My final thesis exhibition is directed towards children and parents. My goal is to create a connection between parent and child, and their past, present, and future through memory. Such a connection is accomplished through the implementation of these three different ideas in the artwork: 1) creating different layers of understanding, 2) producing everlasting memories, 3) connecting adult viewers to their past. In addition, I use principles as the foundation for each piece, such as the principles of kindness and learning. These principles are presented to the viewer through parables of current social and political issues, illustrated through my own cultural and artistic backgrounds. I am interested in planting good principles in the memories of the children and incentivizing parents to think about the impact the world around us has on their children.

ABSTRACT Seagrass beds, mangrove forests and coral reefs as a part of marine environments play an important role in the coastal regions. These environments support the coastal communities by providing resources such as food and income. For many years, marine environments have been facing destruction the majority of which is caused by human impact. The lack of knowledge of how to use and manage the marine resources wisely and sustainably is one reason why marine environments are still facing degradation. Primary school children who live in two coastal villages in Lombok Island, Indonesia were questioned about their conceptual understanding of their local marine environments and their ideas about sustainability in these environments. Using an interpretive methodology framework, children and their teachers from Grades 5 and 6 in two primary schools in coastal villages, and elders in the villages were studied and. The data gathered from the children through questionnaires and interviews, and from teachers and elders through interviews. Quantitative and qualitative analysis was used to analyse this data. The children's experiences in their marine environment appear to have strong connection with their knowledge. Their knowledge also developed by interaction with the people in the communities. Children value their local marine environment as a place that provides food for them and their parents teach them to respect it. Long traditions such as dumping waste in the beach or sea has an impact on children from fishing families and creates a contradiction between the positive values they have and negative attitudes they act on. The children are not taught environmental education in the schools since it is not a compulsory subject and teachers lack knowledge about the marine environment. Teachers and elders feel the importance of teaching about the marine environment to their children to give them the knowledge and ability to use the marine resources in sustainable way. For children who are a part of coastal communities, learning about their local marine environment should be made a priority to so they have basic knowledge and understanding in using the marine environment in sustainable ways. Marine environmental education should not only educate children in formal school but also educate people in the communities. The coastal communities as a whole should be working together to achieve the aims of education and conservation. Additionally, the school as a whole needs to support the implementation of marine environmental education.

With the rise in industrial capitalism during the 20th Century, artists increasingly focused on the threat of a disappearing natural world. In the high technology era of the late 20th Century, artists whose practice is termed 'ecological' based their work around new understandings of the relationship between nature and culture, fundamentally underpinned by a shift toward evolutionary, systems-theoretical perspectives from those of conquest and exploitation. Now, at the dawn of the 21st Century, the information era has brought into intersection the discourses of information technologies, quantum physics, and biological science, awakening artists to the challenge of engaging with ecology as the primary subject of their practice. The doctoral project that is the subject of this exegesis focuses critical attention on our scientific and aesthetic understandings of water - a crucial symbolic element of global import in survival. It explores the representation of water in and through art practice that is informed by political ecological awareness and new (digital) technologies. My practice exploits the potential of recent digital technologies to create experiences that aim to encourage a more ecologically sustainable human engagement with nature through this focus on water. This exegesis describes and locates the creative work within an ongoing discourse in contemporary culture that actively seeks to re-establish and redefine the relationship between culture and nature.

<p>In all times school has defined and categorized pupils from a hypothetical normality. The National Agency for Education is today critical to how the municipalities provide for the necessity of special support for pupils with difficulties in school.</p><p>Pupil`s assistants has been a growing profession in school during the last decade and their importance for the pupils is relatively unexplored. The aim of this study is to find out how the pupils think about having pupil`s assistant during the obligatory school on the basis of the ideas of power, knowledge, involvment and understanding. The study is based on qualitative interviews, consisting of half-structured questions, with eight pupils that have or have had pupil`s assistant during their time in senior compulsory school. The result notifies that the pupils feel powerless in school, they have no opportunity to affect and they do not think they are someone that could make any change. With the pupil`s assistant the pupils get an opportunity to affect and a feeling of recognition. The pupil thinks that the pupil`s assistant is a translator of the teachers instructions and someone who builds a bridge between teacher and pupil. There is a fear within the pupils to be different, to not belong. When the pupil`s assistance is given in the classroom the pupil think they belong more to the class than if the assistance is given outside the classroom. With assistance outside the classroom the pupil sees the pupil`s assistant more as a teacher.</p>

This paper is about an implemented natural language interface that translates from English into semantic net relations and from semantic net relations back into English. The parser and companion generator were implemented for two reasons: (a) to enable experimental work in support of a theory of learning by analogy; (b) to demonstrate the viability of a theory of parsing and generation built on commutative transformations. The learning theory was shaped to a great degree by experiments that would have been extraordinarily tedious to perform without the English interface with which the experimental data base was prepared, revise, and revised again. Inasmuch as current work on the learning theory is moving toward a tenfold increase in data-base size, the English interface is moving from a facilitating role to an enabling one. The parsing and generation theory has two particularly important features: (a) the same grammar is used for both parsing and generation; (b) the transformations of the grammar are commutative. The language generation procedure converts a semantic network fragment into kernel frames, chooses the set of transformations that should be performed upon each frame, executes the specified transformations, combines the altered kernels into a sentence, performs a pronominalization process, and finally produces the appropriate English word string. Parsing is essentially the reverse of generation. The first step in the parsing process is splitting a given sentence into a set of kernel clauses along with a description of how those clauses hierarchically related to each other. The clauses are hierarchically related to each other. The clauses are used to produce a matrix embedded kernel frames, which in turn supply arguments to relation-creating functions. The evaluation of the relation-creating functions results in the construction of the semantic net fragments.

The problems under consideration center around the interpretation of binocular stereo disparity. In particular, the goal is to establish a set of mappings from stereo disparity to corresponding three-dimensional scene geometry. An analysis has been developed that shows how disparity information can be interpreted in terms of three-dimensional scene properties, such as surface depth, discontinuities, and orientation. These theoretical developments have been embodied in a set of computer algorithms for the recovery of scene geometry from input stereo disparity. The results of applying these algorithms to several disparity maps are presented. Comparisons are made to the interpretation of stereo disparity by biological systems.

My dissertation, The Question of Cross-Cultural Understanding in the Transcultural Travel Narratives about Post-1949 China, aims to intervene in the genre of travel writing and its critical scholarship by studying a flourishing but under-explored archive. Travel literature about (post-) Communist China is abundant and has been proliferating since 1979 when China began to implement its open-door policy. Yet its scholarship is surprisingly scanty. Meanwhile, in the field of travel literature studies, many critics read the genre as one that articulates Western imperialism, an archive where peoples and cultures are defined within conveniently maintained boundaries between home and abroad, West and non-West. Othersin the field of literary and cultural studies as well as other disciplineshave started to question the binary power relationship. However, some of this work may well reinforce the binary opposition, seeking only evidences of the travellers powerlessness in relation to the native; and some, conceiving travel only on a geographical plane, seems unable to transcend the dichotomy of home and abroad, East and West at a theoretical level. My project is committed to further interrogating the binarism constructed by the genre of travel and its scholarship. My intervention is not to argue who gets an upper hand in a hierarchical relationship, but to challenge the stability of the hierarchy by foregrounding the contingency and complexity of cross-cultural relationships. My dissertation engages with the key issue of cross-cultural understanding and explicates various modalities of the travellers interpretation of otherness. By reading Canadian journalist Jan Wong, geophysicist Jock Tuzo Wilson, US Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler, American anthropologist Hill Gates, and humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, I examine the ways in which the Western traveller negotiates and interprets foreignness, and probe the consequences of transcultural interactions. The overall argument of my dissertationin dialogue with other scholarship in the fieldis that travel not only (re)produces cultural differences but also paradoxically engenders a cosmopolitan potential that recognizes but transcends them. / English

In this work the concept of 'context' is considered in five main points. First, context is seen as always necessary for an adequate explication of the concepts of meaning and understanding. Context always plays a role and is not merely brought into consideration when handling a special class of statements or terms, or when there is doubt and clarification is necessary. Second, context cannot be completely reduced to some system of representation. The reason for this is the presence of humans, which is always an important component of a context. Humans experience situations in ways that are not always reducible to symbolic representation. Third, contexts are in principle open. In normal cases they cannot be determined or described in advance. A context is not to be equated with a set of information. Fourth, we understand the parameters of a context pragmatically, which is why we are not led into doubt or even to meaning skepticism by the open nature of a context. This pragmatic knowledge belongs to the category of an ability. Fifth, contexts are, in principle, accessible. This denies the idea that some contexts are incommensurable. There are a number of pragmatic ways of accessing unfamiliar contexts. Some of these are here examined in light of the so-called 'culture wars' in the U.S.A. / Der Kontextbegriff wird so betrachtet, dass es in fünf Hauptpunkte untergliedert wird. Erstens: der Kontextbegriff ist für eine Explikation der Begriff die Bedeutung und des Verstehens immer notwendig. Der Kontext spielt immer eine Rolle und ist nicht nur für Fälle gut, in denen eine besondere Klasse von Wörtern behandelt wird, oder in denen Zweifel bestehen und eine Klarstellung benötigt wird. Zweitens: der Kontextbegriff lässt sich nicht vollständig auf eine Art von Repräsentation reduzieren. Grund dafür ist das Vorhandensein von Menschen, was immer ein wichtiger Bestandteil des Kontextes ist. Drittens: Kontexte sind grundsätzlich offen. Sie können nicht im Normalfall in vorbestimmter Art und Weise eingegrenzt oder beschrieben werden. Viertens: wir verstehen die Parameter eines Kontextes nach pragmatischer Art und Weise, daher führt uns die offene Natur eines Kontextes nicht zur epistemischen Zweifeln oder sogar Bedeutungsskeptizismus. Dieses pragmatische Wissen gehört in eine völlig andere Kategorie; die eine Fähigkeit ist. Fünftens: Kontexte sind prinzipiell zugänglich. Dies lehnt eine These der Inkommensurabilität zwischen Kontexte ab. Es gibt verschiedene pragmatishce Wege, um Zugang zu fremden Kontexte zu erreichen. Die sogenannte 'culure wars' in den U.S.A. werden hier als Beispiel bennant.

In all times school has defined and categorized pupils from a hypothetical normality. The National Agency for Education is today critical to how the municipalities provide for the necessity of special support for pupils with difficulties in school. Pupil`s assistants has been a growing profession in school during the last decade and their importance for the pupils is relatively unexplored. The aim of this study is to find out how the pupils think about having pupil`s assistant during the obligatory school on the basis of the ideas of power, knowledge, involvment and understanding. The study is based on qualitative interviews, consisting of half-structured questions, with eight pupils that have or have had pupil`s assistant during their time in senior compulsory school. The result notifies that the pupils feel powerless in school, they have no opportunity to affect and they do not think they are someone that could make any change. With the pupil`s assistant the pupils get an opportunity to affect and a feeling of recognition. The pupil thinks that the pupil`s assistant is a translator of the teachers instructions and someone who builds a bridge between teacher and pupil. There is a fear within the pupils to be different, to not belong. When the pupil`s assistance is given in the classroom the pupil think they belong more to the class than if the assistance is given outside the classroom. With assistance outside the classroom the pupil sees the pupil`s assistant more as a teacher.

Ungdomar genomgår en mognadsprocess innehållande ett flertal viktiga faktorer i dagens samhälle. Utvecklingen består av att bli självständig, forma personligheten, hantera känslor samt hantera sexualitet. I detta ingår att skydda sig mot den sexuellt överförbara infektionen Chlamydia trachomatis (CT). Syftet med studien var att beskriva gymnasieungdomars uppfattning om infektionen. Hur är kunskapen i ämnet? På vilket sätt tror de att ungdomar skyddar sig? Hur ser de på kärlek och sexualitet? Författarna har valt en kvalitativ ansats med fokusgrupps intervjuer och analyserat resultatet enligt innehållsanalys. Fyra intervjuer har utförts där två flickgrupper respektive två pojkgrupper medverkat. Fyra teman förekommer i resultatet; Uppfattning och kunskap kring att drabbas av CT, uppfattning om sex och kärlek, attityder till skydd samt sexualundervisning. Resultatet visar likheter och skillnader hos flickor och pojkar i författarnas intervjuer. Kunskap om CT varierar, men att konsekvensen av en obehandlad CT kan leda till infertilitet hade samtliga ungdomar kunskap om. Även psykologiska aspekter framkommer. Resultatet speglar skillnader gällande sex och kärlek. Det första samlaget är en ”milstolpe” enligt pojkarna medan flickor anser att det hör ihop. Skydd förknippas med ”lathet” och skydd mot oönskad graviditet, inte skydd mot CT. / Youths are going through a growing process involving many different factors.  The development consists of becoming independent, shape personality, handle feelings and sexuality.  This includes protecting yourself against the sexually transmitted disease, Chlamydia trachomatis (CT). The purpose of this study was to describe upper secondary school youths knowledge and understanding of the infection. How is the knowledge in the subject? In what way do they think youths protect themselves? What are their views about love and sexuality? The authors have chosen a qualitative approach with interviews in focus groups. The data was analyzed with content analyse. Four interviews have been done, where two groups of girls and two groups of boys participated. Four themes exist in the results; knowledge and understanding of CT, understanding of sex and love, attitudes towards protection and sexual education. The result shows similarities and differences between boys and girls in the interviews. The knowledge about CT fluctuates, but the knowledge about that a not treated CT can give rise to infertility did the group knowledge about. Even psychological aspects appear. The result reflects differences about sex and love. The first intercourse is a "milestone" according to the boys whereas the girls have the opinion that it belongs together. Protection is put together with "laziness" and unplanned pregnancy, not protection against CT.