In today's society it has become increasingly important for organizations to take into account non-financial values. Sustainability reporting involves reporting the economic, social and environmental aspects of an organization's operations. The trend has been towards an all the more scrutinizing society with an increasing demand for transparency and translucency. A greater focus on environmental issues has also contributed to sustainability?s increasing importance as a topic.

The report describes an ecodesign thesis performed by the author at the ÅF EcoDesign Center. The basic idea of ecodesign is to develop products with a minimized environmental load, without neglecting other significant product aspects such as function and price. During the last couple of years the public interest in environmental friendly products has increased, which has made it possible for companies to make a profit from their investments in ecodesign. To meet the increasing market for ecodesign services ÅF started the ÅF EcoDesign Center, where the company has gathered all of their competence in ecodesign in order to help companies to become greener. The task was to develop a tool for an Eco Screening.

An energy study has been performed on two blocks in an area called Gävle Strand. The buildings are owned by a tenant-owner?s association called brf Carolina and were built by the company Skanska 2008. The builder as well as brf Carolina are pussled by the fact that electricity use is higher than expected while heating is less. Skanska is also very interested in finding out how much heat recovery from stale exhaust air through a geo-thermal heat pump is contributing to the general heating requirement and energy balance in four out of the ten buildings located on the properties.To find possible answers to the higher electricity use a literature survey on user behaviour was conducted.

A Queer Reading of Charles Bukowski?s Women and Love is a dog from hellThis thesis aims to examine how the representation of gender is portrayed in relation to sex and power in Charles Bukowski?s novel Women and poetry collection Love is a dog from hell.The theoretical frame of the analysis is based on Judith Butler?s queer theory regarding the heterosexual matrix and gender performativity. The analysis consists of a textual comparison where a specific selection of poems is analysed parallel to the novel to see how they interact and how they oppose each other, through a queer reading.The analysis is divided in three parts where the first one discusses the construction of masculinity in Charles Bukowski?s protagonist Henry Chinaski and how this is presented differently in the two literary genres. The second part reveals how sex is presented in relation to power and how active and passive women are considered as sexually acceptable.

Probiotics is a special group of health products on the market. The most common type of  these is live cultures of lactic acid fermenting bacteria from raw milk . These include, among others, yogurt and various trademarks such as Hälsofil ®, Acidophilus ®, Dofilus ® and Kefir ®. Such products are often used by patients who are treated with antibiotics to combat the intestinal flora eliminated, thus causing digestive problems. The present work deals with yet another type of health product, viz.

There is a great need to reduce nutrient leaching from arable land into lakes and oceans. By using several different types of models it has previously been possible to describe nutrient losses in a catchment area with a minimum unit of sub-catchment level. At present, it is instead desirable to model a smaller catchment with an opportunity to re-connect the results to the corresponding fields in the catchment. Such models already exist but they are not fully able to properly describe Swedish conditions and land characteristics in our region.With the approach of creating such a model, SLU has developed a project with this work as its first stage. The model is expected to be created under the working name SWE-model which stands for Soil Water Environment and is in this first stage supposed to apply the SOIL model in catchment scale. During the procedure to describe the first step in the process of developing such a model adapted to Swedish conditions and which works in the catchment scale with an area of about 10-30 km2, focus has been set on calculating the transport of water flow from different hydrological response units. Regardless of the processes occurring in the soil after the water has been added, it is assumed that all the water which flows from each simulated unit is drained.In the first step the hydrologic response units were identified based on land use and soil type in the study area. With the help of a script with functions that retrieve and transform data, certain units were chosen for simulation. The script was also created in this project. Finally, the model results were aggregated and summarized for each unique unit, for each sub-catchment, and also for the whole catchment.From the results it is possible to see similarities in the flow dynamics between modeled and measured data. The efficiency coefficient has been calculated to correspond to the mean of the measured values for the whole simulation period. With an automated calibration process the model should be able to perform better. The volume error gives an indication of overestimation from the model..

ASSA develops locks and integrated security systems for doors. ASSA is Sweden?s leadingsupplier of locks and security systems. ASSA AB worked during the master thesis withimplementing a common development process for all companies within the group. Ideageneration was one relative unexplored area for the group and the interest of finding effectivemethods was required, the company understood what an effective handling of ideas couldcontribute in the pursuit of more and pleased customers.The purpose of the master thesis has been to study and to map which methods are used inorder to carry out idea generation.

The project was made in cooperation with Coffee Queen AB, Arvika. The task was to develop and design a new cooler for the milk to Jura Impressa X9, an espresso machine. The good assistance with staff at Coffee Queen and engineers in China and at KPA in Karlstad led to a solution to the problem. It was a long road to get there, many different concepts was developed. When the day came to decide which concept to work with, the choice stood between two different technical solutions.

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.

Title: Go for it! - A study of anxiety in relation to students performing in ensemble class.This study discusses anxiety in relation to students in ensemble performance. The expectations on musicians are extremely high and demanding. They are expected to perform to the maximum of their ability despite both physical and mental pressure. I present in this study the result of the interviews I have performed with three students at Swedish Academies of Music. The study shows that all of the students included are in one way or the other suffering from anxiety in relation to performance.

Large-scale land investments is not a new phenomenon, but increasing prices on food and agrofuels have inflated prices on land and has led to an enhanced interest in landinvestments from a range of different actors. The ProSavana project in the Nacala corridor in the Nampula province, northern Mozambique is a large-scale land investment with the purpose of establishing intensive commercial agriculture and is planned to be implemented this year (2013). The project is financed by Brazil and Japan in collaboration with the government of Mozambique. It is not quite clear how large-scale land investments affect the areas they are implemented in and how they can affect the possibilities for sustainable development in these areas. Both opportunities and problems can be observed within the social, economic and ecological dimensions of sustainable development.

On September 4, 2013, two men were shot in the suburb Biskopsgården in Gothenburg. This was the catalysts to a very problematic autumn in both Biskopsgården as in another suburb, Hisingsbacka. The local media reports of the events were very through, where the newspaper Göteborgs-Posten took a leading role. It?s these reports which form the basis, the so called material of our essay.

This Master Thesis is a product development project that has been carried out in cooperation with Scania CV AB. The purpose has been to find the relationship between geometric parameters and the swirl number for an XPI- cylinder head in order to improve the design specification.The increased focus on environmental issues from society leads to tighter emission legislations for the truck manufactures. In order to drive the development forward considerable resources are spent on research and development on diesel engines and its combustion process. The inlet air has a significant impact on the formation of emissions and the flow that is desired is called swirl. Swirl is achieved by making the air rotate around the vertical axis of the cylinder.Earlier cylinder heads that has been developed at Scania CV AB have shown clear relationships between geometric parameters of the cylinder head and the swirl number.

A trading halt is a measure conducted by a securities exchange in order to reduce information imbalances between market participants, thus enabling a higher level of market efficiency. A market is said to be efficient when new information concerning a company is instantly reflected in its stock price, implying that abnormal stock returns cannot be systematically achieved in an efficient market. The purpose of this study is to examine the occurrence of abnormal stock returns following trading halts on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The study is based on a sample of 64 trading halts executed between January 2003 and February 2008. Historical daily prices for stocks subject to trading halts during the period have been gathered from the Datastream Advance database, while information on date and time of trading halts have been collected from the Stockholm Stock Exchange website.

The purpose of the project is to determine the impact of solar cells and electrical vehicles on the future electricity grid and distribution network. Future electricity grids will be affected differently than it does today. Therefore, it is important to determine the impacts so that the current electricity distribution system can be developed and redesign to achieve the future demand. In Sweden, government has changed rules and laws in order to make it easier for private sector to invest in renewable energy sources. Our project focused on the impact of the solar cells and electric vehicles on the low voltage electricity distribution.