This study investigates how the members of four different role-playing communities on the online platform Second Life perform social as well as dramatic roles within their community. The trajectories of power influencing these roles are my main focus. Theoretically I am relying primarily on performance studies scholar Richard Schechner, sociologist Erving Goffman, and post-structuralists Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felìx Guattari. My methodological stance has its origin primarily within literature studies using text analysis as my preferred method, but I also draw on the (cyber)ethnographical works of primarily T.L. Taylor, Celia Pearce, and Mikael Jakobsson. In this dissertation my focus is the relationship of the role-player to their chosen role especially in terms of the boundary between being in character, and as such removed from ”reality,” and the popping out of character, which instead highlights the negotiations of the social, sometimes make-belief, roles. Destabilising and problematising the dichotomy between the notion of the online as virtual and the offline as real, as well as the idea that everything is ”real” regardless of context, my aim is to understand role-play in a digital realm in a new way, in which two modes of performance, dramatic and social, take place in a digital context online — or inworld as many SL residents call it.

The networks of surveillance cameras installed in public places and private territories continuously record video data with the aim of detecting and preventing unlawful activities. This enhances the importance of video content analysis applications, either for real time (i.e. analytic) or post-event (i.e. forensic) analysis. In this thesis, the primary focus is on four key aspects of video content analysis, namely; 1. Moving object detection and recognition, 2. Correction of colours in the video frames and recognition of colours of moving objects, 3. Make and model recognition of vehicles and identification of their type, 4. Detection and recognition of text information in outdoor scenes. To address the first issue, a framework is presented in the first part of the thesis that efficiently detects and recognizes moving objects in videos. The framework targets the problem of object detection in the presence of complex background. The object detection part of the framework relies on background modelling technique and a novel post processing step where the contours of the foreground regions (i.e. moving object) are refined by the classification of edge segments as belonging either to the background or to the foreground region. Further, a novel feature descriptor is devised for the classification of moving objects into humans, vehicles and background. The proposed feature descriptor captures the texture information present in the silhouette of foreground objects. To address the second issue, a framework for the correction and recognition of true colours of objects in videos is presented with novel noise reduction, colour enhancement and colour recognition stages. The colour recognition stage makes use of temporal information to reliably recognize the true colours of moving objects in multiple frames. The proposed framework is specifically designed to perform robustly on videos that have poor quality because of surrounding illumination, camera sensor imperfection and artefacts due to high compression. In the third part of the thesis, a framework for vehicle make and model recognition and type identification is presented. As a part of this work, a novel feature representation technique for distinctive representation of vehicle images has emerged. The feature representation technique uses dense feature description and mid-level feature encoding scheme to capture the texture in the frontal view of the vehicles. The proposed method is insensitive to minor in-plane rotation and skew within the image. The capability of the proposed framework can be enhanced to any number of vehicle classes without re-training. Another important contribution of this work is the publication of a comprehensive up to date dataset of vehicle images to support future research in this domain. The problem of text detection and recognition in images is addressed in the last part of the thesis. A novel technique is proposed that exploits the colour information in the image for the identification of text regions. Apart from detection, the colour information is also used to segment characters from the words. The recognition of identified characters is performed using shape features and supervised learning. Finally, a lexicon based alignment procedure is adopted to finalize the recognition of strings present in word images. Extensive experiments have been conducted on benchmark datasets to analyse the performance of proposed algorithms. The results show that the proposed moving object detection and recognition technique superseded well-know baseline techniques. The proposed framework for the correction and recognition of object colours in video frames achieved all the aforementioned goals. The performance analysis of the vehicle make and model recognition framework on multiple datasets has shown the strength and reliability of the technique when used within various scenarios. Finally, the experimental results for the text detection and recognition framework on benchmark datasets have revealed the potential of the proposed scheme for accurate detection and recognition of text in the wild.

Empresas de manufatura contratada terão sucesso se conseguirem definir sua estratégia por meio do desenvolvimento de competências operacionais alinhadas aos requisitos do mercado, direcionando decisões e ações que as impulsionem a obterem um melhor desempenho. As incertezas, tanto de produtos como de volumes que serão demandados, envolvidas no relacionamento com as empresas-cliente reduzem a oportunidade de um planejamento antecipado da produção, requerendo, então, uma política de atendimento da demanda do tipo make-to-order (MTO). O grande desafio enfrentado pelas empresas que operam no ambiente MTO é atender à demanda do cliente de forma rápida e confiável, ou seja, respeitando-se os prazos e as quantidades requeridos. O objetivo geral deste trabalho foi analisar como práticas do sistema Lean Manufacturing (LM) poderiam ser efetivamente implementadas em conjunto a um sistema de planejamento e controle da produção (PCP) apropriado, visando ao desenvolvimento de competências operacionais alinhadas à política MTO. Os objetivos específicos do estudo concentraram-se em identificar na literatura as principais competências operacionais requeridas no ambiente MTO, discutir o processo de implementação de práticas do sistema LM e comparar, conceitualmente, sistemas de PCP. A empresa de manufatura contratada escolhida para este estudo representava um caso puro da utilização da política MTO, dada a natureza de seu relacionamento com os clientes. A aplicação da metodologia pesquisa-ação permitiu que o estudo fosse conduzido de forma participativa e com uma abordagem de solução de problemas, além de fornecer um roteiro de referência, relacionando as etapas da pesquisa aos conceitos abordados na literatura. Como resultado, verificou-se que a adoção de práticas do sistema LM auxilia de forma significativa no desenvolvimento de competências operacionais em empresas que operam em ambientes MTO. No entanto, é necessário que estas práticas estejam associadas a um sistema de PCP apropriado - Workload Control (WLC) - para que se obtenham os resultados esperados. / Contract manufacturing companies will succeed if they can define their strategy through the development of operational competencies aligned to market requirements, directing decisions and actions that lead them to have a better performance. The relationship with the hiring firm involves multiple products and demand uncertainty, reducing the opportunities for advanced planning, requiring a make-to-order (MTO) demand management policy. The main challenge faced by companies operating in an MTO environment is to achieve high delivery reliability in terms of order quantities and delivery schedules. The general objective of this study was to analyze how Lean Manufacturing (LM) practices could be effectively implemented together with an appropriate production planning and control system (PPC), aiming to develop operational competences aligned to the MTO policy. The specific objectives of this study include identifying in the literature the main operational competencies required to operate on a MTO basis, discussing the LM implementation process and comparing conceptually PPC systems. The contract manufacturing company chosen for this study operated according to a MTO policy due to the nature of its relationship with the customers. The application of the action research methodology allowed conducting the study in a participative manner, using a problem solving approach and providing a reference guide relating the action research steps to concepts discussed in the literature review. As a result, it was found that the adoption of LM practices contributes substantially to the development of operational competences in companies operating in an MTO environment. However, it is necessary that these practices are associated with an appropriated PPC - Workload Control - to obtain the expected results.

Este trabalho tem por objetivo compreender os modos de aquisição de informação para exportação, realizando a aplicação de um modelo desenvolvido por Souchon & Diamantopoulos (1999). O trabalho utiliza tem uma abordagem descritiva conclusiva por meio de uma amostragem não-probabilística e a seleção de sua amostra foi por conveniência. Além da aplicação do modelo que indica três modos de aquisição de informações, sendo (1) pesquisa de marketing em mercados externos; (2) serviços de apoio à exportação; e (3) inteligência de mercado para exportação, é realizada uma avaliação de como as empresas exportadoras da região de Ribeirão Preto/SP utilizam estes diferentes modos de aquisição de informação. Também é realizada uma avaliação da aplicação do modelo teórico e uma avaliação da intercambiabilidade dos modos de aquisição de informação para exportação. Os resultados obtidos indicam a predominância da inteligência de mercado para exportação como modo de aquisição de informação preferencial. São indicadas as formas que as empresas entrevistadas utilizam como lidam com os modos de aquisição e qual é a importância de cada modo de informação. Ao final, são apresentadas as conclusões dos estudos realizados, indicando que outros estudos podem ser desenvolvidos para melhor compreender a inteligência de mercado com um todo. / This work has for objective to understand export information acquisition modes, accomplishing the application of Souchon & Diamantopoulos\' model (1999). The work uses has a conclusive descriptive approach through a sampling no-probabilistic and the selection of sample was for convenience. Besides the application of the model that indicates three export information acquisition modes, being (1) export marketing research; (2) export assistance; And (3) export marketing intelligence, an evaluation is accomplished of as the companies exporters of the area Ribeirão Preto / SP they use these different export information acquisition modes. It is also accomplished an evaluation of the application of the theoretical model and an evaluation of the interexchangeable of the export information acquisition modes. The obtained results indicate the predominance of the market intelligence for export as way of acquisition of preferential information. They are suitable the forms that the companies interviewees use how they work with the acquisition manners and which is the importance in each way of information. At the end, the conclusions of the accomplished studies are presented, indicating that other studies can be developed for best to understand the market intelligence with a whole.

In the make-to-order (MTO) industry, offering competitive due dates and on-time delivery for customer orders is important to the survival of MTO companies. Workload control is a production planning and control approach designed to meet the need of the MTO companies. In this dissertation, a multi-agent workload control methodology that simultaneously deals with due date setting, job release and scheduling is proposed to discourage job early or tardy completions. The earliness and tardiness objectives are consistent with the just-in-time production philosophy which has attracted significant attention in both industry and academic community. This methodology consists of the order entry agent, job release agent, job routing and sequencing agent, and information feedback agent. Two new due date setting rules are developed to establish job due dates based on two existing rules. A feedback mechanism to dynamically adjust due date setting is introduced. Both new rules are nonparametric and easy to be implemented in practice. A job release mechanism is applied to reduce job flowtimes (up to 20.3%) and work-in-process inventory (up to 33.1%), without worsening earliness and tardiness, and lead time performances. Flexible job shop scheduling problems are an important extension of the classical job shop scheduling problems and present additional complexity. A multi-agent scheduling method with job earliness and tardiness objectives in a flexible job shop environment is proposed. A new job routing and sequencing mechanism is developed. In this mechanism, different criteria for two kinds of jobs are proposed to route these jobs. Two sequencing algorithms based on existing methods are developed to deal with these two kinds of jobs. The proposed methodology is implemented in a flexible job shop environment. The computational results indicate that the proposed methodology is extremely fast. In particular, it takes less than 1.5 minutes of simulation time on a 1.6GHz PC to find a complete schedule with over 2000 jobs on 10 machines. Such computational efficiency makes the proposed method applicable in real time. Therefore, the proposed workload control methodology is very effective for the production planning and control in MTO companies.

Var tredje person i Sverige kan under sin livstid drabbas av en cancersjukdom. När en familjmedlem får diagnosen cancer påverkar detta oftast livet för dem som är närstående. Forskning visar att de närstående upplever olika förändringar i livet. Det uppstår oftast känslor som ångest, hjälplöshet och maktlöshet. Syftet med denna litteraturöversikt var att beskriva hur närstående till personer med cancer upplever sin förändrade livssituation. Informationskällor använda i analysen är 13 artiklar som beskriver närståendes upplevelser. Resultatet presenteras i fyra olika huvudteman med tillhörande underteman. Dessa fyra teman är Förändrad livssituation, Maktlöshet och hjälplöshet, Stöd är betydelsefullt och Behov av information. I resultatet framgår att relationer mellan familjmedlemmar antingen fördjupas eller försämras. Behovet av information och stöd visar sig vara stort hos den närstående. Det är av betydelse att resultatet används i vården så att sjuksköterskor samt annan vårdpersonal blir uppmärksamma på närståendes upplevelse. Dessa kunskaper kan hjälpa sjuksköterskor och annan vårdpersonal att erbjuda bättre stöd till dessa närstående. / Every third person in Sweden can be afflicted by cancer during a life course.  When a family member gets the cancer diagnosis this most often influences the lives of those who are closest to them. Research shows that family caregivers experience various changes through life. These changes are often accompanied by feelings of anxiety, helplessness, and powerlessness. The purpose with this literature review was to describe how caregivers of persons with cancer experience their changed situation of life. The sources of information used in analysis are 13 articles who describe the experiences of caregivers. The result is presented in four main themes with sub themes. These four themes are Changed life situation, Powerlessness and helplessness, Support is important and Need for information. In the presented result it is clear that relations between family members is either deepened or worsen. The need for information and support has showed itself to be of great value for family members. It is of importance to implement the result in healthcare so that registered nurses and other staff can be attentive to the experiences of the relatives. This knowledge can help nurses and other personnel to offer better opportunities to give support to these relatives.

Nowadays, many companies attempt to adapt their production planning and strategy to make order fulfillment more flexible. In manufacturing, the capacity and capability constraints are key factors which need efficient production planning for controlling service level and minimizing inventory cost. This thesis focuses on looking for the economic and efficient strategies for Capability to Promise or CTP handling. This strategy is proposed to work for Low Volume/High Mixed product manufacturing. Moreover, SAP is used as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system for steering the CTP handling strategies in order to increase automated order handling regarding cost efficiency. The results of this research are both concepts and implementations on how to set CTP handling by using SAP, regarding the demand uncertainty environment in Make to Order (MTO) fulfillment.

The difficulties in responding to variation in product order mixes and load levels effectively in make to order are known. Most of the existing approaches consider releasing jobs to the shop (input control), changing capacity levels (output control) in a controlled way, order acceptance with different definitions of work load and due date assignment. Controlling the processes, routing options and the order accepting capacity with various tool combinations that will decrease tool loading are not considered properly. However the manufacturing flexibility provided by the computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines, provides both part variety and due date achievement given a reasonable extra capacity. Positive effects of flexibility on the due date achievement of the make to order is shown with a variety of experimental and field studies leaving little doubt. However taking flexibility only as a strategic issue and not considering it as a means of planning and management in either the short term or medium term decisions have been commonplace practice. In this study, benefits of providing three kinds of flexibility, considering order pool and acceptance probability of the new arrivals in a periodic setting, is the focal issue. If the required flexible environment is provided, the necessity to make a detailed job loading, route planning and scheduling will be reduced to a low level and a high shop congestion and due date achievement will be realized simultaneously. A typical realistic shop with a scaled part mix is assumed in the flexibility management modeling and simulation experiments are conducted applying periodical flexibility planning approach. These experiments briefly support the ideas that worth of anticipation is more than plain expectations and flexibility improves robustness.

<p> </p><p>Var tredje person i Sverige kan under sin livstid drabbas av en cancersjukdom. När en familjmedlem får diagnosen cancer påverkar detta oftast livet för dem som är närstående. Forskning visar att de närstående upplever olika förändringar i livet. Det uppstår oftast känslor som ångest, hjälplöshet och maktlöshet. Syftet med denna litteraturöversikt var att beskriva hur närstående till personer med cancer upplever sin förändrade livssituation. Informationskällor använda i analysen är 13 artiklar som beskriver närståendes upplevelser. Resultatet presenteras i fyra olika huvudteman med tillhörande underteman. Dessa fyra teman är <em>Förändrad livssituation</em>, <em>Maktlöshet och hjälplöshet, Stöd är betydelsefullt</em> och <em>Behov av information</em>. I resultatet framgår att relationer mellan familjmedlemmar antingen fördjupas eller försämras. Behovet av information och stöd visar sig vara stort hos den närstående. Det är av betydelse att resultatet används i vården så att sjuksköterskor samt annan vårdpersonal blir uppmärksamma på närståendes upplevelse. Dessa kunskaper kan hjälpa sjuksköterskor och annan vårdpersonal att erbjuda bättre stöd till dessa närstående.</p> / <p> </p><p>Every third person in Sweden can be afflicted by cancer during a life course.  When a family member gets the cancer diagnosis this most often influences the lives of those who are closest to them. Research shows that family caregivers experience various changes through life. These changes are often accompanied by feelings of anxiety, helplessness, and powerlessness. The purpose with this literature review was to describe how caregivers of persons with cancer experience their changed situation of life. The sources of information used in analysis are 13 articles who describe the experiences of caregivers. The result is presented in four main themes with sub themes. These four themes are Changed <em>life situation, Powerlessness and helplessness, Support is important</em> and <em>Need for information</em>. In the presented result it is clear that relations between family members is either deepened or worsen. The need for information and support has showed itself to be of great value for family members. It is of importance to implement the result in healthcare so that registered nurses and other staff can be attentive to the experiences of the relatives. This knowledge can help nurses and other personnel to offer better opportunities to give support to these relatives.</p>

I denna kandidatuppsats undersöks hur ett förändrat produktionsupplägg påverkar ett svensktproducerande företags konkurrenskraft när konkurrensen från globala lågprisalternativ medkort leveranstid ökar. Genom att byta produktionsupplägg från produktion mot lager tillmontering mot order och genom att standardisera artiklar och till viss del modulindelaprodukter kan kundorderpunkten flyttas bak i produktionsprocessen. Komponenternamonteras då ihop till slutprodukt först när kundordern anlänt, vilket bidrar till att antaletlagerförda variantartiklar minskar vilket är något som bidrar till en lägre kapitalbindning.Kostnadsbesparingen detta medför kan användas till att utveckla ordervinnande egenskaper.Exempel på sådana egenskaper är att förbättra kvaliteten på produkterna, öka mervärdet,förlänga garantin samt stärka varumärket som ett mer miljövänligt alternativ. / This Bachelor thesis examines how a changed production structure affects one Swedishmanufacturing corporation’s competitiveness, when competition from global low priceoptions with short delivery times is increasing. By switching production structure from “maketo stock” to “assembly to order” and by standardizing articles, to some extent, modularizeproducts, the customer order decoupling point moves back in the production process. Thecomponents are assembled into finished products when the orders arrive, thus helping toreduce the number of stocked variant articles, and generally to decrease the value of fixedcapital.The cost savings this entails can be used to develop order-winning properties, to improveproduct quality, increase the added value and extend the warranty or work to become anenvironmentally friendly alternative, which strengthens the brand.