The aim of the present study is to describe and analyse how an inter-cultural perspective presents itself in the didactic considerations and in the practice of preschool teachers on a multiethnic preschool.The theoretical perspective upon which the study is founded is social constructivism, but in addition to this Ingegerd Municio?s idea of two existing discourses present within the institutions in the Swedish educational system, as well as René León?s concept of a diversified normality, has been used as theoretical tools and points of departure.The empirical investigation consists of a qualitative field study at a multi-ethnic preschool, where participating observation and group interviews have been used to collect data. In these teachers from the preschool have participated.The results and the analysis of the data show that an inter-cultural perspective surfaces in the didactic considerations and in the practice of the preschool teachers in their construction of a diversified normality. The diversified normality thus constructed is constituted through different social processes. I have here identified the following ones: the preschool teachers emphasize differences among the children in general, they allow that the children behave differently and they allow them to be different; they recognize ?cultural? differences, differences in origin, and frames of reference, and they recognize that the children at the preschool are bilingual..

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how key performance indicators are being used as performance management tools within the production industry. Specifically the purpose is to investigate how the KPI:s within the telecommunications industry drives reusability regarding production test systems. This thesis will also highlight today?s cost models and suggest improvements of the KPI and what new ones could be introduced. A case study at Ericsson AB has been performed.

Management control systems are a popular area of research and a lot of new research has been done over the past years. This development has been looking into new situations and circumstances, and interdisciplinary studies are being made to further understand the connection between different fields of study. A new field of study that has grown significantly over the past few years is the connection between management control systems and entrepreneurship. Leading researchers have proposed a number of questions for further research and one of them is the board of directors? use of management control systems in entrepreneurial firms.The purpose of this study was to examine the differences and similarities in the board of directors? use of management control systems between entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial firms.The study was conducted as a deductive qualitative study through interviews with respondents from entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial firms.

Unhealthiness is not just a damaged back or asbestos. The fact that mental ill-health seems to increase in our society is well known. Statistics from Arbetsmiljöverket proves a fourfold increase of work-related disorders since 1997. These are primarily caused by organizational and social factors, 60% are considered caused by stress and a heavy workload. Sick leave due work related fatigue and depressions are scarily common today.

District heating covers around 80 % of the heating demand in apartment buildings and 10 % in single-family homes in Sweden. In the year 2010 the total input of energy to the Swedish district heating grids was about 70 TWh, which corresponds to 11 % of the total energy input to the whole energy system in the country. Through the combined production of heat and power the CHP-plants often reaches an efficiency of 90 % from energy in the fuel to produced heat and power. In order to keep the efficiency high it is important for the owners of the plant to have good knowledge about the plants performance at different operation points. Strängnäs Energi AB initiated this diploma work together with FVB Sverige ab in order to come up with a program for short term planning of the production of heat and power at the company´s CHP-plant.The work consists of three main parts.

Testosterone is a steroid and anabolic hormone found in all mammals. Previous research indicates that testosterone levels correlates with physical capacities related to physical performance. However, these studies refers only to men and boys. The aim of present study was therefore to investigate the potential relationship between body composition, strength, power and endurance capabilities in relation to blood levels of testosterone and DHEAS in young female football players. Seventeen female elite football (age: 15,4 ± 0,6, body mass: 57,2 ± 7,4kg, height 1,65 ±0,04m) players volunteered for the study.

In  the  constantly  changing working  life  of  today, where  emphasis  on  human  capital  grows stronger,  the  importance  of  recruiting  and  retaining  good  staff  increases.  Successful recruitment  requires  a  first-rate  recruitment  process.  In  literature  on  recruitment recommendations for successful recruitment are presented.   The  aim  of  this  study  is  to  describe  similarities  and  differences  between  these recommendations and Svenska Spel?s recruitment practice on the basis of a description of the recruitment process at AB Svenska Spel, and also to identify possible reasons for differences between theory and practice.  To  meet  the  purpose  of  this  study  literature  and  scientific  reports  have  been  studied. Interviews  with  five  HR-specialists  and  four  managers  have  also  been  conducted.  The recruitment process is therefore described out of the employer?s point of view.

The high level of energy consumption that the industrialised countries have reached and thepollution that this brings has long been a cause for analysis and debate, development and usageof so called renewable energy sources is therefore more important than ever. The energy in theelectromagnetic radiation from the sun is an interesting alternative. One way of harvesting thisenergy is by using solar cells, devices that generate DC current when exposed to electromagneticradiation.The goal of this master?s thesis was to design a solar powered power supply to Syntronic AB?sMidrange platform. The envisioned application is a stand-alone distributed embedded system,for example a node-based temperature monitoring system.

This report evaluates whether an interpreted high-level garbage collected language has enough information about its memory behaviour to make better cache decisions than modern general CPU hardware.With a generational garbage collector, depending on promotion algorithm and generation size, around 90% of all objects never leave the first generation. This report is based on the hypothesis that, because of the low promotion rate, accesses to higher generations are sufficiently rare not to benefit from caching.To test this hypothesis, we built an operating system with a Scheme interpreter in kernel mode, where the interpreter controls the cache. Generic x86 PC hardware was used, since it allows fine-grained control of cache decisions.Measurements of execution time in this interpreter show that disabling the cache for generations higher than the first does not give any performance gain, but rather a performance loss of up to 50%.We conclude that this interpreter design is not an improvement, but cannot conclude that the hypothesis is false in general. We suggest building a better CPU simulator to gather more data from which to make better caching decisions, moving internal interpreter data structures into the garbage collected heap and modifying the hardware to allow control in the currently rigid dimension of where data is cached---for example separate control of instruction and data caches and separate data caches for different areas of memory..

The residential and service sector in Sweden accounts for approximately 38% of the total energy usage and Sweden has an aim to reduce the total energy use by 20% by 2020 compared to 2008, which means residential sector will have to improve energy efficiency. As part of that a law was instituted by the Swedish parliament that all properties must have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) to thereby give the property owners a greater insight into energy use in their buildings and propose recommendations for energy-efficiency measures. On the EPC, a value on the building's energy performance in terms of energy use in kWh / m2 per year is declared, of which electricity is a share of it. Instructions on what to include in the amount facility electricity for running the facilities is regulated by the authority for building, Boverket while SVEBY has made an interpretation of the regulations in their report "Brukarindata bostäder" where they have a table on what should be included in the amount and what not to include.This report is a study of two similar apartment buildings, where one of the buildings recently underwent renovation, to see if the declared amount of energy for electricity, in the EPC, is consistent with the measured value, and whether there has been any reduction in facility electricity in the renovated building after the renovation.The result shows that the measured value of the building electricity was 2.6 kWh / m2 per year, 28,8 %, lower than the declared value in the building that have not undergone a renovation. Calculation of values from previous years (2011) by the same percentage of facility electricity as in the results of the measurements, 56.7%, it becomes clear that the declared value for facility electricity in the EPC of the renovated building do not correspond with reality and that there has been an increase in use of facility electricity after the renovation..

AbstractAs a developer of database-driven applications you will be faced with difficult choices, when it comes to choosing database, server and programming language. For the result to be satisfactory it requires the different techniques to interact well with each other and also fulfill performance expectations. This is even more important when the application is deployed to the cloud and the response time plays a major role.This paper evaluates different databases and their performance. To test the databases there was an application made in the server script language PHP or Hypertext Preprocessor and it was deployed to Windows Azure cloud platform. The test applications task is to call and load databases by controlled requests which creates, reads, updates and deletes data in an relatively large extent.The results shows that locale databases or databases in the same data center as the server generates the fastest response.

Till min uppsats valde jag att koncentrera mig på två verk, Post Office och Factotum, av författaren Charles Bukowski (1920-1994). Huvudpersonen i båda romanerna kallas Henry Chinaski och är en mycket komplicerad karaktär. För att kunna analysera dennes självdestruktivitet samt syn på kvinnor och arbete anlade jag ett mansforskningsperspektiv, något som jag också utförligt beskriver..

The purpose of this graduate work is to seek knowledge about how children?s right to participation and influence is interpreted and understood in a specific context and also to examine how this right can be conditioned and shaped by the pedagogical practice of early childhood education.The focus of this study has been to examine the arguments and attitudes towards the right to participation and influence as a pedagogical practice as it is understood in early childhood education. Additionally, I have been interested in studying the affordances and restrictions that early childhood educators experience when dealing with children´s right to participation and influence.The platform used for data collection is Facebook and the informants recruited were active participants in forums regarding democracy in preschool education. In the second phase of the study I conducted online focus groups with these participants.For the analysis of the material I have adopted a poststructuralist perspective, starting from Jaques Derridas philosophical texts and use of deconstruction.The results show the complexity in early childhood education´s democratic mission. What becomes clear is the importance for the teachers to adopting an open, ethical and democratic approach in order to make children´s right to participation and genuine influence possible in the everyday reality of early childhood education. .

This paper researches how the palimpsest concept is used in relation to landscape, and how it can function as a tool within landscape architecture. Palimpsest originally refers to old parchment handwritings, where new text has been applied on top of effaced, but still discernable, earlier writing. Superimposition of information is the core of the palimpsest concept, used within a range of scientific as well as cultural fields. The purpose of this paper is to find how a landscape palimpsest can be distinguished among the many different layers of landscape, such as historical or cultural, and to examine the potential use of the concept in theory and practice of the landscape architecture field. The study is conducted as a literature survey, examining the use of the palimpsest concept within academic works related to landscape.

Title: Am I doing what I think I am doing when I am practicing? A self study in practicing. The purpose of this study is to determine whether I do what I think I do when I practice. The reason for this is to make myself a better teacher as well as a musician. By gaining knowledge about my own practicing I will be able to guide future students in their own practicing in a better way.