Term: Spring term 2007Study objects: Reitan Servicehandel AB, Vi-butikerna, ICA Sverige ABPurpose: The purpose of this study is to analyse how procurement is used as a strategy to achieve better competitive strength, within the retail food industry.Theoretical: The theoretical chapter illustrates different procurement organisations, multiple and single sourcing, brand equity, consumer behaviour and involvement, Efficient Consumer Response including supply chain and category management and finally Demand Chain Management.Method: For the case studies, three food retail companies have been interviewed: Reitan Servicehandel AB, Vi-butikerna and ICA AB. To illustrate how consumer behaviour influences retail food market, several secondary consumer research studies have been analysed.Conclusions: The results indicate that the procurement organisation can achieve a better competitive strength by a centralised organisation, which make it possible to improve conditions of terms when ordering higher purchase volumes. The sourcing strategies can improve a company?s power within the supply chain. All companies within the study had a very good knowledge about consumer behaviour.

The aim with this master's thesis is to describe the work process with the graduation film Player, by a composers perspective and given conditions. It provides a detailed insight into how the work was done from the script stage to the end result, scene by scene reflecting about both the musical performance and the collaboration between the director and me as a composer. The work was done during the spring term of 2012 at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts..

Free play is a term that often common in educational activities. The definition of the term is difficult, but it is about the children themselves decides the scope, content and process in their play. On an after-school, this may mean that it is the children are given the opportunity to freely choose their own activity in the leisure constraints. Free play can be an alternative to other, more controlled activities where adults control framework. The purpose of this study is to investigate the variations in how some children perceive and experience the phenomenon of free play in the after-school and how the children perceive the teacher´s role in the free game.

This Masters thesis work describes a comparison between two different methods for estimation of the down channel (base station to mobile subscriber) in Wide-band Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA). The first estimation method, Optimal Feed-forward Channel Estimation (OFCE), is a conventional method that bases the estimates on data that is known to both sender and receiver, so called pilots. The second method, Decision Directed Channel Estimation (DDCE), is an elaboration of OFCE. It also uses user data for estimation. Simulations show that DDCE, in comparison to OFCE, does not attain an improvement in signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) for high bit error rates (BER). An improvement is only seen when the BER becomes much lower than what is common in real situations. In conclusion DDCE is complicated, involves many mathematical operations and gives insignificant improvement of SNR when BER takes common values. It is legitimate to question if it is possible to use the method in a real mobile phone system..

This thesis is focusing on how global and local search engines retrieve information from the local domain. The three search engines tested are the global search engines Yahoo, Ask.com and the local search engine Web Wombat. The questions we examined were: which search engine has the best retrieval effectiveness? Could there be other reasons than retrieval effectiveness, to choosing a local search engine?For our test we constructed 20 questions related to Australia.We chose to divide the questions into topics like nature, sports and culture. For all questions we evaluated the relevance of the first 20 hits.

Digital games are today avaliable on all kinds of different platform. Games and game thinking is also increasingly being applied within non-traditional contexts. This thesis explores the term "gamifiation" which can be defined as "the use of game design elements in non-game contexts". The purpose of the study was to identify and give perspective on the discourse surrounding the use and applicability of the term today. More specifically, it explores the possibilities of the potentially value creating ability in the context of work, and focused on the application of gamified software in the context of project work.

The aim with this master's thesis is to describe the work process with the graduation film Player, by a composers perspective and given conditions. It provides a detailed insight into how the work was done from the script stage to the end result, scene by scene reflecting about both the musical performance and the collaboration between the director and me as a composer. The work was done during the spring term of 2012 at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts..

Soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks and fluxes in forest ecosystems are influenced by natural and human disturbances. In the tropical regions the highest impacts on disturbance in forest C cycles are related to human activities such as conversion of natural lands to cropland and pasture areas and to forest plantations. The disturbances in the forest C cycles will release CO2 emissions to the atmosphere triggering global warming. In this study the focus was set in subtropical soils in Brazil, south extreme region of Bahia. The aim of the study was to investigate whether reforestation of Eucalyptus plantations under former pasture areas will help mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration.

Master thesis work at ITN (Department of Science and Technology) in the areas of A/D-construction and RF-circuit design. Major goal of project were to research suitable possibilities for implementations of direct conversion in transceivers operating in the 160MHz band, theoretic study followed by development of components in the construction environment Cadence. Suitable A/D- converter and other important parts were selected at the end of the theoretic study. Subsampling technique was applied to make A/D sample requirements more realistic to achieve. Besides lowering requirements on A/D-converter it allows a more simple construction, which saves more components than subsampling adds.

In time with HolmenSkog district Egenskog Norrköping´s decreasing mountain of cleaning, the office started to look around for new alternative cleaning strategies to lower the costs connected with cleaning. One option was to make the inventory strategy more effective and after a phonecall with the head of the district, Jonnie Friberg, the planning started to try inventory in pictures taken from a helicopter. The pictures was at last taken from a digtal camera and the vegetationheight was mesured with a laser. The gear was supplied from Kallax Flyg AB, Luleå. In the trial 15 stands was selected depended on age and different mixtures between pine (Pinus sylvestris), spruce (Picea abies) and birch (Betula pubescense and Betula pendula).

Background: Animals have been shown to have a positive effect on people. The nursing science approach says that a person can experience well-being despite illness. The positive attributes of animals can be used in health care to help ill people experience well-being. An animal-assisted intervention can be a form of activity or therapy involving pets (AAA / AAT) or horses (EAT).Aim: The purpose of this study was to elucidate how animals in health care promote well-being for people with long-term illness.Methods: Literature review based on fourteen original scientific articles, with both qualitative and quantitative approach.Results: The compilation of the results led to four main categories with two subcategories respectively. These were: Physical aspects with subcategories Physical well-being and Bodily functions; Psychic aspects with subcategories Psychic well-being and Reduced psychiatric symptoms; Existential aspects with subcategories Quality of Life and Safety; Social Aspects with subcategories Social behavior and Relationships.Discussions: Review and discussion of the selected method.

Ett mönster är uppbyggt av ett motiv som upprepas. Denna upprepning kan fortsätta i all oändlighet. Hållbar antyder långsiktighet. Mönstrets övergripande egenskap är oändlighet. Hur kan denna egenskap hos mönstret nyttjas inom mönsterdesign för att främja hållbar utveckling? Det här kandidatarbetet undersöker mönsterdesignens möjlighet att verka för hållbar utveckling genom att se till begreppet mönster ur ett bredare perspektiv, samt i relation till design för hållbar utveckling.

Purpose: The aim with the report is to investigate if the South East Asian customer on the food processing market base their investments on Total Cost of Ownership and if so, which are the cost drivers considered most vital. Moreover, do these cost-drivers diverge from the perception FP Ltd has, and if so, can a Total Cost of Ownership-model help to achieve a mutual understanding? Methodology: First a descriptive approach will be taken, identifying FP Ltd?s employers? perception on how to meet the customer. This will later be compared to our empirical findings of the actual customer behaviour in Thailand and Vietnam. Thorough analyse of the gap between the two parts will give us the outcome whether or not FP Ltd will have any use of presenting a quantitative model justifying their higher price.

In the western world, strokes are the third most common cause of death, hitting mainly the elderly population. Smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and overweight are known risk factors for causing strokes. Previous studies show that an increased level of particulate matter, PM, is also related to an increased number of strokes. The population in this study consists of patients over 65 years old who live in Malmö. Levels of particulate matter were measured from October 2004 to April 2005 at a central outdoor monitoring site in Malmö.

Library 2.0 is a term which emerged a few years ago and is frequently discussed. There is no uniform definition of the term but the central aspect of the concept is to encourage increased participation from library users.The aim of this Master's thesis is to investigate if and if so, how the professional role of the librarian is affected by Library 2.0. To do that, we have conducted a case study at the public library in Umeå. Their homepage minabibliotek.se is a practical example of Library 2.0. The homepage is based on interactivity and the library users can participate in various ways.We thougt that qualitive interviews was the best way to gain an understanding for how the librarians at the public library in Umeå experience how the work with minabibliotek.se affect their professional role.