Recently there have been a lot of talk a about the financial crisis and recession. This is understandable since the crisis, which initially was limited to the U.S. now has spread its concern globally in form of bankruptcies, less investment and lots of people have lost here jobs. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the financial crisis have affected the construction industry relating to market and personnel, but also examine what measures the construction companies have taken. The examination was carried out by information received from the majority of construction-related websites which then was followed up with interviews in the various construction sectors.

Through wing pattern, posture and movement, a harmless moth of the family Brenthia imitates an eight-eyed jumping spider. When an octopus of the species Thaumoctopus mimicus sense danger it can alter its appearance to that of a venomous sea snake. They are both drawing attention to themselves. Nevertheless, and because of this, they are protected. The mechanism is called mimicry.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the two new phenomena; the pricing model Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) and the launch of daily newspapers in the iPad. A quantitative study was conducted in order to examine what would happen if the PWYW-model where to be used by a daily newspaper for its iPad product, and what this would signal to consumers about the brand in terms of brand association and brand attitude. Furthermore, we have investigated which of these factors that are affecting willingness to pay in this PWYW-situation. Moreover, a secondary purpose was to test the two possible presentations of the digital newspaper in the iPad; Product and Access ? and how the results differed between these two.

This master thesis includes a description of how a number of sensors are put together in a sensor platform. It also gives a description of how localization and mapping has been performed with data collected from the sensor platform. Localization is a prerequisite for most of the tasks that can be requested from an autonomous mobile robot. In many situations the GPS signal is not available and hence an additional localization system is required. One approach is to apply localization based on landmarks extracted from the robots surrounding.

Examensarbetet har genomförts med utveckling och undersökning av signalbehandlingsalgoritmer för MEMS-gyron. Idag används många MEMS-gyron i olika elektronikprodukter. Företaget Motion Control utvecklar elektronik och inbyggd programvara och de har bland annat tagit fram MultiPos, som är en huvudmus för rörelsehindrade. MultiPos är en MEMS-gyro-baserad datormus. MEMS-gyron används för att känna av huvudrörelser som användaren gör, men det är önskvärt med en bättre signalbehandling, d.v.s.

There are several thousands shallow bays along the Swedish east coast. Most of them are disturbed by different human activities, and undisturbed bays can be considered as quite unique. In the sheltered shallow bays water warms up more rapidly than adjacent water favoring the growth of vegetation, which in turns is beneficial to spring spawning fish species like perch and pike. It is nowadays more common that coastal habitats are inventoried to facilitate future preservation and planning. The aim of this study was to investigate the shallow bay Utanåfladen (59° 53`31.38 N 19°00`44.90 E) in the north Stockholm archipelago and evaluate its habitat value.

Ett program som simulerar signalbehandlingen i ett cochleaimplantat med signalbehandlingsstrategin ACE (Advanced Combined Encoder) har konstruerats. Programmets främsta syfte är att i förväg prova ut inställningar i ett cochleaimplantat och genom detta försöka förutsäga olika användares individuella inställningar. Programmet har validerats med utsignaler bearbetade av Cochlear Limited i deras egenkonstruerade Matlab-modul för forskning inom cochleaimplantat, NMT (Nucleus Matlab Toolbox). Samma insignal som använts av Cochlear Limited har processats av programmet och utsignalerna från detta jämfördes med utsignalerna från NMT. De bägge utsignalerna, producerade med samma inställningar, stämde bra överens. Komprimeringsfunktionen i programmet, som är en vital del av signalbehandlingen, visade sig stämma bra överens med NMT:s komprimeringsfunktion, sånär som på en relativ minskning av värdet vid starka insignaler. Programmet ska nu användas på Cochleaimplantat-sektionen vid Uppsala Akademiska sjukhus för att pröva ut individuella inställningar till användare av cochleaimplantat.

The aim of this study was to isolate and identify Lactobacillus species indigenous to the gastrointestinal microflora of Swedish horses. These lactobacilli are to be used as probiotic candidates in research concerning antibiotic-associated diarrhoea in horses. Eight horses, age 6-10 years, were selected from a riding school for collection of faeces samples. Man Rogosa Sharp medium and gram staining were used for the selection of supposed lactobacilli. We could identify 33 isolates of supposed lactobacilli. With the use of API tests 22 of these 33 isolates could be identified.

The aim of this study was to investigate whether a direct shift inpostural alignment results in changes in voice source characteristics. Ninemales with untrained voices were recorded standing in ideal posturalalignment and in the deviant postures swayback and kyphosis characterizedby extended hips and a slump back respectively. The voice source wasderived from the audio signal by inverse filtering. The parameters pulseamplitude, maximal flow declination rate, level difference between the firstand second voice source partials, closed quotient and the normalizedamplitude quotient in relation to subglottal pressure were compared betweenideal postural alignment and swayback and kyphosis respectively. Resultsindicate an impact of changed postural alignment on the voice source.Swayback posture gave significantly less pulse amplitude and maximal flowdeclination rate and significantly higher subglottal pressures thus resulting ina less effective phonation.

I denna uppsats kommer muntliga och skriftliga berättelser av andraspråkselever på Komvux att analyseras med hjälp av performansanalys. Syftet med studien är att se på utvecklingen av bestämdhet inom nominalfrasen och i fall det sker i enlighet med processbarhetsteorin. Det kommer även att ske en analys mellan den muntliga och skriftliga produktionen för att åskådliggöra eventuella skillnader i utvecklingen av bestämdhet.Resultatet visar att det finns belägg för processbarhetsteorin och att detta kan tillämpas på nominalfraserna och dess bestämdhet. Resultatet visar dock inga generella skillnader mellan utvecklingen av bestämdhet när det kommer till skillnaden mellan muntlig och skriftlig framställning. Däremot kan man uttala sig om individuella skillnader hos informanterna..

This Masters thesis work describes a comparison between two different methods for estimation of the down channel (base station to mobile subscriber) in Wide-band Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA). The first estimation method, Optimal Feed-forward Channel Estimation (OFCE), is a conventional method that bases the estimates on data that is known to both sender and receiver, so called pilots. The second method, Decision Directed Channel Estimation (DDCE), is an elaboration of OFCE. It also uses user data for estimation. Simulations show that DDCE, in comparison to OFCE, does not attain an improvement in signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) for high bit error rates (BER).

The purpose of this study was to gather knowledge about the functioning of the rein tension meter and test it for future studies of match and mismatch between rider and horse. We looked specifically into the possibilities to use a rein-tension meter to determine the quality of cooperation between horse and rider. We examined whether a rider shows a specific tension pattern and also if certain patterns could be recognised for a specific horse. During the study, a manual with pictures and text was written to support the practical use of the meter. The manual describes in a simple way the first steps in the installation and use of the meter.

The Swedish forest have about 100 000 km of watercourses and it?s an important structure in Swedish landscapes and catchments. In some of the watercourses lives spieces like the freshwater pearl mussel (Margaritifera margaritifera) and brown trout (Salmo trutta) which both are sensitive for inteference from the forestry. The new EU water framework directive has a goal that all surface water will have high or good ecological- and good chemical status at latest by the 22nd December of 2015. The study has been made in the catchment of Håltjärnsbäcken and it is from a national perspective one of the most valuable streams in Sweden and which also have been included in a LIFE-project. The catchment is situated within the Eco-park of Malingsbo-Kloten and managed by Sveaskog AB.

ABSTRACTThe aim of this study is to analyse if the UN today constructs the water issue as a security issue and to argue about in which way the organization in that case does so alternatively why it can be said that the UN doesn?t construct the water issue as a security issue.In order to reach this purpose the following questions will be answered:?Does the UN construct the water issue as a security issue today?-If yes, in which way?-If no, why can it be said that the organisation doesn?t?The methods used are qualitative literature studies of policy documents on water from the UN. The focus is to analyze the ideas about water and to apply my theory on the concept of security, which is Barry Buzan?s framework on security, to these ideas.The main results showed that the UN strongly constructs the water issue as an environmental security issue for environments and species and in relatively strong terms also constructs it as an environmental security issue for civilisations. In rare cases the organisation constructs it as a societal security issue, but the UN doesn?t construct the water issue as a military, political or economic security issue..

In this Master's thesis, a direct-conversion receiver front-end has been designed in a 0.18um CMOS technology. Direct-conversion receivers (DCR) have obvious advantages over the heterodyne counterpart. Since the intermediate frequency (IF) is zero, the problem of image is circumvented. As a result, no front-end image reject filter is required and the channel selection requires only a low-pass filter, which makes it easy to integrate directly on chip. However, the DCR also suffers from several drawbacks such as extreme sensitivity to DC offsets, 1/f noise, local oscillator (LO) leakage/radiation, front-end nonlinearity and I/Q mismatch.