To build high-rise buildings made of timber has for long been limited by national laws, due to the lack of knowledge in engineering solutions. Frame structures made of wood has for a long time been associated with major fire hazards and consequently lower safety and this connection is still being made today. The increased environmental awareness in recent years has contributed to the exploitation of indigenous building materials, including wood from our own Swedish forests and has become increasingly common. Increased knowledge about how structures behave in fire and how they can be protected in order to achieve safe timber structures has resulted in a growing interest in these structures in the construction industry. Research in the area is constantly updated and new laws allow any number of storeys in wooden buildings in Sweden as long as the performance requirements are fulfilled.The main part of this work has involved calculations of the fire resistance and load bearing capacity of floor and wall constructions.

This report is a bachelor's thesis of two students from the Energy and Environment degree at KTH Stockholm. Grinda is an island situated Stockholm archipelago. Skärgårdsstiftelsen is landowners and manages the area. Grinda Wärdshus, a guest house located in the island, currently uses an oil-fired boiler as a heating system. The aim of this thesis is to investigate whether wood chips or pellets is, from a sustainability standpoint, a suitable heating method for the guest house.

A new type of chartered holiday, fitness holiday, has evolved during the last years and has also been mentioned in different media channels. Despite this, fitness holiday is a relatively new and unexplored phenomenon, which caught our interest to further explore this. The desire to travel on a holiday of this type has also increased. Therefore, a study about this particular phenomenon with focus on the traveler?s motives behind the choice to go has been done.It?s a qualitative study and most part of the data has been collected during a field study to Playitas Resort, Canary Islands.

This report explores how organizations act when they are choosing an Outsourcing supplier. The study was conducted through multiple interviews with managers of different organizations. The data from those interviews was then analyzed through the use of two theoretical models. Our findings indicate that most organizations share the same base factors (qualifiers) when selecting an Outsourcing supplier. What therefore become crucial are the key factors that the Organizations see as Order winning factors.

What kind of self images characterise a football supporter? This question is the main focus of this thesis. Therefore, the thesis is trying to find distinguishing characteristic traits for football supporters. This work has been carried out through qualitative interviews with individuals who define themselves as football supporters. The interviews were mainly focused on two different types of supporters, official supporters and other supporters.

Aquatic organisms are usually not exposed to single substances but rather to mixtures of toxicants in streams located in agricultural areas. The transport of pesticides used in the agricultural area in Sweden is monitored with continuous environmental supervision every year. During 2002-2008 an average of 10 pesticides were found in each sample and 40% of the samples contained substances with concentrations higher than the Water Quality Standards. Chemical risk management is normally based on single-test evaluations. A problem when assessing mixture toxicities is that the constituents and concentrations of pollutants in the environment vary greatly.

Diabetes typ 2 är en kronisk sjukdom som ständigt ökar. Syftet med denna litteraturstudie var att beskriva patienters upplevelser av att leva med diabetes typ 2. Nio vetenskapliga artiklar analyserades. Analysen resulterade i fem huvudkategorier; upplevelser av att ändra livsstil, coping - ett sätt att hantera sin diabetes, upplevelser av en förändrad självkänsla, upplevelser av vårdpersonalens bemötande och framtidssyn. Resultat som framkom i studien var svårigheter med att ändra livsstil beträffande kostvanor, hantering av medicinering och fysisk aktivitet.

BACKGROUND: The isolation facility is an important ward in veterinary hospitals. This is where infectious patients are treated in order to reduce the risk for cross-contamination between the infectious patients and other patients and humans in the hospital. But it can only function in a safe manner as long as adequate precautions for infection control are adhered to. This has shown to be a problem in many isolation facilities in veterinary hospitals in Sweden. AIM: The aim of this paper was to examine which factors that can affect the quality of the infection control in the isolation facility. The aim is also to stress the importance of adequate infection control practices. METHOD: Two interviews were conducted with staff from two veterinary hospitals.

In a competitive market as supermarkets, hundreds of the same products fight for attention in the shops. Every day thousands of targeted advertising messages is given to us. As a natural result of all this, power is transferred to consumers. You can no longer differentiate yourself by only price and function, thus companies must play on the emotional aspects and create a relationship with consumers. A key to success is to understand people's emotional needs and then satisfying them.In various journals and papers you can find highlighted success stories of strong brands such as Harley-Davidson, Apple and Virgin Airlines.

Uppsatsens huvudproblem: Genom att studera klassiska modeller och teorier för hur man på bästa sätt marknadsför en produkt eller ett varumärke, skapas en uppfattning om att det är tydlighet som bör prioriteras. Under senare år har emellertid raka motsatsen till detta uppvisats på reklammarknaden. Istället för tydlig och informativ reklam, använder man sig av irrationell, osammanhängande och i många fall obegriplig reklam för att nå ut till sin tilltänkta målgrupp. Samtidigt kommer indikationer på att denna typ av reklam inte alls är den som i detta fall ungdomar vill se i dagens media. Om detta fenomen är ett medvetet förfarande eller om reklammakare helt enkelt inte lyssnat tillräckligt på vilken typ av reklam som ungdomar föredrar, ämnar vi att undersöka i denna uppsats.

This Masters thesis deals with query expansion in an online library catalogue. The aim of the study was to compare the retrieval effectiveness of four different query types when applied to the online library catalogue of the University College of Borås. The query types were: an initial query, the initial query with right hand truncation, the initial query expanded with synonyms and finally the initial query expanded with synonyms and right hand truncation. 24 topics were formulated, and four queries for each topic were constructed. The records retrieved by the searches were judged with regard to topicality, and were judged to be non-relevant, partially relevant or relevant.

This project investigated how elevation and vegetation type influences variation in plant litter phenolic content and protein precipitation capacity among and within common plant species for two different vegetation types, heath and meadow, in a subarctic ecosystem in the Abisko region of northern Sweden. As nutrient availability generally decreases with increasing elevation as a result of decreasing temperature, I hypothesised that phenolic content would increase with elevation and be higher on the heath than the meadow. To test this, the total phenolic content and protein precipitation capacity was estimated in leaf litter from 13 species in both heath and meadow vegetation across an elevational gradient ranging from 500 to 1000 meters above sea level (m.a.s.l.) in the study region. The results showed that elevation and vegetation type both had a strong impact on both variables. Total phenolic concentrations decreased with elevation for the meadow, and were greater for the heath than the meadow.

At present day there are several different methods for measuring of paved surfaces.The most common methods today are measuring with a total station, the GlobalNavigation Satellite System (GNSS) and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). Recently thedevelopment of unmanned aerial vehicles, known as drones, has increasedexponentially and today there are several ways of using drones for measuring surfacesby photographing and laser scanning.This thesis contains a comparison between the methods terrestrial laser scanning(TLS), and unmanned aerial vehicle photogrammetry (UAV). The measurements havebeen applied on two different test surfaces, one of asphalt and one of gravel. Thepurpose of the comparison is to investigate whether the airborne photogrammetry isequivalent accurate in its height levels as the terrestrial laser scanning. For thecomparison to be more extensive, these two methods have not only been comparedin precision but also in the areas of ease of use and economy.The precision was analyzed by comparing the height levels in randomly placed controlpoints on the test surfaces.

SAMMANFATTNINGNatriuretiska peptider är en är en grupp proteiner som via natriuretiska, diuretiska och vasodilaterande egenskaper reglerar vätskehomeostasen i kroppen (Levin et al, 1998). De frisätts bland annat när hjärtmuskelcellerna utsätts för stress och kan fungera som biomarkör för att utvärdera hjärtsjukdom. Analysering av typ B natriuretic peptide (BNP) i blod kan komma att vara till hjälp för den praktiserande veterinären vid diagnostisering av hjärtsvikt och även vid uppskattning av grad av hjärtsjukdom. Det har även visat sig att BNP kan användas för att uppskatta prognosen hos hundar med kronisk klaffdegeneration (Chetboul et al, 2009; Moonarmart et al, 2010).Kronisk klaffdegeneration är den vanligaste hjärtsjukdomarna hos hund och drabbar fram för allt små till medelstora hundar från medelåldern och uppåt (Kogure, 1980). Atrioventrikulärklaffarna, vanligtvis mitralis, blir nodulärt förtjockade med inlagring av glukosaminoglykaner och fibrosvävnad vilket leder till klaffinsufficiens.

Are agency and responsibility solely ascribable to humans? The advent of artificial intelligence (AI), including the development of so-called ?affective computing,? appears to be chipping away at the traditional building blocks of moral agency and responsibility. Spurred by the realization that fully autonomous, self-aware, even rational and emotionally-intelligent computer systems may emerge in the future, professionals in engineering and computer science have historically been the most vocal to warn of the ways in which such systems may alter our understanding of computer ethics. Despite the increasing attention of many philosophers and ethicists to the development of AI, there continues to exist a fair amount of conceptual muddiness on the conditions for assigning agency and responsibility to such systems, from both an ethical and a legal perspective. Moral and legal philosophies may overlap to a high degree, but are neither interchangeable nor identical.