AbstractThis report was undertaken at the request of the Management and maintenancedepartment of Swedish National Road Authority (Vägverket Region Sydöst) inJönköping.In 1992, the management and maintenance of Swedish roads were laid out onexternal contractors. When putting out a tender for the work, the foundation isfrom a national set of rules which are in constant change. This report is limited towinter road upkeep.The trend in the invitation for tenders is that it is moving from the moreconventional executional demands towards the less controlling demands. Thedownside of functional, less controlling demands is that it is difficult to articulatehow to measure them. The order authority therefore has to find ways to makesure to get what has been paid for.In connection to the invitation for tender of winter road upkeep for 2005, the newset of rules, ATB Vinter 2003 was deployed.The main purpose of this thesis is to see which the big changes in the set of rulesare and how these changes affect the organisation and activities of the contractor.It is also studied how the changes in execution is perceived by road users and howit affects the possibilities of the contractor to come as a newcomer to a new areaof administration.Interviews and examination of sets of rules has led to a list of a number ofchanges that the contractors feel affect their work in any sense.Views from road users that have come in to the order authority have beenscrutinized to see how they have experienced the change.

Barns inflytande i förskolan - Children?s influence at the preschool This essay concentrates around teachers work with children´s influence at the preschool and how that affects the days there for the children and the teachers. The purpose of the essay is to present how four educationalists placed at two different preschools work with childrens influence at the preschool and their point of wiev of the matter. With that I also wanted to expose how the educationalists work with childrens rights at the preschool and to that I added how democracy is used at the preschool. The investigation´s starting point was the questions: What does childrens influence at the preschool mean for the educationalists? How do the educationalists think regarding childrens rights? When can the children be included in dessisionmaking at the preschool? When is it not possible for the children to be included in the dessisionmaking? The four educationalists were intervjued seperately to get the most honest answers.

Numerous studies raise the topic of highly educated immigrants whose education and list of qualifications devalue in the context of the Swedish labour market. However, little is known of those with foreign background who enter into higher education in Sweden. Our study attempts to shed some light onto the value of higher education relative to that of a person?s ethnic background. The background material features nine in-depth interviews of foreign background academics, as well as data extracted from an extensive survey study previously carried out at Växjö University. Initially, the quantitative data showed that students with foreign background, including Swedish-born children of immigrants, had not managed to find qualified work upon completion of studies to the same extent as their Swedish background counterparts.

This study examines the possibilities of interpreting the moral values and ethics presented in the current curriculums in a way that makes them inclusive and constructive. The study also reveals how the liberal democratic ideal, presented in the curriculums as a hyper-ideology, is not at all easy to define or live up to in the pluralistic school of today.By close-reading and criticizing the curriculum for the Swedish senior high school (Gy11)and by looking at it from two different points of views, as rules or norms and as a process, Ishow how the curriculum can be interpreted as a basis or starting point for a communicationabout values. I also discuss wether the aim of this communication should be consensus or anongoing process..

This report examines the possibility of developing a modular system for concrete homes that cancontribute to greater diversity of today's market. The issue was whether it ? from a competitive pointof view ? is possible to produce smart prefab modules that customers themselves can combine to avilla. The report addresses the question how the modules and wall panels should be designed for thegreatest variety of floor plans.With regard to what is asked of the customer interviews where held for the purpose ofunderstanding concrete's popularity and elements of high value in their homes today. The answersfrom the interviews laid ground for four prototype homes which were made to demonstrate how theelements can be combined to achieve different types of houses..

This master thesis is about Augmented Reality (AR), a phenomenon that has existed since the mid-fifties but only recently has become available for the general public. This report is a knowledge compilation about AR, focusing on AR in cell phones and the use of the technology in traffic related situations.AR is usually described as adding a digital layer of information onto the real world. There are different technologies to make virtual images; in cell phones sensor-based and camera-based technologies are the most common ones.In this report, the market of AR applications for cell phones has been investigated. Three use cases have also been investigated in order to get more knowledge about the designers' thoughts and visions.In order to analyze the technology and the applications in a broader and more scientific perspective, two theories has been used: Situation Awareness (SA) and the Service Dominant Logic (SDL). These theories seem useful when reflecting on the Swedish road administrations vision, and to investigate what the applications and the AR technology can contribute to the traffic domain.The conclusions of this thesis are that:- AR can be applied on most of the human senses, but augmenting by visualization is most common.- The market for cell phone applications is growing rapidly: AR applications are relatively new but on the rise.

There are no reliable, objective and simple methods today for measuring pain in horses. The purpose of this study was to evaluate and describe measuring of mechanical nociceptive threshold (MNT) values with a pressure algometer in clinically pain free riding horses at the riding school of Strömsholm. In this study there were 24 horses. Tape recording and electromyelografi (EMG) was used in an attempt to increase objectivity in the examination. MNT increased with age, however sex and colour had no influence.

GPGPU is a collective term for research involving general computation on graphics cards. A modern graphics card typically provides more than ten times the computational power of an ordinary PC processor. This is a result of the high demands for speed and image quality in computer games.This thesis investigates the possibility of exploiting this computational power for image processing purposes. Three well known methods where implemented on a graphics card: FFT (Fast Fourier Transform), KLT (Kanade Lucas Tomasi point tracking) and the generation of scale pyramids. All algorithms where successfully implemented and they are tree to ten times faster than correspondning optimized CPU implementation..

The company System Andersson is developing systems for controlling materials and production in industries. They want to add a new service, where parts of those systems are accessible through cell phones.In this paper we are investigating which technology are best suited for this kind of application. And then we describe how we are developing a prototype fort this application, based upon that technology. After investigating technologies such as Java ME, Microsoft Silverlight, and web applications we settled upon building the system as a web application, customized for a mobile environment.To build a web page which is readable by many different cell phones we use the markup-languages which are developed for cell phones. We put much effort in reading about the standards and recommendations for the mobile web, produced by the organizations W3C and OMA.

This thesis is based on design theory about how to build an application for the mobile platform, a scientific analysis and an application for grocery shopping and meal planning. The thesis also contains a valuation of the research and of the application. The valuation of the application was done by a usability test and an analysis of the results of the test.The application of the thesis has an easy navigation system, which is time saving and simple to use. Finding recipes with the associated ingredients is a quick fix. The search function can be used for searching freely after recipes as well as for separate ingredients. That makes it possible for the user to create own recipes from available ingredients.

This report describes a master thesis performed at Saab in Arboga. The main purpose was to build a controller for a system containing a turn table and an antenna beam. The idea is to use this system on a boat where it will be exposed to position disturbances due to waves. The desired behaviour is that antennas placed on the antenna beam should point towards the same target all the time. To solve this problem the system has been modeled and simulated in Matlab and Simulink.

Music production software has a strong tradition of two-dimensional graphical user interface (GUI), in which the time line is represented as a flat composition either horizontally (from left to right) or vertically (from top to bottom). In my degree work titled Sequi, I approach music composition from a different angle. Instead of a two-dimensional time line with only two possibly ways of progression (forward or backward) I constructed a three-dimensional GUI with the maximum of four different ways of progression from any given point in a composition. The height axis is used to describe time-intervals (the time between downbeats) and the wide and depth axes are used to describe progression from one sound to another..

This thesis deals with a Swedish shopping centre, NOVA, from a phenomenological point of view. Starting in my own experience of the architecture I discuss issues such as gender, consumerism and the image of the ideal society, the Heterotopia, as they appear to me in my studies of the building.Divided into three different themes I then discuss the aspects I?ve found through my meeting with the architecture in comparison to a number of texts on the subject.My phenomenological analysis, combined with earlier research, presents to me a number of aspects more evident than others, as I do my own interpretation of the building and its architecture..

Misogyny in gaming culture ? a qualitative discourse analysis of the reproduction of patriarchal dominance in the gaming culture is based on Teun A. van Dijk's belief that a dominant group continuously produces and reproduces its social dominance over a subordinate group by using the language. The members of this group do not simply do this by being. A person does not want to risk damaging its reputation which makes the dominant group forced to use various strategies to reproduce its dominance.

The purpose of this essay is to examine Swedish HR-managers who have either received, or been nominated for, the award ?HR-manager of the Year?. We investigate the managers? personalities, how they think about their own role and HR?s function in the organization, all in an environment that can be characterized by some skepticism towards HR. We find the HR-managers to be ?winners?; strong individuals that are confident, communicative, and driven.