As EU?s authority increased the number of lobbies in Brussels grew. Today there are approximately 15 000 lobbyists in Brussels. EU decisions and EU directives can have a huge impact on companies and organizations. They can however influence these decisions and directives through lobbying.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine how the public library communicates with young users through the library web sites. Four Swedish public library web pages for children are analysed. In the analysis the web pages are treated as a combination of semiotic resources that, communicating as a whole, hold a meaning potential. In order to identify the underlying meaning of the whole I have applied the tools of Kress' & van Leeuwen's visual social semiotics to the chosen web pages.The information value, the framing and the salience of each composition is examined and analysed, as is the size of frame, the perspective and the vertical angle of a selection of images from each web page. The results of the semiotic analysis are then discussed and related to Jochumsen et al:s four space-model and the notion of ?child perspective? and ?empowerment?.The results show that the child perspective is strongest on the web pages that represent the performative space as dominating and that empowerment is mainly represented as ?doing?, ?participating? and the ?free choice?.

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.

Scania?s discount rate - the return requirement of investments - refers to Scania?s WACC or weighted average cost of capital. The capital markets return requirement on equity and the credit market interest cost of borrowing is weighted to become the single discount rate, the WACC. The purpose of this study is to investigate which asset pricing model of APT and CAPM Scania should use in their WACC calculations. The company now uses a group WACC of 11 percent which is used in all company levels.

Objective: In recent years there has been an increasing interest within the clinical (medical) science in measuring people?s health. When estimating quality of life, present practise is to use the EQ-5D questionnaire and an index which weighs the different questions. The question is what happens if the individuals estimate there own health, would it differ from the public preferences? The aim is to make a new prediction model based on the opinion of patients and compare it to the present model based on public preferences.Method: A sample of 362 patients with unstable coronary artery disease from the Frisc II trial, valued their quality of life in the acute phase and after 3, 6 and 12 months.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to our knowledge about what methods? teachers say they use in the work with pupils? early reading acquisition, and how they evaluate the pupils´ reading development. I also like to find out what educational interventions teachers believe that pupils with reading difficulties need, and how they say they work to meet the needs of these pupils. The project is based on the following questions: What methods do teachers say they use in the work with pupils early reading acquisition? What extra resources do teachers consider that pupils with reading difficulties need? How do teachers evaluate children's reading development? In order to answer my questions, I've done qualitative interviews with three teachers, at two schools, in two medium-sized municipalities.

In conjunction with an overview of the organizational structure of the municipality of Arvika the Balanced Scorecard was introduced as a management model. After the Balanced Scorecard has been in use over a period of years the conception of it varies throughout the organization.The purpose of this study is identifying which factors are facilitating and which factors are obstructing when implementing the Balanced Scorecard in the municipality of Arvika. This is a case study of the staff organization of the municipality of Arvika. The study is explanatory as our objective is to describe why the current situation appears as it does today. A qualitative method has been applied during this study.

Interference in an ecosystem means a disturbance. When harvesting, forest roads have to be build to cope with heavy duty vehicles. Crossing brooks can not always be avoided. In this case bridges or culverts have to be built. There are many different kinds of culverts and depending on what type you choose and how you place the culvert, the watercourse and the water organisms can be harmed in different ways.

This report is going to be focusing on the development of a promotion page and login system for the web production company Adoreyou. The promotion page and login will be parts of a new taxi application for iPhone that lets the customer book a taxi and drivers manage the requests from the customers.Taxi application?s that let customer?s book trips are nothing new but they are constantly being explored and developed. The most common practice is to let the customer fill in from what address he or she wants to be picked up and to where he or she wants to be taken. Then the price is set in the application depending on the distance and most likely other factors like weekday and time.

This thesis has examined the Tekla Structures modeling software and answered the question of whether it could act as a suitable modeling program for the design department at Bjerking AB in Uppsala. The method used in this work is a case study of a previous project with existing basis to work form. The demarcation of the study was to examine only the usability of the foundations of in situ concrete. The work examined three main areas within the design process. The first was to model the concrete elements then to model the reinforcing and ultimately production of the drawings. Because Autodesk Revit was the existing modeling program in the Department conducted the evaluation as a comparison between the two programs.

Background: In previous studies on the subject hope it has been revealed that hope is an important condition for the experience of health, quality of life and well-being. In the literature hope is described as a great support in life that is vital for a person's life and for how the person manages to become afflicted with a fatal disease. Within palliative care the 6S: s is a person-centered model for care that is directed towards the promotion of patient´s participation, relief from suffering and enablement of well-being and support of the patient and his or her family members. Aim: To describe how patients find hope in their situation in palliative care, and to examine whether there is an interaction between the different dimensions of 6 S: s model and with patients' experiences of hope. Methods: This degree project is literature study.

The aim of this thesis is to fill a knowledge gap regarding how online players use libraries, their attitude towards libraries and what they want out of future libraries. We see it as a problem that the library world of today does not have much knowledge about an audience that is so prevalent in society.The theory used in the thesis is Henrik Jochumsen, Casper Rasmussen Hvenegaard & Dorte Skot-Hansens model that divides libraries into four functions. The four functions are meetings, knowledge, inspiration and experiences. In the analysis we added a suggested fifth function, a digital space, giving the digital interaction and information needs of today´s society. The method was focus groups on online forums for gamers.

Kalmar Municipality has in 2008-2010 made an effort to educate managers on gender, with the goal of mainstreaming gender into public activities so that all citizens should feel safe in that treatment and services are designed and resources are distributed equally to both sexes living conditions and needs. The overall aim of this study was to examine whether the training effort has paid off, and how gender mainstreaming has been implemented in the different activities. We have used a qualitative approach, which we examined through interviews managers' approach to gender equality.Gender was generally described as an important issue of all respondents, and all were working to mainstream gender into their activities and workplaces. The results show that the operational and management needed clearer directives and strategies in their efforts to promote gender equality. Education was necessary because personal definition of gender may differ from the control contents of the documents.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine how the gender structure appears in detective novels and in the society during the 1960s and 2000s. We have a pre-understanding that the gender structure is more distinct in the earlier books and we will investigate this by looking at the two aspects occupation and family role. We find this to be an important question to notice because society today isnt equal between the sexes. Our study is based on a theory of Yvonne Hirdmans, she claims that the man is the dominant part and the woman is in an inferior position. We apply a stereotype model she has conceived and we try to categorize the characters in the books we have analysed into this model.

Organic cotton has been in the medias field of vision for quite some time. This interestalso reflects in a growing awareness in the textile industry where more and morecompanies today offer organic cotton in their product range. With this in mind wequestion whether organic cotton has become a viable commercial product. We alsoacknowledge there is a lacking of understanding the complex problems that organiccotton manufacture involves, for example the huge effort and cost required for a transitionfrom conventional to organic cotton farming.The purpose of this paper was to study how textile, ecology and competition today arebeing combined by companies. We wanted with our investigation to find out whethercompanies in the textile industry use ecology as a competitive advantage.