As stocks have become a more common way for people to save their money, the range of financial information has had a substantial increase. To understand the assumptions that stock valuation and analysis are built upon, it is important for the reader to have an understanding for the models that are used by banks and institutions when recommendations are published.The cash flow model, which is the most commonly used stock valuation tool, is based on CAPM. This model describes the relationship between an assets return and its risk in relation to an index. The risk parameter is called the beta value and has grown to be the dominating risk factor within financial economics literature.The use of beta values has been widely discussed in the world of academics and some researchers claim that the degree of explanation brought about by the beta is so low that it should be discarded, others are faithful to the beta and believe that it still serves a purpose. As a result of this criticism other ways to calculate the beta have surfaced, models that take other factors of risk into consideration.

This report describes the development of a RESTful web service for mobile applications. The web service makes resources from an existing system called kompetensdatabasen ("the competence database") available. Kompetensdatabasen holds information about the capabilities of consultants and about assignments carried out at the IT consultant business Nethouse AB.The web service was developed according to the principles of REST and ROA (Resource Oriented Architecture) which puts focus on making resources available. The resources are made available through the HTTP protocol and the methods associated with it. This means it was designed to use the same technologies as the world wide web.

Starting out as a minor form of amusement, the game industry has become one of the most lucrative andsuccessful in the entertainment business competing against giants such as television, movies and music.As the internal competition within the developer community grows companies work hard at discoveringnew ways to attract and keep customers. By having a playcentric approach focusing on user experiencethey hope to achieve that goal. This thesis describes the process of designing a game with focus on theplayer. We apply the concept of flow on game development and investigate through research throughdesign if we are able to create a game that keeps the player in flow.Play tests showed several elements such as control issues and too difficult challenges early in the game,affecting the possibility for players to experience flow while playing. These negative factors came to becalled flowleakers.

Värderingar är ett centralt begrepp inom psykologin och handlar om vad man anser vara viktigt i livet. Tidigare forskning har fokuserat på hur värderingar påverkar människors vilja att betala mer för livsmedel som har miljö- eller social produktmärkning. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka värderingar och viljan att betala extra för en mobiltelefon med miljö- eller social produktmärkning hos personer i Uddevalla, Vänersborg och Trollhättan. Resultaten påvisade att de deltagare som var villiga att betala extra för mobiltelefoner med social produktmärkning lade störst vikt vid värderingen solidaritet och de deltagare som var villiga att betala extra för mobiltelefoner med miljömärkning lade störst vikt vid välvilja. Detta resultat ligger i linje med tidigare forskning.

Platelet aggregation is a major and common problem in blood samples from cats. This greatly affects the accuracy of counting of the platelets. Because of the difficulties in counting feline platelets, results for patients and reliable reference values for cat platelets are currently so inaccurate as to be almost useless in diagnosis of thrombocytopenia. In this study we used an effective method to prevent platelet aggregation. Blood was collected in CTAD test tubes and prostaglandin E1 was added to the blood sample.

In Korsnäs district Dala Väst there were problems with information concerning their younger forests, mainly those in pre-thinning stage. They were divided into large, heterogeneous stands with often poor stand data quality. In 2006 an aerial photo interpretation of the young forests was conducted to fix these problems. Necessary information to get from the interpretation were silvicultural management suggestions, new stand delineation and new stand data. This thesis is supposed to evaluate the quality and usability of the interpreted data. To evaluate the interpretation an objective control inventory was conducted in 60 stands, either through callipering or counting stems.

The concept of leadership development plays an important role within the modern organization. As a result of the increasing interest in developing leadership competencies, investments in leadership development programs are becoming a common part of business strategies. However, the return on those investments is seldom evaluated. The reason for this is considered to be the complexity created by the many factors that influence leadership but have no relation to the program. This is a case study based on interviews with participants from a one-year leadership development program that was carried out at AB Previa.

The rural development programme is a tool for promoting sustainable development in the Swedish countryside. The master plan should, for example, give directions for the national interest and describe how it will follow up national and regional targets such as the EU's environmental quality standards. Because the municipality has considerable freedom to formulate the plan in its sole discretion, and that it contains the municipality's political vision, it is also feasible to make a discourse analysis of the plan text.In discourse analysis, including articles and documents written by Rural Network Working Group on land use planning to be included. The purpose of discourse analysis is to see if there are differences in the way rural areas are described and if there are any flaws in how the designer interprets the rural development programme. Furthermore, the analysis result in tools that are adapted to the standards we create and choose.The standards we have are being designed based on our values, which differ.

The purpose of this essay is to study the two cases ?The hijacking of a bus in Årdal? & ?The double murder in Ljungsbro? from media ethics aspects.  The aim for this study is to clear up if the the Swedish newspapers have reported according to the mediaethic rules and to see if there is any differences between the newspapers reporting. The following theories has been used to reach the objective: the journalism task, news values, the liberty of press and speach, media ethical rules and discursive discrimination. The study has used a critical discourse method formed by Teun a. van Dijk to analyse the material, mainly through macro- and microstructures.

The river Göta Älv reaches between Vänern and Gothenburg and is the main raw water source for Gothenburg that supplies about 700 000 people with water. To protect and maintain a high water quality, continuously samples and water analyses are made throughout the river. In 1998 a protection area was founded between surte and Lärjeholm where the raw water intake is. This was made to increase the awareness of the importance to protect the water. However, there is a lot of contribution of untreated stormwater to Göta Älv within the protection area.Göteborg Water and Sewage Works commissioned this thesis where two areas, Tagene industrial area and Kärra residential area, with untreated stormwater outlets within the protection area are studied.

The main purposes of this study were to 1) quantify bacterial production in winter during ice conditions, and 2) to compare these production measures with values measured from summer and open water conditions in three humic lakes situated in northern Sweden. Another purpose of this study was to 3) examine whether clear-cutting significantly affected bacterial production or water chemistry in two lakes situated in catchments were a large part of the forest had been removed through logging compared to an undisturbed reference lake. In winter (March/April 2014), the bacterial production ranged from 0, 7 - 2, 2 µgC/L/day and in the summer of 2013 the production values was 4 ? 10 times higher. The main reason for lower bacterial production in winter was ascribed to lower water temperatures as well as to older and more recalcitrant DOC, as there were no significant differences in total dissolved nitrogen or DOC concentration or -quality, that could explain a lower production compared to summer.

The purpose of this study was to examine the foreign news flow in Sweden´s largest news agency TT. Since TT has an important position as a news provider to most of Sweden´s local and national news outlets, it was important to examine exactly what their news stories consisted of.The theoretical background of this study consist of theories of news values, agenda setting, dependency theory and the theory about the ?news shadow? a lack of coverage leads to.In our quantitative study we have looked at 506 articles taken from the TT news flow during two weeks In November 2013. We have studied which continents and countries the news origins from, who have supplied the text, the topics of the news, which one gets to speak in the text and what general tone the story has.The study shows that the supply of news follows the criteria of news values. It also shows that in some regions of the world the coverage is almost nonexistent.

The overall purpose of this essay was to provide a better understanding of the importance of discretion for social workers in direct social services. To answer the purpose three questions were formulated: (1) How do social workers define and describe their discretion and their ability to independently accomplish their work? (2) How do social workers experience that workplace organization, policies and economic conditions interact with their discretion and (3) How do social workers experience that the interaction with the client can affect how they use their discretion in the individual case? The method used was qualitative interviews. The theoretical framework was Michael Lipskys (1980) Street-level bureaucracy and the four themes organization, professional role, skills and interaction.The results showed that the respondents, although they did not consider themselves to be affected by the economy still adapted to budget restrictions when they said that they were cost conscious in their work. This adjustment to budget framework could possibly be what made them not feel limited in their work.

In light of the massive property bubbles that have been bursting in the USA, Spain and Ireland during the last decade, the aim of this thesis is to clarify whether ? or to what degree - the municipality of Stockholm might experience a property bubble in the near future. The municipality of Stockholm is undergoing a housing shortage and house prices have risen during the last few years. Neoliberalism and property bubbles are used as a theoretical framework in this paper. The methodology consist of semi structured interviews, analysis of documents and statistical data from Eurostat, Valueguard and the Swedish administrative authority; Statistiska centralbyrån (SCB).

Using interviews conducted within the municipality of Nam Dich, Vietnam, this qualitative study explores how ethnic minority parents and children navigate around the state's supervision in order to preserve their traditional practices of child marriages. Moreover, the research explores the roles and expectations between individuals within an ethnic minority family as a collective unit. Using governmentality supported by the concept of state evasion, culture bearers and empowerment, I argue that understanding child marriage as a phenomenon requires analysis of cultural context. The paper starts with an introduction of the ongoing relation between the Vietnamese state and ethnic minority traditions related to child marriage. While the Vietnamese state ?s modernization projects aim to empower individuals by creating more freedom within the process of marriage and increasing the opportunity for education and work, certain ethnic minority groups want to uphold their cultural ways of marriage when parental arrangement occurs from an early age.