The report describes an ecodesign thesis performed by the author at the ÅF EcoDesign Center. The basic idea of ecodesign is to develop products with a minimized environmental load, without neglecting other significant product aspects such as function and price. During the last couple of years the public interest in environmental friendly products has increased, which has made it possible for companies to make a profit from their investments in ecodesign. To meet the increasing market for ecodesign services ÅF started the ÅF EcoDesign Center, where the company has gathered all of their competence in ecodesign in order to help companies to become greener. The task was to develop a tool for an Eco Screening.

In many products a compromise between ground clearance and the required space to store the product has to be made. This problem attracted the attention of the authors of this thesis.The objective of this project is to develop a functioning solution to a foldable wheel. The solution should be applicable to several types of product groups. A limitation for this work has been made so that the work only covers solutions for lighter vehicles.The purpose is to drive this project forward, so that a solution can be found. Furthermore the purpose of the report is to clarify how the authors proceeded to design and construct the wheel according to a fixed specification.

Writing is a critical element for many of the second language learners that I?ve encountered in my work as a Swedish teacher. Therefore, on the basis of Jerome Bruners theories of reflec-tion and learning, was the purpose with this study to examine the scaffolded structured reflec-tion conversation as a method for writing development. Bruner says that the knowledge be-comes deeper when we consciously reflect over it (Arfwedson 1992:110 f).I have used a qualitative method where I let five students write a text in Swedish on the subject "application for internship". After that I held a conversation with each of the pupils.

There is a great need to reduce nutrient leaching from arable land into lakes and oceans. By using several different types of models it has previously been possible to describe nutrient losses in a catchment area with a minimum unit of sub-catchment level. At present, it is instead desirable to model a smaller catchment with an opportunity to re-connect the results to the corresponding fields in the catchment. Such models already exist but they are not fully able to properly describe Swedish conditions and land characteristics in our region.With the approach of creating such a model, SLU has developed a project with this work as its first stage. The model is expected to be created under the working name SWE-model which stands for Soil Water Environment and is in this first stage supposed to apply the SOIL model in catchment scale. During the procedure to describe the first step in the process of developing such a model adapted to Swedish conditions and which works in the catchment scale with an area of about 10-30 km2, focus has been set on calculating the transport of water flow from different hydrological response units. Regardless of the processes occurring in the soil after the water has been added, it is assumed that all the water which flows from each simulated unit is drained.In the first step the hydrologic response units were identified based on land use and soil type in the study area. With the help of a script with functions that retrieve and transform data, certain units were chosen for simulation. The script was also created in this project. Finally, the model results were aggregated and summarized for each unique unit, for each sub-catchment, and also for the whole catchment.From the results it is possible to see similarities in the flow dynamics between modeled and measured data. The efficiency coefficient has been calculated to correspond to the mean of the measured values for the whole simulation period. With an automated calibration process the model should be able to perform better. The volume error gives an indication of overestimation from the model..

The Societety Park (Societetsparken) of Varberg here in Sweden, established in the year 1883 (1856), is one of the most famous parks in Varberg. Today it is, more or less, only used as a park that you will walk through in the wintertime, under the summer season though, the park starts blooming and then it is used for public music and singalong evenings. Earlier it was an old health resort park with its fine old traditions.The Societetsparken was a private owned park until 1902 when the town purchased it. On this plot there was already a smaller park and it was established as early as in 1856. It was called Badhusparken (The Public Bath Park) and it belonged to the hot- and cold-bathhouses, and these baths were very well frequented.

The ?civilized? world is in need of fossil fuel in order to function. Hybricon AB is a company in Umeå that is developing a technology that hopefully can reduce parts of this need. They are currently testing their two electrical busses (with Hybrid backup) in city traffic on the roads of Umeå in cooperation with the county of Umeå.                               The busses are originally diesel-busses, but the diesel motor has been replaced with two electrical hub-motors with a power of 145 kW each that are powered by batteries.The batteries are charged at the end station after each route. In case the batteries should run low on capacity during driving, they can be recharged by the so called genset.

Title: The role of social media on today?s markets ? Companies? desire to understand theircustomersAuthors: Kristoffer Avci-Nåmark & Patrik WidlundBackground: The markets of today are characterized by dynamic conditions because of thecontinuous change in consumer preference. Due to this, the interaction between the company and its consumers is gaining importance as companies find the need to increase their knowledge about the market. Out of this need social media has emerged as a tool forcompanies to improve their communication with customers. The popularity of social media isincreasing at a rapid rate and sites such as Facebook now has around 500 million usersworldwide.

When designing roads it?s important to knowwhat loads will bedriven on it. The axles on heavy vehicles can either have super single tires ordual tires which, according to studies, damage the roads differently. The SwedishTransport Administration is developing an understanding for the character ofthese different kinds of axle and tire types on the loads induced on Swedishroads. In this thesis a field study was conducted to determine the distributionbetween axles with super single tires and axles with dual tires on heavy vehicles.A highway, a country road and a national road were investigated during thestudy.

This master thesis aims to examine how public libraries in Sweden are practically and ideologically equipped to deal with e-books, outside of the dominant distributor Elib. The study also aims to find out what?s required of the book market and the public libraries to make further progress in the question of e-books. In Sweden e-books are still representing only a small amount of all the library loans and an even smaller amount of the commercial book market.The methodological and theoretical ground for the thesis is Grounded Theory, and the survey is based on interviews with publishers, librarians and distributors.The conclusions of this thesis are that the public libraries lack resources to invest in e-books, and that they also lack in knowledge about the media and its readers. It also exposes that both internal and external collaboration efforts need to be further developed.

Intresset för studien väcktes ur gemensamma diskussioner kring lärares vardagsarbete i relation till skolans organisation och ledning. Vi fann därför ett förändringsarbete från traditionell till temabaserade undervisning på gymnasieskola intressant att studera. Studiens syfte var att undersöka och söka förståelse för hur förändringsprocessen upplevs och påverkar lärarna samt att vara en del i utvärderingen av lärarnas nybildade tematiska arbetslag.Vi valde att använda aktionsforskning som metod med en hermeneutisk ansats som innebär tolkning och reflektion. När vi studerade tidigare forskning uppmärksammade vi att Blossing (2000) i sin studie konstaterar att bland annat skolkulturen och skolledaren har betydelse för förändringarbetets utveckling. Vi använde oss av reflexiva intervjuer eftersom de erbjuder flexibilitet vid intervjutillfällena och vi relekterade över olika aspekter som framkom.

Large-scale land investments is not a new phenomenon, but increasing prices on food and agrofuels have inflated prices on land and has led to an enhanced interest in landinvestments from a range of different actors. The ProSavana project in the Nacala corridor in the Nampula province, northern Mozambique is a large-scale land investment with the purpose of establishing intensive commercial agriculture and is planned to be implemented this year (2013). The project is financed by Brazil and Japan in collaboration with the government of Mozambique. It is not quite clear how large-scale land investments affect the areas they are implemented in and how they can affect the possibilities for sustainable development in these areas. Both opportunities and problems can be observed within the social, economic and ecological dimensions of sustainable development.

The parallel bars is used in physical therapy and is mainly used for patients who have to train walking and balance after a stroke or an operation. It consists of two long handrails with two legs on each handrail. These legs go down into two ground-plates and are locked at the wanted height with a pin. The parallel bars is an appreciated device and is used on a daily basis in many care units.The main issue with the manual parallel bars is that it is very difficult and heavy for a single person to adjust the height of it. If a larger adjustment of the height has to be done, the legs have to be adjusted one at a time otherwise the they will be locked.

Many companies are currently working to optimize and streamline their processes and production lines to achieve higher profitability. In increasingly competitive markets, companies are working to find solutions to increase the value of their production with such a small use of resources as possible. A tool used to accomplish this is the Lean management system. Lean comes from the production system that Toyota has been developing since the early 1900's, The Toyota Production System (TPS). The Lean philosophy helps companies, by working towards continuous improvement in its operations, to achieve higher customer satisfaction, more efficient production and ultimately higher profitability. Many companies are working to implement Lean in their organization. But there are many who fail to implement a complete change towards Lean.

Background In Nyanza in western Kenya are 30,5% of children estimated as malnourished. It is a family situation that nurses often come in contact with. Therefore it is of interest to know how nurses work with parents of malnourished children when they have a significant role in developing the family's knowledge and child health. Aim. The aim is to investigate how nurses experience that they are working with parents of malnourished children.

This master thesis is commissioned by Permobil AB. The report describes thoroughly the developing process of an adjustable backrest for wheelchairs. The target group for the backrest are people that suffer from scoliosis or other spinal diseases. Because of insufficient pressure distribution usage of traditional backrests is not an option for them.The current solution has got a frame that is made by several adjustable links that is held in place by friction. Between the links velcro tapes are attached that is adjusts the depth.