Background: Palliative care is a type of care, which does not cure but eases the suffering caused by the disease. The goal of palliative care is not to extend or shorten the patient's life, but to relieve pain and distressing symptoms and to promote the patients? quality of life (QOL). QOL can be understood as a subjective sense of happiness of existence, which means that the patient is experiencing life when her total life situation is consistent with her ??wishes.

The purpose of this study was to gain insight into refuges experience of traumatic events such as torture, political persecution, war, natural disasters and other trauma. For the study used theories which, inter alia, deals with many of the refugees coming to Sweden is influenced by various psychological trauma and may be accompanied by torture, political persecution, war, natural disasters and other trauma. To this study, a survey with 40 participants, 17 women and 23 men. There was also an interview on the Internet with a refugees consultant within the Red Cross. The men had higher average than women in all the perceived problems.

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).

This thesis describes new methods for automatic crack detection in pavements. Cracks in pavements can be used as an early indication for the need of reparation.Automatic crack detection is preferable compared to manual inventory; the repeatability can be better, the inventory can be done at a higher speed and can be done without interruption of the traffic.The automatic and semi-automatic crack detection systems that exist today use Image Analysis methods. There are today powerful methods available in the area of Computer Vision. These methods work in higher dimensions with greater complexity and generate measures of local signal properties, while Image Analyses methods for crack detection use morphological operations on binary images.Methods for digitalizing video data on VHS-cassettes and stitching images from nearby frames have been developed.Four methods for crack detection have been evaluated, and two of them have been used to form a crack detection and classification program implemented in the calculation program Matlab.One image set was used during the implementation and another image set was used for validation. The crack detection system did perform correct detection on 99.2 percent when analysing the images which were used during implementation.

This thesis aims to examine the conditions for entrepreneurship in Taiwan by the occurrence of cultural phenomenon guanxi. Based on the concept of familiness and guanxi, the family is central in this study of family business. Traditional descriptions of the Asian culture claim that guanxi is vital in the business context. Though, recent studies indicate that significance of guanxi seems to be changing. Therefore the purpose of this thesis is to create an understanding of the importance and relevance of guanxi in the context of Taiwanese family business.By travelling to Kaohsiung, Taiwan to interview six managers of Taiwanese family firms this study?s empirical material was gathered for further processing based on a qualitative approach.

Active work to increase the efficiency of energy use is taking place in Sweden and throughout all of Europe. Electricity is an important part in our society?s energy system which means that the electrical grid operators and associated therewith has a central role in this work. Monitoring and controlling the electrical grids are managed from the distribution system operator?s DC, dispatch center.The aim of this report is to examine how the operations in a typical DC on the Swedish electricity distribution network will look like in five to ten years.

                                  The study aimed to explore how patients with ICDs experience their quality of life with a focus on everyday life, electric shocks, and how support from the health service is perceived. The studydesign is descriptive with a qualitative approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven patients. Data collection lasted for three weeks and interviews were conducted in the participant´s homes, at the participants? workplaces or over the phone.The study shows that most participants have learned to live with the ICD.

This study was conducted on behalf of SCA forest AB, Västerbottens forest administration. Timber procurement from non-industrial private forest owners has become an increasingly important part of SCA:s wood supply. The objectives of this study was to report the current forest conditions in the private forests in the county of Västerbotten, analyse the potential for procurement of wood from private forest owners, and provide a basis for decisions on future strategies for timber procurement from private owners.Material and data have been collected from different sources, mainly from Swedish National Forest Inventory and SKA-VB08. This material was the basis for the analysis and calculations performed with the Heureka application PlanWise. This study area was divided into six different analytical areas (Coastal south, Coastal middle, Lycksele, Inland south, Inland north, Skellefteå), where each area of analysis is represented by a number of municipalities.In this study, two scenarios were specified; one describing the current forest management with current harvesting levels and the effects of these assumptions, the second to illuminate what potential there is for future timber harvesting.

This essay has a purpose to understand and investigate how disabled people, where the handicap imply difficulty to speak for one self, get the rights of self-determination and influence satisfied. Our purpose with this essay is to focus on how representatives from organizations, trustees and Support and Service for Persons with Certain functional Impairments- officials(abbreviated LSS after the Swedish title of the Act lag om stöd och service till vissa funktionshindrade), describe and discuss matters concerning the individuals? opinions and requests from within their respective position. We will with this as a base analyze how these three parties facilitate and meet the individuals? influence and self-determination.

The aim of this diploma work was to obtain a review of the appeal process in Sweden under the Planning and Building Act and the possibilities of appeal in the planning and building permit process. The work was intended to identify potential problems surrounding the appeal process and possible efficiency measures. The goal was to form a report that provides a satisfactory overview of the appeal process in theory and practical application as well as provide relevant concrete proposals on how the appeal process can be streamlined.Background and facts surrounding the work were taken from different types of literature and through several interviews with representatives in government, industry and politicians.The main problems related to the appeal process are in the long processing times and the high number of appeals. There is a great interest to streamline the appeals process and the government is going to launch studies in which possible future actions will be investigated.It is possible to appeal for up to two instances before you need a so called ?leave to appeal? in order for your complaint to be passed on to the next instance.

This study is focusing on students at compulsory level and their performance in national exam tests when the students first language is taken into account. Students in Swedish schools with non-Swedish speaking parents commonly follow language classes for limited Swedish proficient students. How does this affect their results when tested in other subjects as physics,biology and chemistry? A general claim is that national tests can provide data for balancedand fair grades. This view is challenged in this paper, through Principal Component Analysisof test results that shows a difference between schools when the schools social position and share of limited Swedish proficient students are measured.

At a manufacturing company, due to the competition the price is reducedtowards the manufacturing cost. Therefore it is important to maintain control ofones costs and keep calculations up-to-date.This thesis deals with cost accounting at a aluminium-processing company. The report focuses on calculating machine cost per hour since the manufacturing costs are the major part of the total product cost.Managers on the company believe that the costs they use in calculations todayneither is up-to-date nor advantageous in a market aspect and due to that their calculations need to be revised. The machines cost per hour is a major part in the manufacturing calculation. The company wants to provide a competitive price that also covers their costs.

This study has been carried out in cooperation with Unilever and partly with the EC founded project, Smartdoc IST-2000-28137. In areas of statistics and image processing, both the amount of data and the dimensions are increasing rapidly and an interactive visualization tool that lets the user perform real-time analysis can save valuable time. Real-time cropping and drill-down considerably facilitate the analysis process and yield more accurate decisions. In the Smartdoc project, there has been a request for a component used for smart filtering in multidimensional data sets. As the Smartdoc project aims to develop smart, interactive components to be used on low-end systems, the implementation of the self-organizing map algorithm proposes which dimensions to visualize.

In this master thesis a robot arm belonging to an automatic milking machine from DeLaval is investigated. The robot arm is controlled by a pneumatic cylinder and a valve. The goal of the master thesis is to investigate instability problems and to find out if it is possible to solve them by using gain scheduling. Gain scheduling is a type of controller where the parameters of the controller are changed during operation, for example depending on the working point. First a nonlinear mathematical model of the system was made.

We have 3G on the doorstep but nothing seems to attract ordinary people to this technology. To attract the mass market the telecom industry must show something beyond high bit rates. They must show how ordinary people can take advantage of this new technology. This is done by showing the possibilities of the new technology and by demonstrating applications that it will handle. The telecom industry must convince the telecom operators to invest in this technology and the only thing that matters to them is how much revenue they can make by adopting the upcoming technology.