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The aim of this dissertation is to describe the language choice among Saamis in Övre Soppero, and to relate their language choice to social and cultural factors in order to establish whetheror not there exist systematic connections. The population studied (55 informants) consists of trilingual Saamis living in the village of Övre Soppero in the far north of Sweden. The informants all speak Saami, Swedish and Finnish. The study is based on interviews and observations, i.e. partly on information provided by the informants themselves concerning language choice in different discourse situations, and partly on my own observations of their language behaviour in different contexts. Language choice has been related both to domains and discourse situations and to the social backgrounds and attitudes of the informants. A description is given of the linguistic uncertainty in different discourse situations. A discourse situation comprises the following elements: interlocutors, the role relationship between them, and the scene and/or activity. The term "domain" is an abstraction of concrete discourse situations. By linguistic uncertainty, I mean the individual's use of more than one language in one and the same discourse situation. Discourse situations are divided into the following domains: family, circle of friends, casual acquaintances, religion, free time, social participation, consumer activity and public matters. All three languages occur in all domains. In the majority of domains, there is great variation in language choice depending on the discourse situation at hand. The degree of linguistic uncertainty also varies. Discourse situations have also been divided into groups according to the degree of linguistic uncertainty, and according to whether the situation is personal or transactional. Linguistic uncertainty is low, for example, when the interlocutors' roles are unambiguous and clearly established, whereas it is high when, for example, the interlocutors' roles are ambiguous and varied. Language choice has also been related to the age, profession, education and geographic mobility of the informants. The thing that most separates the different categories of informants from each other is the fact that the youngest group and those with unspecified professional category more often speak Swedish than the other groups. The former groups have a comparatively higher level of education and are socially and geographically mobile. The group that most often uses Saami is the professional category "reindeer herders". For this group, the Saami language is primarily a means of communication, whereas the youngest informants use the Saami language as an ethnic marker. The factors that seem to have the greatest influence on language choice are, for example, whether the discourse situation is public or private, and whether the relationship between the interlocutors is intimate or not, and whether it is intra- or inter-ethnic. Of crucial importance are also the sender's age, profession, social and geographical mobility, and the sender's degree of ethnic consciousness. / digitalisering@umu

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This thesis is an ethnographic study of place-making in a war-altered landscape. It describes over a decade of resettlement efforts in a village in northwest Cambodia. As war drew to a close in the late 1990s, land on the former frontlines was allotted to those willing to risk occupancy on possibly mined terrain. Area resettlement was driven by need, forged by hope, and fraught with physical risk and material dangers. Food security and the prospect of acquiring land rights required settlers’ physical presence in and active engagement with the materialities of a forested landscape strewn with the remnants of war and the ruins of earlier settlements. Residents' conceptual and corporeal engagements with place were influenced by longstanding Khmer depictions of the srok, the ordered and cultivated landscape of agriculture and human dwelling, and the prai, the wild and fecund landscape of the forest, replete with powerful but often malevolent spirits. The srok was the landscape that the inhabitants of Handsome village longed to dwell within and struggled to create. The area’s pre-war reputation as a famously fertile agricultural zone had drawn many of its residents to risk the hazards of resettlement. The dream of the srok drove residents' actions in the actively dangerous, ever fluctuating terrain. In addition to being envisioned, the place was intimately known and directly experienced through the corporeal bodies of its inhabitants and their engagements with its material assemblages. Making the srok involved arduous physical effort in a constantly shifting material environment along with concentrated social and conceptual work. Resettlement did not merely entail hewing fields out of forests and removing mines and ordnance, but also encompassed attempts to transition into peacetime—to move from soldiering to farming, to come to rest after years of mobility and displacement, and to recreate social and moral order. This study analyzes successes and failures in place-making processes, illustrating how different aspects of landscape posed both affordances and constraints to these processes. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which material assemblages contributed to uncertainty in place-making efforts, illustrating that the material dimensions of landscape may resist as much as they acquiesce to human alteration. On a material level, place-making was a struggle that pitted human agency and will against an active and agentive landscape. Village residents were interacting with material environs in a constant state of change and becoming. The unsettling material traces of the past and the continuing threat some remnants posed in the present contributed to the ongoing indeterminacy residents experienced about the state and contents of the once famous ground. The landscape that residents sought to form and fix was always in danger of undoing its formation and categorization and revealing itself to be something else. Yet despite their failures at establishing and fixing the srok in the constantly shifting landscape of Handsome village, residents maintained their quest to transform the present configuration of place into the landscape and the future that they desired.

<p>This dissertation focuses on the development and calibration of reaction models for multilayered nanocomposites. The nanocomposites comprise sputter deposited alternating layers of distinct metallic elements. Specifically, we focus on the equimolar Ni-Al and Zr-Al multilayered systems. Computational models are developed to capture the transient reaction phenomena as well as understand the dependence of reaction properties on the microstructure, composition and geometry of the multilayers. Together with the available experimental data, simulations are used to calibrate the models and enhance the accuracy of their predictions.</p><p>Recent modeling efforts for the Ni-Al system have investigated the nature of self-propagating reactions in the multilayers. Model fidelity was enhanced by incorporating melting effects due to aluminum [Besnoin et al. (2002)]. Salloum and Knio formulated a reduced model to mitigate computational costs associated with multi-dimensional reaction simulations [Salloum and Knio (2010a)]. However, exist- ing formulations relied on a single Arrhenius correlation for diffusivity, estimated for the self-propagating reactions, and cannot be used to quantify mixing rates at lower temperatures within reasonable accuracy [Fritz (2011)]. We thus develop a thermal model for a multilayer stack comprising a reactive Ni-Al bilayer (nanocalorimeter) and exploit temperature evolution measurements to calibrate the diffusion parameters associated with solid state mixing (720 K - 860 K) in the bilayer.</p><p> </p><p>The equimolar Zr-Al multilayered system when reacted aerobically is shown to </p><p>exhibit slow aerobic oxidation of zirconium (in the intermetallic), sustained for about 2-10 seconds after completion of the formation reaction. In a collaborative effort, we aim to exploit the sustained heat release for bio-agent defeat application. A simplified computational model is developed to capture the extended reaction regime characterized by oxidation of Zr-Al multilayers. Simulations provide insight into the growth phenomenon for the zirconia layer during the oxidation process. It is observed that the growth of zirconia is predominantly governed by surface-reaction. However, once the layer thickens, the growth is controlled by the diffusion of oxygen in zirconia.</p><p>A computational model is developed for formation reactions in Zr-Al multilayers. We estimate Arrhenius diffusivity correlations for a low temperature mixing regime characterized by homogeneous ignition in the multilayers, and a high temperature mixing regime characterized by self-propagating reactions in the multilayers. Experimental measurements for temperature and reaction velocity are used for this purpose. Diffusivity estimates for the two regimes are first inferred using regression analysis and full posterior distributions are then estimated for the diffusion parameters using Bayesian statistical approaches. A tight bound on posteriors is observed in the ignition regime whereas estimates for the self-propagating regime exhibit large levels of uncertainty. We further discuss a framework for optimal design of experiments to assess and optimize the utility of a set of experimental measurements for application to reaction models.</p> / Dissertation

Probabilistic reasoning in databases has been an active area of research during the last twodecades. However, the previously proposed database approaches, including the probabilistic relationalapproach and the probabilistic object approach, are not good fits for storing and managingdiverse probability distributions along with their auxiliary information.The work in this dissertation extends significantly the initial semistructured probabilistic databaseframework proposed by Dekhtyar, Goldsmith and Hawkes in [20]. We extend the formal SemistructuredProbabilistic Object (SPO) data model of [20]. Accordingly, we also extend the SemistructuredProbabilistic Algebra (SP-algebra), the query algebra proposed for the SPO model.Based on the extended framework, we have designed and implemented a Semistructured ProbabilisticDatabase Management System (SPDBMS) on top of a relational DBMS. The SPDBMS isflexible enough to meet the need of storing and manipulating diverse probability distributions alongwith their associated information. Its query language supports standard database queries as wellas queries specific to probabilities, such as conditionalization and marginalization. Currently theSPDBMS serves as a storage backbone for the project Decision Making and Planning under Uncertaintywith Constraints 1‡ , that involves managing large quantities of probabilistic information. Wealso report our experimental results evaluating the performance of the SPDBMS.We describe an extension of the SPO model for handling interval probability distributions. TheExtended Semistructured Probabilistic Object (ESPO) framework improves the flexibility of theoriginal semistructured data model in two important features: (i) support for interval probabilitiesand (ii) association of context and conditionals with individual random variables. An extended SPO1 This project is partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ITR-0325063.(ESPO) data model has been developed, and an extended query algebra for ESPO has also beenintroduced to manipulate probability distributions for probability intervals.The Bayesian Network Development Suite (BaNDeS), a system which builds Bayesian networkswith full data management support of the SPDBMS, has been described. It allows expertswith particular expertise to work only on specific subsystems during the Bayesian network constructionprocess independently and asynchronously while updating the model in real-time.There are three major foci of our ongoing and future work: (1) implementation of a queryoptimizer and performance evaluation of query optimization, (2) extension of the SPDBMS to handleinterval probability distributions, and (3) incorporation of machine learning techniques into theBaNDeS.

Discrete choice models (DCMs) are used to forecast demand in a variety of engineering, marketing, and policy contexts, and understanding the uncertainty associated with model forecasts is crucial to inform decision-making. This thesis evaluates the suitability of DCMs for forecasting automotive demand. The entire scope of this investigation is too broad to be covered here, but I explore several elements with a focus on three themes: defining how to measure forecast accuracy, comparing model specifications and forecasting methods in terms of prediction accuracy, and comparing the implications of model specifications and forecasting methods on vehicle design. Specifically I address several questions regarding the accuracy and uncertainty of market share predictions resulting from choice of utility function and structural specification, estimation method, and data structure assumptions. I1 compare more than 9,000 models based on those used in peer-reviewed literature and academic and government studies. Firstly, I find that including more model covariates generally improves predictive accuracy, but that the form those covariates take in the utility function is less important. Secondly, better model fit correlates well with better predictive accuracy; however, the models I construct— representative of those in extant literature— exhibit substantial prediction error stemming largely from limited model fit due to unobserved attributes. Lastly, accuracy of predictions in existing markets is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for use in design. Much of the econometrics literature on vehicle market modeling has presumed that biased coefficients make for bad models. For purely predictive purposes, the drawbacks of potentially mitigating bias using generalized method of moments estimation coupled with instrumental variables outweigh the expected benefits in the experiments conducted in this dissertation. The risk of specifying invalid instruments is high, and my results suggest that the instruments frequently used in the automotive demand literature are likely invalid. Furthermore, biased coefficients are not necessarily bad for maximizing the predictive power of the model. Bias can even aid predictions by implicitly capturing persistent unobserved effects in some circumstances. Including alternative specific constants (ASCs) in DCM utility functions improves model fit but not necessarily forecast accuracy. For frequentist estimated models all tested methods of forecasting ASCs improved share predictions of the whole midsize sedan market over excluding ASC in predictions, but only one method results in improved long term new vehicle, or entrant, forecasts. As seen in a synthetic data study, assuming an incorrect relationship between observed attributes and the ASC for forecasting risks making worse forecasts than would be made by a model that excludes ASCs entirely. Treating the ASCs as model parameters with full distributions of uncertainty via Bayesian estimation is more robust to selection of ASC forecasting method and less reliant on persistent market structures, however it comes at increased computational cost. Additionally, the best long term forecasts are made by the frequentist model that treats ASCs as calibration constants fit to the model post estimation of other parameters.

Background: Many people within the health care system experience uncertainty. Uncertainty can be described as a feeling, a condition or as a phenomenon. Uncertainty is often associated with stress and an emotional burden among patients. It’s important for the nurse to have knowledge about the expressions of uncertainty to get a higher appreciation for the patients’ situation. Aim: The aim of this study was to describe how uncertainty expresses itself among people in an uncertain situation. Method: The study was based on 20 narratives about uncertainty, written by students. A manifest content analysis was applied. Result: The study resulted in two main categories. The category The invisible expressions of uncertainty describes that many feelings aroused. Many thoughts and questions were also evoked whilst in uncertainty. In the category The visible and physical expressions of uncertainty the expressions appeared as varied behaviour and actions. The body also showed physical reactions. Conclusion: Many of the expressions of uncertainty have a negative impact on people and can therefore be seen as a threat against their wellbeing and health. Despite of the individual expressions of uncertainty, this study shows that uncertainty could be discovered among people. Increased participation and person-centred care could alleviate the uncertainty among patients. / Bakgrund: Inom vården upplever många människor någon gång ovisshet. Ovisshet kan beskrivas som en känsla, ett tillstånd eller som ett fenomen. Ofta är ovisshet associerat med stress och känslosam påfrestning för patienter. Som sjuksköterska är det därför viktigt att ha kännedom om hur ovisshet kan uttrycka sig hos personer för att få en ökad förståelse för patientens situation. Syftet: Syftet var att beskriva hur ovisshet kan uttrycka sig hos personer som befinner sig i en oviss situation. Metod: Studien baserades på 20 berättelser om ovisshet, skrivna av studenter. Berättelserna bearbetades genom manifest innehållsanalys. Resultat: Studien resulterade i två huvudkategorier. Kategorin Ovisshetens osynliga uttryck handlar om att många känslor föddes när personer var i ovisshet. Det framkom också att många tankar och frågor väcktes. I kategorin Ovisshetens synliga och fysiska uttryck framkom det att ovisshet kunde uttrycka sig som beteenden och handlingar, samt att kroppen reagerade fysiskt. Slutsats: Många av ovisshetens uttryck påverkar personer negativt och kan därför ses som ett hot mot personers välbefinnande och hälsa. Trots att ovisshet uttrycker sig individuellt visade studien att ovisshet skulle kunna upptäckas hos personer. Ökad delaktighet och personcentrerad omvårdnad skulle kunna lindra ovisshet hos patienter.

Planning is an essential part of intelligent behavior and a ubiquitous task for both humans and rational agents. One framework for planning in the presence of uncertainty is probabilistic planning, in which actions are described by a probability distribution over their possible outcomes. Probabilistic planning has been applied to different real-world scenarios such as public health, sustainability and robotics; however, the usage of probabilistic planning in practice is limited due to the poor performance of existing planners. In this thesis, we introduce a novel approach to effectively solve probabilistic planning problems by relaxing them into short-sighted problems. A short-sighted problem is a relaxed problem in which the state space of the original problem is pruned and artificial goals are added to heuristically estimate the cost of reaching an original goal from the pruned states. Differently from previously proposed relaxations, short-sighted problems maintain the original structure of actions and no restrictions are imposed in the maximum number of actions that can be executed. Therefore, the solutions for short-sighted problems take into consideration all the probabilistic outcomes of actions and their probabilities. In this thesis, we also study different criteria to generate short-sighted problems, i.e., how to prune the state space, and the relation between the obtained short-sighted models and previously proposed relaxation approaches. We present different planning algorithms that use short-sighted problems in order to solve probabilistic planning problems. These algorithms iteratively generate and execute optimal policies for short-sighted problems until the goal of the original problem is reached. We also formally analyze the introduced algorithms, focusing on their optimality guarantees with respect to the original probabilistic problem. Finally, this thesis contributes a rich empirical comparison between our algorithms and state-of-the-art probabilistic planners.

Vi människor gör dagligen många olika bedömningar antingen genom intuition eller mer strategiska där vi genom resonemang kommer fram till ett svar. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka sambandet mellan experters helhetsbedömningar och samma experters bedömningar utifrån kriterier. Data samlades in genom en webbaserad enkät som skickades ut till lärare på Karlstads universitet vilka utvärderade nya idéer relaterade till undervisning.  33 personers svar analyserades genom en multipel regressionsanalys och två t-tester. Slutsatserna är att 43 % av helhetsbedömningen kunde förklaras av de fyra kriterierna: Originalitet, genomförbarhet, användarvärde för studenter och användarvärde för lärare. De återstående procenten kan anses vara intuition samt andra kriterier eller personliga värderingar. Lärare bör därför begrunda hur de gör sina bedömningar och vilka värderingar de lägger in förutom de kriterier som tas upp i kursplanen. / We humans do many different assessments each day; either through intuition or more strategic where we through deliberate reasoning arrive at answers. The purpose of this study was to examine the link between experts overall evaluations and the same experts criteria based assessments. Data were collected through a web-based questionnaire sent to teachers at Karlstad University where they evaluated new ideas related to education. Answers from 33 individuals where analyzed with a multiple regression analysis and two t-tests. The conclusions are that about 43 % of overall assessments could be explained by the four criteria: Originality, operability, user value for students and user value for teachers. The remaining percentage can be considered intuition as well as other criteria or personal values. Teachers should therefore ponder how they make their assessments and what values ​​they put in addition to the criteria listed in the syllabus.