The aim of this study was to, with a social constructivistic approach, examine how parents,regarded as neglecting their children, are depicted in 12 LVU-legal cases from the Supreme Administrative Court in Sweden. By using a document analysis influenced by discourse analytical tools, we found that there are repeated descriptions of the parents, which constructs an image of parents as shortcoming in the care of their children. The categories lack of emotions, mental disorder, substance abuse and physical maltreatment were the main reasons for child neglect that the parents were described from. Attitudes towards authority, aggression and immaturity, lack of insight, and deficiencies in the home were repeated in the description of the parent. We further found that mothers were regarded as more responsible of the children compared to fathers. According to Goffman, describing certain groups of individuals with discredited words has a stigmatizing effect. It helps to reinforce what is considered normal or abnormal. Furthermore, we have found that the language of the LVU-legal cases, possess a power in the construction of parents who neglect their children, which was analyzed on the basis of Foucault's theory of power.

The issue of standards for household latrines is complex because discussions related to standards for latrines in literature from the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector tend to focus on the negative aspects of standards and highlights cases where the miss-application of standards in the past has caused problems. However, despite concerns about the constraints that standards can seemingly impose, there is an acknowledgement that standards can play a more positive role in supporting efforts to increase access to household latrines. The World Health Organisation has long established and widely recognised standards for water supply quality and quantity but there are no equivalent standards for sanitation services and there is currently no guidance that deals with the topic of standards for household latrines. Household latrines are a small component of the wider sanitation system in a country and by considering how standards for household latrines operate within this wider sanitation system the aim of this research is to understand what influences standards can have on household latrines and explore how the negative perceptions about standards and latrine building can be overcome. The development of guidance on how to develop well written standards is the core focus of this research. This research explores the factors that can influence the development and use of a standard for household latrines in Rwanda using three data collection methods. Document analysis using 66 documents, including policies and strategies, design manuals and training guides from 17 countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa was used in conjunction with the Delphi Method involving an expert panel of 27 from Rwanda and 38 semi-structured interviews. The research concludes that perceptions about standards for household latrines are fragmented and confused with little consensus in Rwanda on what need a standard should meet and what role it should play. The study has found that the need for a standard must be considered in the context of the wider sanitation system otherwise it can lead to duplication of efforts and increased confusion for all stakeholders. The study also found that there is an assumed link between standards and enforcement of standards through regulation and punishments which creates the negative perceptions about standards in Rwanda. However, despite this aversion to standards, there are still intentions to promote the standardisation of latrine technologies and designs, led by national government in Rwanda and in other Sub-Saharan African countries. The contribution to knowledge of this research includes a decision process presented at the end of the study which can be used by decision makers who are interested in developing a standard for household latrines. The decision process acts as a tool for outlining how a standard can operate within the national sanitation system. This understanding provides decision makers with the basis for continuing the debate on what a well written standard looks like in the national context and supports the development of a standard that is fit for purpose and provides a positive contribution to the sector.

The humanities have for a long time been a collection of fields that have not gained from the advancements in computational power, as predicted by Moore´s law.  Fields like medicine, biology, physics, chemistry, geology and economics have all developed quantitative tools that take advantage of the exponential increase of processing power over time.  Recent advances in computerized pattern recognition, in combination with a rapid digitization of historical document collections around the world, is about to change this. The first part of this dissertation focuses on constructing a full system for finding handwritten words in historical manuscripts. A novel segmentation algorithm is presented, capable of finding and separating text lines in pre-modern manuscripts.  Text recognition is performed by translating the image data of the text lines into sequences of numbers, called features. Commonly used features are analysed and evaluated on manuscript sources from the Uppsala University library Carolina Rediviva and the US Library of Congress.  Decoding the text in the vast number of photographed manuscripts from our libraries makes computational linguistics and social network analysis directly applicable to historical sources. Hence, text recognition is considered a key technology for the future of computerized research methods in the humanities. The second part of this thesis addresses digital palaeography, using a computers superior capacity for endlessly performing measurements on ink stroke shapes. Objective criteria of character shapes only partly catches what a palaeographer use for assessing similarity. The palaeographer often gets a feel for the scribe's style.  This is, however, hard to quantify.  A method for identifying the scribal hands of a pre-modern copy of the revelations of saint Bridget of Sweden, using semi-supervised learning, is presented.  Methods for production year estimation are presented and evaluated on a collection with close to 11000 medieval charters.  The production dates are estimated using a Gaussian process, where the uncertainty is inferred together with the most likely production year. In summary, this dissertation presents several novel methods related to image analysis and machine learning. In combination with recent advances of the field, they enable efficient computational analysis of very large collections of historical documents. / q2b

There has been a history of a strained relationship between the public and the police institution for decades; most recently as a result of documented high levels of arrest rates among marginalized communities. Stop and frisk practices have been active in the United States since the 1950s and have been studied academically in the United States since the 1990s. However, research concerning Canadian data is limited. This project, using Bourdieusian concepts (field, habitus, capital, and doxa) with other resistance to change/police culture research, addresses the gaps in literature surrounding the practice of ‘carding’ in Canada by determining the forms of strategies and capital used by parties to defend and contest the police practice in the city of Toronto. Using a form of Document Analysis, this project created inductive categories from reports and recommendations submitted by the Toronto Police, several activist groups, and the province of Ontario between the years of 2012-2015. Findings from this paper were similar to previous literature; however, we saw an emotional argument surrounding the use of risk emerge through those justifying the police practice of ‘carding’. This emotional argument relied on a platform of fear and risk discourse, arguing that having limited faith in police not only goes against previously accepted practices, but places our communities in greater potential danger. Furthermore, our findings showed that narratives presented by those contesting the practice of ‘carding’ saw legal and factual arguments emerge which were not seen in previous literature. These legal and factual arguments focused on Constitutionality and statistics to contest the practice of ‘carding’, rather than rely on emotional arguments as seen in previous literature. This project allowed for a snapshot of the case in Toronto to help understand the issue in a Canadian context. Many themes developed were similar to previous literature; however, we saw a new emotional argument surrounding a risk discourse and those contesting ’carding’ have accessed the legal ‘field’ to express concerns. Directions for future research are presented at the end of this study.

The purpose of this study was both to determine the most popular art curricula used by home-schooled students in Georgia and also to access whether or not these curricula align with State and National Standards for art education as well as current trends in the field. This research was approached from a document analysis standpoint and individual curriculum documents were examined and evaluated. Seven curricula/teaching resources were identified as the most popular in the state of Georgia and these were evaluated individually to identify themes, which were then compared to themes present in the National and State Standards for art education. While there was some overlap in themes from the curricula examined and the State and National Standards, it was determined that on the whole the curricula made no concerted effort to adhere to these standards.

The dissertation examines the recruitment to the nursing education in Denmark from 1850 but with emphasis on the years 1988-2001 during which a major reform was conceived and implemented. Pursuant to that reform, in 2001 the nursing education was given the status of a Bachelor’s Degree Program in Nursing. The aim of the dissertation is to determine the effects – if any – of this development on the recruitment profile and on the objective position of the nursing education in the field of advanced education in Denmark and whether there are polarizations and/or regularities in young peoples’ approach to the nursing education homologous with socio-cultural constellations. The dissertation draws theoretical inspiration from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, with emphasis on Bourdieu’s reproduction theory and praxeology. The empirical basis for the dissertation consists of formal documents defining the nursing education since the first law on authorized nurses was passed in 1933 until The Executive Order regarding the nursing education in 2001. These documents form the basis for an objectifying analysis of the institutional, structural and education policy conditions that historically formed the framework for the shaping and content of the nursing educations. The historical background contributes to a contextualization of the analyses carried out concerning changes in recruitment patterns and students’ social positioning since nursing was established as an occupation. The analysis of recruitment patterns builds mainly on a survey carried out in 2004/5 covering a class of students from five nursing schools in Denmark (a third of the total population). The dissertation shows that the 2000/2001 reform did not lead to a fundamental change in ranking in the academic hierarchy. Although social recruitment to the nursing profession moved “upward”, seen over a longer period, the analyses showed that the nursing education as a whole, also after the 2001 reform, mainly attracted young women from “lower” positions in the social space than those from which university students were recruited. The dissertation furthermore shows how students’ social background and acquired dispositions can generate a basic habitual orientation that may have a determining influence on the way they orient themselves in relation to the education and occupation.

Sweden currently has no legislated regulation of lobbying, but the professional lobbyist can voluntarily subscribe to, among others, the professional code of standars created by the trade association of Public Relations, Precis. There is an ongoing discussion in Sweden to regulate lobbying, both in mass media and in politics. This study examines this debate and focus on which arguments there are for and against lobbying regulation in Sweden. It also attempts to identify the differences, if there are any, between left and rights parties with regards to their views on regulation of lobbying. Tha main method used was document analysis of parliamentary bills which have been raised concerning a lobbying regulation in Sweden. In the theory section, I include four different types of requirements placed on democratic lobbying (se for example Jaatinen 1998, Kitchen 1999, Larsson 2005, Möller 2009 and Naurin 2001). The research showed the need for transparency to be the most prominent, followed by requirement of equal acces to diffrent social groups to lobby. The document analysis focus on the arguments that are given to regulate lobbying in Sweden. The arguments for regulating lobbying presented of the parliamentary bills include measures taken to prevent covert lobbying, to create more equal opportunities to lobby, to that the kind of self-regulation practiced by the proffesional lobbyists by Precis proffesional standars has shortcomings, to that the PR industry will expand and that lobbying is at least commom in Sweden as in other parlaments. Therefore, there is a need to review how other countries have regulated lobbying. The study shows that among the parliamentary bills, The European Parliament regulatory system is the largest role model of other parliaments regulating lobbying. Furtheremore it shows that a registration system is the type of regulation advocated by the most of the politicians behind the researched parliamentary bills. The counter-arguments to a lobbyng regulation in Sweden, identified trough the document analysis and interviews in this study, are that ethics and morality of the individual are more important than rules and laws and a skepticism that a registration system can record people's lifes, which from a democratic point of view is not desirable. Other counter-arguments are that the community allready has so many rules and laws and that a regulatory system can discriminate less economically affluent groups in society. The study has shown that one can devise some differences between left- and right-wing views concerning policies for regulating lobbying in Sweden. This because no parliamentary bills has brought on a lobbying regulation by any of the so- called red parties and the majority of the bills are raised by politicians from the right-wing Moderate Party. One can also see diffrences in the arguments of regulating lobbying by politicians. The bourgeous side seems tho think that the most important requirement of lobbying from a democratic perspective is transparency while the Swedish Green Party is focusing on the lack of equal access between different social groups to lobby.

Internationalization of post secondary institutions has been suggested as one of the most critical undertakings of higher education today. Despite growing interest in this phenomenon as an institutional initiative, relatively few studies consider internationalization from the perspective of faculty members whom some have identified as key catalysts of the internationalization process. Using a phenomenological research approach to examine the experience of five faculty members actively engaged in the internationalization process of their Canadian university I seek to understand how participants define internationalization, what motivates them to engage in this process and how the institutional and individual efforts to internationalize influence each other. I compare faculty motivations with institutional positions through an analysis of strategic institutional documents using de Wit’s (2002) internationalization rationale categories. Results suggest that institutional internationalization might be more effective in engaging faculty members when faculty perspectives and priorities are considered in the development of institutional strategies.

Internationalization of post secondary institutions has been suggested as one of the most critical undertakings of higher education today. Despite growing interest in this phenomenon as an institutional initiative, relatively few studies consider internationalization from the perspective of faculty members whom some have identified as key catalysts of the internationalization process. Using a phenomenological research approach to examine the experience of five faculty members actively engaged in the internationalization process of their Canadian university I seek to understand how participants define internationalization, what motivates them to engage in this process and how the institutional and individual efforts to internationalize influence each other. I compare faculty motivations with institutional positions through an analysis of strategic institutional documents using de Wit’s (2002) internationalization rationale categories. Results suggest that institutional internationalization might be more effective in engaging faculty members when faculty perspectives and priorities are considered in the development of institutional strategies.

Texture analysis is an important problem in machine vision, with applications in many fields including medical imaging, remote sensing (SAR), automated flaw detection in various products, and document analysis to name but a few. Over the last four decades many techniques for the analysis of textured images have been proposed in the literature for the purposes of classification, segmentation, synthesis and compression. Such approaches include analysis the properties of individual texture elements, using statistical features obtained from the grey-level values of the image itself, random field models, and multichannel filtering. The wavelet transform, a unified framework for the multiresolution decomposition of signals, falls into this final category, and allows a texture to be examined in a number of resolutions whilst maintaining spatial resolution. This thesis explores the use of the wavelet transform to the specific task of texture classification and proposes a number of improvements to existing techniques, both in the area of feature extraction and classifier design. By applying a nonlinear transform to the wavelet coefficients, a better characterisation can be obtained for many natural textures, leading to increased classification performance when using first and second order statistics of these coefficients as features. In the area of classifier design, a combination of an optimal discriminate function and a non-parametric Gaussian mixture model classifier is shown to experimentally outperform other classifier configurations. By modelling the relationships between neighbouring bands of the wavelet trans- form, more information regarding a texture can be obtained. Using such a representation, an efficient algorithm for the searching and retrieval of textured images from a database is proposed, as well as a novel set of features for texture classification. These features are experimentally shown to outperform features proposed in the literature, as well as provide increased robustness to small changes in scale. Determining the script and language of a printed document is an important task in the field of document processing. In the final part of this thesis, the use of texture analysis techniques to accomplish these tasks is investigated. Using maximum a posterior (MAP) adaptation, prior information regarding the nature of script images can be used to increase the accuracy of these methods. Novel techniques for estimating the skew of such documents, normalising text block prior to extraction of texture features and accurately classifying multiple fonts are also presented.