his study focuses on Google’s user agreements and how students within the field of library and information science at the University of Borås are perceiving and relating to these agreements. User agreements are designed as contracts which makes the user data available for Google, but also for the user to protect his or her personal integrity. A problem recent studies show is that few internet users read these agreements and don’t know enough about what Google collect and do with their user data. In this study the concept of surveillance capitalism is used to describe how Google has become a dominant actor on a new form of market. This market is partly formed by Google’s business model which turns user data into financial gain for the company. It is discussed in recent studies that this form of exploitation of user data is problematic and is intruding on people’s personal integrity. The theoretical framework was constructed from theories that social norms influence human behaviour which makes people sign the agreements without reading them. Technological determinism and affordance are also used to discuss how technology contributes to influence people. Surveys where distributed to examine how the students perceived Google’s user agreements. The results of the study show that the students seems to know a lot about what Google collects and how the user data is used, although they rarely read them since they perceive the agreements as complicated and too long.

Notre thèse propose, à partir du corpus psychanalytique, d’élever la notion de « surgissement » à la hauteur d’un concept suffisamment heuristique pour, d’une part, expliquer le phénomène de « cyberdépendance », d’autre part, justifier la possibilité d’intégrer le virtuel dans un dispositif psychothérapeutique. Au travers du « surgissement », notre thèse prend comme objet d’étude le rapport qu’entretient l’homme avec l’imprévu de la contingence qui selon nous caractérise principalement la phénoménologie numérique, gouvernée par des algorithmes humainement imprédictibles. Nous proposons donc un modèle de compréhension du virtuel qui se fonde sur la dialectique du hasard et du déterminisme telle qu’elle a été articulée par Freud. Cette recherche vérifiera au travers d’une méthode clinique nouvelle que le virtuel peut constituer un moyen avantageux d’investigation de l’inconscient par l’exploitation « d’instants de surgissements » en après-coup. Cette méthode se fonde sur le principe suivant : plus un sujet est en prise avec un désir refoulé, plus il entretiendra un rapport animiste avec le surgissement. / Originating from the psychoanalytic corpus, our thesis aims at raising "emergence" to the position of a heuristic enough concept able to explain on one hand, the phenomenon of "Internet and computer addiction" and on the other hand, legitimate the opportunity to integrate virtual world in a psychotherapeutic process. Through "emergence", our thesis focuses on the relationship between mankind and the unexpected contingency that we believe to be a main feature of digital phenomenology, ruled by algorithms which cannot be predicted by human beings. We are therefore offering a way, built on the dialectic of chance versus determinism as formulated by Freud, to comprehend virtuality. Thanks to a new clinical method, this research will establish that virtual world can prove to be a great mean of investigating the unconscious by exploiting brief occurences of "emergence" with the benefit of hindsight. This method is based on the following principle: the more a subject is confronted to a repressed desire, the more he or she will sustain a animist connection with the phenomenon of emergence.

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The research was to examine the issue of environmental determinism. It was an ideology that was prevalent throughout the early decades of the 20th century that held that the natural environment was responsible for virtually all human development. It helped bring the study of geography into the venue of postsecondary education, where it was viewed as a tool for study of human activities. It was a new science inspired by Darwinism that viewed human adaptation to the natural environment as critical to socialization. Relying on historical sources, the purpose of the study was to reveal how environmental determinism became a controversial extension of an ancient belief system. It played a role in religious thought, philosophy, and the rise of the social sciences. It likely dates back to the Neolithic epoch in which cultures explained the mysteries of the natural world in terms of fearsome anthropomorphisized elements. Today, the gods and goddesses have fallen by the wayside, while environmental determinism has not. Eventually, the ideology lost its major supporter and then became a topic of disapproval. However, it was never entirely disproven, but it did fall from grace. And, it is a belief that has persisted for centuries. It was central to Calvinism and some versions of Protestantism that were relocated to North America where it took root. In view of the evidence, it is proposed that environmental determinism be reopened for reassessment and debate. It is manifest that future generations be apprised of the potential problems that it may inspire. To paraphrase Ellen Churchill Semple, the study of humans without consideration of the earth, would be like studying cactus without consideration of the desert.

Parallelization is an important part of modern data systems. However, the non-determinism of thread scheduling introduces the difficult problem of considering all different execution orders when constructing an algorithm. Therefore deterministic-by-design concurrent systems are attractive. A new approach called LVars consists of using data which is part of a lattice, with a predefined join operation. Updates to shared data are carried out using the join operation and thus the updates commute. Together with limiting the reads of shared data, this guarantees a deterministic result. The Reactive Async framework follows a similar approach but has several aspects which can cause a non-deterministic result. The goal with this thesis is to explore how we can ammend Reactive Async in order to guarantee a deterministic result. First an exploration into the subtleties of lattice based data combined with concurrency is made. Then a formal model based on a simple object-oriented language is constructed. The constructed small-step operational semantics and type system are shown to guarantee a form of determinism. This shows that LVars-similar system can be implemented in an object-oriented setting. Furthermore the work can act as a basis for future revisions of Reactive Async and similar frameworks. / Parallellisering är en viktig del i moderna datasystem. Flertrådade applikationer innebär dock en svårighet i och med att programmerare måste ta alla exekveringsordningar i beaktning. Därför är beräkningsmodeller vars resultat är garanterat deterministiskt en attraktiv utväg. En ny modell, kallad LVars, använder gitterstrukturer tillsammans med en supremum-operation för att garantera att uppdateringar av delad data kommuterar. Detta tillsammans med begränsningar av läsning av datan garanterar ett deterministiskt resultat. Reactive Async är ett programmeringsramverk som följer en liknande strategi. Det finns dock flera delar i dess konstruktion som i en oförsiktig programmerares händer kan orsaka att ett programs resultat blir icke-deterministiskt. Målet med detta examensarbete är att utforska vilka modifikationer som skulle kunna göras av Reactive Async för att garantera determinism. Först görs en undersökning av de mer svårförståeliga delarna i kombinationen av gitterbaserad data med flertrådad exekvering. Sedan konstrueras en formell beräkningsmodell baserad på ett enkelt objektorienterat språk. Konstruktionens småstegade operationella semantik tillsammans med dess typsystem visas kunna garantera en form av determinism. Detta visar att ett system liknande LVars kan implementeras i ett objektorienterat språk. Därmed skulle detta arbete kunna ligga till grund för framtida versioner av Reactive Async.

Då det finns skillnader i skolresultat mellan manliga och kvinnliga elever i den svenska grund- och gymnasieskolan undersöks sättet elever talar, beskriver och resonerar kring matematik då det kan påverka inlärningen. Syftet med detta examensarbete var att undersöka gymnasieelevers attityder kring matematik. Tre fokusområden valdes ut för att studera elevernas diskurs, deras attityd till matematik, kontrollfokus och uppfattningar om hur inlärning av matematik sker. En enkätundersökning i pappersform delades ut till 200 elever på en gymnasieskola i en Svensk stad. Resultaten sorterades enligt könstillhörighet och undersöktes efter eventuella samband. Fynden indikerar att deltagarna, oavsett könstillhörighet, hade en starkt negativ bild av skolmatematiken. Vidare, kvinnliga elever hänvisade sina resultat i skolmatematiken till interna faktorer i större utsträckning än externa. Till skillnad från manliga elever som hade en mer jämn fördelning mellan externa och interna faktorer. Både manliga och kvinnliga elever hade en deterministisk uppfattning kring inlärning av skolmatematik, trots att båda grupper identifierade hårt arbete som en viktig faktor för inlärning av skolmatematik. De manliga eleverna hade en deterministisk syn på skolmatematiken då de kände sig maktlösa om de inte var "födda med det". De kvinnliga eleverna hade en deterministisk syn på skolmatematiken då de var mer självkritiska och, på grund av synen av matematik som en mansdominerad arena, står emot att identifiera sig själva som "smarta". Sammanfattningsvis, det visade sig att de tillfrågade gymnasieeleverna har negativa associationer till skolmatematiken, och könsstereotypa uppfattningar om skolmatematiken påverkar både manliga och kvinnliga elever negativt. / In light of mathematical achievement disparity between male and female elementary students in Swedish high school, student discourse about mathematics is investigated as a possible key factor. The purpose of this investigation was to examine upper secondary high school students’ attitudes towards learning mathematics. Three measurements were chosen in order to investigate student discourse, attitudes towards mathematics, locus of control and perceptions about the acquisition of mathematical knowledge. 200 student responses from the same upper secondary high school in a Swedish City were collected through a printed survey and analyzed in regards to gender. The findings indicate that the participants, regardless of gender, had a strongly negative attitude towards mathematics. Additionally, female students were more prone to attribute their achievements in mathematics to internal factors whereas male students had a more equal distribution of external and internal. Furthermore, both male and female students were more inclined to have a deterministic idea of mathematical knowledge, in spite of both groups identifying hard work as a key factor for success in mathematics. Arguably, the male students had a deterministic view of mathematics because they felt powerless if they were not “born with it”. On the other hand, the female students possibly had a deterministic view because they were more self-critical of their results and, because of existing discourse about mathematics as a male dominated arena, resist identifying as “smart”. Concluding, it was found that mathematics have strongly negative connotations for high school students, and existing stereotypical discourses limit both male and female students’ possibilities for learning.

Senses of Freedom explores Walter Pater’s provocative claim that poetry’s defining importance would be to “rearrange the details of modern life” in order to restore the “sense of freedom” lost to modern consciousness. Freedom, variously defined and contested, has long been a central concern to philosophical aesthetics, but few have made its problematics central to an applied criticism. The critical practice I explore asks how form, in a given instance, provides a “sense of freedom” by addressing anxieties of causal determinism, and foregrounding the cultural and linguistic materiality of a subjective perspective. After an introduction outlining and contextualizing a formalist aesthetic criticism drawn from Pater’s work, the dissertation is divided into two parts. Part I surveys aestheticism’s determinist vision (Chapter I) and defines the complex term personality (Chapter II) across Pater’s oeuvre. Aestheticism’s determinism anchors the authorial personality to a network of historically contingent cultural and linguistic determinants; while the personality in turn gives an epistemologically accessible human form to these defining “forces.” Part II exemplifies aesthetic criticism in stand-alone essays on the poetry of three modern authors: Charlotte Mew, Samuel Beckett, and W. H. Auden. In Mew’s work I examine the structure of confinement and passionate renunciation in the form of the hushed tone broken by the “cri de coeur.” In Beckett, I consider the gnomic mode as resolving the problematized space, the “no-man’s land,” between objective and subjective artistic positions. In Auden, I explore how the “gratuitous” and “gratitude” align in his later work, the former an attempt to find artistic freedom within an adequate determinism, and the latter the resolution to recognize world and self in their radical necessity. / 2026-01-31T00:00:00Z

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