Due to their complexity and heavy wear from rail traffic, switches are a sensitive part of the railway infrastructure and moreover expensive to maintain. Furthermore, increasing railway traffic not only accelerates the wear rate but also obstructs the necessary maintenance measures. This paper examines the opportunities for a transition to a long-term maintenance strategy in the Swedish railway network. It contains a study of the maintenance strategy of Banverket, and also analyses statistics of errors in the railway infrastructure. The survey was completed utilising interviews with infrastructure managers, maintenance contractors, planners of railway operations and the Banverket material service department.

Shear Strength and Deformation Characteristics of Uppsala Clay with CRS and Standard OedometerTyra Morell Bonin & Magdalena MählerTo see how much a clay compact under different pressure one can use several different methods and in this project, two methods were used, the Standard Oedometer and a CRS apparatus. A Standard Oedometer is a full-time manual device and the CRS apparatus is a modern electric and automatic device. The aim of the project was to see similarities and differences between the two methods and examine which method that were most reliable. This has been done with repeated laboratory tests and afterward evaluations. With this information one can get a picture of how the clay will behave and how it will deform in nature.

The aim of this research is to examine the Göteborg International Film Festival Fund (GIFFF, 1998?2011) as a part of the festival's overall operations, to provide answers to questions about if/how the Fund can be understood as an expression of the festival's fundamental values, and how the Fund can be recognized within the festival's strategic development. The GIFFF is also discussed in relation to contemporary academic studies that interpret Western film funds for the developing countries ? such as Hubert Bals Fund and Fond Sud Cinéma ? as an expression of Eurocentrism.The investigation is based on the contemporary film festival research, previous academic studies on Göteborg International Film Festival, the festival?s printed material ? such as programs and press releases ? as well as interviews with the former festival director Gunnar Bergdahl, who initiated the Fund, and festival editor Ulf Sigvardson, who ran the Fund during its final years of existence.The conclusions are: The Fund's objectives ? such as to support filmmakers and film schools in the developing countries, and also to screen their films at the festival ? can be seen as a broader interpretation of the vision that was determined by the festival founders, that the festival should be a platform for independent filmmaking and also help screen the films that otherwise would not reach the Swedish audience. Also, the Fund was a significant part of the festival's expansion strategies during the 1990s.

Findus Sverige AB, referred to asFindus from now on, harvests peas during a period ofaround 50 days during the summer. The harvest generates about 30 000 tonnes of peas which gives around 40 000 pallets to distribute to the warehouses which Findus uses for final storage. Three hours after the peas are picked in the fields, they have to be frozen to keep their good taste and quality. Because of this the pallets are marked with a preliminary label with quality classification of the content. The Findus quality department then has one day to determine the correct quality of each pallet.

Ericsson?s factory in Kumla, Modules Kumla, became a hub for radio modules and micro base stations, which enables mobile communication through radio base stations, in 2004. Because of this the factory focuses more on the logistics operations. This has led to a need to be able to plan the capacity for the materials handling system. This master thesis has therefore been performed at Modules Kumla to develop a capacity calculation model for the material handling flow during the autumn of 2005.The work has contained a mapping of the material handling flow regarding to which activities was performed and how much time they consumed.

A large number of farms within the agricultural sector will shortly be facing a point of time where the farm will be transferred to the next generation. The grantor can choose between totally 8 different strategies to transfer the farm, of which purchase, gift and a mixed form of these are the most common. During 2007 almost 10 000 transfers of agricultural estates occurred in Sweden and the expectation for the coming years is that about 15 000 estates will be transferred each year. By the time a transfer is about to materialize there are usually several stakeholders that in one way or another is trying to influence the outcome of the transfer. The choice of transfer method affects the conditions and possibilities for compensating the siblings.

Farmers Cooperative has in recent years developed from national markets to cross-border, international, collaborations. One example is the merger between the Swedish dairy company Arla and Danish MD Foods, where the companies collectively are sought to reduce transaction costs and thus improve efficiency. The Swedish market for commodities (fertilizers and pesticides) in agriculture has for many years been dominated by a few large players, with little opportunity for grain associations and local grain companies to offer their customers a varied range of commodities with a competitive pricing.To change this state, a majority of Swedish and Danish grain associations and local grain companies have established a trans-national cooperation. Through the establishment of the organization DLA Agro, they offer their customers a good variety of products with competitive prices. This study investigates thus according to the theory of cooperative models to what extent and how the DLA Agro helps to create benefits for the Swedish member companies.

Denna rapport ger en bild av vilka olika saker byggherrar i Sverigeanvänder sig av idag för att öka den sociala hållbarheten. De projektsom studerats är Bygga om Dialogen i Malmö, Älvstaden i Göteborg,Vivalla i Örebro och föreningen Byggemenskap.Genom att intervjua en person från varje område studeras likheteroch skillnader i hur man arbetat med den sociala hållbarheten vidbyggnation. I Malmö och Örebro studeras arbetet med att öka densociala hållbarheten vid renoveringsobjekt, hur får de hela områdensom länge haft ett dåligt rykte att bli socialt hållbara där stort fokusligger på att anställa långtidsarbetslösa.I Göteborg och i föreningen Byggemenskap fokuserar man på attföra in den sociala hållbarheten vid nybyggnation och hur vi kan byggahyresrätter som har en lägre hyra än nybyggda lägenheter i dagslägethar..

The forecast ability of four well-known exchange rate models for theSwedish krona is tested in this thesis. The models that are tested arethe purchase power parity, the real interest differential model, thesticky-price model and a productivity model. In addition to thebenchmark, the random walk, they are also compared to each other.They are all tested on three different horizons one quarter, two quartersand four quarters. The mean squared forecast error criteria and thedirection of change criteria are used for evaluation of the forecastability. Only in a couple of cases are the forecast ability of thetheoretical based models significant better than the random walk..

 The aim of this paper was to investigate how many students studying Swesdish as a foreign language, at secondary school level, in Tierps kommun, that have dropped out and their reasons for doing so. The reason for this is the report from Skolverket, stating that the rate of drop outs at this level is very high. To investigate this, a quantitative method was used. A questionnaire was sent out to all the students that dropped out 2005-2008. The result showed that the two main reasons for leaving their studies were that the individuals had found a job or thought the studies were too hard. The research also showed that the majority of the students had not been in contact with Career counseller prior to ending their studies. We came to the conclusion that there might be a need for developing the teaching and to work out routines for guidance at drop out situations.

The original promise behind the Internet Protocol was to deliver data from a sender to the receiver using a best-effort approach. This means that the protocol makes no guarantees except that it will try to deliver the data to the destination. If some problem occurs the packet may be discarded by the network without any notice. No guarantees are made regarding the time it takes to deliver the data, the rate at which data will be delivered or if data is delivered in the same order it was sent. The best-effort approach is arguably the reason behind the success of the Internet Protocol and is what makes IP scalable to networks the size of the Internet.

The voluntary none-financial sustainability report has become a trend within accounting. The environmental issues used to be driven by activists only, but lately it has moved in to the general agenda in many companies. Investors are starting to put more attention to the sustainability reporting as it is considered to add value to the company. There are several standard guidelines to be used when producing a sustainability report, one example is the GRI´s Guidelines that takes the following three dimensions in consideration: economy, environment and social. This Guideline is from an international perspective considered to be of good accounting practice (Ljungdahl 2008).

The thesis strives to answer the question whether there are any differences between how young customers, in comparison with older, are affected by brands when buying different products. The purpose is to get a clearer idea about the brands' importance in the future and in that way also to give guidance to companies about how to best market themselves and there products.To answer the question, an experiment was conducted with 480 respondents taking a survey where they had to rate a product after reading a short text about it. Some of the texts stated that a specific brand was behind the product while some said the product was produced by an unknown brand.The result of the study was that young people showed a greater propensity of rating products with a brand higher than products without brands, in comparison with the older respondents. This gives reason to believe that brands progressively will become an even more important tool for marketers and an unmatched asset for companies in the future..

Transboundary protected areas are a fairly recent concept that have been increasing in popularity and are increasingly being integrated into large international organizations? environmental policy making. This essay examines the phenomena through the cooperation between two national parks, Parc National des Pyrénées in France and Parque Nacional Ordesa Monte Perdido in Spain. The theoretical framework used in this essay is based upon border theory, focusing on the different factors that influence the behavior of the border dweller and how the different social conceptions of nature influence the way it is managed. The results in this study result from researching published and private documents from the national parks and interviews carried out with staff from the park administrations from both countries.

This literature review summarizes available data on infection with the parasitic roundworm, Ascaridia galli, as a cause of disease in poultry, including the consequences of a conversion to alternative production systems. Ascaridia galli has a direct life cycle with resistant eggs that survive and are easily spread in the environment, especially in systems with bedding materials where the faecal contact is high. The infection is usually subclinical but depending on the infection dose, the symptoms range from weight loss and diarrhea to mortality. Factors such as the feed composition and genetic variation among different hybrids clearly affect the establishment rate of the infection. Ascaridia galli will probably become an increasing problem, with a shift from the traditional battery cages to alternative systems where the risk of re-infection is high.