Background: Increasingly, companies choose to finance their business with corporate bonds which has resulted in an increased demand on credit ratings. As such the rating agencies have a very important role in the financial markets. Examining the value of a credit-rating can be very interesting for both issuer and investor. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to identify and define the value of rating. Execution: The study is built upon nine interviews with rated and non-rated firms and investors.

This thesis emphasizes the importance of understanding the employees? attitude and motivation towards their workplace at a company that works in the advertising business. An example company; thcommunication agency PS Communication in Stockholm, was used for the empirical part to investigate the purpose. The topic is interesting since the company works in a fast changing environment with new techniques,tools and professionals and the company is also going through an expansion that include many new recruitments.The purpose in this thesis is as follows: ?the purpose of this study is to elucidate the fate of attitude and motivation of employees in relation to the workplace during business expansion, if performance is reduced and competition increases.?The analysis and results shows that attitudes andmotivation among the employees in the workplace has deteriorated, the employees agree that it is due to expansion the company is undergoing.

Long time-series of pressure measurements often have high quality because the early instrumentsare more or less the same as the modern ones. A time-series from Lund consisting of three dailymeasurements from 1780-1997 has been homogenised and is therefore suitable for analysingpossible influences of the enhanced greenhouse effect. According to a two-layer model of theatmosphere one finds a shift in the frequency of baroclinic instability due to an increasedtemperature gradient caused by the increasing CO2. Baroclinic instability over the Atlantic Oceanis the main cause for frontal zone production, causing cyclonic activity over the southern part ofScandinavia. Changes to the baroclinic instability would therefore be traceable in the time seriesfrom Lund.

Middle managers in social care find themselves in a middle position. The middle management position involves demands from several interested parties. The demands affect and generate feelings both within themselves and within others and the middle managers have to deal with them all.The aim of this study was to investigate the social care middle manager?s personal experiences of emotions in work.We have completed interviews with four middle managers who are assigned to carry out social care. When doing the interviews we used an interview guide divided into different interview areas.

When contemplating entering an alliance the rationale behind the decision should differdepending on the size of the companies involved as well as on other important factors. The importantfactors influencing the decision are related to the resource pooling potential of the alliance,the power structure along with the business network the companies are a part of. Theanalysis has shown proof of a need for cooperation if one wish to succeed in the telecommunicationindustry and it has also determined which resources that are deemed to be most important toget in touch with, for our study object, to facilitate its access to the market. Those resources aredefined as a direct channel to the customer, funds/capital and the access to relevant businessnetworks. To get in touch with these lacking resources, three alternative approaches has beenproposed; all of them involving a strategic alliance decision.

We have through our theoretical framework been able to create a simplified measuring tool for a KIZ; the S-TKL. We have found that the S-TKL is possible to implement on the Öresund Region but with some flaws. Even though the Öresund Region has implemented the mindset of a KIZ, accurate statistics are in some areas hard to find. We can also through our empirical findings say that it is difficult to use the S-TKL on Shenzhen. The data we have found gives a good indication of both of the regions.

How do we match our education with the needs of the construction line of business and the requirementsof the Swedish National Agency for education? Is there something that we have to change?In this study I have asked our former students about their opinion of our education and I have also asked them to give me their view on what a good teacher is like. I have been able to benefit a lot from their answers in my efforts to be that good teacher. This survey took place at Facebook.The answers showed that we carry on a piece of solid workmanship. But you can always improve, try harder.

This document is a summary of my work to create a project management system for a small firm working with computer graphics. The intention is to manage customers, projects, images and invoices in the easiest possible way. To make the system as flexible as possible a web-interface was chosen which makes it possible to access the system from any computer, making it independent of any particular operating system. The only requirement on the user environment is that the computer must have a connection to the Internet to be able to access the system. The different techniques that have been used to develop the project management system is primarily Ruby on Rails and a MySQL database. Although Ruby on Rails was completely new to me, I decided to use this framework instead of PHP, which I already have a good knowledge of, because of the benefits Ruby on Rails provide.

Outsourcing in IS/IT offers organizations the possibility to use external resources, maximize flexibility and focus on core business, this prompts many organizations today to be less keen on developing IS/IT-services in-house. Sourcing IS/IT is however a complex activity in itself thus requiring competencies in many areas of expertise and lots of organizations has experienced the challenge of managing the necessary competencies to ensure successful Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO). A literature review in the field of outsourcing revealed the lack of a comprehensive competency management framework with the ability to guide competency resource planning in ITO projects. In order to highlight the problem area, an extensive and thorough literature review and an empirical case study which investigated the skills and assets in ITO projects at ten major Swedish organizations was conducted. The study found that it is possible for organizations through structured analysis of their intellectual capital, using the competency framework developed within the study, to plan sourcing processes and prepare the necessary changes to ensure the ITO projects can be implemented with the desired effect..

Hand hygiene compliance is one of the most important factors to prevent healtcare associated infections (HAI), which can cause unnessesary suffering, prelonged insitutional care, invalidity and higher mortality rate. It has been shown that despite regulations for hygiene compliances in healthcare, these are used unadequately. HAI affects 5-10 % of all patients in industrailized countries, in development countries the number is estimated to be up to 20 times higher. The aim of this study was to illustrate healthcareworkers hygiene compliances in patient care at a rural healthcarecentre in western India. Participant observation was used as a method, fieldnotes was taken for qualitative analysis.

There is no commonly accepted definition of a business method. It ought to consist of a method or a process of doing business. Business methods constitutes a broad category of patents, it is hard to tell exactly what can be interpreted in to the term. Most of the world's legal systems have made an exception from patentability for business methods. In the USA the exception was abolished in a case 1998.

Private equity-investeringar innebär kapitalsatsningar i onoterade företag med ett aktivt och tidsbegränsat ägarengagemang. Detta kan indelas beroende på tidpunkten och kapitalbehovet för investeringen och benämns: affärsänglar, venture capital och buyout. Det finns en allmän uppfattning att dessa bolag agerar som affärspirater, vilka suger ut tillgångarna i företag för att sedan sälja av det utan att tänka på konsekvenserna. Det finns en ovetskap om vad som egentligen tillför värde och på vilket sätt detta sker. På uppdrag av Svenska Riskkapitalföreningen skrivs därför denna uppsats.

The aim of this thesis is to ascertain if women are discriminated in the European Parliament, and if so, how it is expressed. Our hypothesis is that female members of the parliament suffer a kind of double discrimination. The European Parliament consists of roughly one third women, but nevertheless the discrimination does not end there. According to our hypothesis women do not have the same opportunity to influence as their male colleagues, hence the double discrimination.The results of this thesis show that women are discriminated, mainly by not gaining access to the European Union's important issues, whilst the female dominated issues are scheduled on late evening and at the end of a session week. Another unsatisfactory issue was that even though half of the reports were given by women, they only received one third of the references to their reports while men received two thirds of the references.

This paper is a literature study on search engine optimization (SEO) considering the leader of the search engine market: Google. There´s an introductory background description of Google and its methods of  crawling the Internet and indexing the web pages, along with a brief review of the famous PageRank algorithm. The purpose of this paper is to describe the major important methods for improved rankings on Google´s result lists. These methods could be categorized as on-page methods tied to the website to be optimized or off-page methods that are external to the website such as link development. Furthermore the most common unethical methods are described, known as ?black hat?, which is the secondary purpose of the text.

Under den sista tidens turbulenta börsklimat har förtroende för börsanalytiker ifrågasatts.Röster har höjts och påståenden att anställda inom finanssektorn missköter sitt arbete har duggat tätt i medier. Detta faktum har väckt ett intresse från vår sida att undersöka hur detta arbete verkligen går till; är arbetssättet detsamma som vi lärt oss på universitetet eller har man andra arbetsmetoder än de som man inte kan läsa om i litteraturen?Syftet med denna uppsats är att, utifrån en kvalitativ undersökning, relevanspröva de aktievärderingsmodeller vi har kommit i kontakt med på universitetet. De modeller vi valt att undersöka är:- Capital asset pricing model/CAPM- Kassaflödesbaserad värdering- P/E-talsvärdering- Utdelningsbaserad värdering- Substansvärdering- Teknisk analysFör att genomföra detta har vi undersökt hur man arbetar med frågor kring aktievärdering på Handelsbanken och då främst på deras investmentbank Handelsbanken Capital Markets. Vi har även valt att inkludera en annan svensk storbank för att möjligen kunna generalisera de slutsatser vi kommer fram till.