1.1 billion people are today living without sustainable access to improved water. The debate over the water sector has been dominated by the discussion over whether public or private actors are the most competent to manage it. In this paper the arguments pro and contra the two positions are presented to try to overview the debate and to try to find new ways to approach the question of the people living without clean water. By examining possible alternatives towards the discussion of public and private actors, it might result in some new approaches on how to move closer towards a solution. One alternative is local, small- scale projects which focus on the situation of the targetgroup in most need.

Today?s electrical grid companies understand that better knowledge of and information about their grid can help realize a smart grid network. One way to gain better knowledge and information about the low voltage network is to install measuring equipment on the substation transformer´s secondary low voltage side that measures the low voltage network losses for that specific substation. By doing so, grid companies can, due to the calculation of the low voltage network losses, identify and address issues such as illegal power dissipation, unmeasured power outtakes, and unsatisfied technical documentation for the substations low voltage network.During 2012, Mälarenergi Elnät AB had a total electrical network loss (both medium and low voltage network losses included) of three to four percent of their total distributed electrical volume. Converting this energy volume into a monetary figure this accounts for a loss of around 30 million Swedish crowns.

The purpose of this essay was to sort out parents attitudes concerning children and their use of smartphones, primarily in regards to the integrity-aspect. I have studied if parents believe that their children should have smartphones, if they want to control their use, how they want to control their use and what implications this might have. I've chosen two methods for my research, one quantitative, online questionnaires, and one qualitative, semi-structured interviews. My base has been previous research in the area, to the extent it existed. My findings suggest that parents, on the whole, are positive to letting their children use smartphones but that they?d like some sort of control over their use.

The purpose of this research is to examine the implications of the provisions in the Swedish Code of Corporate Governance (the Code) concerning auditor attestation of the internal control report. We will focus on how the auditors? augmented responsibilities will affect the efficiency in the audit process.Our research indicates that the main benefit from reviewing the internal control report is achieving more reliable internal controls, which results in greater prevention of misstatements in the financial statements. This will affect the efficiency in the audit process since the auditor can place more reliance on internal controls when performing audit procedures. This implies that the benefits of preventing misstatements could outweigh the efforts and resources spent on reviewing the internal control report..

Background: Despite the time and money invested in relationships with other companies, it is a fact that many of them fail. Considering this, remarkably little research has been done regarding how inter-organisational relationships are controlled, given that control can function as a solution to the problems involved with collaboration, which arise since such a relation exists in the interface between organisational boundaries, where the companies? often conflicting interests and points of view meet. If one part is stronger than the other in a relationship, the weaker however tends to give way for the stronger?s will.

The purpose of this study was to create a deeper understanding for, and shine a light on the exit process for former criminal gang members. Which conditions appear to be important and what may constitute the enabling and inhibiting factors of an exit process? The study was based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with respondents who themselves have experience of a criminal lifestyle and gang affiliation, and with professionals in social work. Our theoretical approach is based on Helen Ebaugh?s definition of an exit process, labeling theories, strain theory and control theory.

The purpose of this essay is to examine which factors that influence the design of internal control in municipal context and how well it works. We choose seven municipals, where we interviewed the administrative managers, the chairmen of the committees and two persons of the staff in each activity unit. The interviews were performed by telephone, due to the keeping of the essay?s timeframe.The theory in our essay comprises eight hypotheses. These hypotheses were operationalised into different variables aiming to make statistical tests possible.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine and present the oportunities of solvingcontrol problems using Modelica. This is done by creating some demonstrationexamples with exercises. These examples should cover as many types of controlproblems as possible. The exercises are aimed for people with basic knowledgein modeling and automatic control engineering but with little or no knowledgein Modelica. There are different types of Modelica implementations and the onesused in this thesis are OpenModelica and MathModelica..

This essay has discussed and analyzed a draft for an idea about a network called EduSync. This idea is based on that teachers and students, attending and holding courses, all over the world should be able to find and interact with each other. EduSync is founded from a new learning theory, connectivism. Interviews, participation in a conference and two workshops have been used to gather information and different points of view concerning e-learning, for example possibilities and problems with this idea of a network.  A comparison of web communities and e-learning environments that exists today was also done. The gathered information from persons as well as literature resulted in a discussion concerning learning and what would or would not be possible with the creation of EduSync.

This thesis aims at exploring a national collaborative gateway-service, PictureAustralia, hosted at the National Library of Australia. This will be done by means of investigating some underlying principles for descriptive standards and conventions as of the library discourse which is the objective of bibliographic control and access. The reason to do this is to bring some main features of these principles into the context of a cross-institutional cooperation between libraries, galleries/museums and archives in a picture database service. The attention will lay on the objectives of what functions the system is designed to perform to give access, as defined by Elaine Svenonius in the Intellectual Foundations of Information Organization 2000, and how these objectives will affect this particular database-service collocating performance, which is a system- and logical approach. Though, this study will be done in an explorative and qualitative way, by a case-study, which is to examine some sample metadata records emanated from different institutions in this project.

???This study has been made with the purpose of gaining an understanding of how a Swedish company may think and act concerning their internal control. An American body, COSO, have for some time published documents containing guidelines for how companies should go about this process, however, when conducting this study we were not aware of the extent to which companies in Europe and mainly Sweden used them. In order to learn about this, and also to gain an understanding of when these guidelines are appropriate, we conducted a case study with a large-sized, multinational Swedish company. We also conducted an interview with an expert in internal control monitoring, Anna-Clara af Ekenstam of Pricewaterhouse Coopers, in order to get the perspective of the evaluators in this process and to gain some insight as to whether our case is typical in Sweden or not. We found that our company disregards certain aspects of internal control condoned by COSO, while performing better on other dimensions.

Franchise theorists have to a large extent failed to keep up with the actual development in global franchise chains. The recent emergence of fast growing multi-unit-franchisees has fundamentally been ignored, and it has been claimed that the new phenomenon can be regarded as a mere replication of the franchisors? structure and control system into sub hierarchies. This study however, suggests that the reality is more complex. Through conducting case studies of two Nordic multi-unit-franchisees, new theories are built explaining how and why control systems are designed the way they are.

BackgroundThere are different organizational structures and control and it has been proved difficult to find a combination between these that leads to goal congruence and improved efficiency. An organization can be structured according to hierarchical levels and the decision making can be either centralized or decentralized. Organizational control can be classified according to the amount of rules and balanced scorecard can be used to weld together the structure with the control.PurposeThe purpose is to create an understanding of how two types of structures and control in an organization appears and also to investigate how these differ from one another concerning the balanced scorecard as a control system. We will also investigate how the variables goal congruence and efficiency are affected by the implementation of the balanced scorecard.MethodTo answer the purpose of this thesis we have mainly used the qualitative method since we have studied two organizations thoroughly through interviews on different levels of the organization. The study also has some quantitative elements since we wanted to get a more truthful picture of the organizations.

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to describe and compare the degree of selfreporting succession to the basal hygienic routines of emplyees working in municipal old peoples care versus hospital care. It is also to describe the access of material available in prevention of cross infections. The study was also carried out with a comparative and quantitative run up design. The study is based on a questionnaire in the district of Gävleborg in the spring of 2009. Nurses, auxiliaries and carers whom were in close contact with patients were asked to join the study.

The district heating load is seasonally dependent, with a low load during periods of high ambient temperature. Thermal energy storage (TES) has the potential to shift heating loads from winter to summer, thus reducing cost and environmental impact of District Heat production. In this study, a concept of high temperature borehole thermal energy storage (HT-BTES) together with a pellet heating plant for temperature boost, is presented and evaluated by its technical limitations, its ability to supply heat, its function within the district heating system, as well as its environmental impact and economic viability in Gothenburg, Sweden, a city with access to high quantities of waste heat.The concept has proven potentially environmentally friendly and potentially profitable if its design is balanced to achieve a good enough supply temperature from the HT-BTES. The size of the heat storage, the distance between boreholes and low borehole thermal resistance are key parameters to achieve high temperature. Profitability increases if a location with lower temperature demand, as well as risk of future shortage of supply, can be met.