Multi-branch companies are facing many challenges in order to become successful. Competitive advantages can be gained through a unified strong brand, standardised products and economies of scale. This normally calls for centralisation. On the contrary is decentralisation, which is said to improve work motivation and local market orientation, which are also competitive advantages. The focus of this thesis is to study how local branch managers want their companies to be structured in accordance with this dilemma.

This essay is a study of the government bills for a new grading scale in the Swedish schools. There have been many complaints about the current grading scale and the main problem seems to be that teachers are interpreting the criteria for certificates differently. There are two major challenges for Swedish teachers, one is how to interpret the criteria for certificates, the other one is the equality problem , students can not be sure of that two different teachers would give the same grades. The main point of the essay is to try to find out whether the new grading scale will solve this problem. To my help I have made an analysis of the bills of the Swedish government for the new grading scale.

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.

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 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.

There are several methods avaliable to find areas of interest, but most fail at detecting such areas in cluttered scenes. In this paper two methods will be presented and tested in a qualitative perspective. The first is the darg operator, which is used to detect three dimensional convex or concave objects by calculating the derivative of the argument of the gradient in one direction of four rotated versions. The four versions are thereafter added together in their original orientation. A multi scale version is recommended to avoid the problem that the standard deviation of the Gaussians, combined with the derivatives, controls the scale of the object, which is detected.

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.

The purpose of the essay Multi criteria analysis of potential conflicts concerning land use planning - natural stone mining in Lysekil municipal is to study possibilities and limitations in GIS based multi criteria analysis as a tool for land use planning. How GIS based multi criteria analysis can be implemented to localize potential conflict areas between natural stone mining and other land use activities and what advantages and disadvantages the method holds are the main issues of this study. The essay studies these questions through a case study, concerning the geographical area of Lysekil municipal in western Sweden and problematizes the interest of natural stone mining in relation to other land use interests. A literature study was carried through, concerning multi criteria analysis and planning. After collecting and processing of data the multi criteria analysis could be implemented in the ArcGIS tool Weighted Sum.

In Sweden exist a Swedish institute for children?s book which is a national information center. They have an annual "Book tasting" where they present statistics and trends from the latest publications of literature for youth and children.In their ?book tasting?? from 2010 a number of picture books had, as they say, children who descend from non-Swedish culture (Swedish institute for children?s book, 2010). The aim of this thesis is to investigate how the ethnical diversity describes in these picture books from 2010. To understand how the ethnical diversity describes in these books I had two questions which helped me in my research.

The construction and use of buildings in the EU accounts for half of the EU?s extracted materials and energy consumptions, and a third of greenhouse gas emissions. In the past decade, the construction sector has responded to such concerns by focusing on post production energy efficiency. However, new findings indicate that upstream construction processes influence emissions significantly ? necessitating a shift in focus to include material choices and building processes.

The thesis demonstrates a low-cost, low-bandwidth and low-resolution Analog-to- Digital Converter(ADC) in 0.35 um CMOS Process. A second-order Sigma-Delta modulator is used as the basis of the A/D Converter. A Semi-Uniform quantizer is used with the modulator to take advantage of input distributions that are dominated by smaller-amplitude signals e.g. Audio, Voice and Image-sensor signals. A Single-bit feedback topology is used with a multi-bit quantizer in the modulator.

För att ta reda på hur väl en Multi-Agent-Systems-bot kan stå sig mot andra, icke-MAS-bottar, så har vi implementerat en bot till brädspelet Arimaa. Botten är implementerad i C++ och den kan spela mot andra bottar, eller människor, genom Arimaas officiella hemsida. Syftet har varit att skapa en fullfjädrad bot som både klarar av att spela korrekt, och att spela bra. För att ta reda på om MAS är en bra designfilosofi för Arimaa så har vi utmanat ett antal av de bottar som andra människor skapat och lagt upp på hemsidan. Alla bottarna har under tiden de legat uppe blivit rankade genom tävlingar och utmaningar och flera av dessa har tävlat om stora pengar, vilket betyder att människor har lagt mycket tid på dem.

The aim with my master thesis is to develop and test the applicability of methods to quantify and map solute advective travel times and pollutant transport at the catchment scale. Such quantification and mapping can increase the understanding of catchment-scale pollutant transport in general and contribute to the identification of the main sources of water pollution and the most efficient measures to reduce such pollution. The study area is the catchment of Oxundaån, about 20 km north of Stockholm. For detailed GIS modeling of water flow and catchment-scale contaminant transport in water, I´ve used new high-resolution elevation maps, land cover maps and soil maps combined with other available relevant data..

Är dykare spänningssökare? Är män mer spänningssökande än kvinnor? 51 dykare, 27 män och 24 kvinnor, läts fylla i enkäten Sensation seeking scale version 5 (SSS-V). Sensation seeking scale har utvecklats av Marvin Zuckerman med kollegor sedan 1960-talet och mäter graden av spänningssökande personlighetsdrag, på engelska: sensation seeking. Enkäten har visat sig valid på flera hundra studier men har bara testats på dykare ett fåtal gånger. Hypoteserna är att dykare är mer spänningssökande än normalpopulationen (H1) och att dykande män är mer spänningssökande än dykande kvinnor (H2).

Profit in first commercial thinnings of today is hard to achieve. This is because of prevailing pulpwood prices and because of high costs of logging and transport. To reduce these costs higher productivity is advocated. One way to increase the productivity is the use of multi-tree handling harvester heads. The aim of this study was to calculate logging and transport costs in first thinnings, where multi-tree handling has been used.