Background: Knowledge of customer needs is a key factor in companies? struggle to develop successful products. Several studies illustrate that the main reason for failure in product development is lack of customer understanding. Lately considerable changes have occurred. Large-scale mass production is continuously being replaced by customer orientation, especially in the high technological market.

The cost of transportation has strongly increased in the recent years, transportations which are a major part for the construction companies. Skanska Asphalt which is a part of Skanska Sverige AB has noticed that there are significant cost savings to be made with the purchasing of transports. The transports in this case is about asphalt, where the costs are about 10% of the outsourcing business turnover. The purpose of this thesis is to study the working practice that Skanska Asphalt are using today in controlling and time-writing, for the asphalt transportations. Resulting in recommendations on how to improve the working practice at Skanska Asphalt.This study was conducted with the help of a number of interviews with Skanska?s employees and with suppliers of transportation to describe the practices which are being used in during the asphalt transportation.

This essay deals with the principle of surprise warfare and its development as well as the adaptation of military action that had to be made to surprise the opponent in the modern era.The concept of surprise is divided into its components in order to clarify what is required to implement a surprising maneuver, to understand the complex concept and form a theoretical framework for gathering facts in the case study.Development and adaption are demonstrated by a comparative case study where Pearl Harbor illustrates an example of historical surprise and Operation Desert Storm illustrates a modern surprise. The product will then be analyzed in order to detect the development and how military conduct is forced to adapt in order to carry out a surprising maneuver. The results shows that the military action of performing a surprise attack has had a major development and is now carried out in a different stage of the attack..

Chinese Remainder Theorem is used to solving problems in computing, coding and cryptography. In computing we can compute with shorter numbers instead of large numbers and this will make the computing-process faster and easier. In coding it can be used for error-searching and error-regulating.Cryptography means that we can send a coded message and that no one will be able to read it without the decode-key which is based on prim-numbers. I am writing about the history of mathematics and how the number- and decimal number-system is used in Babylon, Egypt, Greece and in China. Abacus was a very important aid to calculate advanced mathematical problems.

This thesis focuses on the testing activities at the stages of development and change regardingintegration brokers. The study aimed to examine the overall challenges that exist regarding thetesting activities within this context, and the thoughts towards the development method testdrivendevelopment (TDD). TDD emphasizes high level of test coverage and where the testprocess is well integrated with the development process. To seek answers to our question weapplied qualitative interviews with companies and respondents to try to understand the globalchallenges that are related to this work and processes. The main conclusions presented in thisstudy is that the overall challenges are involving and educating project participants in the testingprocess activities and the contributory effect test have on the end product.

The aim of the present study was to examine students' text comprehension in grades 4 and 6. Participants were 61 students without documented or suspected reading and writing difficulties, in grades 4 and 6. The focus was on texts designed by Bishop and Adams (1992), containing two types of questions: literal and inference questions, and three different ways of presenting the text; listening, silent reading and silent reading with the text available when responding to the questions. The texts have been previously used in research and as a tool for clinical, qualitative estimate of reading comprehension in speech and language pathologists? assessments.

ABSTRACT System development has become more and more concentrated on development for the Web and this has resulted in larger target groups. It will most surely continue to be so considering that the Web will be the infrastructure of business and services in the future. A big target group involves that the owner of a system can earn a lot of money from the paying users, but that assumes that the system can meet user needs. If a system on the Web does not satisfy the user?s demands then they will use the competitor?s system instead because it is only a mouse-click away.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how social procurement can be a further development of public-private partnership. This is done with interviews and a case study of the social procurement Mitt Gröna Kvarter and its labor effort Boendebyggarna. The theoretical framework used in the thesis consists of public-private partnership and corporate social responsibility. It tries to answer the following questions:What does this social procurement mean by the concept of public-private partnership?What does this social procurement mean for the participants involved?How can social procurement be seen as a further development of public-private partnership?The thesis uses the theory development around the concepts of public-private partnership and corporate social responsibility and shows that social procurement does indeed have similarities to public-private partnership and could very well be a further development of it..

For a long period of time there have been discussions about the need to modernize, to keep up with the changes in our society. The schools as a result have to keep up and adapt in order for the education to be up-to-date. This includes the technological developments. Many steps have been taken and mighty sums have been invested in order to keep up the pace ? but are there any consequences from these kinds of investments? In this report I?m going to take a closer look on a recent addition to this phenomenon that were installed by means of a top-down approach and study the teachers and how they have adapted and view the change in their environment ? namely the newly installed interactive writing-boards.The questions I will study include how the teachers express their view about the installation of the interactive writing-boards.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine literature on current media events. We see a close relationship between this literature and the media society where we relate Manuel Castells theory of the network society. In this thesis we have chosen books which give different views on three major media events in Sweden: 1 the assassination of Anna Lindh, the former Swedish Minister for foreign Affairs; 2 the Knutby murder and; 3 the Tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia. These books combine fact and fiction in their writing which in media science is called faction. This form of writing has similarities to genres like new journalism and documentarism and can be problematic for the reader in terms of genre expectations because of the mix of fact and fiction.

My analysis consists of an in-depth study of the experience of a group of development programme participants who were exposed to the use of art and artistic work in organisation and leadership development, resulting in positive effects. My starting point is creativity as a concept according to paediatrician and psychoanalyst DW Winnicott who stresses how important playing and creativity is for us, even as an adult, for us to utilise our full potential. He believes that we have a psychological space ? a crossover area ? where the outer, objective reality and the inner, subjective reality meet. Playing, creative development and experiences occur in this space.

My analysis consists of an in-depth study of the experience of a group of development programme participants who were exposed to the use of art and artistic work in organisation and leadership development, resulting in positive effects. My starting point is creativity as a concept according to paediatrician and psychoanalyst DW Winnicott who stresses how important playing and creativity is for us, even as an adult, for us to utilise our full potential. He believes that we have a psychological space ? a crossover area ? where the outer, objective reality and the inner, subjective reality meet. Playing, creative development and experiences occur in this space.

Testing and analysis of measurement data is a major part of the workday for development engineers within the section Fluid and Emission Treatment to assure the quality of products developed by Scania CV. The ineluctable variation and therefore uncertainty of results can be quantified and discussed with the use of statistical methods.The overall objective of this study is to examine how the competence of development engineers can be improved within the area of statistics. This has been done by relating the concept of competence with the use of statistical methods to analyse experimental data and by investigating which factors that influence the competence of the engineers. Observations of the daily operations, interviews and a focus group with development engineers and a workshop with management personnel, has been used as research methods in this study.The results show that the desired competence, from the perspective of the individual, consists of knowledge, motivation and support. It is important that none of these parts are neglected when the competence of engineers is to be strengthened.

This study aims mainly to investigate what kind of role the public library plays in the regional and local development. The aim is also to investigate how the public library can strengthen the role as a factor of regional and local development. To explore the subject, the study is focused on the Swedish region of Västra Götaland. Three officials along with two policy documents, are included in the study as representatives of the region. Four public library managers are also interviewed but as representatives of the local perspective.

This essay is a study that takes interest in technical and technological change essential to philosophy of science. What is shown is the importance of an active attitude towards this change, by the articulation of the question: Does technical development lead to new ontological questions for science? - and by the answer that such questions do appear.It is clear that passive assumptions in this matter might prohibit science in the proceeding search for truth.By examples of ways in which technical development helps and challenges science, it is concluded that scrutiny of the relationship between technical development and ontological suppositions and hypotheses within science is well motivated..