Dagens samhälle är präglat av materialism och dagens konsumtionsmönster är ohållbara ur miljömässig synpunkt. Konsumtionen skapar därmed miljöproblem och ett viktigt styrmedel för att göra den mer hållbar är miljömärkning. Miljömärkta produkter produceras på ett miljöansvarigt sätt utan kemiska bekämpningsmedel och gödsel som är skadliga för både människa och miljö. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka den nuvarande medvetenheten kring miljömärkningar hos unga vuxna på Möckelngymnasiet. Metoden för studien var enkätutdelning till skolklasser som går sista året på gymnasiet. Utfallet av undersökningen visar att medvetenheten kring miljömärkningar är stor hos respondenterna och att respondenterna känner igen många av miljömärkningarna. Allmän kunskap om människans miljöpåverkan och om konsumentansvar visas i de flesta fallen vara knutna till val av miljömärkta produkter. En anledning till att köpa miljömärkta produkter är ansvarskänsla, vilket tyder på ekologiskt medborgarskap hos respondenterna. En anledning till att inte köpa miljömärkta produkter är för högt pris, vilket visar att det kan vara kontextuella faktorer som gör att vissa respondenter inte köper miljömärkta produkter. / Today’s society is characterized by materialism and today’s consumption patterns are unsustainable from an environmental point of view. The consumption is thus creating environmental problems and an important instrument to make it more sustainable is environmental labeling. Environmental labeled products are being produced in an environmental responsible manner without chemical pesticides or manure that both are harmful for humans and the environment. The purpose of this study was to examine the current state of awareness on environmental labels of young adults in a high school called Möckelngymnasiet. The method of the study was to do a survey research in classes with final year high school students. The outcome of the survey shows that the awareness on environmental labels is high among the respondents and that the respondents recognize many of the environmental labels. General knowledge on human’s environmental impact and on responsibility of consumers is shown to in most cases be linked to buying environmental labeled products. One reason to buy environmental labeled products is a sense of responsibility, which indicates on ecological citizenship among the respondents. One reason to not buy environmental labeled products is too high price, which shows that contextual factors can lead to that some respondents not buying environmental labeled products.

Microvascular lesions of the brain are observed in numerous pathological conditions including Alzheimer's disease (AD). Regional patterns of microvascular abnormality can be characterized using current neuroimaging technologies. When applied to mouse models of human disease, these technologies reveal cerebral vascular patterns and help uncover genotype-to-phenotype relationships. This thesis focuses on the development and testing of techniques for measuring two perfusion-related metrics in mouse brain regions, namely, cerebral blood volume (CBV) and cerebral blood flow (CBF) using micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) and arterial spin labeling (ASL), respectively. The main developments for measurement of CBV have included: refinements to micro-CT specimen preparation; registration of micro-CT images to an MRI anatomical brain atlas; and masking of major vessels to calculate small-vessel CBV (sv-CBV). The development of this micro-CT technique provided reference values of CBV over neuroanatomical brain regions in wildtype mice. A separate study was conducted to assess regional sv-CBV in a mouse model of AD; this study was motivated by the prevalence of microvascular lesions in patients who suffer from AD. Significant regional differences in sv-CBV were found between AD-afflicted mice and controls. The main developments for measurement of CBF have included: design and implementation of accurate ASL slice positioning and optimization of inversion efficiency parameters. The development of this ASL technique provided reference values of CBF over neuroanatomical brain regions in wildtype mice. These techniques for measuring CBV and CBF over mouse brain regions could lead to improved characterization of vascularity in models of neurological diseases.

Microvascular lesions of the brain are observed in numerous pathological conditions including Alzheimer's disease (AD). Regional patterns of microvascular abnormality can be characterized using current neuroimaging technologies. When applied to mouse models of human disease, these technologies reveal cerebral vascular patterns and help uncover genotype-to-phenotype relationships. This thesis focuses on the development and testing of techniques for measuring two perfusion-related metrics in mouse brain regions, namely, cerebral blood volume (CBV) and cerebral blood flow (CBF) using micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) and arterial spin labeling (ASL), respectively. The main developments for measurement of CBV have included: refinements to micro-CT specimen preparation; registration of micro-CT images to an MRI anatomical brain atlas; and masking of major vessels to calculate small-vessel CBV (sv-CBV). The development of this micro-CT technique provided reference values of CBV over neuroanatomical brain regions in wildtype mice. A separate study was conducted to assess regional sv-CBV in a mouse model of AD; this study was motivated by the prevalence of microvascular lesions in patients who suffer from AD. Significant regional differences in sv-CBV were found between AD-afflicted mice and controls. The main developments for measurement of CBF have included: design and implementation of accurate ASL slice positioning and optimization of inversion efficiency parameters. The development of this ASL technique provided reference values of CBF over neuroanatomical brain regions in wildtype mice. These techniques for measuring CBV and CBF over mouse brain regions could lead to improved characterization of vascularity in models of neurological diseases.

In this thesis, a Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system to query the objects in an image database is proposed. Images are represented as collections of regions after being segmented with Normalized Cuts algorithm. MPEG-7 content descriptors are used to encode regions in a 239-dimensional feature space. User of the proposed CBIR system decides which objects to query and labels exemplar regions to train the system using a graphical interface. Fuzzy ARTMAP algorithm is used to learn the mapping between feature vectors and binary coded class identification numbers. Preliminary recognition experiments prove the power of fuzzy ARTMAP as a region classifier. After training, features of all regions in the database are extracted and classified. Simple index files enabling fast access to all regions from a given class are prepared to be used in the querying phase. To retrieve images containing a particular object, user opens an image and selects a query region together with a label in the graphical interface of our system. Then the system ranks all regions in the indexed set of the query class with respect to their L2 (Euclidean) distance to the query region and displays resulting images. During retrieval experiments, comparable class precisions with respect to exhaustive searching of the database are maintained which demonstrates e ectiveness of the classifier in narrowing down the search space.

We have synthesized dimethyl derivatives of the GFP chromophore (p-HOBDI) and several of its derivatives, and their photochemistry and photophysics were investigated using various steady-state and time-resolved techniques as follows. We first consider the effect of the £]-barrel on the optical properties of the GFP chromophore (p-HOBDI) experimentally by selective variation of the protonation state of chromophores and different solvents. Each of these forms shows a complex solvatochromic behavior and is governed by both polar and acid/base properties of the solvents. In contrast to their solution behavior, some O-alkyl GFP chromophore (alkoxy-BDI) derivatives exhibit large fluorescent enhancement in the solid state. The color of the crystalline BDI is tuned by substituent-mediated crystal packing, showing the potential applications in optoelectronic devices. Using femtosecond polarization-sensitive infrared (IR) spectrosceopy of the C=O stretching mode of the HOBDI, we have then discovered a near complete twisting around the ethylenic bridge between the phenolate and imidazolidinone groups upon electronic excitation. Cis/trans isomerization induced by the rotation around the bridge is thought to be responsible for the behavior of blinking in fluorescent protein; however, the mechanism of the thermal reverse isomerization is more problematic. Thus we synthesized BDI derivatives with decreasing para-donating ability, HO, CH3O, CH3, H, and Cl, and used a Hammett plot for the rate study. With a positive â value, we conceived, for the first time, a novel nucleophilic addition/elimination mechanism. Finally, the GFP chromophore falls into the general category of hydroxyarene photoacids, which exhibit high excited-state acidities but neutral ground states. A hydroxyl substituent at the meta position shows enhanced charge transfer and greater acidity in the excited state. As a result, we have demonstrated that the fast quenching of the excited state by internal conversion to the ground state is much slower in meta- than in para-HOBDI derivatives. This allows studies of this ultrafast intermolecular ESPT that competes with isomerization. The photoinduced dynamics of the meta isomer of GFP chromophore was further investigated using femtosecond transient absorption and fluorescence upconversion spectroscopies.

The present work addresses poor bone/implant integration and severe bone defects. In both conditions external stimuli is required for new bone to form. A multilayered functional implant coating, comprised of an inner layer of crystalline titanium dioxide (TiO2) and an outer layer of hydroxyapatite (HAP), loaded with bone morphogenetic protein-2 (BMP-2), was proposed as a tool for providing both improved initial bone formation and long-term osseointegration. The in vitro characterization of the implant coatings showed that TiO2 and HAP were more favorable for cell viability, cell morphology and initial cell differentiation, compared to native titanium oxide. Furthermore, significantly higher cell differentiation was observed on surfaces with BMP-2, indicating that a simple soaking process can be used for incorporating bioactive molecules. Moreover, the results suggest that there could be a direct interaction between BMP-2 and HAP, which prolongs the retention of the growth factor, improving its therapeutic effect. For treating severe bone defects a strategy involving BMP-2 delivery from hyaluronan hydrogels was explored. The hydrogels were prepared from two reactive polymers – an aldehyde-modified hyaluronan and a hydrazide-modified poly(vinyl alcohol). Upon mixing, the two components formed a chemically crosslinked hydrogel. In this work the mixing of the hydrogel components was optimized by rheological measurements. Furthermore, an appropriate buffer was selected for in vitro experiments by studying the swelling of hydrogels in PBS and in cell culture medium. A detection method, based on radioactive labeling of BMP-2 with 125I was used to monitor growth factor release both in vitro and in vivo. The results showed a biphasic release profile of BMP-2, where approximately 16 %  and 3 % of the growth factor remained inside the hydrogel after 4 weeks in vitro and in vivo, respectively. The initial fast release phase corresponded to the early ectopic bone formation observed 8 d after injection of the hydrogel formulation in the thigh muscle of rats. The hydrogel formulation could be improved by incorporation of HAP powder into the hydrogel formulation. Furthermore, bone formation could be increased by pre-incubation of the premixed hydrogel components inside the syringe prior to injection. Crushed hydrogels were also observed to induce more bone formation compared to solid hydrogels, when implanted subcutaneously in rats. This was thought to be due to increased surface area of the hydrogel, which allowed for improved cell infiltration.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Karolinska institutet, 2002. / Härtill 6 uppsatser.

In order to meet the needs of people with hearing loss today hearing aids are custom designed. Increasingly accurate 3-D scanning technology has contributed to the transition from conventional production scenarios to software based processes. Nonetheless, there is a tremendous amount of manual work involved to transform an input 3-D surface mesh of the outer ear into a final hearing aid shape. This manual work is often cumbersome and requires lots of experience which is why automatic solutions are of high practical relevance. This work is concerned with the recognition of 3-D surface meshes of ear implants. In particular we present a semantic part-labeling framework which significantly outperforms existing approaches for this task. We make at least three contributions which may also be found useful for other classes of 3-D meshes. Firstly, we validate the discriminative performance of several local descriptors and show that the majority of them performs poorly on our data except for 3-D shape contexts. The reason for this is that many local descriptor schemas are not rich enough to capture subtle variations in form of bends which is typical for organic shapes. Secondly, based on the observation that the left and the right outer ear of an individual look very similar we raised the question how similar the ear shapes among arbitrary individuals are? In this work, we define a notion of distance between ear shapes as building block of a non-parametric shape model of the ear to better handle the anatomical variability in ear implant labeling. Thirdly, we introduce a conditional random field model with a variety of label priors to facilitate the semantic part-labeling of 3-D meshes of ear implants. In particular we introduce the concept of a global parametric transition prior to enforce transition boundaries between adjacent object parts with an a priori known parametric form. In this way we were able to overcome the issue of inadequate geometric cues (e.g., ridges, bumps, concavities) as natural indicators for the presence of part boundaries. The last part of this work offers an outlook to possible extensions of our methods, in particular the development of 3-D descriptors that are fast to compute whilst at the same time rich enough to capture the characteristic differences between objects residing in the same class.

Thesis (MScEng (Industrial Engineering))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / This thesis explores the innovation survival issue. As role players in an increasingly global marketplace, businesses acknowledge that regular and constant innovation is the key to remaining competitive. In other words, in order to be successful, businesses are compelled to operate and produce products that will satisfy the changing market requirements and exploit new technology opportunities. The study also investigates the difficulties and risks associated with innovation activities. Secondly, with the goal of addressing the identified problems and risks, a study is made of formal innovation models. The different innovation models are then compared with each other and plotted on a general Innovation Landscape. The populated Innovation Landscape thus serves as a positioning guide to innovators, so that they can select the best-suited innovation model for a specific industry and project. A case study is then undertaken to test the level of applicability and the possible support that formal innovation models can offer to a real industrial problem. The case study focuses on the front-end of innovation and the formal innovation model studied was the W-Model. The W-Model is also critically evaluated, based on the results of the case study, in order to propose improvements so that it can better support future industry innovation applications.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-17T14:49:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 942615 bytes, checksum: 7f5e0611dc6b5d3af2061aab6c8cac86 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-02-13 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / Yogurt and fermented milk beverages are fermented dairy products that have increased consumption worldwide, and the demand for functional foods spurred the expansion of these products. Thus, it was entended to evaluate the quality of fermented dairy foods produced in the state of Paraíba. Samples of yogurts and milk beverages of the four mesoregions of the state with federal or state registration were performed, the drinks were evaluated on their labeling, microbiological, physical, chemical and rheological properties. Observing the labels, it was found that 89% were in compliance with the legislation, the main irregularities detected were: unauthorized use of additives in the Technical Regulations and the illegibility of the dates of manufacture and validity, which puts at risk consumer health. Although there has been growth of molds and yeasts, 91% of the samples were within the microbiological parameters determined by current legislation. The centesimal composition varied depending on the mesoregion and inspection record. The rheological behavior varied between samples. Was observed relationship between physico-chemical parameters (total solids and protein) and the apparent viscosity. Overall, yogurts and fermented dairy beverages showed satisfactory quality, but should improve labeling requirements, standards of identity and sanitary quality in order to not endanger consumers health, satisfy the increasingly demanding market and to compete with major brands. / Iogurte e bebida láctea fermentada são produtos lácteos fermentados que tem consumo crescente em todo o mundo, e a demanda por alimentos funcionais impulsionou a expansão desses produtos. Assim, pretendeu-se avaliar a qualidade dos alimentos lácteos fermentados produzidos no Estado da Paraíba. Foram realizadas coletas de iogurtes e bebidas lácteas nas quatro mesorregiões do Estado, contendo registro federal ou estadual, as bebidas foram avaliadas quanto à sua rotulagem, características microbiológicas, físicas, químicas e reológicas. Observando os rótulos, verificou-se que 89% estavam em conformidade com a legislação, tendo como principais irregularidades detectadas: uso de aditivos não autorizados nos Regulamentos Técnicos e a ilegibilidade das datas de fabricação e validade, o que põe em risco à saúde dos consumidores. Embora tenha havido crescimento de bolores e leveduras, 91% das amostras mostrou-se dentro dos parâmetros microbiológicos determinados pela legislação vigente. A composição centesimal variou em função da mesorregião e do registro de inspeção. O comportamento reológico variou entre as amostras. Observou-se relação dos parâmetros físico-químicos (sólidos totais e proteína) com a viscosidade aparente. De modo geral, os iogurtes e bebidas lácteas fermentadas apresentaram qualidade satisfatória, porém devem melhorar requisitos de rotulagem, padrões de identidade e qualidade sanitária, a fim de não pôr em risco a saúde dos consumidores, atender o mercado cada vez mais exigente e competir com grandes marcas.