The female dog has a unique reproductive endocrinology, with high levels of progesterone throughout the 70-day long luteal phase. In this project, markers of glucose metabolism were studied and compared from the aspects of breed group and time in oestral cycle. The parameters studied were: glucose, insulin, progesterone, fructosamine and the newly introduced analysis of HbA1c. Hba1c was also further evaluated and discussed as a diagnostic tool in canine medicine.No differences in terms of glucose markers were found between a group of purebreed dogs of various breeds compared to a group of dogs with high risk of dioestrus diabetes, namely the Norwegian and Swedish elkhounds.No differences were found between the two sample occasions, anoestrus and dioestrus, concluding that there is no need for relating test results to the time of the oestrous cycle in middle-aged intact female dogs.There were statistically significant higher values of all glucose markers in diabetic dogs than in non-diabetic dogs. When it came to HbA1c, however, there was a larger overlap between the two groups, compared to fructosamine.

There are no set guidelines on how to interpret the criteria?s in the adjustment rule within the meaning of the companies act. The criteria?s are not discussed in literature and the Swedish case law in this area is very limited. A reason for the limited use of the adjustment rule is the slow and very costly process, which does not grantee the outcome of the case.

Floating housing is a concept gaining ground in Sweden. The dwellings are different in many ways from traditional homes, not only regarding flotation, but also several other technologies. The purpose of this thesis is to emphasize the qualities that exist in living on water. The ambition was to present a proposal for a floating residential area located in Jönköping, containing homes of varying sizes, and to present their technologies. In order to find inspiration and solutions studies have been made on existing floating homes in Stockholm and Kalmar, focusing on their technical and functional solutions.

In the last decades the continuous work for more sustainable manufacturing has become a large part of the manufacturing companies? operations. It is also well known that the factory planning shapes the manufacturing process to a great extent. Consequently it is logical to assume that the manufacturing companies? factory planning process plays a major role in the work for increased sustainability.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the classification,shelf arrangement and display of documents in antiquarianbookshops and see the reasons behind these. The results willbe compared with previous reviews of alternative shelfarrangement in Swedish public libraries, to see whatdifferences and similarities there are in the classification andshelf arrangement between antiquarian booksellers andlibraries. The questions to be answered were: (1)What formsof classification and shelf arrangement are used inantiquarian bookshops and how does it differ from theclassification and shelf arrangement made in libraries withan alternative shelf arrangement? (2)What exposure ofdocuments are there in the various antiquarian bookshops? Isthere anything regarding the exposure that differs betweenthe antiquarian bookshops and the libraries? An idea andideology analysis of various dimensions is used as atheoretical tool during the work. The dimensions were: (1)Shelf arrangement: It is important that customers/borrowerscan find themselves - it is important that staff know wherethe documents are.

This essay aims to investigate how students raised in Jehovah's Witnesses have experienced their career counseling during their middle and high school education. My main objectives are, based on the testimonies of former Jehovah's Witnesses, to investigate how career counselors can find a strategy to approach these students in a non-threatening way. I also try to take into account the contextual elements which are of great importance when counseling students raised as Jehovah's Witnesses. A qualitative study has been carried out with five informants with a background in the movement. The material has then been analyzed using a qualitative, narrative method.

Nearly nine percent of the population in Sweden are 75 years or older. Still they consume more than a quarter of all medicines. This increased use, is specially noticeable in nursing home residents, where the elderly is using a average of 8-10 preparations per day. According to the National Board of Health and Welfare in Sweden, the number of drugs and specially psychotropic drugs, has proved to be a risk factor for drug-related problems among the elderly, such as drug interaction and side effects. Routines for regular and systematic follow-up of drug prescription and utilisation reviews were not extensively implemented.

Purpose:  The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the major car companies have been affected by the global financial crisis. We would also want to look at how revenues and profits have been affected, and what the consequences have been both within the company and the market in general. It?s also interesting to see how profitability and financial stability has been affected. We had chosen to do a ?before-after? comparison, and we chose to compare the years 2007 and 2009.Boundaries: We have chosen to concentrate on a corporation in the Asian market, more specifically Toyota.

The subject of this thesis is the application of Support Vector Machines on two totally different applications, facial expressions recognition and remote sensing.The basic idea of kernel algorithms is to transpose input data in a higher dimensional space, the feature space, in which linear operations on the data can be processed more easily. These operations in the feature space can be expressed in terms of input data thanks to the kernel functions. Support Vector Machines is a classifier using this kernel method by computing, in the feature space and on basis of examples of the different classes, hyperplanes that separate the classes. The hyperplanes in the feature space correspond to non linear surfaces in the input space.Concerning facial expressions, the aim is to train and test a classifier able to recognise, on basis of some pictures of faces, which emotion (among these six ones: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sad, and surprise) that is expressed by the person in the picture. In this application, each picture has to be seen has a point in an N-dimensional space where N is the number of pixels in the image.The second application is the detection of camouflage nets hidden in vegetation using a hyperspectral image taken by an aircraft.

Abstract Back ground: Home based care is a meaningful activity giving patients and their families a chance to live their lives as close to normal as possible. Advanced palliative care is today provided at home, although geography does play a role in shaping that care. A rural setting can mean that conditions for such care differ from those in urban areas.Purpose: To describe the experiences of district nurses in palliative home care settings in a rural community.Method: Semi structured interviews with seven district nurses. The interviews were recorded digitally and transcribed in a precise fashion. A method of qualitative analysis of the contents, inspired by Burnard, was used to analyze the material.Results: Palliative care places high demands on the competency and experience of district nurses.

How do you summarize the content of a fictional work, let?s sayLord of the Rings, into a few "telling" words that may represent it? This master?s thesis is a comparative study of how library users? freely chosen tags/keywords deviate from controlled vocabulary made by professional indexers when representing fiction. The thesis answers four main questions:? Do the tags that the library users give fictional works correspond to the categories used in professional indexing in Sweden?? Do the tags follow the standards for vocabulary, semantics and syntax used when indexing professionally?? Do the tags add something to document representations?? Are there differences between the tags used for adult fiction and the tags used for children?s literature?With a starting point in indexing theories of Frederick W. Lancaster, Annelise Pejtersen, and the semiotic theory of the indexing process of Jens-Erik Mai, 383 tags from totally 70 fictional works are analyzed.

This thesis explore women?s needs when reentering society after having served a sentence at the female prison Färingsö, outside Stockholm and whether those needs are being met in the reentry strategies that are being provided. Parallel to this the thesis also examines if there, based on nonconformity and gender theories, is a socially constructed representation of women maintained in the rehabilitation work.The method of this thesis applied semi-structured interviews and used snowball sampling to expand the network of informants to obtain the data necessary. Totally five interviews were carried out. Previous research has shown that women in prison have much more complex problems than men and that there is a need for reentry strategies that take gender in account.The results showed that in terms of being able to reenter back in society, women needed help to structure a previously chaotic life.

This study is about the work around festivals and traditions that takes place in multicultural preschools. The purpose of this study is to describe and reflect upon the work around festivals and traditions in multicultural preschools from the view of five preschool teachers who are active in their profession.  The purpose is also to investigate which festivals and traditions that are given attention at preschool and for what reason according to the preschool teachers.The method of research chosen in this study is qualitative in the form of individual interviews with the intention of obtaining and interpreting the descriptions and reflections of the informants around the subject. The results will be analyzed from an intercultural perspective.The results show that all investigated preschools celebrate the traditional Swedish festivals Christmas, St. Lucia?s day, Easter and Midsummer, and that these festivals take up lots of space in terms of time and labor.

In this study, we looked at how balanced the various christian denominations in Sweden were raised in the news, on the basis of the requirement for balanced reporting. To measure the balance, we utilized Harcup and O'Neill?s news values and studied to what degree these values occurs in association with news articles that address the various denominations. The following denominations were selected for this study; Word of Life, the Pentecostal Church, Jehovah's witnesses, the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army and the Swedish Church. These denominations were then studied on the basis of news values in four of Sweden?s largest news organisations, in terms of audience numbers.

Abortion remains a contentious issue, which greatly raises ethical problems. This thesis examines the leading arguments in the Swedish abortion debate around the ? in terms of legislation ? critical years of 1938 and 1974. With Foucault's genealogical method, Butler's theories of gender as a social construction in relation to power and doxa, the study examines what the development of the argumentation says about the views on morality, the woman's body, life, individual and state? How has the arguments pro and against abortion changed over time and what does this say about the norms that guide and orientate the arguments? The most obvious change in argumentation is seen in the shift from an absolute moral and conservative position into an increasingly relativistic and liberal position, and this study will argue that this shift has its prerequisites in the changing status of the citizen and state.