Background: As a result of the financial markets ever ongoing product innovation a new derivative was introduced in the USA in 1997. A derivative that derived it's value, not from the price of an underlying asset, but instead from a climate factor. It's been known for a long time that revenue in certain industries are affected by weather conditions. The suppliers of weather derivatives claim that these weather sensitive businesses can user weather derivatives in order to lessen weather risk. Purpose: To do a critical evaluation of how weather derivatives can be used by companies as a risk management tool.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate adult students information seeking. We draw a distinction between traditional timetabled studies, flexitime studies and external studies. For many adult students flexitime studies and external studies involve a new kind of studying. The new types of studies entail that adult students must apply themselves to more information seeking. In our study we investigate how the students proceed when seeking information.

This thesis explores some issues regarding estimations of the cost of capital on the Stockholm Stock Exchange through reverse engineering of the Residual Income Valuation model and through usage of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. Previous studies are in conflict of whether the risk premium changes considerably over time or not. Furthermore, the risk premium estimated by CAPM tends to be fairly stable. In this study, reverse engineering of the cost of capital implied by analysts? forecasts shows a significant difference in the risk premium over time.

Auditing demands knowledge in many diverse areas. To be able to provide all this knowledge it is necessary for the auditor to have access to persons with special skills. Through these contacts the auditor builds up a business network that brings support in the daily work. Our purpose with this study is to find out how auditor?s network in big auditing firms is organized and to show how they use their network.

Denna studie jämför hur Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) och Fama-French trefaktorsmodell förklarar och förutspår avkastning på en global aktiemarknad. CAPM utgår ifrån att investerarna förväntar sig en riskfri ränta adderat marknadspremien multiplicerat med företagens exponering mot marknaden. Fama-Frenchs är en utvidgning av CAPM modellen, där företagens storlek och book-to-market-värde läggs till som förklarande variabler för avkastning. Genom regressionsmodeller och prediktioner för portföljer indelade i storlek och book-to-market jämförs modellerna. Fama-French tycks vara genomgående bättre på att förklara och förutspå avkastning under perioden 1990m07-2013m02 för samtliga portföljer, förutom portföljen för stora företag med medelhögt book-to-market värde.

In order to fully grasp the phenomena 'City' we must understand its political structure as an integrated part of its physical structure and vice versa. This thesis focuses on one crucial element of the City, the public space, and discusses it in relation to the public realm, or sphere, of the City. The aim is to see if it is possible to conceive public space as a spatial dimension of power, and if so, how to analyse this. With the help of the theoretical tool of two ideal types of the configuration of public space, "The city as civic public life" and "The city as authoritarian control" an empirical study is carried out on the case of Prishtina, capital of Kosovo.Conclusions made are that function and use of a city's public spaces can be understood in relation to changes in the political climate of the society. Furthermore, a void in the asset of concepts offered by the ideal types is found ? and therefore also need for new concepts to describe and understand a public space undergoing a dynamic transformation, as being a part of a city in political transition..

An individual´s health is an important quality and asset to the individual, as well as to organizations and communities. The health of a human being is affected by the whole life situation, where the work place forms a significant part. The work place is an arena that can contribute to creating ill-health. In the light of increasing work- related ill-health in our society, it is important today to work with health-promoting initiatives in order to improve the well-being of people. It is advisable that an appointed key person at the work place works with health-promoting efforts.

The discovery and excavation of Long Barrows has been one of the major developments in the understanding of the Early Neolithic in Southern Scandinavia during the last decade. The Long Barrows are one of the oldest monumental burial forms that we see in northern Europe in the neolithic. They are also the first example of a common idea that is connected to a monumental burial form amongst the people. In this essay I attempt to show that there actually are quite a large number of Long Barrows in Scandinavia that show similarities with Long Barrows in well-known areas such as Kujavia (Poland) and Pommerania (Germany/Poland), in both architecture and location in the landscape. I also scrutinise some theories regarding this phenomenon and discuss, and i some cases, criticise them.

The hillforts of Bohusl?n are numerous, yet few have been studied, leaving gaps in our understanding of their dating, morphology, and connections to nearby prehistoric sites. With the help of settlement archaeology, the aim of this study has been to analyse three hillforts on Hisingen and answer these questions. This was done by observing the location and morphology of the hillforts and by analysing the age and functions of nearby prehistoric sites within a kilometer of the hillforts. The results indicate that Bj?rlanda 22:1 and Torslanda 56:1 were likely ritualistic enclosures, while Torslanda 15:1 had defensive functions.

Feral animal populations are distributed over many parts of the world and are often seen as a problem. Since they are a threat against other species, destroy farmlands and can spread dis-eases, they are often referred to as pests. Artificial selection has contributed to loss of genetic diversity in our domesticated animals. Feral animal populations are affected by natural selec-tion, which allows them to adapt to the environment. Their ability to adapt is a reason to see them as pests but can also be seen as an asset.

This thesis focuses on the mass media cover of ?Smart textiles?. The Swedish?smart? textiles are developed in Borås and are a mix of ordinary textile and new technology.  I analyse the article with a text analysis method, looking at themes and the language?s propositions in focus. Context and the actors in the articles are also important in the analysis.Many women occur as developers of the new smart technical product, a field often knowed as a typical male subject.

This text answers the questions how do we define what a campus is, how the concept of the campus came to exist and how it is used today, and how the Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) campus can be designed according to site conditions and the conclusions drawn from case studies at Chalmers University of Technology and Karlstad University. The purpose of the case studies is to gain insight into their campuses advantages and disadvantages. This finally results in an interpretation of how the Blekinge Institute of Technology campus can be planned. A campus is the area of land on which a college or university and its surrounding buildings resides on. Campus as a concept meant a field at first, it later evolved at American universities due to their design of college campuses.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how students who study with Problem-based learning PBL in a distance learning course perceive the support from the university library. I first went into adult education, PBL and distance studies, one at a time, and then took a look at the combination of problem-based learning in distance studies. During the investigation, I conducted five interviews using a phenomenographic method to understand how the students perceived the support they received from the university library. The university library gives a lot of support but what I noticed while I was writing was that it is difficult to reach the students with the information regarding the help that is available to them. I give some example on how to develop the support and find that the students have a wide range of different needs for support from the library depending on their individual situation, social context, academic ability, location and course of study.

Behaviour problems are often behaviours that cat owners don´t like, but are normal to the cat. The reason to why cat owners experience certain feline behaviours as problematic is probably due to the current practice in cat housing. The ways that cats are kept today causes somewhat of a compromise between cat and owner and inhibits the expressions of the cat's natural and normal behaviour. The cat owners may misunderstand their cats behaviour, for example the cat owners believe that their cats perform certain behaviours because of feelings of guilt, hate, revenge or maybe to protest against something or someone. An animal hospital may help solve behaviour problems, but also help the cat owners to undstand their cat´s behaviour in an other perspective. The aim of this study is to investigate the need of a cat ethologist in animal hospitals.

An efficient market implies that the use of fundamental analysis should not result in excess return, and that any return exceeding the market average can be explained by compensation for risk, accord-ing to The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). The focus of this study is to test whether the suc-cessful investment strategy developed by Piotroski (2000) generates excess return on American data, after risk adjustment by using Fama & French?s (1993) 3-factor and Carhart?s (1997) 4-factor CAPM. Initially we form stock portfolios based on companies characterized by high book-to-market values, additionally, we divide them into different performance classes by ranking them with Piotroski?s (2000) measure of financial performance, F_SCORE.