A cochlear implant (CI) is a hearing device that makes it possible for individuals who are deaf or has a severe hearing impairment to receive auditory information and develop spoken language. The pragmatic ability may be affected. In short, pragmatics may be described as the study of language use in social contexts. Pragmatic ability can be seen as the result of the individual?s behavior as well as the underlying causes.The aim of the present study was to describe the pragmatic ability in children with CI.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, OTEC, a technology using the temperature difference between cold deep seawater and warm surface water, can extract the work in the form of electricity. OTEC gives also synergies of drinkable fresh water. The temperature difference has an impact on the efficiency of the technology, which means that the feasibility of OTEC is geographically limited. The project intends to explore the possibility of replacing the atoll Tarawa?s present electricity generation with an OTEC plant and to explore synergies. In the present situation all of Tarawa?s electricity is generated by fossil fuels.

The purpose of this study was to find out how SISU reason about cohesion with respect to its own operations, as sports consultants.There is no previous research on how sports consultants using cohesion as a pedagogical tool. However, there is research on cohesion linked to sport. Earlier research sees cohesion as a multidimensional phenomenon. This means that multiple factors determine the experience of cohesion. Such factors include how how-knit the team or group are, individual and joint objectives and that the individuals share common experiences.

The wood-living beetle Ceruchus chrysomelinus is a rare species connected to natural forests. In Sweden, it is red-listed as endangered (EN) and an action plan for its preservation has been done by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. In this work I have therefore investigated how a translocation of the species succeeded after 17 years. I aimed to study the species dispersal biology, its substrate preferences and the supply of suitable wood on this site. The study was performed during 2012 in Pansaruddens nature reserve close to Uppsala in Sweden, which is a spruce dominated forest.

Dog bites pose a threat to public health globally and can lead to infection, disfigurement, incapacity, post-traumatic stress syndrome and even death. In geographical areas where rabies is endemic, bites from infected dogs account for over 90% of the human rabies cases. Children have been proven to be at a greater risk of being bitten by dogs and subsequently contracting rabies than adults. In this cross-sectional study, a school survey was undertaken in association with a rabies awareness campaign in India, to investigate the dog bite incidence and various risk factors associated with dog bites as well as assessing the knowledge of safe interaction with dogs among children in the age group 10-18 years. A total of 1295 questionnaires were collected. 43.2 % (n=556) out of the respondents were boys and 56.8 % (n=731) were girls with a mean age of 14 years.

In Uganda, small scale pig production plays a major role for households to earn a living and to secure their access to meat. Piglet mortality due to diar-rhoea-related dieseases is high. In an attempt to understand the underlying causes for this high mortality this study aims to investigate the role of trans-missible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV) and is a part of a larger project con-ducted at Makerere university in Uganda. A complicating factor in this investigation is the porcine respiratory corona-virus (PRCV), a stabile mutant form of the TGE virus. The occurrence of this virus had shown to alter the impact of TGEV in e.g. Europe and North Amer-ica.

Inventories of epiphytic lichens on Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) were conducted at three sites in east central Sweden: along the newly build motorway (Road E4), along the old road (Road 600) and in a reference site, to compare the effects of traffic pollution on lichen diversities. At each site, species richness, lichen mean sensitivity value (MK), air quality index of the forest stand/sample plot (LKI) and nitrogen impact value (N) were calculated and it was tested if there was any difference between the sites. Twenty-four species were observed in total, and Parmeliopsis ambigua and Hypogymnia physodes were the most common species at all sites. At Road E4, fewer lichen species were observed than at the other sites and this might be due to the impact of air pollution. The species richness at Road 600 was similar to that of the reference site, which might be explained by the improved air quality.

Background: Sweden is a country where vitamin D deficiency seems to be common, partly because of its geographical position, which reduces the availability of UVB radiation, but also that people avoid sunlight due to increased skin cancer risk. Research shows that vitamin D plays an important role in the prevention of many diseases such as cancer as well as autoimmune and neuropsychiatric diseases.Vitamin D is a fat soluble pre-hormone and a collective name for closely related compounds which act as hormones after undergoing a transformation in the body.Humans can utilize vitamin D through diet and produce it in the body by exposing the skin to the sun. Previous observational studies and epidemiological studies have established a hypothesis that there seems to be an association between vitamin D supplementation and reduction of depressive symptoms.Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate if vitamin D supplements may decrease depressive symptoms.Methods: This work is organized as a literature review and article search is made in the database PubMed in January 2012. Keywords used were ?vitamin D and depression? and inclusion criteria were: randomized clinical trials, be conducted on humans, written in English.

The purpose of this study is to gain insight of four preschool teacher?s perspectives and reasoning in two different local if they working to counteract exclusion. The questions this study assumes are: How does the teachers in preschool reason about how they working against exclusion of children with diagnosis in the free game, if there are? How does the teachers reasoning about their methods and personal strategies they uses to include children with diagnosis in the free game, if they are excluded? How does the teachers reasoning about the diagnosis effect of these children?s social interaction with other children if the diagnosis became their identity? The method in this study to collect material about the teacher´s perspective on the subject is semi-structured interviews. The collected material has been analyzed and interpreted from a socio-cultural perspective.

Knowledge is today one of the most important resources for an organization to handle. But knowledge can also be difficult for organizations to manage. The internet is still growing and new tools take form that allows users to effectively share information. The purpose of this report was to describe how organizations can make use out of internal social media to facilitate knowledge management processes. Three issues involving mapping, coding and dissemination of knowledge to were produced to answer the thesis. The study was limited to examining the identification, coding and dissemination of knowledge through the internal social media plattformen, IBM Connections. The theoretical framework emphasizes how social networks can promote knowledge sharing, how a knowledge mapping can promote knowledge dissemination and sharing, how knowledge can be stored in data sources and how important interaction is to spread awareness. The theory has been supplemented by descriptions of how the system IBM Connections works. Surveys were conducted on four companies that use IBM Connections as an internal communication plattformen. The four companies were selected to illustrate how they use the plattformen of knowledge management processes and we chose to interview the people who were responsible for the introduction of the plattformen. The study identified several similarities between the different companies and that although there were some technical and cultural recalcitrant units against this new type of system within the organization so favored IBM Connections knowledge in several ways. The built-in search automatic created a map of knowledge through the plattform's user profiles. Saved files and documents could be found even after the employees left the company, which encodes knowledge into the company knowledge resources. The opportunity to interact with one another, often over great distances, favored the sharing of knowledge. A comparison with the theoretical framework provided us with the conclusion that internal social media can be used in several ways to Knowledge management through automated knowledge maps, the ability to store knowledge within the company and to communicate knowledge across functional and geographical boundaries in interactive discussions..

The purpose of this study was to investigate the kind of treatment strategies used by Swedish Veterinarians with cattle practice when treating calves with symptoms of pneumonia. A questionnaire, consisting of seven questions, was sent to one hundred veterinarians who have had practice with cattle and are employed by the Swedish Board of Agriculture. The survey was answered by a total of 73% of the Veterinarians. Of the respondents, 73 % use Penicillins as their first choice of drug for treating calves with symptoms of pneumonia, and as their second choice 64 % use Tetracycline. Supplementary treatment such as NSAID (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) and/or SAID (steroid anti-inflammatory drugs) are used by 97.5 % of the respondents.

This essay gives the reader an overview of the different problems and issues a landscape architect might meet, in the process of planning and realizing an eco-village. Its aim is to stimulate new ideas, based on the traditional, present and future working field of landscape architects. The essay does not claim to cover all imaginable aspects of social sustainability within an eco- village, but refers to the presented sources for further in-depth reading. Although the original focus has been on physical planning, the interviewees? words have been of big importance, and to a certain extent changed the constitution of this essay.

This Master´s thesis aims to aquire knowledge about volunteers attitude toward work. It emphasis is on the differences between volunteers and non volunteers. There are four research questions used in order to fulfill the aim in a scientific manner. The essay aims to get in depth knowledge regarding whether or not the respondents feel that they have gained advantages in work life due to the fact that they are involved in volunteer work. One of the pivotal questions is if there is a possibility to see a pattern that binds together the reasons for volunteer work and the attitude toward work.

Cattle have a species specific movement pattern when lying down and getting up. They need sufficient space for their heads to perform these movements normally. The aim of this study was to investigate the lying down and getting up behaviour of beef bulls at a Swedish farm operation. The hypothesis was that bulls older than 10 months (over approximately 400 kg) were disturbed by a horizontal front rail and that the time to lie down and get up differed from what can be regarded as normal based on earlier scientific studies. The bulls were Swedish Red and White (SRB), Swedish Friesian (SLB) or crossbreeds of these two, and were kept in a cubicle system with a stall front design where there was a horizontal rail 40 cm above the stall floor.

This thesis deals with an iterative user-centered IT-development project in a bank setting. The aim is to present a solution for deployment of future Internet banking for small businesses. The project features a design of IT-related concepts and ideas with a strong emphasis on scenario-based design and the usage of patterns as a documentation tool.The project plan featured an iterative framework and was carried out by a group of designers in collaboration with a reference group representing the future users of the system. This group consisted of company managers and bank employees, all from the small town of Åtvidaberg in Sweden.The method used in the development process was Scrum. A total of three sprints were completed with user meetings at the end of every sprint.