The aim with this thesis is to make a comparison between forcing tulips in a hydroponic system and the forcing off tulips that have been planted in soil. The results are mostly based on interviews with six Dutch and one Swedish tulip forcer and the managing director at the Horticultural Research Centre, Proeftuin Zwaagdijke, in the Netherlands. There are benefits and disadvantages with both methods. Tulip bulbs planted in soil seem to get a brighter colour after forcing, compared with those forced ?in water?.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to investigate how trained social workers experience information in their daily work. The thesis focussed on three major questions: - What type of information and information sources are mostly used by the trained social workers? - What kind of information barriers are described by the participants? - How can the patterns of information seeking and information use be understood on the basis of the trained social workers professional and social context? Semi-structured interviews were carried out with trained social workers working with child welfare enquiries. My theoretical framework consists of user and context oriented theories about classifications of information, information barriers and models of information sources. My conclusions are that trained social workers working with risk assessment in child protection services, need to use different kinds of information in their daily work, such as problem information, domain information and problem-solving information.

Embedded Systems Lab at Umeå University is currently part of a research project with the purpose to examine the behavior of dairy cows inside a barn. Each cow needs to be tracked with a precision of 50 cm, and since GPS-technique has poor functionality at indoor environments, an indoor positioning system needs to be developed.Embedded Systems Lab has already developed an indoor positioning system using IR-light and radio, but since this system demands extensive infrastructure and is rather expensive, an alternate positioning system using ultrasonic pulses and radio is being examined.In this report the range, beam angle and current consumption of ultrasonic transmitters- and receivers are investigated. Three different driver stages for the transmitter is tested, and two amplifier solutions for the receiver. The report also describes how the length of the transmitted ultrasonic pulse affects the received signal, accessibility of a ?shadowed? signal, and the effect of different sound frequency..

The aim of this comparative study is to analyse the French and the Polish regional governance in order to see if there are any differences in their regional ruling systems. Further more I will study their different possibilities in taking part in the European Union regional political market. The shape of the regional systems will be explored both organisationally (study of the institutional entities of the regional construction) and functionally (study of the competencies of the regional body etcetera) to focus on its cause on the regional development. My over all focus will be to find out whether regional rule means differently in the countries France and Poland.Several questions are dealt with and the two main ones are as follows; How do the different structures of the form of government in France and Poland influence the governance on the regional level? Do Poland, as a new member state of the European Union, have what it takes to face the challenges of the new membership; or are there a complex of problems arising from the admittance that prevent its regions from fully taking part in the European regional political market?Some of my conclusions are as follows;There are major differences between the two countries when it comes to their regional ruling systems leading to different abilities in taking part in the European regional political market.

Projects of all kinds generate documentation that needs to be organized and stored for future use. Well adapted tools, together with a unified modus operandi need to be available for both the project members and those having a more organizing role if an organization is to be effective.A study of the tools available to project members at Svenska Kraftnät have been performed along with an analysis of the guidelines for the tools' usage. The study has focused on the needs of the project members, not the organization as a whole, thus providing a bottom-up approach to the problem instead of the more organizational top-down approach. Interviews of around 20 project members, whose roles include project leaders, technical experts and documentation supervisors, have been conducted to get an idea of the practical problems that exists.All systems, except for a local network storage device, were found to at least meet Svenska Kraftnät's current demands. The usage guidelines, however, covers only the general process that a project should follow and lacks detailed information on a per system level in several areas.

The purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate how some teachers make use of the results of the national tests in mathematics to plan their teaching. The questions are how they plan their teaching in mathematics and if they use the results of the national tests to compare with their own teaching.   Five teachers in mathematics has been interviewed. I have used unstructured interviews with open-ended questions, and I have been able to ask follow-up questions based on their answers. The analysis of the survey is made from a systems theory approach.  The result of the survey shows that teachers make use of student performance to look at their own teaching of the current group of students. However, there is not enough time to rehearse and repair the deficiencies discovered in the national tests, which for some is perceived as a stress factor.

Active headsets have been on the market for years and now it is time for something else to enter the stage. The technology of active noise reduction can for exmple also be used in ventilation systems for reducing ventilation noise. An active control system principally consists of four important components, namely the downstream error microphone, the upstream detection or reference microphone, the digital signal processor (DSP) and a loudspeaker. The upstream reference microphone listen to the primary ventilation noise and sends it to the DSP which makes a phase shift to the signal and sends it to the loudspeaker. The loudspeaker sends out the opposite waveform of the incoming one and reduce the primary ventilation noise.

This study has been conducted on behalf of Vectura Consulting AB with the purpose to examine how different actors perceive the dimensions of sustainability and sustainable construction. The purpose is also to provide an understanding of existing barriers and opportunities for sustainable construction within the industry and exemplify with different directions for the actors in order to develop sustainability. The study has approach the research problem by using systems theory, developed by Checkland, to identify the relevant system. Other systems theories has been used as an theoretical framework in order to identify barriers and opportunities, which in this study are based on Hughes?s theory about reverse salients and salients.

Abstract In the contemporary world of information technology you find a multitude of applications and systems covering a broad spectrum of areas of need in different companies. One effect of this multitude of programs is the difficulty to make them exchange information with each other or to collaborate, since they are developed by different programming languages for different platforms, with different standards and different data formats. Our aim with this work is to describe how it is possible to tie these programs together to make them actually communicate with each other in order to exchange information, share their native methods and also to become a part of the overall business processes. In this integration task you will, among other things, find different levels of application integration such as data level, method level, application interface level and user interface level integration. Application integration also involves hardware components, called middleware, that facilitate the physical connection between applications.

This study concerns how organizations manage various problematic areaswhen implementeing Business Intelligence and experiences from BusinessIntelligence project failures on management level. In order to highlightthese questions, we have carried out interviews with four organizationswhich have great experience in working with Business Intelligence on adaily basis.The result of the study shows that all organizations deal with difficultiesregarding cost-benefit issues and justification concerning BusinessIntelligence investments. The result also showed that the organizationsfaced difficulties with integration concerning time and cost. Documentingand securing support systems presented different attitudes between theorganizations, primary in the question about sub complements to BusinessIntelligence and in the way that they were documented. In the discourse oflegal issues and privacy the majority of the organizations chose not to storepersonal information relative to legal security demands.

Studien har utförts i två organisationer, järnverket Uddeholm Tooling AB samt Statens Räddningsverk. På Uddeholm Tooling AB har undersökningen koncentrerats till avdelningen Terminalen och på Statens Räddningsverk har två enheter studerats, ekonomienheten i Karlstad samt Revinge skola. På såväl Terminalen som Statens Räddningsverk finns problem gällande kommunikationen mellan olika aktörer. Studien har genomförts med en kvalitativ metod bestående av observationer och intervjuer. Syftet med studien är att undersöka och skapa förståelse för kommunikationens betydelse vid förmedling av ekonomisk information.Under studiens gång har meningsskapande blivit det övergripande ämnesområdet.

Denna studie belyser några svenska statliga myndigheters genomförande av FN:s konvention om barnets rättigheter. Ambitionen är att fördjupa förståelsen av och få ökad insikt om betydelsefulla förutsättningar vid ett implementeringsarbete sett ur ett systemteoretiskt perspektiv. Studien baseras på semistrukturerade intervjuer med myndighetsrepresentanter. Genom framställande av myndigheternas hierarkiska nivåer: ledarnivå, organisationsnivå och kontextnivå, skildras respektive nivås betydelse och medverkan under konkretiseringen av konventionen. Studien indikerar att en kombination av information, yttrande och förståelse mellan de olika nivåerna, är av central betydelse beträffande realiserande av Barnkonventionen..

Sustainability reports have during the last decade had a strong development. Both in terms of establishing a sustainability assurance, in its form, and get it assured together with standards, principles and regulations which organisations and accountants have utilized. The growth of sustainability reports and the choice of getting them assured have in particular favoured the accounting business. Due to this result, some critics have voiced that assuring a sustainability report gain accounting firms more than it gains the actual organisation. Other say that it is necessary in order to increase the credibility and the eligibility of the report, while it also has become a requirement from stakeholders.

This study is an attempt to examine how hospital libraries should develop its activities towards their target groups in time of reductions. The method was a case study of the hospital libraries in Uddevalla and Trollhättan. An opinion poll was carried out among a selection of hospital staff, patients, medical researchers and students. In addition a patient group at some wards was observed. The libraries in the study produce an annual report, which presents a proposal for developments.

The purpose of this essay is to do an ecocritical reading of Vilhelm Moberg?s The Emi-grants from 1949. By asking and answering the three following questions; How does a system present itself, What are the different reasons for emigration; Why does differentsystem fit some well and some not.By using two articles from Green Planets - Ecology and Science Fiction to illus-trate two different views; Different parts value in an ekosystem and The Ship as an ecosystem. I have also created, based on the literary text four different terms concern-ing the dynamic system; Stable, Static, Unstable and Collapsing systems. I have found that all system goes through changes, some drastic, that changes the way the parts of the systems fit with in it.