Communication is an important part of any multi-agent system. There are different ways of communicating and they have different effects on a multi-agent system. This project describes and evaluates two different ways of communication, implicit and explicit. To compare the two methods, two experiments have been executed. The result of the experiments have been compared and discussed.

NCC has given us a commission to investigate a planned housing area in Haga, Karlstad, situated close to the traffic route Hagaleden and the railway. The housing area consists of one hundred apartments in five different houses. The houses are linked to each other by balconies with glass panels. A long carport is situated between Hagaleden and the housing area to absorb part of the noise from the road. The design of the housing area is creating a silent backyard.

 AbstractThe background for this study is that there were a great amount of buildings constructed in Sweden in the years 1965-1975 in a program designed to create one million apartments in a time-period of ten years. These buildings are now, somewhat forty years later in most cases in very poor condition and the need for renovation is great and urgent. This has become a growing problem and more and more voices are being heard pointing towards the vast and extremely expensive task of renovating these buildings. Lately, it has also been more and more important for buildings to be energy-efficient and sustainable environment friendly.In recent years there has been an atempt to solve these problems by renovating such buildings but at the same time making them very energy-efficient. This is in some cases being done by isolating the shell of the building and changing the ventilation-system and so forth.

Background: There might be a risk that family members experience limited possibilities to act, participate and influence the end of life care for the elderly in the nursing home. For family members it could be the first time they face death which can imply a lot of questions and existential needs. Aim: The aim of this study was to examine the needs of family members in the patient terminal care in a nursing home. Research methods: The study implemented a qualitative approach and data was collected through four interviews and through a literature review were 17 articles were selected. The results were processed and analysed with a qualitative content analysis and two main categories, participation and assurance with subcategories were identified.

The purpose of this study is to understand how street-level bureaucrats, working with clients with mental illness, are implementing their statutory obligation of support for family carers who are caring for or supporting relatives with mental illness. The study are based on vignettes and qualitative interviews with social workers in three different municipalities in southern Sweden. The questions of this study are:? How do the social workers communicate their statutory obligation of support to family carers?? How do the social workers distinguish the family carers?? How do the social workers distinguish the family carers who are in need of support? Metod: Vignettes and qualitative interviews has been used as methods to gather empirical data.Theory: Theories of street-level bureaucracy has been used as theory in the analyses of the empirical material.Results: The result of this study concludes that the social workers, in lack of policy introduction, communicate their obligation to support family carers within their discretion. The result shows that the majority of the municipalities do not have formalized support for family carers supporting relatives with mental illness. The study also concludes that the social workers have different understandings of which family carer who is a carer in need of support.

This report is about the exam project; Blomgren- a collection ofpatterns. During eight weeks I have from the family Blomgren, whowas my grandfather?s family with siblings and parents, produced fivepatterns for textiles into interior and space. In addition to thefamily as an inspiration, I have taken into account of the collection?sname - as a word and the meaning of the word.

This paper replicates a test performed by Burgstahler and Dichev (1997), which identifies a kink in the frequency distribution of earnings for companies listed on American stock exchanges. Their claim, that the kink is evidence of earnings management, has however been dismissed as a methodical consequence. To address this concern, this paper not only replicates the test in general, but also performs tests on a split sample, where founding family-owned companies are separated from the others, since earlier research has shown that founding family ownership is correlated with less earnings management. The results are in line with the findings of Burgstahler and Dichev, with a significant kink in the frequency distribution in the general test. The findings also show that the significance of the kink increases in the non-family-owned sample, while it disappears in the family-owned sample.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate the role of link collections in Swedish public libraries mediation of Internet resources. The study is focusing on the effects on the contents and the structure in the link collections when the target group is immigrant users. This is done through literature studies completed with an examination of two link collections containing multi-cultural and multi-lingual material and qualitative interviews with the two librarians who are in charge of the collections. The major questions raised in this study are: What function do the link collections have for the public libraries? What is the difference in working with traditional, printed material compared to the work with Internet resources? And how are the selection of Internet resources and the structure of the link collections affected when the collection is intended for immigrant users? The main results are that link collections in public libraries can give a concrete form to political guidelines.

The purpose of this study is to better understand, from a foster parent perspective, how the integration process of the foster child is carried out in the foster family. The purpose is to identify the challenges and success factors in the process. The study is based on a qualitative method. The data consist of interviews with six foster families. The study?s theoretical framework is mostly based on system theory and also on the theory of ambivalence.The results show that most of our families considered five factors to be important in order to facilitate the integration process.

Det här är ett examensarbete som är utfört på uppdrag av Meal Planning Concepts AB. Målet var att utveckla en native multi-plattformsapplikation till smartphones och surfplattor som skulle fungera på Android och iOS och dela databas med deras nuvarande webbsystem. Funktionaliteten skulle vara baserad på den som fanns på deras webbsida. Applikationen utvecklades i MoSync som är ett ramverk som klarar utveckling till multiplattform. Examensarbetet gick också ut på att utvärdera MoSync under projektetsgång och presentera andra liknande verktyg och hur de förhöll sig till MoSync.

The thesis aims to study how rainbows families are being treated by the authorities and the surroundings. It focuses on how homosexual parents are met in society. Although, homosexuals have the legal right to have a family and enter into marriage, the social norms are still far behind and rainbows families are seen as ?the others? and abnormal.  Earlier researches have been studding how the authorities still assumes that every family are living in a heterosexual family constellation. By this assumption they exclude families who are not living in a heterosexual family.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and to analyse didactic considerations and decisions made by pre-school teachers in the context of a multi-cultural pedagogical environment.The basic theoretical perspective is social constructivism, but notions from Donald A. Schön and John Dewey's theories of thinking and reflection have also informed the study; even Hans Lorentz' definition of a multi-cultural pedagogical environment has been employed as an analytic tool.The empirical study consists of a qualitative field study at a pre-school, where participatory observation and a group interview have been used in order to collect data. Those who participated were teachers at the pre-school.The results of the study, when analysed in accordance with the method, shows mainly three things. First of all that the teachers at the pre-school, in their didactic considerations, make use of the following methods of knowledge formation: knowledge-in-practice, reflection-in-practice, reflection on practice, reflection on knowledge-in-practice, and reflection on reflection-in-practice. Secondly, that no reflection particularly on the learning conditions in a multi-cultural pedagogical environment takes place.

The purpose of this study was to gain knowledge and a picture of how foster parents perceive their task, the role of the placed children and their biological parents.  Even how they perceived their family have been affected by the mandates removal. Consistently showed the most positive experiences with strong ties to the children placed. However, there are experiences of the need for additional guidance, support, education and contact with the client to enhance a sense of competence in the task and prevent collapse. Burnout experienced often based in the placed child's difficulties in integration.

The purpose of this study explains the relationship between corporate governance and the auditor's role in Swedish family firms with the definitions micro, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and how this relationship is affected by the firms strategy. The study is based on a survey sent out to 3000 Swedish SMEs, of which 280 responses from family firms could be used. Our findings showed that the auditor in the family firms didn?t have a specific role or contributed added value to the firm, and that the strategy didn?t affect the outcome. Furthermore, we found correlation between the perceptions of the auditor's role and added value depending on the family firms type of corporate governance.

The intention of this study was to create an understanding of how multi-professional interaction could convert into inter-professional collaboration, which takes advantage of and acknowledges the individual professional identity. The intention was to understand the meaning of collaboration through the study of meetings between professionals who use different symbol systems. In particular, we wanted to study inter-professional interaction from a symbolic interactional perspective with a focus on Self, Identity, Symbols, Meaning and Professional community. The employed method was semi-structured interviews with ten questions. A convenience sample was used to identify working groups composed of different professions, such as teachers, social workers and therapy assistants.