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The purpose of this study is the reports of Peak Oil in Swedish newspapers. In otherwords, how do the news portray or describe the concept and what sources are usedwhen writing articles. With this in mind, I have studied eight published articles in threeSwedish newspapers, Dagens Nyheter, Dagens Industri and Svenska Dagbladet. To studythese articles I've used a qualitative content analysis, as a method, or more specific aCritical Discourse Analysis (CDA). This method was chosen due to it's tools to examinethe text itself and to reveal the structures, unconscious meaning and power of words.Further more I have used theories as agenda-setting (including framing and priming),ideology and newsworthiness to complement the study. The result from the content analysis shows two evident ideologies, one with aneconomic perspective and the other with an environment perspective – with resourcelimitation in mind. The credibility of the sources used depends on who wrote the texts,where both sides tried to be as convincing as possible when presenting their truth andfacts. Overall the environment perspective was portrayed as doomsayers and pessimistswith a greater degree of uncertainty, while the economic perspective was described asoptimists and with certainty. Regarding the sources the paper also shows that in all thearticles confirm and legitimize the power to certain sources. One particular sourcestands out, specifically Kjell Aleklett who is represented in more than half of the articles.One probable reason being that he is an respected scientiest who primarily representsthe resource limitation aswell as the enviroment perspective. Another that journalistsuse certain sources to apper credible, but also let sources with power to keep holding onto it.

This dissertation aimed to investigate the use of Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) as supportive materials in students&rsquo / learning process. In this respect, a MUVE named Quest Atlantis had been used by students in formal and informal learning settings. The students participated in a project that was developed based on an ecological problem resulted in fish decline in a river. As being a multiple case study research, data were collected from four separate cases, selected from three different places. Specifically, students&rsquo / and teachers&rsquo / perceptions were gathered, and challenges and barriers of implementations were investigated. The research results indicated that most of the students liked learning in environments using MUVEs. Besides being intrinsically motivated towards learning science topics, the students stated that it was a good way of reinforcing what they learn in school settings. Students found MUVEs effective learning environments as it allowed them to learn with active participation / rather than being taught as it usually happens in school context. The teachers had positive opinions about the use of MUVEs. They claimed that MUVEs have the potential to support students&rsquo / learning visually and let students learn through an inquiry-based learning approach with situated information to virtual settings. According to the teachers, MUVEs allowed various skill developments of the students and it created a dynamic learning environment in which students interacted and collaborated with each other. Even though students and teachers have positive perception about the use of MUVEs in learning setting, it is quite challenging to place these applications to learning settings, especially to formal ones. There are numerous challenges and barriers that can be faced with during the implementation process. In this research, the challenges and barriers are grouped under four main categories: 1) teacher related, 2) student related, 3) system related, and 4) technology related. When the implementation results of formal and informal learning setting were compared, it was possible to see how the very dimensions of formal learning settings made the innovative technology-based implementations difficult. On the other hand, informal learning settings were more flexible learning environments allowing a better learning experience for the students.

Kandidatuppsatsen ”Sverige behöver inte oroa sig – än.” syftar till att skapa en överblick av hur svenska medier gestaltar andra länder, och vad denna gestaltning beror på. Rapporteringen kring Ryssland i svenska medier har under början av året varit omfattande. I och med de olympiska spelen i Sotji och den ryska interventionen i Ukraina rapporterar svenska nyhetsmedier frekvent om såväl rysk inrikes- och utrikespolitik som brott mot mänskliga rättigheter, ekonomiskt och politiskt förfall samt ett potentiellt hot om militära insatser i och omkring Ryssland. Det har förekommit diskussioner i svenska medier, hos svenska politiker och bland Sveriges allmänhet som tyder på reaktioner och ställningstagande. Det stora mediegenomslaget och dess eventuella påverkan på såväl svensk politik som den svenska allmänhetens bild av grannen i öst gör ämnet intressant och viktigt att studera. Vi menar nämligen att mediernas gestaltning av andra länder kan ha en viss samhällelig påverkan. Uppsatsens mål är att ge en både bred och detaljerad bild av hur svenska medier gestaltar Ryssland. Uppsatsen bygger på medierapportering under tiden då OS i Sotji samt den ryska interventionen i Ukraina stod i fokus. För att nå vårt resultat har vi gjort både en kvantitativ och en kvalitativ analys av empirin. Den kvalitativa analysen är en kritisk diskursanalys och vår analysmodell är inspirerad av såväl diskursanalys och tematisk analys som retorisk analys. Uppsatsens empiri består av tidningsartiklar från Dagens Nyheter och Aftonbladet samt TV- och radiosända nyhetssändningar hämtade från Rapport och Dagens Eko. Analysen av uppsatsens empiri visar att de svenska mediernas gestaltning av Ryssland är negativ, onyanserad, ensidig och får stå oemotsagd. Vår studie visar att det finns en stereotyp bild av Ryssland i svenska medier. I 83 procent av de analyserade tidningsartiklarna och nyhetssändningarna gestaltas Ryssland som ett hot, antingen mot sig självt och sina medborgare eller mot resten av omvärlden. Vi kommer fram till att den negativa inställningen till, och gestaltningen av, Ryssland verkar ha blivit ett tankesätt som vi tar för givet och som vi lätt förväxlar med neutral information eller objektiv fakta. Vår studie visar att mediernas innehåll konstrueras utifrån en sociokulturell kontext som påverkas av såväl traditionella och kulturella som politiska och sociala strukturer. Dessa strukturer avspeglas i våra medier och mediernas rapportering påverkas också i sin tur av allmänhetens åsikter, journalistens egna övertygelser samt makthavarnas påverkningsmöjligheter på mediernas innehåll och vinkling. Allt detta tillsammans gör att man kan ifrågasätta mediernas gestaltning av olika länder, händelser och företeelser. I detta fall - Vad är det som säger att Ryssland har propaganda och att vi har sanningen? / The purpose of this study is to obtain an overview of how Swedish media portray other countries, and on what this depend. We believe that the media's portrayal of other countries may have some social impact. Discussions on Swedish domestic and defense policy linked to events in Russia and Ukraine, have already appeared in the Swedish media and in other forums. The essay aims to give a broad and clear picture of how the Swedish media portray Russia. The methods used in this thesis is quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The qualitative analysis model is influenced by discourse analysis, thematic analysis and rhetorical analysis. The study is a case study with focus on Russia. To be able to analyze the Swedish media´s portrayal of Russia we have analyzed news articles, televised news and radio broadcasted news. The Swedish media´s portrayal of Russia is negative, undifferentiated and uncontradicted. In Swedish media Russia is portrayed as a threat. The study shows that the Russian image in Swedish media is influenced by both history and culture as well as politics and the processes used when constructing news. The Swedish way of thinking and reporting about Russia seems to be a mindset that we take for granted and that we easily confuse with neutral information or objective facts.

During the Late Bronze Age, the number of metal objects in the Baltic Sea region increased tremendously.  Mobility and interaction in this northern inland sea intensified. This occurred in a period of prehistory when the ship was the predominant symbol in southern Scandinavia. The ship can be found in rock carvings, on bronze objects and by way of erected stone monuments: stone ship settings. These stone ships are mainly to be found in the Baltic Sea region, with a marked concentration on Gotland. The stone ship settings and their landscape context are the focus of this dissertation. The objective is to clarify whether it is possible to find evidence of social groupings of people in the Nordic Late Bronze Age (1100-500 BC), by focusing on the stone ship monument, adopting a maritime approach. These people might have been part of a maritime institution specializing in trade and long distance journeys during this period, thus achieving a more advanced maritime way of life in the Baltic Sea. Are the ship settings an expression of these specific groups of people, who utilized their practices to position and articulate themselves in the landscape? If such maritime institutions can in fact be traced, there must also be uniformly structured locations for these groups of people to meet in, some kind of antecedents of harbours. By taking an inland sea, the Baltic Sea, as a geographical demarcation, a different perspective of prehistory is attained. The area in the Late Bronze Age and earliest Iron Age (950/900-200 BC) differed from the Nordic Bronze Age sphere. The communities around the Baltic Sea, through the establishment and sharing of mutual interests, seem to have reached a certain degree of consensus. This concordance might well be largely explained by the complex dependency on metal. Such a manifestation would not have been possible without an infrastructure or network, in this case a maritime one. This is something which has previously been overlooked in discussions on the Bronze Age in the Baltic Sea.

Auf der Makroebene der Blogosphäre gibt es die sogenannten „A-Blogger“. Diese zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass ihr Weblog (Blog) im Gegensatz zur großen Mehrheit der Blogs über sehr viele Inlinks-verfügt. In der Literatur sind verschiedene theoretische Ansätze zu finden, die sich mit der Frage beschäftigen, welche Funktion den A-Bloggern in der Blogosphäre zukommt. So wird beispielsweise davon gesprochen, dass sie eine Agenda-Setting-Funktion für die Blogosphäre einnehmen. Das bedeutet, dass sie die in der Blogosphäre diskutierten Themen vorgeben und somit die anderen Blogs, die über deutlich weniger Links verfügen, in deren Themenwahl beeinflussen. Anhand eines Datensatzes (Burton, Java et al. 2009) soll überprüft werden, ob eine Agenda-Setting-Funktion der deutschen A-Blogger für die deutschsprachige Blogosphäre bestätigt werden kann. Als Methode wird die Hyperlinkanalyse eingesetzt.

The subject for this thesis stems from the recent world events, were Sweden has received its largest number of refugees and asylum seekers since World War II. At the same time integration policies all over Europe are getting stricter. People are concerned about the increasingly normalizing racist discourse in public debate. A cornerstone in an open and democratic society like Sweden is equal treatment and how we talk about each other effects how we treat each other. Hence great importance lies in the portrayal of all social groups, such as refugees. Using discourse as a unit - both as a theory and a method this thesis examine and analyze how refugees are represented in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN). The thesis focuses on eight articles from the time period between January-April before the parliamentary elections in September 2014 and 2018. Questions were asked about how refugees are portrayed in DN and what differences and similarities could be identified between the time periods. With the help from theories concerning representation and agenda-setting the empirical analysis indicate similarities between the time periods regarding the representation of refugees. Differences was found in the portrayal of people from different places and how they were put in contradiction to each other. To deepen the analysis of the empirical material and to understand the textual discourses in the articles the thesis uses previous research, both international and national concerning the coverage of refugees.

We consider the problem of designing revenue-optimal mechanisms for selling two heterogeneous items to a single buyer. Designing a revenue-optimal mechanism for selling a single item is simple: Set a threshold price based on the distribution, and sell the item only when the buyer’s valuation exceeds the threshold. However, designing a revenue-optimal mechanism to sell two heterogeneous items is a harder problem. Even the simplest setting with two items and one buyer remains unsolved as yet. The partial characterizations available in the literature have succeeded in solving the problem largely for distributions that are bordered by the coordinate axes. We consider distributions that do not contain (0; 0) in their support sets. Specifically, we consider the buyer’s valuations to be distributed uniformly over arbitrary rectangles in the positive quadrant. We anticipate that the special cases we solve could be a guideline to un-derstand the methods to solve the general problem. We explore two different methods – the duality method and the virtual valuation method – and apply them to solve the problem for distributions that are not bordered by the coordinate axes. The thesis consists of two parts. In the first part, we consider the problem when the buyer has no demand constraints. We assume the buyer’s valuations to be uniformly distributed over an arbitrary rectangle [c1; c1 + b1] [c2; c2 + b2] in the positive quadrant. We first study the duality approach that solves the problem for the (c1; c2) = (0; 0) case. We then nontrivially extend this approach to provide an explicit solution for arbitrary nonnegative values of (c1; c2; b1; b2). We prove that the optimal mechanism is to sell the two items according to one of eight simple menus. The menus indicate that the items must be sold individually for certain values of (c1; c2), the items must be bundled for certain other values, and the auction is an interplay of individual sale and a bundled sale for the remaining values of (c1; c2). We conjecture that our method can be extended to a wider class of distributions. We provide some preliminary results to support the conjecture. In the second part, we consider the problem when the buyer has a unit-demand constraint. We assume the buyer’s valuations (z1; z2) to be uniformly distributed over an arbitrary rectangle [c; c + b1] [c; c + b2] in the positive quadrant, having its south-west corner on the line z1 = z2. We first show that the structure of the dual measure shows significant variations for different values of (c; b1; b2) which makes it hard to discover the correct dual measure, and hence to compute the solution. We then nontrivially extend the virtual valuation method to provide a complete, explicit solution for the problem considered. In particular, we prove that the optimal mechanism is structured into five simple menus. We then conjecture, with promising preliminary results, that the optimal mechanism when the valuations are uniformly distributed in an arbitrary rectangle [c1; c1 + b1] [c2; c2 + b2] is also structured according to similar menus.

Este trabalho analisa dois eventos bastante distintos (o Movimento das Diretas Já, no Brasil, em 1984, e a mobilização popular após o atentado de 11 de Março, na Espanha, em 2004) sob o ponto de vista das hipóteses de agendamento e espiral do silêncio. O objetivo é mostrar que, em casos muito especiais, é possível que o público legitime determinada reivindicação, reorganizando a esfera pública e forçando que tal reivindicação seja incorporada pelas agendas da mídia e do governo, em um processo que chamaremos de contra-agendamento. Para tanto, foram analisadas edições dos jornais Folha de São Paulo e Zero Hora, no caso brasileiro, e El Pais e El Mundo, no caso espanhol. / This paper examines two very different events (the campaign for direct elections, in Brazil, in 1984, and the manifestations after March 11th bombings in Madrid, in 2004) from agenda-stetting and spiral of silence points of view. The aim is to show that, under special occasions, it is possible that the public legitimates a certain demand, which is forced to be incorporated in the media and government agendas, in a process called social-setting. To do so, were analyzed issues from newspapers Folha de São Paulo, Zero Hora, El Pais and El Mundo.

Este trabalho analisa dois eventos bastante distintos (o Movimento das Diretas Já, no Brasil, em 1984, e a mobilização popular após o atentado de 11 de Março, na Espanha, em 2004) sob o ponto de vista das hipóteses de agendamento e espiral do silêncio. O objetivo é mostrar que, em casos muito especiais, é possível que o público legitime determinada reivindicação, reorganizando a esfera pública e forçando que tal reivindicação seja incorporada pelas agendas da mídia e do governo, em um processo que chamaremos de contra-agendamento. Para tanto, foram analisadas edições dos jornais Folha de São Paulo e Zero Hora, no caso brasileiro, e El Pais e El Mundo, no caso espanhol. / This paper examines two very different events (the campaign for direct elections, in Brazil, in 1984, and the manifestations after March 11th bombings in Madrid, in 2004) from agenda-stetting and spiral of silence points of view. The aim is to show that, under special occasions, it is possible that the public legitimates a certain demand, which is forced to be incorporated in the media and government agendas, in a process called social-setting. To do so, were analyzed issues from newspapers Folha de São Paulo, Zero Hora, El Pais and El Mundo.