The process of food production has changed dramatically over the past one hundred years. Industrialization has led to large units of production, manufacturing, distribution, marketing and retail business. The final food product, in this system, is quite often fairly anonymous and the consumer will most likely know very little concerning the origin of the product. In recent years, the market for locally produced food has grown. There is an increasing interest in and demand for locally produced food items.

This thesis aims at investigating the two municipality?s Gislaved and Ljungby. Where the aim is to see if there is any connections, between the type and the degree of public-private partnerships, and the municipalities obtained environment performance. In this essay the starting point is that the environmental performance in the chosen municipalities is good.Interviews among local politicians and representatives for the municipalities plastic industries, has functioned as a way to test the hypothesis. Gislaved and Ljungby have thereafter been compared, in order to see if there is any similarity in the sort and the degree of public-private partnerships, and how that will affect the environmental performance. The overall questions in this essay are:How can the cooperation among the chosen municipalities and the      local business life be described? What kind of Public-private partnership      exists in the selected municipalities?Is there any difference between the municipalities, referring to      the degree of cooperation between the municipalities and the local      business life? Does the degree of cooperation affect the progress on the environmental      performance? The end result shows that the local business life doesn?t have any impact on the environmental performance.

This thesis is focusing on how global and local search engines retrieve information from the local domain. The three search engines tested are the global search engines Yahoo, Ask.com and the local search engine Web Wombat. The questions we examined were: which search engine has the best retrieval effectiveness? Could there be other reasons than retrieval effectiveness, to choosing a local search engine?For our test we constructed 20 questions related to Australia.We chose to divide the questions into topics like nature, sports and culture. For all questions we evaluated the relevance of the first 20 hits.

A recent trend in the technological evolution has been to increase the mobility of the end-user. A contributing factor is the fast rate of improvement in the smartphone area. This, in turn, has changed the expectations end-users have on the availability of services, which has allowed mobile applications, apps, to find their place in everyday life.This study has been conducted at Scania?s Fleet Management department that offers a web-based service where haulage contractors can administer, monitor and follow up on their vehicle fleets. The purpose of this study was to investigate if Scania?s existing web service should be extended into the mobile area, and if so, what organizational and technical challenges app development imposes.

A study of the generations problematic in museums of work and local folklore societies, principally run through volunteer work. Illustrative examples are Ödestugu local folklore society and Husqvarna Factory Museum in Småland (Sweden). The empirical study consists of interviews with active people and inquiry among societymembers and workers at the factory. An analysis of interest, engagement and the view of the future is made and concepts like professionalisation and change are discussed. By way of conclusion the coming generation problem is discussed in relation to professionalisation, the historical development, volunteer work, economy and national projects..

The ability to tackle NP-hard problems has been greatly extended by the introduction of Metaheuristics (see Blum & Roli (2003)) for a summary of most Metaheuristics, general problem-independent optimisation algorithms extending the hill-climbing local search approach to escape local minima. One of these algorithms is Iterated Local Search (ILS) (Lourenco et al., 2002; Stützle, 1999a, p. 25ff), a recent easy to implement but powerful algorithm with results comparable or superior to other state-of-the-art methods for many combinatorial optimisation problems, among them the Traveling Salesman (TSP) and Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). ILS iteratively samples local minima by modifying the current local minimum and restartinga local search porcedure on this modified solution. This thesis will show how ILS can be implemented for MSA.

The ability to tackle NP-hard problems has been greatly extended by the introduction of Metaheuristics (see Blum & Roli (2003)) for a summary of most Metaheuristics, general problem-independent optimisation algorithms extending the hill-climbing local search approach to escape local minima. One of these algorithms is Iterated Local Search (ILS) (Lourenco et al., 2002; Stützle, 1999a, p. 25ff), a recent easy to implement but powerful algorithm with results comparable or superior to other state-of-the-art methods for many combinatorial optimisation problems, among them the Traveling Salesman (TSP) and Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). ILS iteratively samples local minima by modifying the current local minimum and restartinga local search porcedure on this modified solution. This thesis will show how ILS can be implemented for MSA.

The ability to tackle NP-hard problems has been greatly extended by the introduction of Metaheuristics (see Blum & Roli (2003)) for a summary of most Metaheuristics, general problem-independent optimisation algorithms extending the hill-climbing local search approach to escape local minima. One of these algorithms is Iterated Local Search (ILS) (Lourenco et al., 2002; Stützle, 1999a, p. 25ff), a recent easy to implement but powerful algorithm with results comparable or superior to other state-of-the-art methods for many combinatorial optimisation problems, among them the Traveling Salesman (TSP) and Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). ILS iteratively samples local minima by modifying the current local minimum and restartinga local search porcedure on this modified solution. This thesis will show how ILS can be implemented for MSA.

Today?s community requires an increase in food production. Animals are today bred so that they produce more than their ancestors did. Production has been the most important and breeds with the highest production levels have therefore become popular. Many of the old local breeds have become extinct or are about to become extinct because of this trend.

The focus on this essay is derived from an international and national dialogue for sustainable development. The recommendation from international level has been to find solutions for governments to implement strategies for sustainable development between local and regional level. This initiative is to improve and stimulate the dialogue between the local inhabitants, officials, entrepreneurs and stakeholders in the communities together with the authorities on the regional level. The purpose is to share knowledge and find ways to learn about the natural systems and how to co-operate in the work of preserving the natural resources and developing different processes for a sustainable development. Many scientists? today stress the importance that ecosystem resilience is promoted by biodiversity conservation and that we need to find solutions for local ecosystem management practices.This essay aims to find theoretical approaches and perspectives that can be used in a wider framework to study co-operative processes between the local (agent) and regional (structure) level.

Purpose: The purpose with this study is to clarify what importance a co-occurrence event can have on a smaller town, and also what positive and negative consequences it can have on the town seen from a social, economic and political aspect. I will also look at what magnitude the festival have on the local commercial and industrial life and how it affects those who live there. I will also determent how the moving of the festival might come and affect the local businesses, the local population and the community it-self.Method: I will thorough-out this study work with qualitative research methodology. I will there-for process the empirical data that will be collected and used for this study from a qualitative research methodology point of view. I will likewise go through with two deep-going interviews with people well familiar with the subject to increase and strengthen the validity of my study.

Mass distribution with techniques as multicast and peer-to-peer are becoming increasingly important in the Internet. Today the distribution of sound and video over Internet, so called streaming media, is static due to the unicast method. This results in a linear increase of distribution costs and therefore no conditions for commercial scalability. This thesis describes why multicast may be the only scalable alternative for commercial mass distribution of streaming media over Internet. Mass distribution through peer-to-peer technology promises a lot but is fronting a couple of great challenges, for example asymmetric bandwidth, locality and legalization.

The thesis has two aims to first describe the phenomena by explaining how interim management works and what the charachteristics of an interim manger are. The second aim is to look at the value issue of interim management; What value does an interim manager provide to a company and how do interim managers try to capture and cultivate this?The qualitative method has been used. The interim management market analysed in this thesis can be stated to consist of three parts; the interim manager as a provider of knowledge, a client firm in need of a temporary manager, and an interim agency in between working as an intermediary/supplier. The characteristics of interim managers are; they are in general self-employers and rather generalists than specialists, meaning they are experienced and have great knowledge skills.

All inclusive travel has become a popular way to travel abroad. When tourists pay for everything in advance their need for contact with the local people will be reduced. The consequences of this can be dissatisfaction from the local people as they are left out and do not share the financial benefits created by tourism. During the purchasing cycle of an all inclusive travel, it is possible that the tour operator can influence a sustainable development.The aim of this paper is to compare how a large and a small tour operator in their purchase of all inclusive holidays interacts with local players to create sustainable development, thereby creating a surplus value to the customer. The hypothesis is that the amount of knowledge and application of this knowledge regarding sustainable development differs in the purchase process between large and small tour operators.This paper was carried out as a case study.

This paper deals with challenges associated with handling scrubber waste in the port of Karlshamn and what various industry partners are doing to meet this growing demand. The main challenges have been the proportion of ships with scrubber, the amount of generated waste and waste characterisation. An understanding of these factors has been crucial in order to ascertain the aim of this study, which has been made with calculations based on leading manufacturer?s scrubber analyses and with an estimation of the quantity of ships with scrubber by examining AIS data from the Port of Karlshamn. In order to calculate the quantity of scrubber waste two different scenarios were established, which in turn produced two different outcomes.