In 2005, Outokumpu began to implement its system of continuous improvement, OK> 1, at Avesta Jernverk. OK> 1 has not generated sufficient results on plant KPI:s. The purpose of this study is to identify the understanding,  participation and commitment regarding to OK> 1, and to suggest some actions to make OK> 1 more successful with emphasis on these three aspects. The thesis shall also determine whether there are any differences in the attitude towards OK>1 between Blue Collars and White Collars.The study consisted of a survey, and interviews. The output from these methods were processed and analyzed and finally resulted in a SWOT ? analysis and suggested actions for improving the understanding, participation and commitment towards OK>1.

During the last decades the questions about environment and social ethics, so called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), have increased in importance. It is in the business world highly important for the corporations to show the public that the company care about these questions. A common approach nowadays is to outsource productions to other countries resulting in that suppliers have a great part of the work with CSR. CSR as a trend is a rather new phenomenon, and therefore interesting to see how the corporations handle these questions and how the approach looks like. The purpose with this study is to show how corporations which are recommended by CSR organizations for their handling regarding these questions approach CSR and how the work look like in the supply chain.

The Swedish government has proposed that 20 % of the cultivated land in Sweden should be organic by the year 2010 (The Swedish Board of Agriculture, 2008). In addition to this the production of organic food like milk, meat and egg should increase considerably. To reach the government?s goal it is necessary that the Swedish farmers get motivated to convert their production from conventional to organic. Milko is a dairy association that has chosen to focus on organic products, they want to be the leading organic dairy association, and therefore they have a large need for organic milk (Milko, 2008).

Instrumental conditioning, the use of reinforcement and punishment, is used when training horses and these procedures may have different consequences regarding animal welfare. The aim of this study was to investigate what kind of reinforcers that are used in training horses and when these reinforcers are used. This study has its focus on positive reinforcement and its advantages and disadvantages. Interviews of five A-level and B -level equestrian coaches about their training methods were conducted to complement the literature search and give a greater understanding to why certain methods are used or not in training horses. The results show that negative reinforcement seems to be the foundation of training horses whereas positive reinforcement is used but not to the same extent.

The purpose of the present study was to study if the systemic blood pressure in cats significant increases due to stress associated with a visit to a veterinarian clinic. We also wanted to investigate the clinical utility of two different methods for indirect blood pressure measurements in cats by assessing how easy they were to use and how reliable measurements they provided. The methods that were used were oscillometric (Memo Diagnostic) and ultrasound-doppler technique (Minidop). The blood pressure was measured in both clinical environment and home environment. Fifty cats were used in the study, from which measurements were impossible to obtain in one cat.

Den här studien undersöker om det finns ett samband mellan betalningsmedel och utfall vid företagsförvärv. För att försöka mäta denna kvantitativa studie utfördes ett antal intervjuer för att få fram parametrar, specifikt tidsaspekten och hur ett lyckat förvärv definieras, detta eftersom det finns en avsaknad av standarder inom förvärvsutvärderingar. Slutligen användes fem år som utvärderingsperiod och tillväxten i rörelseresultat beräknat från den senaste årsredovisningen innan förvärvet och den femte årsredovisningen efter förvärvet. Informationen som analyserades var hämtad från databasen Zephyr där förvärven genomförda av svenska företag mellan åren 2002 och 2007 togs med, vilket blev 134 stycken. Resultatet visade att det inte finns ett samband mellan betalningsmedlet och utfallet för förvärvet.

In order to understand user behaviour and navigation patterns, user logging is today widely used in analysis and development of user interfaces. These user logs tend to be quite many and can contain a lot of different data. A big issue is how to process and display this data in a perspicuous way to the stakeholder. This study is about how to develop a prototype to handle this issue. It was solved by various methods from human-computer interaction.

The purpose of this study is to examine what professionals tell about stress, rewards, impact and treatment in the professional treatment with young sexual offenders. Eleven qualitative interviews of half-structured design brought up results about the professional role in the treatment process. During the interviews the professionals described which methods of treatment they work with. We examined the methods through literature research, which was added to the study whit the purpose of strengthening the interview data. The professionals consider their work important and meaningful and they feel safe in their working role.

The use of laptops, interactive whiteboards and the Internet is step-by-step working it?s way into Swedish schools. The aim of this study is to investigate the attitudes of teachers towards using IT-related tools in their teaching. How are the tools given used as mediating tools, what new methods do the teachers find themselves discovering while using these, how do the teachers feel about digital teaching platforms and how do the IT-related tools affect students language progression? These are all questions that this study is meant to answer.

There is desire to evaluate the tracheal diameter in the Swedish population of English Bulldog, a breed with breathing disorders, and if possible use it as a criteria for breeding in the hope of improving the life situation for these dogs. The Swedish Kennel Club has together with the Swedish Club for English Bulldog and veterinarians presented a five year radiological study that has the purpose to give an average look on how the tracheal situation is in the population. The trachea will be evaluated through two different methods, both measuring two distances in the thorax. The first one compares the tracheal diameter to the height of the cranial opening of the thorax, and the second one to the width of the third rib. With the measured distances one will calculate a quotient and compares it to the reference values.This study is designed to get a preliminary evaluation, based on the 65 dogs that were available on the time for the study, with measurements done by two persons on three different occasions each.

The objective of this work was to evaluate and implement a number of energy saving functions for a specific embedded system. The functions were then grouped into a number of energy levels with known properties in terms of functionality, energy consumption, and transition time between the levels.The embedded system consisted of an AT91 ARM9 processor, GSM/GPRS modem, display, Ethernet and other peripheral units. Some energy saving methods that were considered were suspend to RAM, suspend to disk, frequency scaling, and methods for saving energy in the modem, Ethernet, USB and display backlight. The functions were grouped into levels and an interface was specified for controlling the energy level.It proved possible to get known properties within the defined energy levels, even though the paritioning of functions into these levels proved to be sub-optimal in a typical application usage scenario because it was designed for mainly energy consumption, not usage.The final result is a number of energy saving functions grouped into levels, which are controllable via an application interface. Each of the levels have a known energy consumption in both loaded and un-loaded mode..

The consumer of today is bombarded by an increasing number of commercial messages, which makes it harder and harder for brands to cut through the clutter. Because of this, new methods are developed and introduced to the market every day. One of the most widely discussed of these methods is guerrilla advertising. Even though the method has received numerous praises there are not any academic proofs supporting these arguments. The authors, of this thesis, have examined if guerrilla advertising is more or less effective compared to traditional advertising and what the reasons for the result are.

The aim of this study was to investigate whether teachers are involved in children´s play, what their perspectives are on the importance of play and what conditions teachers have to stimulate children in their playing. In this study, I?ve been able to verify that play has a great value for children?s learning development. My method have been interviewing four teachers at a kindergarten in order to examine educators? perspective on the importance of play.The results of my investigation showed that teachers believe that play and role- play have a major impact on children's learning.

Intranet is today a common technical groupware to communicate in many organisations. People can interact through the Intranet and communicate within the organization and get relevant information according to their workplace. It can be difficult to get everybody to use the Intranet as an information- and communication tool. This causes problems when people want to reach out with information. With these thoughts we entered our work at Luftfartsverket at Arlanda airport.

The objective of this work was to evaluate and implement a number of energy saving functions for a specific embedded system. The functions were then grouped into a number of energy levels with known properties in terms of functionality, energy consumption, and transition time between the levels.The embedded system consisted of an AT91 ARM9 processor, GSM/GPRS modem, display, Ethernet and other peripheral units. Some energy saving methods that were considered were suspend to RAM, suspend to disk, frequency scaling, and methods for saving energy in the modem, Ethernet, USB and display backlight. The functions were grouped into levels and an interface was specified for controlling the energy level.It proved possible to get known properties within the defined energy levels, even though the paritioning of functions into these levels proved to be sub-optimal in a typical application usage scenario because it was designed for mainly energy consumption, not usage.The final result is a number of energy saving functions grouped into levels, which are controllable via an application interface. Each of the levels have a known energy consumption in both loaded and un-loaded mode..