This study will focus on the luxury market and how this market has been affected by the present recession. The economic downturn have had a major impact on today?s business and consumption, practically all industries have been affected. However there exist different opinions about how the luxury market have been influenced, certain experts mean that this segment is recession proof while others believe that this market will experience the worst side-effects. For that reason we find it interesting to analyze the luxury market and develop our own opinion about the impact of the recession.

This study is made in cooperation with the insurance company, Skandia. Skandia is a part of Old Mutual group?s Nordic division and is one of Swedens largest insurance companies with a total of 1.9 million customers. The company offers traditional life assurance, unit-linked insurance, private healthcare insurance and banking services. Insurance companies such as Skandia operate in a highly competitive environment.

The aim with my work was to gain a deeper understanding of some adult adopted children?s experiences and reflections about which role parent ship plays for the adopted child?s development of identity. Following questions have been in focus: What does a working parent ship imply, seen from the perspective of adopted child? In which way can the development of identity for the adopted child be supported by a functional parent ship? Semi-structured interviews were carried out with the two following themes: Support and confirmation. The sample consisted of five foreign-adopted between the age of 18 and 37 years.

Today there is a keen competition between regions in the world for companies and inhabitants in order to improve regional development and economic growth. In many regions there is an active effort to create a good home base for companies and inhabitants. Since 2003 municipalities in nine counties in Sweden have come together in co-operative agencies in order to work towards more efficient regional development.This essay focuses on the relation between the state and the co-operative agencies in the regional development policy and which possibilities the state gives the co-operative agencies to pursue an efficient regional development policy, both legally and financially. I have researched and analysed this through models and ideas on how the state governs the administration and through the translation theory. The result of my study is that the co-operative agencies have a relatively large amount of freedom to make there own priorities, but the ability to act efficiently within regional development is limited..

When developing software that is meant to be distributed over several different computers and several different networks while still working together against a common goal there is a challenge in testing how updates within a single component will affect the system as a whole. Even if the performance of that specific component increases that is no guarantee for the increased performance of the entire system. Traditional methods of testing software becomes both hard and tedious when several different machines has to be involved for a single test and all of those machines has to be synchronized as well.This thesis has resulted in an exemplary application suite for testing distributed software. The thesis describes the method used for implementation as well as a description of the actual application suite that was developed. During the development several important factors and improvements for such a system was identified, which are described at the end of the thesis even though some of them never made it into the actual implementation.

Japan is the first industrialized country that is experiencing the threat of a rapidly declining and aging population. This has shifted the focus and the limelight is now on the matter that for a long time has been ignored. That is, the Japanese women?s situation in the society. This thesis seeks to point out the relevance of gender in the construction of leadership in order to get a deeper understanding of the Japanese women?s situation today.

My project aims to understand more about the methods used in making woven textiles on an industrial level, and how these tech¬niques can be adapted to create object-specific pieces. On visiting the furniture fair in Stockholm, I was surprised to see that most of the textiles used for furniture were so similar, despite the variation in the furniture itself. My project is about creating textile patterns that are specific for each piece.The idea behind the process could be used for any product, but the pattern I created is specifically for the armchair Accent by Yngve Ekström. I wanted to create the feeling of a pattern moving over the surface of the object and adjusting to it. I worked primarily with differences in density.

In this essay we aimed to find how economic scarcity among children and youth presents itself in school, according to how school staff experience it. We have conducted interviews with student welfare staff to hear their experiences of this subject and how the schools try to help these pupils. We have used interpretative phenomenology as a base for our work. We have also used some of this traditions most important notions along with notions of Erving Goffman and Sara Ahmed during our processing off the material.  With help from these, we report our most interesting results. We have seen that a lack of resources exists among youth today and that everyone not has easy access to things many of us might take for granted.

The Scanian woodfences has been determined by two mainly elements: Scania's composition of tree species, with a large element of deciduous forest, and the local building tradition which has more in common with the European continent than the Swedish tradition. By examining responses from ethnological question lists deriving from the first half of the 1900s, combined with literature studies, I have been able to deepen and broaden the knowledge behind the various fencing design. In addition I ?ve constructed maps which could illustrate their historical geographic distribution.I have come to the conclusion that there was three main types of woodfences that was most common until the barbed wire was introduced in the early 1900s and later on replaced the elderly woodfences. Common for the three main types is that the base material was made out of Juniperus communis, this largely because of its durability against rot.

The purpose of this study was to explore the approach of the personal in residential care homes, legal guardians and Refugee secretaries consider as effective in their efforts to care for and guide unaccompanied boys in the Swedish society. With the help of qualitative method and semi-structured interviews, we have taken note of eleven informants? perspective on what approach they believe to be essential in the work of integration process with unaccompanied boys. We used Empowerment and the Swedish Integration Board´s proposal on indicators of integration as a theoretical base. The results show among other things, that our informants believe the keys to integration in Sweden for the unaccompanied youth are the Swedish language, education and a stable social network.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of our most common neurological diseases. The development of the disease often make the affected persons live with it for a long time. There are two types of the disease, the first is a progressive type and the other is relapsing remitting. Strengthening exercises isn?t commonly used as a treatment method although muscle weakness and fatigue are common symptoms.

Problem: Our opinion is that it is important to consider about usability in system development. In this thesis we will focus on usability in point-of-sale systems. The point-of-sale system we base this thesis on is Extenda Retail. Our case study is performed on Ica Kvantum in Bromölla, which implemented Extenda Retail about two years ago. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to figure out what important factors there are to consider, in usability aspects, when developing point-of-sale systems, with focus on the cashier.

This report is the product of the course AF101X, a bachelors degree in Samhällsbyggnad atKTH. The task of the course is to design a small house at a given location and also implement adeepening study. The house in this report is located in Kiruna in the north of Sweden, where theclimate is much colder than in the rest of the country.The deepening study of this report is to evaluates how realistic passive housing north of thePolar Circle is based on those facts. The house will to some extent be designed to fit the passivehousing standard.

This Masters thesis work describes a comparison between two different methods for estimation of the down channel (base station to mobile subscriber) in Wide-band Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA). The first estimation method, Optimal Feed-forward Channel Estimation (OFCE), is a conventional method that bases the estimates on data that is known to both sender and receiver, so called pilots. The second method, Decision Directed Channel Estimation (DDCE), is an elaboration of OFCE. It also uses user data for estimation. Simulations show that DDCE, in comparison to OFCE, does not attain an improvement in signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) for high bit error rates (BER).

How does a corporation work during the recruitment phase to entice and motivate younger members to work for their organization?The aim is to examine in which grade corporations and organizations? recruitment needs to adapt to encounter Generation Y on the labour market.The base in our method is abduction and our research is based on a qualitative method. We have fulfilled interviews with corporations such as Scania, Skatteverket, Swedbank and Appelqvist & Ottoson HR AB.Corporations need in a sense change their recruitment and emphasis their resources to sell the whole corporation and its image to the young job applicant. The younger members demand a total impression of the corporation to implement an interest and to get motivated to work there. Together with our respondents we have realized that Generation Y has higher demands on their workplace than earlier generations..