| 1. |
- Gu, Limin
(författare)
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Chinese Daycare in Cultural Change
- 1996
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Ingår i: Tidskrift för lärarutbildning och forskning. - Umeå : Dept. of Education, Umeå Univ.. - 1404-7659. ; 3:4, s. 17-44
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 2. |
- Hilletofth, Per
(författare)
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Differentiated Supply Chain Strategy - Response to a fragmented and complex market
- 2008
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Supply Chain Management (SCM) aims to synchronize the requirements of customers with the flow of materials from suppliers, in order to satisfy the needs of the customers as costefficiently as possible. This has become a difficult task due to several developments in the market, such as increased competition, increased demand variability, increased product variety, increased amounts of customer-specific products, and shortening product life cycles. These developments, due in part to globalization, provide additional management challenges and new practices in which supply chains are designed and managed, and can eventually make the difference between companies staying competitive or not. The overall purpose of this thesis is to investigate how complexity and globalization affect supply chain design and operations. The main emphasis has been on producing descriptive results of the studied phenomenon. This research involves five case studies covering international transportation structures used in SCM, the selection of supply chain strategies in different business environments, and the role of information systems and technology in achieving the objective of SCM. In this thesis it has been concluded that in order to cope with increasingly complex and fragmented markets companies need more differentiated transportation structures, modes, and supply chains. Furthermore, to effectively manage this, information systems and advanced decision support tools are required. In addition, this thesis has shown that current taxonomies for supply chain strategy selection are too simplistic due to three major problems: they mediate that it is a question of choosing one supply chain strategy for the entire company,they regard markets as rather homogeneous, and they link each supply chain strategy to a specific business context. Instead, it has been concluded that in order to better satisfy differing customer needs in various markets it is increasingly necessary to develop a differentiated supply chain strategy by utilizing different manufacturing and delivery strategies concurrently. Thus, a need exists for new taxonomies for supply chain strategy selection which recognize that the markets are becoming more fragmented and complex, that customer preferences differ across customer/market segments, and that there is a need to differentiate the supply chain strategy. This thesis also highlights several requirements of a differentiated supply chain strategy. Firstly, extended supply chain collaboration is required, since a differentiated supply chain strategy will involve more supply chain partners than a traditional supply chain strategy. Secondly, there is a need for more transportation mode alternatives, particularly intermodal, both in supply and distribution operations, due to the fact that differentiation requires diversity. In this thesis, intermodal landbridge freight services are highlighted as one interesting avenue, which could potentially facilitate a more differentiated supply chain strategy. Thirdly, more integrated information systems are needed along with decision support tools. This study illustrates that agent based modeling appears to be an interesting method for developing realistic decision support tools in the context of complex supply chains. An interesting aspect for further research is to investigate how different manufacturing and delivery strategies can be used concurrently in international supply chains. Moreover, there are several requirements and opportunities of a differentiated supply chain strategy, and these have to be investigated further
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| 3. |
- Johansson, Helena, 1971-
(författare)
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Mathematical Reasoning in Physics Tests : Requirements, Relations, Dependence
- 2013
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- By analysing and expanding upon mathematical reasoning requirements in physics tests, this licentiate thesis aims to contribute to the research studying how students’ knowledge in mathematics influence their learning of physics. A sample of physics tests from the Swedish National Test Bank in Physics was used as data, together with information of upper secondary students’ scores and grades on the tests. First it was decided whether the tasks in the tests required mathematical reasoning at all and if they did, that reasoning was characterised. Further, the relation between students’ grades and mathematical reasoning requirements was examined. Another aim in this thesis is to try out if the Mantel-Haenszel procedure is an appropriate statistical method to answer questions about if there is a dependence between students’ success on different physics tasks requiring different kinds of mathematical reasoning. The results show that 75% of the tasks in the physics tests require mathematical reasoning and that it is impossible to pass six out of eight tests without mathematical reasoning. It is also revealed that it is uncommon that a student gets a higher grade than Pass without solving tasks that require the student to come up with not already familiar solutions. It is concluded that the Mantel-Haenszel procedure is sensitive to the number of students each teacher accounts for. If there are not too few students, the procedure can be used. The outcome indicates that there is a dependence between success on tasks requiring different kinds of reasoning. It is more likely that a student manages to solve a task that requires the produce of new reasoning if the student has solved a task that is familiar from before.
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Bergvall, Olof
(författare)
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Cohomology of the moduli space of curves of genus three with level two structure
- 2014
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this thesis we investigate the moduli space M3[2] of curves of genus 3 equipped with a symplectic level 2 structure. In particular, we are interested in the cohomology of this space. We obtain cohomological information by decomposing M3[2] into a disjoint union of two natural subspaces, Q[2] and H3[2], and then making S7- resp. S8-equivariantpoint counts of each of these spaces separately.
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| 6. |
- Blackman, Corey
(författare)
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Evaluation of a thermally driven heat pump for solar heating and cooling applications
- 2015
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Exploiting solar energy technology for both heating and cooling purposes has the potential of meeting an appreciable portion of the energy demand in buildings throughout the year. By developing an integrated, multi-purpose solar energy system, that can operate all twelve months of the year, a high utilisation factor can be achieved which translates to more economical systems. However, there are still some techno-economic barriers to the general commercialisation and market penetration of such technologies. These are associated with high system and installation costs, significant system complexity, and lack of knowledge of system implementation and expected performance. A sorption heat pump module that can be integrated directly into a solar thermal collector has thus been developed in order to tackle the aforementioned market barriers. This has been designed for the development of cost-effective pre-engineered solar energy system kits that can provide both heating and cooling.This thesis summarises the characterisation studies of the operation of individual sorption modules, sorption module integrated solar collectors and a full solar heating and cooling system employing sorption module integrated collectors. Key performance indicators for the individual sorption modules showed cooling delivery for 6 hours at an average power of 40 W and a temperature lift of 21°C. Upon integration of the sorption modules into a solar collector, measured solar radiation energy to cooling energy conversion efficiencies (solar cooling COP) were between 0.10 and 0.25 with average cooling powers between 90 and 200 W/m2 collector aperture area. Further investigations of the sorption module integrated collectors implementation in a full solar heating and cooling system yielded electrical cooling COP ranging from 1.7 to 12.6 with an average of 10.6 for the test period.Additionally, simulations were performed to determine system energy and cost saving potential for various system sizes over a full year of operation for a 140 m2 single-family dwelling located in Madrid, Spain. Simulations yielded an annual solar fraction of 42% and potential cost savings of €386 per annum for a solar heating and cooling installation employing 20m2 of sorption integrated collectors.
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| 7. |
- Broms, Loove
(författare)
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Sustainable Interactions : Studies in the Design of Energy Awareness Artefacts
- 2011
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis presents a collection of experimental designs that approach the problem of growing electricity consumption in homes. From the perspective of design, the intention has been to critically explore the design space of energy awareness artefacts to reinstate awareness of energy use in everyday practice. The design experiments were used as vehicles for thinking about the relationship between physical form, interaction, and social practice. The rationale behind the concepts was based on a small-scale ethnography, situated interviews, and design experience. Moreover, the thesis compares designer intention and actual user experiences of a prototype that was installed in nine homes in a residential area in Stockholm for three months. This was done in order to elicit tacit knowledge about how the concept was used in real-world domestic settings, to challenge everyday routines, and to enable both users and designers to critically reflect on artefacts and practices.From a design perspective, contributions include design approaches to communicating energy use: visualizations for showing relationships between behaviour and electricity consumption, shapes and forms to direct action, means for turning restrictions caused by energy conservation into central parts of the product experience, and ways to promote sustainable behaviour with positive driving forces based on user lifestyles.The general results indicate that inclusion is of great importance when designing energy awareness artefacts; all members of the household should be able to access, interact with, and reflect on their energy use. Therefore, design-related aspects such as placement and visibility, as well as how the artefact might affect the social interactions in the home, become central. Additionally, the thesis argues that these types of artefacts can potentially create awareness accompanied by negative results such as stress. A challenge for the designer is to create artefacts that communicate and direct energy use in ways that are attractive and can be accepted by all household members as a possible way of life.
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| 8. |
- Bågander, Linnea
(författare)
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Body of movement : (in)forming movement
- 2017
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In dance many choreographers uses neutral garments not to distract too much from the movement the ”natural” body performs. Still these garments paints the body with color, form, identity and movement qualities. The work exemplifies how the body can extend into materiality and through this it questions the borders of the body not only in form, which is usually the case in fashion design, but also in movement qualities as temporal form. Further it high lightens the importance of awareness of movement qualities in materials of dress as they express the form. The potential of dress in dance is explored in three chapters. For each of these, materials were chosen and arranged in order to provide an additional layer to the movement that the body naturally performs, allowing material to transform the body into various figures of movement. The first part introduces the use of dress in dance and how dress acts with the moving body. The second part explores how movement with the origin in the body can extend spatially and the last part focuses on the materials ability to interpret and materialize the movement. The result of this work suggest that dress has the potential in dance as both choreographic tool and movement quality of equal importance as the movement of a body in a dance performance. Further it intersects the aesthetics of dance, a temporal aesthetic, with the aesthetics of garments, as a form based aesthetic, as it suggests dress as temporal design, allowing dress to create a new body of movement.
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| 9. |
- Ekelin, Annelie
(författare)
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Working with the Fogbow : Design and Reconfiguration of services and Participation in E-Government
- 2003
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is about the metaphors of the rainbow and the fogbow, investigations and evaluations, public Internet monitors, writing women, reflections and discussions about politics, design and democracy. It is also about the ongoing re-structuring of participation in service design within the development of E-Government. The aim behind the drive towards E-Government is to modernise administration and make it more efficient. The transformation and modernisation of public services are proclaimed to bring about a change in services based on a 'citizen-centred approach.' In such a process, communication between citizens and public authorities should play an essential role. Themes such as accountability, accessibility and participation all form part of the reconfiguration and at the same time these themes is shaped by the transformation. The papers in this thesis discuss, in different ways, how this reconfiguration is enacted in practice. Theories and methodologies from feminist theories, participatory design and informatics, are used in order to develop broader and more complex understandings of ongoing development within E-Government. Introduction to the papers Paper I Everyday Dialogue and Design for Co-Operative Use: An Evaluation of the Public Internet Monitor Project Accessibility is a central issue in the achievement of democracy, i.e. with respect to the opportunity for and right to 'access' to new technology and information – an argument also used when justifying the Public Internet Monitor Project. 'Access' in this context refers not only to purely physical access to new technology and information, it is also about the opportunity to take part in community business on several different levels. The present sub-report presents the project and its background. The paper also discusses the way in which the Public Internet Monitor Project as a whole has contributed to the development of a social interface or contact surface between citizens and public authorities, as well as how it has stimulated processes of change within public administration and in contacts between public authorities and citizens. Among the questions raised during the evaluation are; how local networks and activities can be stimulated by the citizen monitor and how the user's ideas and experience can be utilised in local adaptations so that they become an essential part of a continuous development of services and technology. The paper also describes the linked chains of responsibility exemplified in the excerpts from the interviews. These also include final users as a means of creating a personalised service adapted to local praxis and user environments. The question is posed "is it possible to talk in terms of interactivity on several different levels, not only in the sense of transmitting information or communicating, but also as a means of creating a relation-based interactivity?" Paper II Reconfiguration of Citizenship: Rights and Duties in Development of Public Services This paper presents the case of the cleaner in the library and some examples of feedback failures. Access to information, technology, and to some degree, participation in development of new services, is a central issue in the prevailing eGovernment discourse. This vision also comprises the idea of the active, contributing citizen and considers the development of local public participation as a process of co-construction of citizenship and services engaging several actors on different levels. At the same time, access must be seen as a contemporaneous process of inclusion and exclusion, a defining and drawing up of the boundaries of a new electronically mediated membership, where access is becoming a prerequisite for activating citizenship, transforming "the right to have access" into a "duty to participate", not just for citizens but for the employees who must manage the reconfiguration of citizenship and relations. The foundations for participation, however, turn out to be relatively restricted in practice. The original title of the paper was: Co-Construction of Citizenship: Rights and duties in development of public services. Paper III Consulting the Citizens – Relationship-based Interaction in the Development of E-Government This paper investigates current practices for involving citizens in the development of web-based services in public administration and tries to track their motives. With respect to democratisation, I argue that there is a large potential in adopting participatory design methods for establishing relation-based interaction between administration and citizens. The paper presents an analysis of E-Government initiatives. More particularly it explores the discourse of the materials surrounding these initiatives, particularly with respect to value systems derived from the marketing perspective contra democratic values. It demonstrates that conventional images of democracy have only a background role to play in such efforts. Paper IV Mapping Out and Constructing Needs in the Development of Online Public Services This paper is based on a study concerning experiences of, access to and requests for public services on-line, within the RISI+ Project. The paper presents a pilot study of the setting up of public services in the local context of the county of Blekinge, in southeast Sweden. The study was conducted as a peer evaluation of a selection of methods, or types of needs analysis, used by different actors and producers of public services in order to gain a picture of various needs among users. One part of this study focuses on the views expressed by service providers about the dialogue between themselves and citizens on the provision of public services. This is compared with the practical use or, in some cases, lack of use, of explicit techniques, such as questionnaires, larger surveys and work carried out with the help of focus groups. A basic question is, 'what role does citizen involvement play in the analysis of needs and services and in the choice of design?'. Parts of this report were presented in a poster display at the NordiCHI 2000 conference, "Design versus design" in Stockholm in October 2000 and, in a different version, as a work-in-progress report at the PDC 2000 (Participatory Design) Conference "Bringing in more voices" , in New York in November. Paper V Making E-Government Happen : Everyday Co-Development of Services, Citizenship and Technology This paper describes the use of a metaphorical figure used in different contexts as part of a discussion of working relationships of the co-development of services, citizenship and technology change. The paper discusses the challenge of developing a supportive infrastructure for the ongoing local adaptation and development of public services as citizens use them. Developing supportive structures for co-operation in the design task involves incorporating ways of including the general public, mapping out networks, developing tailorable software and cultivating shop-floor management. If continuous joint co-development of services is made a central part of the co-development of services, citizenship and technology, this also blurs the boundaries between governmental and municipal authorities, private sector employees and other actors within, for example, the voluntary sector - but above all, continuous joint co-development blurs the boundary between citizens and local authorities. The citizens become key figures in the 'web of connections' that makes up the design, content and use of new technologies. In the discourse on participation in E-Government, few reflections are made concerning the basic issue of the democratic values that could be gained by early involvement of local employees and citizens in developmental work or technology-based changes. Making more deliberate use of participatory design methods for incorporating multi-perspectives in service design as well as technology production and use could be a way to stimulate a broader, more inclusive and sustainable participation in local development of E-Government. Paper VI Discourses and Cracks - A Case Study of Information Technology and Writing Women in a Regional Context This is the first of the papers I wrote, where empirical material from a local IT project is discussed and mirrored against the dominating discourses of information technology. Paper VI discusses information technology as a political and practical discourse, which is in part shaped by the repetition of an exalted rhetoric. This repetitive discursive model can be distinguished in global, regional and local contexts and reflects an optimistic belief in technology as an independent power that automatically furthers democratic development. The second part of the paper presents empirical material and experiences from the Women Writing on the Net-project (this was included in the framework of the DIALOGUE project, which was partially funded by ISPO/EC). The aim of the project was to create a virtual space for women on the Internet, and to explore the writing process in terms of aims, tool and method. The method of approach incorporates reflections and discussions about empowerment, democracy and representation of women. This contributed to a more complex understanding of the values of the predominant IT discourses, and revealed the "cracks" in, and possibilities of feminist redefinitions of, these values.
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| 10. |
- Ekengren, Jens, 1976-
(författare)
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Estimating inclusion content in high performance steels
- 2008
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Non-metallic inclusions in steel pose a major problem for the fatigue resistance, especially regarding fatigue at very long lives corresponding to low cyclic stress levels, as well as being detrimental to material toughness and polishability.The largest inclusions are quite rare, which makes conventional detection methods timeconsuming if reliable results are to be obtained. Based on surface scanning using light or electron microscopes, these methods provide results that have to be converted to reflect the statistical volume distribution of inclusions.Very high cycle fatigue (in the order of 109 cycles or more) using ultrasonic fatigue at 20 kHz has been found efficient at finding the largest inclusions in volumes of about 300 mm3 per specimen. The inclusions found at the fatigue initiation site can then been used to estimate the distribution of large inclusions using extreme value statistics.In this work, a new method for estimating the volume distribution of large inclusions is presented as well as a suggested ranking variable based on the volume distribution.Results from fatigue fractography and area scanning methods are compared to the endurance limit at 109 cycles for a number of batches from two high performance steels.In addition, the extreme value distributions of fatigue initiating inclusions in six high performace steels, produced by different routes, are presented. It is shown that all modes of the Generalized Extreme Values distribution can be found in different materials. This result shows that the assumption of mode I distribution, also known as Gumbel or Largest Extreme Value distribution, must be substantiated.
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