Online news has grown in frequency and popularity as a convenient source of information for several years. A result of this drastic surge is the increased competition for viewer-ship and prolonged relevance of online news websites. Higher demands by internet audiences have led to the use of sensationalism such as ‘clickbait’ articles or ‘fake news’ to attract more viewers. The subsequent shift in the journalistic approach in new media opened new opportunities to study the behaviour and intent behind the news content. As news publications cater their news to a specific target audience, conclusions about said news outlets and their readers can be deduced from the content they wish to broadcast. In order to understand the nature behind the publication’s choice of producing content, this thesis uses automated text categorisation as a means to analyse the words and phrases used by most news outlets. The thesis acts as a case study for approximately 143,000 online news articles from 15 different publications focused on the United States between the years 2016 and 2017. The focus of this thesis is to create a framework that observes how news articles group themselves based on the most relevant terms in their corpora. Similarly, other forms of analyses were performed to find similar insights that may give an idea about the news structure over a certain period of time. For this thesis, a preliminary quantitative analysis was also conducted before data processing, followed by applying K-means clustering to these articles post-cleansing. The overall categorisation approach and visual analysis provided sufficient data to re-use this framework with further adjustments. The cluster groups deduced that the most common news categories or genres for the selected publications were either politics - with special focus on the U.S. presidential elections - or crime-related news within the U.S and around the world. The visual formations of these clusters heavily implied that the above two categories were distributed even within groups containing other genres like finance or infotainment. Moreover, the added factor of churning out multiple articles and stories per day suggest that mainstream online news websites continue to use broadcast journalism as their main form of communication with their audiences

Titre: Categorisation et évaluation de l'innovation :approche par la théorie des prospects appliquée au cas du vin allégé en alcool.Chaque année de très nombreuses innovations sont proposées sur le marché, mais seul un nombre réduit d'entre elles rencontre le succès espéré. Face à ce constat, l'une des explications avancées par la recherche marketing est la difficulté du consommateur à catégoriser un nouveau produit.Ce travail s'insère dans le courant de recherches sur la catégorisation de l'innovation et suggère de tenir compte de l'incertitude qui caractérise ce processus. L'originalité de cette étude est de proposer un lien entre les recherches sur la catégorisation de l'innovation et celles sur la prise de décision en condition d'incertitude. La Théorie des Prospects (Kahneman et Tversky, 1979) en particulier, et l'un de ses principes, celui d'aversion aux pertes, ont fourni un cadre théorique adapté pour tenir compte du caractère d'incertitude de l'innovation. Notre question de recherche a proposé de vérifier si le principe d'aversion aux pertes pouvait s'appliquer pour expliquer comment la modification de certains attributs d'une catégorie provoque la perception d'une rupture et la création d'une nouvelle catégorie de produits par le consommateur.La partie empirique de ce travail a été appliquée dans le domaine le vin, un produit qui traverse une grave crise de consommation. Nous avons retenu une approche expérimentale à travers six études conduites sur des innovations du secteur vinicole. Les résultats ont permis de mettre en évidence le rôle majeur joué par la nature de l'attribut dans la catégorisation ainsi que son influence sur la perception des ruptures d'une catégorie.Du point de vue managérial, les conclusions de ce travail ont pour objet l'efficacité des stratégies d'innovation qui agissent sur les attributs d'un produit et sur leur capacité à différencier une innovation parmi la concurrence. Cette recherche fournit également des suggestions quant au positionnement et à la communication à mettre en place pour faciliter la compréhension d'un nouveau produit et donc son choix par le consommateur. / Title: Categorization and evaluation of innovation: a prospect théory approach applied to the case of low alcohol content wine Every year numerous innovations are available on the market but only a small number meet the hoped-for success. Given this fact, one of the explanations offered by marketing research is the difficulty the consumer has to categorize a new product. This work is part of current research on the categorization of innovation and suggests to consider the uncertainty that characterizes this process. Its originality is to propose a link between research on the categorization of innovation and those of decision making under uncertain conditions. Prospect Theory (Kahneman et Tversky, 1979), in particular, and one of its principles, that of loss aversion, this research has provided a theoretical framework adapted to take into account the uncertainty of innovation. Our research question proposes to determine whether the principle of loss aversion can be applied to explain how the modification of certain attributes of a class causes the perception of a break and create a new category of products by the consumer. The empirical part of this work was conducted on wine, a product that is going through a major crisis of consumption. We chose an experimental approach across six studies conducted on innovations in the wine sector. The results were used to highlight the major role played by the nature of the attribute in the categorization and its influence on the perception of breaks in a category. From the managerial point of view, the conclusions of this work relate to the effectiveness of innovation strategies that affect the attributes of a product in their ability to differentiate an innovation from competition. This work also provides suggestions for the positioning and communication set up to facilitate the understanding of a new product and therefore its choice by the consumer.

Background: In Sweden the national labour market policies are administered by the Public Employment Service which is in charge of assessing job-seekers’ need for support in the process of reaching employment. Equality is a fundamental principle for the administration. Neither ethnicity nor the person’s economical situation should influence the assessment. At the same time job-seekers are entitled to an individual assessment. Although the state has a national responsibility for labour market policy since the 1990s different municipal labour market interventions have also developed.   Aim: To investigate the impact of different income support systems (unemployment benefit/activity support or social assistance) and ethnicity on the assessments made by public employment officers.   Method: The study used a quantitative method with a questionnaire in the form of a factorial vignette experiment with fictitious cases in which only one factor/variable changed. 118 respondents at eight employment offices completed the survey between 20 January and 1 April 2020. Correlation analyses were performed using crosstabs (Cramers V) and Chi2-tests. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were used to compare data at two different times (first and second phase of the survey).   Results: Employment officers advocated support at the employment service/external operator as their first choice in 86 per cent of cases, against municipal labour market interventions as first choice in 14 per cent of cases. There were statistically significant differences in the assessments based on the form of income support in all three vignettes. Unemployment benefit/activity support and social assistance resulted in statistically significant different assessments. Employment officers want to refer job-seekers with social assistance to municipal labour market interventions more often than they do with those with unemployment benefit or activity income. No significant differences in the assessments were observed regarding the ethnicity of job-seekers.   Conclusions: The study shows that in the process of labour market policy assessment not only the job-seeker's ability to work and the need for support to find a job is evaluated, but the income support system of the job-seeker plays a role. The differences in assessments based on the job-seekers' form of income may be due to categorisations. These categorisations may spring from stereotypical views of job-seekers benefiting from social assistance, or may be due to institutional factors with two different income support systems for the unemployed, or lastly spring from a lack of clarity regarding borders and distribution between national and municipal labour market policies. Regardless the reason, the categorisations might lead to significant consequences for job-seekers with social assistance, who in addition to a lower level of economical compensation also risk being referred to municipal labour market interventions. These are sometimes designed to be a demand for activity in return for receiving social assistance and do not always have as their primary purpose to strengthen working capacity. Based on the results of the study, Sweden thereby does not live up to being a universal welfare state with social citizenship, since social rights do not apply equally to all job seekers.

This study explores identity negotiation through talk-in-interaction by undergraduate female students at a male dominated study program of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. The main aim of this study is to investigate what interactional identities are occupied by the female students in relation to Membership Categorisation Device “Gender”. Theoretical framework that has been developed and used in this study is a combination of Grounded Theory and Membership Categorisation Analysis which is a part of Conversation Analysis developed by Harvey Sacks. The data has been collected through ten semi-structured interviews that have been conducted with undergraduate female students of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. The results demonstrate that there are various ways in which the female students negotiate their interactional identity in relation to Membership Categorisation Device “Gender”. The use of Membership Categorisation Device “Gender” is both appropriated and rejected in negotiation of interactional identity. The results of this study might be useful in providing a better understanding of how interactional identity is negotiated by undergraduate female students of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. In turn, that might facilitate effort of making gender ratio in male dominated IT-areas more equal. Moreover, the results of this study may contribute to further research on the relationship between gender identity negotiation by women in male dominated IT-areas and the phenomenon of “Gender Paradox”.

This diploma thesis deals with the representation and categorisation of old age and elderly care and their changes in media discourse of daily newspaper Blesk. Theory focuses on definitions of elderly and description of seniors and practices of elderly care in the Czech Republic. It describes changes of old age discourse in connection with the development of social policy and expert knowledge. It describes the concepts of representation and categorisation and their possible impacts in the form of stigmatisation, stereotyping and ageism. It discusses media as resources of symbolic power, ideology and discourse and sets out media representation of elderly. Related empirical part is based on qualitative discourse analysis of articles from Blesk in years 2007 and 2011. It discusses the outcomes with respect to changes of discourse and representation, stereotypes and active old age. It distinguishes three types of senior representation - like normal, stigmatized and active. Thematic distribution and stigmatisation of elderly constructs symbolic subordination of elderly as a population category. Care is described only rarely and isn't offered as the solution of the elderly's frailty.

Better methods and tools are needed in the fight against child pornography. This thesis presents a method for file type categorisation of unknown data fragments, a method for reassembly of JPEG fragments, and the requirements put on an artificial JPEG header for viewing reassembled images. To enable empirical evaluation of the methods a number of tools based on the methods have been implemented. The file type categorisation method identifies JPEG fragments with a detection rate of 100% and a false positives rate of 0.1%. The method uses three algorithms, Byte Frequency Distribution (BFD), Rate of Change (RoC), and 2-grams. The algorithms are designed for different situations, depending on the requirements at hand. The reconnection method correctly reconnects 97% of a Restart (RST) marker enabled JPEG image, fragmented into 4 KiB large pieces. When dealing with fragments from several images at once, the method is able to correctly connect 70% of the fragments at the first iteration. Two parameters in a JPEG header are crucial to the quality of the image; the size of the image and the sampling factor (actually factors) of the image. The size can be found using brute force and the sampling factors only take on three different values. Hence it is possible to use an artificial JPEG header to view full of parts of an image. The only requirement is that the fragments contain RST markers. The results of the evaluations of the methods show that it is possible to find, reassemble, and view JPEG image fragments with high certainty.

Anställda på företag gör ibland utlägg på köp åt företaget som de behöver dokumentera manuellt. För att underlätta dokumentation av utlägg hos anställda på företaget Consid AB har detta arbete haft i syfte att utveckla en tjänst som från en bild på ett kvitto kan extrahera relevant data såsom pris, datum, företagsnamn samt kategorisera kvittot. Resultatet som arbetet har medfört är en tjänst som kan extrahera text från kvitton med en säkerhet på i snitt 73 % på att texten är rätt. Efter tester kan det även fastställas att tjänsten kan hitta pris, datum och företagsnamn från ca. 64 % av testade kvitton med olika kvalité och innehåll. Tjänsten som byggdes har även implementerat två olika kategoriseringsmetoder där hälften av de testade kvittona kan kategoriseras av de båda metoderna. Efter analyser av metoder och resultat har slutsatser kunnat dragits i att tjänsten innehåller ett flertal brister samt att mer tid bör läggas för att optimera och testa tjänsten ytterligare. / Employees at companies sometimes make purchases on behalf of the company which they manually need to document. To ease the documentation of purchases made by employees at Consid AB, this study has had the goal to develop a service that from an image of a receipt can extract relevant data such as price, date, company name along with a category of the purchase. The resulting service can extract text from receipts with a confidence of 73 % in that the text is correct. Tests of the service shows that it can find price, date and company name on around 64 % of test receipts with different quality and contents. The resulting service has also implemented two different methods for categorisation where half of the test receipts could be categorised by both methods. After analysing methods and results, conclusions have been made in that the service contains of numerous flaws and that more time needs to be put in to optimise and test the service.

This study investigates how multilinguals compared with monolinguals categorise landscape. The aim is to contribute to research already done with fresh data in a new setting. The thesis suggests that speakers with lower proficiency in a language will tend to choose vocabulary based on frequency and not semantic knowledge. The study was done through a quantitative and qualitative questionnaire targeting French, English, and Swiss-German speakers. Methods used were among others word-to-referent mapping and priming to gather useful vocabulary. The participants were to look at 30 images per language and choose among three words which one best fit the images. All images portraying different features of landscapes. What could be found is that 20% of the time the multilingual had a tendency to behave differently to the monolingual baseline. Data from this study shows that the Indo-European languages in this research seem to have more similar constraints on the semantic domains than differences. 80% of the time all speakers, monolingual and multilingual, agreed on what word best fit the image. Qualitative and quantitative data support this idea. The frequency theory proved to be true in the 20% of cases where the trilingual group deviated from the answers of the other groups.

Thesis (MA (Political Science))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010. / See full text for abstract

"Instead of studying, for example, how the psychology of personality limits and prevents real social and political change, we should be studying how political and ideological changes create new personalities and individual needs and motives." The above quotation is from social psychologist Professor John Turner, who is one of the two theorists, the other being Henri Tajfel, most responsible for the Social Identity Perspective, the principle subject of this thesis. The Social Identity Perspective is an approach to Social Psychology that incorporates two sub-theories: Tajfel's Social Identity Theory and Turner's Self-Categorization Theory. This thesis is based upon using the perspective for the purposes of creating more realistic and believable fictional characters in realist fiction. For the purposes of this thesis Pam Morris' definition of realism will be used, that being, 'any writing that is based upon an implicit or explicit assumption that it is possible to communicate about a reality beyond the writing.' According to both theories, individuals can develop two principal identities: the personal self, which is to say a collection of idiosyncratic qualities that define them as a unique individual, and a collective self (or social identity) that encapsulates the status and characteristics of the social groups they belong to in opposition to other social groupings. Turner theorised that the personality of a human being is heavily influenced by their social context at an unconscious level. This influence can be made manifest by their parents, by their school friends and work colleagues, by their romantic partners, and especially by the collective cultural expectations native to the area they choose to reside in. Turner put forward the concept that our personality and actions are therefore influenced by society at the level of how the individual defines himself or herself. This occurs without agency on the part of the individual. These social belief systems therefore mould what the individual thinks, their actions, and their motivations. This thesis will demonstrate a method of usage for elements of Social Psychology, specifically the Social Identity Perspective that underpins the actions, interactions and motivations of the fictional characters contained within the thesis's creative element. It is the contention of this thesis that The Social Identity Perspective will assist an author in marrying together ever more realistic characterisation to other areas of writer research already extensively drawn upon by the author such as those projects focused upon creating a more realistic setting in a historical novel for instance. As previously stated it is the intention of this thesis to apply aspects of social psychology to the creation of realist texts only, the findings however may also be of use to authors who write in other genres, after all even the writer of fantastic fiction still requires characters whose actions are fundamentally recognisable and justifiable to the reader in order for them to be able to make sense of the fiction and as Henry James said, 'one can speak best from one's own taste, and I may therefore venture to say the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel'. It is the aim of this thesis that its findings may highlight the potential of using The Social Identity Perspective and other adjuncts of Social Psychology as tools for both plot construction and character development that is completely realistic. This may then lead to other areas of research, some of which are suggested in the concluding chapter of this thesis.