The thesis focuses on description and detailed analysis of factors and the strengths which influence the Finnish educational system, which makes it one of the best in the world. These strengths include, for example, the preparation (training) of future teachers at faculties, the support for pupils in education, or the current curriculum for basic education valid from 2016, etc. The strengths are influenced by factors such as history of a country, culture, geographical and demographic characteristics or economic situation in the background. The analysis of these strengths and factors includes comments based on my personal experience with Finnish education, which I was able to get during my study stay in Finland and is the starting point for a final comparison with Czech primary education. These experiences are also included in the form of written records and other supporting materials obtained during the hospice lessons at the Finnish Primary Schools. The subsequent comparison focuses on the most important points of analysis, both in Finland and Czech education, and shows not only the differences in both schools but also some similarities that we can observe. This comparison brings us a lot of knowledge about the qualities and reserves of Czech education and, last but not least, points to the...

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p><em>Bachelor thesis in political science by Alexander Hassan, autumn 2008, “Effects of external factors on a nations democratisation process during the transition from authoritarian to electoral democratic rule – A categorical analysis”</em></p><p><em>Supervisor: Tomas Sedelius</em></p><p>In recent years globalization has become a hot topic in understanding the world we live in today. Globalization has indeed had a great impact on international relations and with it a great influence on the domestic conditions that determine a nation’s possibilities. It is therefore rational to hold true that this also would apply to a nation’s democratic process. This basic notion is what lies as a foundation for the thesis, where the purpose of the study is to examine the relatively new field of the international context and its significance on democratisation.</p><p>The aim of the study is to examine and determine, through a categorical analysis, the different forms and roles that the external factors can take during the process leading up to the transition and implementation of an electoral democracy, the most basic form of democracy.</p><p>The thesis thus has demanded the study and infusion of all discourses within the field of democratisation processes, as the only way to produce the roles and forms of the international contexts impact on the domestic process is through the study and determination of the different domestic spheres associated with the process.</p><p>The different forms of external influences have been studied within the confines of the third wave of democracy, and their roles in the democratic process determined depending on the respective domestic spheres they affect. The significant result of the studies where chiefly that all forms of external influence have the possibility to affect the democratisation process indirectly as well as directly. Where direct influence is exerted within the political sphere of the nation; where the actual transition takes place, and the indirect influence is exerted through the socio-economical and cultural sphere; which exerts its influence in the process through the political sphere. </p><p>The results thus show that it is hard to draw the conclusion that an indirect form of influence would be superior to the direct approach or vice versa, as both are prevalent in successful democratic transitions.</p>

<p>Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is a broad discipline that studies different concerns regarding interactive systems’ development. One of the major interest points within the discipline is the reasoning behind building specific functionality into computers and the long-term effects that usage of systems will have on humans.</p><p>Within Human Computer Interaction there are theories and frameworks how to involve a user in the process of developing new systems. In this paper focus is applied to the development process within developing applications for Enterprice Digital Assistants (EDA) and to what extent the end-users are involved in the process. Fazer Bageri AB has been choosen to represent a business corporation that uses handheld computers in their everyday tasks.</p><p>The method used to gather information for this study has been by performing interviews and observations with key stakeholders at Fazer Bageri AB and MobiOne AB. Fazer Bageri AB is the purchaser, customer and user of the handheld computer applications that MobiOne AB developed.</p><p>The result shows that the end-users were only involved in the end of the developing process. We found that one of the main reasons for this is that there are not any resources for supporting involvement of the end-users. Within user-centric design there are many aspects to consider, but one of the most prominently is to establish a mutual understanding by all persons involved in the project, from developers to end-users about the importance of involving users throughout the development. We also found that there is no routine established for securing that the information about different updates in the handheld computers reaches the end-users.</p><p>The development process demonstrates that Fazer Bageri AB uses a traditional system development philosophy rather than a user-centric system development philosophy.</p> / <p>Inom ämnet människa datorinteraktion handlar många metoder om hur man involverar användaren i framtagandet av nya system. I denna undersökning ville författarna ta reda på hur verksamhetsprocessen vid framtagande av systemapplikationer för handdatorer kan gå till och om användarna involveras i processen. Verksamhetsprocessen jämfördes sedan mot teorier inom området. Valet föll på att undersöka verksamhetsprocessen hos Fazer Bageri AB då vetskap fanns om att de har 350 chaufförer som använder handdatorer i sitt dagliga arbete. När man utvecklar för så många användare är det viktigt att ta med användaren tidigt i processen.</p><p>Metoderna som använts i undersökningen har varit strukturerade intervjuer och observationer. Respondenterna har varit nyckelpersoner inom Fazer Bageri AB och MobiOne AB. Fazer Bageri AB är beställare, kund och användare av de mobila applikationerna för handdatorer som MobiOne AB tillhandahåller och är experter på.</p><p>Resultatet visar att användarna i denna undersökning var involverade endast i slutet av processen, en orsak till detta tycks vara att det saknas resurser för att ersätta ytterligare involvering av användare. Med att ersätta menas i detta fall ekonomisk kompensation till chaufförerna för den extra arbetstid det skulle innebära att involveras i processen. En viktig aspekt inom användarcentrerad design är att säkerställa att samtliga involverade har samma uppfattning om det som skall göras eller vad som åstadkommits. Viktigt är därför att informationsflödet inom företagen fungerar för att samtliga skall ha möjlighet att ta del av arbetet. Informationsflödet mellan handdatoransvarig och slutanvändare hos Fazer Bageri AB kan verka tveksamt då det innefattar flera olika informationsled.</p><p>Verksamhetsprocessens olika faser som kartlagts skiljer sig delvis ifrån de teorier inom människa datorinteraktion som tagits del av inför denna undersökning. Detta beror till stor del på att Fazer Bageri AB har en traditionell systemutvecklingsfilosofi snarare än en användarcentrerad designfilosofi.</p>

E-commerce is far more common in large firms than in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As a result SMEs risk competitive disadvantages. A growing body of research has attended to this problem but few studies examine the adoption of e-commerce from a broader contextual perspective. To be able to understand SMEs’ adoption of e-commerce it is desirable to study their contextual preconditions, approaches and effects. The purpose of this study is to contribute to the theory building in the e-commerce area by forming a conceptual framework over SMEs’ adoption of e-commerce: the ECA (Electronic Commerce Adoption) framework. A central starting point for the study is Pettigrew’s (1985) contextual framework for strategic changes. The analysis dimensions in Pettigrew’s framework − content, context and process − are adapted to adoption of e-commerce. Thus, the ECA framework consists of analysis models that focus on a) the content, b) the context and c) the process of e-commerce adoption in SMEs. Further, the ECA framework includes an analysis model over the interplay between content, context and process and a typology over adoption situations. The SME in its role as a supplier is the unit of analysis. The study uses an abductive approach where results from previous studies in areas such as e-commerce, information systems and decision making are used as sources for forming the ECA framework. The ECA framework is then applied to the collection, interpretation and analyze of empirical data from the case studies of two small and one medium-sized enterprise. The case studies lead to the identification of additional elements that are added to the analysis models. One contribution from the study is the typology over adoption situations. The typology, which builds on studies of Junghagen (1998) and Engsbo et al. (2001), divides the adoption of e-commerce in SMEs into five categories of adoption situations: proactive adoption situations, adaptive adoption situations, pragmatic adoption situations, forced adoption situations and enabled adoption situations. An adoption situation describes what is being adopted (content), why (context) and how (process). Another contribution is the so called adoption guides. These are contextual conditions whose states indicate if a SME will adopt e-commerce or not and if so, which adoption situation they are likely to find themselves in. The adoption guides are: the relative dependence on individual customers, the degree of customer pressure, the strategic needs of e-commerce, the information complexity and, the CEO’s extent of aversion towards risk-taking. Consequently two major conclusions from this study are that SMEs’ e-commerce adoption can be divided into five different adoption situations and a small number of contextual conditions – here called adoption guides – determine which of them a SME tend to go through. The typology enables organizations that educate SMEs or support their development of e-commerce to design their efforts more efficiently and researchers to diversify the studied population. As the study is theory building the contributions and conclusions are propositions that need to be tested empirically in future studies.

Vi möts av mängder med bilder av teknik och vetenskap i populärkulturens verk. Dessa bilder kan ses som representationer av vår verklighet och bidrar också till att skapa våra uppfattningar om världen. Denna uppsats fokuserar på att studera just de populärvetenskapliga bilderna av teknik och vetenskap som finns representerade samt hur dessa bilder är en del av sin kontext. Genom att närmare studera filmerna Demolition Man och Sunshine, utifrån frågor om tekniken skildras som ond, god eller neutral, hur vetenskapsmannen gestaltas samt hur förhållandet mellan människa och maskin ser ut, nystar denna uppsats fram de bilder av teknik och vetenskap som återfinns i dessa två verk.

Purpose/Aim: Our purpose with this study is to examen the differences in communication between digital immigrants and digital natives, how the digitization has changed our way to communicate in an interpersonal matter. Main Results: Through our study we have concluded that barriers do exist between students (natives) and teachers (immigrants), but not to the extent we first predicted. The digitization has resulted in a change in the way we communicate and our relation to each other. But in a purely communicative matter, the digitization hasn’t made it harder for natives and immigrants to understand each other, but it has contributed to new vocabulary and the use of the language. New codes has been developed, but thanks to the younger generations ability to adapt to change - this linguistic difference it is not a problem for the understanding of the code used by the immigrants. Through our study, we discovered, however, an unwillingness or fear of the immigrants to adapt to the younger code, and adapt to the technological change. Key Words: digital native, digital immigrant, digitization, communication, interpersonal, barriers, code, encoding, decoding, context, culture

Die Perspektive, die der Autor entwickelt, ist die der dialektischen Tätigkeitstheorie. Gemäß dieser Theorie ist Musik eine spezifische Art der Aneignung von Wirklichkeit. SchülerInnen sollten im Musikunterricht lernen, bewusst, selbstbestimmt und sozial zu handeln, wenn sie sich durch Musizieren Wirklichkeit aneignen. Wenn SchülerInnen im Unterricht Musik machen, müssen sie sich daher auch des kulturellen Kontextes bewusst sein, dem die Musik entstammt. Sie sollten auch selbstbestimmt handeln, d.h. es muss ihnen die Gelegenheit geboten werden, auf soziale Art und Weise innerhalb der Gruppe das Ergebnis mit zu bestimmen. Daher kritisiert der Autor alle drei der vorgeführten Musikstunden, weil sie den kulturellen Kontext und damit die Bedeutung und Funktion der Musik nicht berücksichtigen. Zwei der vorgeführten Stunden geben den Schüler/innen auch nicht die Möglichkeit selbstbestimmt zu handeln. Da alle drei Musikstunden „interkulturelle Themen“ behandeln, skizziert der Autor ein Handlungskonzept, so Musik zu machen, dass der kulturelle Kontext impliziert ist und die SchülerInnen selbstbestimmt handeln. Dies Konzept hat der Autor im Zusammenhang mit der Diskussion um interkulturelle Musikerziehung entwickelt. / The author sketches his specific perspective which is derived from a dialectic action-theory. Following this theory music is a genuine way to acquire reality. Music students have to learn to act conscious, self-determined, and social when they acquire reality by making music. When making music students have to be conscious of the cultural context the music comes from. They also have to act self-determined, i.e. they have to have the opportunity to determine the result of their music-making in a social way within the group. Thus the autor critizes all three lessons because they do not deal with the cultural context and therefore the meaning and function of the music. Two of the lessons also do not give the students the opportunity to act self-determined. As all three music lessons deal with „intercultural subjects“, the author sketches a concept of acting and making music in a way that includes cultural context and self-determination, and which he has developed within the context of multicultural music education.

Context-aware computing aims at making mobile devices sensitive to the social and physical settings in which they are used. A necessary requirement to achieve this goal is to enable those devices to establish a shared understanding of the desired settings. Establishing a shared understanding entails the need to manipulate sensed data in order to capture a real world situation wholly, conceptually, and meaningfully. Quite often, however, the data acquired from sensors can be inexact, incomplete, and/or uncertain. Inexact sensing arises mostly due to the inherent limitation of sensors to capture a real world phenomenon precisely. Incompleteness is caused by the absence of a mechanism to capture certain real-world aspects; and uncertainty stems from the lack of knowledge about the reliability of the sensing sources, such as their sensing range, accuracy, and resolution. The thesis identifies a set of criteria for a context-aware system to capture dynamic real-world situations. On the basis of these criteria, a distributed architecture is designed, implemented and tested. The architecture consists of Primitive Context Servers, which abstract the acquisition of primitive contexts from physical sensors; Aggregators, to minimise error caused by inconsistent sensing, and to gather correlated primitive contexts pertaining to a particular entity or situation; a Knowledge Base and an Empirical Ambient Knowledge Component, to model dynamic properties of entities with facts and beliefs; and a Composer, to reason about dynamic real-world situations on the basis of sensed data. Two additional components, namely, the Event Handler and the Rule Organiser, are responsible for dynamically generating context rules by associating decision events ? signifying a user?s activity ? with the context in which those decision events are produced. Context-rules are essential elements with which the behaviour of mobile devices can be controlled and useful services can be provided. Four estimation and recognition schemes, namely, Fuzzy Logic, Hidden Markov Models, Dempster-Schafer Theory of Evidence, and Bayesian Networks, are investigated, and their suitability for the implementation of the components of the architecture of the thesis is studied. Subsequently, fuzzy sets are chosen to model dynamic properties of entities. Dempster-Schafer?s combination theory is chosen for aggregating primitive contexts; and Bayesian Networks are chosen to reason about a higher-level context, which is an abstraction of a real-world situation. A Bayesian Composer is implemented to demonstrate the capability of the architecture in dealing with uncertainty, in revising the belief of the Empirical Ambient Knowledge Component, in dealing with the dynamics of primitive contexts and in dynamically defining contextual states. The Composer could be able to reason about the whereabouts of a person in the absence of any localisation sensor. Thermal, relative humidity, light intensity properties of a place as well as time information were employed to model and reason about a place. Consequently, depending on the variety and reliability of the sensors employed, the Composer could be able to discriminate between rooms, corridors, a building, or an outdoor place with different degrees of uncertainty. The Context-Aware E-Pad (CAEP) application is designed and implemented to demonstrate how applications can employ a higher-level context without the need to directly deal with its composition, and how a context rule can be generated by associating the activities (decision events) of a mobile user with the context in which the decision events are produced.

<p>Vi möts av mängder med bilder av teknik och vetenskap i populärkulturens verk. Dessa bilder kan ses som representationer av vår verklighet och bidrar också till att skapa våra uppfattningar om världen.</p><p>Denna uppsats fokuserar på att studera just de populärvetenskapliga bilderna av teknik och vetenskap som finns representerade samt hur dessa bilder är en del av sin kontext. Genom att närmare studera filmerna Demolition Man och Sunshine, utifrån frågor om tekniken skildras som ond, god eller neutral, hur vetenskapsmannen gestaltas samt hur förhållandet mellan människa och maskin ser ut, nystar denna uppsats fram de bilder av teknik och vetenskap som återfinns i dessa två verk.</p>

This thesis introduces a collection of new real-time rendering techniques and applications for focus+context visualization of interactive 3D geovirtual environments such as virtual 3D city and landscape models. These environments are generally characterized by a large number of objects and are of high complexity with respect to geometry and textures. For these reasons, their interactive 3D rendering represents a major challenge. Their 3D depiction implies a number of weaknesses such as occlusions, cluttered image contents, and partial screen-space usage. To overcome these limitations and, thus, to facilitate the effective communication of geo-information, principles of focus+context visualization can be used for the design of real-time 3D rendering techniques for 3D geovirtual environments (see Figure). In general, detailed views of a 3D geovirtual environment are combined seamlessly with abstracted views of the context within a single image. To perform the real-time image synthesis required for interactive visualization, dedicated parallel processors (GPUs) for rasterization of computer graphics primitives are used. For this purpose, the design and implementation of appropriate data structures and rendering pipelines are necessary. The contribution of this work comprises the following five real-time rendering methods: • The rendering technique for 3D generalization lenses enables the combination of different 3D city geometries (e.g., generalized versions of a 3D city model) in a single image in real time. The method is based on a generalized and fragment-precise clipping approach, which uses a compressible, raster-based data structure. It enables the combination of detailed views in the focus area with the representation of abstracted variants in the context area. • The rendering technique for the interactive visualization of dynamic raster data in 3D geovirtual environments facilitates the rendering of 2D surface lenses. It enables a flexible combination of different raster layers (e.g., aerial images or videos) using projective texturing for decoupling image and geometry data. Thus, various overlapping and nested 2D surface lenses of different contents can be visualized interactively. • The interactive rendering technique for image-based deformation of 3D geovirtual environments enables the real-time image synthesis of non-planar projections, such as cylindrical and spherical projections, as well as multi-focal 3D fisheye-lenses and the combination of planar and non-planar projections. • The rendering technique for view-dependent multi-perspective views of 3D geovirtual environments, based on the application of global deformations to the 3D scene geometry, can be used for synthesizing interactive panorama maps to combine detailed views close to the camera (focus) with abstract views in the background (context). This approach reduces occlusions, increases the usage the available screen space, and reduces the overload of image contents. • The object-based and image-based rendering techniques for highlighting objects and focus areas inside and outside the view frustum facilitate preattentive perception. The concepts and implementations of interactive image synthesis for focus+context visualization and their selected applications enable a more effective communication of spatial information, and provide building blocks for design and development of new applications and systems in the field of 3D geovirtual environments. / Die Darstellung immer komplexerer raumbezogener Information durch Geovisualisierung stellt die existierenden Technologien und den Menschen ständig vor neue Herausforderungen. In dieser Arbeit werden fünf neue, echtzeitfähige Renderingverfahren und darauf basierende Anwendungen für die Fokus-&-Kontext-Visualisierung von interaktiven geovirtuellen 3D-Umgebungen – wie virtuelle 3D-Stadt- und Landschaftsmodelle – vorgestellt. Die große Menge verschiedener darzustellender raumbezogener Information in 3D-Umgebungen führt oft zu einer hohen Anzahl unterschiedlicher Objekte und somit zu einer hohen Geometrie- und Texturkomplexität. In der Folge verlieren 3D-Darstellungen durch Verdeckungen, überladene Bildinhalte und eine geringe Ausnutzung des zur Verfügung stehenden Bildraumes an Informationswert. Um diese Beschränkungen zu kompensieren und somit die Kommunikation raumbezogener Information zu verbessern, kann das Prinzip der Fokus-&-Kontext-Visualisierung angewendet werden. Hierbei wird die für den Nutzer wesentliche Information als detaillierte Ansicht im Fokus mit abstrahierter Kontextinformation nahtlos miteinander kombiniert. Um das für die interaktive Visualisierung notwendige Echtzeit-Rendering durchzuführen, können spezialisierte Parallelprozessoren für die Rasterisierung von computergraphischen Primitiven (GPUs) verwendet werden. Dazu ist die Konzeption und Implementierung von geeigneten Datenstrukturen und Rendering-Pipelines notwendig. Der Beitrag dieser Arbeit umfasst die folgenden fünf Renderingverfahren. • Das Renderingverfahren für interaktive 3D-Generalisierungslinsen: Hierbei wird die Kombination unterschiedlicher 3D-Szenengeometrien, z. B. generalisierte Varianten eines 3DStadtmodells, in einem Bild ermöglicht. Das Verfahren basiert auf einem generalisierten Clipping-Ansatz, der es erlaubt, unter Verwendung einer komprimierbaren, rasterbasierten Datenstruktur beliebige Bereiche einer 3D-Szene freizustellen bzw. zu kappen. Somit lässt sich eine Kombination von detaillierten Ansichten im Fokusbereich mit der Darstellung einer abstrahierten Variante im Kontextbereich implementieren. • Das Renderingverfahren zur Visualisierung von dynamischen Raster-Daten in geovirtuellen 3D-Umgebungen zur Darstellung von 2D-Oberflächenlinsen: Die Verwendung von projektiven Texturen zur Entkoppelung von Bild- und Geometriedaten ermöglicht eine flexible Kombination verschiedener Rasterebenen (z.B. Luftbilder oder Videos). Somit können verschiedene überlappende sowie verschachtelte 2D-Oberflächenlinsen mit unterschiedlichen Dateninhalten interaktiv visualisiert werden. • Das Renderingverfahren zur bildbasierten Deformation von geovirtuellen 3D-Umgebungen: Neben der interaktiven Bildsynthese von nicht-planaren Projektionen, wie beispielsweise zylindrischen oder sphärischen Panoramen, lassen sich mit diesem Verfahren multifokale 3D-Fischaugen-Linsen erzeugen sowie planare und nicht-planare Projektionen miteinander kombinieren. • Das Renderingverfahren für die Generierung von sichtabhängigen multiperspektivischen Ansichten von geovirtuellen 3D-Umgebungen: Das Verfahren basiert auf globalen Deformationen der 3D-Szenengeometrie und kann zur Erstellung von interaktiven 3D-Panoramakarten verwendet werden, welche beispielsweise detaillierte Absichten nahe der virtuellen Kamera (Fokus) mit abstrakten Ansichten im Hintergrund (Kontext) kombinieren. Dieser Ansatz reduziert Verdeckungen, nutzt den zur Verfügung stehenden Bildraum in verbesserter Weise aus und reduziert das Überladen von Bildinhalten. • Objekt-und bildbasierte Renderingverfahren für die Hervorhebung von Fokus-Objekten und Fokus-Bereichen innerhalb und außerhalb des sichtbaren Bildausschnitts, um die präattentive Wahrnehmung eines Benutzers besser zu unterstützen. Die in dieser Arbeit vorgestellten Konzepte, Entwürfe und Implementierungen von interaktiven Renderingverfahren zur Fokus-&-Kontext-Visualisierung sowie deren ausgewählte Anwendungen ermöglichen eine effektivere Kommunikation raumbezogener Information und repräsentieren softwaretechnische Bausteine für die Entwicklung neuer Anwendungen und Systeme im Bereich der geovirtuellen 3D-Umgebungen.