The economic development and industrialization that has taken place in many parts of the world during the past century has brought about a huge increase in economic welfare. During this process, it has repeatedly been debated whether the gains from economic development are shared by everyone or just a few. In the field of economics, vast research has been conducted on this particular subject ever since the 1950?s. The most famous contribution might be said to be Simon Kuznets article, Growth and Income Inequality from 1955 and the ?inverted U?-hypothesis that was formulated on the basis of that article.

Hur fungerar Internet som politiskt verktyg i praktiken? På vilka sätt förändras förutsättningarna för politisk kamp med ökade möjligheter till oberoende medieproduktion och global distribution? Med ett tvärvetenskapligt förhållningssätt grundat i ett medie- och kommunikationsvetenskapligt perspektiv intervjuas representanter från den svenska miljörörelsen samt organisationer som arbetar för mänskliga rättigheter i Tibet. Resultatet av undersökningen visar att sociala rörelser arbetar i digitala nätverk där autonomi, decentralisation och flexibilitet är nyckelord ? precis samma organisationslogik som globaliserade företag arbetar under. Detta möjliggör en oberoende sfär för information och kommunikation som i sin tur leder till ett symbiotiskt förhållande med etablerade mediekanaler. Vi går därmed ifrån att vara ?konsumenter? till att bli ?användare? ? en radikalt förändrad maktrelation mellan producent och mottagare.

This thesis concerns how the power quality in the grid is affected by the connection of wind power plants. As things are at present, Fortum Distribution AB has a number of wind turbines and wind parks connected to the own grid. As the pressure on building and connecting additional wind power is increasing, so is also the interest of how the already existing wind power generation affects the power quality in the nearby distribution grids. The study is performed by direction of Fortum Distribution AB and is limited to the 10 kV/40 kV-grid in Bohuslän, Sweden. The methods for calculation of power quality are compared to the results of a number of measurements.

Detta examensarbete har genomförts på Schenker Logistics AB där målsättningen har varit att analysera den nuvarande returprocessen och därefter presentera eventuella förbättringsförslag.Den information som ligger till grund för resultatet av detta arbete har införskaffats via observationer och intervjuer med de personer som arbetar i returprocessen.Analysen som utfördes resulterade i att ett flertal brister kunde identifieras i returprocessen. Alla dessa brister bidrog till att komplikationer uppstod vid returhanteringen av gods på Schenker Logistics AB. Några exempel på brister som identifierades är att gods som var i godkänt fysiskt skick, returnerades till Schenker Logistics AB utan angiven orsak till returleveransen. Dessutom dokumenterades inte skadeorsaker hos någon part i försörjningskedjan, vilket bidrog till att Schenker Logistics AB var ovetande om skadans uppkomst samt vem/vad som bidrog till att skadan uppstod. Ytterligare brister som kunde identifieras i returprocessen är att fraktsedlar med ett specifikt nummer ofta försvann, fraktsedlar som är synnerligen viktiga för att Schenker Logistics AB ska kunna hantera returgodset.

The market of fruit and vegetables develops continuously to become tougher and more complex. The fast development makes it difficult to keep up with all the changes. This is the case for apples and tomatoes. The purpose of this work is to explain what the trade routes are like for Swedish imports as well as the Swedish production of tomatoes and apples, both in the present and the past times. There is also an ambition to create comprehension of the trade routes.

The aim with this study was to examine which information sources are used by the librarians in the process of changing automated library system and why. Furthermore it was of interest to examine whether there are any correlations between variables environment, information quality, information availability, information need and information sources. I used a quantitative method that was carried out in form of a nationwide survey. Questionnaires were sent out to all the Swedish libraries that had change library systems sometime between the years 2000.

Problem area and purposeNowadays, 2006, the downloading of music and movies is an increasingly more burning issue. But while the music industry has made great progress in using the Internet as a distribution channel the film industry has been at a standstill for several years. Recently however there has been progress in the form of a few film companies beginning to offer their customers legal ways to acquire films over the Internet. But with this progress one central question arises, which this report will try to answer; what are the important factors for selling films as the Internet moves from primarily being a information channel to also functioning as a distribution channel? The purpose is to examine what the consumers find important when purchasing film, and to establish to what degree there is a substitution effect between DVDs and downloadable films.MethodThe report is first and foremost based on an Internet survey with a total of 383 participants.

This study is a formative evaluation of a prototypecollaboratory for sharing data collection instruments inlibrary and information science (LIS). The aims were to findout: how the study participants, five hospital librarians,experienced the interaction with the prototype while workingwith predetermined tasks; and their views on the differentfunctions of the prototype collaboratory.Methods used for data collection was as a survey; followedby a think-aloud session where the participant verbalisedhis/her thoughts during the interaction with the prototype;and finally a semistructured interview. The survey wasanalysed with a frequency distribution, while the data fromthe other methods were analysed qualitatively by extractingthemes from the transcribed sessions.The results show that although the librarians expresseddifferent problems while working with the interface, mainlyrelated to the language in the prototype collaboratory anddifficulties with the page for applying metadata, all of themwere confident in being able to learn the system after using itfor a while. The librarians had a positive attitude towardssharing data collection instruments as well as comments inthe prototype collaboratory. At the same time, they wereaware that students and researchers might have differentabilities or incentives to work and share information.

The music distribution in Sweden and the world is rapidly changing. The music industry, however, has been reluctant to change the way they distribute music. The consequence has been that illegal music files have been available for downloading to anyone with an Internet connection. Because of the illegal downloading a new law have been implemented in an attempt to stop this behaviour. Our theory is that in implementing the IPRED-law, the sites that were hosting most of the illegal material will experience a severe decrease in traffic.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how the internal information processing and management is carried out within a unit of Viskafors municipality. Furthermore, to explore and make recommendations of how the organisation can improve its internal information management. To get a full picture I have interviewed people at different levels of the organisation. The main findings showed that there was a dysfunction in the internal information processing and management. For example the study showed that the internal information did not reach out to the different parts of the organisation due to insufficient information processing.

Companies have in the past decades changed fromtraditional manufacturing organizations into serviceorganizations. For these service organizationsinformation and competence have become animportant resource. The traditional view oninformation is that an employee use and search forinformation to reduce uncertainty for their decisionmaking. Even though information is strategicallyimportant for organizations, information is not valuedin any way. Hence, this thesis aims to valueinformation in terms of the utility it brings to theorganization.The conclusion is that four factors are important whenvaluing information in terms of utility.

A change towards using more biofuels than fossil fuels is taking place in Sweden, and in many other parts of the world. This makes the use of fuel pellets increasingly popular, causing a greater demand for sawmill sawdust products. There is a trend towards the use of multiple types of shredders, instead of a single type in each sawmill. The purpose of the study was to characterize the different flows of saw particles that can be found at Sävar såg when cutting thick or thin wood with different cutting techniques. The saw particles size, shape, moisture content and heat value were analysed by the cutting stations: first cutting fast and slow, second cutting fast and slow, grading fast and slow and planning.

The Swedish energy system will be influenced by many future changes, such as energy and climate policy objectives. The installation of more renewable electricity could increase by using solar energy. Over the recent years, grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems have increased dramatically in Sweden, partly due to various support systems and compensation models. These support systems have been designed to make it easy for individuals and businesses to invest in self-generated electricity and thus contribute to the transformation of the energy system.The introduction of a higher proportion of solar energy may in turn affect the Swedish electricity system. This could mean that the electricity companies will be facing a number of changes in the near future.

Chlorinated solvents are common contaminants in soil and water. Under anaerobic conditions microbes are capable of transforming chlorinated solvents into ethylene which would result in a remediation of the contaminated area. In order to use natural attenuation as a remediation method evidence of continuous degradation is required. Furthermore, the degradation must occur at a sufficient rate and continuous monitoring of the site is needed until the demanded levels are achieved. A field study was performed on the basis of data from a dry-cleaning facility contaminated mainly by perchloroethylene.

Ternary codes for unequal error protection is a part of a communication system where different parts of the information to be transmitted can receive different amount of error protection. There are a lot of applications where the channel conditions fluctuate so that reliable or acceptable communication can not be guaranteed. Regardless whether the fluctuations of the channel are intentional or not the idea is to let the coderate decrease so that the error correcting capability can increase for the part of the information to be more protected. By using the support, the nonzero positions of the ternary code, a new binary code can be extracted with properties different from the ternary code in the sense of cardinality and minimum Hamming distance. When the channel conditions are good the receiver decodes the message using ternary decisions and receives all information included in the codeword.