Leksaker har en stor och viktig del i barns uppväxt vilket gör att leksaksföretag har inflytande i hur barnen kan komma att se sig själva och sin omgivning. Vi har studerat två leksakskedjors reklamblad ur ett genusperspektiv för att se hur flickor och pojkar framställs samt hur genus framställs i leksakerna och deras marknadsföring. Vi har använt oss av semiotisk metod för att urskilja olika mönster i de bildspråk som finns i reklambladen. Det vi sett är att man gör skillnader mellan flickor och pojkar genom hur leksakerna presenteras och man låter traditionella roller styra. Flickor förväntas att ha rosa leksaker, ta hand om familjen och göra sig vacker och åtråvärd medan pojkar förväntas att inte ha rosa leksaker, gå in i viktiga och maktfulla roller samt vara starka och uppfinningsrika.

The risk of food insecurity in the form of higher food prices has prompted policymakers in the United States (US) and European Union (EU) to revise their approach to biofuel development. The US Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and EU Directive 2009/28/EC require long term use of renewable energy in transportation, subject to sustainability. This thesis examines the implications of the US RFS and EU Directive 2009/28/EC in a trade context using a partial equilibrium/comparative static framework. The focus is on the effect of the revised biofuels policies on opportunities for developing countries to supply the US and/or EU markets. For the US, the implications when the volume produced and/or required under the RFS is technologically infeasible with imports of ethanol as a potential policy alternative are explored. For the EU, the impact of the sustainability criteria on foreign biodiesel suppliers in terms of compliance cost is examined. In general, the US policy may enhance opportunities for trade while the EU policy will likely inhibit trade. A discussion of the implications of the mandates for developing countries and WTO is included.

This study seeks to assess the correlation which exists between exchange rate of Nigerian naira and Unites States dollar and oil price on the basis of monthly data from 1999-2009. The research employ the fundamental variables which were assumed to be the monthly spot crude oil price, monthly exchange rate of Nigeria naira and monthly exchange rate of United States dollar. The empirical result adopted the ordinary least square using regression analysis and also the correlation model which shows that there is a weak/negative relationship between exchange rate and oil price as there are other factors that brings about changes in oil price other than the exchange rate. The activities of cartel pricing policy and oil speculators too have come to greatly affect the price of crude oil, and it will be interesting to examine the impact speculators have on the change in price of crude oil against the normal drivers of crude oil price.

I uppsatsen undersöks designerrollen så som den ser ut idag utifrån teorin om att designerrollen liksom konstnärsrollen har tagit sig nya uttrycksformer. I uppsatsen undersöks designgrupperna Front och Form us with love i syfte att söka svar på huruvida fenomenet designgrupper är något nytt. Men också för att ta reda på varför man väljer att arbeta som grupp och hur man framställs/framställer sig som grupp. Här hävdas att fenomenet designgrupper i sig inte är något nytt. Författaren framhåller dock att designerrollen har förändrats.

Abstract Background Oil and gas is a main source of revenue for many countries. Norway is one of them. Several companies operate in these countries. The companies demand accounting to communicate to their stakeholders. The two biggest accounting regimes, IASB and USA have their own standards for the upstream activities of those companies. The standard setting bodies mandatorily require companies to comply. Norwegian listed companies, as they are in the IASB regime, must comply with the IASB standard, IFRS 6. Problem  The IASB standard has a problem of addressing the entire upstream activities of the companies Moreover, the standard has conceptual flaw. However, these oil and gas firms are required to follow it. As a remedy, the entities fill the gap by using the US GAAP, if they are listed, as the regulation requires them to follow IFRS. Thus, using these two standards coupled with the defect of the IASB standard is affecting them. Purpose The purpose of this thesis is to explain the effects of IFRS 6 on companies by comparing it with the US GAAP standard. In doing so, theories relevant to the issue are described and the technical gaps between the two standards are elaborated. Method  This thesis uses mixed method. The research design followed is concurrently mixing quantitative and qualitative methods. However, qualitative method dominates in the mixing. As a data collection mechanism, interview, questionnaire and documentation i.e. the annual reports of the companies are used. In the study both deductive and inductive reasoning are used. Conclusion Subsequent to making the study, the author concludes that the surveyed companies have used the US GAAP to fill the gap that IFRS possess. However, retaining two sets of accounts has economic effect and the companies are paying for that. Moreover, they expend costs for adopting the IFRS when they change their standard from US GAAP to IFRS. Moreover, it is difficult to make conclusion about diffusion of accounting method due to contagion effect. Similarly, although previous studies show that size of a firm is a determinant factor, it is tricky to make conclusion on the studied companies.

<p>In the century and a half since Emancipation, slavery has remained a central topic at Somerset Place, a plantation-turned-state historic site in northeastern North Carolina, and programmers and audiences have thought about and interpreted it in many different ways. When North Carolina's Department of Archives and History first adopted the former plantation into its Historic Sites System in 1967, Somerset was dedicated to memorializing the planter, Josiah Collins III; the enslaved rarely made it into the site's narrative at all, and if they did it was as objects rather than subjects. In the final decades of the twentieth century, Somerset Place began to celebrate the lives of the 850 slaves who lived and worked at the plantation during the antebellum era, framing their history as a story about kinship, triumph and reconciliation. Both versions of the story--as well as the many other stories that the site has told since the end of slavery in 1865--require careful historical analysis and critique. </p><p>This dissertation considers Somerset's history and varying interpretations since the end of Reconstruction. It examines the gradual invention of Somerset Place State Historic Site in order to explore the nature and implications of representations of slavery, and the development of Americans' historical consciousness of slavery during their nation's long transition into freedom. It employs manuscript sources; oral histories and interviews; public documents, records and reports; and material artifacts in order to trace Somerset's gradual shift from a site of agricultural production to one of cultural representation, situated within North Carolina's developing public history programming and tourism industry. This research joins a rich body of literature that addresses southern history, epistemology, memory, and politics. It is comparative: it sets two centuries side by side, excavating literal cause-and-effect--the ways in which the events of the nineteenth century led to those of the twentieth--and their figurative relationship, the dialectical play between the ante- and post-bellum worlds. By examining the ways twentieth-century Americans employed the antebellum era as an intellectual and cultural category, this dissertation sheds light on slavery's diverse legacies and the complexity of living with collective historical traumas.</p> / Dissertation

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This dissertation is concerned with (i) how to model an agricultural market, (ii) how to analyze the impacts of a certain event (i.e. animal disease outbreak) on the market, and (iii) what are the relationships between different markets. The research on the first two issues will focus on the US beef market, and the impact of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) outbreak (Dec. 2003) on the US beef market will be analyzed. For the third issue, a multinational meat market will be considered, which includes three countries (Korea, US, and UK) and three meat products (beef, pork, and poultry). Their market movements will be compared, considering the impacts of the major animal disease outbreaks: BSE, foot and mouth disease (FMD), and avian influenza (AI). Based on the properties of an agricultural product (longer cycle of production and perishability) and the extensive empirical results, it is concluded that a recursive model is appropriate for modeling an agricultural market. A variety of structural change tests are applied to reveal that the change due to the BSE event still lies in an allowable range of the prediction error. For the comparisons between market movements, some multivariate statistical methods such as canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and principal component analysis (PCA) are used, and the main finding is that the knowledge about the threat of BSE to human health played an important role in changing people's attitude towards an animal disease event.

This dissertation work presents a novel method for addressing system uncertainty to improve management of a small-scale fishery in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. Using fishers' ecological knowledge (FEK), this research examines existing perspectives and biases through the Q-Method to identify regulatory inefficiencies in the management framework and strengthen the rationale for including fishers into the management process, develops a coupled behavior-economics model to predict the likelihood of fishing the preferred grounds under a range of physical and regulatory conditions, establishes a baseline assessment of a spawning aggregation of mutton snapper following sixteen years of protection through a no-take marine protected area, and conducts a discrete choice method test to examine likely public support for FEK-based proposed regulatory alternatives. This work contributes to an under-studied and much-needed area of fisheries management, that of incorporating socioeconomic motivations within an ecosystem-based framework. As fisheries management efforts begin to embrace ecosystem-based approaches, the need for understanding and incorporating the knowledge and behavior of fishers into management has never been greater. Ecological goals of fishery sustainability and continued habitat function cannot be achieved without first understanding how fishers view and respond to any regulatory environment and then developing a framework that achieves the greatest support for those regulations. The time has come for incorporating FEK into ecosystem-based fisheries management.

There was a well documented surge of wage inequality in the US that started from mid-70s and continued in 80s, slowing down by mid-90s, caused by increased dispersion both between and within groups of people with similar personal characteristics and skills. We analyze the US wage inequality in the more recent years to see if this trend continues. We apply the decomposition technique of Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1993) and quantile regression to March Current Population Survey data of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics data and Luxembourg Income Study data for a few selected European countries. We find that the increase in wage inequality continues during the 90s, especially in the second half. In addition, the focus of wage inequality shifts into the upper half of the wage distribution after mid-80s. The European countries do not show a common trend in the direction of wage inequality during the 90s. However, the focus of their wage inequality seems to be shifting towards the lower half of the wage distribution as opposed to that of US.