During our education to become lighting designers at Jönköping University, the artificial lighting has been in focus. Therefore we wanted to learn more about daylight. We chose to do this from a visual approach in open plan offices. Since daylight is part of the architects´ responsibility to master, we wanted to examine what architects think of when they plan daylight environments in open plan offices and how this is expressed in the buildings with focus on the visual factors.Our questions at issue are:What knowledge do architects have concerning daylight planning, and how do they use this knowledge in their practice?How well do the chosen daylight environments meet the end-users need of a good visual environment? The study consists of three case studies, carried out in the same way.

The aim of this study is to describe and understand the reasons to why people choose to become foster parents. By using the theory of action we wanted to investigate their intentions rather than their motives. The questions we wanted to answer where: How do the foster parents describe their reasons for becoming a foster home? What reasons do they give fore keeping on being foster parents? How do they comprehend their task and the fulfilling of it? The study was performed by utilizing qualitative interviews with five foster parents, four women and one man. In the analysis we used the theory of action as a theoretical perspective.

Society has depended on fossil-based fuel for a long time, which has led to a fundamental increase of greenhouse gases in the Earth?s atmosphere. To tackle this problem the international community has agreed that action is necessary. Focus is now directed towards local extraction of energy from renewable sources such as biogas.Utö is participating in the Green Island project, which aims to investigate the possibility of making the island climate neutral. This report has been implemented on behalf of Skärgårdsstiftelsen, the main partner responsible for the Green Island project in Sweden.

An increase interest of new methods and tools has begun to grow in the real estate business, this new trend causes an increase in new programs that aim to simplify processes of energy-efficiency and environmental issues.After consulting with Björn Alsmark from Bjerking AB, an architect and engineering company, we made a decision that the Degree Project is going to examine the program IES (Integrated Environmental Solutions) with some integrations from Revit Architecture application.To be able to examine IES, we got access to a completed project from Bjerking. The project is a nursery school in Uppsala. An application has been handed in from Bjerking to make this project to a Green Building-certificated project. According to Bjerking own calculations (with the energy-calculation program Enorm), the consumption of energy of the nursery school is 48 percent lesser than required by BBR.An evaluation of IES and Enorm has been made with an aim to compare these two programs and find out if IES is an appropriate program to replace Enorm. Does Enorm or IES come up to BBR´s recommendations?The Degree Project cover 15 ECT, that required several adjusting and delimitations, and the study sketch ended with a literature study.After finishing the study sketch the modeling of the nursery school began.

The environmental monitoring in Sweden has been developed by several different parties and is now being coordinated and made more effective in order to meet the current demands on high quality information regarding the state of the environment. Sweden has been divided into five different water districts based on watershed areas because of requirements in the Water Directive of the EU. In Sweden there are two common types of environmental monitoring programs used to gather information on changes in time and in space. Currently both these two types are used for lakes in the water district of the western sea but only one is used for watersheds. The purpose of this report is to supply basic information regarding the possible need for a second environmental monitoring program for watersheds in order to better describe the spatial variation within the district as well as to determine the number of samples necessary in order to describe the district over time and space.

Pulsatilla vernalis is one of several endangered plant species that benefit from wildfires and small scale disturbance events that repel competing vegetation and create open patches in the vegetation cover. Previous studies argue that Pulsatilla vernalis is decreasing in numbers due to vegetation changes associated with the decrease in wildfires, forest grazing and changes in forest management. In this study, 17 populations of P. vernalis were inventoried in order to examine if soil and/or vegetation structures affect the population structure of P. vernalis (i.e.

This essay investigates how the chapters of the interwar and the Second World War have changed in the high school history textbooks during the period from 1944 to 2008. In the study eleven history textbooks have been studied, most quantitatively but also qualitatively. For example the number of pages and rows devoted to different subjects and countries are compared in the books over time. The result of the study shows that there are some big changes over time but in most sections there are also big differences between the books, which make it harder to draw general conclusions. There are a lot more names, pictures and dates in the newer books compared to the older ones, although the number of different names is about the same in all the books.

The focus of this two year master?s thesis in Library- and Information science is the study of two Swedish Public Library buildings with the examples Lomma and Halmstad. The main goal and purpose of the thesis is to try to uncover which views and values of the public library are expressed in the examined libraries; and to what extent these views manifests are shown in its architecture.The theoretical framework is based on Raymond Williams?s cultural concepts of effective, dominant culture and the two extremities of this culture, called residual and emergent cultures. A second aspect is Yi-Fu Tuans concepts of Space and Place.

This is a study about the relation between the Swedish school and the political system of Sweden. I wanted to see if the relation had changed since the election of 2010 as it was in that election the Sweden Democrats got over five percent of the votes and took seat in the Swedish parliament. The thing that is unique about this election is that it was really the first time a right-wing party had been elected into the Swedish parliament. Many experts argue that this is the first xenophobic party that has been elected into the Swedish parliament. This led to a problem for schools and their principals and a difficult question to answer because xenophobia is contrary to the school?s core values and the school?s democratic mission.Should the school still be open for political parties? How do schools manage to distinguish between political information and political propaganda? If parties still are welcome into the schools, which parties should be allowed? The equality ombudsman has said in a report that the schools have to comply with the principle of objectivity, which stipulates that the public sector has to be unbiased.I have chosen to make use of a qualitative method because I think the study then gets a deeper understanding of the topic.

Since the beginning of the new millennium the world?s population has increased exponentially fast. The majority of this growth has been accommodated for by urbanization of the developing world. This in turn has lead to a wide spread of informal settlements. Thus, areas of urban slums, that have risen illegally on the marginal lands within and at the periphery of the formal city.

Grönområden kan bidra med en mängd nyttor till en stad som till exempel att reglera lokalklimatet, säkerställa vattenresurser och så vidare. Grönområden gynnar också människors hälsa både genom att verka mentalt återhämtande och underlätta och inspirera till fysisk aktivitet. Analysen av vad åsikterna kring grönområden i Umeå stad var utgick ifrån en enkätundersökning på nätet som dels publicerades på Umeå kommuns hemsida och dessutom skickades ut med e-post till de föreningar som fanns registrerade hos kommunen samt de verksamma på SLU i Umeå. Datainsamlingen avbröts när antalet svarande uppgått till 1000 stycken. Svaren kom från ett brett urval av befolkningen, och personer med olika åldrar, kön, uppväxtmiljöer med mera fanns representerade.

Ericsson har utvecklat ett ramverk för multimediakommunikation som heter Mario. Mario kan användas för att sätta upp video- och ljud-samtal över IP och finns fungerande på Android och iOS. Mario är en del av web browsern Bowser som finns att hämta på Google Play eller App Store. Bowser möjliggör att köra WebRTC applikationer skrivna i HTML5 och JavaScript på Android och iOS.Nu när Microsoft släpper sina nya plattformar, Windows RT, Windows 8 och Windows Phone 8 så finns ett intresse att försöka flytta detta ramverk till dessa plattformar. Vi kommer göra ett försök att porta Mario till Windows RT.

In this study my aim has been to discover what connections can be made between the way of creating a library building and the general values concerning the library activities and the library users. What kind of ideology could possibly be reflected in a library room? My study includes two different parts. First of all there is a theoretical section based upon literature relevant for the subject. Here I try to focus on the libraryÕs role in society as a public room.

Reptiles are animals than have been neglected in the research for all times. Some people have the opinion that these animals have fewer needs and demand less from their caretakers. The Aldabra Giant Tortoise lives on the Aldabra atoll outside the coast of Tanzania. The Aldabra tortoise population has varied throughout the years, but today the population is around 100.000 animals. The purpose of this study was to analyze the enclosure utilization of two Aldabra tortoises, a male and a female, at Parken Zoo in Eskilstuna, Sweden.

Med hållbar stadsplanering menas en planering som värnar om framtiden ochkommande generationer. Inom detta område berörs såväl tekniska som fysiskaaspekter inom samhället. Rapporten fokuserar på hållbar stadsplanering i form avkommunikation, rörelse och integration vid utformning och planering avstadsdelar, samt det faktum att det finns digitala verktyg som inte utnyttjasregelbundet i det dagliga arbetet.I samspel med Borås Stad har en analys gällande arbetsmetoder vid stadsplaneringgenomförts. Begreppen kommunikation, rörelse och integration diskuteras ochanalyseras i relation till kommunens arbete. Syftet är att formulera och pröva enarbetsmodell som kan vara vägledande inom arbetet med hållbar stadsplanering.Målet är undersöka om det finns grund för introducering av digitala verktyg somstrategi i kommunens stadsplanering.Frågeställningarna berör kvalitetsbegreppen kommunikation, rörelse ochintegration samt hur dessa tillämpas vid daglig kommunal stadsplanering.