<p>There has been a long-term decline in number of cyclic vole populations in boreal Sweden since the 1970s. Several hypotheses have been suggested to explain this decline. Commonly for <i>C. glareolus</i>, <i>C. rufocanus</i> and <i>M. agrestis</i>, the decline has followed upon an increased frequency and severeness of winter declines and has shown up as a drop in spring densities. The spring decline is most pronounced for <i>C. rufocanus</i>. In contrast to other voles, <i>C. rufocanus</i> also show a decline in fall densities, suggesting some additional disturbance in this species. Habitat fragmentation has been suggested as such an additional disturbance and in this thesis the effect of habitat fragmentation on <i>C. rufocanus</i> is explored.</p><p>At first the sampling method was evaluated i.e. whether the decline could be due to destructive sampling when the method in use in the long-term monitoring is snap-trapping. This resulted in a rejection of the destructive sampling hypothesis as a possible cause behind the decline in <i>C. rufocanus</i>. Habitat preference revealed that three habitats at the local scale (trap station) were high quality habitats for <i>C. rufocanus</i>: forest of moist and wet/hydric dwarf-shrub type, in addition to forest/swamp complexes rich in dwarf-shrubs. The occurrence of <i>C. rufocanus</i> at the landscape scale was positively correlated with the amount of boulder fields and a low degree of fragmentation of old-growth pine forests. There was considerable local variation in the decline in vole density among the 58 1-ha sampling plots, with respect to both density and timing of the decline, which suggested that habitat destruction outside sampling plots might be involved. Overall, clear-cuts had a negative influence on vole densities at both the local and landscape scale. A multiple regression analysis suggested that having both a high quality habitat at the local scale and a high proximity among xeric-mesic mires and a low connectivity among clear-cuts at the landscape scale were important for the occurrence of <i>C. rufocanus</i>.</p><p>Initial analysis at the landscape scale were based on landscape data collected from 2.5 x 2.5 km areas centred on the individual vole sampling plots. Further investigations, however, on the patch level suggest that focal forest patch size and quality was of major importance in determining occurrence and persistence of <i>C. rufocanus</i>. Although not tested formally in these studies, the habitat fragmentation hypothesis has so far received support. Currently <i>C. rufocanus</i> seems to be affected negatively by too low patch sizes of suitable habitats in the surrounding landscape suggesting that the amount of suitable habitats could already be below the fragmentation threshold. However, this has to be evaluated further. Work is in progress to establish time-series over local landscape changes, and to evaluate if such changes have been associated with local declines of <i>C. rufocanus</i> and whether habitat loss, true habitat fragmentation or both have been influential.</p>

Es wurde ein plattenförmiges Qualitätshalbzeug aus Spezialholzwerkstoffen für den konstruktiven Einsatz im Maschinebau, mit dem Schwerpunkt Fördertechnik entwickelt. Mit diesem Halbzeug sind ökologisch vorteilhafte Konstruktionen möglich. Entwicklungsschwerpunkte waren: einstellbare, hohe absolute und spezifische mechanische Eigenschaften mit kleinen Streuungen. Die Entwicklung wurde durch verschiedene Werkstoffprüfungen von Labor- und Industriewerkstoffen begleitet und deren Ergebnisse mittels speziell erarbeitetet Bewertungskriterien evaluiert. Weiterhin wurde das Werkstoffverhalten von diversen Holzwerkstoffen unter dynamischer Belastung klassifiziert. / A panel-shaped high quality semi-finished product made of special wood-based materials for structural applications in mechanical engineering, with a focus on materials handling technology, was developed. With said semi-finished product ecologically advantageous constructions are possible. Development priorities were: adjustable, high absolute and specific mechanical properties with little variation. The development was accompanied by various materials tests of laboratory and industrially manufactured materials, and their results were evaluated by specially developed evaluation criteria. Furthermore, the material behaviour of various woodbased materials under dynamic loading was classified.

There has been a long-term decline in number of cyclic vole populations in boreal Sweden since the 1970s. Several hypotheses have been suggested to explain this decline. Commonly for C. glareolus, C. rufocanus and M. agrestis, the decline has followed upon an increased frequency and severeness of winter declines and has shown up as a drop in spring densities. The spring decline is most pronounced for C. rufocanus. In contrast to other voles, C. rufocanus also show a decline in fall densities, suggesting some additional disturbance in this species. Habitat fragmentation has been suggested as such an additional disturbance and in this thesis the effect of habitat fragmentation on C. rufocanus is explored. At first the sampling method was evaluated i.e. whether the decline could be due to destructive sampling when the method in use in the long-term monitoring is snap-trapping. This resulted in a rejection of the destructive sampling hypothesis as a possible cause behind the decline in C. rufocanus. Habitat preference revealed that three habitats at the local scale (trap station) were high quality habitats for C. rufocanus: forest of moist and wet/hydric dwarf-shrub type, in addition to forest/swamp complexes rich in dwarf-shrubs. The occurrence of C. rufocanus at the landscape scale was positively correlated with the amount of boulder fields and a low degree of fragmentation of old-growth pine forests. There was considerable local variation in the decline in vole density among the 58 1-ha sampling plots, with respect to both density and timing of the decline, which suggested that habitat destruction outside sampling plots might be involved. Overall, clear-cuts had a negative influence on vole densities at both the local and landscape scale. A multiple regression analysis suggested that having both a high quality habitat at the local scale and a high proximity among xeric-mesic mires and a low connectivity among clear-cuts at the landscape scale were important for the occurrence of C. rufocanus. Initial analysis at the landscape scale were based on landscape data collected from 2.5 x 2.5 km areas centred on the individual vole sampling plots. Further investigations, however, on the patch level suggest that focal forest patch size and quality was of major importance in determining occurrence and persistence of C. rufocanus. Although not tested formally in these studies, the habitat fragmentation hypothesis has so far received support. Currently C. rufocanus seems to be affected negatively by too low patch sizes of suitable habitats in the surrounding landscape suggesting that the amount of suitable habitats could already be below the fragmentation threshold. However, this has to be evaluated further. Work is in progress to establish time-series over local landscape changes, and to evaluate if such changes have been associated with local declines of C. rufocanus and whether habitat loss, true habitat fragmentation or both have been influential.

L’objectif de ces travaux est le développement en technologie intégrée standard d’une topologiede ligne de propagation optimisée en termes de pertes, d’encombrement et de facteur de qualitéaux fréquences millimétriques. Cette topologie nommée S-CPW (Shielded CoPlanarWaveguide) utilise le phénomène d’ondes lentes afin de miniaturiser longitudinalement la ligned’un facteur compris entre 1,3 et 3,2 par rapport à des topologies classiques. Disposantégalement de faibles pertes, les lignes développées présentent un facteur de qualité élevé parfoissupérieur à 40, à 60 GHz. A partir de l’étude du champ électromagnétique dans la structure, unmodèle électrique a été développé. C’est le premier modèle dans la littérature prenant en compteles pertes dans ce type de guide d’onde. Plusieurs dispositifs passifs intégrés réalisés avec deslignes S-CPW dans différentes technologies CMOS ont été caractérisés jusqu’à 110GHz. Lacompacité et les faibles pertes d’insertion obtenues pour la mesure de filtres à stubs et dediviseurs de puissance permettent de réussir l’intégration de circuits passifs compacts entechnologie microélectronique CMOS standard aux fréquences millimétriques. / This work focuses on high-performance S-CPW (Shielded CoPlanar Waveguide) transmissionlines in classical CMOS integrated technologies for the millimeter-wave frequency band.Thanks to an important slow-wave phenomenon, the physical length of S-CPW decreases by afactor from 1.3 to 3.2 compared with classical transmission lines. Presenting also lowattenuation loss, the developed transmission lines show very high quality factor (higher than 40at 60 GHz). The precise study of the electromagnetism field leads to an electrical model forS-CPWs. This is the first model that takes the losses in this topology into account. Then, somebasic passive circuits designed with S-CPWs and characterized up to 110 GHz are presented invarious CMOS technologies. The low insertion losses and relative low surfaces of a powerdivider and a passband filter show the great interest of S-CPW to integrate compact passivecircuits in classical CMOS technologies at millimeter-wave frequencies.

This study focuses on and tries to identify areas where machine translation can be useful by examining translated fictional and non-fictional texts, and the extent to which these different text types are better or worse suited for machine translation.  It additionally evaluates the performance of the free online translation tool Google Translate (GT). The BLEU automatic evaluation metric for machine translation was used for this study, giving a score of 27.75 BLEU value for fictional texts and 32.16 for the non-fictional texts. The non-fictional texts are samples of law documents, (commercial) company reports, social science texts (religion, welfare, astronomy) and medicine. These texts were selected because of their degree of difficulty. The non-fictional sentences are longer than those of the fictional texts and in this regard MT systems have struggled. In spite of having longer sentences, the non-fictional texts got a higher BLUE score than the fictional ones. It is speculated that one reason for the higher score of non-fictional texts might be that more specific terminology is used in these texts, leaving less room for subjective interpretation than for the fictional texts. There are other levels of meaning at work in the fictional texts that the human translator needs to capture.

Nowadays, new approaches to fabricate high-performance electrode materials are of vital importance in the renewable energy field. Here, we present a facile synthesis procedure of 3D Ni(OH)2/graphene hybrids for supercapacitors via synchronous electrochemical-assisted exfoliation and assembly of graphene on 3D Ni(OH)2 networks. With the assistance of an electric field, the electrochemically exfoliated high-quality graphene can be readily, uniformly assembled on the surfaces of 3D Ni(OH)2. When serving as electrode materials for supercapacitors, the resulting 3D Ni(OH)2/graphene composites exhibited excellent specific capacitance (263 mF cm−2 at 2 mA cm−2), remarkable rate capability and super-long cycle life (retention of 94.1% even after 10 000 continuous charge–discharge cycles), which may be attributed to their highly porous, stable 3D architecture as well as uniform, firm anchoring of ultrathin graphene on their surfaces. Therefore, our approach provides a facile strategy for the large-scale synthesis of high-quality graphene based composites towards various applications.

We have deposited bulk, monolayer and few-layers as well as large-scale 2D layered MoS2 thin films by pulsed DC magnetron sputtering from an MoS2 target. MoS2 has gained great attention lately, together with other layered Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (TMDCs), for its unique optical and electrical properties with thickness-dependent bandgap. MoS2 also transitions from an indirect to a direct bandgap when thinned down to monolayer. This is intriguing in the fabrication of novel solar cells and photodetectors. Sputter-deposition has the advantage of producing large-scale, high-quality films, which is paramount for layered MoS2 to be applicable on an industrial level. The quality in terms of crystallinity and c⊥-texture of sputtered bulk MoS2 was evaluated as a function of several deposition process parameters: process pressure, substrate temperature and H2S-to-Ar ratio. X-ray Diffraction (XRD) results revealed that the high substrate temperature of 700 °C together with reactive H2S process gas improved the quality regardless of pressure. However, the quality was slightly improved further with increasing pressure up to 50 mTorr. We also found that the quality improved with increasing temperature up to 700 °C using pure Ar as the process gas. Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry (RBS) analysis showed that with the addition of H2S the stoichiometry of MoSx improved from MoS1.78 using pure Ar to fully stoichiometric MoS2.01 at 40% H2S in the H2S/Ar mixture. Cross-sectional Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) imaging revealed the high-quality 2D layered structure of the MoS2 films and a maximum thickness of 5 nm of c⊥-growth MoS2 before the onset of the undesirable c∥-growth. These results provide a solution with respect to the ongoing challenge of obtaining high quality and good stoichiometry of sputtered TMDC films at elevated temperatures. Formation of monolayer and few-layers MoS2 was confirmed by Raman and Photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. The peak separation of the E12g and A1g Raman-active modes for MoS2 monolayer was measured to 19.3 cm-1 on SiO2/Si, increases substantially in the transition to bilayer MoS2 and exhibits bulk values from four layers MoS2 and above. This result serves as a good indicator of monolayer as well as few-layers MoS2 formation. The monolayer film exhibits a strong photoluminescence peak at 1.88 eV owing to its direct optical bandgap, as compared to the indirect one of bilayer and thicker films. X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) spectra of the monolayer MoSx film indicate successful sulfurization of the molybdenum atoms and absence of residual sulfur. XPS also showed ideal stoichiometric MoS2.03 ± 0.03 of the monolayer film. Furthermore, a uniform MoS2 monolayer was successfully grown on a 4" SiO2/Si wafer, demonstrating the large-scale uniformity that can be achieved by sputter-deposition, making it highly applicable on an industrial level.

The aim of this thesis was to investigate whether higher quality troops would perform better in civilian protection within UN-peacekeeping missions. The appropriate method to answer this question was through a Structured Focused Comparison and the most similar system design. The theory suggested that higher quality peacekeepers would be more effective in combating armed groups and directly protecting civilians during civil wars. However, the case comparison did not fully answer the given hypothesis. Instead, it showcased another dilemma that high-quality troops exhibit. These peacekeeping troops seemed reluctant to utilize their high-quality equipment and assets effectively for the mission. Instead, they displayed risk-aversive behaviour and difficulty to cooperate with other troop contributing nations. These findings have important implications for policy making.

El mundo se encuentra en un estado de cambio con las nuevas tendencias de protección del medio ambiente y las especies animales. En el Perú, estas tendencias toman fuerza con el reemplazo de productos de origen animal por materiales vegetales que se usan en la fabricación. En tal sentido, este trabajo se enfoca en desarrollar casacas fabricadas a base de cuero de piña, el cual es un material textil proveniente de las hojas de piña. Este método contribuye con el uso de elementos residuales del cultivo de esta fruta, potenciando el comercio de proveedores locales. Al mismo tiempo, se busca contribuir a la disminución de la contaminación provocada por la industria del cuero. Durante el trabajo de investigación para la validación de este proyecto se realizaron experimentos a base de encuestas, entrevistas, uso de landing page y concierge del producto. La metodología de validación permite delimitar el tamaño del mercado peruano para las casacas de cuero de piña. Se toman como potenciales clientes a las personas que buscan alternativas de vestimenta ecológica y a personas que sean afines al movimiento animalista. El potencial del mercado peruano según la información extraída en este proyecto es de aproximadamente 10 millones de soles anuales, los cuales resultan compatibles con las necesidades financieras y operativas para la fabricación y comercialización de las casacas de cuero de piña

El mundo se encuentra en un estado de cambio con las nuevas tendencias de protección del medio ambiente y las especies animales. En el Perú, estas tendencias toman fuerza con el reemplazo de productos de origen animal por materiales vegetales que se usan en la fabricación. En tal sentido, este trabajo se enfoca en desarrollar casacas fabricadas a base de cuero de piña, el cual es un material textil proveniente de las hojas de piña. Este método contribuye con el uso de elementos residuales del cultivo de esta fruta, potenciando el comercio de proveedores locales. Al mismo tiempo, se busca contribuir a la disminución de la contaminación provocada por la industria del cuero. Durante el trabajo de investigación para la validación de este proyecto se realizaron experimentos a base de encuestas, entrevistas, uso de landing page y concierge del producto. La metodología de validación permite delimitar el tamaño del mercado peruano para las casacas de cuero de piña. Se toman como potenciales clientes a las personas que buscan alternativas de vestimenta ecológica y a personas que sean afines al movimiento animalista. El potencial del mercado peruano según la información extraída en este proyecto es de aproximadamente 10 millones de soles anuales, los cuales resultan compatibles con las necesidades financieras y operativas para la fabricación y comercialización de las casacas de cuero de piña. / The following project is based on the implementation of a business idea called "Ecopiña". This business idea focuses on the production of coats made from leather which has pineapple leaves as the main supply. It is a project that offers an ecological and sustainable alternative that also avoids hurting animal life, since millions of cows are slaughtered for their skin, the most important supply for coats in the market nowadays, so this idea is a really good alternative to save animal life. Furthermore, leather made from pineapple leaves is a strong and durable material that guarantees high-quality coats. We have identified through surveys and interviews that there is a large no satisfied demand, due to several people mentioned that there are not many ecological alternatives to replace cowhide nowadays. On the other hand, we seek to implement important tools through digital platforms such as a web page and social media that allow us to have a bigger reach towards our target audience. We also worked to follow up on the interactions people generate on social media in order to validate the purchase intention of our prospective customers. To sum it up, it has been concluded that it is a high-value project that can demonstrate scalability in different markets, since it satisfies an increasing need for sustainability that gradually brings awareness to the population. / Trabajo de investigación