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.

The xenophobic attitudes in Europe are stronger than even. Never before have the member states had as many right-wing parties in action. The aim with this report is therefore to consider whether the Schengen cooperation has had an influence on the development of xenophobia in the member states of EU. The Schengen cooperation became a part of the European Union in 1997, with the aim to abolish the internal border controls for citizens and strengthen the external boarders towards non-members. The intention is furthermore to investigate whether the distance to Schengen ?s external boarder has an impact on the xenophobic attitudes.Three countries are compared: Italy, Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

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.

A study was conducted to investigate the new and frequently discussed concept curling parents. There were no previous studies of curling parenting, and therefore traditional classifications of parenting (Baumrind, 1967, 1980; Maccoby & Martin, 1983) have been used for comparison. Parents (N=140) born between 1959 and 1981 participated. They completed questionnaires to establish their level of curling behaviour. The high Cronbach's alfa confirmed coherence in the curlingcriteria, which implied that curling parents exists as a group.The results confirmed our hypothesis that participants exhibiting high levels of curling behaviour were permissive in their parenting style, had a bad conscience concerning their parenting and wished for more time with their children.

Consumers today are bombarded with innumerable advertising messages. The need for companies to create advertisements that consumers find relevant is thus increasing. In order to break through the ad clutter, companies have to give something extra to their customers and show that they care about them. How a company decides to communicate might then be more important than what the company actually communicates.The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the use of creative media choices induces signaling effects and enhances advertising value as well as perceived corporate consideration. The two last mentioned variables are explored as potential driving forces behind the signaling effects.

This essay aims to analyse if the Russian military operation carried out against Georgia between the 7th and 12th of august 2008 were executed with adherence to the Russian principles for military deception, maskirovka.   A superior purpose is to assess the situation according to the Swedish Armed Forces task of identifying possible needs for new or changed needs for abilities and competence.   The method used is two-alternative hypotheses which are tried by comparing actual events before and during the Russian-Georgian war with the ten methods of maskirovka, compiled from military analytical literature. Such traces of resemblance are further examined, both individually and as a part of a larger indication.   Further the essay describes the Russian art of war, the prerequisites for military surprise, information warfare in Russian doctrine, the disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and the principles for maskirovka.   The conclusion is that the Russian operation was executed with some adherence to maskirovka, though unspecified of to what degree.   Author of this essay is Cadet Martin Svensson of the Swedish Army, currently a student at the Armed Forces Technical School in Halmstad..

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.

This thesis aims at investigating the two municipality?s Gislaved and Ljungby. Where the aim is to see if there is any connections, between the type and the degree of public-private partnerships, and the municipalities obtained environment performance. In this essay the starting point is that the environmental performance in the chosen municipalities is good.Interviews among local politicians and representatives for the municipalities plastic industries, has functioned as a way to test the hypothesis. Gislaved and Ljungby have thereafter been compared, in order to see if there is any similarity in the sort and the degree of public-private partnerships, and how that will affect the environmental performance. The overall questions in this essay are:How can the cooperation among the chosen municipalities and the      local business life be described? What kind of Public-private partnership      exists in the selected municipalities?Is there any difference between the municipalities, referring to      the degree of cooperation between the municipalities and the local      business life? Does the degree of cooperation affect the progress on the environmental      performance? The end result shows that the local business life doesn?t have any impact on the environmental performance.

Background: When firms grow through acquisitions it is commonly debated whether the two entities ought to be better off as standalone companies rather than as a merged company. This thesis aims at discussing this issue of M&As advantages and disadvantages in terms of source of synergies from the perspective of resource allocation. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyze to what extent pre-M&A differences (against similarities) in resource allocation and corporate culture between the acquiring and target firm have an impact on the post-M&A performance. Theoretical framework: Efficient market hypothesis, resource based view, strategic fit. Methodology: A longitudinal study is conducted on the EU market during 1992 to 2002 based on balance sheet and income statement data.

Since Sweden became a member of the European Union (EU) several constitutional reforms has been taking place. During this time, Sweden has also changed its view on democracy,from a collective to an individual perspective of democracy in the politics. A reasonable hypothesis and the purpose of this essay is to investigate if the Swedish government has beendeveloped towards an Europeanization.The Swedish state audit changed in a pioneering way after the EU- entry, with the formation of Riksrevisionen. Another constitutional change is that the Swedish EU- membership is being instituted in the Swedish constitution. The role of Swedish courts has also changed since the EU- entry.

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.

This study presents an alternate viewpoint to the strive to overcome the gap between research and practitioners within paper prototyping in interaction design. Earlier research identifies three aspects of this gap, which is:Practitioners being unaware of interaction design methods and theoriesPractitioners being aware, but choosing not to apply these methods and theories, due to time, budget and constraints of labourPractitioners and research having different perspective on similar design issuesOur study was done by carrying out qualitative interviews with interaction designers based on two digital design bureaus. One of the bureaus has an expressed link to research: the other has not. Our hypothesis is that the gap would manifest as a difference in work practice between the two bureaus.Our study shows that the two bureaus have similarities in work practice and that this work practice is based on scientific methods and theories, but is adapted to fit the client and/or the project. We conclude that the overcoming of the gap might not be necessary.

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.

There is a strong debate in the media about the CEO compensation in the listed companies and whether they deserve their high rewards. Many previous studies have shown differences in the reward system depending on the ownership structure, mostly testing for only ownership concentration or ownership category. This study aims to investigate how the influence of the owners affects the CEO reward system, testing for both the level and the structure of the reward. The sample used in the investigation is Swedish listed corporations and consists of 251 observations. A survey was also conducted but due to low response rate and because the answers are not representative for the whole sample the survey will only be used as an illustration.

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..