The main purpose of this study was to obtain insight into what students and teachers think about field trips in ecology and whether they think that fieldtrips result in increase of students? learning. Open questionnaires and half structured interviews were used to investigate this. Persons who answered the questionnaires and participated in the interviews were senior high school teachers in biology or science and high school science students. All the teachers and most of the students thought that field trips in ecology resulted in increased learning.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects ofparticipation in an integrated intensive stuttering program (IST) on stutteringbehavior, intelligibility and communication attitude, at individual and grouplevels. Five children aged eight to twelve years participated in the study.Stuttering behavior and intelligibility were judged by two independentstudents in speech and language pathology based on a total of eight videorecordings, before, during and after therapy. Communication attitude wasmeasured by the Swedish version of the self-report questionnaireCommunication Attitude Test (CAT-S). At an individual level, the initialstuttering profile and the changes shown during and after the IST varied. Ata group level, a significant decrease in stuttering frequency and asignificantly higher level of intelligibility were found, after as compared tobefore therapy.

The aim of the study was to explore how persons with aphasiaexperience literacy and reading and writing. Seven persons with mild-moderateaphasia were interviewed. The interviews were recorded, transcribed andanalysed using qualitative content analysis. The analysis resulted in three mainthemes; A changed reading, A changed writing and How to adjust andaccommodate to new conditions. The most apparent aspect was that theinformants experienced that literacy had changed, regarding what and how theyread/write.

Real-time systems are required to answer to external stimuli within a specified time-period. For this to be possible, the systems behaviour must be predictable. The use of active databases in real-time systems introduces unpredictability in the system, e.g. due to their use of active rules. The behaviour in active databases is usually specified in ECA-rules.

In today's society there is a significant focus on energy efficiency. Despite this, people leave lamps, televisions and computer screens etc. powered on unnecessarily. The goal of this project is to build a simple prototype for home automation where a user, via an application on a mobile phone, can switch on and off the power of an electrical products in the home and as well as being able to check whether such products are switched on or off. The prototype will also collect data on power consumption for these electrical products.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the fatigue life of two components in different hydraulic quick couplings. The crack which initiates the fatigue failure usually occurs in the bottom of one of the threads. Thus, the threads in the coupling are carefully investigated. A few different approaches for determining the fatigue life are studied for each component. CAD (Computer Aided Design) models for both components are created and analyzed with FEM (Finite Element Method).

This thesis has been done at the Unversity of Örebro for Örebro University Hospital (USÖ). In our work we have developed a product for hearing tests to determine hearing thresholds of small children. Our product contains software and a control surface for controlling two separate screens. One of the demands was that our software could handle big file libraries. Reliability and simplicity were essential for the user.In our work we have utilized programming of both microcontrollers and Windows software.

This paper investigates the possibilities to construct automatized portfolios based on optimizations strategies that could outperform comparable indexes. The study is based on time-series of Swedish stocks dating from 1986 to 2006. In the research four different portfolio optimization techniques were studied. These were: the Classical Markowitz Approach, Mean-Absolute-Deviation, Minimum-Regret and Conditional Value-at-Risk of which the three latter are based on generated scenarios. The behaviour of these models was studied for different choices of parameters such as backward time-horizon and targeted average return.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine children's communication and interaction during story time at the public library. The aim is also to examine how to develop the story time ? in terms of participation and equality ? at a specific library.Action research was used as a research strategy and participant observation, log, tutoring and interviews as methods to collect data. Since action research is done on the basis of practice, a significant collaboration with the librarian and the participant children is taking place within this study.Research from the fields of Library and Information Science, Education and Childhood Sociology form the interdisciplinary research area to which this study links. The theoretical framework consists of theory and concepts from the Socio-cultural Perspective, Poststrucuralist Feminism and Childhood Sociology.

The purpose of this study is to show how the modern society, with demands, expectations and the time constraints of adults, affects children and the everyday life at the preschool. Our intention is also to show the importance of identify stress symptoms of the children.        The study is of qualitative empirical kind and is based on a questionnaire to 19 parents of preschool children at the age of three to five years old. Interviews are made with four preschool teachers on one preschool. An observation of children in possible stressful situations is made during three days each at two preschools.     The results show that the modern society affects children and can be stressful. It also affects the everyday life at the preschool.

Göbekli Tepe is an 11000 year old religious center where Totem has been exercised. It was raised by megalithic hunters and collectors that still during the construction lived in small-scaled mobile groups in order to find food and therefore should not have had time to raised costly stone monuments. The religious center consists of four enclosures with two T-pillars decorated with pictures of different animals and birds. Any dwellings have not been found. The place has been constructed by a well-organized elitist organization that has been capable of raising constructions in order to exercise their religion in a way we did not thought was possible such a long time ago. Analysis and findings from the near east existing from this time shows however that social changes happen in the communities around the region. Can archeological finding from the excavations on the religious center give any answer or clue regarding how man came to develop from hunter and collector to farmer? Do the findings reveal that the religion has changed Mans way to think and organize so that she was prepared to introduce the agriculture that occurs? The aim of thesis is to clarify whether Göbekli Tepe has played any role in the complex origin of agriculture..

The report is about efficiency of a current production group where there is no clear production flow and there are some buffers between the operations. The efficiency is done with the help of a tool that is calledWork process of flow production which is used by Atlas Copco CTO. The most obviously results are that the lead time drops from 25 hours to 425 minutes and that the balancing loss decreases from 85 % to 8 %. The report focus on decreasing transports, decreasing buffers, more reliability in lead time and quality. And a more stimulating labour content for the workers is another result..

This thesis looks at two sides of the same coin: how to support the production and future development at a specialist medical technology department at Danderyd Hospital. The two sides are; a pilot study of a product management system (PDM) and an interview based study on the characteristics of the silent knowledge of the technicians. The department (National respiratory centre, NRC) is facing retirement of several key employees.The technical study shows that the success of an implementation is largely dependent on the users? prior knowledge and use of a 3D Computer aided design system (CAD).The system itself is shown to fulfill the Lifecycle requirement of tracking the products (mostly tracheostomy tubes) but without a CAD centered workflow, some substantial education and preferably some new recruits, an implementation of the PDM system will fail. The author recommends development of the current ?low-tech? system of MS Excel and Access rather than redistribute the dependency from technician towards a complex, commercial software and its vendor.The analysis of the technicians? silent knowledge with the newly developed method, epithet for silent knowledge (ETK), shows that the longer employment time:the more differentiated technicians become in describing their work,practical knowledge are regarded higher andthe social and collective problem solving factors of the work becomes more important.Typically, it is shown that a new employee should preferably enjoy problem solving, being pragmatic and social as well as having some prior education or work experience in a CAD and/or a PDM system..

Turkey has taken part in regular negotiations to gain membership in the EU since 2005. At the same time is Turkey a candidate that stands out from those of earlier rounds of enlargement, and its possible membership got both supporters and critics amongst the Unions member countries. The aim of this thesis is to, trough a textual analysis, investigate the prospects and obstacles Turkeys candidature faces. The material consists of documents from a number of think tanks connected to the European Commission, as well as the Commissions own documents regarding Turkeys negotiations.A recurring picture is that Turkey is treated differently then earlier candidates, and that the Commission has a hard time keeping an unambiguous line in its negotiation frame. The material of the think tanks attributes the public opinions distrust of the member countries of EU as a hindrance, and Turkeys meddling in the conflict on Cyprus is problemized.

Denna studie undersöker lärares attityder, föreställningar och undervisning om livsfrågor inom ämnet religionskunskap. Huvudfrågorna fokuserar på hur lärare resonerar kring sin undervisning, vilket material som används och hur undervisningen kan se ut. Studien lyfter även vad barns livsfrågor är utifrån ett lärarperspektiv. Åtta mellanstadielärare från två olika skolor i södra Sverige har intervjuats. Resultatet visar bland annat att livsfrågeundervisningen till stor del flyter ihop med värdegrundsundervisningen, både begreppsmässigt och i den praktiska undervisningen.