This report, written by Ma?ns Ridze?n and Jonas Stenberg, presents the thesis carried out the spring of 2012. The authors met the first time in 2008, when they started their studies at Uppsala University. Since then they have completed various projects, both within and without the university. This study is based on a theory that was first conceived when Jonas Stenberg did his internship in the summer of 2010.

The purpose of this Master's thesis is to investigate the role of the public library when the local government in the municipality arranges distance education at university level. The thesis has two main areas of questioning and these are goals and resources. In the study it is examined if the local goals have changed during the period 2000 until 2005, due to the development of distance education. It is investigated if change actually has occurred and if it has, in what way the goals have changed. It is also examined if and how the goals correspond with the work that is being performed in the public library.

This thesis intends to examine the role of the city, Dublin, in the Irish economic growth during the 1990s. It is a case study where Dublin is compared with current theories on post modern cities as growth machines and increasingly prominent actors in the global context. The study has an interdisciplinary approach but focuses on political science issues such as power distribution, global-local governance and local political organisation. It is a theory driven study that also intends to add aspects to the understanding of the cities of our time. I argue that Dublin has faced a lot of changes during the last decades in accordance with the post modern city.

The analysis of regional development and the formation of regional policy have experienced an increasing importance in Europe and in Sweden during the last decades. There is a widespread assumption that the increasing significance of regions is due to the diminishing role of the nationstate in the era of globalization. This essay suggests that there is a hegemonic discourse, heavily relying on the assumptions of New Regionalism, when addressing regional building. Sometimes described as an ideology, New Regionalism, which is derived from research of successful regions, is based on the assumption that regional competitiveness and autonomy creates economic growth. The Committee on Public Sector Responsibilities (Ansvarskommittén) suggests that Sweden requires new regional structure, due to the increasing expenditures facing the welfare state.

The following essay aims at the interplay between regional och municipal growth work, and theway cultural heritage is used in growth work strategies. The main issue has been whether theregional strategies are followed up in the municipal strategies, which has been investigated bymeans of question which impact the region?s strategies has at the local level.The essay draws upon an instrumental perspective on cultural heritage and cultural environment,here defined as instruments in the national development and growth efforts. Three publicationsthat highlights potential roles of cultural heritage and cultural environment to act as instrumentsin the regional and municipal development and growth efforts has thereby been selected astheoretical models. These roles has further been summarized in a tabular form as a schematicdivision of main themes with sub-categories, used as a framework for deciphering the regionaland municipal strategies.A content analysis of available strategies at both regional and local levels have been used as amethod for investigating the issue, where the role of cultural heritage and cultural environment(as defined in the schematic table) has guided the reading.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate the airline industry and its part in the mobile community. Further on, to investigate the factors that throughout history are having an impact on the airline industry and have lead to the condition of today. Through this information we are outlining the future of the airline industry.This essay has been written in a qualitative approach. The empirical gathering has been made through interviews based on open discussions between the interviewers and respondents. We started out with creating a theoretical pre-understanding and continued by comparing how well these theories matched the reality.The gathering of the theoretical material was chosen on the basis how well it matches the subject of our essay.

Allocation of funds to public libraries is uneven and this study will try to explain the reasons and clarify why the allocations of funds are distributed like they are and what calculations influenced the financial apportionment. This master thesis accounts for allocation in seven public libraries in Uppsala. The study shows that one reason for uneven allocations is demographic. Another reason is that the library has come into a good or bad circle. There are no models for allocation of funds to public libraries in Uppsala, thats why their allocations are given after a percentage increase of earlier years allocations, and that leads to a good or bad circle.

A great fire seized a suburb in a small town in Sweden in the autumn of 2011. Parts of a shopping mall were burnt to the ground by youngsters. Due to the suburb's earlier problems, the event was a tough ethical dilemma for the town's journalists.The purpose of this thesis was to study and examine the local newspapers ethical treatment of this event. How do they motivate their decisions on what to publish and what not to publish? How do the articles treat ethical dilemmas? What do the journalists think about ethical journalism?This study is based on a survey of the articles published about the fire in the two local newspapers seven days after the fire.

This master?s degree project concerns the combination of a multi dwelling passive house with solar energy for the generation of electricity and domestic hot water (DHW). Different alternatives with either solar thermal systems or photovoltaic (PV) systems are compared with two reference alternatives producing DHW from electricity or district heating. The economical comparison uses a life cycle cost (LCC) perspective based on the present value of expenditures for investment, energy and annual operating and maintenance.The energy yields from the solar energy systems were calculated by hand and with simulation software. Calculation and dimensioning of PV systems were carried out with a software called PVSYST.

When SKL (Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science) gets images to analyse, the task often is to identify a person or an object. In that work it?s important to find features. Unfortunately images from camera surveillances often contain a lot of noise, so details can be hard to discern.A simple method to improve an image from a sequence is to compute the mean of some of the images. However, the part of interest in the image has to be in the same position in all images.

AbstractDuring the last five years there has been a considerable immigration from the Netherlands to Värmland in Sweden. INVA, Invest in Värmland, wanted to highlight this phenomenon and therefore contacted Karlstad University to make a survey about how extensive the immigration is and what consequences it brings for the business life and municipalities in Värmland. We were luckily chosen to perform this research and the main focus in this study has been the following questions:? Why do the Dutchmen choose to buy their house in Värmland?? What are the main reasons for leaving the Netherlands?? What consequences does the immigration cause for the business life in Värmland?? How do the Dutchmen experience the contact with Swedish authorities?To answer the questions we designed a questionnaire that was sent to 200 Dutch house purchasers. The ambition was to survey all the Dutch house purchasers in Värmland, but with the time constrains and the municipalities having problem to find complete data, we limited the survey to 200 households.

This Master?s thesis is one of two parts of a combined project called Sustainable development around the Lake Victoria, the purpose of which is to investigate the importance of local anchoring and active participation in the work towards sustainable development. The present study aims to investigate whether men and women are empowered by the participatory rural appraisal (PRA) process promoted in their villages by the VI Agroforestry Project Masaka/Rakai. The study is primarily based on interviews with farmers within the project area and brings up a local perspective on the concepts sustainable development, active participation and empowerment. The study shows that to improve the farmers? livelihood and to create a sustainable development in the community, the farmers have to be actively involved in, and in control of, the process.

Care and solicitude about Swedish documentary heritage has varied substantially throughout the years. The main purpose of this essay has been to investigate what efforts have been made to preserve rare book collections at public libraries. These cultural policies have been studied from both a national as well as local perspective. What we have tried to explore can be condensed into three questions: What national initiatives have been taken in the past century to preserve the municipal documentary heritage?What initiatives have been taken in the past century to preserve thedocumentary heritage of what is presently the municipality of Jönköping? What value do rare book collections at public libraries represent? The results indicate few national efforts were initially made to preserve rare book collections in the timeframe we studied.

This essay deals with the question of lines of development within the politics in the rural municipality of Nyed 1950-1962. The aim is to explore how local politics and policies were handled from two perspectives. Firstly the issue of conflict and consensus or majority rule and consensus. Here Arend Lijphard's theory of majority and consensus provides a theoretical base for the essay. Secondly the aim is to explore the actions of the local politicians with regards to leisure time policies to find out whether or not they ideologically belonged to the concept of ?folkhemmets kommun? by Ulla Ekström von Essen.The source material for this essay has been the minutes from the two major bodies of local politics in Nyed, kommunalfullmäktige and kommunalnämnden.

This bachelor thesis is based on interviews with staff from three Egyptian NGOs in Cairo during the spring of 2013. The study examines how three Egyptian NGOs discuss the woman?s situation within the Islamic legal discourse in the contemporary Egypt. The empiric material was analysed through a theoretical framework of gender in Islam, and a discussion of the concept of human rights laws in a local context.The respondents emphasize the societies gender stereotypes as obstacles in the discussion regarding women?s rights.