The project was performed in collaboration with Husqvarna, one of the world?s leading manufacturer in the market of electric outdoor products. The report is a thesis work of a bachelor mechanical engineer program, in the field product development and design.The project is a study of the development opportunities within drive belt for a gear driven gearbox to one of Husqvarnas petrol powered hedge trimmers. A big part of the project was also to find combinations of materials for all components in the gearbox, to reduce weight and maintain or improve the performance of the system. Belt drive was of interest to investigate as an alternative solution to the current design that can reduce wear on the system at a performance test performed in the company before the product is released to market.

In this paper we investigate 67 Swedish buyouts in the manufacturing and retailing sector between the years 2004-2012. The purpose is to measure changes in a set of financial key ratios to see if private equity firms are able to improve performance in their portfolio companies compared to a peer group consisting of other firms within the same industries. Furthermore, we examine if there is a difference in the change of the financial key ratios between private equity-owned firms in the two sectors. The key results are that the private equity owned firms have not outperformed their peers with respect to the chosen key ratios. We also conclude that there is no significant difference in the change of the financial key ratios between private equity-owned firms in the two sectors..

Syftet med studien var att skapa en bättre förståelse för hur några juniorishockeyspelare och deras tränare ser på hur faktorerna lagsammanhållning, spelaromsättning, roller och prestation förhåller sig till varandra och hur de arbetade med dessa faktorer. Instrumenten som användes var GEQ (Group Environment Questionnaire) och två helstrukturerade intervjuguider. Deltagarna i studien var ishockeyspelarna i ett J18-lag (n=18) och deras tränare (n=1) i en medelstor klubb i Sverige. Resultatet visade att samtliga intervjudeltagare upplevde ett positivt samband mellan lagsammanhållning, spelaromsättning, rollklarhet och prestation. Sambandet beskrevs dock som cirkulärt, att alla faktorerna var beroende av varandra och påverkades av varandra.

In the last couple of decades, corporate law firms have rapidly grown to become both influential and highly profitable corporations in the business world. Today, the largest law firms are assumed to bear far greater resemblance to large and often multinational public limited companies than the small businesses generally associated with legal services. However, one interesting specific set them apart from the majority of other companies; the partnership and its interrelated profit sharing. The aim of this study has therefore been to investigate partner compensation systems in corporate law firms and further examine what implications chosen compensation systems have on the organizations. Using a multiple case study, including 7 of Scandinavia?s largest and most well known law firms, the results show that partner compensation systems are highly individual and the critical question is whether to employ seniority based or performance based compensation systems.

Lokala investeringsprogram was a subsidy program which supported environmental reforms during the years 1998 to 2002. The subsidies were given to Swedish municipalities. Most of the evaluations of the subsidised projects have now been completed and included in a database. The purpose with this thesis is to analyse whether the instrument has been effective with respect to carbon dioxide reductions and costs. These calculations have focused on subsidy and cost efficiency. The analysis has been compared with a previous report called "LIP ur ett samhällsekonomiskt perspektiv". The result shows that the reduction cost for one kg CO2 has been almost one SEK, which is twice as high as the cost reported in a previous report, half a SEK.

The DuPont formula is one of the most well known and basic tools used for financial statement analysis and is highly useful for understanding firms strategies and operating environment. Previous studies on American listed companies have also shown that analysis of the changes in the DuPont components is useful in forecasting contexts. In this thesis we test whether disaggregating the change in return on net operating assets provides incremental information about future performance for Swedish listed and not listed companies. We find that the change in asset turnover is a leading indicator of increased profitability for both listed and private companies, regardless of size. We also find evidence that the usefulness of the disaggregation for understanding future performance is greater in capital intense industries and lesser in service industries..

The actual project presents the development of a testing rig for a steam engine. A short overviewabout the development of steam engines is presented, until arriving to the development of thepresent engine, which will require to be tested in different ways.The testing rig studied on this project (based on a Lanchester engine) will be used to testdifferent materials and layouts for the group Piston-Cylinder.The engine is a high performance steam power engine, which is going to have a highpower/dimensions ratio, what will lead to require high performance components and materials.An introduction to the testing rig is presented, and the entire design project is done in order toreplace the disappeared documentation of the current testing rig, built on the 1970?s. Also somemodifications done in the original testing rig are presented, as well as some detected problemsand their possible solutions..

Organizational learning has become more and more important in the last decades as the environment in which organizations exist continues to change rapidly and unexpectedly. In order for organizational learning to happen, the individuals within the organization must learn. Just as different individuals possess different skills, each individual also has their own learning style. As the use of teamwork increases, so does the need for techniques to put high performing teams together and with organizational learning as one of the objectives the question is, how do we maximize learning, efficiency and performance in teams? This study uses a quantitative method to examine how teams, from a course at the Stockholm School of Economics, perform on the individual learning, team efficiency and team performance scale based on the individual learning styles within the team.

This paper presents a study that evaluates the performance of stock recommendations issued on Swedish stocks during 2003. The selection of recommendations in this paper originates from banks, major brokerage firms and financial press located in Sweden. The total of 171 recommendations consisted of 99 buy recommendations and 72 sell recommendations. Forecast revisions presented in this paper suggest that Investment managers have no ability to predict performance winners, nor do their forecasts in general have any significant impact on stock prices. A mere 50 percent of the recommendations in this revision had a weak ability to outperform their benchmark indexes as in other similar revisions.

In this essay I analyze the performative aspects relating to Marina Abramovi?'s The Artist Is Present, which took place in spring 2010 at MoMA in New York, from the context of the artist and work, institution and documentation. In this performance work, for the duration of the exhibition, Abramovi? sits completely still opposite another chair where anyone from the audience may sit. The art arises through this participation.

In this master thesis outage statistics covering tree years from two distribution grids are analyzed with the purpose to deduce which factors yield outages. The statistics are extensive therefore allowing in-depth analysis of both customer and system related factors. From this starting point and as a model of explanation energy not supplied is studied as the consequence and the measurement of the inconvenience caused by outages. Different methods for calculating energy not supplied are developed and studied and put in comparison to the method used in Network Performance Assessment Model, which is the Swedish frame work for regulating electricity distribution.Analysis of the outage statistics show a relation between the type category of customer and outages that can be deduced to the variance and the density associated with that customer category. Prioritization of different customer categories is elevated also in this aspect.

At night, the visibility is reduced and the demands on the driver increase. A safety system that enables the driver to discover warmer objects in the surroundings when the visibility are reduced, such as the Vision Enhancement System (VES) contributes to safer night-time driving. Since the benefits of this system are established, it is of interest to investigate different design aspects. The VES display has in earlier studies been positioned in front of the driver but different display positions such as peripheral placement should be evaluated. The present simulator study is an investigation of the effects of different display positions inside the car.

This thesis discusses main problems associated with dictionary-based Cross-Language Information Retrieval as lexical and translational ambiguity of query terms, translation of compounds and phrases, dictionary limitation. The purpose of the study is to investigate how query structure influences the effectiveness of CLIR regarding performance of three query types: original query, unstructured query and structured query. Query structuring refers to the application of #syn-operator to group query terms. The study comprises an experiment that was performed in the InQuery IR system with TrecUta database that contains 550,000 news articles from different American newspapers. 24 topics were used for the experiment.

To many of us blogging is a natural part of our everyday life. Bloggers dedicate hours to writing in blogs, reading blogs, commenting on posts or answering comments on published posts. But what we choose to blog about can differ; this is an important note due to my discovery that what we choose to write about determines what benefits blogging holds to the blogger.This paper discusses the conventions of blogging as well as tries to answer the question of why blogging is so popular: why do we start blogging and why do so many choose to continue? These questions get answered by me analyzing the phenomenon that is blogging.I have studied both blogging as genre and as a kind of performance, as well as I have tried to hold an open dialogue with my informants. Thus I have concluded that blogging is to be considered a tool with many uses.

This thesis deals with the problems you face as a new game developer for the mobile platform Android when developing a 3D game and presents solutions to these problems. It also explores which optimizations should be made to increase performance and how well suited for game development the Android platform is. A simple 3D game for version 2.2 of Android was developed to examine this. The conclusion was that a good game structure for Android separates logic and rendering by running these separately in different threads. Solutions to rendering and updating of game logic were presented and optimizations were implemented for performance, although fewer optimizations were needed than was anticipated.