Methane is an important green house gas as it is responsible for 15-20 % of the green house effect. Marine environments in general and shallow near-coastal waters specifically may be important contributors of methane emissions but are as of today poorly studied.  In this study we measured total fluxes of methane from shallow near-coastal waters at two sites along the east coast of Sweden. The sea-to-air emissions of methane where captured using floating chambers. This gave measured fluxes as compared to earlier studies of the Baltic Sea where calculated fluxes are often used. Measured fluxes have the merit of not having to rely on several highly varying and complex variables e.g. mean wind speed and piston velocity that vary and give an uncertainty to the results.  The fluxes ranged from -2.14 to 0.37 mg CH4 m-2 d-1 with a mean of 0.05 mg CH4 m-2 d-1. The results show a correlation, however not strong, between depth and methane. No difference in flux between the study sites could be seen. We look forward to further studies using floating chambers on shallow near-coastal waters with longer sampling periods to catch seasonal variations.

Banker lånar ut pengar till företag genom så kallade företagshypotek som också är väldigt speciellt för Sverige. Som säkerhet användes då olika tillgångar som varulager, maskiner och kundfordringar. Om företaget sedan gick i konkurs så hade banken rätt att få utdelning på 100 procent av kreditgivningen. Nu har de endast rätt att få tillbaka 55 procent av säkerheten. Andra fordringsägare står nu även högre prioriterade än vad banken gör. Syftet med lagreformen är att minska de onödiga konkurserna i form av exempelvis att leverantörerna inte får sin utbetalning av konkursboet och riskerade att gå omkull själva. Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka och beskriva hur bankernas agerande och krav på säkerheter vid kreditgivning till små- och medelstora företag har förändrats efter införandet av nya förmånsrättsregler och lagen om företagsinteckning. Syftet är vidare att undersöka om och hur tillverkande små- och medelstora företags krediter i banken har påverkats på grund av den nya lagen. För att besvara syftet med rapporten så genomfördes en kvalitativ undersökning där banker intervjuades. Vidare genomfördes även en kvantitativ undersökning som bestod av en enkätundersökning som var riktad till 250 tillverkande företag i Gnosjö, Gislaved, Värnamo och Vaggeryds kommuner. Den nya förmånsrättslagen medför ett flertal större konsekvenser för förhållandet mellan banker och företag. De flesta av dessa konsekvenser är negativa för både banker och företag, då majoriteten av båda parterna tror att banken kommer att kräva mer säkerheter i framtiden för att säkerställa sina lån. För att komma undan detta problem så kommer nya utlåningsformer att öka, framför allt factoring och leasing. Resultatet av undersökningen visar att flera av lagsiftarnas syften med lagen inte kommer att uppfyllas. Den största förväntade positiva effekten av förändringen är att leverantörerna kommer ta en mindre smäll när en kund går i konkurs. / Banks lends money to companies through so called floating charges, which are significant for Sweden. Assets, such as stocks, machines and customer claims are used as collateral. If a company went bankrupt, before the new priority right law was used, the bank was in favour to get the entire loan back. Now, after the law reform, the bank only can insist on getting 55% of the given security. Other creditors are now better prioritised than the banks. The purpose with the law reform is to minimize the unnecessery bankruptencies, for example suppliers that cannot handle the loss when a big customer goes bankrupt. The purpose of this thesis is to emphasize what expected consequenses the new law will have on the bank’s granting of credit to small and medium sized companies and how these effects will affect the companie’s credit support. To answer the purpose with this report a qualitative research was made involving interviews with banks. Further a quantitative research, consisting of a inquiry research, addressed to 250 production companies in the Jönköping region was made. The new priority right law brings several consequences affecting the relationship between banks and companies. Most of the consequences are negative for both banks and companies, as the majority of both parts believes that the banks will demand more securities in the future to ensure their loans. To solve this, new lending out forms, especially factoring and leasing, will be used. The result of this research shows that most of the purposes with the law reform will not be fulfilled. The largest positive expected effect of the change is that the suppliers will take a smaller damage when a customer goes bankrupt.

To slow climate change, humans should take immediate and widespread action. One way to slow climate change is by switching to switch to renewable power plants such as solar fields. Recently, pioneering companies have built solar fields on water bodies. This study found that such a pairing of water and solar could increase production efficiency by 8-10% through panel cooling, save millions of liters of water from evaporation, and produce energy with under-utilized space.

The aim of this thesis has been to study and analyse in detail the process by which timber floating in tributaries was phased out. The region covered is that of the Ume and Vindel rivers and the period studied is 1945-70. The years I945-60 have been the most central to the analysis. The approach taken was to study timber floating itself rather than the new transport alternative (lorries) which developed during the post-war period. This brought the increasing costs of timber floating in tributaries into the forefront of the investigation, along with the efforts made to restrain these by means of investment in and partial closure of the floatway network. The consequences in terms of changed labour demand are also discussed. An important part of the analysis has been to examine the inherent weaknesses of timber floating in tributaries and the internal driving forces underlying its phasing-out. The term "internal driving forces" connotes those forces which affected timber floating as a means of transport by causing its costs to rise. In other words it has not been a matter of looking at the direct competition from lorry transport and the advantages of the new transport technique but rather of identifying the drawbacks of floating, when, where and how they arose, and how they helped to make it relatively dearer, thus motivating the changeover to lorry transport. The internal driving forces were forest structure and labour costs. When labour costs incurred in timber floating in tributaries were rising rapidly and the dimensions of the logs became smaller in size, floating became a dearer transport solution than before. As regards changes in forest structure, the dimensions of logs were diminishing throughout the floating epoch. This meant that the risk of sinking during floating increased. The effect of this was that the need to bark the timber was increasing all the time, which in turn entailed an indirect transport cost for floating. In addition to this, smaller log dimensions affected the labour time and cost of floating. The changed labour conditions along with the changed forest structure showed the importance of studying structural change in the Norrland forest region. For during the later 1940s and early 1950s a shortage of labour presented itself, and the cause was to be found in the new job opportunities which were emerging, some in the rural areas, for example in the construction of hydro-electric powerplants, and some in the larger populated localities, and these factors taken together made recruitment for jobs in forestry and timber floating more difficult. One of the chief characteristics of the way events were moving was that recruitment shifted away from having mainly targeted the agrarian lower class of smallholders, crofters and leaseholders so that it now focused increasingly on freehold farmers while at the same time the recruitment base, having previously consisted of younger workers, was now composed mainly of older people. Also in this study, various factors have been examined which could conceivably explain the changes in productivity of timber floating in tributaries. The results show, for example, that during the 1950s a partial phasing-out had very small direct effects on productivity in the area studied. Thus the combination of investment and changes in the quantity of timber is the factor which best explains the differences between different tributaries in the trend of productivity. A tributary´s greater capacity to float timber did not necessarily signify a bigger labour requirement since to a certain extent the watercourse itself “did the job”. As regards investment, clearance operations using caterpillar tractors were probably very important. It is true that the genuine dependence of log driving in tributaries on nature influenced conditions varied strongly from year to year, but since the link between investment costs and the trend of productivity is significant, it still seems reasonable to draw the conclusion that investment lent impetus to the rise in productivity during the 1950s. / digitalisering@umu

There have been proposals of many parity inducing techniques like Forward ErrorCorrection (FEC) which try to cope the problem of channel induced errors to alarge extent if not completely eradicate. The convolutional codes have been widelyidentified to be very efficient among the known channel coding techniques. Theprocess of decoding the convolutionally encoded data stream at the receiving nodecan be quite complex, time consuming and memory inefficient.This thesis outlines the implementation of multistandard soft decision viterbidecoder and word length effects on it. Classic Viterbi algorithm and its variantsoft decision viterbi algorithm, Zero-tail termination and Tail-Biting terminationfor the trellis are discussed. For the final implementation in C language, the "Zero-Tail Termination" approach with soft decision Viterbi decoding is adopted. Thismemory efficient implementation approach is flexible for any code rate and anyconstraint length.The results obtained are compared with MATLAB reference decoder. Simulationresults have been provided which show the performance of the decoderand reveal the interesting trade-off of finite word length with system performance.Such investigation can be very beneficial for the hardware design of communicationsystems. This is of high interest for Viterbi algorithm as convolutional codes havebeen selected in several famous standards like WiMAX, EDGE, IEEE 802.11a,GPRS, WCDMA, GSM, CDMA 2000 and 3GPP-LTE.

This essay investigates the colonized self in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, by analyzing the novels from a postcolonial perspective. Furthermore, it discusses how and why Masuji Ono and Mr. Stevens are affected by Japanese imperialism and British colonialism. Through a close reading of the novels, this essay argues that the protagonists are ‘colonized’ by their own countries, and eventually also ‘imperialized,’ or influenced, by America following the Second World War. Ono is ‘colonized’ by his colleague Matsuda, while Mr. Stevens is ‘colonized’ by his employer, Mr. Darlington. Later on, they are both ‘imperialized’ through the American occupation and influence.

Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att redovisa för de effekter som kan sespå odlingssystem samt livssituation hos småbrukande bönder i Östra Afrika efter ett införande av en liten biogasanläggning kallad "floating drum". Anläggningen genererar rötrester som används som gödslingsmedel i odlingssystem och biogas som bränsle i matlagningssituationer. Resultatet baseras på uppgifter från litteratur, fältstudier och en enkätundersökning. Uppsatsen har sin utgångspunkt från en fältstudie hos en småbrukande familj på landsbygden. Studien genomfördes i ett område som heter Kadongo och ligger i nordvästra Kenya. Familjen installerade en "floating drum" med hjälp av biståndsorganisationen Vi-skogen. Biogasen från en "floating drum" kan helt eller delvis ersätta ved, kol och fotogen som idag är de vanligaste bränslena för energiframställning i Kenya. Mycket mark och landområden har förstörts och förstörs eftersom dessa behövs för odlingar och träden skövlas för att få vedbränsle. Under de senaste trettio åren har mer än halva skogsytan i Kenya försvunnit. När biogas ersätter vedbränsle innebär det att många träd kan sparas. Insamling av ved för den småbrukande familjen är ett tungt och tidskrävande arbete och kan ta uppemot fyra timmar per dag. Arbetet på gården består även av att samla in vatten och sköta odlingarna. När veden ersätts av biogas förbättras familjens men framförallt kvinnans livssituation då det är kvinnan som står för det huvudsakliga arbetet på gården. Förbättringar kan även ses på familjens hälsa eftersom de inte längre behöver inandas den farliga eldröken. På odlingssystem kan olika effekter ses, bland annat i form av ökade skördar, förbättrad kvalité på grödor och ett minskat behov av kemiska gödslings- och bekämpningsmedel. Andra effekter som kan ses är att jämställdheten i familjen ökar och att kvinnan får en ökad social status. En installation av en biogasanläggning är en stor investering och risker för kvävningsolyckor samt explosioner föreligger vid användandet. Kunskap, information och utbildning är viktiga komponenter för att anläggningen ska fungera och inte bli stående ur bruk.

As a comparative study, the global performance of two cases for a floating harbor system are researched by numerical analysis and compared with results from experiments: one is a two-body case such that a floating quay is placed next to a fixed quay, a normal harbor, and the other is a three-body case such that a container ship is posed in the middle of the floating quay and the fixed quay. The numerical modeling is built based on the experimental cases. Mooring system used in the experiments is simplified to sets of linear springs, and gaps between adjacent bodies are remarkably narrow as 1.3m~1.6m with reference to large scales of the floating structures; a water plane of the fixed quay is 480m×160m, and the ship is 15000 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) class. With the experiment-based models, numerical analysis is implemented on two domains: frequency domain using a three dimensional constant panel method, WAMIT, and time domain using a coupled dynamic analysis program of moored floating structures, CHARM3D/HARP. Following general processes of the two main tools, additional two calibrations are implemented if necessary: revision of external stiffness and estimation of damping coefficients. The revision of the external stiffness is conducted to match natural frequency of the simulation with that of the experiment; to find out natural frequencies RAO comparison is used. The next, estimation of damping coefficients is carried out on time domain to match the responses of the simulation with those of the experiment. After optimization of the numerical analysis, a set of experimental results from regular wave tests is compared with RAO on frequency domain, and results from an irregular wave test of the experiment are compared with response histories of simulation on time domain. In addition, fender forces are compared between the simulation and experiment. Based on response histories relative motions of the floating quay and container ship are compared. And the floating harbor system, the three-body case, is compared with a conventional harbor system, a fixed quay on the portside of the container ship, in terms of motions of the container ship. As an additional simulation, the three-body case is investigated on an operating sea state condition. From the present research, the experimental results are well matched with the numerical results obtained from the simulation tools optimized to the experiments. In addition, the floating harbor system show more stable motions of the container ship than the conventional harbor system, and the floating harbor system in the operating sea state condition have motions even smaller enough to operate in term of relative motions between the floating quay and the container ship.

This study uses a 3D finite element program, calibrated with the results of a full scale instrumented load test on a limited size footing, to estimate the settlement improvement factor for footings resting on rammed aggregate pier groups. A simplified 3D finite element model (Composite Soil Model) was developed, which takes into account the increase of stiffness around the piers during the ramming process. Design charts for settlement improvement factors of square footings of different sizes (B = 2.4m to 4.8m) resting on aggregate pier groups of different area ratios (AR = 0.087 to 0.349), pier moduli (Ecolumn = 36MPa to 72MPa), and with various compressible clay layer strengths (cu = 20kPa to 60kPa) and thicknesses (L = 5m to 15m) were prepared using this calibrated 3D finite element model. It was found that, the settlement improvement factor increases as the area ratio, pier modulus and footing pressure increase. On the other hand, the settlement improvement factor is observed to decrease as the undrained shear strength and thickness of compressible clay and footing size increase. After using the model to study the behaviour of floating piers, it was concluded that, the advantage of using end bearing piers instead of floating piers for reducing settlements increases as the area ratio of piers increases, the elasticity modulus value of the piers increases, the thickness of the compressible clay layer decreases and the undrained shear strength of the compressible clay decreases.

ABSTRACT A LABORATORY MODEL STUDY ON SETTLEMENT REDUCTION Effect OF STONE COLUMNS IN SOFT CLAY S&uuml / nnetcioglu, Mehmet Emrah M.Sc., Department of Civil Engineering Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ufuk Ergun August 2012, 177 pages An experimental study was conducted in order to examine settlement reduction ratios of footing supported by both floating and end bearing type of stone columns. For the floating types, tests were done with varying column lengths of one and two widths of footing (L=B,2B). Tests were conducted in 200 mm* 200 mm* 200 mm cubic loading tanks. The reinforcement effect was achieved by the installation of four stone columns with 20 mm diameter under 70 mm* 70mm model footing. Parameters such as area replacement ratio (a_s), loading plate dimensions, consolidation and vertical pressures applied, and the relative density (D_R) of the granular column were kept constant, the column length (L) was set as the only variable in the experimental tests conducted. In the tests, footing settlements together with subsurface settlements at depths equal to footing width (B) and two times the footing width (2B) were measured by specially designed telltales. The settlement reduction ratios both at surface and subsurface were evaluated in order to determine the effect of column length on settlement improvement. It has been found out that as the column length increases the settlement reduction ratios decrease for all depth intervals. However, there exists a threshold column length (L=2B), beyond which the composite ground demonstrates little settlement improvement.