Goodwill accounting has for a long time been, and with the implementation of IFRS in 2005, has become an even bigger issue. Critics mean that reporting of goodwill impairments is subject to discretion that can be used by the managers. We have applied a study made by Carlin and Finch (2009) on Nasdaq OMX Stockholm during 2006-2012. Our study contains 50 of the 255 public companies at 2012-12-31. The purpose of the study is to investigate if companies use an opportunistic discount rate when testing for impairment in goodwill and if the relation between goodwill and net profit before taxes, goodwill intensity, is an incentive for opportunism.

As a small and land scarce country, effective waste management is ofoutmost importance in Singapore. In this study the production of biogasthrough anaerobic digestion from the organic fraction of municipal solidwaste (OFMSW) was compared to incineration of the waste. At the momentalmost all of the OFMSW in Singapore is incinerated. Three differentscenarios were compared to the reference scenario (incineration): one with alarge scale biogas plant that can treat half of all OFMSW in Singapore, onewith a medium scale biogas plant about 15 times smaller than the large oneand one with a small scale biogas plant that can treat waste from e.g. ashopping center or a food center.By using life cycle assessment (LCA) the different scenarios were comparedin terms of global warming potential (GWP), acidification, eutrophication,energy use and land use.

The purpose was to investigate whether using two type of interventions (i.e., Four rooms of change in school and EQ- workshop) in addition to curriculum guidelines can affect character development in children 10-12 years of age. The data was collected using the test Junior Temperament and Character Inventory (J-TCI; Cloninger, CR, 1994) in three elementary schools among students in fifth grade who had been involved in any of the two interventions for the past two years or no intervention at all.The J-TCI scales were used to, besides the seven personality dimension it measures, create a self-constructed empathy scale. A total of 55 participants were included in the study (girls n = 26 and boys n = 29). Statistical testing with MANOVA showed no significant main effect on empathy or any personality trait. There was however an interaction effect between intervention and gender on the character traits.

In this study the reliability of dominance profiles as a method of establishing a person's learning style was tested. Eight students at Malmö Academy of Music tried three different ways to learn a short melody at the piano. In this way, their preferred way of learning things (either visual, auditive or kinestetic) was established. Five of the students did best when they used a visual cue to learn a melody, and the remaining three did best when auditive cues were used. All but one of the students had the worst result in the kinestetic trial.

An investigation of the heat impact of laser cutting on the material properties when producing tensile and impact test specimens of different steel types of varying thickness has been performed. The purpose of the thesis project was to provide recommendations regarding how much material that needs to be milled from the laser cut edge before tensile and impact tests. The study has been performed partly by investigating the test specimens by heat camera when the specimens were cut in the laser cutting line and partly by performing hardness tests, investigation by microscopy, and tolerance and roughness measurements and tensile tests of the laser cut material and material produced in the traditional multi operation machine. The results show that the heat affected zone in the thicker materials is greater than previously thought of, and that the currently used recommendation has to be adjusted. The study clearly shows that the thicker the material, the greater the heat affected zone, independently of the steel type, since the thicker material takes longer time to cut.

Sweden has a growing proportion of children living in a multilingual environment. It is thus highly important that caretakers as well as professionals who meet these children have knowledge of multilingualism and its impact on language development. Also, an increase of referrals of multilingual children with suspected language impairment to speech and language pathology clinics is seen.The objective of this study was to investigate the linguistic ability in both Swedish and Arabic in a four year old child with suspected language impairment. A further aim was to implement an intensive intervention and evaluate the efficacy of it. Language testing in both languages showed that the boy?s greatest need was in the lexical domain.

According to many scholars America's soft power is in decline, a power resource whose importance has been increasing in world politics. This makes it interesting to examine if there is a difference between how Democratic and Republican administrations wield their soft power.This thesis is a hypothesis-testing study and the purpose is to test the hypothesis that Democratic administrations, to a greater extent than Republican, can create, utilize and defend soft power. My thesis is based on Joseph Nye's theory of soft power and the focus of this study is the aspects of the foreign policy resources. In order to measure this concept I have made my own operationalization where five different indicators serve as my guidance. I use the method of least likely-cases to select and motivate the administrations being tested, which gives me a comparative study of the Democratic administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton and the Republican administration of George H.

The purpose of this thesis is to show how to use vulnerability testing to identify and search for security flaws in networks of computers. The goal is partly to give a casual description of different types of methods of vulnerability testing and partly to present the method and results from a vulnerability test. A document containing the results of the vulnerability test will be handed over and a solution to the found high risk vulnerabilities. The goal is also to carry out and present this work as a form of a scholarly work.The problem was to show how to perform vulnerability tests and identify vulnerabilities in the organization's network and systems. Programs would be run under controlled circumstances in a way that they did not burden the network.

Workplace accidents in Sweden have in recent years increased. Companies are at the same time putting a greater emphasis on preventing accidents and inform about safety and risks. Therefore there is a need to know how to visualize this safety information. This study is based on a part of a project proposed by the industrial company AB Wahlquists Verkstäder, in which they want to visualize their safety information for new employees and existing staff, and also for temporary contractors and apprentices. The purpose of this study is to see what is required of the visualization of safety information and what guidelines that should be followed.

Gastric ulcer is a common disease among pigs in the whole world where an intensiveproduction occurs. It is mainly the upper region, the nonglandular region of the stomach thatis affected. Gastric ulceration is a disease with several risk factors. The factor that seems tohave the largest impact on the development of gastric ulceration is a small particle size of thefeed. The reported prevalence of gastric ulceration differs from 5 to 100 % and it is a largeherd-to-herd variation.

It is well proven that physical exercise has an impact on our bodies as well as our minds. The aim of this study is to examine if this impact also affects economic behaviour. Three hypotheses regarding the impact of acute exercise on overconfidence, risk enhancement and well-being have been tested by collecting questionnaires from 364 participants at Friskis & Svettis, Kungsholmen who all were asked to answer the questions either before or after exercising. The differences between the before and after group were analysed, indicating small increases in all three test areas after exercising. These increases were, however, not large enough to reject any of the null-hypotheses of zero effect on the given five per cent significance level.

Background: Research about capital budgeting is under constant development. Several researchers developed the research about capital budgeting late in the 20th century. This development shows how companies' internal and external factors and other circumstances have an impact on companies? capital budgeting practice. It has also been shown that there are links between companies capital budgeting and their growth.

This thesis aims to develop a theory in the under researched field of international comparative cultural policy studies. lt does so by combining theories from the fields of political scienceand cultural studies, researching how and to what extent the concepts of culture of different states have an impact on the way cultural policies are constructed.The thesis uses this theoretical development in order to research a specific problem, namely the perceived possibility that Swedish and German cultural structures are slowly converging. Two recent official policy documents from each country are the objects of study. Through comparative idea analysis and with Michiel S. D Vries theories on decentralization, the thesis explains the convergence between the countries by differing cultural views between them.

Fuel produced from renewable resources is of big interest. In this project the difference between a few different renewable materials are compared on the matter of environmental load when ethanol is produced. The renewable materials that are compared are Salix, straw and reed canary-grass (rörflen). The cellulose in the material is cut down to small pieces and then hydrolysed so that the sugar from the cellulose can be fermented into ethanol. Tha amount of ethanols that is studied in this work is the smount of ethanol needed to cultivate 1000 ha. The functional unit in the report is 1000 ha.

[?If we zigzag in the middle, it?s OK?] The purpose of the following study is to examine the relationship between tourism and religion in a Balinese context. We look specifically at changes in religious practice, culture and mentality, as well as how religious philosophy is used as a tool for limiting the negative impact of tourism. The methods used are semi-structured interviews and participant observations. Central themes in the following essay are globalization in the form of tourism, westernization, subsystem theory and capitalism, which also make up the theoretical framework.