The purpose of this masters thesis is to find out if public libraries provide new age materials or not. My research is done using the point of view of the library users. Do they think libraries hold a sufficient amount of new age literature and do the users find this literature of good quality? To find an answer to this question, interviews have been made with a number of library users interested in new age related issues. Interviews have also been made with librarians, to get their point of view on this rather controversial subject.

The objective of this thesis is to examine the capital structure of Swedish small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Accounting data from Swedish game developers, combined with the result from a survey, is used to examine their financial conditions and capital structure decisions. We find that non-debt tax shield, firm size, growth opportunities and age are, to various extents, the determinants of capital structure in the game industry, while effective tax rate and asset structure have marginal effects. Our study also implicates that most of the existing capital structure theories can explain SMEs leverage decisions to some extent; however, some adaptation is needed to fit these theories into the SME context. Additionally, we find the existence of a financial gap in the game industry which might need efforts from both demand side and supply side to eliminate..

This master thesis was conducted during the spring of 2014 at Atlas Copco Rock Drills AB in Örebro. The purpose of the thesis was to develop a simulation model of the rotation system for a hydraulic rock drill. In the future, the model will be used to investigate the phenomena called ?jerky rotation?. In order to validate the simulation model a test bench was designed and tests were made.

A district heating plant has the advantage that it can take advantage of the waste heat from industries and use of cheap fuels to produce heat. But for the long term is competitive requires that energy is also saved in district heating plants. One way to save energy in a district heating system is to increasing cooling to the return temperature. This leads to less power needed to drive the distribution pumps,  and that more energy could be extracted from the same amount of fuel by an improved flue gas condensation.In Karlskoga the return temperature into the district heating plant is high. They would therefore reduce the return temperature in order to extract more energy from the flue gases.

In 2010, Airwatergreen AB started testing their new technology, the Airwaterwell, an atmospherical water generator of their own design that is running on solar heat, with a production capacity of three litres of water per day and m2. The purpose was to focus on foreign aid organizations as main purchasers for project investments towards rural communities in developing countries that suffer from lack of, or compromised quality of drinking water. In order to further understand if this technology would bring a positive impact in the developing countries, the company contacted the Swedish University of Agriculture for a socio-economic study of the Airwaterwells? potential. The authors elected Cost benefit analysis as the appropriate method for conducting the study and India became the study region because of its many problems with water related issues such as diseases as well as insufficient water supply for households. The regions that this study is based on are Gujarat, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh given their differences in income, health situation and poverty rate.

The aim of this essay is to study five teachers' perceptions and experiences of a multicultural class. I want to find out how they relate to intercultural education and how they experience that they may apply it.Sweden is a multicultural society. This fact is even reflected in the school and this imposes on teachers finding new ways to educate and prepare their students for the multicultural society.I chose to carry out a qualitative survey and interviewed five teachers having contact with a multicultural class. The study also offers suggestions to future teachers who can benefit from it in terms of adopting convenient attitudes in multicultural classes with better understanding.The outcome reached shows that the interviewed teachers try to make use of intercultural pedagogy by addressing differences between students, adapting teaching to supply for the needs of students, and also by having good contact with parents. But teachers also experience difficulties.

Can you ensure that your smoke detector will sense fire and sound the alarm in the middle of the night?In 80 percent of the cases where emergency pulls out, smoke detectors are missing where the fire occurred. In the year of 2009, 118 people in Sweden died in fires ? most of them would have survived if there had been a functioning smoke detector.Earlier development of smoke detectors has mainly been focusing on components that sense smoke and alert in case of fire. But in most cases the problem has not been whether the smoke detector was working or not as fully assembled, but rather that it was missing.

In the year 1800, about 5 % of the world population lived in cities (World Wide Fund for Nature, 2012, 3). Today that number is about 70 % in Europe and North America, and in 2050 it is expected to be 86 % in the developed world and 67 % in the developing world (www, UN, 2009). In addition, the global population is expected to increase with 2.2 billion people until 2050. As a result of the population increase more food has to be produced which requires more transport from the countryside to the cities. However, this flow of resources faces some difficulties.

This is a study of a group of Swedish travellers, and of the traveller community, a marginalized group named 'tattare', skojare, tavring, knävling, dinglare, resande (Gypsies, pikeys, tinkers, travellers), whose origins and history are unknown to most people.The purpose of the study is to find out what it is like to be a traveller and look at the culture of travellers, in older times and today. I have focused particularly on the women's situation within the culture, in the past and present.The study is based on interviews with 4 persons, from the traveller community, one man and three women. During the interviews other travellers joined and participated in the discussions and the reasoning.My conclusion is that the traveller community is a group, which has been subjected to severe abuse by authorities, but still managed to preserve their culture. The interviewed travelers share a culture, in which women play a prominent role as breadwinners, for the family cohesion and in raising the children. Functions that gives women the role of culture bearers, meaning that it?s through women the culture is carried onwards..

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.

Construction of an autonomous wind station was a project with the goal of creating a product that could collect wind data from a sensor and then transfer this data to a server wirelessly over the GSM network. The device would be powered by batteries and solar cells and function fully without requiring external power supply. This required that a small computer was constructed and programmed to store and send data at predetermined cycle times and programming of a server that received the sent data. The project also required optimization of power consumption and dimensioning of solar cells and batteries based on this. The construction of this station demanded research both for the selection of hardware and programming software. The computer was based on a microcontroller and a GSM module that sent the data over the 2G network.

This report will examine various solar energy technologies in order to decide if they could be applied in the Royal Seaport. The Royal Seaport is a Swedish urban district under development in Stockholm, with the goal of becoming a sustainable district. Two main techniques, solar collectors and solar cells, including sub-categories, are addressed in this report. Another sub-category, a hybrid system, will also be mentioned. The main difference between solar collectors and solar cells is the type of energy produced by the system.

AbstractA general store is a grocery store that is located in the countryside. In today's modern society, it is difficult for general stores to compete with the supermarkets and discounters in terms of price and supply. The purpose of this thesis is to create an understanding of both the rural merchants and its customers? perspective on a well-­?functioning general store. We have conducted a case study of three general stores where we interviewed the merchants about how they do to please their customers? needs and identify key elements of a well-­?functioning general store.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) är en teknik som enligt många utsetts till framtidens teknologi inom Supply Chain Management. Detta då RFID, utan involvering av människan och utan behov av fri sikt, på distans kan utföra effektiva identifieringar av objekt. Det har emellertid, genom forskning, uppmärksammats problem med RFID och dess i vissa fall bristfälliga ändamålsenlighet inom logistiska sammanhang. Utifrån de möjligheter och hot som RFID innebär, har detta examensarbete kritiskt undersökt hypotesen: "Logistiska RFID-implementeringar är lönsamma och tillförlitliga". Analysen grundar sig på ett arbete genomfört vid Volvo Car Corporation (Volvo) i Göteborg och Olofström, där ett pilotförsök med RFID- utrustning för lång avläsningsdistans installerats och processeffektivitetsstudier fullföljts.

The market for management training programs is growing and the supply of the service is increasing and getting further diversified. A consequence is a market with a wide variety of definitions of the very concept of development, and subsequently a wide variety of practices and methods to achieve development. The individuals that are subject to these programs seldom know what they are purchasing, or what to expect. When assuming a transfer of the developers view on development to the subject, a need for a greater understanding of the concept arises. The purpose of this thesis is to understand what views on development do exist among management trainers and map underlying dimensions of the views to increase the understanding of the concept of development.