The global market is becoming increasingly integrated and to keep up with growing competition and to achieve even greater success, companies expand to foreign markets. Previous studies have shown that the concept of psychic distance has an important impact on international performance regarding small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). The aim of our study is to provide the reader with a deeper understanding of how psychic distance influences export performance regarding Swedish SMEs. Through a single case study of a Swedish SME, we chose to research three different markets in three different continents. Our findings show that psychic distance influences export performance through export marketing strategy and active learning.

User education is an important aspect of university libraries' service to its users. This Masters' Thesis is about online user education. The aim of this study is to analyse five Swedish online user courses in relation to information literacy and learning theory. The web-sites were explored through textual analyses to find how concepts of information literacy and learning theory are expressed. The theoretical framework is based on Carol C Kuhlthau's three levels of user education, Paul Ramsden's three theories of teaching in higher education and Christine Bruce's different aspects of information literacy.

This study aims to examine what students in two schools think of the physical environment in their school, and how this affect their studies. My main question I wanted to answer was:How does the students think that the physical environment affect their day in school?I also wanted to find out what the students think is important in the physical environment in their school. The study is based on interviews with students i two different schools. One secondary school, in which three eight-grade students were interviewed, and one high school in which two students were interviewed. The result of the interviews is that the students think that their work in school is affected by the physical environment. The most important things is to feel safe in school and to have the possibilities to do studies without limitations in the environment, for example room to do their own studies, and a flexibility and variation in the environment.

Uppsatsens syfte ämnar undersöka svenskars benägenhet att välja en utrikes född partner utifrån individers bostadsort samt deras egen och föräldrars utbildning. Valet av partner analyseras utifrån ett perspektiv där valet inte sker slumpmässigt utan styrs av faktorer som påverkar möjligheterna till vilken partner svenskar träffar. Tidigare forskning har främst studerat parförhållanden mellan olika minoritetsgrupper och minoriteters tendens att ha en inrikes född partner. Eftersom parförhållanden mellan majoriteten och minoriteterna anses vara en indikator på hur starka gränserna är mellan olika grupper i samhället, är det av sociologiskt intresse att också studera hur majoritetsgruppen väljer en partner från minoritetsgrupper. Teoriavsnittet beskriver inledningsvis begreppen endogami, homogami och exogami som olika former av parförhållanden för att sedan diskutera hur svenskars partnermarknad påverkas av deras socioekonomiska resurser och sociala kontext.

Background: The way in which corporate managers interpret, reason and evaluate uncertainties and constant changes, and how they take advantage of their experiences and wisdom can make a big difference for the long term survival of their companies. The requirements for efficiency and flexibility have increased in many ways, especially concerning the workforce needed and its degree of competency. In Sweden, employee recruiting industry has grown concurrently with the changes in the Swedish economy. Purpose: The purpose is to better understand the recruiting industry by performing a theoretical evaluation from a cognitive perspective. Delimitation: We intended to study the cognitive characteristics of the Swedish recruitment industry.

This essay examines how age, power and agency is represented and reproduced in contemporary Swedish picture books.This is done through a combination of discourse analysis and literary analysis.It uses theoretical perspectives from sociology, and views childhood as a social construct. It sees discourse and language use as both representing and constructing social reality in the tradition of Norman Fairclough and critical discourse analysis. The main results is that the discourses of childhood in the material construct children as a separate group in society, and childhood as a special time in life. Children is portrayed as both social actors and in need of protection from adult themes and worries..

With examples from a single classroom situation, several educational moments show what goes on between the teacher and the student. The teacher?s responsibility in the learning process is, with a gesture frozen in the air of the moment, to lead and follow the student in her tentative efforts at seeking knowledge. Initially, it is an attempt to shed light upon the "not yet seen" with a certainty that the student herself possesses the capacity and the aptitude to reach greater insight and clarity in her understanding. The Validation/Feil Method presented in this instructional situation illustrates how best to communicate with elderly people suffering from Alzheimer?s dementia.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the research library of Linnæus University is used by students as a meeting place. Building upon Putnam's theory of bonding and bridging social capital and Audunson's conception of high and low intensive meeting places, it aims to explore the research library's potential for creating social capital and thus strengthening both learning and democracy in a university context. Borrowing part of the survey design from a study conducted as part of the Norwegian PLACE project, this study collects responses from 134 students as to their use of the library as a meeting place. The results show that the Linnæus University library is used for a variety of meetings of both high and low intensity, why it should provide a good setting for the creation of social capital. There seems to be a connection between how often one visits the library, as well as to which department one belongs, and how one uses the library as a meeting place.

The objective of this project is to study how two asperger units, one at a junior school and one at a senior-level school are carrying at their work. I have interviewed one pedagouge at each unit to find out how they organize the education at the units and how they work to develop the students' social skills based on the students' functional handicap. The interviews showed that the following factors are providing the foundation for the pedagouges' work with the students: knowledge of the Asperger syndrome and the symptoms shown by each individual, the pedagouges being explicit and well structured as a professional and as adult combined with him/her being humble and showing respect towards the students and self reflection.Keywords: Asperger syndrome, functional handicap, social interaction, attitude..

För att mångfalden av människor i arbetslivet ska kunna tillvaratas, uppskattas och erkännas krävs ett organisationsklimat ochettledarskap som möjliggör detta. Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur ett meningsskapande kring mångfald kommer tilluttryck inom Sveriges Television, då produkten ska nå en mångfaldig publik.Sveriges Television är ett public service-företag vars uppdrag är att nå ut till tv-tittare i hela Sverige, vilket förutsätter en mångfaldig produkt. Åtta semistrukturerade intervjuer har genomförts med anställda på Sveriges Television. Intervjuerna har transkriberats och resultatet hartolkats utifrån Piagets konstruktivistiska lärandeteori och Mezirows teori om transformativt lärande. Våra viktigaste resultat visar att det som upplevs som meningsskapande kommer till uttryck i relationen mellan det som anses värdefullt och det lärande som de anställda får ta del av.

A pupil with ADHD is constantly getting new impulses and is unable to focus and remain concentration on their task at school. When the pupil loses concentration he or she can often be loud and thereby disturbing all the other pupils in the classroom. One of the reasons for losing their concentration is that these pupils got poor working memory. A recently study shows that working memory can be improved by playing and practice music.A theory that all people have a multiple intelligence that emerges from learning is a part of this study because school should encourage all children and ensure their individual learning. Multiple intelligences means that each person learns in different ways, for example through the musical intelligence that this essay partly focuses on.

National Agency for Education for the results of national sample results show that students with another mother tongue than Swedish have low results with a larger percentage than majority students. Research shows that this depends on their mother tongue and the importance of language in the subject to learn.The purpose of this study was to examine how teachers experience, plan and implement their teaching field of mathematics in the preparatory class. The focus is on two perspectives; an intercultural perspective and a social perspective. The newly arrived pupils in the preparatory class come from different parts of the world which leads to an intercultural classroom being formed. The aim of the social perspective is understand how students integrate into the social in the classroom.I use qualitative methods through interviews.

This thesis presents the results of the implementation and evaluation of two machine learning algorithms [Baz98, GB97]based on notions from Rough Set theory [Paw82]. Both algorithms were implemented and tested using the Weka [WF00]software framework. The main purpose for doing this was to investigate whether the experimental results obtained in [Baz98]could be reproduced, by implementing both algorithms in a framework that provided common functionalities needed by both. As a result of this thesis, a Rough Set framework accompanying the Weka system was designed and implemented, as well as three methods for discretization and three classi cation methods. The results of the evaluation did not match those obtained by the original authors.

AbstractIntroductionOccurrence of bacteraemia and fungemia is a serious condition with high mortality and the incidence is increasing worldwide. The aim of this study was to survey the occurrence of bacteria and fungi in blood cultures from adult patients domiciled in the county of Gävleborg during one year and also to calculate the incidence and mortality in the same geographical area.MethodThis is a descriptive epidemiologic study, based on all episodes of blood cultures analyzed at the Microbiology laboratory, Gävle hospital during 2005. Patients from 20 years of age, domiciled in the county of Gävleborg at the date of drawing the blood culture, where included in the study. Criteria of exclusion were negative blood cultures and cultures which were classified as contaminants.ResultsAltogether there were 4 564 blood cultures analyzed, resulting in 524 (11 %) positive cultures for further study. There were 442 patients (48 % women) involved in 499 episodes with confirmed bacteraemia or fungemia.

Denna studie ämnar att gå igenom lärande på arbetsplatsen och hur det situerade lärandet från en tjänst kan användas i andra tjänster. Syftet med uppsatsen är att ta reda på hur individer som arbetar inom HR, som jobbar med personalrelaterade frågor, upplever att tidigare arbetslivserfarenheter har betydelse för det arbete de har idag. Det teoretiska ramverket utgår från det sociokulturella perspektivet på lärande, där tänkandet och handlandet hos oss människor betraktas som situerat till sociala sammanhang. För att kunna belysa det lärandet ytterligare används begreppen redskap, mediering och praktikgemenskap för att förstå hur lärandet kan främjas. Studien baseras på kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer som genomfördes med åtta kvinnor som innehar en HR-tjänst idag.