The main purpose of this analytic study which has a theoretical focus, Is to find out if the two Swedish parties Socialdemokraterna (s) - The Social Democrats - and Folkpartiet (p) - The Liberal Party - has taken position ideologically or strategically to the new sex-degree grading scale. The theory section describes the concepts of ideology and strategy. Despite the talk of the death of the ideologies, this don't need to be the case, they only adjust över time. The second key-point of this essay is strategy, a model based on Frostbergs reasoning illustrates this. A number of problem areas are presented. The politicians are driven by a desire to to realize their preferences and sometimes come strategic actions necessary. On the other side are the voters who will assess the degree of contact and the credibility of what the different parties presents. The material is based upon a varied mix of sources. Socialdemokraterna stands for a theory of equality while Folkpartiet has its roots in the liberal ideas. These two parties have previously done deals in heavy issues, this in a political land of sometimes unexpected decisions and alliances. The school is central to the Government and is a constant  topic of discussion and criticism. Something must be done because the Swedish school has been unsuccessful in quality intemationally. A model is used to illustrate and analyze the outcome of the result of the two parties if they has acted ideologically or strategically in the case of the grade-system. The answer is that (fp) has acted ideologically because they have a clear link to their ideal-type determination. Socialdemokraterna have acted strategically in relation to ideological points as well in their overall opinion explanation with the school had to give up on a number on of points.

Visitor activities in parks often have a heavy impact on the soil, vegetation, water and wildlife. In front country areas, the most extreme damage is concentrated on and adjacent to recreational trails. Aside from controlling the numbers, activities and behaviours of trail users, managers may choose to make trails more resistant to impact through surfacing. Unfortunately, surfacing may have negative influences on park visitors' enjoyment of trails by limiting access or detracting from the primitive setting. In addition, some surfaces may be ineffective in certain environmental conditions such as wet ground or steep slopes. Finally, the wide variety in construction and maintenance costs may make some surface types economically unfeasible. The goals of this research are to investigate the role of trail surfacing in the management of impacts from outdoor recreation; to develop better understanding of the social, economic and environmental aspects of trail surfacing decisions; and to explore a comprehensive framework for incorporating these three factors in trail management. It is hoped that this research can assist park managers in selecting surfacing options to reduce visitor impact without excessively compromising recreational experience or organizational limitations, such as financial resources. In addition to a comprehensive review of literature on visitor impact management on trails and surfacing techniques, this research employs three methods to further investigate the social, environmental and economic aspects of trail surfacing: a trail user survey, manager survey and trail condition assessment. The trail user survey was conducted at two well-used natural areas in southwestern Ontario, Canada: Presqu'ile Provincial Park and Belfountain Conservation Area. Surveys at each area explored trail users' perceptions and preferences of trail surfacing techniques in late summer 1999. The managers' survey provided insight into organizational approaches to surfacing, including construction cost and observations on recreational or environmental effectiveness. Finally, the trail condition assessment explored an approach to determining environmental effectiveness of trail surfacing techniques, but was limited by the physical and recreational variation between trails. Seven recommendations for trail managers are presented, tying in several conceptual frameworks of visitor impact management and trail surfacing decisions developed in the thesis. First, trail managers are recommended to develop a full understanding of trail design principles and alternative visitor impact management techniques. If surfacing is selected as the best impact management technique, trail managers should obtain as much information on user characteristics, environmental conditions and organizational limitations as possible. Despite the benefits and drawbacks for all surfaces, road base gravel (or angular screenings with fines) merits special attention as an excellent surface, while asphalt and concrete are not recommended for front country, semi-primitive recreation. Finally, trail managers are encouraged to share information on surfacing more freely and open surfacing decision processes to affected trail users. Overall, trail managers are provided with an approach to surfacing decisions that considers the social, environmental and economic aspects of trail surfacing, with the goal of working toward more enjoyable, environmentally responsible and cost-effective trail solutions.

As much of the growing population of North America is accommodated within cities or on their fringes, one needs to understand how these people are managing their private outdoor space. Within the cities of Kitchener and Waterloo, Ontario, Canada a randomly selected set of residential occupancies were surveyed in 1994 and 2004 about their yard landscaping and maintenance practices. Parallel mail-out questionnaires were delivered to more than 1,000 randomly selected addresses in both 1994 and 2004. Approximately 30 percent of surveyed occupancies completed the questionnaire in both years. Over one-third of respondents from both 1994 and 2004 were matched together based on individual, household, or address information. The matched respondent results were used to validate similarities and identify any inconsistencies between survey years. In general, matched respondent trends did not differ substantially from the overall study trends. <br /><br /> This study found that much of the outdoor space on residential properties consists of turfgrass lawn. Lawns were the dominant form of landscaping in both 1994 and 2004. Although respondents' attitudes towards lawns shifted slightly in favour of more gardens in the 2004 survey compared to 1994, respondents' actual landscaping styles and behaviours did not follow suit. Regardless of minor differences in attitudes between survey years, turfgrass was reported to be present in more than 85 percent of respondents' yards. On average, lawns were estimated to cover more than half of respondents' total private outdoor space in both 1994 and 2004. Likewise, more than 60 percent of respondents in both survey years indicated that their yard reflected a monoculture lawn. When compared with five other styles of landscaping, the monoculture lawn was found attractive and well-liked by approximately half the respondents in both survey years. In addition to the prevalence and preference for lawns, lawns were seen as practical to maintain as: the majority of respondents had a lawnmower ? mostly gas-powered; respondents were willing to spend almost $200 a year to water their lawn, on average; the application of chemicals, particularly fertilizers, was common with approximately half the respondents; and more than 40 percent of respondents were willing to pay lawn-care professionals to look after their yards. Lawns were also perceived to be the landscaping style most acceptable to neighbours. Thus, given the ubiquitousness of lawns in urban residential environments, the presence of lawns not only represents the yard design preferences of homeowners, but is part of deeply entrenched societal norms. <br /><br /> With assistance from the media and advertisements, these implicit societal norms were found to influence household attitudes and preferences towards what is dubbed 'lawn-scaping'. As confirmation of these subtle norms, more than 60 percent of respondents in both survey years agreed that 'a yard has to have a lawn'. However, these landscaping norms are also explicitly established in municipal property regulations and lot-maintenance by-laws. Hence, the lawn landscape is implicitly linked with social norms and explicitly articulated in legal agreements, making it the unquestioned standard of landscaping styles. It is concluded that a change in local policies and regulations, along with greater education and awareness, will lay the foundation for more alternative styles of landscaping within urban residential areas.

In many areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are interested in helping people make better decisions. This help can result in two advantages. First, computers can process large amounts of data and perform quick calculations, leading to better decisions. Second, if a user does not have to think about some decisions, they have more time to focus on other things they find important. Since users' preferences are private, in order to make intelligent decisions, we need to elicit an accurate model of the users' preferences for different outcomes. We are specifically interested in outcomes involving a degree of risk or uncertainty. A common goal in AI preference elicitation is minimizing regret, or loss of utility. We are often interested in minimax regret, or minimizing the worst-case regret. This thesis examines three important aspects of preference elicitation and minimax regret. First, the standard elicitation process in AI assumes users' preferences follow the axioms of Expected Utility Theory (EUT). However, there is strong evidence from psychology that people may systematically deviate from EUT. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) is an alternative model to expected utility theory which has been shown empirically to better explain humans' decision-making in risky settings. We show that the standard elicitation process can be incompatible with CPT. We develop a new elicitation process that is compatible with both CPT and minimax regret. Second, since minimax regret focuses on the worst-case regret, minimax regret is often an overly cautious estimate of the actual regret. As a result, using minimax regret can often create an unnecessarily long elicitation process. We create a new measure of regret that can be a more accurate estimate of the actual regret. Our measurement of regret is especially well suited for eliciting preferences from multiple users. Finally, we examine issues of multiattribute preferences. Multiattribute preferences provide a natural way for people to reason about preferences. Unfortunately, in the worst-case, the complexity of a user's preferences grows exponentially with respect to the number of attributes. Several models have been proposed to help create compact representations of multiattribute preferences. We compare both the worst-case and average-case relative compactness.

The thick-shelled river mussel (Unio crassus) is a red listed species classified as Endangered (EN) and is also considered within the Habitats Directive. The distribution in Sweden is fragmented and it is mostly occurring in the south eastern parts. We investigated the presence of Unio crassus in a section of the stream Storån, Östergötland County, from Falerum to the inflow into Lake Åkervristen. The environmental parameters investigated were water depth, bottom substrate, shading, water velocity and the slope over the water surface. In this thesis I have focused mainly on water depth and shading, comparing sites with and without mussels. In addition, I used a multivariate PCA analysis to evaluate all parameters together. The water depth was significantly larger in habitats with mussels than in those without. Shading varied from 5 to 80 %, but there was no significant difference between habitats with and without mussels. There was no correlation between water depth and mussel density and not between shading and mussel density either. The multivariate PCA analysis showed that the habitats with and without mussels were different from with regard to the PC1 axis, which included water depth, bottom substrate and water velocity. Alone, the water depth is not enough to predict the presence of Unio crassus in the stream, and it is likely that more parameters need to be considered.  Previous work indicate that the more parameters and habitats that are investigated, the more confident results can be stated of which habitats Unio crassus prefer.

During the 1960´s and 1970´s the number of grey seals in the Baltic Sea was decreasing rapidly, mostly due to hunting and toxic substances like DDT and PCB. When hunting became less intense and toxic substances decreased in the environment the grey seal population started to increase. Today grey seals are found common in the Baltic Sea and have started to become a big treat and a problem to the fishing industry. The grey seal destroys and enters fishing traps and consumes large quantities of the fish that have been caught. The knowledge of the grey seal, like abundance and food preferences, is today limited. It is also important to define the position of the grey seal in the ecosystem in the Baltic Sea and to be able to predict changes that could occur if the population would rapidly decrease or increase. This project was therefore started in an attempt to increase the knowledge about the grey seals food preferences. The study was made in tree separate parts. Part one contained analyses of prey remains from stomachs and digestive tract from fourteen individuals put down in two geographically separate areas. The collected material from the seal digestive tract was cleaned and otoliths (hearing stones from fish), scales and back vertebra from fish eaten by the grey seal were sorted out. With the help of hard parts collected from the intestines the food preferences of the seals could be estimated. Eight different species of prey was found. The species were herring (Clupea harengus membras), sprat (Sprattus sprattus), common whitefish (Coregonus spp), perch (Perca fluviatilis), salmon (Salmo salar), trout (Salmo trutta) and roach (Rutilus rutilus). In two of the digestive tracts several individuals of the isopod Saduria entomon were found. No earlier studies describe the isopod as a food source for the grey seals in the Baltic Sea. The findings are therefore unique information. The results showed that during summer the main part of the grey seal diet in the gulf of Sundsvall and in the surrounding coastal area of Hårte was herring and sprat. No significant difference in food preferences was shown between the investigated seals from the gulf of Sundsvall and seals from the surrounding coastal area of Hårte. The second part was made to investigate if it was possible to build a floating platform that would work as a resting place for the grey seal. The surface of the platform was covered by a layer that keeps the seal scats on the platform so that it could be collected. Otoliths from herring and common whitefish were found on the floating platform. Because the platform could not be under surveillance during the whole study some uncertainties about whether the otoliths found came from grey seal or from resting cormorants or other fish eating birds. However, the otolit size is linearly related to the fish size and this relationship can be used to track the predator. Otoliths from herring taken by grey seals and otoliths found on the platform were significantly bigger than the otoliths originating from the prey of cormorants. The results indicated that the common whitefish size was too big for a full grown cormorant bird to consume. The common whitefish size showed that it probably not had been cormorants that had deposited the otoliths on the platform. The platform method was concluded promising but it needs to be modified in order to work more effective in the future. In the third part scats were collected from the area of Österåsen to increase the amount of information about the grey seals food preferences. The knowledge of the grey seals diet in the Baltic Sea is today limited and few similar study’s have earlier been made. The collected scats and otoliths in this project are therefore unique. 2008:Bi 2

The aim of the paper is to investigate to what extent political parties in the Scandinavian parliaments express opinions on labor immigration in line with the policy preferences predicted by the Stolper-Samuleson theorem. A hypothesis derived from the theorem suggests that left wing parties traditionally connected to labor interests should favor restrictions on labor immigration to a greater extent than right wing parties traditionally connected to businesses and market interests. To establish any such trend, parties are placed on a left-right axis according to their given Rile scores. The findings indicate that there is some evidence for a left-right divide regarding parties' assumed factor interests labor and capital, but the basis for these findings are limited and inferences should be made with care.

Consumers often face conflict between what "makes sense" and what "feels right" - between logical analysis and intuition. This dissertation focuses on the means by which such conflict is resolved. Extending dual-process models of judgment, we suggest that consumers often select a processing output based on their assessment regarding the appropriateness of experiential (system-1) and analytical (system-2) responses. Specifically, we propose distinct mechanisms that affect the weighting of experiential versus analytical outputs by influencing the perceived suitability of each processing mode, and we test these mechanisms in a series of experimental studies. In order to demonstrate the broad applicability of our framework, these studies investigate numerous domains in which the 'head' and 'gut' produce opposing responses, employ diverse manipulations of perceived suitability, and utilize multiple judgment and evaluation measures.The dissertation is organized in three chapters. Chapter One provides an overview of dual-systems theories and introduces the notion of simultaneous conflicting preferences. In addition, the chapter describes our conceptualization of perceived suitability as a metacognitive construct and lays out a model by which this construct influences the resolution of conflicting preferences. Chapter Two presents six empirical studies spanning a number of paradigms relevant to consumer behavior and social cognition. As an initial demonstration, Studies 1-2 utilized a semantic priming task to manipulate representations of experiential and analytical processing, and then tested the effects of this manipulation in a game of chance pitting a logically superior option against one that was perceptually appealing. Studies 3-6 expanded our model to situations involving conflict between implicit and explicit brand attitudes. Three of these studies (3, 5, and 6) tested the proposition that prior-formed, 'implicit' attitudes will affect even overt preferences to the extent that experiential processing is deemed suitable to the evaluation task. The other (Study 4) identified various decision characteristics that may affect the perceived suitability of each processing mode in real-world decisions. Chapter Three concludes the dissertation by reviewing the evidence for our conceptual model and discussing both theoretical and practical contributions of the question "How should I think about it?" in situations pitting instincts against reason. / Dissertation

Web service selection problem focuses on how to choose component Web services to satisfy user¡¦s non-functional (or QoS) need, and it has been extensively studied in the past. The QoS measures include reliability, response time, and execution cost. However, in some applications, execution result, as demonstrated on some output values, matters, and this is seldom addressed by previous researches. In our work, we proposed an approach to guide the WS selection with the goal to meet user¡¦s preferences on the composition execution outcome. In addition, we consider the partner relationship between Web services. Some partner Web services may produce more desired execution result, such as better quality or a discount, than others. In our approach, we use Bayesian Network to guide Web services selection. Specifically, we propose two Bayesian Network-based methods: Partner-first Bayesian Network and Probability-first Bayesian Network. Both methods rank Web services by considering user¡¦s preference, user¡¦s input variables, and the past execution results of Web services. The experiment result shows that the proposed Bayesian Network methods perform better than the other more straightforward methods.

In this dissertation three different economic issues have been analyzed. The first issue is whether monetary policy rules can improve forecasting accuracy of inflation. The second is whether the preference of a central bank is symmetry or not. The last issue is whether the behavior of aggregate dividends is asymmetry. Each issue is considered in Chapter II, III and IV, respectively. The linkage between monetary policy rules and the prediction of inflation is explored in Chapter II. Our analysis finds that the prediction performance of the term structure model hinges on monetary policy rules, which involve the manipulation of the federal funds rate in response to the change in the price level. As the Fed's reaction to inflation becomes stronger, the predictive information contained in the term structure becomes weaker. Using the long-run Taylor rule, a new assessment of the prediction performance regarding future change in inflation is provided. The empirical results indicate that the long-run Taylor rule improves forecasting accuracy. In chapter III, the asymmetric preferences of the central bank of Korea are examined under New Keynesian sticky prices forward-looking economy framework. To this end, this chapter adopts the central bank's objective functional form as a linear-exponential function instead of the standard quadratic function. The monetary policy reaction function is derived and then asymmetric preference parameters are estimated during the inflation targeting period: 1998:9-2005:12. The empirical evidence supports that while the objective of output stability is symmetry, but the objective of price stability is not symmetry. Specifically, it appears that the central bank of Korea aggressively responds to positive inflation gaps compared to negative inflation gaps. Chapter IV examines the nonlinear dividend behavior of the aggregate stock market. We propose a nonlinear dividend model that assumes managers minimize the regime dependent adjustment costs associated with being away from their target dividend payout. By using the threshold vector error correction model, we find significant evidence of a threshold effect in aggregate dividends of S&P 500 Index in quarterly data when real stock prices are used for the target. We also find that when dividends are relatively higher than target, the adjustment cost of dividends is much smaller than that when they are lower.