| 1. |
- Persson, Urban, 1961-
(author)
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Realise the Potential! : Cost Effective and Energy Efficient District Heating in European Urban Areas
- 2011
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The Member States of EU27 need to accelerate the integration of energy efficient technology solutions to reach the 20% energy efficiency target set for 2020. At current pace, projections indicate that only half of expected primary energy reductions will be reached. To meet the energy demands of growing populations and a vibrant economy, while simultaneously reducing primary energy supplies, the European continent faces a new kind of challenge never previously encountered. The identification and application of feasible, competitive, and comprehensive solutions to this problem are of highest priority if the remaining gap is to be closed in time. How is this multi-dimensional and complex dilemma to be dissolved? In this work, expanded use of district heating technology is conceived as a possible solution to substantially reduce future primary energy demands in Europe. By extended recovery and utilisation of vast volumes of currently disregarded excess heat from energy and industry sector fuel transformation processes, district heating systems and combined generation of heat and power can improve the general efficiency of the European energy balance. To investigate the possible range of this solution, this thesis introduces a set of methodologies, theoretical concepts, and model tools, by which a plausible future excess heat utilisation potential, by means of district heat deliveries to residential and service sectors, is estimated. At current conditions and compared to current levels, this potential correspond to a threefold expansion possibility for directly feasible district heating systems in European urban areas and a fourfold increase of European excess heat utilisation.
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| 2. |
- Karlsson, Göran, 1954-
(author)
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Learning science by digital technology : Students’ understanding of computer animated learning material
- 2010
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Digital learning material is associated with grand expectations among educational policy makers. Several attempts to introduce this new technology with the purpose of enhancing learning have been made in recent years. The schooling system has, however, been rather hesitant and not so ready to adopt this kind of teaching aid. The aim of this thesis is to probe into students‘ practical problems of understanding computerised science learning material involving animated sequences and educational text. For the purpose of this investigation an application describing the different events in the carbon cycle was developed. Two studies present analyses of students‘ reasoning and actions when working collaboratively with the task of making a written account of what is illustrated in the learning material. Both studies present examples of identified phenomena that were observed in more extensive empirical materials. The data is represented by video recordings of students‘ interaction with each other and the interface. Results from the studies reveal students‘ propensity for concentrating their attention to prominent characteristics of the animated display and to describe the animated models in correspondence to their resemblance of objects and occurrences in everyday life. In study II it is revealed how students, when constructing a written report of the described events, derive noun phrases from attentionally detected objects in the animation and from the educational text. In their effort to express themselves in colloquial language, when preparing their report, they deliberately select verbs that differ from the educational text. These courses of action together, contribute to give the report on what happens in the process a non-scientific explanation. It is concluded that students, lacking definite access to the relevant subject matter knowledge, consequently, cannot judge whether they have given an approvable account or not. Findings from the studies show that the school context with its explicit stipulations of assignments and implicit request for expressing oneself in your own words frames the learning and creates conditions for how the technology is used and understood. The results indicate that animated models of scientific concepts risk inferring misconceptions if students are left on their own with interpreting information from the learning material. Despite the detected problems of students‘ interpretations of the described phenomena, the results indicate that animated learning material can proffer an exploitable resource in science education. Such a prospect is the ability of animation to engage students in discussions of the subject and to make them recognise otherwise unobservable phenomena.
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| 3. |
- Aagerup, Ulf, 1969-
(author)
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The Impact of User Weight on Brands and Business Practices in Mass Market Fashion
- 2010
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Overweight people claim to be mistreated by the fashion industry. If they were, it would be in line with branding theory supporting the idea of rejecting fat consumers to improve user imagery for fashion brands. However, fashion companies do not confess to such practices.To shed some light on the subject, I have conducted two studies.The first attempts to illustrate what effect, if any, user imagery has on fashion brands. It is an experiment designed to show how the weight of users affects consumers’ perceptions of mass market fashion brands. The findings show that consumers’ impressions of mass market fashion brands are significantly affected by the weight of its users. The effect of male user imagery is ambiguous. For women’s fashion on the other hand, slender users are to be preferred.In the second study I examine what effects these effects have on assortments. I compare the sizes of mass market clothes to the body sizes of the population. No evidence of discrimination of overweight or obese consumers was found -quite the contrary.The reasons for these unexpected findings may be explained by the requirements a brand must fulfil to make management of the customer base for user imagery purposes viable. The brand must be sensitive to user imagery; a requirement that mass market fashion fulfils. However, it must also be feasible for a company to exclude customers, and while garment sizes can be restricted to achieve this, the high volume sales strategy of mass market fashion apparently cannot.
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| 4. |
- Berggren, Eva, 1955-
(author)
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Student Entrepreneurs : The Influence of University, Entrepreneurship Education and Research
- 2009
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This licentiate thesis deals with the questions if and how entrepreneurship education and access to research at university stimulate student start-ups. The phenomenon of student entrepreneurs is approached in three empirical studies. In the first study mail questionnaires were sent out to former entrepreneurship students at three universities in Sweden, in order to find out if the students’ entrepreneurial behaviour was influenced by education. The second study explores differences in communication skills and the handling of liabilities of newness between entrepreneurs with entrepreneurship education at university and/or previous start-up experience. Student entrepreneurs are compared with a control group of randomly chosen Swedish entrepreneurs. In the third study, the influence from university research on student entrepreneurship as well as direct and indirect regional effects are examined through interviews with university spin-offs around Halmstad University. Entrepreneurship education at university is found to influence entrepreneurial behaviour, to increase the student’s awareness of business opportunities and to result in high start-up frequency early in life. The student entrepreneurs perceive fewer problems to handle some aspects of liability of newness as well as communicative skills in terms of openness and adaptation. Other-orientation is on the other hand supported by previous start-up experience. Hence, with experience from both entrepreneurship education and previous start-up, the students seem well prepared for future start-ups. The case study show multiple and long term indirect effects from student entrepreneurship in developing an entrepreneurial region. Established student entrepreneurs support less experienced student entrepreneurs by linking them to supplementary resources. Students are found to shoulder an important role as academic entrepreneurs in interaction with other individuals connected to the university.
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| 5. |
- Blomkvist, Marita, 1959-
(author)
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Entreprenörers delaktighet i att producera redovisning
- 2004
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Entrepreneurs seem to be highly valuable for the firms in which they are involved. However, the knowledge of the role of accounting in a context of entrepreneurship is almost non-existent. Infact, literature in entrepreneurship says that the role of accounting is only about the past and therefore not of interest for the entrepreneur in exploiting opportunities. This paper reports the result of a qualitative study of five entrepreneurs and their involvement in the process of financial reporting. The study aimed to describe and analyse if and how entrepreneurs are involved in producing accounting information when the annual report were prepared. If the entrepreneurs were involved, the purpose was also to explain why the entrepreneurs were involved in the process. In purpose to find entrepreneurs the owner-managers of five small growing companies were asked to participate in semi-structured interviews during which their involvement to produce accounting where discussed. The respondents were also presented the adjustments, the final step in the recording process, and the annual report, in order to assess their involvement and to focus on how the entrepreneurs as producers of annual reports reflect and act in relation to other actors and to the process on the reporting. The study found that the entrepreneurs were certainly involved in producing the annual report. The analysis reveals that the reports were carefully fabricated and consciously managed by the entrepreneurs in the study. The entrepreneurs where involved in the process when certain values of the assets were established and they wrote the directors annual report. The study concludes that it appears to be important for entrepreneurs in small growing firms to discuss and produce accounting together with other actors, primarily the accountant, to improve their understanding and to identify how the audience of the annual reports may read and interpret the annual reports.
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| 6. |
- Deraz, Hossam, 1971-
(author)
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Assessments of Advertisements on Social Networking Sites
- 2016
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Advertisements (ads) in social networking sites (SNSAs) have been considered by many researchers as a crucial area of research. However, the scope of the existing studies on consumers’ assessments of SNSAs has been very limited. Most of the existing studies on assessing SNSAs have focused on Ducoffe’s (1996) model with its three variables, and they have ignored other related variables like the credibility value and interactivity value of the advertisement, which are more logically related to SNSAs than the traditional ads. Moreover, most of these studies have been skewed towards younger users and have ignored the social networking site (SNS) users from other age categories. Finally, previous studies about the assessment of SNSAs have depended on data collected from users of popular SNSs and ignored active users from the brand communities (fans of brands on SNSs). In this thesis, the present author has emphasized these three points as the major gaps in the literature about assessing SNSAs. Moreover, to deepen our understanding of how SNS users assess SNSAs this study presents the research findings of three published papers with three different purposes and with different levels of analysis.The first article aimed to extend Ducoffe’s (1996) model – which was used in the previous literature in assessing SNSAs – by considering the ads’ credibility and interactivity values in addition to Ducoffe’s (1996) three variables of information value, entertainment value, and irritation value. A multiple regression analysis was used to test the modified model, and based on the regression analysis of testing the five predictors, the model without the irritation value had the best coefficient of determination (R2). Moreover, coefficient analysis to test the given hypothesis and to determine the coefficients of the predictors was used. According to this survey study, the four primary variables that predicted the consumers’ assessment of the SNSAs were the information value, entertainment value, credibility value, and interactivity value. As perceived by the SNS users, the interactivity value was the strongest among the four predictors.Based on the unexpected result ofthe irritation value of the first paper, the second paper focused on testing the extended model of the assessments of SNSAs as perceived by a different research population, in this case, brand communities’ consumers (BCCs). Based on the regression analysis of testing the five predictors, the model with the five predictors had the best coefficient of determination (R2). The coefficient analysis was used to test the given hypothesis, to determine the coefficients of the five predictors, and to form a construct equation for assessing the SNSAs. Based on this survey study, the four variables with significant positive effects on the consumers’ assessment of SNSAs were informativeness, entertainment value, credibility value, and interactivity value, while the fifth dimension (irritation value) had a significant negative coefficient on the consumers’ assessment of SNSAs. Moreover, that study provided a deeper understanding of how the BCCs assess SNSAs, and it contributed to identifying the main characteristics ofthe BCCs on an SNS.The third paper focused on exploring the effect of national culture on the consumers’ assessment of SNSAs. The cultural features of the respondents in that study gave additional evidence about how a nation’s cultural characteristics can influence the consumers’ assessment of SNSAs. This study helped to identify how SNS users from Egypt, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom assess SNSAs. In this study, one-way analysis of variance with post hoc tests was used to compare the assessments of the three nations. Based on the empirical findings of this survey study, the three groups had significant difference F-ratios for their perception of four of the five variables for assessing SNSAs. Their perceptions of the entertainment value did not significantly differ between the three groups while the interactivity value had the strongest F-ratio.The overall purpose of this study was to deepen our understanding of how SNS users are assessing SNSAs in different settings by considering SNS users, BCCs, and others from various nations. All of the studies presented here have focused on variables for assessing the ads that have been used by other researchers in different research contexts.
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| 7. |
- Ebbesson, Esbjörn, 1979-
(author)
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Engaging in Urban Living Lab Co-design
- 2023
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Urban Living Labs (ULL) have become a common way to address wicked design challenges within the future mobility, and smart city context. The move toward ULL is part of a paradigm shift away from focusing purely on the IT-artifact, innovation, and user-centeredness toward focusing on the urban context and the construction of a place as a social context rather than implementation of a product or service in isolation.This shift requires diverse sets of stakeholders with different backgrounds to come together to address wicked design challenges collaboratively tied to specific urban contexts. However, the change toward ULLs also brings unique qualities to collaborations. For example, it is often hard to generalize or transfer findings from one ULL to another. In addition, it requires new modes of thinking and acting concerning the value of bottomup approaches anchored in context.Therefore, a core challenge for impactful work in an ULL, is to find ways to retain stakeholders’ local engagements and ways of doing collaborative design beyond the ULL project to create ripple effects. This thesis tweaks this challenge into a question that aims at investigating what a locally contextualized ULL set-up means for the involved stakeholders from a participatory perspective by asking: How can we understand engagement in ULL co-design, and how can this engagement be retained beyond the Living Lab? The question was explored through a design ethnographic approach in a ULL, where citizens, city representatives, car manufacturers, and representatives from public transport worked together to explore future mobility services. The research question is addressed through a description of how stakeholder engagement played out in the ULL along with an analysis of the dynamics of co-design as a co-appropriation process within the ULL, which enabled stakeholders to engage in a social context across sectors and disciplines to co-learn ways of appropriating findings from the ULL as an explorative way of working. Co-appropriation is described as a process moving from acclimatization towards cogitation in co-design, with patching as an activity that supports the process. The thesis also elaborates on how findings from a ULL can be retained and scaled beyond the Living Lab through transformation games, as an example of a patching activity.
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| 8. |
- Elm, Annika, 1958-
(author)
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Interaktion och naturvetenskap i en förskola och en förskoleklass
- 2008
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Syftet med det här forskningsarbetet är att öka förståelsen av hur mönster i interaktionsprocesser påverkar barn och lärare i samtidiga skeenden. Studien syftar även till att öka insikten om hur naturvetenskapligt innehåll väljs ut och gestaltas i samspel mellan såväl barn som barn och lärare i en förskola och förskoleklass. De övergripande forskningsfrågorna är: Vilka interaktionsmönster dominerar när naturvetenskapligt innehåll behandlas? Vilka handlingar påverkar händelseförloppet? Hur väljs det naturvetenskapliga innehållet ut? Hur gestaltas det naturvetenskapliga innehållet i de specifika situationer som studeras? Därutöver syftar arbetet till att genomföra en metodstudie i avsikt att diskutera metodologiska val och analysprocessen. Teoretiska utgångspunkter tar avstamp ur konstruktionistisk teori med förankring i sociologisk interaktionsforskning. Undersökningen genomfördes i en förskola och en förskoleklass. På en förskoleavdelning medverkade en lärare och sex barn i åldern två till fyra år. I förskoleklassen medverkade två lärare och fjorton barn i åldern fem till sex år. De olika situationerna har dokumenterats med hjälp av videokamera och därefter analyserats i ett videoanalysprogram. Begreppen språkbruk och naturvetenskapliga aktiviteter har använts som raster för att strukturera och systematisera materialet. Resultatet visar att naturvetenskapliga aktiviteter som utgörs av observation och undersökning samt frågor som behandlar djur och natur dominerar i de specifika sammanhang som studerats. Interaktionsmönstret visar på konstellationer av barn som återkommande bildar team i olika situationer. Lärarna och vissa team avbarn väljer och styr därmed hur de innehållsliga aspekterna gestaltas i de naturvetenskapliga aktiviteterna.
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| 9. |
- Fabricius, Victor, 1989-
(author)
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Exploring Road Traffic Interactions Between Highly Automated Vehicles and Vulnerable Road Users
- 2023
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Understandings of road traffic interactions are largely based on human-human interactions. However, the development of vehicles controlled by highly auto- mated driving systems (ADS) would introduce a radically novel type of road user. This compilation thesis explores encounters between these “autonomous vehicles” (AVs) and human vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians and cyclists. The included publications are connected to three research questions. First, empirical studies are reviewed to highlight existing interactive be- haviors and communication cues. This is followed by a methodological question of how to investigate AV-VRU interactions. Finally, VRUs’ experiences from initial experiments on AV crossing encounters are presented.While road user trajectories and kinematic behaviors are viewed as primary mechanisms to facilitate traffic interactions, they might also be influenced by cues such as appearances, gestures, eye-gaze, and external human-machine interfaces (eHMI). Using the Wizard-of-Oz approach, we are able to explore VRU encounters with a seemingly highly automated vehicle. Compared to meeting an attentive driver, AV encounters resulted in a reported lower willingness to cross, lower perceived safety, and less calm emotional state, indicating that the absence of driver-centric cues could lead to interaction issues and impede acceptance of AVs. To further explore this, we included light-based eHMI to signal the driving mode and intent of the vehicle (e.g., intent to yield). Future research should continue to investigate how AVs may co-exist with human road users focusing on aspects such as behavioral adaptations, research methodologies, and the role of various eHMI.
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| 10. |
- German Millberg, Lena, 1958-
(author)
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Akademisering av specialistsjuksköterskans utbildning i Sverige : Spänningsförhållanden med anledning av utbildningsreform i enlighet med Bologna
- 2012
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Licentiatavhandlingens övergripande syfte var att studera konsekvenser av ökad akademisering och akademiskt lärande inom Svensk specialist-sjuksköterskeutbildning efter genomförande av ny utbildningsreform enligt Bologna.Bakgrund: Specialistsjuksköterskor förväntas i dagens hälso– och sjukvård att kunna bedriva en patientsäker och evidensbaserad vård, vilket kräver akademisk kompetens. Utbildningen till specialistsjuksköterska fördes i och med Bolognaprocessens införande i Sverige 2007 till avancerad utbildningsnivå. Både yrkesexamen och akademisk examen (magisterexamen) skulle inkluderas och integreras i samma utbildning. Detta medförde en förändring från en ämnesinriktad (samlingskodsinriktad) läroplan till en läroplan som syftar till att integrera ämnen (integrationskodsinriktad). Förutom ämnesintegrering skulle yrkesspecifika mål integreras med akademiska mål.Metod: Artikel I genomfördes i form av ett didaktiskt aktionsforskningsprojekt som pågick under 2½ år. En projektledningsgrupp (n=15-18) från fem lärosäten bildades. Denna grupp har aktivt deltagit i hela aktionsforskningsprocessen och vid projektmöten. Vid varje lärosäte utsågs en projektansvarig som ansvarade för den lokala aktionsforskningsprocessen. Dessa personer samlande in data i form av kursplaner, utbildningsplaner, studiehandledningar, minnesanteckningar från lärarmöten och möten med vårdverksamheter samt minnesanteckningar från forskargruppensmöten. Analys har gjorts med hjälp av konstant komparativ analysmetod. I artikel II användes konstruktivistisk Grounded Theory för att samla in och analysera data. Datainsamlingen påbörjades utifrån specialistsjuksköterskestudenters svar på en enkäts öppna fråga (n=120) i samband med utbildningens avslutning 2009 och 2010. Enkätsvaren reste frågor om specialistsjuksköterskans akademiska lärande. För att inhämta en djupare förståelse genomfördes intervjuer med specialistsjuksköterskor (n=12) som yrkesarbetat mellan 5 och 12 månader efter sin examen. Intervjuerna genomfördes från juni till oktober 2011. Avslutningsvis jämfördes svaren på den öppna enkätfrågan med analysen av intervjuerna.Resultat: Vid utbildningsreformens införande fanns pedagogiska motsättningar och didaktiska svårigheter som gav upphov till spänningsförhållanden mellan vårdutveckling, forskning, yrkesspecifika mål och akademiska mål. Spänningsförhållanden framkom också när specialistsjuksköterskorna inte erfor att deras akademiska kompetens tillvaratogs och värderades i vårdverksamheten. När stöd inte fanns för akademiskt lärande uppkom villrådighet och specialistsjuksköterskorna blev ambivalenta över om akademiskt lärande var meningsfullt. För att främja meningsfullt akademiskt lärande framhåller deltagarna betydelsen av samverkan och gemensamma arenor mellan lärosäten och vårdverksamhet där nyttoaspekten med akademiskt lärande tydliggörs. De spänningsförhållanden som framkommer var av både positiv och negativ karaktär.
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