This report is the written documentation of a project work carried out at the Division of Engineering Materials at Luleå University of Technology in cooperation with Seco Tools AB. The project deals with the analysis of residual stresses in Ti-Al-N thin film grown on WC/Co cutting inserts. The composition of Al varied from 0% up to 75%. Increasing the Al content in the Ti(1-x)Alx N compound improves the compressive residual stresses even after annealing of the material. The experiments have been performed in a high temperature x-ray diffractometer (HTXRD) where the interplanar atomic spacing was determined in-situ and subsequent converted into stresses.

This thesis highlights the complex relationship between social movements and the mass media. The new social movements really have to struggle to get access to the media sphere, often enforced to use spectacular media strategies, and at the same time maintain their political messages. This struggle gives us reason to question the liberal notion of the media as a neutral arena for political communication and debate. In fact we argue that the media industry should be seen as a powerful actor and that the mass media serves to maintain and enforce an ideology that serves the political and economic elites in the liberal capitalist democracy. The Social movements that seek to question these elites and present an alternative, as they did during the EU-meeting in Gothenburg 2001, quite clearly gets far from neutral media image of the political actions taking place instead the are portrayed as violent or associated with violence and not presented as legitimate or believable political subjects..

Jönköping's municipality requested a diploma work witch would present the experiences, as arisen during the existence of the echo village Smeden.To recive information for the background, literature at the university library were searched at the database "Libris" with words like "echo village" and "ecological living".Data was retrieved from 28 questionnaires that were sent out to the inhabitants of the echo village Smeden. The questionnaires contained questions about experiences, opinions, ideas and thoughts about living in this echo village. The results were analyzed and presented by diagrams and tables and showed that the inhabitants where most unsatisfied with the sewer and the system of the toilet. In the opposite the inhabitants experienced that the remaining systems were in satisfactory and the majority of the inhabitants were very pleased with their living conditions.Conclusions of this study are that an echo village would be a suitable alternative to an ordinary living and that ecological living would be something that would work well even in the future. An important thing to remember is that the systems of the households must be easy for the inhabitants to maintain otherwise the environmental thinking would be in risk of failure if some don?t have the energy to manage this properly..

Preschool is a place that is continually undergoing change at a rapid pace and developing the skills of our educators is essential for their ability to keep up with these changes. Guidance conversations can be used as a vital tool for the educators competence development.The purpose of this essay is to investigate how educators, special educators and preschool principals think and reason about the use of guidance conversations in preschool.A qualitative method has been used in the shape of interviews with educators, special educators and preschool principals working within different districts of a medium sized city in the south of Sweden.These interviews revealed that the use of guidance conversations is often controlled by specific needs and is used when a problem arises amongst the children. There are many expectations on the special educators role in these conversations, one of which is the role of conversation leader with the purpose of guiding the conversation amongst involved parties and give them the tools they need to resolve problems by themselves instead of delivering packaged solutions..

Our purpose with this study was to look at the pawnbrokers role in the Swedish welfare state from the customers perspective. Our purpose was also to see how the customers used the loan. We wondered why people used the pawnbroker's and how the pawnbroker's could be understood as a providing alternative related to the three spheres state, market and family? Above looking at previous science we also did three interviews with people who worked at a pawnshop, a budgetadvisor and a smaller investigation with customers of a pawnshop.We came to the conclusion that the customer needed the money from the loan to buy food in many cases, according to the investigation we did with the customers. According to the employees the customers needed the money for different things, such as paying the bills or unexpected expenses.

ABSTRACTMusic and differences in knowledge ? a study of music teachers experiences with differences in musical knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to, out of a music teacher?s perspective, see if the differences in music abilities between 7th grade students are at all, or in some ways connected to the previous schools they?ve attended. I will also research in what areas, in the subject of music, students are differing more, as well as less, in their knowledge. The analysis is based on interviews with six 7th grade music teachers working in the Swedish nine-year compulsory school system.

It has in a broader extent become important for companies and other organizations with large organizations to have a properly functioning web platform where content management is an essential part. Polopoly is a web content management system developed in Sweden, used by several European corporations but foremost Scandinavian such working in different media related business areas.Our aim has been to analyze this tool and render a report which hopefully will assist the initiator of our thesis; a consulting enterprise called Qurius, in their negotiations with future customers, when to suggest Polopoly as a suitable content management solution.By using case studies at companies currently using Polopoly, our goal is to define which characteristic makes the product a competitive publishing tool. To put our analysis in perspective, we will compare the most important aspects of Polopoly with a similar product.According to the results of our investigation we consider Polopoly being a beneficial choice with regard to a number of important parameters. Finally we have summarized these properties in a list of examples explaining in which cases Polopoly is a preferable alternative as a web based content management platform..

Overweight and obesity among children and adolescents is increasing. Diseases which earlier occurred exclusively among adults are now also observed among children. There is an urgent need for new treatments that can change this negative trend. The aim of this study was to describe existing treatments for obesity among children in the age of 6-12 and the effect of those treatments. This descriptive literature study is based on 17 research articles published between 2000 and 2007 from different parts in the world.

The purpose of this paper was that through discourse analysis look at how gender and the equality debate is created between two head debaters and commenter's on a forum. We have used Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson´s (1999) theory about Established and Outsiders to see power struggles between groups in the debate. With Jonathan Potters analysis tools in his book Representing Reality (1996) we were able to analyze the debate texts. Using discourse psychology, we were able to see how people use tactical discourse in their texts to represent themselves and the world in different ways.

The aim of this study was to evaluate parents and course leaders'perceptions of ComHome, a course in communication for parents. Thecourse aims to change the interaction between the parent and the child in aselected play activity based on a defined goal and agreed methodology. Thedata consisted of four group interviews and an individual interview with atotal of 12 parents and course leaders. The interviews were transcribed andcontent analyzed. The study showed that parents and course leadersconsidered goal attainment scaling as a rewarding approach.

Background: Pedagogical documentation is currently used as a natural part of the educational activities under the revised curriculum for preschool.Aim: The purpose of this study is to see how preschool teachers perceive and define educational documentation in preschool. The aim is also to see what opportunities and obstacles that may arise over the pedagogical documentation.Method: The study was conducted along a qualitative approach with questionnaires in order to reach more preschool teachers and thus obtain a broader picture of the subject content. From a phenomenological approach I have taken account of the preschool teachers' experience and perception of educational documentation and designed it to my own interpretation.Results: The results show that pedagogical documentation is an important tool in preschool teachers work not only found to contain a product, but seems more like a collection of a lot of products to be brought together into a whole..

The aim of my study was to investigate a few young peoples experience of their treatment. The study was qualitative based on interviews with three young persons at the end of their treatment there. The subject was chosen because this kind of youth housing is an interesting alternative to institutional care for young people, despite there is not much known about the results of the treatment. The results were analyzed from earlier research and central concepts from the theory of empowerment and Anton Antonovskys theory about Sense of coherence. The results of this study show that these young peoples are satisfied with their treatment at the youth housing.

Counselling is one of the most commonly utilized tools in the work place. The purpose of this paper is to explore how four employers utilize early counselling sessions related to absences due to illness. A qualitative research method has been used and four human resource managers have been interviewed. The research questions have been divided into three categories: the counselling structure, the counselling model and the counselling dilemmas. The interviews have been transcribed and processed through these three categories.

The study aimed to evaluate picture communication during clinical as-sessment and intervention procedures in paediatric care. As part of the project KomHIT (Augmentative communication in paediatric health care settings) care professionals at different care units were provided with education and designed pictorial supports. These consisted of appointment letters with pictorial support, visual schedules and communication boards with both general and specific vocabulary. Care professionals and parents to children with and without communication disabilities participated. Survey data from care professionals and parents at five care units was supplemented with qualitative data from an interview with a multiprofessional group at one of the care units.

The portrayals of women in lifestyle magazines has been a continuous subject in genderresearch, but have mainly been focused on research about heterosexual women. However, how women are being portrayed through editorial content in an LGBT magazines have shown to be a gap in gender research.The purpose of this study was to find out how female identities were portrayed in theeditorial content in the LGBT magazine QX ? Sweden?s largest magazine aimed atmembers of the LGBT community in Sweden.The analysis of the material was conducted through a semiotic and a narrative analysis. Patterns and reoccurring themes were selected, and furthermore were analysed againstfeminist theories and views such as queer theory, radical feminism and post-modernfeminism.Four different gender archetypes derived from the result of the study: The strongfemale, The passive female, The stereotypical female, and The intimate female. Thestudy did show that women featured in QX magazine were portrayed throughheteronormative patterns, although the magazine represents a larger alternative group..