The Swedish forest industry has put a lot of resources in the development of digital communications in hopes of improving collaboration with suppliers. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether VIDA would benefit from using digital communication with suppliers. The survey was conducted as a questionnaire study among the company?s staff and its suppliers. The result indicated needs and interests to use digital communications in both groups. Young suppliers and suppliers on a distance showed the most interest in using digital communication. In terms of using these digital communications, the staffs and suppliers were most interested in information regarding transaction and forestmanagement plans.

This thesis is structured as a combined empirical and literary study. The aim is to investigate how children at the age of 11-12 years reflect on their readings of fiction and how these reflections relate to the librarians' perspective of a child's reading ability and reading development. Qualitative interviews with children and librarians constitute the empirical part. Research and theories are compared to the empirical part then placed into a more extensive context. How do children at the age of 11-12 years old reflect upon their reading of fiction and how do librarians relate themselves to this age? An analysis using interviews, research and theories is used to answer these questions.

This report describes the results of the project "Concept development of jet engine inspection plugs" carried out in the spring of 2008. The work was done at the department of product definition at the company Volvo Aero in Trollhättan. The objective of the work was to develop concepts for a "Volvo-unique" inspection plug. The work is part of Volvo Aero's focus on proprietary (self-developed) technologies. Inspection plugs can be found on virtually all aircraft engines and gas turbines.

The aim of this dissertation is to examine and compare William Easterly?s and PGU?s (Shared Responsibility: Sweden's Policy for Global Development) different views on development and international development cooperation. The methodological approach chosen in this study is an analysis of ideas based on the following questions:1. Which principles should be applied to development and international development cooperation?2.

The automotive industry is a highly competitive market characterised by low profit margins or huge losses. Cost reductions have been of top priority for all OEM?s (Original Equipment Manufacturer) and will continue to be so for many years to come. Beside cost reductions, reducing the time-to-market is of greatest importance to stay in the competition. OEM?s that are slow to market with products that neither matches customer expectations nor the products of their competitors, will soon loose market shares and see their economical performance falter.

This bachelor thesis, written as a part of the European Studies at Gothenburg University, is concerned with the European Unions? (EU) climate political governance in their both climate- and agricultural policy, and in particularly the question whether it is sustainable. This thesis intends to problematize if it is possible for the EU to continue to pursue its current agricultural policies, while at the sametime maintain its role as a sustainable actor on the global arena. The framework of theEUs? climate policy governance disciplines this analysis.

The main purpose of this study was to examine how preschool teachers are working to promote each child's language development and whether they can ensure that they do that. Therefore I wanted to find out what a good language development implies for each teacher, how they work to promote each child's language development in daily practice, how they measure the actual language development and also what conditions the teachers have, to engage in a language development way to work. For the study, I chose a qualitative method, with structured interviews and all together I interviewed six preschool teachers, within the same organization in a suburb close to Stockholm.  The results showed that there is an ambiguity, among the preschool teachers, in what a good language development means, but it can be stated that they do have a language development way to work even if it needs to be developed. Further on, it has emerged that the teachers have the tools to measure children's language development, although they do not have the conditions yet to use the method to the fullest. About the preschool teachers own conditions in order to operate in a language development way to work, I concluded that they have a strong foundation to build on, but they still have much work ahead of them.

The market for management training programs is growing and the supply of the service is increasing and getting further diversified. A consequence is a market with a wide variety of definitions of the very concept of development, and subsequently a wide variety of practices and methods to achieve development. The individuals that are subject to these programs seldom know what they are purchasing, or what to expect. When assuming a transfer of the developers view on development to the subject, a need for a greater understanding of the concept arises. The purpose of this thesis is to understand what views on development do exist among management trainers and map underlying dimensions of the views to increase the understanding of the concept of development.

This is a survey of different techniques that may be used for embedding geographicdata into web pages. Different models of GIS communication are examined and a testsubject in the form of an application is implemented and evaluated.The test application (?StudentKarta? eng. ?Student Map?) lets students submit theirresidential data and shows their position as pins on an embedded Map.An expire date is used to let the pins fade away and disappear.The application uses the popular Google map engines to display the geographicalpresentations.

In the paper we bring up and analyse the attitudes librarianshave towards youth and youth programs in the public library.The purpose is to raise awareness among librarians and tomake the process of change and development. We have usedsemi structured interviews in order to answer our researchquestions and conducted the interviews with five librarians incharge of the youth programs in different public libraries. Inthese interviews we asked about their views on youth as auser group, youth programs and how this affects theiropinions on the roles of the public library. We have also triedto see how the librarian?s opinions differ from how thelibrary runs their youth programs today.We have used two different models as theoretic framework.One of them has defined three different roles of the publiclibrarian and is constructed by Maj Klasson and the other is adeveloped version of Andersson & Skot-Hansen?s classicmodel of the roles of the public library made by Jochumsen,Rasmussen & Skot-Hansen.

This paper investigates the possibilities to construct automatized portfolios based on optimizations strategies that could outperform comparable indexes. The study is based on time-series of Swedish stocks dating from 1986 to 2006. In the research four different portfolio optimization techniques were studied. These were: the Classical Markowitz Approach, Mean-Absolute-Deviation, Minimum-Regret and Conditional Value-at-Risk of which the three latter are based on generated scenarios. The behaviour of these models was studied for different choices of parameters such as backward time-horizon and targeted average return.

SAAB Automobile ABis a car manufacturer within General Motors corporate group. SAABAutomobile ABhas a big part of the responsibility for the brake development in the corporategroup. The car industry is facing harder environmental requirements, which influence the brakedevelopment. The focus is to develop brakes with low drag and sustained brake feeling andperformance. Important characters for the brake caliper are high stiffness and low weight, highstiffness results in high performance and low weight is important because it is unsprung mass.This thesis investigates the possibility to improve the performance of the brake caliper for aGMproject.

In Sweden approximately ten percent of all children grows up in a family where at least one parent is having an alcohol related addiction. Since 1998 the development of group activities for children in this situation has been immense. The aim of group activities is to break the child's isolation and make them feel that they are not lonely in their experiences, give them knowledge about addiction and relive the pressure of guilt and responsibility.In a comparative study we examined studied how two different group activity models one with the conception of illness and one without, use the children's network to support the group process. The aim was also to find each models definition of the "normal family", since we understood the groupactivity as a part in the normalization process. We reached our aim through interviews with group leaders and by literature studies.

This thesis investigates the possibilities offered to a working landscape architect by anincreased and altered use of digital 3D environments. A basic assumption is that increased useof digital three-dimensional environments promotes the creative processes and presentationoptions of landscape architects.The thesis is based on literature studies and communication with working landscapearchitects, and includes an investigation of the visualization methods available in the Blender3D modelling software. The thesis provides a thorough survey of what it means to model inthree dimensions, as well as of what modelling methods are feasible for a landscape architectto use. As landscape architects, we work with human and unique processes, and thus it isdifficult to develop standardized and automatic software for our profession. One possiblesolution is to turn to open source development, where software and models are shared andanyone can contribute.

The purpose of this essay is to present, from a theoretical framwork about regional democracy, possible methods to handle the regional democratic problems in Östergötland in Sweden and to investigate the opinion of the political parties regarding this issue. Both the national and the local/regional level are investigated. The contents of the essay is based on literature studies and interviews of politicians in Östergötland. Regional democratic problems that is discussed are the political responsibility and the power distribution between the political actors on the regional level. A solution of the problem could be to organize the regional society structure in accordance with one of the following organization models"Statligt regionalt ansvar","Kommuner i samverkan"or"Regionalt folkstyre".