Media representations of conflicts and events are constructed in different ways and by different media in this world. Media is a very important actor in real-life politics, since problems could be represented in different ways, which provides different constructions, meanings and understandings in this world. Representation theory and more specifically ‘what is the problem represented to be approach’ implies as a theoretical tool in this research regarding Al-Jazeera’s’ representation of the Syrian conflict of 2011. The aim with this research is to analyze how Al-Jazeera news agency represents the nature of the conflict in Syria of 2011. The research is qualitative and uses Al-Jazeera’s articles as data material, all articles are analyzed during the first three months of the conflicts representation. As a result to this research, the Syrian conflict is represented by Al-Jazeera news agency from a specific point of view. The conflict is represented as a domestic political problem facing a force of overwhelming power that oppresses the Syrian citizens of expressing any political opinions. Al-Jazeera highlights a representation of a lack of democracy and freedom in the country where peaceful protestors are being tortured by the regime whenever they are demanding political changes. The cause of the conflict is according to Al-Jazeera embodied in the incident with some young boys expressing their liberal political opinions regarding the Arab Spring, however imprisoned and tortured by the state force. To briefly summarize the main findings of this research, Al-Jazeera represents the Syrian conflict as a conflict of domestic political oppression from the governments towards the Syrian population.

Studien undersöker hur den kvinnliga politiska representationen ser ut i Kalmars kommunalpolitik. Huvudfrågan riktas mot hur kvinnor delas mellan traditionella kvinnliga och manliga politiska intressen och om det finns någon skillnad i hur kvinnor från olika partier ser på eventuella hinder inom kommunalpolitiken. Den kvantitativa delen av studien visar att en övervägande stor del av kvinnorna hittas i ”mjuka” områden av vårdande karaktär där männen ändå dominerar vilket de även gör i kommunalpolitiken som helhet. Den kvalitativa delen bygger på samtalsintervjuer med kvinnliga politiker i Kalmars kommunalpolitik. Resultatet visar att det inte finns någon skillnad mellan åsikterna i hindersuppfattningar mellan kvinnor från olika partier. Däremot är alla kvinnorna starkt överens om att de manliga politikerna marginaliserar och hindrar deras inflytande. Istället för den traditionella sprickan mellan blå och röda partier visar studien på en tydlig spricka mellan män och kvinnor i politiken.

A software developer explores a software system by asking and answering a series of questions. To answer these questions, a developer may need to consult various sources providing information about the program, such as the static relationships expressed directly in the source code, the run-time behaviour of a program recorded in a dynamic trace, or evolution history as recorded in a source management system. Despite the support afforded by software exploration tools, developers often struggle to find the necessary information to answer their questions and may even become disoriented, where they feel mentally lost and are uncertain of what they were trying to accomplish. This dissertation advances a thesis that a developer's questions, which we refer to as conceptual queries, can be better supported through a model to represent and compose different sources of information about a program. The basis of this model is the sphere, which serves as a simple abstraction of a source of information about a program. Many of the software exploration tools used by a developer can be represented as a sphere. Spheres can be composed in a principled fashion such that information from a sphere may replace or supplement information from a different sphere. Using our sphere model, for example, a developer can use dynamic runtime information from an execution trace to replace information from the static source code to see what actually occurred. We have implemented this model in a configurable tool, called Ferret. We have used the facilities provided by the model to implement 36 conceptual queries identified from the literature, blogs, and our own experience, and to support the integration of four different sources of program information. Establishing correspondences between similar elements from different spheres allows a query to bridge across different spheres in addition to allowing a tool's user interface to drive queries from other sources of information. Through this effort we show that sphere model broadens the set of possible conceptual queries answerable by software exploration tools. Through a small diary study and a controlled experiment, both involving professional software developers, we found the developers used the conceptual queries that were available to them and reported finding Ferret useful.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building. / Documentation within architecture refers to working drawings that are produced to envisage an imagined building. These drawings are a tangible representation of an object that has no tangible existence. Conventional documentation regards the act of drawing as that process upon which the object is wholly dependent for its coming into existence: they assist in ‘getting to’ the building. However, the definition of the word ‘document’ refers to a record of events, that is, post factum evidence. Within architecture, drawing as a record is not the dominant practice. Instead, representation that is a visualisation of the non-existent dominates. Hence, the realm of post factum documentation is under-examined. Due to the predominance of drawing within architecture, models are seen as an adjunct to drawings and so their role and potential has been examined in far less depth than that of architectural drawings. This thesis explores the notion of the model as three-dimensional post factum documentation of architecture. Through the theory of drawing, case studies of models of various scales are examined. These case studies are the Panorama model of New York City, the reconstruction of Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion, and the exhibition of architecture as post factum model, in particular the work of Peter Eisenman, Herzog and de Meuron, El Lissitzky, Allan Wexler and Diller and Scofidio. This examination repositions models within an expanded notion of the design process, which displaces the built object as the endpoint of this process, and investigates the critical facility of models.

Efficient methods for the calculation of radial influence are described and applied to two image processing problems, digital halftoning and mixed content image compression. The methods operate recursively on scanlines of image values, spreading intensity from scanline to scanline in proportions approximating a Cauchy distribution. For error diffusion halftoning, experiments show that this recursive scanline spreading provides an ideal pattern of distribution of error. Error diffusion using masks generated to provide this distribution of error alleviate error diffusion "worm" artifacts. The recursive scanline by scanline application of a spreading filter and a complementary filter can be used to reconstruct an image from its horizontal and vertical pixel difference values. When combined with the use of a downsampled image the reconstruction is robust to incomplete and quantized pixel difference data. Such gradient field integration methods are described in detail proceeding from representation of images by gradient values along contours through to a variety of efficient algorithms. Comparisons show that this form of gradient field integration by convolution provides reduced distortion compared to other high speed gradient integration methods. The reduced distortion can be attributed to success in approximating a radial pattern of influence. An approach to edge-based image compression is proposed using integration of gradient data along edge contours and regularly sampled low resolution image data. This edge-based image compression model is similar to previous sketch based image coding methods but allows a simple and efficient calculation of an edge-based approximation image. A low complexity implementation of this approach to compression is described. The implementation extracts and represents gradient data along edge contours as pixel differences and calculates an approximate image by performing integration of pixel difference data by scanline convolution. The implementation was developed as a prototype for compression of mixed content image data in printing systems. Compression results are reported and strengths and weaknesses of the implementation are identified.

Australia has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world. Epidemiological data indicate that young men (15-25 years of age) make up one of the most vulnerable groups. The print media regularly portray men in this age group as aggressive and violent in various ways (on the sporting field, at war, in their cups, in contests and in leisure, all of which which take on many different forms). This dissertation presents a collection of such images gleaned over a number of years, the purpose of which is to evoke Durkheim's notion of suicidogenic currents that flow through the ??collective consciousness??, finding, according to Durkheim, their clearest expression in suicide rates. Using the notion of ??suicidogenic current?? as a sensitizing concept, this thesis traces the way in which violence weaves its way through social life and influences social relations that may be conducive to suicide. It will be argued that the images presented ?? arranged, for effect, as photomontages ?? express the celebration of violence as a powerful social trend which runs not only through social activity, but also through hearts and minds of contemporary persons; as such, it constitutes one of the suicide-inducing conditions in contemporary society.

Bibliography: p. 121-125. / xiv, 125 p. ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / One of the central issues in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is common sense reasoning. This includes logics of knowledge and belief, non-monotonic reasoning, truth-maintenance and belief revision. Within these fields the notion of a consistent belief state is the crucial one. The issues of inconsistency and partiality of information are central to this thesis which proposes a logical knowledge representation formalism employing partial objects and partial worlds on its semantic side. The syntax includes a language, formulae, and partial theories. Partial worlds and theories are consistent, and contradictory information is assumed to arise in multiple agent situations. Relevant mathematical structures are discussed, in particular partial theories are related to partial worlds. A multiple agent case is considered. Partial theories can be partially ordered by an information ordering and the obtained lattice structure facilitates the theory selection process based on information value and truthness of theories. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Computer Science, 1998

Efficient methods for the calculation of radial influence are described and applied to two image processing problems, digital halftoning and mixed content image compression. The methods operate recursively on scanlines of image values, spreading intensity from scanline to scanline in proportions approximating a Cauchy distribution. For error diffusion halftoning, experiments show that this recursive scanline spreading provides an ideal pattern of distribution of error. Error diffusion using masks generated to provide this distribution of error alleviate error diffusion "worm" artifacts. The recursive scanline by scanline application of a spreading filter and a complementary filter can be used to reconstruct an image from its horizontal and vertical pixel difference values. When combined with the use of a downsampled image the reconstruction is robust to incomplete and quantized pixel difference data. Such gradient field integration methods are described in detail proceeding from representation of images by gradient values along contours through to a variety of efficient algorithms. Comparisons show that this form of gradient field integration by convolution provides reduced distortion compared to other high speed gradient integration methods. The reduced distortion can be attributed to success in approximating a radial pattern of influence. An approach to edge-based image compression is proposed using integration of gradient data along edge contours and regularly sampled low resolution image data. This edge-based image compression model is similar to previous sketch based image coding methods but allows a simple and efficient calculation of an edge-based approximation image. A low complexity implementation of this approach to compression is described. The implementation extracts and represents gradient data along edge contours as pixel differences and calculates an approximate image by performing integration of pixel difference data by scanline convolution. The implementation was developed as a prototype for compression of mixed content image data in printing systems. Compression results are reported and strengths and weaknesses of the implementation are identified.

Efficient methods for the calculation of radial influence are described and applied to two image processing problems, digital halftoning and mixed content image compression. The methods operate recursively on scanlines of image values, spreading intensity from scanline to scanline in proportions approximating a Cauchy distribution. For error diffusion halftoning, experiments show that this recursive scanline spreading provides an ideal pattern of distribution of error. Error diffusion using masks generated to provide this distribution of error alleviate error diffusion "worm" artifacts. The recursive scanline by scanline application of a spreading filter and a complementary filter can be used to reconstruct an image from its horizontal and vertical pixel difference values. When combined with the use of a downsampled image the reconstruction is robust to incomplete and quantized pixel difference data. Such gradient field integration methods are described in detail proceeding from representation of images by gradient values along contours through to a variety of efficient algorithms. Comparisons show that this form of gradient field integration by convolution provides reduced distortion compared to other high speed gradient integration methods. The reduced distortion can be attributed to success in approximating a radial pattern of influence. An approach to edge-based image compression is proposed using integration of gradient data along edge contours and regularly sampled low resolution image data. This edge-based image compression model is similar to previous sketch based image coding methods but allows a simple and efficient calculation of an edge-based approximation image. A low complexity implementation of this approach to compression is described. The implementation extracts and represents gradient data along edge contours as pixel differences and calculates an approximate image by performing integration of pixel difference data by scanline convolution. The implementation was developed as a prototype for compression of mixed content image data in printing systems. Compression results are reported and strengths and weaknesses of the implementation are identified.

Bibliography: p. 121-125. / xiv, 125 p. ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / One of the central issues in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is common sense reasoning. This includes logics of knowledge and belief, non-monotonic reasoning, truth-maintenance and belief revision. Within these fields the notion of a consistent belief state is the crucial one. The issues of inconsistency and partiality of information are central to this thesis which proposes a logical knowledge representation formalism employing partial objects and partial worlds on its semantic side. The syntax includes a language, formulae, and partial theories. Partial worlds and theories are consistent, and contradictory information is assumed to arise in multiple agent situations. Relevant mathematical structures are discussed, in particular partial theories are related to partial worlds. A multiple agent case is considered. Partial theories can be partially ordered by an information ordering and the obtained lattice structure facilitates the theory selection process based on information value and truthness of theories. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Computer Science, 1998