In this project a simulator has been developed (in C++) with the purpose of illustrating how changes in environmental regulations, tax levels and other policy measures affect the composition of an energy system. The aim of the project was to investigate how energy companies? investment strategies are affected when changes in economic and environmental conditions occur. A standard scenario has been created based on current Swedish conditions, but the user can create new scenarios and set parameters freely. The user is tasked with building power plants to supply the city/region with district heating and electricity during a pre-set number of years. When the simulation is finished the result is graded in the following categories: economy, environment and quality. To evaluate the simulator three scenarios were created (?early 20th century?, ?reduced environmental control? and ?future?) in addition to the standard scenario and these were compared with each other by examining how a select group of power plants perform under the given conditions.

GNT Group is a Nordic/Baltic wholesaler that distributes products in the IT, entertainment and home electronics sector. GNT is facing problems with inaccurate inventory levels which can lead to unnecessarily high inventory carrying costs or lost sales. Currently the decisions about when and how many to order are made somewhat arbitrarily by the responsible personnel. Their decisions are based only on some brief sales history and on experience. GNT wants to develop its ERP system to be able to support the purchaser in these and other related decisions.

Hedge funds? importance within the financial system has during the most recent years increased dramatically. These special funds are unique instruments that differ from traditional mutual funds in a variety of ways, however especially in how they expect returns. Due to the fact that hedge funds are able to hold short positions they possess the possibility to become market neutral investment vehicles.Because of this possibility to sustain positions neutral to market fluctuations, the concept of absolute returns became a unique selling point for hedge fund managers and promises of stable returns unchallenged by market conditions was assured. This research paper aims to examine the theory of absolute returns in hedge funds by examining hedge funds from the Nordic region during the last years of economic turmoil that has occurred by  analyzing the results from their strategies, partially by quantitative measurements as well as qualitative.  The results show that none of hedge fund strategies managed to deliver absolute returns over the chosen period..

The purpose of this paper is to get a conception how prioritization and decision making works in technologically advanced companies. We wanted to understand how to administrate models and how to prioritize the best ideas and relate these to technologically advanced companies. How does the company make these decisions and who is responsible?We have chosen to observe TranSiC, a Swedish technologically advanced company that manufacture silicon carbide transistors. They currently have nine employees and mange 10-20 projects simultaneously, but are aiming to expand their business.

The main focus of this study is to explore Swedish soldiers? experiences of the transition back to everyday life after international service missions. This includes the help and support that they have received and also what barriers to care they have experienced during the transition back to everyday life. The theoretical perspectives of this study are social identity and stigma theory. This study was performed using a qualitative method and includes six individual interviews with active duty officers within the Swedish armed forces.

This report describes the development of a sample loader for my diploma work at Q-linea AB in Uppsala. The sample loader will replace the process of loading fluid samples into Q-linea?s instrument for biomolecule analysis. The earlier process was done by hand and was a time consuming and inefficient task.The work was initiated with a design phase where an overview of the system was created. The sample loader will be receiving text commands from a PC that coordinates all the subsystems like pumps and lasers on the analysis instrument.

Logistics and supply chain management in the construction sector is an area with great potential for improvements. Today, a lot of the workers time is spent on non-value adding activities. Research has shown that waste is a large proportion of the total production cost in building projects today.The purpose of this report is to analyze problems concerning logistics in the construction sector. Two of Skanska?s construction projects in Uppsala have been analyzed to identify problems.

Open source software has recently been discussed, not least in media as a revolution in IT. A number of advantages have been listed in changing proprietary software into open source software. Examples of such pros are no expenses for license fees and improved efficiency. In spite of this, few users have made this change. One of the reasons is a distrust of the quality in open source software.

The main focus of this essay is to analyze whether strict employment protection legislation has a negative effect on the labour market possibilities for youth in the EU or not. To empirically examine the labour market possibilities for youth, data for unemployment rates and incidence of temporary jobs are used. By doing simple correlations between the different labour market characteristics and OECD?s employment protection legislation index the effect of the latter is tested. The result is that a tendency for youth unemployment and frequency of youth with temporary employment to be higher when employment protection legislation is strict can be seen.

The aim of this thesis is to study different aspects of the public libraries' investment in public access computers connected to the Internet. What level of accessibility can be found at the surveyed libraries concerning the number of computers open to the public, as well as chat and email services? What activities have been taking place with the computers in focus, and what have the goals of these activities been? Is there any control of content, and what aspects of the Internet are, if that is the case, subject to censorship. And how do the governmental policies relate to the surveyed libraries' intentions and activities regarding the Internet? In order to answer these questions, each main library in the 42 largest towns of Sweden was surveyed response rate: 100 %.

The purpose of this bachelor essay was to analyze two Swedish district footballassociations and how the responsible coaches of the elite youth developmentteams identify and select talent. Key questions in the thesis were how thecoaches described their leadership and their own part in the team, how thecoaches identify talent, how they work with the selection process and theiropinions about the elite youth development team structure. The study wasbased on 7 semi-structured interviews. The interviews showed differencesbetween the district football associations but also many similarities in how theyselected the team during the talent identification process. All coaches wereinvolved in the selection process but the way they talked about developing eliteplayers varied.

Hedge funds have the past few years become an increasingly popular investment alternative and in the last decade hedge fund assets managed have quadrupled to USD 2000 billion, a growth rate of around 25-30% per year. One explanation for this substantial increase is that hedge funds' minimum limits on capital invested has declined, which have made ??them available to retail investors. The recent turmoil in financial markets has also contributed to investors finding their way to hedge funds, whose goal is to generate stable returns regardless of how the market develops.Using Sharpe?s, Treynor?s and Jensen's performance measures, I have investigated whether hedge funds manage to generate higher risk-adjusted returns than traditional managed funds.

The aim of this dissertation is to examine and compare William Easterly?s and PGU?s (Shared Responsibility: Sweden's Policy for Global Development) different views on development and international development cooperation. The methodological approach chosen in this study is an analysis of ideas based on the following questions:1. Which principles should be applied to development and international development cooperation?2.

Today, there is no uniform definition of what an ethical fund is. Fund management companies choose themselves what they believe is ethical and not. The lack of the definition makes it difficult for consumers to understand why these funds are special compared to other funds. The purpose of this study is to examine three Swedish companies; KPA Pension, Swedbank Robur and Folksam, to obtain a clearer picture of the concept ethical funds and its definition. The study describes each company's view of Ethics and how they may affect other companies to work for a more sustainable world.

The question formulation in the essay brought up whether Clas Ohlson works today with their graphical productionflow and if that way of working leads to a desirable result in press. After a dialogue with Clas Ohlson it emerged thatthey had certain problems with the material that came out of the printing presses. Certain colours were not reproducedaccording to the stated values that had been developed. In March -08 an analysis of the graphical production flowspresent situation were done at Clas Ohlsons in order to find out how they worked with their production of print materials.In the analysis, their way to work with color spaces, displays, ICC-profiles, PDF-exports, pictures and printerswere examined. Occasional interviews were also implemented with responsible personnel about how they worked withdifferent aspects.Deficiencies were found on almost all examined parts in their graphical production flow.