Breeding-induced endometritis in horses seems to be down-regulated by certain components in the seminal plasma. These components are most likely some of the proteins in the seminal plasma in the stallion ejaculate, the so-called spermadhesins. This study aimed to recognize these proteins and determine their quantities in different fractions of the ejaculate. Fractionated ejaculates from four stallions were used to determine the presence and amount of proteins by way of size-excluding chromatography. All former known proteins, except two, were recognized in this study.

The wide spread of the Internet and new information technologies in recent years has come to effect how libraries manage and disseminate information. Search engines like Google are widely used by people who often find the information retrieval systems of libraries to be too complicated. In 2004 Google announced plans to digitise five major library collections. Organisations representing the publishing industry and authors have since then filed lawsuits against Google claiming that Googles scanning of library books infringe the rights holders copyright. Due to Googles potential impact on libraries this thesis aims to examine how Googles digitisation project, Google Book Search, has been received in the library community.

The web has made an incredible amount of unorganized information available to anyone. There are search engines that help us structuring the information, but it is still difficult to find what you search for on the web. The purpose of this master's thesis is to investigate whether the already existing techniques for automatic indexing are suited for the new information retrieval context on the web and how the choice to support these techniques, or not, affects the search results. This is examined through a literature study on automatic indexing and other related concepts, such as information retrieval and information searching on the web in order to get a theoretical frame to the work and by an observation of the search engine HotBot to approach the purpose of the thesis. The observation is carried out by searching HotBot's database and investigating the search results in order to try to identify patterns that can reveal something about how HotBot's automatic indexing is done.

Spitz nevus was first described by Sophie Spitz in 1948 as juvenile melanoma. The lesion is a benign melanocytic tumor, which consists of epiteloid- and spindelshaped cells. Histological is spitz nevus difficult to distinguish from malign melanomas and spitzoid melanomas. Loss of symmetry, loss of maturation in the deep component, nuclear polymorphism and hyper chromatic nucleus are features which can be found in melanomas. Some of these features are often seen in spitz nevus.

This paper is a comparing study of the retrieval effectiveness of the search engines Google, Google Scholar and Scirus. The aim is to find out how good they are at retrieving relevant academic material in the research-field of Library and Information science. The thirty search questions where based on actual information needs collected from exams within the field of Library and Information Science. This method was used to prevent that none of the search engines were given an advantage because of construction of the information needs. The first twenty retrieved documents on the retrieval lists are examined for academic content and relevance.

TPB, The Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille, has requested a study to investigate the organization and content of a possible future Swedish web portal for users with reading disabilities. The aim of this thesis is to conduct such a study, with an emphasis on knowledge organization. The main aspects studied are formal description, representation, search and retrieval, document retrieval, and additionally also aspects related to content. The following questions are answered in this thesis: - How are web portals, online databases and Internet libraries for users with reading disabilities constructed, from an organization of knowledge point of view? - How can these solutions for knowledge organization be incorporated into a possible Swedish web portal? - With regards to content, which additional aspects are present in the studied web portals, online databases and Internet libraries? The questions are addressed through a detailed study of ten web portals, online databases and Internet libraries from Nordic and Anglo-American parts of the world.

In information retrieval there is a problem with ambiguous words. To solve this problem word sense disambiguation WSD is used. Few studies combining information retrieval and word sense disambiguation have been conducted with Swedish words. The purpose of this thesis has been divided in two. The first purpose was to examine Swedish information retrieval and disambiguation in the query phase.

This thesis compares four relevance feedback methods. The Rocchio and Ide dec-hi algorithms for the vector space model and the binary independence model and Okapi BM25 within the probabilistic framework. This is done in a custom-made Information Retrieval system utilizing a collection containing 131 896 LA-Times articles which is part of the TREC ad-hoc collection. The methods are compared on two grounds, using only the relevance information from the 20 highest ranked documents from an initial search and also by using all available relevance information. Although a significant effect of choice of method could be found on the first ground, post-hoc analysis could not determine any statistically significant differences between the methods where Rocchio, Ide dec-hi and Okapi BM25 performed equivalent.

The aim of this thesis is to examine how thesauri constructed with latent semantic indexing LSI are performing when used for query expansion. There is a well-known problem with synonymy in information retrieval and one solution to this problem is to use a thesaurus. In this thesis thesauri are created automatically to find statistically related words and not only synonyms. LSI is a method that uses singular value decomposition SVD to reduce dimensions in a matrix and find latent relationships between words. We constructed nine thesauri and used them for query expansion in a Swedish database, GP_HDINF.

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine query expansion. Query expansion is the process of adding new terms to a query to improve the retrieval effectiveness. In this study the baseline query was expanded in five different modes. The first expansion strategy was formulated by the inflected terms as the system does not allow truncation, I have inflected the terms, e. g.

In two feeding experiments Bacillus induced priming of plant defense was tested for its effect against the generalist insect pest Spodoptera littoralis. The main hypothesis for the study was that Bacillus induced priming would enable the plant Arabidopsis thaliana to defend itself better against this insect herbivore since this priming seems to involve jasmonic acid, known to be important for plant defense to insects. A secondary objective of the study was to examine if any differences in a primed defense capability could be seen between different natural genetic variants (ecotypes) of A. thaliana reflecting habitat differences in pest pressure. The methods used for plant cultivation and Bacillus inoculation were aimed at reflecting conditions that can be expected in an agricultural cropping system. This meant that all plants were cultivated in soil, and the feeding experiments were conducted with the plants growing intact in the soil system.

Romanization as a method in the bibliographic environment makes retrieval difficult in many aspects. The object of this thesis is to illustrate the importance and the possibility to include non-Roman script in the records of the library catalogue. The questions at issue are about the consequences of romanization, the technical requirements for implementing non-Roman script, and bibliographical resources that have been developed during the last 20 years. The thesis is based on a literature study and correspondence with people who are familiar with the subject. The thesis points out that Romanization causes information to be distorted in various ways and is inconsistent with the requirements of exactitude in bibliographic control.

This study is about how changed light conditions induce dormancy in plants. It is divided in two parts. First a literature study where quantification of light, the concept dormancy, photoperiod and light quality are discussed. Second an experimental part, where the importance of light for sprouting capacity in root buds of perennial sow thistle (Sonchus arvensis L.) is investigated.In the science in how flowering in plants are induced the concepts short day/long day plants and light dominant/dark dominant are well-established. These concepts can also be applied to how light induce dormancy in plants.

Na?r en student idag utbildar sig vid ett svenskt la?rosa?te beho?ver denne info?rskaffa sig kurslitteratur som ett komplement till undervisningen. Det finns inget sja?lvklart tillva?gaga?ngssa?tt fo?r hur studenten info?rskaffar sig sin kurslitteratur och information om litteraturen presenteras inkonsekvent o?ver olika ka?llor . Vi utvecklar da?rfo?r ett sto?dsystem fo?r so?kning av kurslitteratur, med syfte att effektivisera so?kprocessen samt att exponera studenten fo?r eventuellt tidigare fo?rbisedda ka?llor till kurslitteratur. Systemet utva?rderas i fo?rha?llande etablerade so?kstrategier hos 22 studenter. Resultaten visar att anva?ndandet av detta sto?dsystem inte bara minskar antalet steg markant utan a?ven minskar antalet tja?nster studenten anva?nder fo?r att info?rskaffa sin kurslitteratur ja?mfo?rt med studenters egna so?kstrategi idag..

Background: Abortion implies that the pregnancy is interrupted. According to the World Health Organization approximately 46 million induced abortions are carried out each year. Different methods of abortion can be used such as medical and surgical methods. The medical method especially affects a nurse?s experience of the procedure.