Les images et données volumiques sont devenues importantes dans notre vie quotidienne que ce soit sur le plan artistique, culturel, ou scientifique. Les données volumiques ont un intérêt important dans l'imagerie médicale, l'ingénierie, et l'analyse du patrimoine culturel. Ils sont créées en utilisant la reconstruction tomographique, une technique qui combine une large série de scans 2D capturés de plusieur points de vue. Chaque scan 2D est obtenu par des methodes de rayonnement : Rayons X pour les scanners CT, ondes radiofréquences pour les IRM, annihilation électron-positron pour les PET scans, etc. L'acquisition des images et données volumique est influencée par le bruit provoqué par différents facteurs. Le bruit dans les images peut être causée par un manque d'éclairage, des défauts électroniques, faible dose de rayonnement, et un mauvais positionnement de l'outil ou de l'objet. Le bruit dans les données volumique peut aussi provenir d'une variété de sources : le nombre limité de points de vue, le manque de sensibilité dans les capteurs, des contrastes élevé, les algorithmes de reconstruction employés, etc. L'acquisition de données non bruitée est iréalisable. Alors, il est souhaitable de réduire ou d'éliminer le bruit le plus tôt possible dans le pipeline. La suppression du bruit tout en préservant les caractéristiques fortes d'une image ou d'un objet volumique reste une tâche difficile. Nous proposons une méthode multi-échelle pour lisser des images 2D et des données tomographiques 3D tout en préservant les caractéristiques à l'échelle spécifiée. Notre algorithme est contrôlé par un seul paramètre - la taille des caractéristiques qui doivent être préservées. Toute variation qui est plus petite que l'échelle spécifiée est traitée comme bruit et lissée, tandis que les discontinuités telles que des coins, des bords et des détails à plus grande échelle sont conservés. Nous démontrons les données lissées produites par notre algorithme permettent d'obtenir des images nettes et des iso-surfaces plus propres. Nous comparons nos résultats avec ceux des methodes précédentes. Notre méthode est inspirée par la diffusion anisotrope. Nous calculons nos tenseurs de diffusion à partir des histogrammes continues locaux de gradients autour de chaque pixel dans les images et autour de chaque voxel dans des volumes. Comme notre méthode de lissage fonctionne entièrement sur GPU, il est extrêmement rapide.

This thesis examines young people's attitudes to some aspects of sustainable development.The focus is on attitudes to preservation and to utilization of nature and also to solidarity andto equal distribution of resources. Hence the ecological, social and economic dimensions ofsustainable development are examined in the same survey. The study is aiming to examinehow the attitudes are distributed according to sex, educational programmes and urban/ruralliving as well as to examine how the values, from which the attitudes emanate, are correlatedwith each other.The results show that young female students in theoretical programs and students who livein larger cities are most supportive of nature preservation. The same pattern recurs with evengreater clarity on the attitudes to solidarity. Attitudes to utilization of nature can also be distinguishedclearly between the sexes by young men having more positive attitudes to utilizationthan young women. However, the differences between educational programmes andbetween students from urban and rural areas are clearly smaller than when it comes to attitudesto preservation and to solidarity. Attitudes to equal distribution of recources exhibitirregular patterns. Young women have more positive attitudes than young men but the linksbetween attitudes to equality and educational programme or rural/urban living, are not pointingin any clear direction. The results also show that there is a clear and positive correlationbetween positive attitudes to nature preservation and a willingness to show solidarity with awide circle of people. Those who say they care for nature also say that they are prepared tocare for other people.

The increased demand from citizens for efficient service delivery from public sector organizations has implications for the information that underpins those services. Robust and effective information management is required. Information is looked upon as a resource that can give organizations a competitive edge if it is well leveraged. To address the need for more services and for more efficient service delivery, the Swedish government has promoted e-government initiatives and the two municipalities that are the subjects of this research have responded by engaging in e-service development and provision. e-Government has at its core the use of information and communication technology (ICT).  The municipalities have embarked on the analysis and automation of their business processes and hence the use of information systems.  Web-based technologies have created a two-way communication flow which has generated complex information for the municipalities to address. This development calls for stronger information and records management regimes. Enterprise Content Management is a new information management construct proposed to help organizations to deal with all their information resources. It promotes enterprise-wide information management. There is, however, little knowledge and understanding of ECM in the Swedish public sector. Further, how e-government developments have affected the management of information is an issue that has not been explored. Traditionally Swedish public authorities have employed records management to address the challenges of managing information. Records management has been used for the effective and systematic capture of records and the maintenance of their reliability and authenticity. While information helps with the daily running of business activities, records carry the evidentiary value of the interactions between the citizens and the municipalities. This research critically examines the interface between Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and records management as information/records management approaches. This has meant examining what the similarities and the differences between the two approaches are.  The research instrumentally used the lens of the Records Continuum Model (RCM), which promotes the management of the entire records’ continuum, a proactive approach, combines the management of archives and records and supports the pluralisation of the captured records. The research further highlights the information management challenges that the municipalities are facing as they engage in e-government developments.    Keywords: Enterprise Content Management, Records Management, E-government, Long-term Preservation, Business Process Management, Enterprise Architecture. / Centre for Digital Information Management

The European Union has lead to higher collaboration between the European countries, more exchange of information and a tendency to centralize more political decisions. There is also a tendency to try to create legislations that are more similar in each nation.   This paper aims at giving an idea about the challenges that the nations might meet when working towards higher archival collaboration within the European Union. The report by the European Commission “Report on archives in the enlarged European Union - Increased archival collaboration in Europe: action plan” from 2005 states that there is a need for higher European collaboration within the field of archives. The goal is to create a gateway for the citizens to have easy access to archival information from the different member states.   There are some obstacles for this to easily work. To start with the member nations have different cultural traditions and legislations when it comes to freedom of information. It has also got to do with technical issues such as which computer systems, file types and structures et c that are allowed.   This paper takes its starting point in the field of digital deliveries to the national archives of Sweden and The United Kingdom. A comparison has been made to show the difference of how these countries proceed with their archival work to give an idea about how these differences can affect the wish for higher collaboration within the European Union.

The number of opportunities for cooperative computation has exponentially been increasing with growing interaction via Internet technologies. These computations could occur between trusted partners, between partially trusted partners, or even between competitors. Most of the time, the communicating parties may not want to disclose their private data to the other principal while taking the advantage of collaboration, hence concentrating on the results rather than private and perhaps useless data values. For performing such computations, one party must know inputs from all the participants / however if none of the parties can be trusted enough to know all the inputs, privacy will become a primary concern. Hence the techniques for Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) are quite relevant and practical to overcome such kind of privacy gaps. The subject of SMC has evolved from earlier solutions of combinational logic circuits to the recent proposals of anonymity-enabled computation. In this thesis, we put together the significant research that has been carried out on SMC. We demonstrate the concept by concentrating on a specific technique called Oblivious Polynomial Evaluation (OPE) together with concrete examples. We put critical issues, challenges and the level of adaptation achieved before the researchers. We also provide some future research opportunities based on the literature survey.

This study investigated the relationship between Project Management Planning (PMP) practices and project success for preservation projects of historical significance located in an urban context. The planning for these projects was also emphasized because these historic buildings are recognized by the National Register of Historic Places. Yet, when analyzing the performance metrics of these historically significant renovation projects that included budget and time after the project has been completed denote problems in the management and delivery of these projects. The project team members' perceptions of PMP practices and how these practices affect project success were the focus of this research. To ascertain the importance of these questions, the study incorporated three major bodies of knowledge. The first body of literature focused on project management practices associated with project success. The second concentrated on historic preservation with a focus on historic significance and project planning. The third body centered on facility management as it relates to project management issues in the delivery of a construction project. Combining these bodies of knowledge into one literature review contributed to the development of a conceptual model to illustrate how the research variables and hypotheses were established. To test the research questions and its hypothesis, three statistical tools were used: analysis of variance (ANOVA), descriptive data analysis, and ordinary least square regression. The conclusions from these tests indicated that differences in perceptions of success criteria existed between the project team members. The findings also indicated a significant disconnect between the perceptions of project success and actual performance of project delivery. Furthermore, the findings indicated that only a few project management practices tested were perceived to have significant correlation with project success. The project team members felt that the success criteria of performance and the success factors associated with performance -- site analysis, site layout and staging, and a quality assurance plan -- were more important to the success of the renovation project than many of the management practices in this study.

This thesis is about the heritage in Vientiane. In an attempt to go beyond a more traditional descriptive approach, the study aims at bringing forward a discussion about the definition, or rather the multiplicity of definitions, of the concept of heritage as such. The unavoidabe tension emanating from a modern western frame of thought being applied to the geographical and cultural setting of the study provides an opportunity to develop a criticism of some of the assumptions underlying our current definitions of heritage. For this particular study, heritage is defined as to include stories, places and things. It is a heritage that is complex and ambiguous, because the stories are parallel, the definitions and perceptions of place are manifold and contested, and the things and their meaning appear altered, depending on what approach to materiality is used. The objective is not to propose how to identify and manage such a complex heritage. Rather, it is about what causes this complexity and ambiguity and what is in between the stories, places and things. In addition, the study aims to critically deconstruct the contemporary heritage discourse, which privileges material authenticity, form and fabric and the idea that heritage values are universal and should be preserved for the future and preferably forever. In Laos, Buddhism dominates as religious practice. In this context, the notion of material impermanence also governs the perception of reality. Approaches to materiality in Buddhism are related to the general ideas that things are important from a contemporary perspective and primarily as containers for spiritual values, that the spiritual values carry the connection to the past, and that heritage is primarily spiritual in nature and has little to do with physical structure and form. By exploring the concepts of restoration, destruction and consumption in such a perspective, we understand that preservation and restoration are active processes of materialisation. We also understand that destruction and consumption are necessary for the appreciation of certain heritage expressions, and that heritage is being constantly created. With this understanding, this book is an argument for challenging contemporary western heritage discourse and question its fundamental ideology of preservationism.

Approximately 600 to 500 million years ago, a major evolutionary radiation called the “Cambrian Explosion” gave rise to nearly all of the major animal phyla known today. This radiation is recorded by various fossil lagerstätten, such as the Burgess Shale in Canada, where soft-bodied animals are preserved in exquisite detail. Many Cambrian fossils are enigmatic forms that are morphologically dissimilar to their modern descendants, but which still provide valuable information when interpreted as stem-group taxa because they record the actual progression of evolution and give insight into the order of character acquisitions and homologies between living taxa. One such group of fossils is the anomalocaridids, large presumed predators that have had a complicated history of description. Their body has a trunk with a series of lateral lobes and associated gills, and a cephalic region with a pair of large frontal appendages, a circular mouth apparatus, stalked eyes and a cephalic carapace. Originally, two taxa were described from the Burgess Shale, Anomalocaris and Laggania, however data presented herein suggests that the diversity of the anomalocaridids was much higher. Newly collected fossil material revealed that a third Burgess Shale anomalocaridid, Hurdia, is known from whole-body specimens and study of its morphology has helped to clarify the morphology and systematics of the whole group. Hurdia is distinguished by having mouthparts with extra rows of teeth, a unique frontal appendage, and a large frontal carapace. Two species, Hurdia victoria and Hurdia triangulata were distinguished based on morphometric shape analysis of the frontal carapace. A phylogenetic analysis placed the anomalocaridids in the stem lineage to the euarthropods, and examination of Hurdia’s well-preserved gills confirm the homology of this structure with the outer branches of limbs in upper stem-group arthropods. This homology supports the theory that the Cambrian biramous limb formed by the fusion of a uniramous walking limb with a lateral lobe structure bearing gill blades. In this context, new evidence is present on the closely allied taxon Opabinia, suggesting that it had lobopod walking limbs and a lateral lobe structure with attached Hurdia-like gills. The diversity of the anomalocaridids at the Burgess Shale is further increased by two additional taxa known from isolated frontal appendages. Amplectobelua stephenensis is the first occurrence of this genus outside of the Chengjiang fauna in China, but Caryosyntrips serratus is an appendage unique to the Burgess Shale. To gain a better understanding of global distribution, a possible anomalocaridid is also described from the Sirius Passet biota in North Greenland. Tamisiocaris borealis is known from a single appendage, which is similar to Anomalocaris but unsegmented, suggesting this taxon belongs to the arthropod stem-lineage, perhaps in the anomalocaridid clade. Thus, the anomalocaridids are a widely distributed and highly diverse group of large Cambrian presumed predators, which provide important information relevant to the evolution of the arthropods.

This Bachelor Thesis investigates the inherent conflict of preservation and livelihood, and what can be done to avoid this problem. The purpose of the study is to investigate if there is an enhanced risk of overexploitation in areas in proximity to forest reserves. This assumption is based on the fact that people living in close contact with nature are directly dependent on ecosystem-services for maintaining their livelihood. Hence, preservation of an area could result in degradation, if unprotected areas will have to sustain more people with, for example, firewood and pastoral land. Based on a field study in Babati District, Northern Tanzania, I have seen signs that imply that preservation of Ufiome, the forest covering Mt Kwaraa, has had effects on areas in proximity to the gazetted forest. The method used to conduct this study was semi-structured interviews with local farmers living in closeness to Ufiome NR, but also with district officials. Finally, I think that the solution to many of the problems that come with preservation are possible to handle by the use of Participatory Forest Management (PFM); Joint Forest Management (JFM) and Community Based Forest Management (CBFM). The key to coming to terms with conservational problems lies on scale-related solutions that focuses on implementing management of natural resources on a local level, claiming that fine-scale ecological issues are best dealt with on fine-scale social levels.

Local Roots is a design of a system where local interest circles and study groups share their knowledge and interest in the context of an outdoor museum. Here, museum visitors can get inspired by a first glimpse into the local culture of traditional food production. This thesis project mainly focuses on the introduction experience to this system, on the outdoor museum plant tour "what's my flavor". Interactive plant audio installations of this tour are placed around the territory of the museum. By touching different parts of a plant, museum visitors trigger information about its nutritional and cultural values. They start to see food opportunities in natural ecosystems, gain experience and train watchfulness the same way they would do it for centuries before, by touching, smelling and reading the signs of nature together with the more experienced peers.