The care for the elderly in the municipalities has recently seen the need for a formalized system for quality assurance. Under increasing demands for monetary efficiency while bound by law to retain acceptable standards in health care, there is need for efficient and at the same time quality-assured management. The municipalities often solve this puzzle by introducing systems and standards influenced by theory-clusters such as NPM (New Public Management), TQM (Total Quality Management) or other quality management theories.This essay focuses on how the public administration in the municipalities defines quality and designs and implements system for formalized quality assurance. Our basic view of organizations is institutionalist and our theoretical framework includes theories about quality, NPM and TQM..

The competitive environment forces companies to find new ways to meet their customers? needs and satisfy their wants. Companies have to get to know their customers and therefore they collect more and more information about them. The purpose of this study was to examine how convenience stores use customer information. To meet this case study?s purpose two interviews were carried out at both a central level as well as a local level at the studied company.

The purpose of this thesis was to study the importance of virtual communities for independent record companies. It also aims to examine how these companies use virtual communities in their marketing activities and how to gain competitive advantages by working with virtual communities. A case study based on interviews was conducted with managers from two independent record companies, Music Is My Girlfriend Recordings and B&B Records. Our study has shown that virtual communities are important for independent record companies as tools for finding and addressing the right target market. Useful information about the members of these communities can easily be gathered with the use of the various search options that are available.

Comfort analyses regarding human induced vibrationsIt is not too common among civil engineers in Sweden to perform comfort analyses considering the vibrations caused by human activities. In addition, the Swedish standards lack requirements to be used for comfort analyses in design of floor-systems. The demand for large spans in combination with slender slabs, is today a reason to investigate the floor-system constructions, in order to prevent disturbing vibrations and oscillations.The purpose of this thesis is to create a guide for how a comfort analysis, considering vibrations, should be implemented. Göran Svedenbjörk who is an expert in structural dynamics has been interviewed where he presents his latest project Värtaterminalen and answers some questions about vibrations due to human activities.Floor-systems, consisting of concrete slabs supported by steel or concrete beams, have been investigated with simulations in the finite element program Abaqus. In the simulations, the influence of various factors on the natural frequency of floor-systems and the acceleration level caused by dynamic loads, is studied.

Hydroware Elevation Technology AB sells control and regulation equipment for hydraulic elevators. The company now wants to investigate the possibility of changing their present softstarters to frequency inverters to supply power to their pump engines. They also want to investigate the possibility of future use in so called ?intelligent? houses.The purpose of this report is to investigate these possibilities..

This thesis examines and measures differences in effciency between L1- and L2 language use for solving referential problems. Quantitative measures used in the study were time and error frequency. Qualitative measures, such as how the tasks and the participants own performance were experienced, were measured by an post interview and two questionaires. Two different tasks, a sorting task and a construction task, in which each informant was given the role as a constructor or instructor, were used for data gathering. A total of 20 dyads, divided in two language groups (English and Swedish) participated in the study.

Husums plant has a selection of different pulp pumps at bleaching plant 4 and 5. The displacement- (HC-pump, Sund Defibrator PTD-60) and centrifugalpumps (MC-pump, MCA 42-200, MCP 30/20) are of interest in this report. The centrifugal pumps are controlled by throttle valves, which result in an energy loss. Chemical mixers are used to mix ClO2 into the pulp before proceeding into a holding tower where the bleaching process occurs.The energy demand of the different positions has been measured or calculated to be used in comparisons against new equipment. Quotations were requested and delivered from Valmet and Sulzer.

A power system will inevitably be subjected to transient overvoltages, most often produced by switching operations and lightning strikes. These transient overvoltages may harm sensitive equipment without sufficient protection, but it is not an easy task to predict what transients may occur or how they affect the system. A fault occurred in a low voltage system at Forsmark 2012 and overvoltages from lightning were concluded as the probable cause. The three aims with this thesis are to develop and test a model of the power system at Forsmark 3, analyse the transient behaviour of the system when subjected to lightning surges and identify critical parameters, and lastly to provide a tool for investigating the protection of the system. The modelling and simulations were performed in the freely available simulation program LT Spice.

For several years Uppsala University together with several companies has been involved in a WISENET project aimed at improving railway transport security. By placing a sensor system near the wheels of each wagon, the temperature of the bearings can be measured and transmitted to a collector placed centrally on the wagon. This in turn transmits the collected data to RFID receivers placed intermittently along the railway.As the signals are transmitted wirelessly, problems may occur as the antennas get dirty or coated with ice and snow. To determine the effects of these coatings, several tests were performed examining the reflection coefficient S11, the impedance Z11 and the efficiency eta of an antenna, and how they varied when various coatings were placed over the antenna. Examined coatings were ice, snow and water to determine the effects of weather, and various metal-based coatings: powdered iron both pure and partially oxidized, and iron ore granules.

Active headsets have been on the market for years and now it is time for something else to enter the stage. The technology of active noise reduction can for exmple also be used in ventilation systems for reducing ventilation noise. An active control system principally consists of four important components, namely the downstream error microphone, the upstream detection or reference microphone, the digital signal processor (DSP) and a loudspeaker. The upstream reference microphone listen to the primary ventilation noise and sends it to the DSP which makes a phase shift to the signal and sends it to the loudspeaker. The loudspeaker sends out the opposite waveform of the incoming one and reduce the primary ventilation noise.

Report of diploma work conducted at the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM) as part of the bachelors program in Nuclear Engineering at Uppsala University.All nuclear power plants in Sweden are obliged to report any deficiency in their barriers or the defense in depth in obedience to SSM?s regulations concerning safety in nuclear facilities. In addition, there is an international system for reporting such events. The purpose of this thesis is to study the Swedish report system and to analyze the differences between Swedish and international event reporting.In the Swedish system, SSM?s regulations are effectuated by means of event reports classified as category 1-3, designed individually at each Swedish facility.

This report is a degree project performed at Freudenberg Household Products AB, (FHP). The degree project comprises measurement and analysis of the power net at FHP Basproduction. The content is divided between one theory-part, one document- part with measurements and also conclusions and a list of measures to be taken. During the project the purpose and restriction change from a quality investigation to only concentrate on harmonics and finding the reason why they exist, and also to find a solution to the problem with harmonics. The measurements shows that the power net contains harmonics of different order and intensity.

There is a lot of research made on second language (L2) learning (Jesney, 2004). However the relationship between foreign accent, intelligibility and acoustics within pronunciation tutoring is quite an unresearched area (Thorén, 2008). The aim of the study was to analyze how a course in Swedish pronunciation affected foreign accent, intelligibility and acoustics among L2-learners of Swedish. A total of 41 people participated in the study: 16 L2-learners, 4 native Swedish speakers consisting a control group and 21 perceptual assessors with Swedish as native language. The L2-learners foreign accent and intelligibility were rated by the listeners before and after a course in Swedish pronunciation on an eight-point Likert-scale.

During the development of microwave based sensors such as radar target seekers, input signals are needed to verify the performance of the system. Therefore, a channel board has been developed by previous thesis projects at Saab Bofors Dynamics. It uses a technique called Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM). The purpose of this board is to sample and digitally store radio frequency signals in order to reconstruct them after a certain delay.The aim of this thesis project was to use the channel board named above to construct a portable instrument for generation of stimuli signals. This assignment has been divided into two tasks: firstly, to construct and put together the hardware components and secondly, to implement a graphical user interface for the instrument.

The thesis focus on how organizations can improve the ability of absorbing coworkers ideas in purpose of gaining long term competitive advantage through innovations. The study was conducted at IKEA AB where a campaign to collect coworkers ideas was a big success given the quantity of ideas collected. This fact allows a comparative analysis of idea management in the shape of campaigns and in comparison, idea management in the everyday line-organization.The analysis show that fundamental factors for innovative environments such as organizational climate, culture and leadership perceives auspiciously by the respondents. However, lack of infrastructure such as systems and processes hinders coworkers ambitions to contribute with ideas.An important issue in idea management is the treatment of incentives for innovation. Results of the study show that the ?soft? incentives ?feedback, encouragement and attention have a higher impact in coworkers willingness to the contribution of ideas than for instance monetary rewards..