The purposes of this thesis is study the European Court of Justice from a non legal perspective and investigate the courts possibility to advance its own preferred goals rather that of the member states in cases of non-compliance. Drawing on general principal-agent theory I construct a model from which I derive certain hypothesis mainly about under what circumstances we should expect the Court to be more sensitive to member states preferences and under what circumstances we should expect the Court to be less sensitive. These hypotheses are then tested empirically against all cases of non-compliance initiated by the European Commission against member states between 1953-2000. The results from the study are rather positive. The most important result is that when the threat of sanctions against the Court increases so does the Courts sensitiveness to member states preferences and when it decreases so does the Courts sensitiveness..

This work is done to try to solve a scientific computer problem and its basis derived from the web, as there are a variety of ways to program to it. The most common languages used by developers, both private and corporate are PHP, .NET and Ruby. But why do companies or a private developer choose a specific programming language? Is it because it is better and has more features than the others, or because they are forced? This essay uses a questionnaire and through tests sees which is best and which one is the most popular/used. To illustrate the problem, a survey is conducted and sent to several companies and asked them to answer the questions regarding the issue.

The main purpose of this examination paper has been to do a review of recent scientific and evaluated studies performed on children 0-15 years of age, treated with an animal as an assistant to the therapist/professional. The key term is Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT). Our focus has been to describe in what fields these kinds of studies have been performed, what the results are and how effective they have been. As a supplement to our study we have performed 8 short telephone interviews with professionals in the same field of occupation corresponding to the studies we have summarized. Our results concerning the studies show that there has been a positive outcome in the treatment of children and adolescents and AAT.

The purpose of this essay is to examine which factors that influence the design of internal control in municipal context and how well it works. We choose seven municipals, where we interviewed the administrative managers, the chairmen of the committees and two persons of the staff in each activity unit. The interviews were performed by telephone, due to the keeping of the essay?s timeframe.The theory in our essay comprises eight hypotheses. These hypotheses were operationalised into different variables aiming to make statistical tests possible.

This is a study of how emotional engagement can be measured and be taken into account in the development of websites. We believe that emotions become relevant only when viewed in correlation to how users experiencing a webpage. In this study, we developed a tool for use together with user tests where the information about the user's emotional engagement can add new value to the evaluation. The tool allows the user to mark, on the website, his/her emotions and level of engagement represented by colored circles, generating quantiative data on how users feel about the website. The tool is part of a method for evaluating the emotional engagement that we have developed which consists of user testing supported by the tool and accompanied by interviews..

The aim of this study is to examine the word acquisition, focusing on the nouns and word exercises, in two Swedish textbooks for German in the upper secondary school. The chosen method for investigating the nouns was corpus analysis. The noun frequency and distribution in the textbooks were analysed and discussed in relation to research in second language acquisition. The Involvement Load Hypothesis by Batia Laufer and Jan Hulstijn was used to examine the exercises in the textbooks. The study showed that most nouns only occurred once in the textbooks, but the most frequent nouns were well spread in the textbooks.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how Bahamas, a magazine belonging to the antideutsche current in German left-wing politics, acted during a two year period between the summer 2001 and 2003. When explaining the anti-deutsche phenomena and the editors? politics it is common to take the currents own history-writing as a fact, thus presenting the development of the current as a reaction to outside factors and impulses outside. In this thesis it is stressed that the editors are far from only passively reacting, rather the opposite is true. I claim that the editors have a fixed ideology that they strive to implant in to certain parts of the radical left.

Syftet med det här arbetet var att presentera några faktorer som hindrar eleverna i år nio från att uppfylla sin önskan om att lära sig kommunicera på franska och därmed att uppfylla kursplanens mål angående muntlig kommunikation. För att kunna ge exempel på sådana faktorer har jag studerat litteratur och tidigare forskning samt genomfört fyra kvalitativa intervjuer med elever i år nio. Undersökningarna visade att kommunikativ kompetens är ett komplext begrepp. Det medför att anledningarna till att eleverna inte kommunicerar varierar. De faktorer jag har presenterat som hindrar eleverna från att kommunicera är: otillräcklig mängd av och svårighetsgrad på input, avsaknad av kunskaper om vad kommunikativ språkförmåga innebär bland elever samt att eleverna inte känner språklig eller social trygghet i undervisningssituationen..

Civil society is facing many challenges in modern society and there is a lot of debate about where it is heading - is volunteer work declining or just taking a new form Whichever hypothesis will prove correct in the future, organizations that are dependent on volunteers will need to adapt to the new circumstances. This study aims to examine what forces drive voluntary work at Rädda Barnen (Save the Children Sweden) and Hungerprojektet (The Hunger Project Sweden). Through interviews with employees and volunteers at the two organizations, this study finds that volunteers at Rädda Barnen are primarily driven by values and understanding, and that the volunteers at Hungerprojektet are primarily driven by career and to some extent by values, enhancement and social factors. Understanding these driving forces allow the organizations to adapt to the new circumstances by matching the volunteers interests with the organizations' needs..

This report describes a thesis done at the Jönköping University of Technology. The aim of this thesis was to create conditions to optimize an existing automatic electrostatic coating system by changing the technology for dispensing lacquer. To select the technology, a study of different dispensing techniques carried out which concluded that the piezoelectric membrane and electrostatic atomization are the most interesting techniques.In order to perform tests with dispensing techniques a demonstrator has been optimized. The controller and PC software of the demonstrator has been programmed to be able to send out PWM signals that control the dispensers. An adapter card was designed to control the piezoelectric membrane and a steering link to the electrostatic atomization has been developed for PWM signals up to 500V.The work has laid ground for a demonstrator where further testing of the dispensing technologies can be performed..

In this paper I study how the repeal of the Swedish wealth tax (1 of January 2007) has affected people´s labour supply behaviour. This particular issue is relevant because it may help us understand some of the effects of the earnings tax changes that have taken place in Sweden. Accoring to standard economic theory a repealed wealth tax is similar to an income effect for the persons who previously paid the tax. That means that they theoretically will want to consume more leisure, that is decrease their labour supply. The method I am using to test this hypothesis is a difference-in-difference approach where the treatment group consists of persons who previously paid the tax and the control group of comparable persons who did not pay the tax.

Social phobia is a fear which limits a person's capabilities in daily situations. The fear can be so strong that a person can distance themselves from all social situations, for example education, marriage, sports activities etc. The purpose of this study is to discover whether there are any correlations between social fear and choice of educational program, between social fear and sex, and between social fear and Internet use. Questionnaires were administered to 80 upper secondary pupils. Each questionnaire answer was assigned a certain score, which was then coded in SPSS, the highest scores corresponding to highest degrees of shyness.

The main aim of this research was to investigate four humour styles, affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating humour, and compare these with emotional perception. Forty-eight persons took part in the research, 27 women and 21 men living in the southern part of Sweden. Two humour tests were used: the Humour Scale Questionnaire ? HSQ, with 32 items, and a newly composed video test, assembled after pilot testing from 26 video clips, the Humour Video Questionnaire ? HVQ. To measure perception and interpretation of emotion, the revised version of the ?Reading the Mind in the Eyes? Test was used.

The purpose of this study is to examine the capital market reaction generated by layoff announcements. The study takes place in Sweden and tests 138 news concerning layoffs which are categorized according to a content analysis. They are divided as: positive or negative news. The layoffs are also divided into three subgroups with varying sizes: 0,98 percent or less, between 0,99 and 4,49 percent or 4,5 percent or larger. The study uses an event study method to measure the reaction of the capital market.

The purpose of this study is to show how some Swedish teachers in the grades four to six assess the subject of English and what impact the national tests have on teachers? way of looking at assessments and grades and how teachers are supposed to work with assessment and grading according to the curriculum and the education act. The method of this study has been interviews with principals, teachers and pupils to get as many perspectives of the subject as possible. It has contributed to an interesting content and the end result will be as fundamental as it can be. The findings of this study show that teachers teaching English in Sweden have a great responsibility because of the lack of subject priority and communication between themselves, the government and other authorities in the world of education.