The Third International Assessment of Educational Progress (TIMMS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) during the last decades regarding the results of mathematics teaching shows that China have a better performance than Sweden?s.Swedish teacher-guidelines focus on developing student?s individual interest and confidence for mathematics. In the Chinese teaching-guidelines for Mathematics Curriculum Standards, Ordninary Senior Secondary, the focus is given on: Elevate their mathematics literacy necessary for future citizenship and Development of citizen´s qualities (s.3).Teachers are the primary factors that impact teaching and learning of mathematics. Two teachers from Sweden and two from China were interviewed and their methods were compared in my study. The aim of my study was to understand mathematics teaching in China and Sweden.

There is an increased pressure for firms to provide the financial market with additional information. Such disclosure is attached with different kinds of costs. In spite of these costs, and in spite of increased mandatory disclosures, firms choose to voluntary disclosure financial information to analysts and others. This indicates that firms also benefit from providing additional information. The subjects of this study is 431 annual reports from firms listed at the Stockholm Stock Exchange for 2002 and 2005 and the objective is to survey factors that can explain variations in firms? voluntary disclosure.

The eighth of august the Olympic games in Beijing started. The chinese regime promised to improve the human rights situation in the country if awarded the Olympic games 2008. The decision to place the games in Beijing arouse severe critique and many questioned how the International Olympic Committe could place the games in a country that so obviously violate basic human rights.The main purpose of this essay has been to analyse what consequences the Olympic Games has given the human rights situation in China. In order to accomplish this I have studied some specific human rights, which I consider to be directly linked to the games. I found that the situation for these human rights has infact worsened since 2001 when China was awarded the games.

 We have chosen to write our thesis within a transport company. The work was carried out at DHL activities in Uppsala. DHL is one of the leading transport companies worldwide. Our interest lies in more efficient and advanced transportation and terminals, as globalization and new trends require effective solutions.The aim of our work is to explain the need for information technology applications in road haulage and associated terminal operations. Furthermore, we analyses terminal and applied information technology.

Sambandet mellan samhällsutvecklingen och de växande miljöproblemen kom i slutet av 1980-talet att få en allt mer framskjuten roll på den politiska agendan i Sverige. I och med att energianvändningen står för en stor del av miljöproblemen har allt fler kommit att inse vikten av att uppnå en hållbar situation för energianvändandet. För att se hur arbetet mot en hållbar energianvändning fortskrider har International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) tagit fram en modell för detta. Studiens övergripande syfte har varit att analysera huruvida Sverige går mot en mer hållbar energianvändning med hjälp av IAEA:s indikatorer. Teorin i studien har baserats på grundläggande miljöekonomiska resonemang.

In the last decades the continuous work for more sustainable manufacturing has become a large part of the manufacturing companies? operations. It is also well known that the factory planning shapes the manufacturing process to a great extent. Consequently it is logical to assume that the manufacturing companies? factory planning process plays a major role in the work for increased sustainability.

The subject of this thesis is the application of Support Vector Machines on two totally different applications, facial expressions recognition and remote sensing.The basic idea of kernel algorithms is to transpose input data in a higher dimensional space, the feature space, in which linear operations on the data can be processed more easily. These operations in the feature space can be expressed in terms of input data thanks to the kernel functions. Support Vector Machines is a classifier using this kernel method by computing, in the feature space and on basis of examples of the different classes, hyperplanes that separate the classes. The hyperplanes in the feature space correspond to non linear surfaces in the input space.Concerning facial expressions, the aim is to train and test a classifier able to recognise, on basis of some pictures of faces, which emotion (among these six ones: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sad, and surprise) that is expressed by the person in the picture. In this application, each picture has to be seen has a point in an N-dimensional space where N is the number of pixels in the image.The second application is the detection of camouflage nets hidden in vegetation using a hyperspectral image taken by an aircraft.

In this study we examine how the image of women, through framing and stereotyping in interviews, is constructed in the Swedish television morning show Gomorron Sverige on International Women?s Day. Our study is based on qualitative method, using the ECA (Ethnographic Content Analysis) model.Our main theoretical assumptions are that media contributes to constructing the images of reality we see in our heads, and that the images of women mediated through television are stereotypes which are displayed in the presenter?s questions and in the respondent?s answers. By defining the problems related to International Women?s Day, showing causal connections, making moral judgments and presenting solutions, television contributes to the viewer?s perception of what is important, why it is important, what is wrong and how to make it right.Based on our theoretical assumptions we have divided our study into three analytical themes:1.

The underlying purpose of this study is to see whether a library focused solely on providing literature in other languages than Swedish serves as a unifying, integrating force, or as an agent for division and exclusion. The study focuses on the International Library in Stockholm. The authors have created a profile of the visitors of the selected library, concerning their characteristics, their library habits and their perceptions of the International library. This profile has then been compared with the staff?s perception of the visitors as a group.

The aim of this essay is to analyze the implementation process of the International Baccalaureate?s Diploma Programme in four of the approximately 30 schools currently offering the IB at upper secondary level in Sweden. The starting point is a comparison between definitions in fundamental documents in the national programmes for Natural Science (NV) and Social Science (SP) on the one hand, and the IBDP on the other. The evaluation, based on Program theory, focuses in particular on the consistencies in the Organizational plans of each system.  The basic assumption is that the IB due to a deviating organizational system, different structures, aims and objectives makes a challenge for the dominating educational discourse, to use a concept by Michel Foucault, and that resistance against the IB therefore is to be expected.As a second part of the evaluation five people who either play, or have played the role of coordinators of the IB, and who thereby are responsible for the implementation, have been interviewed. The questions have been focused around in what sense the informants can confirm resistance in their implementation work due to the differences found in the first part of the evaluation, and in what ways it manifests itself.Finally, Michel Foucault?s power structures in connection to discourse analysis have been applied on the results of the two previous parts of the essay.

In Sweden, little research has been done on the topic of international exchange programs that various schools offer to their pupils. This study investigates how pupils view these exchange programs, and how in their opinion it affects their learning and their level of motivation. The study also investigates the motives for taking part in or declining an international exchange. To answer these questions a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews with pupils with and without experience respectively was carried out.The study indicates that pupils that have not taken part in an exchange believe that it is a time consuming quest that may affect the student?s results in other courses, which is not a belief shared by the other group.

It has been found that customers in the home market perceive the retailer?s store image more positively than customers in the host market, even though this study has found that theretailer?s store image is generally perceived very positively by customers in both examined markets. In addition, this thesis has found that there is a significant difference in how IKEA?smanagement and customers perceive its store image. It can also be concluded that IKEA management perceived store image more positively than customers.

Frågan om civil-militär samverkan i multinationella insatser har länge diskuterats. I takt med att den säkerhetspolitiska situationen i världen förändras, förändras också inställningen som de i multinationella insatser ingående aktörerna har till civil-militär samverkan. Sedan det kalla krigets slut har konfliktmönstren i världen förändrats. Trenden pekar mot färre mellanstatliga krig, och fler inomstatliga konflikter. I dessa konflikter samexisterar militära och civilaaktörer, och samverkan dem emellan blir därför viktig.Detta har uppmärksammats i det internationella samfundet, medan det har varit tystare i Sverige.Den här uppsatsen söker finna en möjlig förklaring till att det blivit så.

This graduation thesis aims to give a survey of how cultural property is protected withininternational law and how these protections worked during the conflicts in the formerYugoslavia and later at the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY.Cultural heritage is important symbols for ethnicity, religion or political views. Because ofthis cultural property has been targeted in armed conflicts as long as can beremembered. The protection of cultural property within international law has developedfrom the midst of the 19th century up til today and is still developing towards strongerprotection. One of the latest armed conflicts where the cultural property became targetedwas the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990?s.

In 2009, the Swedish Basketball Federation started a Region U15 development project in order to change the structure of the regional organization to get into a more transparent and similar operations throughout the country. My purpose is to study the attitudes to the change among the region leaders in the regional operations and evaluate the change from an organizational perspective. The study is primarily based on the following questions: What are the experiences of the change process among the region leaders in the regional organization? How involved have region leaders been in the changing process? Which are the positive and negative aspects with the regional operation today? What can be done further to develop the regional operation and to what extent do the organizational change follow general organizational theories? In my study, a qualitative method was used in terms of interviews with 8 regional leaders to understand their attitude to the project and the changing process. To analyze the results of the region leaders ?responses, a transcription have been made.