High demands are set on all equipment used in emergency service work, where small margins can be the distinguishing factor between life and death during a rescue operation. It is important that tools such as ladders quickly and easily can be dismounted from a vehicle and still satisfy the regulatory requirements for securing loads during transport. The existing solution for getting ladders down from the roof of a fire engine requires a large manual effort from the user in an ergonomically unsound posture.In this degree project a new ladder holder is developed with focus on the user to solve the ergonomic problems and at the same time create a more compact design that can be adapted to several different types of ladders. After an initial pre-study with user-interviews and measurement of forces and distances a set of requirements was formulated that came to govern the project's direction. Creative methods were used to generate concepts that improved the function and through design solutions, calculations and testing in CAD a base for manufacturing of a new product was created.The result is a completely new type of ladder holder that minimizes the user's manual effort and simplifies the securing of ladders in the holder.

Usability studies are not a central field of research in library and information science. Although literature in library and information science treats the importance of usable user interfaces quite extensively, the literature does not significantly treat potential problems in measuring usability. The aim of this master thesis is to investigate, through a critical analysis, the methods used when conducting usability studies in library and information science. The critical analysis is based on potential problems in measuring usability identified through a literature review from the field of studies Human-Computer Interaction, the concept of usabilitys original domain. The material which is to be analysed, is chosen from one library and information science journal Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

Sveriges Radio stores their data in large archives which makes it hard to retrieve specific information. The sheer size of the archives makes retrieving information about a specific event difficult and causes a big problem. To solve this problem a more consistent use of metadata is needed. This resulted in an investigation about metadata and keyword genera-tion.The appointed task was to automatically generate keywords from transcribed radio shows. This included an investigation of which systems and algorithms that can be used to generate keywords, based on previous works.

The student project Elba at KTH started in 2011 and is a project where a battery driven prototype car is developed. The vehicle competes in Eco Shell Marathon in Rotterdam, Holland. In this competition the vehicle that travels a certain distance including several starts and stops with the lowest energy consumption wins. To minimize the consumption is therefore very important, which requires knowledge of the vehicles energy losses.A vehicle's energy losses depends on several factors and can be divided into the powertrain efficiency and the driving resistance. The driving resistance can then be divided in to rolling and air resistance, if smaller losses like vibrations are ignored.

This Master Thesis has been carried out in cooperation with Silva Sweden AB. A companywhich manufactures products like compasses, pedometers, headlamps, hiking poles and otherequipment for the out door life and navigation. The purpose of the project has been toassemble methods and models which support user involvement in Silva?s design process.Thus, to increase the number of products with purchasing power, enhance product quality aswell as increase foundation for new product ideas.The focus through out the project has been to assemble a pallet with methods for userinvolvement and from this select a few methods that will fit the company. The purpose of thepallet is to be accessible for the company during their work of change with the design processthat has been going on and will be in the future.

This report contains a programming improvement work in a LabVIEW? fire testing furnace control system for SP Fire Technology in Borås. Here materials and products behaviour are tested and evaluated, being exposed to fire. For this task, UGNET is being used for control and surveillance of the testing furnace system. System hardware has been updated gradually through the years, while the software has been neglected.

The project is a thesis which intends to strengthen the form language and increase the user friendliness of an International Moth. This is a single handed dinghy with only one sail. It sails on two hydrofoils and receives a very high speed compared to its size, and are therefore often referred to as ?the Formula One on water ?. The result is a new concept where the aerodynamic forces have been used to stabilize the boat and relieve the hydrofoils.

We have made a suggestion for a map based search tool used with a database containinginformation on natural disasters. The database is being developed by NCO (SwedishCentre for Lessons Learned from Incidents & Accidents).We examined both Swedish and international examples of databases on naturaldisasters. The examples that we found were often hard to get the hang of, due to poorcompilation. The problem, that is typical of the international examples, is that the processof data collection is not standardized, as it is performed by different organizations andcompanies with diverse demands on and needs for the database. Therefore, to keep itsymmetrical, there ought to be only one department with the overall responsibility for anational database on natural disasters in Sweden.The natural disaster we based our study on was the flooding in Arvika in the year 2000.We inspected the availability of data about the flooding, and found it to be satisfying.Through contact with the municipality of Arvika, by mail and telephone, and a visit at theArvika municipality office, we acquired reports on the flooding and the joint rescueoperation that followed, and also GIS layers showing the extension of the flooding..

The aim of this thesis is to establish a ?förvaltningsplans? template to Fastighetskontoret in Vasteras city. Further general information about the mission was given at our first meeting with Rolf Haraldsson, who happened to be our mentor and works at Fastighetskontoret in Vasteras city.We agreed that using the software Excel was the most appropriate way to establish the template, because Fastighetskontoret also make use of Excel in their internal system, and also because Excel has a more friendly user interface and it is more easier to use compared to other software that have complex templates.One of the first things we did was to get in contact with different fastighetskontors around Sweden so that we could either take part of their ?förvaltningsplaner? or get referred to other material that could have been used. But this turned out to be an unsuccessful strategy.

St. Jude Medical Inc is one of the worlds leading companies in the medical technology area with cardiovascular devices as its specialty.Manufacturing implantable medical devices such as Pace Maker Electrodes requires complex design, safe processes and well trained operators. User friendly manufacturing operations are a necessity.Lately there?s been an increase of the manufacturing volume which also increased the number of operators. More operators need to be trained and cross-trained.

Last spring I did a study where I studied how young girls where being depicted in Swedish novels of 2010. My ambition with this exam is to study how young teenage boys are being depicted in Swedish novels of 2010 and to compare this study and the results with the results from my study last spring. Throughout history we can see that boy?s novels have had the purpose to bring up boys into being adventurous. In the novels of 2010 we can see that boys now are being depicted in another more modern and contemporary way.From my analysis we can see that all the books have many things in common.

The objective of this work was to evaluate and implement a number of energy saving functions for a specific embedded system. The functions were then grouped into a number of energy levels with known properties in terms of functionality, energy consumption, and transition time between the levels.The embedded system consisted of an AT91 ARM9 processor, GSM/GPRS modem, display, Ethernet and other peripheral units. Some energy saving methods that were considered were suspend to RAM, suspend to disk, frequency scaling, and methods for saving energy in the modem, Ethernet, USB and display backlight. The functions were grouped into levels and an interface was specified for controlling the energy level.It proved possible to get known properties within the defined energy levels, even though the paritioning of functions into these levels proved to be sub-optimal in a typical application usage scenario because it was designed for mainly energy consumption, not usage.The final result is a number of energy saving functions grouped into levels, which are controllable via an application interface. Each of the levels have a known energy consumption in both loaded and un-loaded mode..

Since social media is used more today than just a few years ago, it is easier to share our lives to the public in just a few seconds. Social media is easily accessible on smartphones, tablets and computers which allow us users to use them whenever we want.Instagram is an example of a very popular social media today. In this paper we focus on how younger women think about their privacy when using and publishing pictures on Instagram. We have been using a qualitative research method in which ten people were interviewed. All respondents agreed that privacy is important when publishing pictures or videos on Instagram, but there were also some differences between users with public and private accounts.

Today Internet is clogged up and packed with homepages and information from both private persons and commercial companies. This has led to a decreased availability for a company to be noticed. The most common tool for consumers to use while searching for products online is via search engines. But because of the nature of these, not all companies can have good placements. Our research question was, "How do small online-companies attract consumers to their website"? The purpose of this thesis is to identify how a company works through online-communications and how to attract consumers to their home page.

Cache simulator is a tool to increase the understanding of a cache memory. Therefore cache memory simulation is included in the course Computer Engineering IS1200 at the Royal Institution of Technology. The purpose of this project is to develop a cache memory simulator for education. The existing MipsIt and Mips Simulator which is currently used in IS1200 has been the main source of inspiration. This resulted in the development of the cache memory simulator LMSim.