According to many scholars America's soft power is in decline, a power resource whose importance has been increasing in world politics. This makes it interesting to examine if there is a difference between how Democratic and Republican administrations wield their soft power.This thesis is a Hypothesis-testing study and the purpose is to test the hypothesis that Democratic administrations, to a greater extent than Republican, can create, utilize and defend soft power. My thesis is based on Joseph Nye's theory of soft power and the focus of this study is the aspects of the foreign policy resources. In order to measure this concept I have made my own operationalization where five different indicators serve as my guidance. I use the method of least likely-cases to select and motivate the administrations being tested, which gives me a comparative study of the Democratic administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton and the Republican administration of George H.

Objective: The study will investigate whether cash liquidity have a negative affect on profitability and share value of companies, listed on Nasdaq OMX Stockholm 2008-2011. Part of the purpose is also to show if the industry risk is of importance for treasury management of these companies.Method: The methodology for the study is key analysis through hypothesis testing and regression analysisConclusion: The liquidity ratio affects profitability in a negative direction on the entire sample. No other conclusion can be drawn..

The aim with this thesis is to investigate two different methods used to test usability on web-sites to determine the advantages and disadvantages of two methods and compare the results. The two selected methods are the think aloud method and asynchronous remote method. Re-mote usability testing has existed for more than ten years but the possibilities with this meth-od needs to be explored more.To achieve the purpose of this thesis a case study was conducted on an e-commerce site and for the online remote usability testing software was used.The results of this study show that think aloud usability testing encounter more issues with the website than the remote usability testing..

Question:"Does the market possess perfect information as the efficient market hypothesis says?""Is there any significant relationship between the abnormal stock return on the ex ? day and the dividend?" Purpose: The purpose of this study is to enlighten and find understanding about stock return versus dividend on the ex ? day and try to figure out if abnormal returns occur on the portfolio during dividends.Methodology:The study was based in a quantitative nature and was derived with an event study and a hypothesis testing. The authors investigated the thirty most traded shares on the Stockholm stock exchange during a period of five years (2005 ? 2009). They were analyzed during a total of nine days; the estimation window was set to sixty days.

The purpose of this thesis was to create a saw pattern program for the sawmill industry. I have chosen to focus on the module that describes the shrinking on the wood. There are several theories about how the wood deforms by shrinking. Several hypotheses were simulated in the program and after testing them I decided to use only one of them (hypothesis C). The program is written in Visual Basic .NET and I choused that program language because it is easy to do changes in the layout. Another great advantage in Visual .Net is that you can mix different languages in the same program.

The actual project presents the development of a testing rig for a steam engine. A short overviewabout the development of steam engines is presented, until arriving to the development of thepresent engine, which will require to be tested in different ways.The testing rig studied on this project (based on a Lanchester engine) will be used to testdifferent materials and layouts for the group Piston-Cylinder.The engine is a high performance steam power engine, which is going to have a highpower/dimensions ratio, what will lead to require high performance components and materials.An introduction to the testing rig is presented, and the entire design project is done in order toreplace the disappeared documentation of the current testing rig, built on the 1970?s. Also somemodifications done in the original testing rig are presented, as well as some detected problemsand their possible solutions..

Unit testing is a type of testing technique which is becoming quite fashionable to the developers and companies that are in the business of creating and managing software. Alas there are seldom any concrete data to support the positive claims of the authors in unit testing methodology books. These claims are instead based on empirical studies and the experience of the authors. The problem that arises from this situation is that it becomes problematic for managers and also the developers themselves to convince both customers and their own management to use this type of testing as there is no exact return of investment model. This essay examines this problem from two points, the first point is from the literature itself and interviews conducted with a number of developers at a software company located in Umea, Sweden.

This study aims to measure the effect of accounting conservatism and to identify thebusiness activities causing firms to undervalue owners? equity. To estimateaccounting conservatism, we have followed the hypothesis that no firm over time cangenerate a return greater than its cost of equity, i.e. CAPM. Thus, if a firm in factgenerates an excess return over time, we assume that the excess return is an estimateof accounting conservatism within that firm.The hypothesis originates from the corporate valuation model ?Economic ValueAdded®? which tries to adjust for accounting bias.

The aim of this study is to get a deeper understanding about user tests as well as answer the question about if testing for users is necessary at all times. I've done a comparison between what the literature says, and what a company says, about testing. The tests that's been in focus in this study is prototyping and card sorting tests. Prototyping aims to give the developer feedback about the design and check if there are any obvious problems with the design. A card sorting test can be used to get input about how information architecture should be constructed.

The market-leading wage and PA-.system for the Swedish public sector Palasso is developed in Karlstad. In order to achieve the highest quality of code , the developing team behind Palasso has been conducting extensive testing. Testing is done to ensure that the software does what it should do. However, the testing has been done at a high level. In order to continue to evolve, the group that develops Palasso has started to look at the new development methods that have become popular in the computer industry in recent years.

Banks have been some of the biggest operators on the market of business customers financing. When the Swedish Förmånsrättslagen was changed 2004 the banks became more restrictive to allow traditional bank loans. The change made it more difficult for customers to get their loans granted. For that reason customers had to find other forms of financing. Factoring is an alternative that means companies can mortage/sell their claim on customers to finance companies.

Banks have been some of the biggest operators on the market of business customers financing. When the Swedish Förmånsrättslagen was changed 2004 the banks became more restrictive to allow traditional bank loans. The change made it more difficult for customers to get their loans granted. For that reason customers had to find other forms of financing. Factoring is an alternative that means companies can mortage/sell their claim on customers to finance companies.

Testing has always been an important task in the scope of software quality. Though it has never been as much appreciated within the management of the organisations as the software development has. However testing is becoming more attractive within organisations because it becomes more evident how much money working systems saves in contrast to defect ones. A tester often use testing tools to simplify the work progress. There are a lot of tools nowadays but not many evaluating models which helps the tester to know which one to recommend.

WebGL is a standard for drawing graphics in a web browser. Currently it isn?t widely understood how consistently WebGL performs across a majority of the de- vices that support it. Determining if an image looks correct to a human observer is an interesting problem. The solution for this is useful when developing WebGL applications, since a developer could make better informed decisions during de- velopment.

Vacuum box leak testing is, because of geometrical problems, not always possible andtherefore an alternate test method with dye penetrant is used. DEKRA Industrial has identifieda need for quality assurance of the method and development of a written procedure withguidelines that lead to more uniform ways of testing.A literature study was done to get a general overview of nondestructive testing (NDT) and tosee how the method is used in different applications. European and American standards werestudied. Analytical and numerical solutions, involving flow simulation, were deemed to berather difficult and beyond the scoop of this project. Thus the problems had to be solved byusing experimental methods.