Syfte: Huvudsyftet med denna undersökning var att kartlägga den psykosociala arbetsmiljön samt identifiera stressfaktorer bland undersköteskor och vårdbiträden i olika kommunala hemtjänstverksamheter. Metoder: Till denna undersökning användes en metodkombination utav kvantitativa samt kvalitativa undersökningar. En enkätsundersökning skickades till 149 medarbetare i berörd kommun och 91 medarbetare besvarade frågorna. Därefter analyserades svaren med hjälp av programmet SPSS. Slutligen genomfördes nio intervjuer med ändamålet att förstå samt försöka identifiera orsaken till stressfaktorer som visade sig i enkätsundersökningen. Resultat: En hög svarsfrekvens av stressrelaterad ohälsa bland hemtjänstpersonal påvisas utifrån mina undersökningar. Analysen har visat att den psykosociala arbetsmiljön på de olika hemtjänstverksamheterna består av höga krav och låga kontrollmöjligheter. Dock var det sociala stödet högt eftersom flertalet upplevde en god sammanhållning inom arbetsgrupperna. Resultatet i den kvantitativa undersökningen visade att det fanns stressfaktorer i dessa verksamheter. Det som var intressant och stack ut var att det allmänna hälsotillståndet upplevdes som mycket bra/ ganska bra av 70.8% av deltagarna, dessutom bedömde 80.3% arbetsförmågan kring psykiska krav som mycket god/ ganska god. 82.4% bedömde arbetsförmågan när det gäller fysiska krav som mycket god/ ganska god. Trots dessa positiva procentenheter svarade flertalet att arbetet krävde att man arbetar fort samt hårt. Dessutom svarade 83.5% att man ibland, ganska ofta, nästan jämt kände sig uppvarvad, 67,1% svarade att man ibland, ganska ofta, nästan jämnt känner sig pressade på gränsen av vad man klarar av. Ytterligare var det 71.8% som upplevde stress ibland, ganska ofta, nästan jämnt. Det vill säga att resultatet påvisade stressfaktorer dock inga bakomliggande orsaker. För att definiera bakomliggande orsaker genomfördes nio intervjuer i studie 2 med ändamålet att förstå medarbetarnas arbetssituation. Resultatet av studie 2 påvisade att orsakerna till att stress uppstod var förändrade arbetsuppgifter där administrativa uppgifter hade ökat radikalt, därtill poängterades det av alla intervjupersoner att man fått flera kundbesök med kort restid emellan vilket ledde till frustration, oro, stress samt dåligt samvete. På så sätt påverkades medarbetarnas meningsfullhet med arbetet. Därtill påvisade undersökningen att medarbetarnas arbetsplatser var så kallade ”spända arbeten” eftersom kraven var höga och beslutsutrymmen väldigt små.

This master´s thesis in Library and Information Science examines the experiences of children who read to a dog. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the interactions between the librarian, the readingdog-handler, the child-ren and the dogs and what the benefits from the interactions might be. The aim is also to examine how the child-ren express their literacy during the readingsessions and how to develop the readingsessions at a specific library. The author follows a reading dog project for seven weeks, in collaboration with a specific school and library. Action research was used as a research strategy, and since action research is done on the basis of practice, a coll-laboration with the participating children, the librarian and the readingdog-handler was significant in this study.The theoretical framework concists of theory and concepts from the sociocultural theory developed by Ro-ger Säljö, and human-animal studies with concepts from Donna Haraway. The method used to collecet data was qualitative interviews, participant observation, logbook and tutoring. A total of 33 observations was collected, 33 short interviews were conducted and 6 tutoring meetings. Also the author, readingdog-handler and the lib-rarian kept a log for this seven week long readingdog project. A total of five third grade children participated in this study.Important results are that the children view the readingsessions as a schoolbased activity, but they would also read to a dog in their spare time. The interaction with the dog and the relationship between the child and the dog are important for the readingsessions to work well. The readingsessions have the potential to let children express and develop their literacy in several ways, though in this study literacy was expressed mainly by tradit-ional reading of printed books. The thesis also discuss to what extent the participant children are allowed to be involved in planning and developing the readingdog-sessions. All of the children participating in this study had a positive experience of the readingsessions and felt that their readingskills improved by reading to a dog.

No description available.

Published Article / The pass rate of grade 12 learners is shockingly low and this is supposed to be the feeding ground for Higher Educations in South Africa. Alet Rademeyer quotes from a document of Advocate Paul Hoffman, SC, and director of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, that the South African School System only delivers one out of 29 functional literate Black matriculants. It is a national crisis and is an indication of gigantic proportions. The aim of the Academic Literacy Programme (ALP) at the CUT is to improve student's academic literacy skills which will ultimately boost the student throughput rate at the CUT. The programme will help students develop their academic language skills whilst creating a positive attitude towards the English language.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / This paper will discuss the design and performance of card level telemetry receivers and combiners. This will include products that have been designed to operate in compact computer controlled environments such as VME chassis, VXI chassis and personal computers using ISA buses. The paper will discuss design considerations required to overcome limitation of this environment such as noise and space. The paper will also discuss the performance of a telemetry receiver and combiner in this environment. This will include performance test results such as bit error rate test, phase noise measurements and combiner improvement measurements. Finally, the paper will discuss typical applications of card level telemetry receivers and combiners.

Finance risk management has been playing an increasingly important role in the finance sector, to analyse finance data and to prevent any potential crisis. It has been widely recognised that Value at Risk (VaR) is an effective method for finance risk management and evaluation. This thesis conducts a comprehensive review on a number of VaR methods and discusses in depth their strengths and limitations. Among these VaR methods, Monte Carlo simulation and analysis has proven to be the most accurate VaR method in finance risk evaluation due to its strong modelling capabilities. However, one major challenge in Monte Carlo analysis is its high computing complexity of O(n²). To speed up the computation in Monte Carlo analysis, this thesis parallelises Monte Carlo using the MapReduce model, which has become a major software programming model in support of data intensive applications. MapReduce consists of two functions - Map and Reduce. The Map function segments a large data set into small data chunks and distribute these data chunks among a number of computers for processing in parallel with a Mapper processing a data chunk on a computing node. The Reduce function collects the results generated by these Map nodes (Mappers) and generates an output. The parallel Monte Carlo is evaluated initially in a small scale MapReduce experimental environment, and subsequently evaluated in a large scale simulation environment. Both experimental and simulation results show that the MapReduce based parallel Monte Carlo is greatly faster than the sequential Monte Carlo in computation, and the accuracy level is maintained as well. In data intensive applications, moving huge volumes of data among the computing nodes could incur high overhead in communication. To address this issue, this thesis further considers data locality in the MapReduce based parallel Monte Carlo, and evaluates the impacts of data locality on the performance in computation.

The aim of this study is to examine the long-term cognitive effects and educational outcomes of being born small-for-gestational-age (SGA). It also assesses whether the family’s attitude towards education modifies the effect of SGA on cognitive performance. A total of 9598 children born in 1953 and living in the Stockholm metropolitan area in 1963 were included in this study. Data were obtained from the Stockholm Birth Cohort. Multiple ordinary least square regressions analyses suggest that SGA children have lower mean verbal, spatial and numerical test scores than appropriate-for-gestational-age (AGA) children. However, these differences are small. Other results from modification analyses indicate that the effect of SGA status on cognitive performance is modified by the family’s attitude towards education. Additional logistic regression analyses suggest that the unadjusted difference in log odds of attaining higher education is largely explained by the family’s attitude towards education. The results suggest that the detrimental influences of being born SGA on some cognitive and educational outcomes are limited and may be reduced.

published_or_final_version / Physics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Civil Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The ignition of the first sources of light marked the end of the cosmic dark ages, an era when the Universe transitioned from the relatively simple conditions following the Big Bang to the complex tapestry of dark matter, baryons, and pervasive cosmic radiation fields we see today. To better understand this uncharted cosmic epoch, we primarily utilize hydrodynamical, N-body simulations to model the assembly of the first galaxies at redshifts greater than ten and the stars that form within them. These simulations begin from cosmological initial conditions, employ a robust, non-equilibrium chemo-thermodynamic model, and take advantage of adaptive-grid-refinement to probe the multi-scale, complex process of star formation from ab initio principles. We explore the consequences that metal enrichment has on the process of star formation, confirming the presence of a critical metallicity for low-mass star formation. To assess the observational prospects of these primeval stellar populations with next-generation telescopes, like the James Webb Space Telescope, we constrain the star formation efficiency of both metal-enriched and metal-free star formation in a typical first galaxy. We also resolve the formation of individual metal-enriched stars in simulations that ultimately began from cosmological scales, allowing meaningful comparisons between our simulations and the recently discovered ultra-faint dwarf satellite galaxies, the suspected analogs of the first galaxies in the local Universe. / text