Over the past few years the Åland islands have attracted growing internationalattention as an example of how to successfully secure the position of a minorityregion, and in the current situation the government of Åland has an intention toextend the efforts of spreading the example of Åland. The purpose of this essay isto shed light on the political discussion about the example of Åland, andinvestigate the underlying political reasons for emphasizing the example of Ålandinternationally. Through interviews with leading politicians on Åland I analyzeÅland as a norm entrepreneur. The research shows that besides altruism, selfinterestis a factor behind emphasizing the example of Åland. The essay showsthat the theory of norm entrepreneurship also can be applied on an autonomousarea, but instead of influencing international organizations themselves, theautonomous area use norm entrepreneurship as a tool for influencing domesticpolitics..

We have made a suggestion for a map based search tool used with a database containinginformation on natural disasters. The database is being developed by NCO (SwedishCentre for Lessons Learned from Incidents & Accidents).We examined both Swedish and international examples of databases on naturaldisasters. The examples that we found were often hard to get the hang of, due to poorcompilation. The problem, that is typical of the international examples, is that the processof data collection is not standardized, as it is performed by different organizations andcompanies with diverse demands on and needs for the database. Therefore, to keep itsymmetrical, there ought to be only one department with the overall responsibility for anational database on natural disasters in Sweden.The natural disaster we based our study on was the flooding in Arvika in the year 2000.We inspected the availability of data about the flooding, and found it to be satisfying.Through contact with the municipality of Arvika, by mail and telephone, and a visit at theArvika municipality office, we acquired reports on the flooding and the joint rescueoperation that followed, and also GIS layers showing the extension of the flooding..

Modern technology and fast development of heat pumps, the hunt for savings in energy consumption and the strive for environmentally friendly energy sources, convenience, and financial profit, have made heat pumps a reasonable alternative for the heating of houses.When the heat pump starts it will consume a considerable amount of current, which may result in a short-lived voltage-drop if the power grid is weak compared to the start-up current.The company Fortum Distribution which owns and administrates electrical network is interested in an investigation that deals with heat pumps affect on the quality of electricity.The purpose of this investigation is to study fast electrical fluctuations (flicker) as a result of start-up currents for single as well as multiple heat pumps on the same electrical station and from this evaluate whether there will be any problems installing heat pumps..

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.

Postmodernism and neo-liberalism is often thought of as two opposite conceptions of the reality and the world. This thesis takes on a critical view of this assertion and the main purpose was to perform a correlation between postmodernism and neo-liberalism. With different theoretical assumptions about constructions of thoughts, agency and structure and the welfare-state a theoretical framework was created. According to this framework the two isms were correlated to each other and the welfare-state to see if there where similarities or dissimilarities between the isms. The assumptions of this thesis are that there are correlations between postmodernism and neo-liberalism in the constructions of thoughts, namely similar view on epistemology.

Today all buildings contain some form of home automation. It might be heating controlled by athermostat or motion detectors controlling outdoor lighting.This paper,The Intelligent House, deals with the planning of a house in Kiruna, in the north ofSweden and further immerses itself in home automation or intelligent control in single-familyhomes. The house has been entirely planned, from layout to structural design and plumbing.The purpose of the paper has been to investigate the possibilities in home automation in singlefamilyhomes and to choose a suitable home automation system for the house being planned.The system has been designed and the costs and energy savings have been calculated.The system chosen for the house is called KNX and is the largest system for home automation inSweden. It is used to control heating, ventilation, lighting and alarm systems in the house. Is hasbeen found that KNX is very expensive and that the amount of energy, possible to save in thehouse, using the system, is relatively small.

Genom att studera olika kommunikationsprotokoll kunna svara på vad det är som gör att ett visst protokoll är bäst anpassat för att användas mellan mobila enheter och IoT-enheter.I arbetet användes en kvalitativ litteraturstudie för att ge en grundlig teoretisk bakgrund samt en experimentell studie där ett par teorier undersökts ifall de stämmer med resultaten ifrån verkligheten. De fem faktorerna kompatibilitet, batteritid, frekvens, räckvidd och tillförlitlighet undersöktes hos kommunikationsprotokollen Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Närfältskommunikation (NFC) och Wi-Fi. Dessa tre valdes eftersom de stöds av nyare mobila plattformar idag. Kommunikations-protokollen analyserades sedan gentemot olika användningsområden inom IoT, eftersom påståendet vad som är bäst anpassat beror på vad situationen kräver för egenskaper.En systemutvecklare som ska välja kommunikationsprotokoll till en IoT-tillämpning och läser denna rapport bör själv jämföra de olika protokollen mot varandra inom de fem faktorerna för att kunna avgöra vilket protokoll som passar bäst inom dennes situation. I arbetet utfördes endast experimentella studier på BLE på grund av begränsningar inom utrustningen.

Today, we live in a consumption society. We buy products to soothe our needs and desires. Thru material things we can express our own personal identity and shopping is seen more as a pleasure than a need to survive. With the background media- and communication studies, the reason of this study was to explore how blogs as a social medium can influence the consumption ideal in society. With dialogical analysis and semiotic analysis we wanted to see if we could find a specific consumption culture in the content of six blogs we did our studies on. We found that the blogs showed us that there is normal to have everyday luxury and spoil oneself with expensive things.

The Swedish government have a goal that wind turbines shall produce 30 TWh by the year 2020, compared to about 3,5 TWh produced in Sweden during 2010. To minimize the disturbance that wind turbines create the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency has stated a guideline value that noise from wind turbines at nearby residents shouldn?t exceed 40 dBA, at 8 m/s wind speed. With advanced calculation models, like Nord 2000, the emitted sound from future wind turbines can be calculated at an early stage to optimize the power production without exceeding the 40 dBA. When the turbines have been built there is a need to verify that they really are within the guideline.

Constantly growing demands from the costumers in the Automotive industry forces the subcontractors to seek alternative ways to compete. One parameter of quality is the components tolerance against NVH(Noise, Vibraion & Harshness) aspects. Kongsbergs Automotive has developed a new gear shifter platform (Shift-by-Wire) that is sold to Alfa Romeo and used in of their car models. However, the company is not pleased with the components sound quality, therefore the main purpose of this thesis is to develope a number of concepts that is supposed to enhance these NVH-aspects.To get an understanding of the problem an analysis of the causes of the emitted sound has been done parallell to a product decomposition, function decomposition and a Ishikawa-diagram. Together with these methods has a litterature study been performed to get familiar with the physics of an impact and especially the emittment of noise.

Cooling down the indoor air can be done in several ways. One way is desiccantcooling which will be used at the Stockholm Arena. This method is used in airhandling units that use temperature changes and moisture fluctuations in the air. Oneof the steps is to add heat during the cooling process in order to reduce the relativehumidity of the exhaust air. The air passes thru an adsorptions rotor which thenabsorbs moisture from the supply air.

The purpose in this thesis is to explore the underlying conceptions concerningeuropeanization and public administration that Statskontoret is expressing in itspublications. Statskontoret is an agency in the service of the Swedish State whichprovides the Government and the Ministries with investigations and surveys. Themethodological choice in this thesis is to perform an idea analysis containing twoideal types which correspond with two polar theories, transnationalism andnation-state logic, concerning how a state will react on increasing european-ization. Initially, the theoretical framework is presented, and is followed by apresentation of the content in the relevant publications of Statskontoret. The idealtypes and the publications are examined from six different dimensions with theambition to explore the underlying conception in the publications.

Increased resource efficiency in an energy system could result in large economic and environmental benefits. Tekniska verken i Linköping AB (Tekniska verken) is responsible for the district heating network in Linköping. Their vision is to create the world?s most resource efficient region. An important step towards this vision is more efficient usage of produced heat, something which could be achieved through integration of a seasonal heat storage in the energy system.

In this thesis, the Train Power System Simulator (TPSS) has been compared and verified with the commercial simulator TracFeed® Simulation (TracFeed). The basis for the comparison was a given part of the Swedish railway system, with steel transportation trains. Primarily, emphasis was placed on running time and energy consumption in simulation results. Two transformer systems were analyzed, booster and auto transformers. The high voltage transmission line, parallel to the railroad track, was disconnected in some simulations.

The recent development in several countries? legislation and best practice recommendations in relation to corporate governance in general and audit committees in particular have affected Swedish listed corporations in the form of the Swedish Corporate Governance Code and the coming EU-directive. This paper aims to discover what factors affected Swedish listed companies to form audit committees when this was entirely voluntary. We collected data from the annual reports of 121 Swedish listed companies and formed eleven hypotheses as to what factors we believed affected the voluntary formation of audit committees based on Agency Theory, economies of scale and circumstances specific to the Swedish environment. We then analyzed the data through the use of a multivariate logistic regression model.