Borders and border barriers can be breached and boundaries and political agendas can change. The Great Walls of China, Hadrian's Wall, and the Iron Curtain have lost their strategic value. Walls are contested presently in the Middle East. And the unpopulated DMZ in Korea, while still of strategic value, is being recognized for its biodiversity and resurgence of endangered flora and fauna. Presently, the United States is building a defensive wall along the U.S.-Mexico border in the name of national security and to stem the tide of drug and human trafficking. In the process it has waived numerous environmental laws thereby putting transboundary ecosystems in danger of irreparable harm. Why should there be interest? For the reason, as put forth by Mumme and Ibáñez, that while much attention has been paid to adverse environmental effects within the United States, "little attention has been given to the potentially complicated effects of the international boundary, water, and environmental agreements to which [the United States and Mexico] are party should Mexico choose to press its rights at the level of international law. . . . As international treaties and protocols, these agreements enjoy a legal standing that may supersede the authority of most domestic legislation." The implications are far reaching. Mexico has sent diplomatic notes to the U.S. embassy in Mexico and to the U.S. Department of State, and the Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (SEMARNAT), Mexico's environment secretariat, has held informal talks with the Department of the Interior (DOI) and with the Secretary of Homeland Security--all apparently of no avail. Canada's notes have been similarly ignored by the Department of Homeland Security. What then for the U.S-Mexico border fence? Will it eventually become a relic of past political policy? Is the United States to ignore the lessons of the past and void its environmental treaties and agreements with Mexico? Should we not be concentrating on comprehensive immigration reform and the causes of drug abuse in the United States rather than a short-term solution to long-term problems?

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無 / Walls provide not only physical but also ideological boundaries between neighbors. They can be seen as a symbol of protection or segregation. Using as stimulus the security fence between Mexico and the United States, this study aims to identify the main frames in American and Mexican political cartoons to decode the different messages and symbolism towards the border wall through which one can understand the U.S.-Mexico border issue as seen in the newspapers from the two countries. Using a qualitative analysis, the thesis studies 34 American and 69 Mexican cartoons from dailies that are representative of the press in the two countries. The cartoons evidence the use of six frames and symbolism: Death of migrants and the renegotiation of NAFTA were exclusively used by the Mexican papers. The freedom issue and the divisive nature of the wall balanced in both countries’ cartoons and the main preoccupations of the United States cartoons concerned the country’s double standard of hiring illegal migrant laborers while at the same rejecting an immigration agreement with Mexico. This study’s original contribution serves as a small step in the long road of empirical database expansion in framing political cartoons and the symbolism behind the portrayal of barriers.

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Some Location Based Services (LBS) can automatically find geographic locations that are relevant to the everyday smartphone user. A relevant location, or place, is a location that is of some significance to a user, e.g. home, workplace, airports or stores. Knowledge of these places can be used to enhance a smartphone application. However, most approaches to finding places are coarse, and simply define a place with a circle or polygon representing a geographical area. Instead this paper explored the feasibility of defining a place by using the natural boundaries found in the information of a map. The developed algorithm calculated the center of a cluster of location points by adding biased weights to each point. A close proximity of the center point was then searched for certain types of map elements such as buildings or parks. Because of time restrictions, map images were used instead of the underlying data. The developed algorithm found the correct place in 78% of the 45 test cases. In 15% of the cases it could not find anything, mainly because the map did not contain sufficiently detailed information about buildings outside of cities. The remaining 7% were incorrect results, some of which might have been remedied by more detailed map information. Overall the suggested approach was viable when a user had been in a building, park, or other clearly defined place, and when there was sufficiently detailed map information. To further this research an algorithm that processes geographical data directly instead of using map images could be tested. It would avoid some of the problems created by having an image as a middle layer between data and algorithm. / Vissa tjänster baserade på användarens geografiska position kan automatiskt hitta områden som är relevanta för en smartphoneanvändare. En relevant plats är ett område som har någon betydelse för en användare, till exempel ett hem, en arbetsplats, flygplats eller butik. Information om dessa platser kan användas för att berika en smartphoneapplikation. De flesta ansatser till att hitta relevanta platser är mindre detaljerade, och definierar en plats med en cirkel eller polygon som beskriver ett geografiskt område. Den här uppsatsen utforskar istället om det är möjligt att definiera en plats genom att använda naturliga gränser som finns i informationen på en karta. Den utvecklade algoritmen beräknade mittpunkten av ett cluster av GPS-punkter genom att partiskt ge varje punkt en vikt. Den sökte sedan igenom ett område runt mittpunkten efter en viss typ av kartelement, till exempel byggnader eller parker. På grund av tidbegränsningar användes kartbilder istället för underliggande geografisk data. Den utvecklade algoritmen hittade rätt plats i 78% av de 45 testfallen. I 15% av fallen hittade den ingen plats, främst på grund av att kartan saknade information om byggnader utanför städer. De resterande 7% var inkorrekta resultat, varav vissa skulle kunna räddats om kartan innehöll information om byggnaderna i området. Generellt var den föreslagna strategin användbar främst när en användare hade varit i en byggnad, park eller annan tydligt avgränsad plats, och när kartan innehöll tillräckligt detaljerad information. För att fortsätta denna undersökning kan en algoritm som använder den underliggande geografiska datan istället för en kartbild utvecklas. Det skulle undvika vissa av problemen som skapas av att ha en bild som mellanlager mellan data och algoritm.

Writing concurrent programs with shared memory is often not trivial. Correctly synchronising the threads and handling the non-determinism of executions require a good understanding of the interleaving semantics. Yet, interleavings are not sufficient to model correctly the executions of modern, multicore processors. These executions follow rules that are weaker than those observed by the interleavings, often leading to reorderings in the sequence of updates and readings from memory; the executions are subject to a weaker memory consistency. Reorderings can produce executions that would not be observable with interleavings, and these possible executions also depend on the architecture that the processors implement. It is therefore necessary to locate and understand these reorderings in the context of a program running, or to prevent them in an automated way. In this dissertation, we aim to automate the reasoning behind weak memory consistency and perform transformations over the code so that developers need not to consider all the specifics of the processors when writing concurrent programs. We claim that we can do automatic static analysis for axiomatically-defined weak memory models. The method that we designed also allows re-use of automated verification tools like model checkers or abstract interpreters that were not designed for weak memory consistency, by modification of the input programs. We define an abstraction in detail that allows us to reason statically about weak memory models over programs. We locate the parts of the code where the semantics could be affected by the weak memory consistency. We then provide a method to explicitly reveal the resulting reorderings so that usual verification techniques can handle the program semantics under a weaker memory consistency. We finally provide a technique that synthesises synchronisations so that the program would behave as if only interleavings were allowed. We finally test these approaches on artificial and real software. We justify our choice of an axiomatic model with the scalability of the approach and the runtime performance of the programs modified by our method.