The toxicological screening of the numerous chemicals that we are exposed to requires significant cost and the use of animals. Accordingly, more efficient methods for the evaluation of toxicity are required to reduce cost and the number of animals used. Computational strategies have the potential to reduce both the cost and the use of animal testing in toxicity screening. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to develop computational models for the prediction of toxicological endpoints that can serve as an alternative to animal testing. In Paper I, an attempt was made to construct a global quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR)model for the acute toxicity endpoint (LD50 values) using the Munro database that represents a broad chemical landscape. Such a model could be used for acute toxicity screening of chemicals of diverse structures. Paper II focuses on the use of acute toxicity data to support the prediction of chronic toxicity. The results of this study suggest that for related chemicals having acute toxicities within a similar range, their lowest observed effect levels (LOELs) can be used in read-across strategies to fill gaps in chronic toxicity data. In Paper III a k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classification model was developed to predict human ether-a-go-go related gene (hERG)-derived toxicity. The results suggest that the model has potential for use in identifying compounds with hERG-liabilities, e.g. in drug development.

This thesis investigates temporal characteristics of monosyllabic words (je, se, že) in semi-spontaneous dialogues and read speech. Our material consisted of two sets of recordings from six speakers (three men and three women). The speakers read a text first, and this reading was followed by a recording of a spontaneous dialogue. We investigated differences of temporal characteristics of monosyllabic words between the two types of speech. In addition, we also examined how these characteristics are affected by different variables, which included: position in a stress group, presence of stress, presence of pause and speaker's personality. It was found that the type of speech had a significant influence on duration ratio of sounds in examined words je, že. Word se remained unaffected by the type of speech and generally appeared as a very stable element. The type of speech also influenced variability in duration - this variability proved to be higher in spontaneous speech. The type of speech did not affect average duration of words je, se, že. Position in the stress group also proved to have a significant effect on duration of words. This effect was mainly caused by words which created isolated stress groups - words in such position had longer duration than words in other positions. For words je, se...

Syftet med detta arbete är att få reda på vad som kan skapa motivation att läsa skönlitteratur i skolan för elever som saknar motivation att läsa. Det handlar om elever som inte har problem med sin läsförmåga utan att de inte har någon lust att läsa. Jag vill även ta reda på om de förstår syftet med att läsa skönlitteratur i skolan. Jag tar upp vad tidigare forskning säger om läsmotivation och hur vi påverkas och utvecklas genom att läsa skönlitteratur i skolan och i hemmet under barndomen. För att få en bättre bild av läsundvikarnas attityd till läsning har jag intervjuat fem elever som saknar motivation att läsa. Jag har i min studie kommit fram till att tiden och upplägget för undervisningen är av stor vikt när det gäller litteraturläsning. Läsning måste ha ett syfte som är förståeligt för eleverna. Lärare måste därför ge alla elever mer tid att läsa och mer tid för att hjälpa dem att hitta rätt böcker för att de ska känna lusten och nöjet att läsa. / The purpose with this work is to find out what can create motivation to read fiction in school for students without motivation to read. It’s about students who don’t have problems with their reading skills, but they don’t have the pleasure to read. I also want to find out if they understand the purpose of reading fiction in school. I study what previous research says about reading motivation and how we are influenced and developed by reading in school and at home during childhood. To get a better picture of what attitude the students that I call read avoiders have towards reading, I have interviewed five students who have no motivation to read. In my study, I have come to the conclusion that the time and structure of teaching is of great importance in reading literature. Reading must have a purpose that is understandable to the students. Teachers must therefore provide all students with more time to read and more time to help them to find the right books to make them feel the desire and the pleasure of reading.

Det övergripande syftet med denna studie var att få fram förskollärares syn på högläsning i förskolan och hur förskollärare använder både spontan och planerad högläsning. Studien gjordes genom semi-strukturerade intervjuer och deltagarna som intervjuades var fyra förskollärare som jobbade inom samma kommun. Resultatet visade att förskollärare som deltog i studien tyckte att högläsning är viktigt för språkutveckling liksom bokvalet. Resultatet visade även att användningen av planerad högläsning kunde kopplas till pågående projekt och läsvilan. Den spontana högläsningen användes mest som ett tillfälle att låta barnens inflytande gå igenom och även som ett tillfälle att läsa böcker på ett mer ingående sätt. Avslutningsvis visar studien att pedagoger kan se på högläsning som en viktig del i förskolans verksamhet och inte bara som en rutin. / The overall aim of this study was to obtain pre-school teachers' views on read-aloud in preschool and the preschool teachers use of both spontaneous and planned read-aloud situations. The study was done by qualitative semi-structured interviews and the participants interviewed were four preschool teachers who worked within the same city. The results showed that preschool teachers' views on reading aloud was that they thought reading aloud was important for language development and how they read a book and book choice was important. The results also showed that the use of planned reading aloud could be linked to ongoing projects and reading relaxation. The spontaneous reading aloud was mostly used as an opportunity to let the children´s will go through, but also as an opportunity to read books in a more detailed way. Finally, the study shows how teachers can see read-aloud as part of the preschool that is not just a routine, but an important part of the pre-school that is important for children’s development.

The purpose of this study is to determine which effect preschool teachers believe that read aloud has on children’s literacy development. To gain knowledge about this I have interviewed and observed currently working preschool teachers at two preschools in Västra Götalands län. As guidance, I have used a designed interview guide which encouraged the preschool teachers to openminded answers. In relation to those I’ve also carried out unstructured observations during read aloud occasions. The material was analysed out of the sociocultural perspective. The outcome of this has concluded that preschool teachers claims that read aloud should be given more space in preschools as it is developing the language but also, that the interest itself is a key to development. The result shows at the same time that read aloud is bound socially and that children needs to be challenged in their reading to be able to move forward. But it also shows that the connection between read aloud and children’s reading-, language- and writing development is hard for preschool teachers to connect.

Aquatic ecotoxicology is the study of toxic chemicals and its effects on aquatic biological systems with the aim of minimising threats to human health and ensure self-sustained ecosystems. Freshwater bivalves are excellent sentinels for use in ecotoxilogical research due to their filter feeding properties, stationary lifestyle and inability to regulate body temperature. This project aimed to assess the feasibility and use of nanopore sequencing, a real-time single-molecule sequencing technology in comparative expression analysis by sequencing transcriptomic RNA from the freshwater mussel Anodonta anatina following exposure to copper. RNAs were extracted from 80 mg hepatopancreas tissue, followed by poly(A) RNA selection. Furthermore, the poly(A) RNA was used to construct a nanopore sequencing library. Sequencing a total amount of 560 ng poly(A) RNA over the course of two separate runs generated 239,448 reads, in which 75% of the reads were obtained during the first run (control) and 25% of the reads were obtained during the second run (case). The median read lengths ranged between 534-650 nucleotides, with a base call accuracy <90%. Due to the big differences in sequence data output between the two sequencing runs, the data was ineligible for comparative analysis. The findings conclude that nanopore sequencing is capable of generating longer read lengths when compared to other sequencing platforms. However, the technology is error-prone in terms of accurate base call identifications and relies on other platforms for error corrections. Future advances include de novo transcriptome assembly for efficient use of Anodonta anatina as a bioindicator in aquatic ecotoxicology.

Syftet med denna studie är att jämföra hur lärare i årskurs F–3 respektive årskurs 4–6 använder högläsning i sin undervisning. Studiens frågeställningar är: vad syftet med högläsning är i årskurs F–3 jämfört med årskurs 4–6, hur lärare i årskurs F–3 respektive årskurs 4–6 använder högläsning i sin undervisning samt om aktiviteter används i samband med högläsningen. Studiens teoretiska utgångspunkt är det sociokulturella perspektivet. För att få syn på deltagarnas perspektiv har halvstrukturerade intervjuer använts som datainsamlingsmetod. Det är sex verksamma lärare som intervjuats i studien. Studiens resultat visar att syftet med högläsningen är att utveckla elevers språkförståelse samt upptäcka böckernas värld. Det ges även mer utrymme åt högläsning i årskurs F–3 än årskurs 4–6. Den vanligaste aktiviteten är att samtala om och diskutera det lästa. / The purpose of this study is to compare how teachers in grades F-3 and 4–6 use reading aloud in their teaching. The following research questions have been considered: what is the purpose of reading aloud in grades F-3 compared to grades 4–6 and how teachers in grades F-3 and 4–6 respectively use reading aloud in their teaching. The study will also inquire into activities used with reading aloud. The theoretical starting point of this study is the socio-cultural perspective. In order to gain an overview of the participants' perspectives, semi-structured interviews have been used as a data collection method. There are six teachers interviewed in this study. The results of the study show that the purpose of reading aloud is to develop the pupils' language comprehension and to discover the world of books. Reading aloud is also given more space in grade F – 3 than grade 4–6. Speaking about and discussing the reading is a common activity.

Many texts we encounter in our everyday lives are lexically and syntactically very complex. This makes them difficult to understand for people with intellectual or reading impairments, and difficult for various natural language processing systems to process. This motivated the need for text simplification (TS) which transforms texts into their simpler variants. Given that this is still a relatively new research area, many challenges are still remaining. The focus of this thesis is on better understanding the current problems in automatic text simplification (ATS) and proposing new data-driven approaches to solving them. We propose methods for learning sentence splitting and deletion decisions, built upon parallel corpora of original and manually simplified Spanish texts, which outperform the existing similar systems. Our experiments in adaptation of those methods to different text genres and target populations report promising results, thus offering one possible solution for dealing with the scarcity of parallel corpora for text simplification aimed at specific target populations, which is currently one of the main issues in ATS. The results of our extensive analysis of the phrase-based statistical machine translation (PB-SMT) approach to ATS reject the widespread assumption that the success of that approach largely depends on the size of the training and development datasets. They indicate more influential factors for the success of the PB-SMT approach to ATS, and reveal some important differences between cross-lingual MT and the monolingual v MT used in ATS. Our event-based system for simplifying news stories in English (EventSimplify) overcomes some of the main problems in ATS. It does not require a large number of handcrafted simplification rules nor parallel data, and it performs significant content reduction. The automatic and human evaluations conducted show that it produces grammatical text and increases readability, preserving and simplifying relevant content and reducing irrelevant content. Finally, this thesis addresses another important issue in TS which is how to automatically evaluate the performance of TS systems given that access to the target users might be difficult. Our experiments indicate that existing readability metrics can successfully be used for this task when enriched with human evaluation of grammaticality and preservation of meaning.

A tese Na Estrada dos Enigmas, Leituras e Linguagens - Imagem e Palavra em Cena propõe uma reflexão sobre a formação de professores de leitura e produção textual e relata uma prática de ensino que utiliza a arte como mediadora e, para isso, atenta que é preciso que o educador transite pelo universo da arte; assim, pretendemos mostrar como isso foi possível em nossa dimensão pedagógica, a partir de experiências intelectuais, artísticas, pedagógicas, emocionais que nos constituíram enquanto educadora. Retomando as palavras de Jean Lauand, ela serve \"no sentido daquela felicíssima confusão que a língua espanhola faz com a palavra enseñar: ensinar não só como ensinar, mas como mostrar\". Sendo assim, o primeiro capítulo se destinou a delinear, por meio das formas poéticas da vida, recriadas pela arte, uma reflexão acerca da formação do educador na sociedade contemporânea. Nosso intento foi descrever como mediamos um processo pedagógico com vistas à formação do educador contemporâneo, capaz de encontrar os arregalados olhos grandes que há dentro de cada alma formada e vertida pelo céu e pela ciência, e ver a realidade além da imagem e, a partir da sua contemplação, encontrar vias possíveis para a solução de seus próprios enigmas. E isso se justificou pelo fato de que na sociedade contemporânea, verificamos a emergência de nos constituirmos enquanto educadores que exerçam uma função social, que articulem seus saberes, planejem e concretizem o fazer pedagógico de forma realmente profissional, conscientes da responsabilidade perante o aprendiz que nos foi confiado, bem como perante aos outros integrantes do tecido social, e que alcancem com o objetivo de possibilitar a constituição de uma educação estética e, consequentemente, pela educação de seres humanos autônomos e melhores. No segundo capítulo, apresentamos um estudo que fundamenta a concepção de leitura do educador leitor e produtor de textos, apto a mediar a construção do conhecimento de seus alunos, no que concerne à leitura e à produção de textos. Partirmos da constatação de que não é possível extrair do vazio, a leitura e a produção textual. Por esse motivo, entendemos que é papel do educador despertar no aluno a consciência de que a leitura e a reflexão sobre o processo de composição textual desenvolvido por outros autores são elementos primordiais e fundamentais do processo de construção do seu (do aluno) texto, pois, leitura e conhecimento técnico são propulsores da compreensão e da interpretação, bem como contribuem para o fluir da criação. No terceiro capítulo, relatamos algumas práticas de leitura e produção de textos que desenvolvemos com nossos aprendizes, a fim de ilustrar que ensinar a produzir textos, longe da crença comum, não é simplesmente transmitir conhecimentos sobre definição de gêneros, modalidades e estrutura formal de produções discursivas; é sim um ato de extrema complexidade, pois exige que o leitor e, posteriormente, o produtor de textos, primeiramente, se emaranhe no tecido e na estrutura textual alheia para desvendá-los e, depois possa, finalmente, criar o próprio texto. E, além disso, possa também eleger destinos e dá-los a esses textos. E, finalmente concluímos, certos de que para a epifania da escrita ocorra, é preciso que a leitura salte para dentro da vida. / On the Enigma, Reading and Language Road - Images and Words on Stage is a study that proposes a reflection on the education of reading and text production teachers and reports on a teaching practice that uses art as medium, thus, calling attention to the need of educators to pass through the world of art. We intend to show how this is possible within our pedagogical dimension, and through the use of the intellectual, artistic, pedagogical, and emotional experiences we acquired as teachers. In Jean Lauand\'s words, it is used \"in the way that Spanish very delightfully confuses the word enseñar: enseñar means not only teach, but also show\". Therefore, the objective of the first chapter was to outline, through the poetic forms of life, recreated through art, a reflection on the education of the teacher in today\'s contemporary society. Our aim was to describe how we mediated the educational process in the development of today\'s teachers, capable of seeking deep inside their souls for the awareness of looking beyond the image, and through this contemplation, find possible solutions for their own enigmas. This was justified by the fact that in contemporary society we note the urgency of developing educators who actually perform a social function. These are educators who articulate knowledge, plan pedagogical activities and carry them out in a truly professional manner, conscious of their responsibilities to the learner who was entrusted to them, as well as to other participants in the social fabric and whose objectives are to provide an aesthetic education which will consequently result in the education of better and independent human beings. In the second chapter, we present a study based on the educator\'s concept of reading, on his/her capacity of acting as a medium in the building of knowledge in his/her students, in reference to reading and text production. We begin with the verification that it is not possible to extract reading or text production from empty space. For this reason, we understand that the role of the educator is to awaken the student\'s awareness to the fact that reading and reflecting on texts written by other authors are basic and fundamental principals for the student\'s own text production, because, reading and technical skills are the driving force to comprehension and interpretation, as well as contributors to the creative flow. In the third chapter we report some reading and text production practices that we developed along with our learners, to illustrate that teaching to produce texts, far from common belief, is not simply transmitting knowledge and defining genres, modes and formal discursive structures. Text production is an extremely complex activity, because it requires that the reader, who later will become a text producer him/herself, first be enmeshed in the texture and structure of someone else\'s text, to unveil it, so he/she may later create his/her own text, as well as determine the purpose and fate of these texts. We finally conclude that for a writer\'s epiphany to occur, reading must take a leap into life.

Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka hur lärare säger sig använda högläsning som aktivitet i grundskolans årskurser F-3 samt att undersöka vilka ställningstaganden som ligger till grund för utformningen av högläsning av skönlitteratur i grundskolans årskurser F-3. De frågeställningar som legat till grund för studien är följande: o Hur anger lärare att högläsning av skönlitteratur i klassrummet utformas samt kan utformas och av vilka anledningar? o Hur anger lärare att skönlitterära verk väljs ut för högläsning i grundskolans årskurser F-3 och hur kan skönlitterära verk väljas ut? Kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer användes och sex aktiva lärare intervjuades. En fenomenologisk ansats användes i analysarbetet vilket innebär att likheter och skillnader mellan informanternas svar söktes och analyserades för att ge en bild av hur informanterna uppfattar att de arbetar med högläsning i grundskolans årskurser F-3. Den forskning som ligger till grund för denna studie visar att en genomtänkt högläsning där elever görs delaktiga genom olika aktiviteter runt läsningen kan ge elever en god läs- och skriftspråksutveckling samt stärka elevers ord- och begreppsförråd. Detta innebär att lärare som vill använda högläsning i syfte att stärka elevers språkutveckling bör arbeta aktivt med att utforma sin högläsning på ett sådant sätt att elevernas förmågor stärks. Studien visar att samtliga informanter använder högläsning i sin undervisning men att högläsningens syfte samt den tid som läggs på högläsning skiljer sig något mellan olika lärare. Vidare visar studien att det i huvudsak är läraren som väljer vilka texter som ska användas i högläsningssituationer och att aktiviteter kopplade till högläsning i syfte att göra elever delaktiga inte används i särskilt stor omfattning. / <p>Svenska</p>