Due to their complexity and heavy wear from rail traffic, switches are a sensitive part of the railway infrastructure and moreover expensive to maintain. Furthermore, increasing railway traffic not only accelerates the wear rate but also obstructs the necessary maintenance measures. This paper examines the opportunities for a transition to a long-term maintenance strategy in the Swedish railway network. It contains a study of the maintenance strategy of Banverket, and also analyses statistics of errors in the railway infrastructure. The survey was completed utilising interviews with infrastructure managers, maintenance contractors, planners of railway operations and the Banverket material service department.

Electrooculogram (EOG) data was used to develop, adjust and validate a method for drowsiness detection in drivers. The drowsiness detection was based on changes in blink behaviour and classification was made on a four graded scale. The purpose was to detect early signs of drowsiness in order to warn a driver. MATLAB was used for implementation. For adjustment and validatation, two different reference measures were used; driver reported ratings of drowsiness and an electroencephalogram (EEG) based scoring scale.

The European Union's long-term budget negotiations during the summer of 2005 were obstructed from being successful due to a quite fierceful debate about the future guidelines of the Common Agricultural Policy. A quarrel about money and who gets what, was the common answer as to why it took the European leaders six months to accept the budget, and quite rightfully. This essay, however, goes beneath those explanations and tries to see what other reasons there might be for such a phenomena.With a new institutionalistic approach this study seeks to see what underlying reasons for why an institution such as CAP is so resistant to change. With special attention to the new historical institutionalism and the rational choice institutionalism the study successfully shows that though the front laying reasons to the problems with the budget might have been economical, several other factors also affected the outcome of the budget negotiations.Structures, national identity and decisions taken when outlining the Common Agricultural Policy in the 1960's still affect the European union, its members and foremost of all, the Policy/institution itself..

This essay is aimed at exploring how governments inclination to adhere to international human rights law develops in the wake of interstate conflicts. It examines how human rights in Eritrea and Ethiopia has developed after the war in 1998-2000 by examining the historical background to the war, and reviewing country reports from United States State Department and Amnesty International between 2001-2005.The result of the paper shows that Eritrea's adherence to human rights suffered setbacks, and that some of these happened due to the aftermath of the war. Ethiopia also had some lesser setback primarily due to internal turmoil. The essay concludes that states adherence to human rights in postconflict situations depend on if the war severely weakened the state, in which case the state becomes more repressive in order to cling to power..

This work is meant to contribute to the research of adaptation studies by focusing on a special case: the transformation of a fictional diary into a movie. In order to sustain the form of the literary source the adaptation to movie requires certain strategies. Först of all, the diary genre is characterized by a one-dimensional narration. Second, diaries only supply a few written dialogues, hence this "void" has to be compensated and filled by media specific measures. Third, the investigated diary is a story of individualization and emancipation of a single woman.

The overall aim of this thesis is to examine the production and repetitiveness of gender patterns with focus on girls in the swedish tween magazine Kamratposten. This is of importance due to the non existing research on Kamratposten concerning this specific topic. The aim is also to evoke a broader discussion about the relationsship between gender representation and pedagody. The theoretical framework is based on three concepts, namly Yvonne Hirdman?s gender contract, Judith Butler?s performativity and the idea of heteronormativity.

Ulla Isaksson (1916 ? 2000) wrote many novels, often with a woman or several women as protagonists. In Dit du icke vill (?Where Thou Willst Not?) from 1956 she depicts a crisis of faith in a woman, which would not have been successful had she chosen a contemporary setting. She uses an adequate historical framework, the prosecution of witches in Sweden in the 17th century, well documented in reliable sources.

Electromyography (EMG) is a technique that measures muscle activity, whichmeans detecting the electrical signals that travel through the muscle in connectionwith muscle contraction. This project deals with how EMG can be used tocontrol a computer game.The project is centered around the game 'EMG Track Game' which has beenconstructed as part of this work. 'EMG Track Game' is controlled by twoelectrodes fastened on the player. These are attached to two selected musclesand control the motion in one direction each, one up and the other one down.The game is constructed in the purpose of being used in several elds of application.Among these are as entertainment, training equipment and a tool inresearch related to EMG and muscles.To highlight a possible application a study concerning muscle control has beenconducted. It answers the question of whether players score better with theirdominant arm in comparison with their non-dominant one.

This essay focuses on how women and the woman emancipation are described in high school history textbooks from the years 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000, using the theories history consciousness and gender. Two textbooks are analyzed from each period. There are several gender theories, in this essay it is Yvonne Hirdman?s theory concerning woman- and gender history that is used. This means that the woman emancipation and women?s history are analyzed from the perspectives invisible, add, and-, how- and gender history.

The purpose of this project is to examine the development of the upper secondary school physics course and from this get a better understanding why the course is organized the way it is today. The timeless argument for studying science in school will begin this essay. After that the reader will be aware of when important discoveries in physics were made. Then school history is presented. In this part we are told when the first school started in Sweden, but the focus lies on the upper secondary school and the physics course.

This study investigates how nutrients from source-separated human urine from Gothenburg properties can be used as fertiliser in agriculture or for parks or sports fields. The initiator is the Department of Sustainable Water and Waste Management at the City of Gothenburg. Today urine-diverting systems are installed in two apartment buildings and two public-use buildings. Urine recycling is expected to lead to less exploitation of natural resources and less eutrophicating discharges into water recipients. In the study the urine?s market potential is investigated, for which practical handling issues, business aspects and acceptance of customers, employees and visitors have proved to be important.

The aim of our master thesis is to study the way valuation of real estate is conducted by real estate companies. Furthermore we want to identify the factors that affect the relevance and reliability of the valuation. The reason for this is the introduction of IFRS, in 2005, and the application of the IAS 40 rules stating that real estate are to be recognized at fair value on the balance sheet. To do this we have performed a case study on 10 Swedish real estate compa-nies listed on the Stockholm stock exchange, OMX, Large Cap and Mid Cap list to see how the share value has performed in relation to the reported net asset value since 2005 and how they value their collection of properties. We also studied the assumptions made by real estate company analysts.

The daily newspaper market in Sweden has been a mighty strong media market, except for major market crisis which occurred in the 1990s in Sweden, that led to several newspapers came into an economic crisis. One of the actions that many Swedish newspapers did was to reduce the physical size of the newspaper from broadsheet to tabloid. After studying several academical studies from scientists and students who claim and show in their results that the tabloid tendencies has spread out in the editorial content I discovered that the common thing for these studies where firstly, that there were not many studies that showed the tabloid tendencies of the editorial content in a longer historical perspective, secondly that the studies jointly studied tabloidization tendencies (how the editorial content changed from writing about hard news to write about soft news) in the editorial content of newspapers that have changed the physical format size. The material that was analysed was tabloid tendencies in news articles in two daily Swedish newspapers, Jönköping-Posten (broadsheet) and Aftonbladet (tabloid) in the years 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. The goal was to see if or how much of the editorial content of news articles that changed over time by tabloid tendencies in individual daily newspaper as well as a comparison of the various newspaper formats.This lead to the purpose of this master study:To investigate if it exists tabloid tendencies in the editorial content of news articles in the Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet and Jönköping-Posten between the 1950s to 1990s.In addition this purpose was operationalized from theories of tabloidization, the main theories that are used in this master study is developed by the researchers Shelly McLachlan and Peter Golding and their definition for tabloidization range, form and style.The best tool to analyse the material that have been gathered was to use of quantitative content analysis.

Lerbodaälven is a river in the municipality of Kil which, due to high phosphorus content is not meeting the requirements for good ecological status according to the Water Framework Directive. The purpose of this report is to investigate the causes for the high content of phosphorus that has been measured in Lerbodaälven between 1995-2010. Four questions will be answered in this report. 1. Does the sewage treatment work affect the phosphorus level in Lerbodaälven? The result from the time series analysis shows that the sewage treatment works have a small impact on the phosphorus level in Lerbodaälven.

In this study we aim to research teacher opinions on sexual education and how it is conducted within schools in Sweden. From their view of the education we want to elucidate the different factors of success and tribulation that the sexual education contains. The teacher opinions, which are collected through semi-structured interviews, reflect many different aspects of the sexual education. Though the informants possess different positions within schools they all seem to have some what the same idea of what successes and tribulations the sexual education contains. Furthermore all of them agree on one thing, the students want more sexual education.