This report is a thesis work for a B.Sc. in Forestry exam at the School for Forest Engineers, SLU. The work was an assignment from Södra Skogsägarna and the aim of the work was to investigate the economical and biological output after mechanical planting with Eco-Planter compared with traditional manual planting. Eco-Planter is a tool for mechanized planting, fixed at the end of the boom on a conventional harvester. The study confirms that manual planting is less expensive under normal conditions. However, the differences between mechanized and manual planting are not that big and with technical development and/or increased labor costs together with an improved work organization the system with Eco-Planter could be competitive. The biological output, e.g. planting result and survival rate, seems to be quite good.

The aim of this study is to enlighten how todays working environment affects young individuals descriptions of how to reach success in work life, now often titled as ?career?. Our purpose has been to analyse how the term career is constituted discursively among young people in jobs characterized by flexibility. The study is based on six qualitative interviews with young adults in the media industry, all between 20-30 years old. By utilising a Foucaultdian discourse analysis we want to expose how the competing and dominating discourses, that our interviewees? statements are based on, can be associated with a wider social context.  The study reveals that our interviewees describe career in two separate ways, both positively and negatively.

This study, a narrative analysis of it, deals with the term, home, its importance and the use of it by Child welfare investigators in the city of Malmö between the years 1930-1936. Commonly used and acknowledged, home stood for security and order while the term, street, had just the opposite meaning. Living in the countryside symbolized health and sensibility, while city life was considered to be cramped, dirty and immoral. The responsibility of achieving the liberals and conservatives ideal of a sunny, clean and orderly home was given to the woman of the house, as was the task of keeping the home morally correct, and providing the necessary atmosphere for proper upbringing of the children. Consequently, the basis of theory, using Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in regards to the conflicts between the upper and lower classes, and even theories of Jane Lewis of woman´s connection to home and family, have been the grounds for the study.

During the study's first stage we noticed that the Swedish term ? utanförskap? was constructed for political purposes, the term?s ambiguity what was first raised our interest. Therefore the aims of this study was to examine how social workers at the social welfare office and the labor market related project Framtid Kronoberg  as well as politicians within the administration of Arbete & Välfärd (Work & Welfare) relates to utanförskap as a social phenomenon. The study?s second aim was to examine how the aforementioned persons consider utanförskap to be counteracted among young adults.

This study is about Wikipedia which defines itself as a free online encyclopaedia. Our chief interest lies in the debate and the controversy which has arisen around Wikipedia. After reading critical articles concerning Wikipedia we found that the debate for most parts had one identifiable theme namely the question whether Wikipedia is an encyclo-paedia or not.Encyclopaedia as a term and a phenomenon has a long tradition. Wikipedia, despite calling itself an encyclopaedia, functions differently in comparison to more traditional encyclopaedias. These traditional views involve encyclopaedic structure, its organiza-tion and its functions.

Internationally most Internet trade related payments are performed with the use of a credit card based payment system on the Internet. Payment against invoice is still most common when trading over the Internet in Sweden. The security development, comfort and timesaving indicate that credit card based payment systems on the Internet soon will have a breakthrough in Sweden as well. The Swedish legislation concerning payment is neither especially extensive nor suited to electronic payments but to payments performed with notes and coins. When the legal effects, of a payment performed with a credit card based payment system on the Internet, set in is not fixed.

The opinion of social workers towards their work with children and young persons wasstudied in this essay. Even their point of view with reference to the term the child?s bestinterest has being considered and special focus was laid on the social workers attitudestowards media coverage and its criticism towards their work. A qualitative approach was usedconsisted of six interviews. The theoretical frameworks were based on the theory aboutfreedom of action and the theory of social representations.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the Swedish governments discourse on integration of immigrants and thereby examine what social reality it constructs. The aim is to examine how integration and immigrants are constructed within the discourse. The method and theory being used in this essay is discourse theory. As a methodological instrument we use the policy on functional impairment as a comparison. The material being analyzed in this essay is political documents on the strategy on integration policy and the strategy on the policy of functional impairment.

This work aims to evaluate the possibility of using a graphical programming language to develop software for a digital signal processor. A fixed-point digital signal processor called Blackfin BF-537 is used for this. Instead of using conventional programming languages, like C or assembler, for software development the possibilities to use a graphical environment to fill the same purpose are examined. The development environment primarily used is NI LabVIEW, but also the use of Mathworks Matlab Simulink is investigated. A variety of programs consisting of various signal processing operations and utilities are developed using these development environments.

This study aims to examine how the interventions for homeless persons in the municipality of Kalmar are organized. The study is based on four half-structured qualitative interviews with both representatives from different instances and also from persons who have experience of being homeless.The theoretical bases we have used to analyze the material are organization theory, specifically the concept of bureaucracy. Our results show that homelessness is not seen as a problem in itself, since the general view is that homeless people often have a complex problem scenario where drug- and alcohol abuse and mental illness are common.It is often the latter that takes priority in the interventions and the housing question is therefore neglected. We also found that social services do not have a satisfactory structure around the organization of the work on homelessness. They do not have any specific device in Kalmar that focus on homelessness issues with the result that the existing units are forced to take care of the work of homelessness.

The high incidence of cranial cruciate ligament injury in dogs results in both suffering and significant costs due to treatment and care of affected dogs. Today there are several different technics for surgical treatment in dogs with ruptured cranial cruciate ligament. At University Animal Hospital (UDS), SLU, in Uppsala two fundamentally different methods; TPLO (Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy) and external fixation with suture material are practiced. The aim of this study was to estimate if the different surgery technics result in any difference regarding the function of the dog in a long term perspective. Since motion and function are very affected by arthritis, was the purpose also to determine if there are any differences in developing arthritis between dogs surgical treated with external fixation respectively with TPLO. Development of arthritis is common after surgery or traumatic injuries in a joint, such as cruciate ligament rupture. Unfortunately was the number of dogs in the study to small to achieve two comparable groups.

The largest project at the AICG lab at Linköping University, Cognitive models for virtual characters, focuses on creating an agent architecture for intelligent, virtual characters. The goal is to create an agent that acts naturally and gives a realistic user experience. The purpose of this thesis is to develop and implement an appropriate learning model that fits the existing agent architecture using an agile project methodology. The model developed can be seen as an online unsupervised reinforcement learning model that enhances experiences through reward. The model is based on Maes model where new effects are created depending on whether the agent is fulfilling its goals or not.The model we have developed is based on constant monitoring of the system.

Thinning is the partial removal of trees in a forest stand prior to final harvest. The term can be divided in pre-commercial thinning where little if any volume is removed from the stand and commercial thinning where removals are intended to provide a positive economic result. From a silvicultural point of view, the goal of thinning is to enhance future crop tree quality by removing low-quality stems and providing sufficient space for the accelerated development of retained ones (Huuskonen & Hynynen, 2006). The goals of this study was to see if commercial thinning could positively affect the short and medium term timber supply (MTTS) in the Interior regions of British Columbia (BC), and whether or not Scandinavian forestry practices could be adopted in the BC context. The mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) has created significant forest planning problems in BC. The annual allowable cut (AAC) was raised to capture beetle-killed timber while still merchantable.

The Rya power plant in Borås produces district heating, district cooling and electricity. The plant is owned by Borås Energi och Miljö AB and is run by Dalkia Facility Management AB.In order to get the best heat exchange from the district hot water a pair of twin pumps and a turbine circuit pump are used as return pumps. Turbine circuit pumps are used to increase the pressure through the heat exchangers at the power plant. The pumps are in use when the flow is over 2 000 m3 h-1 and during the summer when re-cooling is used to improve the effectivens of the heat boilers.Since the pumps, that are parallel connected, rotating at a fixed rate per minute, the pressure is regulated with regulating valves. This report shows that during the 4,300 hours that the pumps where in use, energy corresponding to 590 MWh was wasted.

Boliden Mineral Ab's mine in Garpenberg, Dalarna is going through a massiveexpansion. The annual ore production is being increased from 1,4 million tons to 2,5million tons in less than two years period of time. Along this expansion thedepartment of mining techniques is administrating a project of optimizing the shortterm planning for the mining production. Garpenberg have since mid 90s storedinformation from all mining processes in a database.The information consists of time data from all the different activities required in themining process, for example charging, blasting, loading etc. The database also containstime data of delays that are affecting the production.