This study aims to illustrate the Leader approach and analyze the work of collaboration development within Leader. The idea has also been to describe some of the difficulties that might be encountered in this type of development work. By highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of this approach we hope to enhance the chance that future work in similar projects can be implemented more easily. Leader is a tool and methodology used in the European Union (EU) for work on sustainable rural development and it has been used since 1991. The purpose of Leader is that by supporting rural projects they will gain social capital and development in the rural communities.

The purpose of this essay is to study if and how five South African educators work with music as a special pedagogical tool in children's language development. To achieve the purpose of this study, two research questions were created. As method, interviews of a qualitative character were chosen.  The aim of the method is to give the educators the opportunity to think about and use their own experience before answering the questions.The result shows that the South African educators are not using music as a special educational tool. They rather use music as an everyday educational tool to promote children's language development. The result indicates that music in educational activities promotes children?s communication with each other.

This Master?s thesis is one of two parts of a combined project called Sustainable development around the Lake Victoria, the purpose of which is to investigate the importance of local anchoring and active participation in the work towards sustainable development. The present study aims to investigate whether men and women are empowered by the participatory rural appraisal (PRA) process promoted in their villages by the VI Agroforestry Project Masaka/Rakai. The study is primarily based on interviews with farmers within the project area and brings up a local perspective on the concepts sustainable development, active participation and empowerment. The study shows that to improve the farmers? livelihood and to create a sustainable development in the community, the farmers have to be actively involved in, and in control of, the process.

The basis of the study lies with a newly patented gearbox by cardiologist and inventor Stig Lundbäck. Stig founded CorPower Ocean AB to further develop the gearbox to be used in a wave energy device. The purpose of this project is to develop a concept of a lifting system with CorPower Oceans gearbox that is more energy efficient than a hydraulic lifting system. The goal is to use technology from CorPower Oceans gearbox inversely to perform heavy lifting as an alternative to hydraulics. The project is limited to applying the gearbox and gear rack on a forklift with a lifting capacity of ten tons.The main tool in this project will be the product development process Systems Engineering where only the most relevant parts will be used to develop a concept.

This thesis examines history of the subject of mechatronics and innovation. The main reason tostudy mechatronics from a historical point of view is that it has never been done to a greater extent before. An overview is justified because various definitions have been used over the decades, but nowadays the subject has become more established. Focus in this thesis is mainly on development of the subject of mechatronics at Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Innovation is the other aspect of this thesis.

The profit a company makes is dependant of its employees which means that their competence is important for the company to perform well. The middle manager has a central position in the organization and is expected to take on different roles. This probably puts a lot of demands on the middle managers and their competence. We want to contribute with a comprehension of how learning, competence and needs for competence can look at a middle management level. Furthermore we also want to find out what kind of strategy for competence development the middle managers want the company to use so their competence development can be facilitated.

The purpose of this study is to examine how pre-school teachers think about the importance of circle time in regard to the child's language and social development from a sociocultural perspective. Furthermore the study will include what role the educators? have during the circle time.To answer our purpose we have chosen the following question:What is the role of the teachers in the circle time?What are the teacher?s thoughts about the circle time?s importance to children's social development?What are the teacher?s thoughts about the circle time?s importance to children's language development?The study is constructed on qualitative methods, where we conducted structured interviews with six preschool teachers and observed their circle time to collect our empirical material. The study is also based on Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective which says that all learning takes place through relations and interaction with other people in the cultural context you are in. The results have shown that pre-school teachers are aware of the circle time?s importance to children?s development, and purposely plan the circle time to give children the opportunity to develop both socially and linguistically skills..

This thesis is about Swedish and Serbian teachers and their views on how literature should be taught to students in high school. The twist is that these teachers live in two different European countries, and work under two different educational systems. Three of them work in Stockholm, Sweden and the other three in Belgrade, Serbia. The purpose of this thesis was to find similarities and differences in the practice of teaching literature among teachers in these two different educational systems. The teachers were interviewed separately and spoke freely about their views and methods when teaching literature.

Swedish dairy production has during the last decades undergone considerable structural rationalisation and the number of dairy herds has decreased to less than 7000. At the same time the average herd size has increased and a large proportion of those investing in new buildings today choose automatic milking (AM). During 2008 more than ten percent of the Swedish cows will be milked with AM. The development has been faster than expected and the need for consulting has increased rapidly. This study aims to evaluate whether a check list originating from the FRISKKO (?healthy cow?) programme can be a useful tool when assessing how well the herd functions in various areas.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how a valuation model of a Private Equity firm is interpreted into a management control system within the company's different organizational levels. A case study was developed based on the infra-net company Eltel. The management control systems developed by Malmi and Brown (2008)(1) was used to characterize the control systems at each organizational level. The building blocks of this system are planning, cybernetic, reward/compensation, administrative and culture. Miller and O'Learys (2007)(2) theory of mediating instruments and technology roadmaps was applied to analyze the mediating process of the valuation model.

This thesis aims to contribute to improved functional procurement of photovoltaic systems, PV systems. Functional procurement means that criteria concerning a function are set rather than specifying technical details or products. Possible advantages and difficulties in using functional procurement have been analyzed by interviews, simulations and a case study. Electricity production and surplus production for different scenarios have been simulated via MATLAB. The MATLAB script was also used to generate rules of thumb on feasible solar fraction for six different load profiles; a church, a farm, a car mechanic, an office, an industry and an apartment building.

The aim of this study has been to describe the ongoing region enlargement process in the region Mälardalen, located in the east part of Sweden, and to investigate how this process can affect the local level. The study is especially orientated on public communications and accessibility. The intention has also been to examine how the local accessibility can affect the re-gional development in Mälardalen. The local investigation object that has been chosen for this research is the city Strängnäs, situated in the province of Södermanland. The city of Strängnäs and the cities in it?s near geographic surroundings has been the benchmark for this casestudy, in which the local accessibility with public transportation has been investigated.

The environmental requirements and laws on combustion engine emissions are very tough today andthey will become even more stringent in the future. To achieve these requirements there are highdemands on the control systems for these engines. An improved precision in the measurement of anengine's speed and position gives the electronic control system an even better timing when it comes tofuel injection and ignition. This makes the engine more fuel efficient, reducing the emissions. This thesisis part of a collaborative project between Hoerbiger Control Systems and subsidiaries.

The aim of this master thesis is to evaluate the performance of the content-based image retrieval system ImBrowse from a semantic point of view. Evaluation of retrieval performance is a problem in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). There are many different methods for measuring the performance of content-based image retrieval systems, but no common way for performing the evaluation. The main focus is on image retrieval regarding the extraction of the visual features in the image, from three semantic levels. The thesis tries to elucidate the semantic gap, which is the problem when the systems extraction of the visual features from the image and the user?s interpretation of that same information do not correspond.

The company Sound Precision has developed a new Line Array loudspeaker system (VHA-40). When using this system, their customers need computer aid to get the best possible sound-quality and control of sound levels for the whole audience. The aim of this thesis is to develop a truly useful sound quality simulator for the VHA-40. The system will help the sound engineers to position the loudspeakers for optimal sound by simulating loudspeaker configurations and visualizing the resulting sound quality and quantity. To solve this a human-centered design (HCD) approach is taken to implement a system that is truly useful for the users, meaning that they will use it more and hence deliver better sound for the audience.