Syfte: Virtuella agenter är ett fenomen som det forskas mycket om, framför allt inom utbildning och språkförståelse. Barn i lågstadiet gynnas av att se sin lärare tala. Det förbättrar taluppfattningen, speciellt om klassrummets akustik är påverkat av stökigt bakgrundsbuller. Virtuella talare kan göra det möjligt att studera hur barns audiovisuella integration påverkas om talaren de ser på är virtu

Syfte: Att utveckla och validera ett kliniskt användbart frågeformulär för utvärdering av effekten av en kurs i Aktiv Kommunikation (AK). Metod: Ett frågeformulär utvecklades och reviderades utifrån kommentarer sprungna ur granskning genomförd av en grupp tidigare kursdeltagare och av ett antal kursledare i Aktiv Kommunikation. Formuläret fylldes sedan i av 61 andra, tidigare kursdeltagare. Ytterl

About 80% of all Swedish social workers are women, which makes male social workers a minority in the Swedish social workers labour force. Research shows that men in women dominated professions get benefits in relation to women. One of the benefits that men possess is that they become more sought after in the women dominated labour market. Our purpose with this study was to examine how male social

Abstract: Previous research has found car-sharing schemes to have great potential, internationally and locally, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the personal transport sector, and contain significant locally bounded advantages with implications for improved urban sustainable mobility and more efficient land-use. The aim of the paper is to explore how and why shared mobility services, specif

This paper studies the female labour supply response to fertility at the extensive margin. The strategy pursued in this analysis is to identify two groups of childless women who utilized family planning services for the first time, one group for help with pregnancy and one group for help with contraception. The identification strategy is meant to resemble a natural experiment where actual treatmen

Cash transfer programs have been shown to be a successful tool in reducing poverty by multinational impact analysis. However, if they are able to affect gender dynamics remains a debated topic. Critics claim that the programs may reinforce traditional gender roles whilst others mean that increasing women’s income with a cash transfer is empowering. This study investigates the Child Support Grant i

Volunteerism has been part of the development field for a long time, but has evolved from knowledge spreading to knowledge development through formal international development volunteer programmes. The purpose of this study is to see how development professionals perceive volunteerism to align with or further the sending organisation’s aims. The data has been collected through semistructured inter

In this project we tackle the problem with forced displacement as a consequence of earthquakes. Our focus is to enable individuals to take preparedness measures that mitigates the need for external aid in disastrous events. The project aims to investigate if something more could be done for victims of disaster and to relief rescue work as well as raising awareness of risk. This is done through dev

Assessing the probability of rare and extreme events is an important issue in the risk management of financial portfolios. Extreme value theory provides the solid fundamentals needed for the statistical modelling of such events and the computation of extreme risk measures. The focus of the paper is on the use of the peak over threshold method under extreme value theory to compute right tail risk m

GMRES (Generalized Minimal RESidual) är en iterativ metod som löser linjära system, där matrisen är inverterbar. Metoden löser systemet genom att generera bättre approximationer i varje iteration. Detta tillvägagångssätt är intressant i de fall man redan har en bra approximation att utgå ifrån. Med tillräckligt bra approximation kan ett väldigt stort system lösas med få iterationer, med en given tIn this thesis a GMRES method is constructed and tested. The method is implemented in a C++ program with the MPI protocol to make it parallel. The parallel parts of this program are discussed in detail, especially the communication and the partitioning of the data between the processes. In the tests that were conducted we come to three important conclusions: the method works as expected, a substan

Inspired by environmental peacebuilding literature, this research explores the peacebuilding potential of natural resources through a qualitative case study of a conflict-affected community’s transition of livelihood strategies from coca cultivation to butterfly farming. The fieldwork was carried out with peasant families in rural Otanche - a biodiversity-rich area that, besides the Colombian conf

In order to enhance the accountability and legitimacy of public research, performance-based research funding systems have been introduced in numerous countries during the last decades. Although this development has gathered considerable interest in recent years, it is thus far not clear how performance measures shape research practices and academic subjectivity. Combining bibliometric studies and

This paper investigates the relationship between capital structure and stock returns for Swedish firms listed on the Nasdaq OMX Stockholm Stock Exchange. Actual stock returns and leverage figures in form of total, long-term and short-term debt are used in the calculations. The results suggest, in contrast with a majority of fundamental theories, that there is a negative relationship between levera

The purpose of this report was to study how two common types of wood stud walls in Sweden will handle the future climate in Sweden, Gothenburg, out of a hydrothermal point of view. These two walls were analyzed with simulations in the hydrothermal calculation software WUFI with varying parameters. The first cases of the simulations were the so called base cases where moisture- and heat-sources was

Purpose: To propose a blueprint of how the policymakers responsible for health care reforms in the county of Scania (Sweden) could evaluate a prospective stroke care intervention from a societal point of view. More specifically, the intervention will consist in the introduction of telemedicine technology to their ambulance fleet. In addition, key methodological issues, of interest to the policymak

The social and environmental impact associated with consuming a product is something that is becoming increasingly important to consumers and businesses alike. This impact can in theory be computed simply by classifying a product and by mapping the classified product to the corresponding life-cycle assessments research. However, this type of mapping requires an extensive product taxonomy with a la

Canada is one of the only nations in the world that offers universal health coverage that excludes outpatient prescription drug services. This means that citizens may find out their diagnosis free of charge, but must incur out-of-pocket expenses for prescription drugs dispensed outside of hospitals. This paper examines the prevalence of prescription drug coverage in Canada across various socioecon

Purpose: The main objective of this thesis is to examine the effect different drivers of agency costs have on corporate cash holdings in public and private German technology firms. The analysis identifies three potential sources of agency costs. By determining target cash levels first and then obtaining deviations from these targets, the influences of agency costs are measurable. Data Set: The sam

This report first analyzed the reason for the deviation of the event-mixing method in background estimation for resonance research, and one possible explanation is that the event-mixing method can not reproduce the specific angular distribution of produced particles caused by jet-effects. This assumption was checked by Monte-Carlo simulations with PYTHIA, and a certain method of correction called