Safety, its a word not commonly associated with elderly people living alone. There is however a device that is supposed to bring safety, and enable elderly people to continue living in their present household - an emergency dialer. However these devices does not serve their own purpose in terms of design. Thepurpose of this study is to create an emergency dailer that everybody would want to put on their wrist or bedside table. The market for these devices have looked the same for the last twentyfive years, despite of society´s advancements in both design and technology.

A reward cycle for investigating the emotional status in animals has been developed and it requires that animals go through three main phases, i.e. anticipation, consumption and relaxation. The reward cycle has not been tested previously for access to play in pigs. Therefore, the aim of this Master thesis was to investigate if growing pigs showed more behaviours indicative of excitement than pigs that were not allowed to play, performed play in a play arena and showed more behaviours indicative of relaxation after play when they were back to their home pen than pigs that were in their home pen the whole time. Forty undocked piglets (10 litters of Specific Pathogen Free half pure-bred Yorkshire and half hybrids of Yorkshire x Landrace balanced for breed between two treatments were used.

This essay is about the use of narrative in video games, and the discussion surrounding it. For years ludologists (game researchers) and narratologists (narrativity researchers) have been arguing about how to analyze narrativity in games. While ludologists have chosen to see games as a product by itself, and therefore something to be analyzed separately, narratologists instead see games as a narrative medium alongside film, theater and books. This essay starts by taking a look at the arguments from both sides, and then introduces three questions regarding narrative in games, and how this phenomenon has changed over the past 13 years. To answer these questions, five case studies are carried out, analyzing games with the help of a new framework built on narrative theory.

The Dark Side of the Word-of-Mouse Effect- An experimental study of how negative information in today?s social media can influence consumer perception As a result of the electronic revolution of information dissemination, social media as a phenomenon has come to play an important part, both in society at large but also when it comes to business and marketing. Nowadays, knowledge and opinions about brands and products are spread by reputation through a wide range of social media platforms, a phenomenon which in the literature is referred to as word-of-mouse or electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM).The purpose of this paper is to investigate how people?s opinions towards a company and its product are affected by negative information in terms of eWOM. Or more precisely, whether or not there is a difference in this effect depending on information content, concerning company values on the one hand and product attributes on the other.This was done in an experimental setting where two groups of respondents were subjected to fictitious information of different types using established social media platforms.

Rådet för kommunal redovisning utkom 2006 och 2009 med nya rekommendationer för hur kommuner ska värdera sina anläggningstillgångars nyttjandetider. Syftet med detta arbete är att öka förståelsen för hur kommuner värderar och fastställer materiella tillgångars nyttjandetider. Arbetet syftar till att identifiera och beskriva kommuners värderingsmetoder, arbetsprocesser samt att utveckla en modell för fastställande av tillgångars nyttjandetider. Arbetets data är insamlad genom två delstudier där semistrukturerade intervjuer användes som datainsamlingsmetod. Insamlad data analyserades med hjälp av teorin om ansvarsskyldighet, agentteorin, teorin om förvaltarskap, institutionell teori samt Life cycle costing teorin.

Theory of mind är att kunna tillskriva andra människor mentala tillstånd som förklarar deras beteenden. Dessa mentala tillstånd kan röra sig om uppfattningar, intentioner eller känslor.    Theory of Mind Scale är en bedömningsskala utformad av Wellman och Liu (2004), som undersöker olika nivåer av theory of mind. Theory of Mind Scale är uppbyggd i skalsteg med stigande svårighetsgrad. Syftet med föreliggande studie var att översätta Theory of Mind Scale från engelska till svenska samt validera bedömningsskalan för barn mellan 3 och 4 år. Studien syftade även till att se om det fanns ett samband mellan dessa barns förmåga till theory of mind, impressiva grammatiska förmåga och impressiva ordförråd.      Valideringen i föreliggande studie visade att skalstegen i den amerikanska originalversionen av Theory of Mind Scale var applicerbara på barnen i föreliggande studie, med undantag för den sista uppgiften.

The purpose of this master thesis is to present a model that illuminates the important factors when deriving technical information from market data within a company. For companies to be able to become and stay competitive in the market, product quality is an important factor. Whilst good product quality leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty, lack of quality brings costs in service and replacements. To improve product quality, the developers need information and knowledge about what quality issues affect existing products. Most companies gather data from market about known issues, but in order eliminate known quality issues in new products; this data has to be transformed into information and knowledge.

AbstractThe aim of the thesis was to examine some older people's experiences of everyday life and how it is to grow old in Namibia today. Because everyday life is a broad concept, we chose to focus on some specific parts of everyday life. These are chores, family, work/education, elderly past and present and the government/society. Furthermore we chose to look at the similarities and differences between the experiences on the basis of gender, race/ethnic groups and class.We chose to use a qualitative research method and to be inspired by life stories. We used a semi-structured interview guide and interviewed six people between 70 and 89 years.

Tissue factor (TF), a 47 kDa glycoprotein, is the initiator of the extrinsic pathway of blood coagulation and consequently of the upmost importance when damage to blood vessel occurs. The source of TF in circulation has been investigated. However, the source of TF is still not clear. One theory is that platelets express and increases the expression of TF after stimulation and the aim of our report was to investigate whether platelets really are a source for TF in circulation.Using specific primers for TF mRNA, platelets in plasma from healthy volunteers and from patients suffering from cardiac infarction were analyzed by using real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Gel electrophoresis was performed after amplification of TF mRNA to verify the results.The samples were negative for TF when using real-time PCR and the few positive all had cycle threshold (Ct) values above 35.

The aim of the following paper has been to test the democratic peace theory through applying it on the conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008.  This to either falsify the theory or come to the conclusion that the states? democracy was not satisfactory in regards to the definition of liberal democracy. The questions asked are: Was Russia and Georgia democratic states? Is democracy a protection from war? And which aspects of the liberal democratic theory, if any, were not satisfactory in either of the countries? The results show that the democratic peace theory is valid in this case and that neither one of the states were democratic.

The conversion in the Viking Age and the High Middle Agea in Scandinavia and how this affected women is discussed. Did women get a better life when the people had converted to Christianity or not. Our written sources are later than the conversion to Christianity. Instead the material culture, graves, grave goods and runic stones, can help us understand the life of women. Nordic mythology presents a contrast between faith in the Viking Age and Christianity..

In this report an MCNP (Monte Carlo N-Particle) model is described for the reactor vessel at Ringhals 2. The model is validated against the specific activity in neutron dosimeters, extracted in 1977, 1984 and 1994. The validation showed that the calculations of the model are within the requirements of a maximum of 20 percent uncertainty for every neutron dosimeter except one, extracted after the first cycle. The uncertainty of this cycle was mostly due to the operation data rather than to the MCNP model.The model has been used to investigate various questions concerning radiation damage. The reliability of the traditional measure of radiation damage, fast neutron flux (En > 1MeV) has been evaluated.  This has been done by taking the ratio for this and another measure of radiation damage, DPA (Displacement Per Atom), for various positions and layers.

Students of all ages host a wide variety of scientifically inaccurate ideas and conceptions about everyday astronomical phenomena, such as the seasons, the moon phases, and gravity. The field of Astronomy Education Research has over the last decade experienced an accelerating growth, although the majority of studies have been conducted in the USA. In this work, the 9th grade students of a typical Swedish school were surveyed by means of a questionnaire in order to probe their conceptual understanding of several key concepts in astronomy. In the end, the number of respondents amassed to a total of 90. The results were analyzed with a constructivist approach in light of conceptual change theory and phenomenological primitives.

The aim of this study was to investigate factors that ex-criminals believe have been of importance to them when they decided to leave a lifestyle of criminality behind. The study was based on eight semi-structured interviews with informants who had committed various forms of crime. Common to all informants is that they are now members in the Swedish association KRIS (In English: CRIS, Criminals Return Into Society), living a life without crime. The stories of the informants have been analyzed on the theoretical basis of social ties, the exit process, role loss, motivation and the life course perspective. Our study showed that the informants have been affected and motivated by various life events that could be identified and pin-pointed during the interviews.

Scandinavian Biogas is involved in the planning of a combined ethanol and biogas factory in Karlskoga, Sweden. Besides biogas and ethanol large amounts of digester residues will be produced, about 450 000 liquid tonnes residue (~7,3 % Dry Substance( DS)). The objective of this thesis was to investigate possible uses of the residue from the biogas production process ScandgasEthanol developed by Scandinavian Biogas, and to derive a methodological approach how to evaluate and compare handling systems. Three systems where proposed and compared in this thesis; spreading of the untreated residue as fertilizer (system 1), dewatering to a higher DS content to reduce transportation before spreading as fertilizer (system 2) and production of a solid fuel by dewatering and drying the residue (system 3). The general conditions for the proposed systems were investigated in terms of practical viability, economical aspects, environmental impact and energy inputs/outputs.