För att ta reda på hur väl en Multi-Agent-Systems-bot kan stå sig mot andra, icke-MAS-bottar, så har vi implementerat en bot till brädspelet Arimaa. Botten är implementerad i C++ och den kan spela mot andra bottar, eller människor, genom Arimaas officiella hemsida. Syftet har varit att skapa en fullfjädrad bot som både klarar av att spela korrekt, och att spela bra. För att ta reda på om MAS är en bra designfilosofi för Arimaa så har vi utmanat ett antal av de bottar som andra människor skapat och lagt upp på hemsidan. Alla bottarna har under tiden de legat uppe blivit rankade genom tävlingar och utmaningar och flera av dessa har tävlat om stora pengar, vilket betyder att människor har lagt mycket tid på dem.

The access to good sanitary facilities is an important factor that elevates the experienced living standard as it improves hygiene and reduces the transmission of deseases. The ratification of the millennium goals by 189 countries demonstrates that this is an important international issue. Together the countries have taken upon themselves that the proportion of the population that lacked access to sustainable safe drinking water and sanitary facilities in the year 2000 will have been reduced by half by the year 2015. In Peru, the construction of sewage pipe networks to transport the sewage out of the direct human environment is progressing. The safety and sustainability of these systems can be questioned, since in Peru the sewage seldom receive any treatment before being emitted to a recipient. This is taking place in Picota and sorrunding villages as well. In the last 25 years several systems implementing small-scale onsite treatment have been introduced throughout Latin America in an attempt to give more people access to sustainable and safe sanitary facilities, reducing water consumption and taking advantage of the agricultural values of the sewage fractions while protecting the environment from its negative impact. In this study three different sanitary systems and the effects of different population growths were compared.

This thesis presents a system which has been implemented to satisfy a need in theresearch on how speech planning interacts with syntactic and prosodic structure inspontaneous speech. The long-term purpose of the research is to provide models forautomatic parsing of spontaneous speech and for psycholinguistical modelling of speechproduction. Identification of inhalation pauses is an important step in the developmentof automatic methods for spontaneous speech parsing.Identification of inhalation pauses is considered to be a keyword-spotting speechrecognition problem. Hybrid HMM(Hidden Markov Models)/ANN(Artificial NeuralNetworks) approach is applied to this problem. Method gets 90,8% in Recall, 66,4% inPrecision and 76,7% in F-score.

The aim of the thesis is to identify and investigate central themes in two video artworks, Poliisi and Pink Ball, by Swedish artist Annika Larsson. Moreover it is an investigation of the configurations of violence, and an enquiring whether these works have a social-minded intention.Elements in scenery, framing and narration are analysed with the term ?crystalline regime? (régim cristallin), described by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, which defines the artificial as opposed to the purely representational. Processes within the narrations of the two works are analysed as rituals, which leads to an investigation of an internal sign-system and to the question whether the rituals in these works have a function. Theory by French philosopher Georges Bataille is used to analyse the ritual with no external purpose, which aims at an intense experience of life.

Livestock animals affect their environment in a number of different ways, mostly through grazing and trampling. This study focused on the effects of Gotland pony grazing on forest structure and diversity, and the impact on ground cover. To compare the fenced and grazed area with a reference area outside the enclosure a number of transects were used. The study showed that there was no significant difference in height structure and diversity between the compared sites; however, there were a significantly higher proportion of damaged trees inside the enclosure. The ground cover variables showed a higher amount of bare soil, plant litter and wood-rush (Luzula sp.) inside the enclosure whilst grass was more frequent in the reference area.

The purpose of the study has been to recognise good development and the factors behind this development. We have chosen an aid-project co-financed first by the Swedish government and later by the government of Great Britain for our study. One of the conditions for good development, according to our chosen theory Another development, is peoples participation. To study good development and peoples participation we conducted a Minor Field Study (MFS) in Rajasthan in the north-west of India in June-August 2001. We had a hermeneutic approach and consequently accomplished interviews and participant observations in the Lok Jumbish project in Rajasthan.

The production of oilseed rape is an important issue in Sweden and those who never have grown oilseed rape (OSR) are now willing to try. It is always a risk to grow oilseed rape, specially winter OSR, because of outwintering. This risk increases as you go north and therefore establishment and autumn growth is very important. These are some of the reasons that I have chosen to write about the establishment of winter oilseed rape in Middle Sweden. There are many factors that influence the outcome of the establishment, e. g.

The store manager can make great benefits of having an eye on how the staff works towards the customer, because the personnel is an important tool when competing with other stores. This paper is focusing on the part that relates to the staff in the store, which is one of the key tools in the competition for customers after the customer made it to the store. Many stores have guidelines which the staff should follow when they meet with customers. If the staff is too tightly controlled by these guidelines, customers can perceive the first encounter with the staff as artificial and as if the genuine friendliness does not exist. It is important that the staff looks at the individual customer and treat every customer in a personal way and that the staff can see the customer?s needs.

The aim of this literature review was to make a comparison between the feeding requirements of Swedish reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) and meat producing cattle (Bos taurus) within farming. Reindeer are an intermediate feeding type; they have the ability to adapt to short term seasonal changes in food. They avoid eating fibre as much as possible and display highly selective behaviour while foraging. Adaptation to harsh environments with a limited amount of food has made reindeer dependent upon easily digestible food and consequently their digestive systems are less capable of processing plants with high fibre content. Herding is an extensive system which requires a significant amount of land and labour and describes the reindeer industry.

Renkavle har under lång tid varit ett stort problem för lantbrukare i stora delar av norra Europa och har etablerat sig på större arealer även i Sverige. Genom sin bio-logi är renkavle mycket väl anpassad till odling av höstsådd spannmål, speciellt i kombination med reducerad jordbearbetning. Det finns en ökande trend av både höstsådd spannmål och reducerad jordbearbetning som talar för att problemen med renkavle kommer att öka framöver. Även den pågående klimatförändringen mot ett varmare klimat i Sverige förbättrar förutsättningarna för att renkavle ska etablera sig längre norrut. Renkavle är ett ogräs som kräver en mycket hög grad av kontroll för att inte öka kommande år eftersom fröproduktionen hos renkavle kan vara mycket stor.

The aims of the silvicultural method natural regeneration of spruce (Picea abies L. Karst) in birch (Betula pendula and pubescens) shelterwoods are to establish a new stand of tree seedl-ings and to protect those from high groundwater levels, frost damages and grass competition during its first life years. The aim of this work has been to (i) describe how shelterwood and stand characteristics influ-ence the results from using natural regeneration of spruce protected by a shelterwood of birch, and to (ii) compare those regeneration results with planting of spruce after soil scarification in clear-cut areas. Totally 17 harvesting sites have been inventoried and 15 of those included natural regenera-tion in birch shelterwoods, and two were subjects to soil scarification and planting of spruce. The sites represented 7-10 year old final cuts and are located in the coastal (eastern) region of the province of Norrbotten in Sweden. In all areas shelterwood and stand characteristics, as well as the number of main crop seedlings and the height of the highest main crop spruce seedling, were estimated and registered in all areas.

The CASA-paradigm, Computers Are Social Actors, was introduced in the book "TheMedia Equation" by Reeves and Nass. One of their experiments concluded that we tend to be polite to computers in the same way as we are to people. In this study I have replicated Reeves and Nass experiment but instead of a text-based interface I have used a virtual agentin order to find out if we are polite to the agents, or still to the computer. Two experimental setups was conducted. The two setups had a common first part that was carried out on onecomputer with one agent.

Agricultural land could be polluted by radioactive substances after a fallout. We would then need information about the level of contamination to decide whether the crops could be utilized as food under these circumstances. In an experiment carried out during the 1990ies the retention of 134Cs in potato haulm and the transfer to the tubers were studied. The experiment was carried out during three consecutive years. The plants were cultivated in pots under field conditions and the artificial deposition was sprayed directly onto the potato haulm at different times during the growing season.

A case study was done of Sthlm Policy Group, a consulting agency that mainly targets NGOs and government agencies in the peace and security sector. The goal of the case study was to explore the tendency of NGOs in Sweden to hire commercial consulting companies. The main interest was to see what the key reasons are for NGOs to hire private consulting agencies, but also to explore what problems that might be associated with such relationships. Interviews were carried out with representatives of the consulting agency, with its clients as well as with other NGOs that were identified as potential clients. The interviewed NGOs and government agencies were found to approve of the use of commercial consultants.

Lao People?s Democratic Republic (PDR) is a country where the majority of the population works within the sector agriculture in one way or another. The number of goats are increasing and the animals can be an important income source for families. However, during the dry season, lack of feed is a great problem for the farmers. Fodder trees have shown great potential as dry season feeding, due to that the trees often hold green and fresh leaves a long time into the season, compared to grass that dry out quickly.