<p><p>The purpose of this thesis was to study the origin of the local news in local newspapers. Do the news originate mostly from the police, the municipality, from press releases or from the reporters own ideas? We also wanted to find out what kind of content predominated in texts with its origin in press releases respectively the reporters own ideas. Of course we also wanted to find out if there were any similarities or differences between the two studied newspapers.</p><p>We used a type of constructed week, but with non random selection instead of random. We chose one of each weekday the newspapers were published and studied the news covered in the papers that specific day. We talked over the phone with the news editors and the reporters and simply asked them about the origin of each news text separately.</p><p>The results showed that every fourth text originates from the police, and that police news often ends up as news items rather than articles. We also came to the conclusion that local newspapers use fewer press releases than earlier research has shown. Only one sixth of the news studied originates from press releases, which is less than we thought it would be. News with its origin in advertisements was less often found.</p><p>News with its origin in the reporters own ideas deal with various subjects. A text that is written on the basis of a press release on the other hand is often about some kind of event and has almost always a very positive tone. We could not notice any remarkable difference between the two studied newspapers.</p></p>

<p>Nuclear reactors release small amounts of radioactivity during their normal operations. The most common method of calculating the dose to the public that results from such releases uses Gaussian Plume models. We are investigating these methods using CAP88-PC, a computer code developed for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the USA that calculates the concentration of radionuclides released from a stack using Pasquill stability classification. A buoyant or momentum driven part is also included. The uptake of the released radionuclide by plants, animals and humans, directly and indirectly, is then calculated to obtain the doses to the public. This method is well established but is known to suffer from many approximations and does not give answers that are accurate to be better than 50% in many cases. More accurate, though much more computer-intensive methods have been developed to calculate the movement of gases&nbsp / using fluid dynamic models. Such a model, using the code FLUENT can model complex terrains and will also be investigated in this work. This work is a preliminary study to compare the results of the traditional Gaussian plume model and a fluid dynamic model for a simplified case. The results indicate that Computational Fluid Dynamics calculations give qualitatively similar results with the possibility of including much more effects than the simple Gaussian plume model.</p>

Software Transactional Memory (STM) helps programmers write correct concurrent code by allowing them to identify atomic sections rather than focusing on the mechanics of concurrency control. Given code with atomic sections, the compiler and STM runtime can work together to ensure proper controlled access to shared memory. STM runtimes use either lazy or eager version management. Lazy versioning buffers transaction updates, whereas eager versioning applies updates in-place. The current set of primitives suit lazy versioning since memory needs to be accessed through the runtime. We present a new set of runtime primitives that better suit eager versioned STM. We propose a novel extension to the compiler/runtime interface, consisting of memory reservations and memory releases. These extensions enable optimizations specific to eager versioned runtimes. A memory reservation allows a transaction to perform instrumentation-free access on a memory address. A release allows a read-only address to be modified by another transaction. Together, these reduce the instrumentation overhead required to support STM and improve concurrency between readers and writers. We have implemented these primitives and evaluated its performance on the STAMP benchmarks. Our results show strong performance and scalability improvements to eager versioned algorithms.

The purpose of this thesis was to study the origin of the local news in local newspapers. Do the news originate mostly from the police, the municipality, from press releases or from the reporters own ideas? We also wanted to find out what kind of content predominated in texts with its origin in press releases respectively the reporters own ideas. Of course we also wanted to find out if there were any similarities or differences between the two studied newspapers. We used a type of constructed week, but with non random selection instead of random. We chose one of each weekday the newspapers were published and studied the news covered in the papers that specific day. We talked over the phone with the news editors and the reporters and simply asked them about the origin of each news text separately. The results showed that every fourth text originates from the police, and that police news often ends up as news items rather than articles. We also came to the conclusion that local newspapers use fewer press releases than earlier research has shown. Only one sixth of the news studied originates from press releases, which is less than we thought it would be. News with its origin in advertisements was less often found. News with its origin in the reporters own ideas deal with various subjects. A text that is written on the basis of a press release on the other hand is often about some kind of event and has almost always a very positive tone. We could not notice any remarkable difference between the two studied newspapers.

The use of hazardous toxic substances is very common in the industrial sector. The substances are often stored in tanks in storage compartments or transported between industrial premises. In case of an accident involving these substances, severe harm can affect both population and the environment. This leaves a demand for an accurate prediction of the substance concentration distribution to mitigate the risks as much as possible and in advance create suitable safety measures. Toxic gases and vapors are often denser than air making it affected by negative buoyancy forces. This will make the gas descend and spread horizontally when reaching the ground. Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) carries today a model called LillPello for simulating the dispersion of gases, yet it does not account for the specific case of a dense gas. Therefore, this thesis aims to implement the necessary effects needed to accurately simulate the dispersion of a dense gas. These effects were implemented in Fortran 90 by solving five conservation equations for energy, momentum (vertical and horizontal) and mass. The model was compared against experimental data of a leak of ammonia (NH3). By analyzing the result of the simulations in this thesis, we can conclude that the overall result is satisfactory. We can notice a small concentration underestimation at all measurement points and the model produced a concentration power law coefficient which lands inside the expected range. Two out of the three statistical quantities Geometric Mean (MG), Geometric Variance (VG) and Factor of 2 (FA2) produced values within the ranges of acceptable values. The drawback of the model as it is implemented today is its efficiency, so the main priority for the future of this thesis is to improve this. The model should also be analyzed on more experiments to further validate its accuracy. / Användandet av giftiga ämnen är vanligt inom den industriella sektorn. Ämnena är oftast lagrade i behållare positionerade i lagringsutrymmen eller så transporteras ämnena mellan industrilokaler. I samband med en olycka innehållande dessa substanser kan stora skador drabba både befolkning och miljön. Detta leder till ett behov av att noggrant kunna förutspå koncentrationsfördelningen för att minska riskerna, samt i förväg kunna skapa lämpliga säkerhetsåtgärder. Giftiga gaser och ångor är oftast tyngre än luft vilket gör att gasen blir påverkad av negativ bärkraft. Detta gör att gasen sjunker och sprids horisontalt när den når marken. Totalförsvarets Forskningsinstitut (FOI) besitter idag en modell kallad LillPello som simulerar spridning av gaser, men den hanterar inte det specifika fallet av en tunggas. Därför siktar detta projekt på att, in i LillPello, implementera de nödvändiga effekterna som behövs för att korrekt kunna simulera spridningen av en tunggas. Dessa effekter är implementerad i Fortran 90 genom att lösa fem konserveringsekvationer för energi, momentum (vertikal och horisontell) samt massa. Modellen jämfördes mot data från ett fältexperiment där ammoniak (NH3) släpptes ut. Genom att analysera resultatet från simuleringar kan vi dra slutsatsen att det övergripande resultatet är tillfredsställande. Vi kan notera en underskattning för alla koncentrationsmätningar i simuleringarna och modellen producerade en potenslagsexponent vars värde hamnade innanför den accepterade gränsen. Två utav de tre beräknade statistiska kvantiteterna: Geometriskt medelvärde (MG), Geometrisk varians (VG) och Faktor av 2 (FA2) producerade värden inom de acceptabla gränserna. Största nackdelen med modellen är dess effektivitet och därför är största prioritet för det fortsatta arbetet inom detta projekt att effektivisera implementeringen. Modellen ska även bli vidare analyserad mot fler experiment för att validera dess noggrannhet.

Software Transactional Memory (STM) helps programmers write correct concurrent code by allowing them to identify atomic sections rather than focusing on the mechanics of concurrency control. Given code with atomic sections, the compiler and STM runtime can work together to ensure proper controlled access to shared memory. STM runtimes use either lazy or eager version management. Lazy versioning buffers transaction updates, whereas eager versioning applies updates in-place. The current set of primitives suit lazy versioning since memory needs to be accessed through the runtime. We present a new set of runtime primitives that better suit eager versioned STM. We propose a novel extension to the compiler/runtime interface, consisting of memory reservations and memory releases. These extensions enable optimizations specific to eager versioned runtimes. A memory reservation allows a transaction to perform instrumentation-free access on a memory address. A release allows a read-only address to be modified by another transaction. Together, these reduce the instrumentation overhead required to support STM and improve concurrency between readers and writers. We have implemented these primitives and evaluated its performance on the STAMP benchmarks. Our results show strong performance and scalability improvements to eager versioned algorithms.

<p>Nuclear reactors release small amounts of radioactivity during their normal operations. The most common method of calculating the dose to the public that results from such releases uses Gaussian Plume models. We are investigating these methods using CAP88-PC, a computer code developed for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the USA that calculates the concentration of radionuclides released from a stack using Pasquill stability classification. A buoyant or momentum driven part is also included. The uptake of the released radionuclide by plants, animals and humans, directly and indirectly, is then calculated to obtain the doses to the public. This method is well established but is known to suffer from many approximations and does not give answers that are accurate to be better than 50% in many cases. More accurate, though much more computer-intensive methods have been developed to calculate the movement of gases&nbsp / using fluid dynamic models. Such a model, using the code FLUENT can model complex terrains and will also be investigated in this work. This work is a preliminary study to compare the results of the traditional Gaussian plume model and a fluid dynamic model for a simplified case. The results indicate that Computational Fluid Dynamics calculations give qualitatively similar results with the possibility of including much more effects than the simple Gaussian plume model.</p>

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Communications. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-72).

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Communications. / Electronic thesis. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-72). Also available in print ed.

This Master Thesis studies the power relationship between NGOs, politics and the society by performing a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) on NGO press releases concerning the case of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline in the USA. Interactions between mass media and NGOs are rising, hence the organizations are contributing to shape the ‘reality’ and the public’s perception. As CDA has a special interest in social representation and power relations, this thesis examines furthermore the representation of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the light of the theory of victimization. The Indigenous communities refused the construction near tribal reservations because the Pipeline threatens the public health, the Tribe’s water supply, existing Treaties and cultural resources. Especially with the Presidential election in late 2016 and President Trump’s signing of an executive order to advance the Pipeline construction aggravated the situation. To meet the requirements of a CDA, I transfer the concepts of a micro- and macro-level Analysis in the way of Teun A. Van Dijk and connect it in the end with the socio-cultural context. I draw on the concepts of power/knowledge as well as on the concepts of media logic to explain the power relations but also the social representations in the 28 press releases of Amnesty International USA and Greenpeace USA. I conclude with the findings that the Indigenous people are represented as the powerless victims, the NGOs use their press releases to raise awareness but also to serve their self-interests and that the NGO press releases complied the media logics.