<p>På grund av en ökande medellivslängd hos Sveriges befolkning, är en betydligt större grupp äldre att vänta. Mer kunskaper kring människors förutsättningar för ett gott liv i hög ålder kommer  att krävas för att på bästa sätt kunna ta hand om denna åldersgrupp. Syftet med denna studie var att försöka få kunskap om hur äldre människor upplever sin livskvalitet och hur åldrandet påverkar deras livssituation. Inför studien valdes kvalitativ metod och 7 stycken intervjuer med målgruppen 80+ genomfördes. Dessa intervjuer analyserades med hjälp av grounded theory och resulterade i fem kategorier; livets ryggsäck, livskriser, känslan av trygghet och rädsla, att känna social glädje och sorg och självständighet ger meningsfullhet. Alla intervjuer genomsyrades av betydelsen av minnen från förr och hur dessa fortfarande påverkar det dagliga livet. På grund av detta, samt även att de fem kategorierna kunde förknippas med dessa minnen blev kärnkategorin kallad; livets ryggsäck. Resultatet visar tydligt hur självständigheten har betydelse för upplevelsen av vardagen och därigenom livskvaliteten. Brist på självständighet ger livet till viss del förlorad mening och innebär en känsla av sorg och svårigheter med det sociala livet. Den oro och rädsla som framgick i varje intervju handlar om att förlora sin självständighet eller sina sociala kontakter. Att förlora sin make/maka var något som de flesta av intervjupersonerna gått igenom och det var en avgörande händelse i livet som innebar stora förändringar i vardagen. Positiva minne tycktes kunna ge en mer positiv inställning till det nuvarande livet medan negativa minnen kan ge en sänkning av livskvaliteten. Vår slutsats är att känslan av att vara nöjd med livet man levt tillsammans med ett tillfredsställande socialt liv och en viss självständighet ger ett gott liv på äldre dar och en hög livskvalitet.</p> / <p>Because of an increasing average duration of live among the Swedish population, a larger group of elderly is to be expected. More knowledge about peoples qualifications for living a good life in older age is going to be needed, to be able to take care of this age-group in the best of ways. The purpose of this study was to learn how older people experience their quality of life and how aging is affecting their life-situation. A qualitative method was chosen for the study and 7 interviews were done with people older than 80. These interviews were analyzed by using grounded theory and the result was 5 categories; bag pack of life, life-crisis, the feeling of safety and fear, to feel happiness and sadness and independence gives meaningfulness. The importance of memories and how these still affect the daily life came up in all the interviews. Because of this, and because of the fact that all the categories could be associated with these memories, we named the main category; the bag pack of life. The results clearly showed how important independence is to the experience of daily life and therefore quality of life. The lack of independence gives a loss of meaning and implies a feeling of sadness and difficulties with the social life. The worry and fear that showed in all of the interviews came from the possibility of losing ones independence or social contacts. Almost all of the people who were interviewed had lost a spouse and this was a big incident that caused a lot of changes in the daily life. Positive memories seems to give a more positive attitude towards life meanwhile negative memories might cause a quality of life reduction. Our conclusion is that satisfaction with the past, together with a satisfying social life and some independence means a good life at old age and high quality of life.</p>

The purpose of this study was to illustrate how adult people think that, experiencing a war during their childhood has affected their lives. Questions at issue: 1. what does it mean to live in a war as a child? 2. How do the respondents think about possible significance of experiencing a war in their childhood and how their lives have turned out today? The study is performed with a qualitative method of research, based on studies of literature, two individual interviews and a group interview. The result is presented on the basis of the theoretic perspective-phenomenology. The result connects back to the earlier research within the subject field and analyses through crisis theory, coping theory and KASAM. The result shows that the respondents live the war within themselves. They still have nightmares and flashbacks from the wartime which still torment them. They are using different ways of coping to handle that. The study also shows that the respondents have a positive self-esteem and a great feeling of compassion towards other people, especially towards children who live in war counties.

På grund av en ökande medellivslängd hos Sveriges befolkning, är en betydligt större grupp äldre att vänta. Mer kunskaper kring människors förutsättningar för ett gott liv i hög ålder kommer  att krävas för att på bästa sätt kunna ta hand om denna åldersgrupp. Syftet med denna studie var att försöka få kunskap om hur äldre människor upplever sin livskvalitet och hur åldrandet påverkar deras livssituation. Inför studien valdes kvalitativ metod och 7 stycken intervjuer med målgruppen 80+ genomfördes. Dessa intervjuer analyserades med hjälp av grounded theory och resulterade i fem kategorier; livets ryggsäck, livskriser, känslan av trygghet och rädsla, att känna social glädje och sorg och självständighet ger meningsfullhet. Alla intervjuer genomsyrades av betydelsen av minnen från förr och hur dessa fortfarande påverkar det dagliga livet. På grund av detta, samt även att de fem kategorierna kunde förknippas med dessa minnen blev kärnkategorin kallad; livets ryggsäck. Resultatet visar tydligt hur självständigheten har betydelse för upplevelsen av vardagen och därigenom livskvaliteten. Brist på självständighet ger livet till viss del förlorad mening och innebär en känsla av sorg och svårigheter med det sociala livet. Den oro och rädsla som framgick i varje intervju handlar om att förlora sin självständighet eller sina sociala kontakter. Att förlora sin make/maka var något som de flesta av intervjupersonerna gått igenom och det var en avgörande händelse i livet som innebar stora förändringar i vardagen. Positiva minne tycktes kunna ge en mer positiv inställning till det nuvarande livet medan negativa minnen kan ge en sänkning av livskvaliteten. Vår slutsats är att känslan av att vara nöjd med livet man levt tillsammans med ett tillfredsställande socialt liv och en viss självständighet ger ett gott liv på äldre dar och en hög livskvalitet. / Because of an increasing average duration of live among the Swedish population, a larger group of elderly is to be expected. More knowledge about peoples qualifications for living a good life in older age is going to be needed, to be able to take care of this age-group in the best of ways. The purpose of this study was to learn how older people experience their quality of life and how aging is affecting their life-situation. A qualitative method was chosen for the study and 7 interviews were done with people older than 80. These interviews were analyzed by using grounded theory and the result was 5 categories; bag pack of life, life-crisis, the feeling of safety and fear, to feel happiness and sadness and independence gives meaningfulness. The importance of memories and how these still affect the daily life came up in all the interviews. Because of this, and because of the fact that all the categories could be associated with these memories, we named the main category; the bag pack of life. The results clearly showed how important independence is to the experience of daily life and therefore quality of life. The lack of independence gives a loss of meaning and implies a feeling of sadness and difficulties with the social life. The worry and fear that showed in all of the interviews came from the possibility of losing ones independence or social contacts. Almost all of the people who were interviewed had lost a spouse and this was a big incident that caused a lot of changes in the daily life. Positive memories seems to give a more positive attitude towards life meanwhile negative memories might cause a quality of life reduction. Our conclusion is that satisfaction with the past, together with a satisfying social life and some independence means a good life at old age and high quality of life.

I Remember…, a series of drawings, is based on personal social experiences starting from the age of thirteen. This series begins with a memory of the first time I had to speak to a room full of people and the unexpected events of that followed. My own relationship with one of the primary subjects, the chair refers to memories of being raised in a home where certain furnishings were “off-limits.” Even more important is the presence of a cryptic narrative, fractured and dreamlike, similar to the style of writing created by Alain Robbe-Grillet. It has been a lifetime goal to create drawings that are interactive with the viewer. The baroque embellished chairs and piano provide a point of departure encouraging contemplative involvement by the viewer conceptually through imagery and physically through scale. Also, showing multiple viewpoints of the object simultaneously creates an atmosphere that is dreamlike and ghostly.

The purpose of this dissertation is to chart how the development of visual effects has changed popular cinema¡¯s vision of the real, producing the powerful reality effect. My investigation of the history of visual effects studies not only the industrial and economic context of visual effects, but also the aesthetic characteristics of the reality effect. In terms of methodology, this study employs a theoretical discourse which compares the parallels between visual effects and the discourse of modernity/postmodernity, utilizing close textual analysis to understand the symptomatic meanings of key texts. The transition in the techniques and meanings of creating visual effects reflects the cultural transformation from modernism to postmodernism. Visual effects have developed by adapting to the structural transformation of production systems and with the advance of technology. The studio system strongly controlled the classical Hollywood cinema by means of the modern economic production system of Fordism. Breakdown of Hollywood classicism as a production system gave rise to the creation of digital effects with the rise of the concept of the blockbuster and with the development of computer technologies. I argue that the characteristic feature of time-space compression, occurring in the process of the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation, clearly reflects that of compression of multi-layered time and space, generated in the development process from analog visual effects, such as trick, rear and front projection, to the digital effects, such as rotoscoping and CGI animation. While the aesthetics of analog visual effects, without computing, can be compared to a Fordist production system, digital effects, which hugely rely on CGI manipulation, are examples of flexible accumulation. As a case study of the local resistance or alternative of Hollywood today, I examine the effects-oriented Korean nationalist blockbuster. The Korean nationalist blockbuster films have sought large-scale filmmaking and presentation of spectacular scenes, including heavy dependence on the use of special effects, which is frequently considered a Hollywood style. This paradoxical combination of peculiar Korean subjects and Hollywood style can be viewed as a form of cultural jujitsu, taking advantage of the force of the dominant culture in order to resist and subvert it.

For this study, twelve life stories of alumni from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, who were enrolled during the Nazi Occupation between 1940 and 1945, were collected and analyzed. Besides exploring the extent to which the interviews were co-constructed jointly by the interviewer and interviewees, this study addresses three questions. First, it acknowledges methodological concerns associated with an overabundance of narrative data, and suggests a new method for arriving at a core narrative based on the distribution of time. This core narrative can then be analyzed further. Second, it is suggested that early memories serve as identity claims; because of their congruency with the remainder of the story, they appear to foreshadow what is to come. As a result, it is argued that childhood memories merit special attention in the analysis of narratives. Third, and finally, the constraints on narratives imposed by cultural conventions, or master narratives, are explored. Narrators use a variety of strategies in order to satisfy sometimes competing demands on their narratives. It is argued that culture makes its influence felt in ways that are not always obvious, particularly if the interviewee and interviewer share the same culture.

Flash memories have become the main type of non-volatile memories. They are widely used in mobile, embedded and mass-storage devices. Flash memories store data in floating-gate cells, where the amount of charge stored in cells – called cell levels – is used to represent data. To reduce the level of any cell, a whole cell block (about 106 cells) must be erased together and then reprogrammed. This operation, called block erasure, is very costly and brings significant challenges to cell programming and rewriting of data. To address these challenges, rank modulation and rewriting codes have been proposed for reliably storing and modifying data. However, for these new schemes, many problems still remain open. In this work, we study error-correcting rank-modulation codes and rewriting codes for flash memories. For the rank modulation scheme, we study a family of one- error-correcting codes, and present efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. For rewriting, we study a family of linear write-once memory (WOM) codes, and present an effective algorithm for rewriting using the codes. We analyze the performance of our solutions for both schemes.

<p>The concept of Parallel Vector (scratch pad) Memories (PVM) was introduced as one solution for Parallel Computing in DSP, which can provides parallel memory addressing efficiently with minimum latency. The parallel programming more efficient by using the parallel addressing generator for parallel vector memory (PVM) proposed in this thesis. However, without hiding complexities by cache, the cost of programming is high. To minimize the programming cost, automatic parallel memory address generation is needed to hide the complexities of memory access.</p><p>This thesis investigates methods for implementing conflict-free vector addressing algorithms on a parallel hardware structure. In particular, match vector addressing requirements extracted from the behaviour model to a prepared parallel memory addressing template, in order to supply data in parallel from the main memory to the on-chip vector memory.</p><p>According to the template and usage of the main and on-chip parallel vector memory, models for data pre-allocation and permutation in scratch pad memories of ASIP can be decided and configured. By exposing the parallel memory access of source code, the memory access flow graph (MFG) will be generated. Then MFG will be used combined with hardware information to match templates in the template library. When it is matched with one template, suited permutation equation will be gained, and the permutation table that include target addresses for data pre-allocation and permutation is created. Thus it is possible to automatically generate memory address for parallel memory accesses.</p><p>A tool for achieving the goal mentioned above is created, Permutator, which is implemented in C++ combined with XML. Memory access coding template is selected, as a result that permutation formulas are specified. And then PVM address table could be generated to make the data pre-allocation, so that efficient parallel memory access is possible.</p><p>The result shows that the memory access complexities is hiden by using Permutator, so that the programming cost is reduced.It works well in the context that each algorithm with its related hardware information is corresponding to a template case, so that extra memory cost is eliminated.</p>

In 1990, ten years after the Sandinista revolution's triumph, came its end. What followed were anti-Sandinistas' attempts to erase Nicaragua's revolutionary past and Sandinistas' defense of that project and the party that represents it, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN). For most Sandinistas, to publicly remember the revolution was a form of defense. Their memories were considered counter-hegemonic ones that reminded people that the past and the revolution's propositions still had value. However, Sandinistas' revolutionary narratives of the past are not free of problems and contradictions. The FSLN has popularized a Sandinista collective memory that idealizes the revolution. This is an indulgent memory that avoids talking about mistakes and problems. It is also a sentimental memory that links sandinismo to high morals and goodness and, in doing so, inhibits questioning the past and the present. This collective memory hinders discussions about other Sandinista memories, but, most importantly, it legitimizes problematic continuities in the way power is exerted; continuities which are not unique to sandinismo. This dissertation analyses how Sandinista peasants from a region in the old agrarian frontier of the country remember the revolution. In analyzing their memories one can see the ways in which the revolution is felt, the meaning of sandinismo among that population, and the kinds of political compromises they have to make today. Their memories show that the strength of the FSLN lies not only in economical or political interests, but also in the way the narratives of the past reaffirm attachments built over thirty years or more. While remembering the revolution's political ideals continues to be an important political statement and source of inspiration, constant critiques should be part of any memory work. To start with, memory work needs to acknowledge the constructed character of any memory, be those personal or collective, and the omissions that constitute them. To do so entail recognizing that memories are made of exclusions, repetitions, and forgetting and that the political work of memory not only never ends but involves the difficult task of questioning itself. / text

This research investigates formative and definitive lived experiences as two narrative forms - art works and writing. The research seeks to uncover the essential features of these experiences (dominated as they are by my experiences of AIDS and the after effects of war) and bring the two narratives together as a reflexive and reflective dialogue. The 'lens' of my art practice (both written and visual) is predominantly that of a landscape painter -be it 'landscape of faces' (portraits), landscapes of the human form (figurative) or the more traditional descriptions of landscape (especially deserts). Phenomenological research is a particular mode of describing and understanding the contours of lived experience. By a process of self-reflection and critical analysis this research explores various understandings of landscape so as to uncover their structure and meaning and to come to a deeper understanding of how those elements influence my art making.