At Sandvik Materials Technology, Argon gas is used as furnace atmosphere when heattreating hot rolled wire. Upon heating chromium steel wire, a rich oxidelayer forms on the wire surface. The abstract of this masters thesis is to enhance the understanding of the constitution of the oxidelayers and the influence of the furnace atmosphere. This will be achieved by performing a number of annealing experiments on laboratory level. Also, the aim is to understand the chemical reactions and physical mecanisms controlling the pickling process.

As we have been actively involved in various teaching programmes for many years, we wanted to enquire how the students and teachers understood their school and compare it to how we experienced it.  Do the students fully understand the knowledge they are receiving and can they learn from it? Do the teachers believe what they are teaching is understood by the students? What is the underlining knowledge of social practices in the school, which can inspire students in different ways? The aim of the study, as the title suggests, is to convey and describe the various methods practiced in a specific social practice.Our project is a quality study.  We have used observation, specific intense individual and group interviews. In the result, arrives a different message through what there is possible for the students to learn about the matter. These messages are visible in the different attitudes the teacher, the school and the organisation have vis-à-vis the matter. In the discussion, we have focussed on what has arrived in the result around the teacher's and the organisation's attitudes.

Student recruitment is a subject that seems to be forgotten in the theory of event communication. Yet the area has some specific reoccurring features. Our purpose was to examine these specific features and how to work with these in the best way, and also see how to get the most out of the event communication to the young at event and fairs. Special features we have looked at are the student ambassadors ands their impact, the meaning of a give-away and also if there are any essential factors to get in contact with the young at fairs and events, and if new technology had an important role to play in the area.Our research has been inductive, and therefore, we have created our own theory and reflected it to the larger topic of event communication and its theories. Our research method has been triangular, both quantitative and qualitative; interviews with those who work with student recruitment, and surveys to young people in upper secondary school.Our study showed the importance of student ambassadors and their specific task to be nice, friendly and outgoing.

Due to an increased population in cities the need of densification of cities increases. This means that the amount of ecological elements in the city is at risk of decreasing. Ecological services contribute to the city?s climate by softening the negative impacts that densification of cities means. Thus increases the will and ambition in city planning in to preserve greenery.This is an interdisciplinary thesis within the subject of geography that studies Biotope Area Factor (BAF), a planning tool that is used in city planning with the purpose of compensating for lost ecological services associated with new housing estate.

Purpose/Aim: To describe likenesses and differences between the personal identity of the common Kalmar nation member and the collective identity of the organization Kalmar nation as described by said members.Material/Method: Collecting data through a quantitative survey, where the members answer questions about themselves and Kalmar nation, and subsequent analysis of said data by means of theories about personal, collective, and brand identity.Main results: After analyzing the data from the survey I conclude that there exists both likenesses and differences between the organization and its members. Some likenesses are more pronounced than others, and the same can be said for the differences. However, within the three areas of study (specific identity traits, politics and music) politics and music showed more similarity between the members and the nation than the specific identity traits did. The most interesting aspect of the analysis show that the members have quite a common view of the organization despite their own widely different descriptions of themselves..

In efforts to strengthen local economies, business development programs are often a way in which governmental organizations and state affiliates try to facilitate innovation and successful entrepreneurship. There is a mutual interest from both the public and private sector that these funds are put to good use. Extensive research has been conducted with the focus of the general effect of public support programs. However, not much research has been done on what external factors affect the situation for receiving businesses. This study attempts to examine whether one specific such factor, the level of maturity on the markets that the recipients operate in, has a discernible effect on the needs for different types of entrepreneurial support.

AimThe specific questions in the theoretic part were:What is contained in the terms "balance and balance skill" and how can this skill be measured?The specific questions in the empirical part were:How does balance skill in different age categories of children correlate with biological and physiological parameters such as age, gender, body height, weight and level of physical activity?MethodsLiterature search based on books and scientific papers related to the questions posed above. Selection was made at libraries and on?line through "Pubmed". Specific search words were used.

Using stimuli with identical information in both PR and advertising, this study seeks to explain how content class together with the level of involvement affects the communication effects of marketing messages. There is currently no established way of measuring the value of PR, and contemporary PR metrics do not take into account what effects PR actually generates. PR is often said to have an advantage over advertising due to the effects of third party endorsement, but previous empirical assessments show inconsistent results regarding what effects each content class generates. The result of this study is that PR is stronger at building recall, interest and credibility, and that it has less perceived selling intent than advertising. Results differ somewhat between different levels of involvement, but the conclusion is that this might not be attributable to the level of involvement per se but rather to the type of products being used in stimuli - a conclusion that seems valid for previous research as well.

The objective of this study was to uncover what aspects of urban plazas and parks that are most important for users? evaluations of places? aesthetics and microclimate (the characteristic climate for a limited space). This was done by investigating people?s general ideas of plazas and parks (the prototypical concepts) and compare these with place users? descriptions of four specific places. Interviews with two groups (31 and 24 persons respectively) were carried out in order to collect this information.

This report deals with hard surfaces and the factors which are behind the criteria for dimensioning, also dependent on the level, or volume, of traffic. A test was made on slabs of two kinds of natural stone. This was made to see if the values that were reached for breakload was transferable to the same tables that the concrete industry is using for surface dimensions of slabs and paving stones. The test showed very high values and the result, together with the written study, led to the author?s suggestion for a classification table where slabs of natural stone were divided in to different classes depending on traffic, thickness and durability..

In this study the author attempts to identify factors that are determinants for why some pupils in Swedish grade school have high status in comparison with their peers. The study takes on the characteristics of both an ethnographic and a literature study by comparing the findings of interviews carried out with students of a first grade class with previous research. The study identify several tools for analyzing of how status may be understood in specific situations.The study also finds that important factors for gaining high status amongst children in aschool classes might be the ability to apply access strategies to get accepted in social interactions, such as game play, have the ability to create games that are enjoyed by peers and social skills, to name a few. Overall the study shows that children's game play with each otherare crucial for their social interactions and their social position. The study also show that children that have earlier established relationships with other children in a specific group alsohave a better opportunity to establish a high status position..

The focus of this thesis is a specific part of Swedish library policy called library plans. A library plan is a political document created with the purpose of constituting a platform for co-operation between different library systems within a municipality, e.g. through determining and analysing the needs for library activities within municipalities in Sweden.This thesis´ aim is to investigate whether library plans are, or can be used as, a tool for change and thereby increase legitimacy for public libraries in Sweden.We have examined aspects of library plans using theories from change management to determine whether these plans include tools focusing on conditions in organisations that could result in an improved and stronger position in the society for public library. Through the use of theories from new institutionalism we opted for an understanding of the interaction between the libraries and the context in which they are part of.Upon examining 23 library plans, we discovered similarities as well as diversities among them. From our study we have drawn the conclusion that it is important to analyse the specific needs of each different municipality and to consider these individual conditions and needs when developing and composing the library plan.

The characteristic of services as an effort carried out in a "moment of truth" implies a risk for failures. This study sheds new light on how alternative offerings that customers are initially exposed to can affect satisfaction and loyalty in the service failure and recovery context. More specifically, two aspects of the initial offering are studied: promised general service quality and the presence of a promise about a specific product attribute. Based on a presentation of the main theoretical perspectives, hypotheses are formulated and a scenario-based experiment in a hotel setting is designed to explore these. The results indicate that a higher level of promised service quality can result in more positive evaluations of satisfaction and stronger word-of-mouth intentions than for a lower level of promised service quality.

This thesis examines the gender boundaries in sports. I do this by exploring three cases in which these boundaries, at least on the surface, have been questioned: the transsexual tennis player Renée Richards, the east European runners Marita Koch and Jarmila Kratochvilova and the Swedish golf player Annika Sörenstam. The results point out different mechanisms that contain the"danger"and restore"security". But they also point out a criticism against the struggle for equality in sports, which is based on the preserving of differences and therefore cannot challenge the ideological assumptions about gender in sports..

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.