To strengthen societies and address the increased risks generated by climate change, development projects within disaster risk reduction [DRR] and climate change adaptation [CCA] must ensure the sustainability of capacity development. However, sustainability is currently flawed in such projects, which could relate to the inadequate achievement of empowerment of targeted beneficiaries. Some scholars suggest that vertical collaboration – the collaboration between stakeholders and beneficiaries – is decisive in determining the achievement of community empowerment during implementation. Still, the role of vertical collaboration and the dynamics of this relationship remains unexplored. By comparing a development initiative within climate-smart agriculture [CSA] implemented in two different communities in Eswatini, this thesis aims to evaluate the achievement of vertical collaboration and explore the relationship between vertical collaboration and empowerment. The results show that the achievement of vertical collaboration does covariate with the presence of empowerment and that certain factors are more influential in determining outcomes than others. These factors include the presence of opportunities for all participants to get involved; active, accessible, and participatory communication; bidirectional learning; and providing beneficiaries with voice and decision-making power. The findings support the theoretical argument, demonstrating that vertical collaboration plays a role in determining empowerment, and highlight the importance of considering it as a critical aspect when implementing CSA projects. However, the sustainability of capacity developments could not be identified in either community, suggesting that alternative factors might be essential for long-term outcomes. Further research is required to understand interconnections among identified factors and how they can be leveraged for the success and sustainability of capacity development within this field.

Hedersrelaterat våld och förtryck är ett omfattande samhällsproblem som Socialtjänsten behöver hantera. Det kännetecknas med stor komplexitet som kräver djupare förståelse av problematiken för att kunna erbjuda relevanta insatser. Det vanligaste beslutet hos Socialtjänsten vid ärenden som är kopplat till hedersrelaterat våld är att individen ska erbjudas skyddat boende för att bli av med våldet direkt. I detta examensarbete undersöks personalens perspektiv på insatsen skyddat boende. Syftet är att belysas skyddat boendes personal erfarenheter och upplevelser av klienter som var utsatta för hedersförtryck. Examensarbetet utgår från tre punkter – den första är personalens uppfattning av hedersproblematiken och skyddade boende. Den andra är fördelarna och nackdelarna med en placering på skyddat boende och sista är samarbetet mellan Socialtjänsten och skyddade boendet. Resultatet visar att personalen har betydande kunskap om hedersproblematiken vilket möjliggör ett individuellt förhållningssätt till att arbeta med klienterna. Vidare pekar resultatet på att personalen identifierar fördelarna samt nackdelarna som uppstår för klienterna på skyddat boende. Sist konstateras ett bra samarbete mellan personalen och Socialtjänsten dock finns det flera områden som kräver förbättring och utveckling. Genomförandet av examensarbetet sker med hjälp av flera teorier, till exempel gräsrotsbyråkratens teori, intersektionalitets teorin, teorin om kön och genus samt teorin om makt. / Honor-related violence and oppression is an extensive social problem that Social Services needs to deal with. It is characterized by great complexity that requires a deep understanding of the problem in order to offer relevant interventions. The most common decision by the Social Services in cases connected to honor-related violence is that the individual is offered sheltered accommodation in order to get rid of the violence immediately. In this degree project, the staff's perspective on the sheltered housing initiative is examined. The aim is to shed light on the experience of protected accommodation staff and the experience of clients who were exposed to honor oppression. The thesis is based on three points - the first is the staff's perception of the honor problem and sheltered accommodation. The second is the advantages and disadvantages of placement in sheltered housing and the last is the cooperation between Social Services and the sheltered housing. The result shows that the staff has significant knowledge of the honor problem, which enables an individual approach to working with the clients. Furthermore, the results indicate that the staff identify the advantages and disadvantages that arise for the clients in the sheltered accommodation. Finally, there is good cooperation between the staff and Social Services, however, there are several areas that require improvement and development. The completion of degree work is done with the help of several theories, for example the theory of grassroots bureaucrats, the theory of intersectionality, the theory of sex and gender and the theory of power.

<p>  Non-model microorganisms offer a wealth of biotechnological potential that may be leveraged to address a variety of global grand challenges. These include challenges in carrying out complex or altogether new chemistries, discovery and production of bioactive molecules, sustainable production of biochemicals and bioproducts from renewable feedstocks, and improving agricultural practices for responsible management of carbon. Specifically, using renewable plant biomass as a substrate for production of fuels and or chemicals offers a near ubiquitous supply that does not compete with food or petrochemicals. Alternatively, identifying new natural products will be essential to addressing the ever-increasing occurrence of antibiotic resistance. Non-model organisms may provide elegant solutions to many of these challenges, whether by possessing new or more efficient strategies to depolymerize lignocellulose, by encoding enzymes with increased stabilities and or specific activities, or perhaps by containing rich biosynthetic capabilities for production of previously unidentified natural products, among others. Yet efforts to leverage non-model microorganisms for their diverse biotechnological potential remain limited to a variety of often difficult, yet not insurmountable challenges.</p> <p>     In this work, I propose anaerobic gut fungi (Neocallimastigomycota) as a robust microbial system that may be leveraged to efficiently depolymerize crude lignocellulose, increase animal nutrition, or identify novel natural products. To this end, I detail the first chromosomally resolved genome assembly of anaerobic fungi (<em>Piromyces communis </em>var. <em>indianae</em> UH3-1). I investigate the genome organization of this isolate and describe how acquisition of Carbohydrate Active EnZymes (CAZymes) contribute to the robust lignocellulolytic activity of gut fungi. I then detail efforts to build a nascent genetic engineering toolbox for these anaerobic organisms. With the acquisition of the first chromosomally resolved genome assemblies, I identify a basic set of genetic parts needed for a genetic engineering toolkit. I show these parts are functional and detail methods to enable higher throughput testing in vivo. I subsequently detail efforts to construct the first preliminary CRISPR tools for anaerobic fungi as these will be essential to establish precise DNA targeting in future strain engineering efforts. I then describe the role of epigenetics in anaerobic fungi, detailing the extent to which it may be leveraged to control gene expression. Finally, I provide a discussion of this work and describe how it may guide future efforts to domesticate these organisms. Collectively, this work provides the first chromosomally resolved genome assembly as a resource for the community, along with genetic tools and techniques to begin domesticating these non-model organisms. Importantly, this work reveals that despite the challenges associated with anaerobic microbes of relatively high complexity, they are not insurmountable, and thus efforts to domesticate them are feasible.</p>

Denna studie avhandlar föräldrars upplevelser gällande sina barns placering i enlighet med lagen med särskilda bestämmelser om vård av unga, (LVU) 2§. Studien har genomförts med en kvalitativ metod, där sju föräldrar intervjuats. Studien undersöker föräldrars upplevelser och därav metodvalet, att kunna ställa respondenternas perspektiv i centrum, i detta avseende deras individuella upplevelser. Studien utgår från teoretiska utgångspunkterna symbolisk interaktionism och intersubjektivitet för att belysa föräldrars upplevelser av att vara förälder till ett placerat barn. Studien belyser även det negativa sociala arvet samt generationstrauma, vilket visar sig i att flera av föräldrarna har erfarenhet av att själva ha utsatts för våld från sina föräldrar och flera har även själva varit familjehemsplacerade som barn. Studiens resultat visade på varierande upplevelser av att få sitt barn placerat enligt 2§ LVU. Flera respondenter beskrev en känsla av att inte uppleva sig själva som förälder förutom under umgänge, andra respondenter ansåg sig själva fortfarande vara föräldrar trots placeringen. De föräldrar som upplevde placeringen som negativ uppgav en känsla av motstånd från familjehemmet samt att bli fråntagen sin roll som förälder. Vissa föräldrar beskrev även en känsla av ambivalens utifrån att de upplevde en viss tacksamhet gentemot familjehemmet trots att föräldern inte samtycker till placeringen. / ABSTRACTThis study deals with parents' experiences regarding the placement of their children in accordance with “lagen med särskilda bestämmelser om vård av unga, (LVU) 2§”. The study was carried out using a qualitative method, where seven parents were interviewed. The study investigates parents' experiences and hence the choice of method, to be able to place the respondents' perspective in the center, in this respect their individual experiences. The study is based on the theoretical starting points of symbolic interactionism and intersubjectivity to shed light on parents' experiences of being the parent of a placed child. The study also highlights the negative social legacy and generational trauma, which is shown in the fact that several of the parents have experience of having been subjected to violence from their parents themselves and several have also themselves been placed in family homes as children. The results of the study showed different experiences of being seated according to § 2 LVU. Several respondents described a feeling of not experiencing themselves as a parent except during socializing, other respondents still considered themselves to be parents despite the placement. The parents who experienced the placement as negative stated a feeling of resistance from the family home and of being deprived of their role as a parent. Some parents also described a feeling of ambivalence based on the fact that they felt a certain gratitude towards the family home despite the parent not consenting to the placement.

No / Nowhere in the world is the demand for peace more prominent and challenging than in Africa. From state collapse and anarchy in Somalia to protracted wars and rampant corruption in the Congo; from bloody civil wars and extreme poverty in Sierra Leone to humanitarian crisis and authoritarianism in Sudan, the continent is the focus of growing political and media attention. This book presents the first comprehensive overview of conflict and peace across the continent. Bringing together a range of leading academics from Africa and beyond, "Peace and Conflict in Africa" is an ideal introduction to key themes of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, security and development. The book's stress on the importance of indigenous Africa approaches to creating peace makes it an innovative and exciting intervention in the field.

Title: Sustainability in non-profit organizations. Exploring drivers, challenges, and opportunities This study explores the drivers, challenges, and opportunities that non-profit organizations face when adopting sustainability practices. By focusing on the drivers, challenges, and opportunities, the study investigates what motivates these organizations to adopt sustainability practices, challenges, and unique opportunities.  The method chosen for the study has enabled an in-depth analysis using triangulation of the organization's sustainability information and interviews. These have illustrated a complex interplay of cultural, strategic, collaborative, and institutional factors driving sustainability efforts. For example, resource constraints were consistently mentioned in interviews as a predominant challenge, whereas organizational documents pointed towards collaborative endeavors as a critical solution. This dual perspective underscores the balance between challenges and solutions in sustainability work. The findings indicate that sustainability in non-profit organizations is subject to change, influenced by internal dynamics, including the alignment with core objectives and the necessity to maintain societal relevance. External pressures, such as expectations from stakeholders such as donors, volunteers, and regulatory bodies, further shape these initiatives. These organizations encounter challenges, including resource limitations and knowledge gaps, which they address through collaborative initiatives and educational endeavors. Opportunities arising from sustainability include enhanced member engagement and environmental impact mitigation. This research portrays sustainability as an ongoing process with challenges and opportunities, emphasizing the importance of integrating sustainability into operational strategies. / Titel: Hållbarhetsarbete inom icke vinstridvande organisationer. En undersökning av drivkrafter, utmaningar och möjligheter. Denna studie utforskar de drivkrafter, utmaningar och möjligheter som ideella organisationer står inför när de inför hållbarhetspraktiker. Genom att fokusera på drivkrafter, utmaningar och möjligheter undersöker studien vad som motiverar dessa organisationer att införa hållbarhetsarbete, utmaningar och möjligheter.  Metoden som valts för studien har möjliggjort en djupgående analys genom triangulering utav intervjuer och hållbarhetsinformation hos fyra organisationer. Dessa har åskådliggjort en komplex samverkan av kulturella, strategiska, samarbetsmässiga och institutionella faktorer som driver hållbarhetsarbetet. Exempelvis nämndes resursbegränsningar konsekvent i intervjuer som en framträdande utmaning, samtidigt som rapporter pekade mot samarbete som en central lösning. Detta dubbla perspektiv understryker balansen mellan utmaningar och lösningar i hållbarhetsarbetet.  Resultaten indikerar att hållbarhet inom icke-vinstdrivande organisationer är föränderlig, påverkad av interna dynamiker och anpassning till mål, idé och vision. Externa påtryckningar, som förväntningar från intressenter och styrande organ, påverkar dessa initiativ. De studerande organisationerna står inför utmaningar, som resursbegränsningar och kunskapsbrist. Möjligheter kopplade till hållbarhet innefattar medlemsengagemang och minskning av miljöpåverkan. Denna studie betraktar hållbarhet som en process med både utmaningar och möjligheter.

The purpose of the study was to increase knowledge about high school students' perspective on the school's support efforts in mathematics teaching. Bronfenbrenner's developmental ecology model was used as the theoretical framework for the design of the interview guide and result analysis. The study has a qualitative approach and the empirical evidence was collected through semi-structured interviews with ten high school students in the high school's university preparatory program at four different schools.  The selection of informants was made based on the students' self-perceived experiences of mathematics difficulties. After transcribing the audio files, the material was analyzed in its entirety using thematic content analysis. The result showed that additional adaptations in mathematics teaching to a greater extent need to meet the students' actual needs. The students in the study preferred a mathematics support in teaching, such as two teachers in the classroom instead of a support outside teaching. To prevent mathematics difficulties, the teaching needs to involve the students in different ways during the lessons, be interesting and understandable according to the study's informants. The language in mathematics could create barriers to accessibility, a factor which can be understood on both a micro and exo level. Several students highlighted the potential of the digital resources for mathematics and how these can be used as supplementary support. Finally, problems at the meso level need attention and transitions both between junior high and high school as well as between high schools need to be ensured regarding the students' need for additional adaptations and knowledge development in mathematics.

<p dir="ltr">Lithium-ion batteries are being used increasingly more often to provide power for systems that range all the way from common cell-phones and laptops to advanced electric automotive and aircraft vehicles. However, as is the case for all battery types, lithium-ion batteries are prone to naturally occurring degradation phenomenon that limit their effective use in these systems to a finite amount of time. This degradation is caused by a plethora of variables and conditions including things like environmental conditions, physical stress/strain on the body of the battery cell, and charge/discharge parameters and cycling. Accurately and reliably being able to predict this degradation behavior in battery systems is crucial for any party looking to implement and use battery powered systems. However, due to the complicated non-linear multivariable processes that affect battery degradation, this can be difficult to achieve. Compared to traditional methods of battery degradation prediction and modeling like equivalent circuit models and physics-based electrochemical models, data-driven machine learning tools have been shown to be able to handle predicting and classifying the complex nature of battery degradation without requiring any prior knowledge of the physical systems they are describing.</p><p dir="ltr">One of the most critical steps in developing these data-driven neural network algorithms is data procurement and preprocessing. Without large amounts of high-quality data, no matter how advanced and accurate the architecture is designed, the neural network prediction tool will not be as effective as one trained on high quality, vast quantities of data. This work aims to gather battery degradation data from a wide variety of sources and studies, examine how the data was produced, test the effectiveness of the data in the Interfacial Multiphysics Laboratory’s autoencoder based neural network tool CD-Net, and analyze the results to determine factors that make battery degradation datasets perform better for use in machine learning/deep learning tools. This work also aims to relate this work to other data-driven models by comparing the CD-Net model’s performance with the publicly available BEEP’s (Battery Evaluation and Early Prediction) ElasticNet model. The reported accuracy and prediction models from the CD-Net and ElasticNet tools demonstrate that larger datasets with actively selected training/testing designations and less errors in the data produce much higher quality neural networks that are much more reliable in estimating the state-of-health of lithium-ion battery systems. The results also demonstrate that data-driven models are much less effective when trained using data from multiple different cell chemistries, form factors, and cycling conditions compared to more congruent datasets when attempting to create a generalized prediction model applicable to multiple forms of battery cells and applications.</p>

In current resuscitation guidelines, tactile stimulation is recommended for infants with insufficient respiratory efforts after birth. No recommendations are made regarding duration, onset, and method of stimulation. Neither is mentioned how tactile stimulation should be applied in relation to the gestational age. The aim was to review the physiological mechanisms of respiratory drive after birth and to identify and structure the current evidence on tactile stimulation during neonatal resuscitation. A systematic review of available data was performed using PubMed, covering the literature up to April 2021. Two independent investigators screened the extracted references and assessed their methodological quality. Six studies were included. Tactile stimulation management, including the onset of stimulation, overall duration, and methods as well as the effect on vital parameters was analyzed and systematically presented. Tactile stimulation varies widely between, as well as within different centers and no consensus exists which stimulation method is most effective. Some evidence shows that repetitive stimulation within the first minutes of resuscitation improves oxygenation. Further studies are warranted to optimize strategies to support spontaneous breathing after birth, assessing the effect of stimulating various body parts respectively within different gestational age groups.

The industrial shift from single core processors to multi-core ones introduced many challenges. Among them, a program cannot get a free performance boost by just upgrading to a new hardware because new chips include more processing units but at the same (or comparable) clock speed as the previous generation. In order to effectively exploit the new available hardware and thus gain performance, a program should maximize parallelism. Unfortunately, parallel programming poses several challenges, especially when synchronization is involved because parallel threads need to access the same shared data. Locks are the standard synchronization mechanism but gaining performance using locks is difficult for a non-expert programmers and without deeply knowing the application logic. A new, easier, synchronization abstraction is therefore required and Transactional Memory (TM) is the concrete candidate. TM is a new programming paradigm that simplifies the implementation of synchronization. The programmer just defines atomic parts of the code and the underlying TM system handles the required synchronization, optimistically. In the past decade, TM researchers worked extensively to improve TM-based systems. Most of the work has been dedicated to Software TM (or STM) as it does not requires special transactional hardware supports. Very recently (in the past two years), those hardware supports have become commercially available as commodity processors, thus a large number of customers can finally take advantage of them. Hardware TM (or HTM) provides the potential to obtain the best performance of any TM-based systems, but current HTM systems are best-effort, thus transactions are not guaranteed to commit in any case. In fact, HTM transactions are limited in size and time as well as prone to livelock at high contention levels. Another challenge posed by the current multi-core hardware platforms is their internal architecture used for interfacing with the main memory. Specifically, when the common computer deployment changed from having a single processor to having multiple multi-core processors, the architects redesigned also the hardware subsystem that manages the memory access from the one providing a Uniform Memory Access (UMA), where the latency needed to fetch a memory location is the same independently from the specific core where the thread executes on, to the current one with a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA), where such a latency differs according to the core used and the memory socket accessed. This switch in technology has an implication on the performance of concurrent applications. In fact, the building blocks commonly used for designing concurrent algorithms under the assumptions of UMA (e.g., relying on centralized meta-data) may not provide the same high performance and scalability when deployed on NUMA-based architectures. In this dissertation, we tackle the performance and scalability challenges of multi-core architectures by providing three solutions for increasing performance using HTM (i.e., Part-HTM, Octonauts, and Precise-TM), and one solution for solving the scalability issues provided by NUMA-architectures (i.e., Nemo). • Part-HTM is the first hybrid transactional memory protocol that solves the problem of transactions aborted due to the resource limitations (space/time) of current best-effort HTM. The basic idea of Part-HTM is to partition those transactions into multiple sub-transactions, which can likely be committed in hardware. Due to the eager nature of HTM, we designed a low-overhead software framework to preserve transaction's correctness (with and without opacity) and isolation. Part-HTM is efficient: our evaluation study confirms that its performance is the best in all tested cases, except for those where HTM cannot be outperformed. However, in such a workload, Part-HTM still performs better than all other software and hybrid competitors. • Octonauts tackles the live-lock problem of HTM at high contention level. HTM lacks of advanced contention management (CM) policies. Octonauts is an HTM-aware scheduler that orchestrates conflicting transactions. It uses a priori knowledge of transactions' working-set to prevent the activation of conflicting transactions, simultaneously. Octonauts also accommodates both HTM and STM with minimal overhead by exploiting adaptivity. Based on the transaction's size, time, and irrevocable calls (e.g., system call) Octonauts selects the best path among HTM, STM, or global locking. Results show a performance improvement up to 60% when Octonauts is deployed in comparison with pure HTM with falling back to global locking. • Precise-TM is a unique approach to solve the granularity of the software fallback path of best-efforts HTM. It provide an efficient and precise technique for HTM-STM communication such that HTM is not interfered by concurrent STM transactions. In addition, the added overhead is marginal in terms of space or execution time. Precise-TM uses address-embedded locks (pointers bit-stealing) for a precise communication between STM and HTM. Results show that our precise fine-grained locking pays off as it allows more concurrency between hardware and software transactions. Specifically, it gains up to 5x over the default HTM implementation with a single global lock as fallback path. • Nemo is a new STM algorithm that ensures high and scalable performance when an application workload with a data locality property is deployed. Existing STM algorithms rely on centralized shared meta-data (e.g., a global timestamp) to synchronize concurrent accesses, but in such a workload, this scheme may hamper the achievement of scalable performance given the high latency introduced by NUMA architectures for updating those centralized meta-data. Nemo overcomes these limitations by allowing only those transactions that actually conflict with each other to perform inter-socket communication. As a result, if two transactions are non-conflicting, they cannot interact with each other through any meta-data. Such a policy does not apply for application threads running in the same socket. In fact, they are allowed to share any meta-data even if they execute non-conflicting operations because, supported by our evaluation study, we found that the local processing happening inside one socket does not interfere with the work done by parallel threads executing on other sockets. Nemo's evaluation study shows improvement over state-of-the-art TM algorithms by as much as 65%. / Ph. D.