Biodiversity consists of all life on Earth and in all forms. Biodiversity is often discussed at three levels: ecosystem, species and genetic variation within species. Biodiversity also provides many of the ecosystem services performed by nature and that we depend on, including cultural services such as aesthetic values, education and recreation. In Sweden the environmental objectives are central; there are 16 environmental quality objectives, and "A rich plant and animal life" is one of them. Conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity is a prerequisite for achieving also most other environmental objectives. Another environmental quality objective that is tied to a rich biodiversity in cities and biodiversity is "Good built environment" where cities, towns and other built environment should provide a good living habitat and contribute to a good environment.

Background: Vacuum assisted closure, VAC, is a method which can benefit wound closure. There are not many reliable studies about the effects of VAC in different types of wounds. Previous studies have shown that patients have experienced pain during dressing changes.Aim: The aim of the study was to survey in what kind of wounds the vascular surgery ward have been using VAC, to study the treatment process of VAC and how it has been documented and also to investigate if patients with VAC experienced pain during dressing changes.Method: The patients were chosen from a ledger, which contained 77 patients that had been treated with VAC on the vascular surgery ward. Data were collected with a journal survey protocol.Results: The result is based on 67 patients with a total of 79 wounds. VAC was shown to have a good effect on wound healing and infected surgical wounds were the most commonly wound category undergoing treatment with VAC.

This report deals with activities that from a CSR perspective are considered to create a shared value for a medium-sized construction company in Sweden. The CSR definition used in the report is the European Commission?s since it reflects the valuecreating aspects of CSR, in contrast to the traditional philanthropic aspect of CSR.Companies in the building construction industry have difficulties identifying activities that create value in society and in the company. The aim with the project is to, from a CSR perspective, identify and evaluate value creating activities in a building construction company. The activities will be evaluated with respect to competitiveness and how they can be implemented into an organization.

ABSTRACTAim. To describe intensive care nurses´ experiences of caring for patients with postoperative delirium after heart surgery.Background. Delirium is a common condition after heart surgery. Previous research has focused more on pathophysiology, incidence, etiology, prevention, detection and management, and less on how nurses caring for patients with delirium experience it.Design. A qualitative interview study.Method.

This report describes a project, which was carried out as a final thesis covering 30 ECTS during the final semester of the Master of Science programme Industrial Design. The assignment was issued by Fagerhults Belysning AB in Habo. The assignment was to design a family of products in which LED was to be used as a source of light. The main focus in the initial part of the project was to find a way to design the inside of armature which was suitable for LED technology. An armature, already in the range of products at Fagerhult, with the desired qualities that was to be strived after was the Zintra. The lighting source of the Zintra is a compact fluorescent lamp.

The ability to tackle NP-hard problems has been greatly extended by the introduction of Metaheuristics (see Blum & Roli (2003)) for a summary of most Metaheuristics, general problem-independent optimisation algorithms extending the hill-climbing local search approach to escape local minima. One of these algorithms is Iterated Local Search (ILS) (Lourenco et al., 2002; Stützle, 1999a, p. 25ff), a recent easy to implement but powerful algorithm with results comparable or superior to other state-of-the-art methods for many combinatorial optimisation problems, among them the Traveling Salesman (TSP) and Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). ILS iteratively samples local minima by modifying the current local minimum and restartinga local search porcedure on this modified solution. This thesis will show how ILS can be implemented for MSA.

Today?s farmers are constantly affected by the fluctuating world market prices on grain and thereby the price risk that comes with the price fluctuations. The volatile prices of grain increase the price risk within the business, which in turn affects the profitability of the business. The fluctuating prices together with the increased price risk within the farm business have opened up the market for hedging instruments. In this master thesis project, the aim is to identify the underlying end-values of 30 Swedish farmers? related to their choice of using hedging and the product; forward contract.

The purpose of this work was to see if it was possible to rebuild an old dairy house into a house fore sheep production. The goals fore the work was to see witch kind of production model was suitable, how the actual drawing would look like and witch kind of interior was needed. The building was built in the beginning of 1900. It is located on the mountain Kinnekulle in Sweden. It was a big production fore its time and hade about 60 dairy cows. It was a lot of hard work because the floor was built by big stone blocks and it was very hard to rebuild when some more automatic solutions came fore handling all the manure. The idea of remaking the building came when we rebuilt the roof fore 5 years ago.

Rapportens syfte är att arbeta fram förslag till en hållbar förnyelse av bostadsområdet Gulsparven i Trollhättan, på uppdrag av AB Eidar Trollhättans bostadsbolag. I dagsläget har området energirelaterade problem och är i behov av upprustning. För att komma fram till goda lösningar har litteratur- ochinformationsstudier, intervjuer med erfarna personer samt inventeringar av området gjorts. Förslagen åskådliggörs i form av ritningar samt 3D-vyer.Fyra förslag till förnyelse har tagits fram med olika grad av åtgärder, där två av dem kräver en omprövad detaljplan. Generella åtgärder, vilket gäller i samtliga förslag, är betydelsefulla lösningar för att växa mot rollen som ett hållbart bostadsområde.

Performance of an intersection affects the total travel time in a traffic network. An intersection with good performance can easily be described by its contribution to lower travel time than in a comparable intersection. The travel time is of importance in the cost calculations when a specific intersection is to be chosen and designed. It is important to be able to make correct and precise performance calculations so that the cost calculations will not be incorrect. For that purpose the software Capcal, which is a traffic model for intersection analysis on performance, is used in Sweden.

When creating a good lighting design it is crucial to know how different types of lamps work. Knowing what kind of light they emit and in which situations they work well is also very important. In this master thesis I present different types of lamps and give an account of how light is spread through the different shapes of luminaires, reflectors, filters and so on. I write about how our eyes register radiation and connections between lighting and how it makes us experience space. Furthermore I deal with the effect of artificial light on living organisms and the environment. After the theoretical studies I deal with the places I have visited to study how different lamps and luminaires work and look like in existing lighting designs. These visits have also been inspirational to my lighting proposal for Bokenäs. Bokenäs is Volvo?s resort and conference center which is situated on the Swedish west coast.

How do you present your message? Is there any technique that is better than others? How do you make a presentation understandable for everybody, not only architects? We have tried to answer these and other questions in this thesis. Our focus has been how to use pictures and texts in presentations. How to put them together and make a good looking presentation, which is understandable and attractive. The work is directed to students working with presentations, using both pictures and texts..

Evidence-based psychotherapeutic methods compete with each other, while meta-analysis have shown that variability due to different methods related to outcome is remarkably low. In this qualitative study six former patients were interviewed about experiences of method and technique in Affect-focused therapy, with a slight overweight towards unsatisfactory experiences. Responses were analysed and categorised in emergent themes. Methodological focus on affect showed to be a much appreciated, as well as insufficient, element. Alongside positive experiences or summaries of therapy, methodological frames were felt to be at times restrictive, even invalidating, as far as not allowing focus on what was felt to be the more predominant need.

This master thesis summarizes contemporary theories on secularization processes in the Western world, and compares these with the example of Sweden, which by many scholars is considered to be the most secularized country in the Western world.I do this by dividing the most influential theorists in five different groups. In each group I explain how the theorists formulate and motivate their positions. These groups are:1) The secularization paradigm, where secularization always accompanies modernization. (Therorists: Steve Bruce and Peter Berger (in the 1960s)2) The paradigm basically accepted, but revised to depend on existential security, rather than modernisation as such. (Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart)3) Religion returned in the public sphere.

This thesis has been carried out at the Department of Urban and Rural Development at SLU Ultuna during the spring semester 2009. The topic of the paper is how energy consumption can be influenced through design and if the conditions for good design decreases when solutions based on energy efficiency are used. The report is divided into one literature study and one part where energy efficient solutions are used in a design. The thesis work has its origin in a project called "Energihus i Uppsala." The planned building will be a center for energy research in Uppsala. The project aims to demonstrate to the public what is currently happening in research related to energy.