The first aim of this thesis is to descriptively identify and chart the activities of the strategic intelligence and environmental scanning that take place at the regional collaboration network Regionförbundet Örebro. This identification is essential in reaching the comprehensive and primary aim of the thesis: to discuss, through normative discourse, what the options of improvement are and in which ways systematic operations can be integrating parts in the organization. In order to offer guidance of development from the perspectives of environmental scanning, the question at issue has emanated from activities concerning the present methods of working at Regionförbundet Örebro.During the creation of this thesis, several interviews have been made with people who are regarded to be key roles within the regional collaboration network. An analysis has been made, based on governing documents and answers from the interviews, where possible improvements of the business have been identified. The inferences become parts of a greater potential of amelioration since they are presented as active solutions and proposals that can be directly adaptable to the organization.Our proposals of improvements/ameliorations are constituted by a number of concrete/explicit points such as: a wider public information supply and an introduction of several annual routines and methods..

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.

Several studies have investigated the relationship between different measures of innovative activity, such as patent statistics and R&D expenditures and some have looked deeper into the differences between large and small firms regarding number of patents issued per employee or per R&D dollar. In this paper, the objective is to find out if there are any indications of a barrier to entry (due to economical factors, lack of knowledge etc) for small firms to get into the field of patent handling. The approach is to first set up a hypothesis based on some simple assumptions about how firms would make decisions about whether to apply for a patent or not and thereafter use econometric methods in an empirical investigation. The data used for this study are figures on number of employees, number of patents granted and R&D expenditures for the Swedish firms in the pulp and paper industry. The main conclusion is that, based on the analysis of the data from this rather limited group of firms, no such barrier can be seen..

A segmented market, according to traditional methods, appears increasingly difficult in mature consumer markets. A common explanation is that the mature markets are often characterised by over-supply which results in a great variety of choices for the consumer. Furthermore, the consumer of today has a more complex and flexible purchase behaviour which is difficult to catch. This makes consumer segmentation difficult. International studies indicate that dividing consumers into generation cohorts might be advantageous in understanding consumers of today.

Studien har haft syftet att undersöka upplevelsen av den terapeutiska relationen hos en grupp terapeuter respektive klienter, där kulturella möten har uppstått. Med kulturella möten avses terapeut - klient konstellationer där en av parterna har en annan etnisk tillhörighet än svensk. Forskarna har tillämpat en kvalitativ ansats och intervjuer som datainsamligsmetod. En övergripande slutsats för terapeutgruppen är att den terapeutiska relationen inte upplevs kvalitativt särskiljande vid transkulturella dyader än vid andra konstellationer. Terapeuter måste dock äga metakulturkompetens och vara trygga i sin profession för att en bra relation ska kunna uppstå.

This report studies how the divergence between men and women is manifested in the physical space and how the representation of room recreates this divergence. Spaces are coded and women have traditionally been associated with private space and men with public space, leading to that the home is encoded as female space and public squares as male space. Thereby women lack a natural place in public space. The National Board of Housing, Building and Planning (Boverket) wants to change this situation by enforcing safety-creating measures based on gender equality theories.I have studied what potential risks the project initiated by Boverket as well as discuss the potential problems with representation. Can representation be used without freezing the space? I also search for methods for working with a gender perspective without reproducing gender stereotypes and roles and avoiding encoding the private as female and public as male? Also I use a public seminar with urban planners, artists and architects to retrieve how we work with these issues today.I conclude that city planning needs to incorporate new strategies of thought that does not divide space, e.g.

The aim of this qualitative study was to study high school PE teachers´ experience of health in high school and how they work with health in their physical education. This was examined by interviewing five high PE school teachers. The results show that all teachers were in the category humanistic approach. They saw health as more than only absence of sickness. The methods for using health in their physical education were divided into three different categories; physical health, improve the individual and theoretical health.

To be able to read and write is necessary to manage well in life. It is important to get a good start in one´s reading and writing development. My purpose in this study was to find out how to teach children to read and write. Obtain knowledge about how to best help children during the early years of reading and writing development, and what is required to teach good reading and writing skills.I wanted to find out how the pedagogues work in the schools, and if they use ant special methods in their teaching. This is something that I, as a future pedagogue didn´t have much knowledge about, which is very important for my future pupils.My research method was qualitative where I interviewed three pedagogues who work whit teaching reading and writing in the early years.

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative study was to illuminate and compare how teachers and parents are describing the homework. The study will also attempt to answer these issues; How is the purpose of the homework described from teachers and parents? How are the effects of the homework described by teachers and parents? How do teachers and parents describe the responsibility for the implementation of the homework?Methods: Qualitative study, a comparison between teachers and parents description of the homework phenomenon. The material that forms the discussion are fetched from blog forums.Summary of conclusions: The Swedish school system is based on democratic values. This means that the students are supposed to gain equal opportunity for qualified education independent of their socioeconomic backgrounds.

Location-based services (LBS) contains of services helping users of finding positions of themselves or other objects. LBS applications can present information in varies types of ways, these could be threw speech, text, geographic symbols, photos etc. Not many studies have been done to examine the aspects of LBS communication and there is a demand for user and context centered mapping.The purpose of this report is to present a model for the development of user and context based services. The model will give guide lines of recommendations when implementing LBS. The different technologies that support LBS will also be noticed.

During twelve weeks of practice experience at the company Sydved AB, I received the mission to develop a structure for the company?s internal communication. A part of this mission was to find out what the company?s employees thought of Sydveds internal communication and the most important; Sydveds intranet called ?Outlook?. Due to Sydveds plans of developing the intranet I designed and accomplished an inquiry-study to find out about the employee?s opinions on the company´s internal communication and in particular their intranet.The answers I want from this study are if I shaped the inquiry-study correctly the first time.

Cultivable land is a limited resource and agriculture contributes to some of the most serious environmental problems facing the planet like, global warming, eutrophication and loss of biodiversity. The specialized, industrial agriculture with monoculture and extensive input of external energy, commercial fertilizer, and chemical pesticides are all essentially unsustainable. An adaptation to other methods of production is necessary to preserve the environment for future generations. The aim of this study is to describe the factors that distinguish sustainable from unsustainable agriculture. The results will be used to examine if and how the European Union (EU) works in order to create a more sustainable agricultural industry and to analyze the preconditions for such development.

This essay aims to map the ideas behind the Swedish cultural reform called Kultursamverkansmodellen, and how the ideas are forming a discourse. Furthermore it examines the social praxis on the three levels that constitutes the model. The three levels are the state, the region and culture creators/civil society. This is a qualitative study based on primary and secondary sources collected on the three levels. The theoretical frame of reference is based on institutional theory, on Michel Foucault?s lecture on The Discourse of Language, and on New Public Management.

There are an increasing number of people suffering from depression and depressed mood. Concurrently important benefits have been noticed from the effects of massage, effects that can be assumed to restore individual?s health with depression and depressed mood. The aim of the study was to examine the importance of gentle massage in connection with depression and depressed mood. The research was based on scientific studies that were applied through the databases Cinahl, elin@Kristianstad, PsycARTICLES, PsycINFO, PubMed and the journal Vård i Norden as well as by manual searches.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate what attributes were used in story-time activities, why attributes were used in story-time activities and what functions they have. The study is based on qualitative methods in the form of a literature studies, observations and interviews. The interviews were undertaken with two storytellers from the same public library. The story-time activities were adapted for children from three to six years of age. The study suggested that there was a connection between story-time activities and a social and cultural perspective.