This Bachelor’s thesis is the result of participation in a minorfield study at Hangzhou Public Library in China. The functionand role of the public library and its librarians are discussedthrough the views and perspectives of the librarians. Sevenlibrarians were interviewed using a semi-structured interviewguide. The results were analyzed with the help of The four-spacesmodel, which was developed to advocate and strengthen the roleof the public library and culture as a sustainable and socialdevelopment. The results are also of interest as there is a lack ofnon-western perspectives in Swedish LIS research and education.The results reveal varied uses of the library in terms of thefour spaces model. Hangzhou public library is similar in manyways to the Swedish and the Anglo-Scandinavian library sector.However, there are also distinct differences, for instance there isgreater emphasis on the librarian’s role as tutor and on the libraryas an educational institution. The informants expressed mixedfeelings towards the future. On the one hand, they believe that therole of the traditional librarian will continue. On the other hand,this belief clashes somewhat with their belief that the publiclibrary will become more of a performative and inspirationalspace. In general, it can be said that the librarians’ views of theirrole and of the functions of the public library are complex and, insome cases, in collision with each other.

Reverse osmosis (RO) desalination plants enable the production of high-quality freshwater from seawater, explaining the increasing global use of this technology. However, a major operational challenge for RO is biofouling, caused by excessive biomass accumulation. Membrane fouling simulators (MFSs), downsized membrane systems, were demonstrated to be suitable for biofouling studies using tap water. There is a need to investigate biofouling using natural seawater. The seawater MFS studies involved (i) an exploratory study to evaluate the MFS setup, (ii) long-term operation without feed water nutrient dosage, (iii) impact of nutrient concentration, and (iv) a comparison of biofouling development with freshwater. MFSs were operated parallel at constant feed flow (0.2 m/s), with feed spacer and RO membrane, at varying biodegradable organic nutrient concentrations (0, 50, and 200 µg C/L). The relative pressure drop (RPD) was monitored over time, and biofilm development was characterized through the MFS window applying optical coherence tomography (OCT). Results demonstrated for seawater that (i) the developed setup had a reliable operation and provided reproducible data, (ii) biofouling development presented a minimal effect when nutrient concentration was quadrupled, (iii) there was no correlation between the nutrient concentration and growth rate for seawater experiments, suggesting biofilm development under conditions close to the maximum growth rate. Compared to tap water at the same nutrient concentrations, seawater showed much faster biofilm development, pressure drop increase, and strongly different biofilm morphology. This research provides new insights, new research directions and underlines the importance of doing MFS research with natural seawater.

Today, only 7 % of the Atlantic Rainforest, that once covered Brazil, remains scattered across the southern parts of the country. As the forest is rapidly disappearing, the government of Brazil has emerging interest of preservation. Thus more and more areas are turned into national parks and reserves. At the outskirts of one of these reserves, the Iracambi research station is situated. The center makes an effort to carry out applied research to find methods of preserving and learning about the forest. It is within that context the project described in this report has been performed. The project aimed to establish a water balance over Graminha Basin, the main river in the Iracambi research area. By doing this the understanding of the fluctuations of the amount of water in the ecosystem could increase. An important part of the objective was also to assess which methods can be used practically at Iracambi.The project was carried out during the rainy season from February 13th to April 12, 2012. During this time the water flow was measured at five stations along the river, using a current meter and instant slug-injection. Between six and fifteen flow measurements were made at each station. Slug- injection was generally the most suitable gauging method to use in the area. Precipitation was measured at two points. Evaporation was measured using an evaporation pan, and also calculated using the Penman-Monteith equation. Even though, the parameterization of the Penman-Monteith needs to be improved it was deemed to be the more suitable method for the area.The results give a rough estimate of the water balance during the period. It was concluded that the storage decreased during the project period. Based on the flow measurements and observations it was concluded that the areas covered by forest were less affected by the floods that occurred during heavy rainfalls than the areas covered by grass. Further on, the result of this report indicates that the Iracambi research station can continue to carry out assessments for changes in water flow, rainfall and evaporation with the simple equipment used in this project. However, more expensive and advanced equipment would be beneficial to establish a more accurate water balance. / Idag återstår endast 7% av den atlantiska regnskogen som en gång täckte Brasilien södra kust. Regnskogen försvinner snabbt vilket har lett till att Brasiliens regering de senaste åren visat ett ökat intresse att bevara regnskogen. Fler och fler områden har förvandlats till nationalparker och reservat. I utkanten till ett av dessa reservat ligger forskningsstationen Iracambi. Iracambi bedriver forskning i och runt området för att hitta metoder för att bevara regnskogen och öka kunskapen om området. Detta projekt är ett litet bidrag till detta arbete. Det övergripande syftet med projektet var att upprätta en vattenbalans över floden Graminhas avrinningsområde. Detta är huvudfloden i området och genom upprätta en vattenbalans kan förståelsen för förändringarna av vattentillgången i ekosystemet öka. Ett viktigt mål med projektet var också att finna verktyg som forskningsstationen Iracambi kan använda för kontinuerliga mätningar av de parametrar som ingår i vattenbalansen.Projektets genomfördes under regnperioden mellan den 13 februari och den 12 april, 2012. Flödesmätningarna utfördes vid fem mätstationer längs floden Graminha. Två typer av utrustning användes: flygel och konduktivitetsmätare. Rekommendationen för Iracambi var att fortsätta mätningarna med framförallt konduktivitetsmätaren. Uppskattningarna av avdunstningen genomfördes på två sätt: dels genom upprättandet av en evaporationspanna, dels genom beräkningar. Beräkningarna genomfördes med Penman-Monteith ekvationen och det kunde konstateras att även om de ingående parametrarna innehåller en del osäkerheter, så var detta den mest passande metoden för att beräkna avdunstningen. Nederbörd mättes på två platser med hjälp av enkla regnmätare konstruerade av pet-flaskor.Slutligen upprättades en vattenbalans för området. Utifrån denna kunde det konstateras att vattenmagasinet för hela orådet minskade under mätperioden. Utifrån flödesmätningar samt observationer kunde slutsatsen dras att skogsområdena drabbades mindre än de gräsbevuxna områdena av de kraftiga översvämningarna som uppstod under intensiva regn. Vidare visar resultaten att forskningsstationen Iracambi kan få en bra uppskattning av flödesförändringar, nederbörd och avdunstning med hjälp av den enkla utrustning som användes i detta projekt. / Minor Field Study

It¡¦s everyone¡¦s dream to have their own career in their life, such as running a restaurant or a store. Although the economy has been depressed for a long time, there are more and more restaurants in Taiwan. Running a lunch-box store is one of the options when people want to have their own stores. Some people successed and had the chain lunch-box stores, even planned to enter China market. Some failed in running their stores and left the market. This research would focus on the operation of the lunch-box store to find what to do to make the store better operated.

The aim of this Bachelor thesis is to study the connection between literacy and development and poverty reduction in a third world country. The study is based on Mothers’ Union Literacy and Development Programme (MULDP) in Malawi, where it examines what difference literacy makes in the learners of MULDPs lives and what meaning literacy has for them. The results found in the study are analysed with a theoretical framework that is built on Freire’s theory of ‘conscientization’ and the concepts of functional literacy and functional illiteracy. The method chosen is unstructured focus group interviews with the learners of MULDP and the findings were classified into themes through meanings condensation and thereafter compared with the theoretical framework. The results show that the effects of literacy are visual in both the personal and public sphere, changing the lives of the individual, the family and the community. The findings illustrate that literacy is both a tool and a social practice. Literacy itself does not develop the learners; it is the knowledge that comes with the social practice that is the trigger to development. This study concludes that literacy is developing the learners as human beings. A connection can, however, not be made between literacy and poverty reduction; literacy cannot on its own take the learners out of poverty because other means are also needed.

<p>Offering basic education is the greatest investment the world can make in its future. Basic education improves live opportunity for people and also give them a chance to form a better life for them selves. Too many of Peru’s inhabitants live in extreme poverty and education could help the country improve this situation. In addition, in the rural areas of Peru a lot of people speak another language than Spanish as their mother tongue. The purpose of this thesis is to get a more profound knowledge about matters concerning Bilingual Intercultural Education in Peru.</p><p>The research question has been what issues can be found, involving EBI education in Peru; opportunities and challenges? I have researched this through interviews with people working in the rural areas combined with a literature study. I visited schools in the area of Cusco and Anchonga. In Cusco the school did not have EBI education and in Anchonga the visited school did have. Some of the findings made are that it is important for the people involved such as parents, principals and teachers to be supportive of EBI education to make it work. It is also a challenge to find teachers who know the method and are bilingual. Many schools are in addition dependent of support from non-governmental organizations, which are an opportunity and a challenge. Important is also to make some teachers and parents believe that EBI education is not against the social development of the country.</p>

The multidrug transporter LmrP, member of the major facilitator superfamily (MFS), confers L. lactis and recombinant E. coli cells resistance to an array of cytotoxic compounds including antibiotics. LmrP mediates drug extrusion from the plasma membrane by an electrogenic proton/drug exchange reaction, whereby a positively charged substrate may move towards the external medium in exchange for two or more protons moving towards the cytoplasm. Recent studies have suggested that MFS transporters require phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) for function and proper topology. However, the specificity of the PE requirement, as well as the contribution of the electrochemical gradient (the driving force of the substrate transport) to this lipid requirement was not addressed. Here we report a new approach for addressing PE specific requirement for the function and the structure of membranes transporters. We used methyl-PE and dimethyl-PE analogs of PE to show that only replacement of the three hydrogens by methyl moieties leads to changes in the biochemical and biophysical properties of the reconstituted protein. This suggests that LmrP does not depend on the bulk properties of the phospholipids tested but solely on the hydrogen bonding ability of the headgroup. We then show that a single point mutation in LmrP, D68C, is sufficient to recapitulate precisely every biochemical and biophysical effect observed when PE is replaced by phosphatidylcholine (PC) ( including energy transfer between the protein tryptophan residues and the lipid headgroups). We conclude that the negatively charged Asp-68 is likely to participate in the interaction with PE and that such interaction is required for proton gradient sensing, substrate binding, and transport. Because Asp-68 belongs to a highly conserved motif in the Major Facilitator Superfamily (which includes LacY and EmrD), this interaction might be a general feature of these transporters that is involved in proton gradient sensing and lipid dependence.

Offering basic education is the greatest investment the world can make in its future. Basic education improves live opportunity for people and also give them a chance to form a better life for them selves. Too many of Peru’s inhabitants live in extreme poverty and education could help the country improve this situation. In addition, in the rural areas of Peru a lot of people speak another language than Spanish as their mother tongue. The purpose of this thesis is to get a more profound knowledge about matters concerning Bilingual Intercultural Education in Peru. The research question has been what issues can be found, involving EBI education in Peru; opportunities and challenges? I have researched this through interviews with people working in the rural areas combined with a literature study. I visited schools in the area of Cusco and Anchonga. In Cusco the school did not have EBI education and in Anchonga the visited school did have. Some of the findings made are that it is important for the people involved such as parents, principals and teachers to be supportive of EBI education to make it work. It is also a challenge to find teachers who know the method and are bilingual. Many schools are in addition dependent of support from non-governmental organizations, which are an opportunity and a challenge. Important is also to make some teachers and parents believe that EBI education is not against the social development of the country.

SOLVATTEN is a household water cleaning device that cleans water with solar energy using filtration, pasteurization and UV sterilization. A field study of the necessary amount of solar insolation that is required to make water drinkable has been carried out in Kenya using a new type of indicator developed by Solvatten AB.  This new indicator will complement the old one, which only registers the temperature, with new features to store information about temperature and insolation. The indicators have been calibrated for energy and temperature and a Matlab program has been developed to analyze the information registered by the indicators. The program handles the time shifting that occurs since the indicator only saves the data at some point during a quarter of an hour. It also handles temperature correction and does a suitable curve fitting using polyfit and spline. The experiments have been divided into two parts, one where the relationship between UV and total solar insolation has been studied and one where we have taken water samples and studied the limiting factors of temperature, UV and total insolation for drinkable water. Previous studies have showed that the water in SOLVATTEN gets clean at 55 C. To reach this temperature the required UV245-400 and UV190-570 insolation is 83.0 Wh/m2 and 307 Wh/m2 according to our tests. The required total insolation is 2680 Wh/m2. From our measurement it can be seen that it is possible for water to be clean at 53 °C. During our artificial tests where we pre-heated the water and thus decreased the total insolation, we never got below 8.2 Wh/indicator which correspond to 1940 Wh/m2 of total insolation at 55 °C. The limit for clean water shown from earlier tests by Solvatten AB is 8 Wh/indicator. Even when the temperature was lower than 55 °C and we got clean water, the insolation was never below this value. This means that it is the temperature that is the limiting factor; however the synergy effect with the insolation is essential for the cleaning process. When it is cloudy the amount of UV that SOLVATTEN receives will be lower compared to the total insolation. With more clouds the temperature will drop and rise many times, while the insolation continues to increase. This means that more clouds will give more total insolation. The shortest time it took to reach 55 °C was 1 hours and 45 minutes at an optimal angle to the sun. / SOLVATTEN är en vattenreningslösning för hushåll som kombinerar filtrering, uppvärmning samt UV-strålning för att döda bakterier. Det är en 11 liters plastdunk, där ena sidan är genomskinlig, och efter att den har exponerats i solen mellan 2- 6 timmar är vattnet rent. En fältstudie har genomförts i Kenya för att undersöka exakt hur mycket solinstrålning som krävs för att vattnet ska bli rent. Idag finns det en väl fungerande indikator som mäter vattnets temperatur men en ny indikator har tagits fram av Solvatten AB som även mäter solinstrålningen och kan lagra den tillsammans med vattentemperaturen. Indikatorerna har kalibrerats för att få rätt energi och temperatur och ett Matlab-program har utvecklats för att kunna analysera informationen. För att kunna ta fram exakta värden används funktionerna polyfit och spline för att kurvanpassa datan. Programmet tar även hänsyn och korrigerar för de fel som kan uppkomma då tiden sparas. Dessa tidsfel uppkommer då indikatorerna endast skriver informationen någon gång under en kvart. Fältstudien är uppdelad i två delar, en där relationen mellan UV och total instrålning har studerats och en där vattenprover har tagits för att undersöka vilken som är den begränsande faktorn för rent vatten; temperatur, UV eller total instrålning. Tidigare studier har visat att SOLVATTEN blir rent vid 55 C. För att lyckas uppnå denna temperatur har det i vår studie krävts 83.0 Wh/m2 av UV245-400 och 307 Wh/m2 av UV190-570. När det gäller den totala instrålningen har det behövts 2680 Wh/m2. Vi har sett att det är möjligt för vattnet att bli rent vid 53 °C. Under våra tester då vi förvärmde vattnet och på sätt fick mindre instrålning, lyckades vi aldrig få under 8.2 Wh/indikator vilket motsvarar 1940 Wh/m2 av totala instrålningen, detta vid 55 °C. Tidigare tester av Solvatten AB visar att det behövs 8 Wh/indikator för att uppnå rent vatten och då vi aldrig lyckades få in mindre instrålning än så tyder det på att det är temperaturen som är den begränsande faktorn. Dock är instrålningen nödvändig då det är synergieffekten mellan värme och instrålningen som uppnår rent vatten vid så låga temperaturer. Om det är mycket moln på himlen sjunker och ökar temperaturen många gånger medan solinstrålningen fortsätter att ackumuleras. Detta betyder att den instrålade energin som når SOLVATTEN blir högre då det krävs längre exponeringstid för att nå 55 °C. Dock har vi sett att mängden UV inte ökar lika mycket som den totala instrålningen men ett generellt förhållande av hur UV och total instrålning förändras vid molnigt väder är dock svårt att kunna få fram. Den kortaste tiden för att uppnå rent vatten är 1 timme och 45 minuter då SOLVATTEN har haft en optimal vinkel mot solen.

This study has been conducted as a Minor Field Study (MFS). It focuses on solar water pumping for small-scale farmers in the Kilimanjaro Region of Tanzania. The purpose is to investigate the possibilities for rural farmers to operate their irrigation with solar power instead of their current option: fossil fuels, primarily petrol. The study was conducted in three phases, starting with pre-study in Sweden, followed by field study in Tanzania from January to March 2015 and finishing with summarizing and calculating in Sweden. Fuel powered water pumping has a cheap capital cost; however, it is expensive and problematic to maintain and operate. Solar powered water pumping is almost completely opposite. It has a higher initial cost; however, it is considerably cheaper to run. The results indicate that the investment in solar power might be too expensive for the farmers, as long as they do not receive external financial and educational support. Assuming that the farmers are able to obtain a solar water pumping system, results show that they will benefit and save a considerably amount of money over a long period of time. Also, solar water pumping is environmentally friendly compared to the systems in Tanzania today.