Due to their complexity and heavy wear from rail traffic, switches are a sensitive part of the railway infrastructure and moreover expensive to maintain. Furthermore, increasing railway traffic not only accelerates the wear rate but also obstructs the necessary maintenance measures. This paper examines the opportunities for a transition to a long-term maintenance strategy in the Swedish railway network. It contains a study of the maintenance strategy of Banverket, and also analyses statistics of errors in the railway infrastructure. The survey was completed utilising interviews with infrastructure managers, maintenance contractors, planners of railway operations and the Banverket material service department.

This bachelor thesis aim to highlight the values that form the basis for the formulation of the municipal local activity support to sports clubs. Key questions was, what are the criteria for the distribution of support, what are the conditions for the support in the municipalities, and what thoughts on development of the local sports club are behind these criteria. The study is based on one policy document from each municipality and 15 interviews that revealed a large spread in mindset and resources between the municipalities, but also similarities in the supports criteria and evaluation work. 14 out of 15 municipalities distribute the support, but the conditions are different. One interesting result the study shows is how little some municipalities really know about the money that goes out to the clubs.

The question formulation for this work has been "is an ice-hockey audience influenced by music during time-outs in a game?". The method was to observe one period with Färjestads BK and Mora IK, but a recording was also made, together with a conversation with the arena DJ. From the recording, the audience reactions were graded from a given scale. The grades were compilated to a diagram that shows the audience reactions in relation to the time, from the first face-off to the final whistle.

Thermal fatigue is a serious problem in todays power plants. A large amount of damages around the world circles around that subject. The damage can come from the mechanism of two flows mixing with different temperatures in a T-junction. It is a fundamental prerequisite that these T-junctions are frequently tested for damages. An amount of criterias steers the rate of testings.

?How does the Turkish debate appear concerning the EU-discourse in relation to political conditionality? Is Turkey accepting the demands that are being made?? These questions are answered in this thesis through a qualitative document analysis of the debate concerning EU as it is in Turkish newspapers and statements made by Turkish political representatives. The debate is used to describe the association?s process in a candidate country through investigating how the process and the relationship between EU and Turkey are discussed within the country. The national debate is then used to compare with the accession process for the Central and Eastern European countries based on conditionality to discover if Turkey is different from other candidate countries and if so explain why.

The purpose of this essay is to illustrate how an organisation with several different cultural activities, such as a regional museum, works with anemphasis on participation. The essay focuses on Kulturparken Småland AB, which encourages the public to be more involved in its activities. Aqualitative approach is used, including nine interviews with employees at theorganisation. A number of theories form the basis of this study: institutionaltheory, which focuses on the context of the organisation, Bourdieu?s theoriesof different capital and Abbott?s theory regarding professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the three search engines Web of Science, Google Scholar and MEDLINE in regards of recovery efficiency and the overlap of relevant documents when it comes to information searching for academic purposes. Furthermore, it raises the question whether freely available search engines and licensed search engines are interchangeable with each other. The empirical data in this study were collected through searches conducted in the three search engines Web of Science, Google Scholar and MEDLINE. Twenty search queries were used and the first twenty retrieved documents for each query were examined for relevance using previously designed criteria. The documents were scored by a binary relevancy scale and thereafter a precision value for each search engine was calculated.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how libraries use thetools and ideas from library 2.0 in their reading promotionwork. We also want to include how librarians motivate thisuse and whatever merits and faults they encounter. We haveperformed document studies and interviews which we thenanalyzed with qualitative content analysis. Our theoreticframework in this study which we also used as a part of ourcoding scheme in the analysis was a model over the conceptlibrary 2.0 developed by Holmberg, Huvila, Kronquist-Bergand Widén-Wulff. This model describes seven aspects oflibrary 2.0 which is users, participation, library and libraryservice, web and web 2.0, social aspects, technology andinteractivity.

This thesis presents a general definition of science education and earth science education.An inventory has been conducted of published material during the years 2011-2013, withthe start in 2013 and working backwards for international publications and with no timelimits in time for Swedish publications. Different databases were used during April 2013 forthe inventory.The thesis organizes and analyses published material in earth science education in a tablewith a following discussion.The purpose with the inventory was to investigate the amount and content ofprevious year?s publications in earth science education. Concept inventories were foundto be the most common subject of the found material, followed by virtual field studies. Thelargest amount of publications was published in North America.

In the 1960?s, Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard developed a theory called Situational Leadership. Situational Leadership is a model where the leader analyses the needs of the situation and the needs of the people to be led. After analysing the situation, decision is made on what leadership style to adopt. The Situational Leadership model was developed in a company environment.

As artificial intelligence (AI) has gained more influence in recruitment, both recruitment processes and the role of the recruiter are changing. This study aims to describe and analyze how recruiters translate, use, and relate to AI in their work. Through a qualitative method based on semi-structured interviews and document analysis, the study explores recruiters? experiences, attitudes, as well as perceived obstacles and opportunities regarding the use of AI in recruitment. With a theoretical foundation in translation theory, fashion, and imitation, the study examines how AI is not only followed as a trend, but also shaped and adapted locally through translation, depending on organizational identity and needs.

This study aims at examining the prospects for a policy transfer of a Swedish municipal environmental policy (that of Växjö) to the French urban commune Blois, for which an ambition of becoming a leading eco-city in France, was declared by the mayor in 2008.In the analysis, emphasis is laid on mechanisms to institutionalize the main environmental policy principles, such as political and institutional structures and processes. Other prospects for an institutionalization of a new environmental policy that are to be investigated are economic structures as well as visions of the different decision-makers concerned. Research methods used in the study are qualitative interviews, document studies and a questionnaire.The findings of the analysis show that today?s prospects for an environmental policy in Blois close to that of Växjö, are clearly limited. The limitations can partly be found in economic structures but these seem to be rather related to a lack of priority amongst actors.

This essay contents a theme-centred study of Elsa Grave?s poetry. It presents an all-pervading featured doom-theme and illuminates three motifs and attitudes through which the theme is featured. The presentation includes analyses that bear in mind the double perspectives within Grave?s poems ? the subjective and the universal, where also an omnipresent political attitude is represented.

This essay deals with the ideas of social change in the Iron Gates Gorge site of Lepenski Vir during the Mesolithic. The change from a mainly fish-based subsistence strategy to a strategy that came to rely more on hunting and later domesticated animals could have been the onset of the social change that is noticeable in the material culture from the site. Theessay is divided in two main segments. The first consists of a case-study based on three themes that describes and searches for changes in the subsistence-, settlement- and burialpractises during the Mesolithic and beginning of the Neolithic phases, and the second part analyses the results from the case-study. It is primarily the idea of transformations and reproductions of traditions that will be dealt with in the analysis which is facilitated by a theoretic structure based on and inspired by the works of Emilé Durkheim and Anthony Giddens..

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to compare classification codes and feature headings of three different universal classification schemes SAB, UDC and DDC, when classifying archaeological literature. The aim is to determine whether a subject analysis of a title generates similar feature headings in the three systems, and to find positive and negative things about each system from an archaeological point of view. The comparison and the analysis of the 22 chosen archaeological monographs showed that the subject analysis of the titles didnt always generate similar feature headings. This could depend on several things, for example different interpretations of the subject analysis of a document, less knowledge about the system and/or the subject, or the fact that its not the same classifier that creates the codes. The study also showed that the different classification systems did treat the subject archaeology a bit differently, and that its difficult to say that one of them is better for classifying archaeological literature.