During the past year it has been made possible to buy back a company?s outstanding stock. This is done in order to change the capital structure towards a situation with less equity. A change in capital structure means a change in the cost of capital for a company and by that a change in the value for the stockholder. This Master Thesis studies the relation between capital structure and business risk.

Syftet med denna studie var att beskriva arbetsterapeuters erfarenheter av att genomföra hembesök tillsammans med äldre patienterna innan utskrivning från sjukhus. En kvalitativ metod valdes med semistukturerade intervjufrågor. Undersökningsgruppen bestod av nio arbetsterapeuter verksamma inom geriatrisk slutenvård i en storstadsregion i södra Sverige. Data analyserades utifrån en kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Analysen kom att resultera i fyra kategorier.

This report is the final result of the master thesis that have been done at  Sharpman Engineering. Sharpman Engineering is a small development and manufacturing company that produces and make drawings for everything from heavy duty log raft to aids for disabled people. The purpose have been to make one concept that make it easy for elderly and people having problem with knee- and back problem to stand up from a sitting position. The final result will the company have for further investigations and use for a pre-serial production with the goal to produce a new working product.To get an overview of what is on the market have a comprehensive survey has been done, followed by a survey on patent. This patent survey are for no intrusion on existing patents should occur and give new ideas.

Due to the globalization today the competition in the market has in- creased and it requires flexibility and produce according to customer demand. In order to reduce the cost of wages industrial companies are now considering moving the manufacturing to low-cost countries. To keep up with the competition in the market without moving the manu- facturing abroad, Lean Automation was developed. The concept of Lean Automation is to reduce the perceived complexity with automa- tion and make automation available for new users and in new applica- tions.Haldex Brake Products are situated in Sweden and want to maintain the manufacturing of the automatic brake adjusters in the country. It is a product well-known and highly exposed to the competition in the mar- ket.

Volvo Construction Equipment is a world leading company in construction machinery. Tomaintain the best products, development is prioritized. The master thesis regards sound reductionof the hydraulic system on a wheel loader. The background to the master thesis is asimulation made on the hydraulic system, performed autumn 2005. The result of the simulationshows that the energy of the pressure ripple is reduced when the paralleled hydraulicpumps are phase shifted and reduces each others pump pulsations.

This is a Master´s Thesis based on my own idea instead of that of a company. It is a survey that focuses on finding out more about which part of the development process that is blocking the establishment of electronic scorecards on the golf market. Why has it not been introduced on the market in a larger scale yet, considering the technology we possess today? This question is investigated through interviews with the Swedish Golf association, and three companies that have chosen different paths to implement an electronic scorecard. The interviews focuses on finding out what developers and the association believe to be the main problem, before taking the next step in releasing electronic scorecards on a larger scale.

This master thesis is a part of the DySCAS project at ENEA. The purpose of this thesisproject is to add support for streaming media and USB support to the DySCAS demonstratorplatform.To achieve this, some of the widely used middlewares available today were studied. The onethat proved to be of most interest is CORBA. Although CORBA?s solution to streamingmedia couldn?t be used due to their use of object programming, the CORBA solution didprovide some interesting thoughts regarding how the USB devices should be handled, in thiscase their ?resource inspector? and ?trading service?.Ethernet was the chosen network to support streaming media.

The aim of this study was to examine care managers and how they understand and use their discretion. We used a qualitative method and the data was gathered by semi-structured interviews. We interviewed eight care managers in four different municipalities in southern Sweden. The theoretical approach we used was Michael Lipsky?s theory about street-level bureaucracy.

The subject of this master thesis is the school library and how we find its potential unutilized. We look at this problem in connection to the democratic assignment that the Swedish school has. The purpose is to elucidate what the democratic assignment consists of and to establish the role that the school library ought to have in this assignment. To describe the democratic assignment we examine and interpret the documents that regulate school and library activities today, including UNESCO/IFLA School Library Manifesto and United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. We use critical ideology analysis because we consider democracy to be a sort of ideology and have a critical view of how the school library is used or rather not used in school.

In visual programming the developer specifies her code, using visual tools. Within the range of visual programming languages lay icon-based languages, form-based languages, and diagram languages.Mediator is a multimedia authoring tool that allows the user to create interactive CD-ROM presentations, dynamic HTML pages and Flash projects, without any coding or scripting. The user can create interactivity in her project, using event driven and icon-based visual programming, through a ?drag and drop? user interface. This report intends to determine some of the qualifications of a tool of this kind, as well as its limitations.The report is based on a case study, in which a smaller software application was to be updated using Mediator 9.

The purpose of this master thesis is to identify some phenomena that may contribute or work against the individual musician?s opportunities to contribute with their personal musical intuition in the orchestral work. I want to investigate under which conditions and in what context the orchestra environment gives musicians opportunities to take musical initiatives. I will also test a method to develop and work with musical intuition in a staged trombone audition called blåst. My wish is to highlight orchestra musician's perspective and experiences and to discuss where in an orchestral musician?s everyday work the artistic and authentic musical initiative appears and how we are going about it.

This Master's thesis in library and information science aims to shed light on the concept of information literacy in higher education, particularly as manifested in two dissertations on the subject. Two models of information literacy are compared: Christina Doyle's list of ten attributes for students to master and Christine Bruce's seven conceptions of information literacy. The cognitive-behaviourist tradition in Doyle's study and the alternative, phenomenographic approach in Bruce's research are compared and commented. The taxonomies and internal relationship between separate components in the two models are investigated, as well as the ways the models relate to each other. The respective views of knowledge and learning are described.

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate the understanding of children's librari-ans regarding children's needs and preconditions in a library context and based on devel-opmental psychology and information seeking theories. The children's perspective is said to be the guiding star in the children's library and the thesis also aims to study the chil-dren's perspective as defined by children's librarians.The master thesis is a qualitative study based on interviews with children's librarians working at major public libraries. Observations of the children's libraries in the study have to some extent been performed.The study reveals that children's librarians are fairly knowledgeable about children but do not to a full extent use that knowledge into adapting the library to children and their needs. The children are not contributing to the adaptation of the library to any extent as there are few routines for that matter. In society in general children are on a regular basis represented by adults and their perspective on children and children's needs, which may differ from the perspective children have on their own lives, and the same is applicable for the children's library.

The purpose of this paper is to find the true meaning to the Swedish word "sinnesträdgård" as a fenonomen. This paper concentrates on the Swedish use of the word, because the term has different definitions in other countries. Our choice was a phenomenological method after reading literature on, and in relevance with, the subject without finding an answer to the question. According to our six informants - a politician, a project manager, two landscape architects and scientists, and two occupational therapists, the concept has not yet been defined. The results show that a "sinnesträdgård" is complex and means several things, but the main purpose of the concept and place is to stimulate all senses. We have discussed how to distinguish the concepts "sinnesträdgård", design garden and health garden, from each other as they all stimulate the senses.

Today more effective computer programs are in use, regarding design of geotechnicalconstructions. There is a risk that the theoretical background of the computerprograms, its limitations and the signification of the choice of soil parameter isforgotten when the computer programs become more user-friendly.This Master thesis deals with simulation and analysis regarding three computerprograms, FEM-design, with the addition Raft, Plaxis and BE-slab. Comparisons aremade for settlement and maximum moment in a concrete-plate. FEM-design is a threedimensional FEM-program, foremost created for design engineers. Plaxis is a twodimensional FEM-program, intended for geotechnical engineers while BE-Slab is aBoundary elements program in two dimensions that is mainly used by designengineers.