The purpose of this project was to invite a changed perception of active sitting, to introduce a more active way of sitting in office environments and destigmatize an active sitting posture such as straddling by giving active sitting products conscious aesthetics based on environment and positive associations. The goal with this project was an active sitting product for office environments with aesthetics considered encouraging to movement in a relaxed way, regardless of age and gender, and connect to materials and aesthetics related to activity, experience and recreation. Horseback riding, retro style surfing and skateboarding was an entry of investigation. The project was based on existing active sitting products, their function and production techniques. It was not a part of the project to investigate new models of sitting.

The purpose of this essay is to raise and discuss children?s problems with concentration in two areas, stress and Adhd, where the symptoms are similar to each other. During recent years I have experienced how "difficult" children increasingly have been diagnosed and "stamped" with various combinations of letters. Because of my own children?s diagnoses, this has raised my interest in studying children´s modes of expression and behavior, and I have come to question whether many children who receive a diagnosis of Adhd really are afflicted by it.

The process of drug discovery is very slow and expensive. There is a need for reliable in silico methods; however the performance of these methods differs.This work presents a targeted study on how the drug discovery methods used in OpenEye?s tools ROCS, EON and FRED perform on targets with small ligands. It was examined if 12 compounds (markers) somewhat similar to AMP could be detected by ROCS in a random data set comprised of 1000 compounds. It was also examined if EON could find any electrostatic similarities between the queries and the markers.

A controversial party?s entry into parliament - a review of Expressen?s depiction of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna)The purpose of this essay was to study how Expressen presents the Sweden Democrats, as well as reasoning about the effects this depiction could have on the citizens? opinion. Using a quantitative method I studied 122 articles, and through a qualitative method four of these could be further analyzed to reach a deeper result. The theoretical perspective that was applied in this study was primary agenda-setting and framing theory, to illuminate the power of media. The result showed that a prominent theme was to present Sweden Democrats as racists.

Through the entry of web 2.0 the technologies behind web development has changed dramatically. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is the umbrella term for different techniques that make it possible to build rich and interactive user interfaces in today?s web browsers. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) describes how common services can be bundled and published so they can be consumed by different systems.The company SYSteam Evolution AB, which has requested this project, wanted a web application that shows a graphical activity chart in order to easier view ongoing projects. The goal for this project is to develop a demo platform that shows how AJAX and SOA can be used to create flexible and reusable applications.

Several studies have investigated the relationship between different measures of innovative activity, such as patent statistics and R&D expenditures and some have looked deeper into the differences between large and small firms regarding number of patents issued per employee or per R&D dollar. In this paper, the objective is to find out if there are any indications of a barrier to entry (due to economical factors, lack of knowledge etc) for small firms to get into the field of patent handling. The approach is to first set up a hypothesis based on some simple assumptions about how firms would make decisions about whether to apply for a patent or not and thereafter use econometric methods in an empirical investigation. The data used for this study are figures on number of employees, number of patents granted and R&D expenditures for the Swedish firms in the pulp and paper industry. The main conclusion is that, based on the analysis of the data from this rather limited group of firms, no such barrier can be seen..

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine to what extent series books for children and youth are included in the acquisitions of public libraries. It also examines which needs series books fulfil among a group of 13-15 year old children. The main question of this thesis was: To what extent do libraries provide series books for children and youth? An inquiry investigation showed that a majority of the libraries in Sweden provide these books. The main reason to provide the books was that the demand is large.

Cycling is one of the most sustainable transport modes available and it is widely promoted inmany urban areas. The health benefits from cycling has shown to be substantial, includingdecreased risks of diseases related to overweight and enhancing brain capacity. However, inurban areas cyclists can temporaly be exposed to high levels of air pollution, resulting inhealth risks as opposed to health benefits.The objective of this thesis is to develop a rasterbased test model in GIS that estimates theinhaled dose of air pollution for cyclists based on relative particle concentration in differenttransportation micro-environments. The method used is a least-cost path approach,calculating three different routes; shortest, fastest and least dose for four different trips withinSödermalm, Stockholm.The results show that the inhaled particle dose can be greatly reduced, 39% - 58% for three ofthe routes, by choosing the least dose route. One of the most interesting findings is thesubstantial increase of dose when high levels of particles are combined with uphill cycling.The conclusion for the thesis is that a raster-GIS model can be very useful for estimating doseof different air pollution particles and chemicals along cycling routes.

Because of among other things the globalization and a focus on core competencies knowledge has become very important for the companies of today, especially for research-intensive companies. The problem is that the companies become more sensitive to how knowledge is created and spread, that is, how organizational knowledge is created. Especially sensitive are companies who are small, young and research-intensive. The purpose with this thesis is to explore how organizational knowledge is created in small, young and research intensive companies.The theory is based on a five-phase model of organizational knowledge creation and four modes of knowledge conversion described by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995). These concepts constitute the foundation of the analytical model used in the thesis.The study is carried out by qualitative, highly structured interviews with low standardization.

The essay is an evaluative study of student democracy in the Swedish high school, its departure point being the 1994 national curriculum for the voluntary school forms (Lpf 94). We adopted an interview method, the survey units consisting in a number of high school teachers. The analysis has two principal theoretical departure points, involving democracy theory and implementation analysis, respectively. The former is utilized to help identifying what sort of democracy permeates the governing document and high school daily life, the latter to explain actual outcomes.The study concludes that the 94 curriculum is characterized by a strong democracy with emphasis on participatory democratic processes, whereas in practice there is a thin democracy in both classroom and formal student government contexts. Representative processes are given plenty of room although few attempts at participatory democratic components can be identified.A deeper analysis of the result reveals implementation problems traceable to elements of symbolism in the goals.

Customer service has traditionally consisted of telephone, mail, and later on chat.But the entry of social media has changed the way companies exercise customerservice. Companies should ask themselves whether the same type of traditionalcommunication may or may not function in a new channel and thus whether itcan be applied to social media.The purpose of this study is to describe the companies? use of customer servicein social media and how the communication differentiates from thecommunication in traditional customer service, and also to define the effect onthe customers? relationship to the company. To reach our conclusions we havecombined theoretical references with qualitative interviews.By our analysis, we found that the communication in social media expandsthe possibilities. By entering an unfamiliar channel, customer service has hadto adapt themselves and their language.

Some MNEs encounter frustration or failures when they enter a new market. The main reason is due to a lack of adaptation. There is a lack of theoretical study about the local adaptation phenomenon of Swedish MNEs in China. Most studies are at the level of experience. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to find out the dimensions subject to local adaptation and their degree for the Swedish MNEs in China.

Hip dysplasia is a common, inherited malformation of the coxofemoral joint that eventually leads to osteoarthrosis. Several breeds of dogs are affected and the prevalence varies between different breeds. As part of the effort to reduce the prevalence of hip dysplasia and select dogs suitable for breeding, radiological screening is performed by at least 12 months of age. Before the radiological examination the dog has to be chemically restrained, sedated or anesthetized. The sedation protocol used differs between veterinary clinics. The impact of sedation method of the screening result for hip dysplasia has been studied.

With increasing traffic congestion problems in bigger cities, it is becoming more and more important to provide the traveller with correct information about all transport alternatives. When doing that, the traveller gets the opportunity to make the best decision based on the current traffic situation. Instead of traditional travel planners, where public and private transport modes are presented separately, the co-modal travel planner offers a combination. In order to make the comparison correct and fair, the travel times have to be estimated realistically and on equal basis. This master thesis focuses on how to estimate travel times in the city of Stockholm for journeys by cars, public transport, bicycles and also for walking.An investigation of the available data on maps and travel times shows where the currently used methods are lacking.

The title is a quote from a blog entry written by the Swedish journalist Linus Fremin. For many years Fremin suffered from bulimia and he claims that men for a long time have been excluded from medias coverage of eating disorders.We wanted to try this thesis and decided to do a quantitative study of articles published in two Swedish newspapers, Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter, regarding eating disorders during the period 20101129-20121129. We studied 199 articles and counted the occurrence of men and women in the texts.Our study showed that women were represented in a majority of the articles, whereas the men were clearly much more absent. In most of the articles eating disorders were described as a female issue and men were rarely included. It?s difficult to say how the ideal division of men and women in media?s coverage of eating disorders should look like.