Foot and mouth disease (FMD) is regarded as one of the greatest biological threats to the U.S. livestock industry because of its potential to cause catastrophic economic damages and massive livestock depopulation. Current U.S. contingency plans call for "stamping out" of FMD. An integral component of a "stamping out" policy is movement restrictions. The main purpose for movement restrictions is to stop the spread of disease, but they also disrupt the agribusiness sector. Welfare slaughter, the depopulation of healthy quarantined animals, is a possibility if movement restrictions are kept in place for prolonged periods of time. Many studies have analyzed the economic consequences of alternative mitigation strategies, but generally these studies have ignored the costs that might arise because of movement restrictions affecting uninfected premises located within the quarantine zone. Ultimately this study seeks to improve preparedness in the event of a FMD outbreak. It does this by developing information for those formulating plans on the costs associated with movement restrictions regarding quarantined, uninfected large feedlots located in the Texas High Plains Region. To accomplish this objective two strategies were compared: an unrestricted feed strategy, where feed is allowed to be brought onto uninfected premises and finished cattle are sold; and a welfare slaughter strategy, where feed isn't allowed to be brought onto the uninfected premises so animals are depopulated. In addition, seasonal differences in total costs were examined. This study expanded on the High Plains Study conducted by M. Ward, L. Highfield, P. Vongseng, and M. Garner by using their epidemiological data combined with a cost accounting framework to estimate the total cost of each strategy. This study examined direct disease management costs (indemnity payments, feed costs, marketing costs, surveillance costs, cleaning and disinfecting costs, appraisal cost, euthanasia costs, and disposal costs). Overall, the unrestricted feed strategy was less expensive than the welfare slaughter strategy, costing on average $22.6 million compared to $48.5 million, respectively. Disease outbreak timing did impact the overall cost of both strategies. The results suggest the policy makers should strongly consider creating movement policies that address feed supply and finished cattle movement for uninfected large feedlots in prolonged quarantine zones; as such policies appear to reduce outbreak related costs for stakeholder and the U.S. government.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka hur hotell i Sverige arbetar med miljöfrågor idag, samt vilka möjligheter och begränsningar som finns för fortsatt utveckling av miljöarbetet. Genom kvalitativa metoder som intervjuer, observationer och litteraturstudier har författarna undersökt tre hotell och Destination Sigtuna, ett nätverk för hållbar turism, utifrån fyra fokuspunkter: noll slöseri, hållbara material, lokal och hållbar mat samt hållbart vatten. Alla de hotell som undersökts har en eller flera miljöcertifieringar, samt bedriver ett miljöarbete av eget engagemang. Miljöarbetet bedrivs i olika omfång, beroende av olika faktorer i omgivningen. De möjligheter och begränsningar som författarna ser för en utveckling av miljöarbetet är bland annat engagemang, ansvarskänsla, samt den lokala omgivningen. / The purpose of this paper is to examine how hotels in Sweden work with environmental issues today, and the possible opportunities and restrictions for a continued development of their environmental practices. The authors have examined three hotels and the organization Destination Sigtuna, a network for sustainable tourism, through qualitative methods such as interviews, observations and literature studies. The authors have focused on four categories; zero waste, sustainable materials, local and sustainable food and sustainable water. All the hotels in this paper have one or several environmental certifications, and conduct environmental practices through their own commitment. The practice is conducted to different degrees depending on a range of circumstances. The opportunities and restrictions that the authors see for development of environmental work are commitment, responsibility and the local surroundings among others.

Data management in resource-limited settings can be a mountainous problem if not approached with a thorough understanding of those limitations and a mindset prepared for rapid changes in the environment. Data management becomes even more challenging at multiple points of entry, where there are many interwoven parts working together in order to get a potential traveler from his/her first steps into an airport area to boarding a plane, all while ensuring that the traveler has been thoroughly screened for any signs or symptoms of a possible Ebola virus disease infection. This capstone describes the history of the International Health Regulations’ effects on control of disease spread and importation at points of entry, the Do Not Board/Lookout List’s role in disease control in the United States, and the CDC’s International Assistance Team’s unique task in creating and implementing country-specific databases to meet the needs of Ebola-affected countries. The most critical data management need at these countries’ points of entry is specifically to prevent the exportation of Ebola virus disease in order to keep each country’s airspace open and allow goods, personnel and services to continue to be imported into these countries during this sustained Ebola outbreak.

Bitcoin has become notorious as the first cryptocurrency to gain widespread media attention, however, despite its many benefits over the existing financial system it remains a volatile fringe currency. This thesis examines the validity of bitcoin as a currency and whether it can play a role in circumventing extractive economic and political institutions in developing countries. The analysis compares bitcoin usage to the level of financial openness, the inflation rate, and the percentage of the population with a bank account in 21 different countries. The correlation is found to be both statistically and economically significant for all of these variables, which suggests that bitcoin is being used in countries with underdeveloped financial systems and detrimental monetary policies. A regression run on these variables indicates that a one-percentage-point increase in inflation leads to a 44.48% increase in bitcoin usage, a one-percentage-point increase in the percentage of people in a country that have a bank account leads to an 8.65% decrease in bitcoin usage and a one unit increase in financial openness leads to a 216% decrease in bitcoin usage. Throughout this analysis the positive and negative implications of widespread bitcoin adoption are discussed with respect to economies in the developing world.

Coronapandemin har skapat stora konsekvenser för världens befolkning och i Sverige har restriktioner och rekommendationer införts som begränsat människors liv. Tidigare forskning gällande livskvalitet under pandemin har bedrivits utanför Sverige med kvantitativa mätinstrument. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka upplevd livskvalitet i Sverige under pendemin. Tolv individer, varav sex män och sex kvinnor, mellan 20-52 år med olika sysselsättningar medverkade. Semistrukturerade intervjuer användes vid insamlingen av data och tematisk analys användes vid databearbetningen. Resultatet visade att det sociala livet förändrats, mer tid spenderats i hemmet och att livsstilen blivit mer stillasittande. Det fanns även en större förväntan att kunna leda sig själv i form av att skapa rutiner. Nära relationer och betydelsefulla fritidsaktiviteter ökade livskvaliteten under pandemin medan den begränsade rörligheten i samhället minskade livskvaliteten. Studiens slutsats var att individens förmåga till anpassning avgjorde hur livskvaliteten upplevdes under pandemin. Vidare forskning föreslogs studera livskvaliteten över tid under pandemin.

Sweden has gone from an agricultural society to an industrial society which may lead to a less self-sufficient country. The concept of self-sufficiency has been a way to narrate how dependent a country is of the import to provide the population with enough food. The Swedish society is not only dependent of import of food but also import of fuel, chemical fertilizers, seeds and spare parts to various agricultural machineries. This study will investigate how agricultural area and enterprises and energy supply per person in Sweden have changed during 1970 to 2020. The results show an overall decrease of agricultural land with 16 percent and especially a decrease is found among smaller scale agricultural enterprises. In contradiction an increase is seen of large agricultural companies with 200 percent during this time period. The energy supply per person has decreased and after taking export into account the change is from 114 percent self -sufficiency 1970 to a 48 percent self-sufficiency during 2020. In conclusion; reduced arable land, decreasing agricultural enterprises and a lower degree of self-sufficiency makes Sweden more dependent on commercial agreements and more vulnerable for trade restrictions. Trade restrictions regarding goods to the agriculture industry could lead to food shortage in the country.

The purpose of this thesis was to find and implement an adaptive method, based on given data and hardware, for selecting different level-of-detail whilst preserving visual quality to the best extent possible. Another important aspect of the new method was that it had to be performance effective, since the target platform was an interactive direct volume rendering application. The project was targeted towards memory restricted systems in which it has previously been impossible to render large-scale volumetric datasets. The previous state of the target platform supports two detail levels: full and half, and does not implement any kind of prioritisation when selecting the level-of-detail of bricks. Apart from failing to render parts of the datasets, the old implementation is also lacking in that the top of the dataset always has the lowest prioritisation, which can prove problematic for certain datasets. An adaptive method which determines a suitable number of detail levels at run-time has been implemented. The new implementation has also reworked the way bricks are prioritised during rendering. The proposed algorithm prioritises bricks holding surface information as well as bricks that match the transfer-function configuration well. The results show that the proposed method is able to render large-scale datasets in limited environments whilst maintaining interactive frame-rates. The new brick selection algorithm is a step in the right direction towards solving the issue with parts of the dataset not being prioritised.

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Durant la première vague de la pandémie de la COVID-19, plus de huit mille personnes sont décédées au Canada après avoir contracté le virus. Dans le but de diminuer cette hausse de mortalité, plusieurs restrictions ont été mises en place par les instances gouvernementales canadiennes pour réduire l'impact de la pandémie sur le système de santé et aplatir la courbe de contagion. En plus de limiter la propagation du virus, ces mesures sanitaires, combinées à la surmortalité causée par la pandémie ont conduit à une diminution aux soins de santé accessibles, une réduction du système de soutien, une précarité financière et des changements majeurs dans les rituels funéraires. C'est dans ce climat anxiogène et futur incertain que des milliers de Canadiens et Canadiennes ont vécu leur deuil. Le but de cette étude qualitative d'analyse de contenu est de comprendre les expériences de deuil survenues au Canada durant la première vague de la pandémie de la COVID-19, à la lumière de ces changements survenus au cours de cette période. L'échantillon est constitué de 128 publications médiatiques canadiennes tirées de la banque de données du Projet Mon Récit COVID par une méthode non probabiliste par choix raisonné. L'analyse des données a été effectuée par codage manuel à l'aide de l'analyse thématique en six étapes de Braun et Clarke. Ceci dans le but d'amener une meilleure compréhension de ces vécus partagés dans les médias à large tirage. C'est dans cette optique qu'elles ont été aussi abordées en utilisant le prisme de la théorie de la reconstruction du sens de Gillies et Neimeyer (2006). Finalement, 6 thèmes et 5 sous thèmes ont émergé de l'analyse thématique soit, le contexte de la pandémie, les émotions et sentiments négatifs, l'altération du processus de deuil, la surmortalité, l'héroïsation des professionnels de la santé et les actions entreprises. Le contexte de la pandémie a été divisé en cinq sous catégories. Ainsi, une analyse des articles de journaux publiés durant la première vague de la pandémie de la COVID-19 nous permet d'avoir une meilleure compréhension des expériences de deuil pandémiques canadiennes. De plus, une lumière a jailli sur plusieurs autres problèmes prépandémiques qui se sont empirés par la présence du coronavirus, tel que le manque de préparation des infirmiers et des infirmières dans l'accompagnement des familles endeuillées ou les capacités d'adaptations inadaptées utilisées par les professionnels de la santé face à leur propre deuil. Ainsi, les résultats obtenus dans cette étude nous incitent à repenser à notre approche de soutien, améliorer la formation et la pratique infirmière afin de fournir des soins de qualité optimale aux familles endeuillées et de réduire la fatigue de compassion et la détresse morale chez les travailleurs de la santé, tout ceci dans le but de réduire la courbe de deuils compliqués prédite par la littérature sur la pandémie de COVID-19.

No description available.