During the last decades the fertility of dairy cows has declined in the same rate as the milk yield has increased. This is a result of the negative genetic correlation between milk yield and fertility, failure to show estrous signs and metabolic problems in the cow. The purpose of this review was to investigate the function of metabolites and hormones as markers for disturbances in fertility, health and production in the dairy cow. There are several metabolites that are suggested to indicate the cow?s energy balance.

Background: Hepatitis E (HEV) is a small, non-enveloped virus that belongs to the viral genus Hepevirus. HEV is a positive sense single-stranded RNA virus and there is insufficient information regarding its replication. This is mainly because the virus has low capacity to grow in normally used cell cultures. Many specific strand assay detection studies have been done in order to understand more about HEV replication. Unfortunately, these assays have the disadvantage of giving false positive results.Aim: The aim of this project was to improve the positive strand assay to increase specificity and eliminate false positivity which is due to high sensitivity of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

Diagnosis means detection and isolation of faults. A model based diagnosis system is built on a mathematical model of the system. The difficulty when constructing the diagnosis system depends om how the model is formulated. In this report, a method is described that rewrites the model on such a form that the construction of the diagnosis algoritm is easy. The model is transformed by two state space transformations and the result will be a system on state space form where one part of the system becomes easy to supervise.

The study shows the current need for security solutions concerning work with information in different areas.Investigations will show important solutions for printers? needs to meet the increasingly harder demands forfast and safe digital communications. Important factors to be analyzed in the investigations are: access todifferent types of information, workers authority of information, access to the data base register internallyand externally, production solutions for an effective fault detection and data base solutions fororders and distribution.Planned and unplanned stops result in a standard of value in interruptions. Internal data bases areprotected by so-called ?Fire Walls?, ?Watch Dogs? and Virtual Private Networks.

Denna rapport är resultatet av ett examensarbete, på 20 högskolepoäng, som har utförts på Scania CV AB, Tekniskt centrum, Södertälje. Examensarbetet behandlar Side Blind Spot Detection och har resulterat i ett prototypsystem som detekterar objekt i döda vinklarna på sidorna av en lastbil. Systemet är ett aktivt säkerhetssystem som syftar till att förhindra olyckor och ge ökad trafiksäkerhet på vägarna. Examensarbetet har varit tvådelat för att uppnå detta mål. Denna rapport behandlar främst val av sensorteknik för att upptäcka objekt i de döda vinklarna på sidan av en lastbil.

In contemporary encryption the vast amount of text subject to cracking has brought about the demand for methods distinguish files more likely to be encrypted. The encryption software Truecrypt can encrypt files that are not possible to identify with a file signature. To solve the detection problem, an algorithm sensitive to the absence of structure in the very code of files was developed. The program was written in the programming language EnScript which is built into the forensic software suite EnCase. The essential part of the algorithm therefore deployes the statistic of a chi-square test for deviance from a uniform distribution to distinguish files with contents that appear to be random.

A helicopter based system equipped with a millimetre-wave fire control radar is studied for improvement of the detection probability for moving ground targets. The system is a pulse doppler radar that sends out the electromagnetic wave in repetitive pulses. The frequency in which radar sends this pulse is called Pulse Repetition Frequency (PRF). The velocity of the moving targets is measured by spectral analysis of the pulses received. With this sort of system some targets will not be possible to detect.

Background: As a part of a national health control program, Statens VeterinärmedicinskaAnstalt performs diagnostics to screen flocks for certain pathogens causing high mortality,morbidity and/or serious economical losses. There are several viruses in the programincluding IBDV (infectious bursal disease virus), IBV (infectious bronchitis virus) and NDV(Newcastle disease virus). Method: 96 serum samples were collected from different poultryflocks in Sweden and analyzed by ELISA, which are currently used in the health controlprogram as well as by a commercial prototype of a multiplex immunoassay manufactured byLuminex Corp., which is currently under evaluation at the United States Department ofAgriculture USDA. This 4-plex assay detects antibodies for the three above-mentionedviruses as well as antibodies of avian reovirus. In the context of this study the ELISAs run inroutine diagnostics as well as a REO ELISA were used as the standard for comparison.Result: The antibody concentration in serum from vaccinated chickens was high while theantibody concentration level in serum from not vaccinated chickens was low.

To United Minds, large-scale surveys are an important offering to clients, not least the public opinion poll Va?ljarbarometern. A risk associated with surveys is satisficing ? sub-optimal response behaviour impairing the possibility of correctly describing the sampled population through its results. The purpose of this study is to ? through the use of multivariate outlier detection methods - identify those observations assumed to be non-representative of the population.

Under de senaste åren har olika former av kognitiv distraktion, till exempel att tala i mobiltelefon med handsfree, relaterats till en betydande mängd olyckor i trafiken. Av den anledning finns det ett stort intresse i att ta fram olika tekniska system för att upptäcka förare som är distraherade. Målet med denna studie var att ta ett steg tillbaka och undersöka människors förmåga och metoder för att avgöra distraktion hos andra. Då det saknas tidigare forskning är upplägget en explorativ förstudie bestående av två delar. Under den första delen samlades material in på distraherade bilförare i simulerad förarmiljö.

Skin temperature is detected through signals in unmyelinated C-fibers and thin myelinated A?-fibers in the peripheral and central nervous system. Disorders in thin nerve fibres are important and not rare but difficult to diagnose by the most common neurophysiological methods. In this pilot study different methods for quantitative sensory testing, QST, were compared to give some ideas about which method could be the most efficient to use in order to point out injuries of the sensory system in clinical practice. The comparison was made between Békésy (separate warmand cold thresholds) and Marstock test (combined warm and cold thresholds).

Food-poisoning is a major health problem and an estimated half a million Swedes are food-poisoned annually, with acute gastroenteritis as a consequence. One of the major causes of contaminated foods is related to food- and waterborne viruses. To be able to trace back the source of contaminant, the method of detecting viruses must be specific and sensitive. No standardized method for detecting foods for sapovirus exists today. The aim of the work described in this bachelor thesis is to implement and opti-mize a real-time RT-PCR method for the detection of all genogroups of human sapovirus in foods.

There are several methods avaliable to find areas of interest, but most fail at detecting such areas in cluttered scenes. In this paper two methods will be presented and tested in a qualitative perspective. The first is the darg operator, which is used to detect three dimensional convex or concave objects by calculating the derivative of the argument of the gradient in one direction of four rotated versions. The four versions are thereafter added together in their original orientation. A multi scale version is recommended to avoid the problem that the standard deviation of the Gaussians, combined with the derivatives, controls the scale of the object, which is detected.

Cyanobacteria belong to the oldest organisms of our planet. They use photosynthesis to produce ATP and gain biomass from carbon dioxide. The cyanobacteria Nostoc punctiforme is a filamentous bacterium that consists of two different types of cells, vegetative cells and heterocysts. The type of cell it differentiates into depends on the media they grow in. In an ammonium-rich medium, the N.punctiforme consists of vegetative cells that differentiate into heterocysts when in the medium is changed to a low-concentration ammonium medium.

Malignant melanoma represents 4-7% of all canine neoplasms and they are the most common malignant tumors of the oral cavity and digits. These tumors are often aggressive and metastasize quickly. To date there is no effective treatment and survival times are short. Most dogs are euthanized due to complications caused by metastases. Melanin pigment is a hallmark of melanomas and is usually present in large amounts in these tumors.