This master thesis concerns whether Swedish non-financial listed firms act in accordance with the optimal capital structure theory and/or pecking order theory. The examined period is 1998-2004 and we discover that Swedish companies neither follow optimal capital structure theory nor pecking order theory. From our results we conclude that there exists no single point of the capital structure which is optimal. Rather it seems as if the optimal point lies in-between an interval from 0 to the industry average, where firms tend to be indifferent to their debt-ratios. Our results show that Swedish companies prefer internal financing followed by equity and as last choice debt issuance..

Development and accuracy tests of advanced exchange trading systems require well adjusted tools for testing. Aptness of these tools are probable to have a major impact on identification of bugs and verification of new functionality. Identifying erroneous parts and bottlenecks of the trading system is of outmost importance for the exchange as a whole since stability and correctness are two of the determinant factors its viability is measured by. This paper covers how this test-tool was created and the motivation behind the design choices made. The tool was created with the goal to be broad enough to cover the majority of cases that could arise, fast enough to be able to test the trading systems speed limitations (i.e.

In the current situation is the straight tube cutter, that provides Luvata?s line of large recoolers with copper tubes, manually operated. To prevent damages and facilitate mounting the tubes must be properly arranged when they leave the machine. This report aims to investigate and present an automated solution where the operator does not need to participate in the process. A number of theories have been drawn up and tests have been done.

Sport horses are widely used for performance in jumping, dressage, endurance etc. To enable comparisons of horses, training facilities, programs or physical status, an exercise test can be used. Exercise tests are also important to increase knowledge about exercise physiology of the horse considering different ways of training to compare training methods or individual qualities, development of an individual or other investigations of equine exercise physiology. Since several investigations are done on standard- and thoroughbred horses but less on sport horses, it is of great importance to get an overview of the investigations done. Most common is to investigate heart rate and lactate concentration.

When developing software that is meant to be distributed over several different computers and several different networks while still working together against a common goal there is a challenge in testing how updates within a single component will affect the system as a whole. Even if the performance of that specific component increases that is no guarantee for the increased performance of the entire system. Traditional methods of testing software becomes both hard and tedious when several different machines has to be involved for a single test and all of those machines has to be synchronized as well.This thesis has resulted in an exemplary application suite for testing distributed software. The thesis describes the method used for implementation as well as a description of the actual application suite that was developed. During the development several important factors and improvements for such a system was identified, which are described at the end of the thesis even though some of them never made it into the actual implementation.

This report is the written documentation of a project work carried out at the Division of Engineering Materials at Luleå University of Technology in cooperation with Seco Tools AB. The project deals with the analysis of residual stresses in Ti-Al-N thin film grown on WC/Co cutting inserts. The composition of Al varied from 0% up to 75%. Increasing the Al content in the Ti(1-x)Alx N compound improves the compressive residual stresses even after annealing of the material. The experiments have been performed in a high temperature x-ray diffractometer (HTXRD) where the interplanar atomic spacing was determined in-situ and subsequent converted into stresses.

In recent years, more of high stakes (National exam- NP) have been introduced in Sweden and now (2015) the government has decided that the NP in social sciences- and natural science in 6th grade is optional in order to reduce teachers' administrative burden. Based on these reforms, to have more tests in more grades and also on the decision to remove the test, the purpose of this study is to examine how teachers perceive the work of the (NP).A quantitative research was done in the form of questionnaires. The study was based on questionnaires regarding the time for working with the NP and of the intention that the NP should be a support for teachers.The result of the study is linked to school development and the constructivist theory of learning. The results show that teachers perceive work with NP takes a lot of time, where as the time for administration seems to take slightly lesser time than the time for assessing the exams. The results also indicate that teachers perceive NP as supportive, mainly in relation to the curriculum.

In our modern society, time is important. Technology is used in countless ways to faster get us from one point to another. The purpose of this report is to inquire whether there is a way to implement an option for personnel at Swedish hospitals to claim priority on an elevator call, and to do this in an efficient way. An ordinary elevator system has been simulated with an implementation of textit{Nearest Car algorithm}, an algorithm which calculates the most suitable elevator car to serve a specific call considering the distance between the call floor and the car and the direction. Along with this algorithm, different ways to handle priority calls has been implemented to see how they affect the mean transport time for both passengers with priority and regular passengers in the elevator.

There are a large number of studies on colour and its influence on human feelings, but thereare only a few studies on the association between feelings and colour combinations. Thisstudie investigates the association between colour combinations consisting of three equallysized colours and the feelings they convey. The methodology used in this studie follows theinstructions from the Nippon Colour & Design Research Institute (NCD) in Japan, NCD havestudied consumer psychology towards colour and colour combinations for several decades.This study used semantically differential scales to evaluate existing colour combinations fromNCD to descriptive adjectives and creation of new colour combinations to explore therelationship between colour combinations and conveyed feelings. A total of 69 peopleparticipated in the tests. The main conclusions formed by this study are: (1) the feelingsconnected with the colour combinations differ partly between the Swedish population and theNCD and (2) the Swedish population have similar feeling associations to most colourcombinations, except for trend dependent adjectives such asmodern, cool etc.

Agricultural soils constitute the base in human food production and soil content of organic matter and plant nutrients together with soil microbial activity are all important parameters for high crop yield of good quality. These parameters are dependant on proper fertilization.Anaerobic digestion of organic wastes for biogas production generates a liquid residue called biogas residue (BR). It contains organic material and plant nutrients which makes ita potential fertilizer for arable cropping. However, it also contains heavy metals and toxic organic compounds and it is therefore in need of evaluation before usage.Microbial tests were performed aiming to evaluate the agronomic traits of four different BR and to find a viable procedure for evaluating slurry fertilizers. Two experiments where soil respiration and soil potential denitrification activity (PDA) was measured at fertilizer addition were performed.

This thesis was developed as an assignment from Ludosity Interactive where the goal was to develop a copy of the Xbox Live Indie Games-marketplace from the Xbox 360. Ludosity Interactive had a necessity to easily test a game's attractiveness to potential customers using testing people from outside the company in a simulated Xbox Live Indie Games test environment; excluding this developed system there is no other way to do such an analysis without actually releasing the game on the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace and then analyze the resulting sales from the product.The finished system had to be similar to the original system to the degree that a user could see past the interface itself and use the system just as he/she would have used the real marketplace. It also had to be easy to change and add games to the system so that Ludosity Interactive easily could show the games and the data that they deemed interesting for their tests. The final product was developed using C#, XNA and XML together with an Agileinspired development method in combination with Pivotal Tracker. This report describes how this product was developed..

This paper accounts for the work with a website for a company whose real name will not be disclosed in the text of this paper. Instead, they have been assigned the fictitious name Larmbolaget, which can be translated as ?The Alarm Company?.During our work with Larmbolaget?s website, we consulted a selection of accessibility guidelines from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, developed by a working group within the World Wide Web Consortium, as well as a number of design principles and heuristics outlined in this paper. We also conducted several usability tests on users from our intended target group. All the measures taken were an effort to ensure that Larmbolaget?s website be as accessible and usable as possible.Our conclusion is that the resulting website does comply with the accessibility guidelines and design principles described in this paper, and thus we consider it to be accessible and usable to a wide range of users, including those with disabilities..

Following the implementation of IFRS with yearly impairment tests, the question of correlations and causalities between impairments and investors? decision making is gaining interest in academia. This essay will study the relationship between significant goodwill impairments, communicated on the Nasdaq OMX Stockholm webpage between the years 2005-2009, and the impact those announcements have had on investors? decision making. Furthermore, the causality behind the impairments will be in focus.

This master thesis was conducted during the spring of 2014 at Atlas Copco Rock Drills AB in Örebro. The purpose of the thesis was to develop a simulation model of the rotation system for a hydraulic rock drill. In the future, the model will be used to investigate the phenomena called ?jerky rotation?. In order to validate the simulation model a test bench was designed and tests were made.

Aquatic organisms are usually not exposed to single substances but rather to mixtures of toxicants in streams located in agricultural areas. The transport of pesticides used in the agricultural area in Sweden is monitored with continuous environmental supervision every year. During 2002-2008 an average of 10 pesticides were found in each sample and 40% of the samples contained substances with concentrations higher than the Water Quality Standards. Chemical risk management is normally based on single-test evaluations. A problem when assessing mixture toxicities is that the constituents and concentrations of pollutants in the environment vary greatly.