The purpose of our essay is to investigate the role of the practice period under supervision from a skilled practioner as a part of the student?s development of knowledge. This essay?s main participants are students who are studying their sixth semester during the spring 2009 at the bachelor program of social work at the University of Gothenburg and active skilled practioners during the autumn of 2008 and spring 2009. The essay has primarily a qualitative approach.

This paper tests the information signalling hypothesis on a sample of firms making open market stock repurchases. Using an earnings-based valuation model, we find that a majority of repurchasing firms are undervalued relative to their economic value. This result is consistent with previous academic studies, which claim that undervaluation is the prevalent factor explaining the observed abnormal return following the announcement of a repurchase program. We do not, however, find any evidence that the repurchase is consciously made by management to provide the market with new information. .

The aim of this study is to examine if and how the diagnosis of ADHD is important for the social practice delimitation to obtain an understanding of how the sorting and categorization of clients affects the distribution of resources. In a qualitative approach, the study is based on eight semi-structured interviews in five different social practices. Young adults diagnosed with ADHD who need society's help and support, constituted our focus in the study. The selection is based on gaining an understanding of how the client process proceeds. The interviews were supplemented with documents, such as legal and internal methodological support.

The theory that concepts that are interpreted subjectively in building care creates problems in how the concepts are defined in practice within the current governing documents and guidelines for building care. This essay has studied concepts in the building maintenance literature to investigate whether there is consensus in compliance practice within the building process. In the study, 9 concepts have been investigated through conversational interviews and questionnaires answered by practitioners with extensive experience in building care processes. In the survey, an attempt is made, to measure how big or small the consensus is between practitioners who often need to collaborate within the building maintenance process. The investigation shows that existence of the concepts in building maintenance is very common in the theoretical literature examined but is almost completely absent in the craft area. Since laws, regulations, principles, and guidelines have defined concepts to support the decisions in the building maintenance process, it can be concluded that there is a lack of practice for compliance.

Previous studies have pointed out the potential risks involved with targeting homosexual consumers by using ads with homosexual imagery in mainstream media. Many of these studies have indicated that there may be drawbacks with exposing heterosexuals to these kinds of advertisements. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether this is true for all groups of heterosexual consumers. An experimental study was carried out to examine the effects of explicit homosexual imagery on a heterosexual group with a generally positive attitude towards homosexuality. Empirical evidence suggests that homosexual imagery does not elicit any negative reactions among these heterosexual consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate what consequences the discussed Balken-case have had with regards to freeze-out prices decisions for cash bids. In order to evaluate this, a comparison with a previous study is made. Last but not least, the aim is also to see what kind of arguments the minority successfully can make use of in order to reach a higher freeze-out price nowadays. Underlying the results is basically an empirical survey based on arbitrations disclosing the tendencies after the Balken-case compared to before. The empirical investigation shows that practice has become more clear and uniform after the settlement of the Balken-case where a movement from theoretical values towards market prices is recommended.

There is strong evidence that cognitive-behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is effective. The aim of this study was to compare 7 group-sessions of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for insomnia (MBCT-I) with 3 group-sessions of CBT-I, on sleep measures and sleep related psychological processes, such as pre-sleep arousal, thought control strategies and mindfulness. Participants (N = 44; age 18-66) with long term insomnia were stratified and randomized into waiting list, MBCT-I and CBT-I. Significant improvements were seen in both groups, compared to waiting list, for instance on insomnia severity, sleep latency and restorative sleep. Small improvements on psychological processes were also found in both groups.

A new phenomenon on the Internet is the online audience response. Mentimeter is a web-based tool where you can create online polls. The users can then cast a vote and the result is shown in real time. We want to test the information visualization in Mentimeter and we base our hypothesis, that a better graph design is possible, on the work of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few. Edward Tufte is an emeritus at Yale University, where he held courses in statistical evidence and information design and has created theories about how visual information should be designed.

The investigation aims to clarify to what extent non-conscious thought has efficacy in e.g. decision making and also examine some aspects of the question whether decisions are caused by free will. This will be conducted through an analysis of new research pertaining to neuroscience, economics, the combination of the two within neuroeconomics; evolutionary theory and especially the new theory of Unconscious thought (Nordgren & Dijksterhuis 2006) which will enjoy special scrutiny due to its recentness in the scientific field. A decision strategy ought to put high-level conscious cognition to use where it's most effective and this is on a different level than the canonized one. Meta decision making is decision making pertaining to which decisions ought to be made consciously.

Sahlgrenska Academyat University of GothenburgDepartment of Internal Medicine and Clinical NutritionAbstractTitle: A vegetarian diet, a possible treatment complement for relief of symptoms ofrheumatoid arthritis? A systematic review.Author: Alexandra Ahlsén and Caroline ForsbergSupervisor: Mette AxelsenExaminer: Anna WinkvistProgramme: Dietician study programme, 180/240 ECTSType of paper: Examination paper, 15 hpDate: May 22, 2012Background: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic remitting polyarthritis that is relapsing.Symptoms are inflammation of the joints with pain, stiffness and degradation of joint tissue.In some cases, also other parts of the body are involved. The treatment consists ofmedications to reduce pain, inflammation and degradation of joint tissue. Today, the offerednutritional treatment is primarily focused on meeting energy requirements and nutrient needs.The diet has also been discussed as symptomatic treatment, and one of the factors believed toinfluence the symptoms is meat.Objective: To assess the evidence as to whether a vegetarian diet affects the symptoms ofrheumatoid arthritis, and if so, to suggest how it can be implemented in practical dieteticswork.Search strategy The databases used in the literature search was PubMed, Scopus, and AMED.The search words used were: "rheumatiod arthritis", "vegetarian", "vegan", "diet", "meat" and"animal protein".Selection criteria: Studies investigating a vegetarian diet on the symptoms of RA wereincluded. Only RCT, clinical trial, controlled clinical trial, human studies and original articlesin English or Swedish were included.

The aim of this thesis is to study social tagging in an OPAC by looking at the tags of Ann Arbor District Library?s catalogue. In this thesis I analyse the possibilities of social tagging. The main questions to be answered are what is the distribution of tags in different categories, what are the differences between fiction and non-fiction and how do the social tags differ from the terms of the professional indexing practice. Studying 500 tags I find that subject matter was the most frequent category for tags assigned to fiction and non-fiction.

Our planet is faced with enormous challenges as the extreme weather events related to the human-caused climate change continue to gain strength. The scale of the problem has made changing human behaviour the central focus of sustainable development, and both public and private sector are expected to gain relevant expertise and introduce this work in their agenda. Over its 40-year history, social marketing has become an established field providing tools for social change, but compared to health promotion, sustainability has not been a major focus of social marketing research so far. At the same time, sustainable lifestyles are embedded in complex systems where both individual factors and those of physical and social environment play a defining role in their adoption. Communities are a good example of such environments, and they became the key focus of Community-Based Social Marketing, which combines different insights from psychology to suggest a step-by-step framework for crafting behaviour change campaigns. However, it has not been applied to larger and diverse communities, like cities, and has not focused on sustaining new behaviour over time, which is crucial for creating sustainable lifestyles.

Research suggests that society's vulnerability to natural disasters along coasts could increase as a result of climate change, which is likely to lead to elevated sea levels and possibly an increase in the occurance of meteorological phenomena such as storms and tropical cyclones. Following the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, both of which received considerable media attention, empirical data has indicated that coastal vegetation might be able to protect and reduce damages to coastal communities during tsunami events and tropical cyclones.The aim of the essay has been to study the function of coastal ecosystems as protection against tsunami waves and storms from a risk management perspective, meaning that I have, through an overview of scientific articles, compiled current research on how coastal ecosystems can attenuate storm surges and tsunami waves, and analysed how this knowledge can be put into practice in coastal communities from a risk management perspective, i.e. if coastal ecosystems are a viable risk reduction measure, are practically applicable, and if so, how they could be applied.There is empirical evidence suggesting that coastal ecosystems, particularly mangroves, can reduce the strength of a tsunami wave, but full scientific consensus on this issue has not yet been reached. With regard to protection against storm surges, there is extensive scientific evidence that coastal vegetation can mitigate damages and reduce the height of a storm surge, although the wave has to traverse several kilometres inland through thick vegetation for the protection to be effective. A synthesis in the form of a figure regarding the many physical factors that influence wave development through coastal ecosystems has been created in an attempt to simplify and explain the phenomenon.The conservation and restoration of coastal ecosystems can be justified from a risk management perspective, but planting new forest belts for the purpose of disaster mitigation is quite unrealistic and can rarely be sustainable, since, for protection to be effective, the forest belt must extend several kilometres inland from the coast, and would thus likely prove difficult to implement along coastal societies..

Several surveys indicate that corporate leaders still consider the aligning of IT and business functions as a top management issue. The aim of this thesis is to illustrate how coordination emerges between IT and business departments and how formal structures intended to coordinate are influenced by human action. To deepen the understanding of this phenomenon we seek to analyze IT/business coordination from a perspective based on practice theory. A field study was conducted where observations and informal interviews were carried out at the IT department of a global company. The empirical analysis indicate that coordination problems between IT and business departments is in part affected by embedded factors such as different goals and perspectives on how IT is to be used in the organization or how to design IT related processes.

The purpose of this thesis was to study how preschool teachers interpret the values of the preschool curriculum that relates to culture and how the teachers describe how they work with these values in their professional practice. The study is based on social constructive and discourse analytic perspectives. I have studied how preschool teachers construct the concept of culture and the values of the preschool curriculum through a specific way to describe this. A specific way to talk about something is called a discourse. In other words I have studied preschool teachers expressed discourses about culture and their professional practice with the values of the preschool curriculum.To study this, I've done interviews with four preschool teachers.