Officially, the EU gender policy since 2000 has been guided by the strategy of Gender Mainstreaming. This strategy aims to promote gender equality and is informed by a feminist ontology which stipulates that women are structurally subordinated.In this essay, I examine whether the European Commission has adequately adhered to this gender policy in its free trade negotiations with the ACP (African, Caribbean, and Pacific) countries as part of the Cotonou Agreement. As a result of my text analysis of documents related to the negotiations, opinion pieces by interested actors and policy papers of the EU, I find that the Commission does not act in accordance to its stated gender policy.To explain this discrepancy between policy intent and actions, I employ postliberal feminist theory and Robert Putnam's Two-Level Game Theory Model. By analyzing statistics and published research, I explore how gender issues are being represented politically on a domestic and international level.My findings show that a key cause of this discrepancy lies in the low levels of female participation in the political institutions of the EU and ACP; a lack of participation that is especially pronounced in the area of international economics. In explaining the constraints on female participation and the prospects of full implementation of the EU's gender policy in the international political economy, I emphasize the role of culturally and historically gendered institutions..

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..

For my advanced degree in archival science, I have organised and catalogued two family archives; man Family Archives ("Gardtmanska släktarkivet") and the Hamnström Family Archives ("Hamnströmska säk- tarkivet"). Though both could be labelled "family archives", there were many differences between the two. The Gardtman Family Archives contained the records of several family members from a period of several centuries, spanning from the early 17th century, to the early 20th century. It was by far the larger of the two archives. A substantial part of the records consisted of documents regarding various agricultural estates the family had owned or been involved with in one way or another.

This bachelor thesis has the purpose to visualize and document the air movementsprovided by different ventilation principles in an operating theatre. The visualizationwill be made as simple as possible in a physical model. The model and thedocumentation should be able to use in educational purposes.The study is based on the two most common systems for airflow, currently used inoperating theatres. The first principle is displacement ventilation in which the air issupplied at low velocity along the floor. The second principle is vertical parallel laminarairflow in which the air is compressed like a piston from ceiling to the floor.A review of literature resulted in the choice of size, design, and scale factor for themodel, as well as choices of ventilation principles and airflows.

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.

This bachelor thesis has the purpose to visualize and document the air movementsprovided by different ventilation principles in an operating theatre. The visualizationwill be made as simple as possible in a physical model. The model and thedocumentation should be able to use in educational purposes.The study is based on the two most common systems for airflow, currently used inoperating theatres. The first principle is displacement ventilation in which the air issupplied at low velocity along the floor. The second principle is vertical parallel laminarairflow in which the air is compressed like a piston from ceiling to the floor.A review of literature resulted in the choice of size, design, and scale factor for themodel, as well as choices of ventilation principles and airflows.

This bachelor thesis has the purpose to visualize and document the air movementsprovided by different ventilation principles in an operating theatre. The visualizationwill be made as simple as possible in a physical model. The model and thedocumentation should be able to use in educational purposes.The study is based on the two most common systems for airflow, currently used inoperating theatres. The first principle is displacement ventilation in which the air issupplied at low velocity along the floor. The second principle is vertical parallel laminarairflow in which the air is compressed like a piston from ceiling to the floor.A review of literature resulted in the choice of size, design, and scale factor for themodel, as well as choices of ventilation principles and airflows.

This bachelor thesis has the purpose to visualize and document the air movementsprovided by different ventilation principles in an operating theatre. The visualizationwill be made as simple as possible in a physical model. The model and thedocumentation should be able to use in educational purposes.The study is based on the two most common systems for airflow, currently used inoperating theatres. The first principle is displacement ventilation in which the air issupplied at low velocity along the floor. The second principle is vertical parallel laminarairflow in which the air is compressed like a piston from ceiling to the floor.A review of literature resulted in the choice of size, design, and scale factor for themodel, as well as choices of ventilation principles and airflows.

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.

In subsequent to Post-colonialism the African nations have dilated into different political directions. While some nations have established well-functioning democracies, others are still under authoritarian regimes. The aim of this thesis is to examine if civil society has an impact on democratic development in West Africa. Therefore the theoretical starting point is Putnam?s theory of social capital, but this study will also examine other possible causal explanations for democratic transition.This study will be based on a comparative analysis of Ghana and Guinea.

This thesis aims at exploring a national collaborative gateway-service, PictureAustralia, hosted at the National Library of Australia. This will be done by means of investigating some underlying principles for descriptive standards and conventions as of the library discourse which is the objective of bibliographic control and access. The reason to do this is to bring some main features of these principles into the context of a cross-institutional cooperation between libraries, galleries/museums and archives in a picture database service. The attention will lay on the objectives of what functions the system is designed to perform to give access, as defined by Elaine Svenonius in the Intellectual Foundations of Information Organization 2000, and how these objectives will affect this particular database-service collocating performance, which is a system- and logical approach. Though, this study will be done in an explorative and qualitative way, by a case-study, which is to examine some sample metadata records emanated from different institutions in this project.

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.

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.