In June 2006 the Swedish government decided that the use of energy in buildings should be reduced by 20 percent until 2020, compared to the level of energy used in 1995. To contribute to this goal, the real estate company ?Eskilstuna Kommunfastigheter AB?, set up own goals for their buildings. In 2009, the goal for schools was to have a maximum energy use of 118 kWh/m2year for heating and hot water.The school ?Hållsta skola?, just south of Eskilstuna, exceeds the limit since it used 270 kWh in 2008.

Background and problems: All that is stated in social media might not always sometimes be right, which has consequences for the individual's view of the described phenomena. The individual interprets and takes in mass media messages, which can lead to that the wrong information makes believed to be is correct one. The news media?s photo illustrations might pictures result in bad images of the suburbs. Hovsjö, residential area in the city of Södertälje, occurs in the media depicted as is a bad place to live due to the high rate of crime there.Purpose and Issues: My main research question is: How do young people view their residential area Hovsjö in comparison with the image they believe consider is given in that the news media gives the area? Further questions of the study are: How do the young people of the district describe their residential area? How do the youth's react to the news media images of Hovsjö? Has the neighborhood helped to form their identity?Method: In my data collection I have chosen a qualitative approach with observation and semistructured interviews.

This thesis concerns how Sweden relates to life cycle assessment (LCA) in the construction process. LCA means analyzing a products impact and the analysis includes the whole life span of the product. A building has a high complexity and the combination with its unique shape will make the LCA more comprehensive, unlike e.g. aluminum cans. Recently there has been a development of a working procedure in the construction industry.

During 2008 we experienced an expansion of large scale investments in foreign farmland. This increasing trend has become a political hot-spot, but there is not much research available within the field. Due to a lack of research it remains a vital task to outline the potential effects of this trend. Drawing on existing ideas from some of the main actors within the field, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), The World Bank, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the latest G8 summit on agriculture, four main purposes are set out for this paper. First, to outline some of the underlying mechanisms behind the trend is considered crucial for the understanding of the nature of these investments.

Background: Today, the tourism sector is one of the economically fastest growing sectors in the world. Volunteer travel is a type of service that is gaining in popularity and a number of tour operators organize these trips. Few aid agencies engaged in volunteer activities and therefore the interest in volunteer travel is caught by tour operators. These tourists travel in small groups and interact with locals. Today fifty million children in Africa are orphaned and Africans struggling with the care of these children by founding orphanages.Research questions:What does volunteers contribute with during their stay at orpahanges?What view does volunteers and orphanages have on volunteer tourism?Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the positive and the negative effects that volunteer tourism contributes to orphanages.Method: The study is based on a qualitative approach with semi-and unstructured interviews, observations, and email interviews.

It is found that the properties of the record years of 1965-1975 is leaking a lot of energy andthese properties are facing a major energy efficiency. From the energy aspect, the facade isafflicted with Poor thermal insulation which is a big problem. To address this problem addinginsulation is a good alternative to reduce overall energy consumption of a building. Thewindows on these buildings are also a problem from the energy point of view. Therefore,there are many reasons considered for energy upgrading.

Abstract:This thesis work has been conducted at the Real Estate Department in Halmstad.The department consists of a construction/project management-unit and an operation/management-unit.Like many other towns in Sweden, Halmstad has had a long lasting problem with indoor environment. Not at least at their preschools.Today they are constructing from current building regulations. They have learned from negative experiences which have occurred in the indoor environment in older buildings.Focus is now on healthy materials, like low emission value, energy efficiency and optimization of the building, but still with soft parameters such as cleaning, interior and choice of materials.The fixtures is provides by the real estate department and the furnishings are provides by the children and youth administration. Together they are trying to provide a great indoor environment.I have, together with the real estate department and the children and youth administration of Halmstad, investigated how to provide a good indoor environment in the preschools with small funds.In my thesis there is one theoretical part with a questionnaire survey of how the preschool staff is experiencing their indoor environment to determine where the problems often start. And a practical part with measurements to try and come down to a result that analysis the cause of the problems and also to make sure that the ventilation systems are fulfilling projected values.The measurements and the questionnaire surveys was made at Lokes preschool in Frösakull, Askens preschool in Oskarström and Gullbrandstorps preschool.There were some differences between the staff-responses at the three different preschools.At Askens preschool they feel that the premises are cleaned Poorly.At Gullbrandstorps preschool they feel that the indoor-air is bad because they can´t open the windows.

The Swedish Red Polled breed is threatened by extinction and there are only around 1100 animals left. The breed was popular in the early twentieth century, but since then the numbers have steadily decreased. The overall objective of this study was to find out whether there may be economic incentives for preserving the breed. The milk quality properties are of major importance in the production of dairy products. Therefore we would like to establish if the Swedish Red Polled breed carries favourable alleles at loci of relevance for milk quality, to potentially make the breed more interesting for milk production.

In Sweden, reduced tillage usually means non-inversion tillage, where primary tillage is carried out using chisel ploughs or disc implements. Primary tillage method is mainly determined by the desired soil loosening and the handling of soil residues. The effect of tillage depth was studied in field experiments in Skåne, Väderstad, Uppsala, Örebro och Västerås in different crops; spring oilseed rape, spring wheat, winter wheat and spring barley.The experiments generally had a randomized block design with the treatments mouldboard ploughing, deep chisel ploughing and shallow chisel ploughing, in some cases also shallow discing and no-tillage. In the experiments the following parameters were determined: seedbed properties, saturated hydraulic conductivity, penetration resistance, number of emerged plants and crop yield (all parameters were not determined in all experiments. Root growth and draught requirement were determined in two separate studies. There were no significant differences between tillage depths in non-inversion tillage in seedbed properties, plant emergence or root development.

The borehole heat exchangers of today suffer from Poor thermal and hydrodynamic performance. The purpose of this thesis is to improve the performance of ground source heat pump systems and thermal energy storages by increasing the energy efficiency of the borehole heat exchangers. For this reason, the annular coaxial borehole heat exchanger (CBHE) has been analyzed. This type of heat exchanger is interesting in terms of both thermal and hydrodynamic performance. A model has been set up in the program Comsol Multiphysics in order to investigate the heat transfer characteristics along the borehole.

Return handling is often regarded as a slow and complex process. Studies have shown that it is not unusual for a return to cost up to nine times as much as a standard outbound delivery. An efficient return handling process is therefore essential to all competitive companies dealing with logistics. This report investigates, analyzes and gives suggestions on development with the purpose to improve the return handling process at LensLogistics AB in Kista, north of Stockholm, Sweden. The study has been conducted from a deliberately practical point of view in order to suggest improvement suggestions possible to implement and thereby change the entire return handling process.

Cambodia is located in Southeast Asia with a tropical monsoon climate and distinctive wet and dry seasons. Poverty is a widespread problem in Cambodia and 30 percent of the population were classified as Poor in 2009. About 80 percent of the populations live in rural areas where poverty is an even greater problem. In agriculture, rice cultivation is dominating and the crop is cultivated on 85 percent of the arable land. Livestock keeping is also a traditional part of Cambodian agriculture.

Zambia is a country in Southern Africa where poverty is widespread and the traditional keeping of local poultry therefore plays a crucial role in improving nutrition. Meat and eggs from poultry are important sources of protein but also of income. Improving the poultry production is thereby a method to fight poverty. For poultry, the access to light is an important factor for both growth and egg production. In this paper, the focus is on the traditional village chickens used for both egg and meat production, how they are kept, their health and welfare and if the use of a solar lamp will influence their behaviour, growth and egg production. Three studies were conducted in Chibombo and Choma Districts in Zambia were 17 farmers were interviewed regarding the village chicken management of which six farmers participated in a solar lamp experiment.

Improved profitability, a reasonable yearly income or the possibility to have employees are all incentives for expansion. A prerequisite for farm businesses to expand is for land to be made available, either to buy or to rent. In Sweden, 43 % of the total arable land is leasehold land, which implies that a functioning leasehold market is of great importance for the Swedish agriculture. Several factors can affect the supply of leasehold land, for instance the leasehold legislation and the Single Payment Scheme. The fact that the leasehold legislation is compulsory, in protection of the leaseholder, might keep land owners from leasing their land out.

The theoretical focus in this master is information retrieval (IR), and especially the part of IR that includes interactivity. This research is by some researchers called IIR. Our principal aim was to examine if search engines on the WWW are taking advantage of research results from IIR research. A way to do this is to look at the application of special features, in this case query expansion (QE) and relevance feedback (RF). Both these methods aim for a better matching of documents and the searchers information need.