This paper analyses how Swedish fine-art oil paintings sold at auctions has performed as a monetary investment during the period autumn 1985 until spring 2006. An average price technique as well as a hedonic regression technique, applied to a sample of 19 213 auction sales, is used to construct price indices. The indices show somewhat different results, which is explained by the inability of the average price model to adjust for relative differences in quality between periods. The hedonic regression model on the other hand captures this effect, why the hedonic index is applied in a financial return model. By adjusting for transaction cost, the financial return of an average investment in paintings is calculated.

The Voices of ParliamentCongruence between party and personThe purpose of this study is to determine the congruence between the opinions of members of parliament and their respective party policies, in order to further determine the cause of poor voter-party congruence and whether or not the individualization of the parliament could affect the character of legislation. To do so, the study asks two primary research questions;- "Are the communicated party policies representative of the opinions of the members of parliament?"- "Is the discrepancy between party policies and the opinions of the members of parliament sufficient for the individualization of parliament to substantially affect the parliament's decisions?"The study answers these questions by comparing the average of self-described left-right stances of members of parliament with the average of voter-described left-right stances of party policies, using existing survey data and a constructed left-right dimension. The lower average is then subtracted from the higher average, creating a value of congruence that is then inserted into a constructed congruence dimension. The primary findings of the study suggest that there is substantial congruence between party policies and the opinions of the members of parliament, and that the discrepancy between them is unlikely to substantially affect the parliament's decisions..

The purpose of this study is to investigate childrens possibilities to retrieve information by searching in searching engines designed for children. Two such search engines are examined: Yahooligans and Kids Click, both of which index pages in English only. I have compared Yahooligans with its equivalence for adults; Yahoo, by evaluating the retrieval effectiveness. Some functions in Kids Click and in Yahooligan are investigated. Seven class room studies are described in the prior research chapter.

This essay investigates whether there?s logic behind the sanction system regarding the penalty imprisonment in the swedish penal code. The focus is in general on crimes against the person and crimes against the state, but in particular on crimes of serious fiscal offence and crimes of serious assault. The idea with the essay was also to explain the wording purpose behind the punishment ranges in these selected crimes. The essays focus is on the public unawareness on how the punishment ranges is used.

Robotic milking in Automatic Milking systems (AMS) is proposed to reduce manual labour and at the same time increase milk yield by increasing milking frequency. In order to increase milking frequency, it is essential to have well-functioning cow traffic. Investing in an AMS is a great capital investment for the farmer, thus it is of major importance to ensure maximal AMS capacity. This study investigated the effect of the traffic systems Feed First? and Free cow traffic with and without waiting area (WA) on cow performance and AMS capacity.

The question whether controlled vocabulary or natural language free-text terms is the most effective search strategy has occupied researchers in LIS for many decades. This Masters thesis is an empirical study which aims to compare these two search strategies in LISA Library and Information Science Abstracts, an online bibliographic database. 22 topics from the discipline of Library and Information Science were constructed and out of each topic one query for each search strategy was formed. Queries in natural language were formed with terms from different sources, for example dictionaries, while queries in controlled vocabulary were built with terms from LISAs electronic thesaurus. The measures used in this study were precision, relative recall pooling method and overlap.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate and compare the retrieval effectiveness of two search engines on the Internet: Svensk Medicin and Google Scholar. Svensk Medicin is a medicine-specific search engine and Google Scholar specialises in indexing scholarly material. A set of 20 questions in four categories were used to conduct the searches with the search engines. Genuine medical information needs were selected from a question collection provided by the television program Fråga doktorn. The relevance of the first 10 retrieved documents was judged by using a binary scale and the measure used was precision.

AimThe aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of MotVikt´s obesity-treatment program on eight severely obese subjects, concerning Body Mass Index, Waist-Circumference and Weight after three and a half months and Sense of Coherence, Body Image and Self-experienced Health after three months. The question in focus was: Did MotVikt´s obesity-treatment program have any effects concerning the factors mentioned above?MetodInformation was collected with questionnaires that were filled out by the eight subjects, three men and five women, who participated in MotVikt´s last round of treatment. Data concerning waist-circumference, weight and BMI were provided by MotVikt. The questionnaires that were used to get information about Sense of Coherence, Body Image and Self-Experienced health were SOC-29, BSQ and IQOLA SF-36.ResultatThe average BMI in the group has decreased with 2,9 kg/m2, from 39,7 till 36,8.

Stump harvest could be found in the late 1970?s and the early 1980?s. And now when the prices on energy are high it has become an interesting topic again. This work has been conducted within Holmen Skog?s stump harvest testing in Norrköping.

This paper deals with evaluating 3D-bootstrap for the mining company New Boliden in an attempt to revise their current method of calculating average gold riches in different areas. The purpose is to find one-sided 3D-bootstrap confidence bound of the average gold riches. There lacks well-defined theory behind using 3D-bootstrap, in this paper the variogram is used as an estimate of dependencies between the observations, and the block length is chosen to be higher than this estimate. In aid of this, a simulated data material is conducted to check the validity of 3D-bootstrap in a controlled area where the theoretical value is known. The results are inconclusive, and further studies are needed..

This essay investigates whether there?s logic behind the sanction system regarding the penalty imprisonment in the swedish penal code. The focus is in general on crimes against the person and crimes against the state, but in particular on crimes of serious fiscal offence and crimes of serious assault. The idea with the essay was also to explain the wording purpose behind the punishment ranges in these selected crimes. The essays focus is on the public unawareness on how the punishment ranges is used.

In modern military operations the requirements of transmitting large amounts of information have increased substantially during the last decade. This increases the demand for high-capacity radio networks. It is also very important that military decisions are made on recent and correct information and this implies that low and known delays are required. The existing military radio ommunications, within the Swedish army, do not meet the requirements for capacity and delay. We have investigated how the capacity and average delay can be improved in an Ad Hoc network with STDMA by using antenna arrays.

This paper investigates the relation between stock performance and owner share retention in Swedish public equity listings during 2009 to 2013. The listings during the period are studied and divided into binary groups of "exits" and "non-exits", which are used in a statistical regression model to determine if there is a significant difference in average stock performance. The study finds that stocks of exit-companies on average significantly underperformed stocks of non-exit-companies during 2009 to 2013. Nevertheless, due to the limited number of observations available and the unusual market conditions, caution is required in interpreting these results..

In this Masters thesis we investigate query expansion using an electronic thesaurus. We formed 30 topics from the library and information science field. For each topic three searches were made in the bibliographic database LISA Library and Information Science Abstracts via CSA Cambridge Scientific Abstracts. LISA has an electronic thesaurus attached. We used this thesaurus to form baseline queries, baseline queries expanded with synonyms, and baseline queries expanded with both synonyms and related terms.

Magnesium is an essential mineral that is important for several physiologic and biochemical processes in the body. Deficiency of magnesium is mainly associated with grass tetany, but can also appear in cows during the indoor period. Since long it is known that potassium has a negative effect on the absorption of magnesium. Due to the fact that potassium fertilisation leads to a higher potassium content in forage, it is of interest to study interactions of potassium on the magnesium balance in dairy cows. There are few studies about magnesium feeding to dairy cows in Sweden and the purpose of this study was to investigate how much magnesium and from which feed-sources dairy cows in Sweden get their magnesium. Data was collected from seven farms in the northern part of Uppland and from seven farms in Skaraborg in Sweden.