Using mobile technology to make ends meet is currently a reality for many people. More and more peopleare working while travelling or work from home. Most knowledge workers are equipped with laptopsand smart phones. To find out how individuals are affected by having the ability to stay continuouslyconnected and work with mobile business applications, we have conducted a case study and in closecooperation with a company have created a prototype of such a mobile business application. Fourindividuals have tested our application and were then interviewed.

AbstractTitle: Network communication for equal opportunities (Nätverkskommunikation för jämställdhet)Number of pages: 47 (54 with enclosures)Author: Hillevi GoodTutor: Ylva EkströmCourse: Media and Communication Studies DPeriod: Spring Semester 2007University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala UniversityAim: The aim of this essay is to study the possibilities to bring about change by the means of communication in two networks, focusing on the implementation of the Swedish Equal Opportunities Act.Material and method: The study draws on data collected in an electronic survey among representatives of two networks consisting of representatives from trade unions and employer?s associations. The material is analyzed using descriptive tools, cross tables and correlation matrices in which general characteristics as well as individual understandings of the network communication are presented and discussed.Main results: The general results indicate that the network communication serves important purposes, such as providing support and motivation for the members and changing attitudes towards equal opportunities. The analysis suggests that the network members have good communicative possibilities to serve as agents of change within their organisations. Moreover, there is an observed relation between, on the one hand, organizational context and, on the other hand, the network members? own communicational behaviour and their experienced possibility to influence their organizations.Keywords: network communication, diffusion of innovations, behaviour change, Equal Opportunities Act.

Children's Need In Focus (BBIC) is a processing and documentation system used in child welfare cases to investigate, plan and monitor interventions. The BBIC has had a breakthrough in Sweden and out of the country's 290 municipalities, there are 284 that use the system daily as a tool in cases involving children. The purpose of this study was to examine how social workers experience the BBIC as a working system and what strengths and weaknesses there are in the BBIC concept. We wanted our study to examine how the BBIC could possibly enhance the quality of childcare matters, but also how the BBIC could potentially increase children's participation in cases. We have performed qualitative interviews with eight social workers who work in four different municipalities where the BBIC is applied daily.

Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate the quality of the social network in regard to young adults, with psychological disorders, and their possibilities to be open about their disease. In addition the study aimed at identifying possible causes to perceived difficulties by young adults to talk about their disease. Method: The survey was a quantitative study with descriptive design. The data was collected using a study-specific questionnaire on a clinic for young adults with psychological disorders, between 18 and 25 years of age. Out of 123 potential participants 79 (64 %) answered the questionnaire, of which two were excluded because they did not see themselves as suffering from mental illness. Results: The results showed that the participants of the study stated that they had a social network and the majority (90%, n=69) considered they had someone to talk to about their disease, but most of them wanted to be more open about their illness.However, the majority had some form of difficulty to talk about their disease with their social network. The most common specified causes were to feel ashamed of their disease and that the mentally ill persons did not think they would be properly understood.Almost the half of the participant experienced that they had some form of difficulty to be open about their mental disorder in front of health professionals and the most common specified causes was that the participant did not thought that they would be properly  understood  or that they did not felt confidence before the health professionals. Conclusion: Young adults with psychological disease have difficulty to be open about their disease, partly because of stigma.

In this paper, a small business network with around 30 users is analyzed with respect to security, performance and usability. Based on this analysis, two suggestions on how to solve the problems listed are given. The first suggestion focus on keeping a low budget, while the other tries to deal with the problems more thoroughly. One advantage of the first suggestion is, in addition to not straining the company's budget more than nessecary, it does not involve too great changes in the way the network is used and administered. On the other hand, the smaller budget leads to certain compromises, and there is a risk that similar problems occur again if, for example, the company would grow.

The mobile revolution is here to stay, and today most people have (at least) one cell phone at home. Some even a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)as a complement for the simpler tasks at the office, e.g sending e-mail, word processing, browsing the Internet etc. Many business have also given the employees the opportunity to do some of the business tasks inbetweeen customer visits with the help from a cell phone or PDA.Despite all this, the so called Internet connected mobile revolution is often mentioned as a big failure. Maybe because the people in general tended not to use the new technology as much as the companies predicted. This could be because they still haven't learned how it works, or just don't seem to have the need for services provided.After a couple of failures in the development process, almost every cell phone has support for mobile Internet today.

Children's Need In Focus (BBIC) is a processing and documentation system used in child welfare cases to investigate, plan and monitor interventions. The BBIC has had a breakthrough in Sweden and out of the country's 290 municipalities, there are 284 that use the system daily as a tool in cases involving children. The purpose of this study was to examine how social workers experience the BBIC as a working system and what strengths and weaknesses there are in the BBIC concept. We wanted our study to examine how the BBIC could possibly enhance the quality of childcare matters, but also how the BBIC could potentially increase children's participation in cases. We have performed qualitative interviews with eight social workers who work in four different municipalities where the BBIC is applied daily.

Our purpose was to research the new reform amendment" Lag om etableringsinsatser för vissa nyanlända invandrare", and whether the establishment of the reform is good and if it was a necessary amendment. For that reason, we have chosen to answer our purpose in these issues with this question formulation; how can the change of the law establishing operations influence the newcomers in the labour market, the problems the law intends to address, how the new change in the law is different from when the municipality "kommun" was responsible, and how the law can be discussed based on theories of social capital and weak ties. The method used in this study is from a adductive approach where the research is based on both empirical evidence and existing theory that interact between these two. The results that emerged in our work was that the newcomers within the labour market has been remote, the way the municipality?s addressed the problem did not work and the result of this was a new reform amendment, where a new participant established.

The purpose of this thesis work is to create a prototype for an augmented reality application that isaimed to support service technician when performing service and maintenance of machines andengines. The prototype will be used for investigating what technical limitations there is and toestablish basic usability for the user interface. The method that is used is user studies and analysis toevaluate use cases and user stories. An iterative work process is then applied for design and theprototype is continuously user tested.The resulting prototype uses a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 running on Android operating system. Theframework used for augmented reality is NyARToolkit which handles marker recognition andconnections to Android.

Destination branding is becoming increasingly acknowledged by regions working with tourism. Underlying is the fragmented web of actors in the supply chain of which the tourism product consists of. The main purpose of our thesis was, from a management perspective, to gain an understanding and describing how a network and the actors within it can build a consistent brand. We therefore chose to make a case study research on The Kingdom of Chrystal, or Glasriket, which is one of the most famous tourist destinations in Sweden. Our research is based on theoretical and empirical data.

This Masters thesis work describes a comparison between two different methods for estimation of the down channel (base station to mobile subscriber) in Wide-band Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA). The first estimation method, Optimal Feed-forward Channel Estimation (OFCE), is a conventional method that bases the estimates on data that is known to both sender and receiver, so called pilots. The second method, Decision Directed Channel Estimation (DDCE), is an elaboration of OFCE. It also uses user data for estimation. Simulations show that DDCE, in comparison to OFCE, does not attain an improvement in signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) for high bit error rates (BER).

The aim of this study has been to examine the role of control mechanisms when it comes to building relationships in a small business network. In order to reach this goal, we have performed a case study of a Swedish supplier of machines to the engineering industry, which acts as the exclusive representative of a foreign manufacturer on the Swedish market. Main results: A number of control mechanisms, both formal and informal, could be identified in the network. Their specific use, as well as relative importance differ between different actors in the network. In general, the importance of formal control mechanisms decreases as the relationship evolves over time and the importance of informal ones, mainly trust, increases in a corresponding manner..

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to describe how Swedish public libraries use the online social network Facebook and its functions. Our focus of this study lies on how the librarians use the network and what experiences they?ve made. The questions we wanted to answer were:? How do the libraries in this study work with Facebook and its services? ? What do the interviewed librarians think about working with Facebook as an instrument?? What pros and cons can be identified from working with Facebook?The methodology used for this study was qualitative interviews.

This thesis follows a qualitative method and aim to describe firms? international business at an emerging market seen from a network perspective. The purpose of the thesis is to study in what way business relations and networks influence the process of internationalization and describe the way in which companies handle the external network in relation to acquisitions. Further does our purpose include analyzing if a firm?s network may be the main factor for why international business occurs.

Sekretessbelagd.