The aim of the project was to investigate if Swedish rodents, brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), house mouse (Mus musculus), wood mouse (Apodemus spp) and water vole (Arvicola terrestris) captured in pig herds and in urban areas, constitute a reservoir for pathogenic Leptospira spp. Under Swedish conditions leptospirosis gives rise to reproductive disorders in pigs and symptoms of flu in humans. It has long been established that rodents are chronic carriers of pathogenic leptospires in their kidneys, and can spread the bacteria with urine. The old nomenclature of serovoars is still in use, but a new system of genetic classification has developed and today the genus Leptospira contains 17 species. There are several diagnostic test developed for leptospirosis.

Abstract Background: In 1997 the Kyoto Protocol was signed, it?s an international agreement which is aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Sweden's goal is to reduce energy using in buildings with 20 percent by 2020 and 50 percent by 2050. This is a comparison with levels from 1995 (Glad, 2006). For Sweden to be able to reach its goals, they need to construct more low-energy buildings (Åhman, Wahlström & Lundblad, 2010).

Temporary architecture is an alternative urban planning concept which has been adapted in many cities worldwide during the last decade. There is however no common definition for temporary architecture and it is diversely labelled and applied. In 2013 it also became publicly introduced in Stockholm via the approval of the city's first architectural guideline. Temporary architecture is presented in the guideline as a potential tool for exploring public spaces among other architecture related themes. The ideas for temporary architecture are ambitious and promising. The problem is that they are vague and leaves questions regarding performance unanswered.

In conventional viscose manufacturing, a large amount of carbondisulfide is consumed. This amount has to be decreased to keep the production cost down and to reduce the environmental impact. The purpose with this work was to show if an enzyme treatment of a dissolving pulp could increase the degree of substitution in the viscose so that the amount of carbon disulfide consumed in the process could be decreased. Previous investigations by Kvarnlöf (2007), Engström et.al. (2006) and Henriksson et.al.

In the assembly process of airframe structures there are many drilled holes and on some parts the holes are mainly drilled manually with pneumatic handheld drilling machines. During conventional drilling in metal, burrs appear. To remove these burrs the parts of the structure must be separated and deburred before they can be put together for fastening. This is a time consuming measure and therefore expensive. To facilitate this process and lower production costs some parts of the process needs to be automated.A part of this thesis was a project in co-operation with Saab, Novator, Specma Automation and the University of Linköping.

Today there is a research project undertaken by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences along with Wången (a highschool specialized in trotter training), which focuses on trotting horse training, performance and health. The project investigates how exercise intensity and feeding strategies affect the development of growing horses. The project includes two groups of horses where all 16 horses are fed in the same way. One group of eight individuals are trained 100% compared to conventional training and the other group are trained 20% less than the other group. All horses are trained twice a week and are out at pasture beyond that.

This project was led on behalf of Bombardier Transportation in Västerås, Sweden, incollaboration with KTH Stockholm and EPFL Lausanne. This project is connected to thedevelopment of a new and simplified tilt system for rail vehicles.Growing competition from other means of transportation has forced railway companiesthroughout the world to search for increased performances.Travelling time is the mostobvious performance indicator that may be improved by introducing high-speed trains.They require very large curve radii and long transitions curves not to impairridecomfort, another performance indicator. Building new tracks adapted to high speedtrains is very costly and can only be justified where the passenger base is large.Trains with the capability to tilt the carbodies inwards the curve is a more cost efficientalternative. The tilt inwards reduces thelateral force felt by the passengers allowing thetrain to pass curves at enhanced speed with maintained ride comfort but increases thefrequency ofmotion sickness.The benefits of tilting trains are improved speed capability in curves and enhancedpassengers comfort, but at higher buying and maintenance cost. As the conventionaltrains increase their speed in curves, the performance advantage of tilting trains isreduced while their prize is still kept significantly higher and constant.

Based on the on the assumption that the two recent Swedish poetry collections mil by Anna Hallberg and mallamerik, mallamer, malameri, mallame, amerik, mallameka, merikka, by Lars Mikael Raattamaa, are constructed with theoretical questions about identity, national identity, language hierarchy and power in mind, this study aims to investigate the ways in which these issues come to expression. Simplified, the term language-poetry, or språkmaterialism, can be used to describe a language-philosophical poetry that aims to eliminate the hierarcic structures between writer and reader in a text and invite the reader to become the co-worker of it. The study shows that by different ways of eliminating the centre of the text, the text is made democratical. But one question that this study asks is how can a nation's conventional and standardised written  language ? the language of the centre ? be used to write itself out of this centre into the margin? Stepping from a theoretical background of postcolonial theories on identity and national identity, including reflections as those given by Benedict Anderson, Madan Sarup, Timothy Brennan, Stefan Helgesson and Mia Cuoto, the analysis points out how this poetry laborates with the terms bugging, repetition, national language identity, and space as poetic material, in order to work in line with ? and contrary to - conceptions of a unified and shared language.

A majority of Swedish consumers have a positive attitude towards organic production and the number of organic products on the market is increasing. Despite these positive trends, there are still relatively few consumers who choose to buy organic produced products. According to statistics, only 3% of the total sales of food consist of organic products. The aim with this essay is to understand what is needed, both from the grocery store and the consumer's point of view, to increase the consumption of organic food. Information has been collected partly through questionnaire with consumers and partly through analysis of sales statistics for a selected numbers of products. Then the empirical material have been analysed in the light of a combination of the Behavioural Perspective Model (Foxell, 1997) and Kotler's Four P:s (Kotler, 2002). Consumer's willingness to buy organic products is influenced by a number of different factors. One important thing is if the grocery store offers a behaviour setting that stimulates the consumers positive attitude and facilitates their possibilities to collect new information. Furthermore, the store needs to offer a broad and well-visualised selection of organic products.

The market for biofuels from the forests have had a positive development and the job initiators for this master´s thesis wanted to examine the profitability of a method for harvesting forest fuel, which was unfamiliar to them. The method was the ?long tree tops-method?, here called the LT-method. The LT-method is characterised by the fact that timber is harvested as the only roundwood assortment while the rest of the stem, which in other cases would become pulpwood, is harvested as forest fuel together with the logging residues. The method is based on the assumption that advantages in handling of the forest fuel assortment such as increased load weights for forest hauling and truck transportation, should compensate for the lower price for pulpwood when sold as forest fuel. The aim of the study was to compare the profitability of the LT-method with the GROT-method (harvest of timber, pulpwood and logging residues) and conventional logging without any harvest of forest fuel, and aslo to try to identify factors affecting the profitability of the different methods.

In Sweden, harvesting pre-commercial thinning (PCT) stems for energy purposes is a interesting way of financing the high cost of preparing dense stands for a profitable first conventional thinning. This concept can be labelled bioenergy thinning. The aim of this study was to quantify the productivity of a Vimek 404R light harvester with an accumulating Naarva-Grip cutting head during the bioenergy thinning of a self-regenerated stand west of Sunnansjö in Dalarna. The stand was birch-dominated, contained 15 371 stems/ha, and measured on average 4,6 cm Dbh and 7 m tall. Even though the driver was well experienced with the machine, the stand in question was the first one that he ever thinned in this manner. Nevertheless, the driver strived to accumulate as many stems as possible during each crane cycle and chose to cut taller stems in half so as to make the handling and forwarding of the harvested stems easier.

The aim of this Master´s thesis is to examine the debate in Swedish library press concerning outsourcing of public libraries. The two magazines studied are BBL (Biblioteksbladet) and bis (bibliotek i samhälle). The period of time covered by the selected articles is 2005 to 2011. Although there are still quite few cases of tendering arrangements in Sweden, the question has been raised in the last years by the decision of the Municipality of Nacka (Stockholm) to outsource their public libraries. Another important factor for bringing the question into focus has been the general elections of 2006, which brought an alliance of right-wing parties to power.     In this thesis the arguments of the participants are documented and analyzed.

Powdery mildew is a serious problem in both field and greenhouse cucumber production and can cause serious infection and radically reduced yields. Today, powdery mildew is the main disease in greenhouse produced cucumber. Disease control should preferably be both efficient and environmentally friendly, which is not easy to achieve at all times. Alternatives to chemical control of powdery mildews are biological control, physical control, non-fungicide control and cultivation of resistant or tolerant varieties. Biological control can be described as the suppression of damaging activities inflicted of a harmful organism by one or more other organisms, which are called antagonists or natural enemies. In Sweden, there are currently no registered biological control products available to control cucumber powdery mildew. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of two biological control products in order to evaluate their ability to prevent or reduce powdery mildew infection to an acceptable level in greenhouse produced cucumber. In the experiments, different application regimes were also studied.

Many traffic incidents are due to the driver?s lack of attention, resulting in dangerous lane departures, either sliding off theroad or into the oppose lane. These kinds of incidents often have serious outcomes, which has led to much effort being concentrated on preventing or lessening the damages when the incident is already a fact, for example by installing safety belts and air bags. These measures may be considered to be acts of so-called passive safety. Active safety on the other hand, means that the safety systems intervene before the incidents have occurred.

Arvika Fjärrvärme AB, a district heating company from Arvika, today cover 74 % of their total energy production with biofuel wich runs a 16 MW bioler giving process water at saturated liquid state.In recent years Vaporel AB has introduced a new tecnique that gives an external generation of steam after boilers. The concept is built on an adiabatic pressure drop of the saturated liquid in a so called Flashbox which makes a small part of the liquid to evaporate. The generated steam is lead into a turbine where electricity is in a conventional manner.The purpose with this rapport was to do a basic study for the specific system at Arvika where it?s possible to see the potential production of electricity that follows an installation of a flasbox.The final goal was to introduce an economic analysis of a flashox installation at given conditions.To reach our goals we have created a model in Excel where we used the given conditions at Arvika Fjärrvärme to do our calculations. The model has been tested at three different states, of process water returning to potboiler, to be able to decide the optimal operation for the system at present.The studies have resulted in a pressure of the processwater at 14,5 bar (at) and a pressuredrop to 9,5 bar (at) in the flashbox.