Hedge funds have the past few years become an increasingly popular investment alternative and in the last decade hedge fund assets managed have quadrupled to USD 2000 billion, a growth rate of around 25-30% per year. One explanation for this substantial increase is that hedge funds' minimum limits on capital invested has declined, which have made ??them available to retail investors. The recent turmoil in financial markets has also contributed to investors finding their way to hedge funds, whose goal is to generate stable returns regardless of how the market develops.Using Sharpe?s, Treynor?s and Jensen's performance measures, I have investigated whether hedge funds manage to generate higher risk-adjusted returns than traditional managed funds.

This essay examines on what kind of Muslim stereotypes exist in entertainment movies which are being produced in the West and particularly the United States. First, the focus will be on explaining the concept of stereotypes and Islamophobia and what role the media has in the movies' production of its contents. The incident at the World Trade Center will also be discussed briefly. By using semiotic and narrative analyses the essay investigates if a stereotyped image is being used about Muslims and how Muslim main characters that have the role of being protagonists, are visualized in entertainment movies. The material that is included in the empirical analysis consists of three selected movies.

Children?s use of mobile devices is constantly increasing and has become very popular withchildren as young as toddlers. Schools in Sweden have made large investments to expand theuse of information technology (IT), and the use of mobile devices in preschools is already acommon support tool for learning. Children?s use of IT is a relatively new phenomenon,which means that is it also a relatively new area of research.

The aim of this study was to examine if transformational leadership, transactional leadership, gender, educational level, income and age predict work motivation, referring to Herzberg?s motivation-hygiene theory. According to past research the factors above increase work motivation. The study was brought about with a survey based on the Multi Factor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ-5X), Herzberg?s motivation-hygiene theory and demographic items.

The aim of this paper is to look into the occurrence of home schooling by choice in Sweden. It examines the subject of home education in order to provide an informative overview. It also looks into the legal aspects of the matter to see whether freedom of choice is an issue here when it comes to choosing a certain type of teaching for children of compulsory school age. A further purpose is to provide a comparison of home education in Sweden and in other countries such as the United States, England and Norway.In order to do this we have carried out a secondary analysis of previous research and have also interviewed teachers as well as people with experience of home educating their own children. To accomplish this, we had to look to England for literature and home educating families as home education is a much more common practise in England.The result of this paper strongly indicates that home schooling is not only a legally viable option to traditional schooling, both in Sweden and the other countries concerned, but that it is also a trend that is expected to increase.

The period of church awakening in Sweden during the first half of the nineteenth century, has had a great influence on the Swedish society. During that time certain persons are to be noticed. Peter Fjellstedt and Peter Wieselgren, priests in the Swedish Church, are among those who were of special importance. But even the British preacher George Scott and later the Swedish layman Carl-Olof Rosenius became aware of the importance of networking. They all felt a call from God to preach a message of redemption and restoration.

Imperialism has for a long time been an important concept in international relations. The literature identifies many different types of imperialism. After the great de-colonization scientists stopped discussing ?classic? imperialism, i.e. using physical strength in the form of conquest and occupation to subdue weaker states.

This thesis aimed to investigate how a rising sea level would affect the livable area of the island Fongafale, Tuvalu. Through the IPCC stabilization scenarios it was examined which areas of the island that would be affected by flooding. The local population?s perceptions of the effects of climate change were studied to see how the consequences of a world-wide problem such as global warming affect people's lives. The paper clarified the Tuvaluans place in the discussion of climate refugees, explained IPCC's work and described the results of previous studies concerning people in Fongafales perceptions and concerns about climate-related changes.

The study deals with young people with visual impairment and their choices of upper secondary school, what is behind and how they are affected by other aspects and other people around them. It also describes how these students experience the career counseling they received for the election. This has been the purpose of the study and was examined through qualitative method and interviews with five young people aged 15 to 21 years with severe visual impairment or blindness. The results and conclusion is that these young people are greatly affected by their parents in choice of upper secondary school and that the school?s attitude to the pupil has a major impact on whether the pupil chooses the school.

This thesis analyses the literature debate in the overlooked Swedish magazine Samtid och Framtid 1944?1949. The magazine was first published at the end of World War II on the initiative of publisher Johan Hansson. After an interesting start, the terms of the debate in the magazine were changed after a power struggle on the editorial level. Thus, the magazine never became the influential arena for literary discussions that it first had potential of becoming.

I have investigated the interaction between man and environment, between my inner reality and a physical place, using a camera as my primary tool. What conceptions do I have and how do they affect how I relate to the outer world? I am not a passive receiver of the surrounding world. Instead I actively (but usually unconsciously) choose what to take in and how I experience it. If we as landscape architects do not reflect upon our conceptions, they will unconsciously affect our decisions. Only when we accept our experiences as subjective, can honest communication take place. By means of literature studies I have connected my own conceptions with different definitions of place: place as enclosure (location, space), place as inner meaning (genius loci) and place as action (the place-creating process).

The purpose of this paper is to give a view of how violence and victims has been portrayed in novels. I have chosen 6 books where the main character is a child who has been exposed to physical, mental and/or sexual violence. I have asked questions to the book and I have tried to find patterns in the child's strategy to cope with violence and how the violence is described. I have also written two chapters about earlier studies of this field and theoretical standpoints. The main perspective I present is the salutogenese perspective and how people create meaningfulness in their lives.The children in the books have different ways to handle their situations.

So called honour based violence is a present problem in Sweden. Although recently there has been a steadily growing political and academic awareness around so called honour based violence, there are still problems in the face to face meeting with the victims. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of these victims. The empirical material is based on five young women's stories about growing up in a context of 'honour' and their experiences from breaking up from this context.  My ambition is letting these stories be heard and told as to lead to an increasing understanding of how these women experience themselves and their surrounding society. The purpose of this dissertation is to illustrate how young women interpret their self in the light of a separation from their families.

This project report describes a supplement for character creation in a tabletop role-playing game ?Dragons and Demons." The purpose of this project is to improve the character creation for the players? trough the narrative elements such as character?s background story. The applied qualitative methods such as a test panel and a questionnaire were conducted for the evaluation of theories used during character creation and to get feedback on the supplement?s creative value for the players. The aim of the questionnaire was to see how the method for the character creation differs from the regular way of making a character for a tabletop role-playing game and if this idea improves user experience during the tabletop role-playing game.The results of the evaluation are based on answers from novice and experienced players, and conclude that the additional background story creates an insight into the character's past, which makes it easier for novice players to get quick started with character creation.

The purpose of this study is to show how the Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet andDagens Nyheter reported on and described Dag Hammarskjöld as a man and a symbolat the time of his death in 1961. The method for the research has been a qualitativethematic analysis of the content in the articles published from the date ofHammarskjöld´s death to the day after the funeral. The study has been based on theoriesabout newspapers roles in the construction of imagined communities, the use of mythsand the objectifying of abstract ideas in news texts.I have found that the investigated newspapers described Dag Hammarskjöld assynonymous with the United Nations, the world peace and a hope for the future. He wasalso described as a link between the present and the past in the Swedish history at thesame time as he was described as a man of the people. He was representing?Swedishness? in an international context and the cosmopolitan.