The Results of this thesis was the creation of two designed house variants with a module to all the apartments. In addition till the first module there are three other modules of apartments that can be put in the houses if it so needs. The house are volume prefabricated and are placed on site in a way that it create an enclosure of the area which faces against the nature and car parks also lies hidden behind these houses. For the actual structure, a cross beam was created to carry the floor above and it is support by all four walls. The structure between the first and the second floor has no "syll" but instead there are two differently alternative to linking the floors in order so that it will not move. The reason with this solution was that there will not be any subsidence when the forces from above are pressed down ward. The forces are instead directly down to the next timber frame system. This can happen when the real estate's owner might want to build more floors on the house than the present two floors house when there is no land to build and spaces are needed in the future.

Ultrasound (US) volume data is noisy, so traditional methods for direct volume rendering (DVR) are less appropriate. Improved methods or new techniques are required. There are furthermore a high performance requirement and limited pre-processing to be considered in order for it to be used interactively, since the volume data might be time-varying. There exist numerous techniques for improving visual perception of volume rendering, and while some perform well and produce a visually enhanced result, many are designed and compared for use with medical data that has a high signal-to-noise ratio. This master thesis describe and compare recent methods for DVR illumination, in the form of ambient occlusion or direct/indirect lighting from an external light source. New designs and modifications are introduced for efficiently and effectively enhancing the visual quality of DVR with US data. Furthermore, this thesis addresses the issue of how clipping is performed during rendering and for the different illumination techniques, which is commonly used in ultrasound visualization. This diploma work was conducted at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, NJ where the partially open source framework XIP is developed. The framework was extended further to include modern methods for DVR illumination that are described in detail within this thesis. Finally, presented results show that several methods can be used to visually enhance the visualization within highly interactive frame-rates.

Stroke is the third largest cause of death in Sweden. In 2005, 30.000 people in Sweden suffered from a stroke. The consequences of a stroke varies, but the most common disability among stroke survivors is abnormal reaching movements, which is the primer reason for limitations in activities of everyday living. Rehabilitation is essential in order to get back to everyday life. Physical assistance (or guidance) is used in rehabilitation by physiotherapists and occupational therapists to help a patient through a dicult movement for example. Today, this guidance is limited to be performed by medical personnel. With the technology of virtual environments (VE) and haptics – force feedback from a computer – there is a possibility to create guidance which does not need medical personnel. This should be used as a complement to the traditional therapy. The intention of this work is to create an invisible guidance eld, which should guide a patient's hand to a desired movement pattern, i.e. aid the patient to perform a task in a virtual environment with haptics. This guidance is added to an already existing assessment tool, which is a part of the Curictus AB rehabilitation system. The guiding system is implemented using SenseGraphics AB's H3D API. To create the feeling of guidance and a guidance eld, the Volume Haptics Toolkit, developed by Dr. Karljohan Lundin Palmerius at Linköping University, was used. The basic idea of the algorithm is to calculate an orientation vector, for every position, in which direction the guidance should guide the patient. The guidance, which is generated via a haptic device, is adaptive to the patient's movements and always guides the patient towards the target in a smooth trajectory. / Stroke är den tredje största dödsorsaken i Sverige. Under år 2005 ck 30.000 svenskar en stroke. Följderna av en stroke kan variera, men vanligast är försämrad rörlighet i en sida av kroppen, vilket också är den främsta orsaken till begränsningar i dagliga aktiviteter för  strokepatienter. Rehabilitering är nödvändig för att kunna återkomma till sitt vanliga liv. Fysisk guidning är något som sjukgymnaster och arbetsterapeuter använder sig av i rehabiliteringen för att hjälpa en patient t.ex. genom en svår rörelse. Denna hjälp är något som idag är begränsad till medicinsk personal. Med teknologi som virtuella miljöer och haptik – kraftåterkoppling från en dator – finns det möjligheter att skapa guidning som inte kräver medicinsk personal. Detta ska fungera som ett komplement till den traditionella rehabiliteringen. Avsikten med det här arbetet är att skapa ett osynligt guidningsfält som ska guida en patients hand till ett önskat rörelsemönster, d.v.s. hjälpa patienten att utföra en övning i en virtuell miljö med haptik. Denna guidning ska läggas in i ett redan existerande utvärderingsverktyg, som nns i Curictus ABs rehabiliteringssystem. Guidningssystemet är implementerat i SenseGraphics ABs H3D API. För att skapa känslan av guidning och guidningsfältet användes the Volume Haptics Toolkit, utvecklat av dr. Karljohan Lundin Palmerius vid Linköpings Universitet. Algoritmen är byggd på att för varje position, beräkna en riktningsvektor dit guidningen ska guida patienten via en haptikenhet. Guidningen, som anpassas efter patientens rörelser, guidar hela tiden mot målet i en mjuk rörelsebana.

Business intelligence has fundamentally changed how many companies conduct their business. The focus of academic literature has however been on volume-operation companies that provide services to millions of customers. Complex-systems companies have fewer customers and pursue customer needs by providing more customized products and services. The knowledge in the research society is limited to volume-operation companies and there a need for more case studies regarding how companies actually use their information systems, specifically complex-systems companies. This work looks at a case of a complex-systems company with the overall aim to see how complex-systems companies may take advantage of business intelligence. A framework was used to measure BI maturity; expressed future needs were compared to future trends in BI literature and BI usage in specific areas was analyzed with the help of a framework from BI literature. The results indicate that the company is somewhere between Aspirational and Experienced with respect to BI maturity. BI is used for reporting a variety of key performance indicators and the main analysis tool for various calculations is Excel. The expressed future needs are mainly strategy-driven and technology-driven and often involve better and faster access to information. The difference in the business models of volume-operations companies and complex-systems companies could influence the BI maturity and help to explain the maturity difference between these two types of companies. Furthermore, the results indicate that there is a difference between the roles of BI tools in complex-systems companies compared to volume-operations.

The rapid proliferation of 3D volume data, including MRI and CT scans, is prompting the search within computer graphics for more effective volume visualisation techniques. Partially because of the traditional association with medical subjects, concepts borrowed from the domain of scientific illustration show great promise for enriching volume visualisation. This thesis describes the first general system dedicated to creating user-directed, variable-detail, scientific illustrations directly from volume data. In particular, using volume segmentation for explicit abstraction in non-photorealistic volume renderings is a new concept. The unique challenges and opportunities of volume data require rethinking many non-photorealistic algorithms that traditionally operate on polygonal meshes. The resulting 2D images are qualitatively different from but complementary to those normally seen in computer graphics, and inspire an analysis of the various artistic implications of volume models for scientific illustration.

Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka vilka effekter luftföroreringar har på lavar och grönalger som växer på lindar, genom att jämföra lavfloran i urban miljö och i landsbygdsmiljö. Mer specifikt var syftet att utreda hur avstånd till närmaste väg, trafikintensitet och trädets exponerade respektive icke-exponerade sida gentemot en väg påverkar lavfloran i urban miljö. 18 utvalda lavarter samt grönalger eftersöktes på 86 lindar i urban miljö och 37 i landsbygdsmiljö inom Norrköpings kommun. Resultaten visade att artantalet, samt förekomsten och täckningsgraden för flertalet lavar var större i landsbygdsmiljö jämfört med urban miljö. Kortare avstånd till närmaste väg och hög trafikintensitet hade negativ effekt på flertalet lavar. I båda fallen visades det motsatta för grönalger. Det fanns ingen skillnad i förekomster av lavar om de exponerades utåt mot vägen eller bort från vägen. / The aim of this study was to investigate which effects air pollution has on epiphytic lichens and green algae in urban and rural environment, respectively.  More specifically, the aim was to investigate the effects on the lichen flora of distance to the nearest road, traffic volume and to compare the effect of tree sides exposed and not exposed to roads in the urban environment. 18 selected lichen selected species and green algae as a taxonomic group where searched on 86 lime trees in urban and 37 in rural environments in the Norrköping municipality. The species number was higher and the majority of the lichens occurred more often and showed a higher cover on trees in rural areas compared to trees in the urban environment. Shorter distance to the nearest road and high traffic volume had a negative impact on the majority of lichens. In both cases the opposite was shown for the green algal group. The lichens occurred equally often on the sides of the trees that were exposed to the road as on the sides that were not exposed to the road.

A massive amount has been written about forecasting but few articles are written about the development of time series models of call volumes for emergency services. In this study, we use different techniques for forecasting and make the comparison of the techniques for the call volume of the emergency service Rescue 1122 Lahore, Pakistan. For the purpose of this study data is taken from emergency calls of Rescue 1122 from 1st January 2008 to 31 December 2009 and 731 observations are used. Our goal is to develop a simple model that could be used for forecasting the daily call volume. Two different approaches are used for forecasting the daily call volume Box and Jenkins (ARIMA) methodology and Smoothing methodology. We generate the models for forecasting of call volume and present a comparison of the two different techniques.

<p>In the United States, heart failure is a leading cause of hospitalization. The medical industry places great emphasis on diagnosing heart disease through cardiac metrics like ejection fraction. Left ventricular ejection fraction is a commonly used diagnostic indicator for heart efficiency and is measured with echocardiography through different volume calculation techniques. However, ejection fraction results can drastically vary from one examiner to another. Generally cardiologists still give ejection fraction measurements a plus or minus 10 percent error range. </p><p>A program developed at Duke called 4DViz is robust enough for users to process 3D ultrasound data. 4DViz allows examiners to determine heart chamber volumes by constructing a surface model over an imaged heart chamber with many mouse click inputs. Through 4DViz programming, a viable approach for calculating ejection fraction is attempted in this thesis. Using feature tracking, surface drawing, and voxel filling, the new approach aims to reduce examiner input and improve ejection fraction consistency. Water filled balloons were used to calibrate the algorithm's parameters. In testing, several volunteers were asked to use the 4DViz. Their results are compared to volume measurements where user input was standard. The results show promise and may remove some of the inconsistency behind ejection fraction measurements.</p> / Thesis

By the time of 2011, Taiwan Futures Exchange has issued 8 kinds of stock index futures. By taking a closer look at the transaction of the index futures, we found out that, in terms of trading volume, there is a significant difference among each others. Based on the observation, our research focuses on studying the existence value of the index futures in terms of hedging and speculating functions. The definition of futures¡¦ existence value is that the investors can use the futures to achieve the objectives of hedging and speculating in financial market. The research objects are TX, TE, TF, MTX, XIF, and GTF. The method to measure the hedging function is based on Portfolio and Hedging Theory of Johnson (1959). We estimate the hedging ratio with different data periods to calculate the hedging effectiveness. The method to measure the speculating function is based on the theory of Rutledge (1979) et al. We calculate the speculating trading volume to study the relationship with the basis by using OLS model. The empirical result shows that, in the hedging function, all of the index futures¡¦ hedging ratios are almost less than 1, and all have high hedging effectiveness. There is no significant influence on hedging effectiveness with different data periods and issuing time. In the speculating function, TX, MTX, and GTF will make speculating activities increase when the basis get bigger but TE, TF, and XIF will not. To sum up, TX, MTX, and GTF have higher existence value than TE, TF, and XIF. At last, based on the observation from this study, we propose several policy suggestions for enhancing the existence value of the index futures in financial market.

This dissertation presents models for turbulent flow and transport by currents and long waves in large domain. From the Navier-Stokes equations, a fully nonlinear depth-integrated equation model for weakly dispersive, turbulent and rotational flow is derived by a perturbation approach based on long wave scaling. The same perturbation approach is applied for the derivation of a depth-integrated transport equation. As the results, coherent structures generated by the turbulence induced by the bottom friction and topography can be predicted very reasonably. The three dimensional turbulence effects are incorporated into the flow model by employing a back scatter model. The back scatter model makes it possible to predict turbulent transport: It contributes to the energy transport and the lateral turbulent diffusion through relying on the turbulent intensity, not by relying on an empirical diffusion constant. The inherent limitation of the depth-integrated transport equation, that is, the limitation for the near field prediction is recognized in the derivation and the numerical simulation. To solve the derived equation set, a highly accurate and stable finite volume scheme numerical solver is developed. Thus, the numerical solver can predict dispersive and nonlinear wave propagation with minimal error. Also, good stability is achieved enough to be applied to the dam-break flows and undular tidal bores. In addition, a robust moving boundary scheme based on simple physical conditions is presented, which can extend the applicability area of the depth-integrated models. By the comparison study with experimental data, it is expected that the numerical model can provide high confidence results for the wave and current transformations including shocks and undular bores on complex bathymetry and topography. For the accurate near field transport prediction, a three dimensional transport model in ?-coordinate coupled with the depth-integrated flow model is developed. Like the other models, this model is also intended for large domain problems, and yet efficient and accurate in the far field and near field together.