmers, AgriLife Extension personnel, and seminars/workshops. The lowest ranking interpersonal information sources were agricultural lenders/bankers and private consultants. The highest ranking print-based information sources were agricultural newspapers and farm magazines. The lowest ranking print-based information sources were publications from non-governmental farm organizations and daily or weekly newspapers. Respondents were neutral on the usefulness of television and radio as information sources. The Internet was the only electronic information source agreed to as useful by responding farmers. The lowest ranking electronic media source was social media. The most common type of contact between farmers and the Texas AgriLife Extension Service was reading an Extension publication monthly, followed by a yearly visit to the Extension office. Farmers were satisfied with the quality of the agriculture related materials and programs provided by the Texas AgriLife Extension Service and were likely to recommend the agency to others. The majority (91.6%) of respondents had not heard of the national Extension website eXtension and only 4 respondents (2.5%) had reported using the website before. Respondents felt that eXtension would increase the accessibility of Extension programming, should be publicized more by local Extension offices, and would make Cooperative Extension more popular. Internet use among farmers was found to be influenced by age, highest level of education attained, Internet connection type, and other electronic devices used. Perceptions about AgriLife Extension were found to be influenced by Innovativeness Category, primary occupation, gender, and other electronic devices used. Findings in this study support the Uses and Gratifications Theory of media use.

This paper presents first results from research into open source projects from a software engineering perspective. The research methodology employed relies on public data retrieved from the CVS-repository of the GNOME project and relevant discussion groups. This methodology is described in detail and some of the results concerning the special characteristics of open source software development are given. (author's abstract) / Series: Diskussionspapiere zum Tätigkeitsfeld Informationsverarbeitung und Informationswirtschaft

Speech communication is gaining in popularity in many different contexts as technology evolves. With the introduction of mobile electronic devices such as cell phones and laptops, and fixed electronic devices such as video and teleconferencing systems, more people are communicating which leads to an increasing demand for new services and better speech quality. Methods to enhance speech recorded by microphones often operate blindly without prior knowledge of the signals. With the addition of multiple microphones to allow for spatial filtering, many blind speech enhancement methods have to operate blindly also in the spatial domain. When attempting to improve the quality of spoken communication it is often necessary to be able to reliably determine the location of the speakers. A dedicated source localization method on top of the speech enhancement methods can assist the speech enhancement method by providing the spatial information about the sources. This thesis addresses the problem of speech-source localization, with a focus on the problem of localization in the presence of multiple concurrent speech sources. The primary work consists of methods to estimate the direction of arrival of multiple concurrent speech sources from an array of sensors and a method to correct the ambiguities when estimating the spatial locations of multiple speech sources from multiple arrays of sensors. The thesis also improves the well-known SRP-based methods with higher-order statistics, and presents an analysis of how the SRP-PHAT performs when the sensor array geometry is not fully calibrated. The thesis is concluded by two envelope-domain-based methods for tonal pattern detection and tonal disturbance detection and cancelation which can be useful to further increase the usability of the proposed localization methods. The main contribution of the thesis is a complete methodology to spatially locate multiple speech sources in enclosed environments. New methods and improvements to the combined solution are presented for the direction-of-arrival estimation, the location estimation and the location ambiguity correction, as well as a sensor array calibration sensitivity analysis.

In this discussion paper, we argue that the literature on tree algorithms is very fragmented. We identify possible causes and discuss good and bad sides of this situation. Among the latter is the lack of free open-source implementations for many algorithms. We argue that if the community adopts a standard of creating and sharing free open-source implementations for their developed algorithms and creates easy access to these programs the bad sides of the fragmentation will be actively combated and will benefit the whole scientific community. (authors' abstract)

Seismology is the study of earthquakes and the Earth’s internal structure using seismic waves. Traditional seismology is constrained by the timing and location of seismic sources, and by the location of seismometers with which energy from the sources are recorded. Improvements in the global seismometer networks have reduced the latter constraint. Furthermore, recent advances into Seismic Interferometry (SI) have enabled detailed information about the Earth’s interior to be obtained using ambient seismic noise, hence even in areas with low natural seismicity. The most common approach to SI is to use the cross-correlation of ambient noise recordings to construct an estimate of the Green’s function between two seismometer locations. The Green’s function estimate is then analysed or inverted for seismic properties of the Earth. This method of noise interferometry is now a popular approach in earthquake seismology as in some situations it renders active seismic sources (earthquakes or synthesised explosions) obsolete, as subsurface information can be obtained even in times of seismic quiescence. This thesis investigates a different method: Source-Receiver Interferometry (SRI). SRI can be used to construct earthquake seismograms on seismometers that were not necessarily deployed when the earthquakes occurred - a form of ‘retrospective seismology’. This might be useful if, for example, we wish to analyse old earthquakes with newly installed seismometers. The application of SRI involves evaluating two interferometric integrals. The first integral is evaluated using ambient noise interferometry: at least 6 months of noise data is cross-correlated to estimate the Green’s functions between pairs of seismometers. These inter-receiver Green’s functions are then used as the “propagators” for SRI. Their role is to project earthquake signals recorded on a backbone array of seismometers to the location of a target sensor at which a new, novel earthquake seismogram is to be constructed - a form of spatial redatuming. To spatially redatum the earthquake data, the second interferometric integral is evaluated using either processes of correlation (resulting in correlation-correlation SRI) or convolution (correlation-convolution SRI). The method used depends on the relative location of the target sensors with respect to both the backbone seismometer array and the earthquake epicentre. The SRI process is completed by integrating (summing) over all projected earthquake signals. To regularise the spatial distribution of the projected earthquake data and to invoke this second interferometric integral more precisely, the backbone seismometers are embedded within 2D spatial Voronoi cells. New seismograms for 87 earthquakes were reconstructed on up to eight target sensors, seven of which were deployed when the earthquakes occurred and are used to test the success of the method by comparing with the SRI results with the directly-recorded seismograms. The seismogram reconstructions on the eighth target sensor are truly novel. The SRI method was developed to operate over two length scales. The first focusses on relatively small length scales in which the inter-station distance between the eight target sensors and the backbone array seismometers is between ~ 210 km and 540 km. Both correlation-correlation SRI and correlation-convolution SRI are used to reconstruct the earthquake seismograms on four of the same target sensors. Applying correlation-convolution SRI is shown to remove spurious signals associated with correlation-correlation SRI. Second, a significantly larger length scale is considered where a second set of target sensors are located up to 2420 km from a second backbone seismometer array. The correlation-correlation and correlation-convolution SRI methods are used in parallel to increase the spatial extent of the study. The quality of the SRI seismograms constructed is shown to depend on the quality of three components: 1) the SRI propagators constructed using ambient noise interferometry, 2) the earthquake signals recorded on the backbone seismometer array, and 3) the correlation (or convolution) functions that are summed in the second interferometric integral to construct the final SRI seismogram. The quality of each component is quantified by its signal-to-noise ratio and root-mean-square value, and criteria are proposed to obtain optimal earthquake seismogram reconstructions using SRI. SRI is most successful when the target sensors are located less than 540 km from the backbone array seismometers. Such SRI seismograms are being used to create a catalogue of new, ‘virtual’ earthquake seismograms that are available to complement real earthquake data for use in future earthquake seismology studies. An alternative approach to noise interferometry is also considered: the recordings from just 15 earthquakes are used to perform multidimensional deconvolution (MDD) to estimate the Green’s functions between pairs of seismometers. This is the first time such data has been used to perform MDD, which is valid in attenuating media and is thus theoretically more valid in earthquake seismology settings than correlational interferometry. The Green’s functions estimated using MDD are compared with those same Green’s functions estimated using ambient noise interferometry and the results are comparable on several occasions, despite using far fewer data for MDD. However, the quality of the results of MDD is significantly affected by the illumination of the receiver array from the earthquake sources. A greater density of earthquakes that sufficiently illuminates all backbone array seismometers is required to obtain accurate Green’s functions by MDD.