When a decision is to be made on what long term strategic forest management plan to use, consideration must often be taken to multiple objectives. Such decisions are very complex and a promising approach to handle them is by Multiple Criteria Decision Analyses (MCDA). The study is based on the problem that the MCDA that have been implemented into forest management planning have only had capacity to compare and evaluate a limited number of management plans; which means that there is a risk the most suitable plan is missed. The aim with this study was to test the applicability of combining the MCDA tools: the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for including consideration to multi-objectives into strategic forest management planning. The study was based on the process of creating and selecting a management plan, using Heureka PlanWise, suitable for all the major objectives found in the forest holdings of a municipality in northern Sweden.

The Iranian artist Shirin Neshat has been living in self-imposed exile since the late 1970s, as she chose not to return to her home country following the ?79 Islamic Revolution. Through her works Neshat examines Iran before and after the revolution and follows political and civil transformations through strong photographs of women in her country of birth.  My own use of the term exile deals with the analysis of the state of exile in relation to artistic work as a globalized and underlying motivation for art and artists. The new definition of exile is analyzed in relation with the artist?s photographs and the verbal and visual statements.

Wood for commercial use is harvested from forests using forest machines like harvesters which folds, branches and cuts trees and forwarders which transports logs to a landing area for further transport to a processing facility. Future forest machines have to be much gentler to the machine operators and forest soil than today's machines. Hence new machine solutions must be developed and tested. A practical way is to develop a physical scale model which can be used as a test-bed to incorporate different types of solutions for suspensions, cabin damping, tires and tracks, crane and overall architecture. The aim of this project was to develop such a 1:5 scale model of a forest machine, named as ?Skogbil.A scaling strategy was employed to arrive at important scale dimensions and specifications ofSkogbil which would be comparable to the full scale model.

The manufacturing industry is currently in a short-term downturn while the competition is increasing. The result of this is that companies must find new ways to bring out their products. Traditional competitive strategies, such as low pricing, is not sufficient today as the customer is inquiring something more than just a good product. Higher demands are presented on an accurate, well functional, communication between customer and companies, as this has become an important strategic factor in achieving long-term profitability.The aim of this independent project was to analyze and evaluate the communication process between a company and its sales companies.In order to illustrate this process, a case study was carried out at Alfa Laval, their sales companies and employees at their distribution center in Tumba. In order to see the differences in attitudes between the management, the sales companies and the employees regarding communication and involvement a gap analysis were used.The theoretical part of the study considers theories about business mission, communication, involvement, quality and creating value.The result showed that a smaller gap exists between the sales companies and the management while a slightly larger one exists between the employees and the management.

As an effect of increased living standards and improved health care, life expectancy has risen in many parts of the world. At the same time, welfare diseases such as diabetes and obesity increases. As the number of elderly and long-term sick rises, so will the medical care needs. E-health applications are often presented as a way to meet future medical and doing so within the scope of existing resources. By facilitating health communication and widen access to health services by offering them online, e-health applications encourages people to become more engaged in their own health, thus working proactively towards a healthier population.

This master thesis concerns the relation between law and the theory of the conceptual metaphor which has developed within cognitive linguistics. Although its main focus is abstract thinking, it also covers a wide range of aspects within cognitive linguistics, such as the prototype theory and radial categories. In order to address this relation, three questions will be dealt with. Firstly, does the theory of the conceptual metaphor have relevance to interpretation of legal rules and contracts? Secondly, can the same theory explain why a legal rule or a contractual term has been interpreted outside of its most given area of application? Thirdly, when an interpretation is not predictable from a legal viewpoint, can such an explanation answer to that fact? Answering the first question will require a descriptive analysis of the conceptual metaphor and cognitive linguistics.

Denna rapport analyserar ekosläckning för en full duplex högtalartelefon. Systemet bygger på en LMS-algoritm som har implementerats på en TMS320C3 1 signalprocessor. Arbetet har gått ut på att undertrycka ekon genom utnyttja så mycket som möjligt av processoms kapacitet. Möjligheterna för att två eller fler personer skall kunna tala med varandra på att ledigt sätt genom en högtalartelefon påverkas mycket av de ekon som finns i systemet. Högtalartelefonens mikrofon fångar upp ljudet ifrån sin egen högtalare och skickar detta ljud tillbaka genom telefonnätet.

This thesis is a case-study of an ongoing court case between the Swedish Competition Agency and Växjö Municipality about a set-up requirement to the long-distance heating system for newly built private houses on municipality owned land. This requirement was set up as part of the municipality?s long-term environmental goals; however the Competition Agency claims that the demand is damaging the free market in the municipality. The purpose of this thesis is to determine which normative assumptions the decision makers have based their actions and re-action on, and whether or not these assumptions are valid, thru theoretical ideal types. This is determined via method of textual analysis.

Vid rening av avloppsvatten använder man ofta olika typer av fällningskemikalier för att rena vattnet på bland annat fosfor. Innan man definitivt väljer fällningskemikalie bör man alltid genomföra fällningsförsök för att fastställa om man kan uppå önskade resultat. Helst ska kemikalieåtgång och kostnad bli så låga som möjligt. Efter småskaleförsöken är det även bra att testa i full skala för att se om de resultat som uppnåtts i labbet även uppnås i reningsverket. Rosviks reningsverk är ett av många små reningsverk i Piteå kommun och är dimensionerat för att ta emot avloppsvatten från ungefär 2 100 personer.

This project was a collaboration with Kajsa Bergström. The projected was to develop the French/English deck of cards. We replaced the knight, queen and king with the numbers 11, 12 and 13. We worked with separate aesthetics and solutions after making that common change. I worked on an idea on how to make the cards look slim, by adapting a handcrafted look, full of details.

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate whether exhibitions and silent pedagogy can be used to develop more inspiring environments in the public library. Silent pedagogy is a term from the field of museum education describing the silent communication with visitors that takes place in exhibitions through introduction and orientation, layout and installation, as well as signage. In the 1980s, articles in a Swedish library magazine discussed the pedagogical importance of library exhibits and how they make the patrons aware of the library?s resources. This led us to museum education and a desire to investigate whether its theories were transferrable to the library context.

The purpose of this thesis is to find out the reasons and perhaps some answers to the problem as we see it, the sickness benefit expiration of those who experience this. By this said we have also taken into account the different laws and adjustments in the long-term sickness benefit, but also major reformation of the security net in the Swedish society. The efficiency of the law on passive long-term sickness absence was added in July 2008, but was later in January 2010 supplemented. The purpose of this law wasn?t only to reduce the long-term sickness absence but also to reduce exclusion.

The purpose with this studie was to examine how individuals with experience of a long-term drugabuse describe their transformationprocess, and if this process has contributed to a change in their selfdescription. The studie was delimit to examine the transformationprocess, not in relation to what sort of abuse the informants had, or in relation to gender. The studie anwered questions concerning motivation to stop abusing, how the informants started the drugcareer, and how life as an abuser is described. In the studie qualitative method was used, five semi-structured interviewes were made with individuals who had a long-term addiction in the past. Symbolic Interactionism was the theoretical frame of referense that was used for analyse.

The purpose of this study has been to examine how female probation officers construct the concept of women who commit crime. This have been done by examining how the probation officers describe the phenomenon from their own point of view, how they perceive society's view of the phenomenon, how they describe the women's self-images and how their own perceptions affect the treatment of these women. To fulfill this aim the study is based on qualitative interviews with five female probation officers. We analyzed their statements by using Gender theory, Goffmans stigma term and Beckers deviant term. The result of this study shows that women who commit crime are described more as victims than offenders and that they are constructed as deviant in two ways; both in relation to the law but also in relation to their gender.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine whether parents that obtain long-term maintenance support in Enköping, consider the support as adequate when trying to meet their children's basic needs. The thesis also intends to investigate whether parents experience that their children, because they receive income support, have been socially excluded or stigmatized in their daily lives because of the family?s maintenance support. Further, the thesis aims to examine if there are any discrepancies in the above mentioned issue in relation to how long the parents have received maintenance support. Theoretical starting points used in this thesis mainly consist of the child perspective, social exclusion and the stigmatization theory.