Each municipality in Sweden have to offer all children a place in a pre-school class starting the autumn term of the year the child turns six until it starts compulsory school. Despite the fact that it is a non-compulsory education, 95 % of all six-year-olds attend pre-school class.The purpose of this study has been to explore how pre-school and compulsory schools organize the pre-school children?s transition to pre-school. It also aims at examining how teachers? co-operate in order to fulfill the commission of the national curriculum and how they make a smooth transition to the new school for the children.Research questions: In what way do teachers in pre-school and compulsory school co-operate in in order to make the children?s transition easy? What part of the process and which operators are most important for the children in the transition? To what extent does the school organization fulfill the commission of the national curriculum regarding co-operation between pre-school and compulsory school?To answer these questions I have used a qualitative method where I have made seven interviews as well as a text analysis of annual reports from the studied schools.

Social media has made it possible to have a conversation in real time through audio, images and text, with anyone worldwide. The easy availability of social media has created a new society. Companies and organizations have the opportunity to interact with their audiences and their target in a way not previously possible. Welcome to the Web 2.0 world!Social media is a collective name for the communication channels that allow users to communicate directly with each other in real time through text, image or sound. Examples of social media are blogs, SMS, Skype, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Linkedin and Myspace.The purpose of this essay is to explore social media's role and opportunities in terms of being able to influence companies and organizations marketing communication. We have used a qualitative approach and our thesis is based on a qualitative text analysis study where we have analyzed 13 articles (the articles are from scholarly journals, magazines and trade/professional) from 2007 to 2009.

Automatic rumination measuring can be applied as a health indicator in dairy farming but is also highly desirable for research purposes. This study aimed to validate the technical functionality of the product RuminActTM, which employ acoustics to monitor rumination duration. The time budget of high yielding cows was studied and possible differences in rumination time between 13 rations were interpreted. Further the study examined what affects daily rumination and rumination efficiency. The validation was performed with direct observations that were compared to the automatically recorded rumination durations.

Overweight and obesity is currently a major health problem in our dogs all around the world and it is becoming more common each year. There are few studies on the proportion of overweight dogs in Sweden, but it was estimated to be 33% in 2005. Studies in other countries report that between 25-40% of all dogs are overweight. The aim of this study was to survey the animal care for an overweight dog. It was also important to develop a scientifically based advice.

Rapid Granulator is one of the world's largest producers of granulators, which is a kind of grinderwho grinds discarded plastics to granules which later can be reused when pressure molding plastics.The company wanted help in developing a new, or alternatively extending their previous,measurement equipment. The old equipment was hard to use, required changes in the code fordifferent measurement scenarios and had a limited array of measuring quantities. Rapid had an ideaof a similar concept only with a greater number of input ports, better range of applicable sensors andan advanced yet easy to use interface. The system is supposed to be placed at Rapid's test departmentwhere it will be used as a tool for finding faults and provide data which can be used for furtherdevelopment of the granulators.The project's members accepted the task and immediately began searching for suitable componentsfor the system. After the search was completed a list of costs, limitations, sensors, I/O's anddevelopment environment was presented to Rapid's staff.

Playboy is a magazine that, for more than a half century, has been mostly known to the wider audience for its stylized pictures of naked women. What a lot of people do not know is that the magazine, with its editor in chief Hugh Hefner in the lead, has been frontrunners in human rights. Playboy has been fighting protecting the right of freedom of speech, fighting for equal rights for all people during the civil rights movement and supported the feminist movement by funding precedent cases on abortion rights. According to a series of text analyses by Beggan & Allison (2000, 2002b) Playboy?s editorial direction contradicted conventional definitions of masculinity. Also, the magazine portrayed its Playmates with complex identities that, in many cases, contained a number of traditionally masculine abilities.In this thesis we have done a critical discourse analysis of the Playboy interview and how the gender of its subject is portrayed by the magazine.

The most common types of smartphones in Sweden are iPhone and Android. Development in the IT feld is constantly changing and Windows Phone is a new operating system that has been introduced on the Swedish market in 2010. However, Windows Phone user interface is quite different from iPhone and Android.The numbers of applications for smartphones are increasing, and users are making greater demands on better  usability. Users want the application to be easy to understand and fast to bring into play.  If the application contains a bug or has other user problems, it can ruin the entire experience. If the user does not have a good experience of the application, the user will quickly stop using the application.Companies that do not have any mobile applications would probably begin with an iPhone application.

This master thesis has been done in cooperation with Sweco Viak AB in Sundsvall. The aimwith the project is to investigate the purifying effect of percolation filter due to iron andmanganese. The overall goal was to investigate how the parameters surface load,sandfractions, and burden time affect the purifying effect. The expectation is to optimize thedesign and find a demouldning of the filter that gives sufficient purifying with a highersurface load. As an attempt to accelerate the curing of the filter, experiments with a layer ofsand which surface has been covered with manganese ore (MnO2) on top of the filter havebeen done.As test filters 10 L bars were used and the experimental work was performed at thewaterworks in Hassela and Munkbysjön.In Hassela different sandfractions were tested.

The exclusion of visually impaired from the information flow presented to us through signs was what led me into this project. With a growing amount of information being presented to us on signs and digital information surface the need of communicating this information in a way that could be read by visually impaired is evident. Looking into different ways of communication, my goal was to create something that filled the need of the visually impaired without branding them as disabled. Having a close relative with bad eyesight is became evident on how much it limited her in her everyday life, not being able to navigate herself without the support of her husband. Through interviews with her and others with varying diagnoses I reached an insight in their situation. To my surprise they still favored a visual form of communication before an auditory or tactile form, because it?s easy to survey and quick to interpret.

Heart failure is an illness that requires life-long treatment and often affects everyday aspects of a person?s life. Self-care is a significant part of the treatment. Good self-care resources make it possible for people with heart failure to make the lifestyle changes they often need to maintain or improve their level of health. Self-care means having knowledge of and being able to recognize the symptoms and signs of deterioration that can occur with heart failure, so that the person can take appropriate measures ? and it also means knowing when it is time to seek professional help.

The ability to tackle NP-hard problems has been greatly extended by the introduction of Metaheuristics (see Blum & Roli (2003)) for a summary of most Metaheuristics, general problem-independent optimisation algorithms extending the hill-climbing local search approach to escape local minima. One of these algorithms is Iterated Local Search (ILS) (Lourenco et al., 2002; Stützle, 1999a, p. 25ff), a recent easy to implement but powerful algorithm with results comparable or superior to other state-of-the-art methods for many combinatorial optimisation problems, among them the Traveling Salesman (TSP) and Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). ILS iteratively samples local minima by modifying the current local minimum and restartinga local search porcedure on this modified solution. This thesis will show how ILS can be implemented for MSA.

We have been looking at three different types of agriculture in Södermanland, in the middle east of Sweden. We call the different types for Intensive, Extensive and Mix. The purpose is to get an economic defensible plan for how to run different farm sizes. We also have been looking at the working hours and how many hours the different types will give. We have a farm called Taxinge Gods as our pilot farm. Taxinge Gods grow 407 ha land and is located 60 km southwest from Stockholm.

The purpose of this work was to see if it was possible to rebuild an old dairy house into a house fore sheep production. The goals fore the work was to see witch kind of production model was suitable, how the actual drawing would look like and witch kind of interior was needed. The building was built in the beginning of 1900. It is located on the mountain Kinnekulle in Sweden. It was a big production fore its time and hade about 60 dairy cows. It was a lot of hard work because the floor was built by big stone blocks and it was very hard to rebuild when some more automatic solutions came fore handling all the manure. The idea of remaking the building came when we rebuilt the roof fore 5 years ago.

Sexual risk-taking among teenagers has rapidly increased and only during the last decade the existence of Chlamydia has more than tripled. The future is facing big challenges to cope with the problem. Though the big efforts made on preventive work, Chlamydia continues to spread. The study aims to examine the existing attitudes towards sexual risk-taking among teenagers. The central mode of procedure is to use qualitative focus group interviews, and is complemented with a quantitative survey. A total of 30 teenagers, 15 boys and 15 girls, age 16-20, are participating from three different high schools in Gothenburg.

Light has always fascinated humans but ever since the invention of the first light bulb, the use of artificial lighting has accelerated dramatically. Darkness has never been as rare as today and the overuse of lighting has created a new phenomenon called light pollution. Most living beings are biologically dependent on the recurrent twenty-four-hour rhythm of light and darkness, called the circadian cycle. Human beings are evolutionary developed after this circadian rhythm and the effects of constant artificial light is yet unknown. Scientists fear the consequences of constant lighting and what it means physically, mentally and philosophically for the human species.