Search results

After four years of queuing on the Swedish list for transplant kidneys, Sam was tired of waiting – he went to Pakistan and bought a new kidney. But where did the new kidney come from? And was the donation of the organ he received really voluntary? In this book, Susanne Lundin explores the murky world of organ trade, where desperate patients like Sam are small pieces in a big puzzle. In her ethnogr

Robots used in manufacturing today are tailored to their tasks by system integration based on expert knowledge concerning both production and machine control. For upcoming new generations of even more flexible robot solutions, in applications such as dexterous assembly, the robot setup and programming gets even more challenging. Reuse of solutions in terms of parameters, controls, process tuning,

Living with dementia means struggling to preserve a sense of self, to retain (and reevaluate) one's values in a new situation, and to search for a new way of life. This study explored the meaning of everyday life as expressed by 11 people suffering from dementia. Data were collected through interviews with people in the early stage of a diagnosed dementia disease. The findings indicate that many p

Two different self-adjoint Pauli extensions describing a spin-1/2 two-dimensional quantum system with singular magnetic field are studied. An Aharonov-Casher type formula is proved for the maximal Pauli extension and the possibility of approximation of the two different self-adjoint extensions by operators with regular magnetic fields is investigated.

The aim of this study was to investigate the specificity of the H-3-triolein assay and to investigate the recovery of highly purified pancreatic lipase and pancreatic lipase in the form of pure non-activated pig pancreatic juice. Blood plasma from pigs was analysed for pancreatic lipase activity using the H-3-triolein substrate assay, with a method specific for lipoprotein lipase and with a method

Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) has gained interest in the last few years and several air interfaces have been proposed to cover WPAN applications. A Multi-Carrier Spread Spectrum (MC-SS) air interface specified to achieve 130 Mbps in typical WPAN channels, is presented in this paper. It operates in the 5.2 GHz ISM band and achieves a spectral efficiency of 3.25 b.s-1.Hz-1. Besides the robu

We report on a large scale calculation concerning the 5s(2) S-1 and 5s5p P-1,P-3 levels in Sr-88 I, using multiconfiguration Dirac-Fock methods. Our focus is on the P-3(2) meta-stable level, which has been shown to be extremely useful in atom cooling and trapping experiments. The lifetime for this level from our work (1071 s) agrees very well with a previous theoretical value, but not with the ava

Antibody-based microarrays is a rapidly evolving technology that has gone from the first proof-of-concept studies to more demanding proteome profiling applications, during the last years. Miniaturized microarrays can be printed with large number of antibodies harbouring predetermined specificities, capable of targeting high- as well as low-abundant analytes in complex, nonfractionated proteomes. C

Participation is about finding consensus in diversity and reflects a normative shift towards multiple-use values that recognise that forest management should blend multiple management objectives into a coherent set of practices. A framework to incorporate interest groups' values and needs into functional forest management systems has yet to be institutionalised in contemporary forest policy and ma

Gaussian wave models have been successfully used since the early 1950s to describe the development of random sea waves, particularly as input to dynamic simulation of the safety of ships and offshore structures. A drawback of the Gaussian model is that it produces stochastically symmetric waves, which is an unrealistic feature and can lead to unconservative safety estimates. The Gaussian model des

We present an algorithm for the computation of the stress field around a branched crack. The algorithm is based on an integral equation with good numerical properties. Our equation is obtained through a left regularization of an integral equation of Fredholm's first kind. Complex valued functions involving repeated products of square roots appear in the regularization. A new and effective scheme f

The hallmark of severe haemophilia, defined as a circulating level of factor (F) VIII (haemophilia A cases) or FIX (haemophilia B cases) of < 1%, is recurrent bleeding into muscles and joints (haemarthroses) from an early age of life. The inevitable result of such bleeding is progressive joint damage, leading to disabling arthritis that is typically evident within the first 2 decades of life in pe

The interactions between wild-type or mutant recombinant forms of human cystatin C and rat cathepsin B were characterized by measuring progress curves for substrate hydrolysis in the presence of inhibitor. The investigation was guided by the use of computer modeling and explores the possibility that amino acid residues in the N-terminal region of cystatin C interact with substrate-binding regions

We present a method for parametrizing the Zeeman effect in hydrogen-like systems in high-temperature plasmas, where the fine-structure is completely unresolved. The method is based on the observation that the different polarization components behave collectively like separate entities, with simple relations. The entire Zeeman pattern can then be reduced to just three components, whose dependence o

Through ethnographic accounts, the method of heat treatment of silica materials to improve the flaking qualities is shown to have been known almost worldwide. Some mesolithic and neolithic flint artifacts from southern Sweden were examined in order to determine if they too were heat treated. From several methods proving or indicating thermal alteration of flint, analysis using scanning electron mi

The present multidisciplinary study examined nigrostriatal dopamine and striatal amino acid transmission in the R6/1 line of transgenic Huntington's disease (HD) mice expressing exon 1 of the HD gene with 115 CAG repeats. Although the number of tyrosine hydroxylase-positive neurons was not reduced and nigrostriatal connectivity remained intact in 16-week-old R6/1 mice, the size of tyrosine hydroxy

The brackish water cyanobacterium Nodularia spumigena produce the hepatotoxic cyclic pentapeptide nodularin. Intoxications for both human as well as animal may arise when water reservoirs are contaminated with potentially toxic Nodularia species. Here, results of three independent methods for the determination of nodularin in different strains of N. spumigena are presented. The results obtained wi

Consider a parametrized family of general hidden Markov models, where both the observed and unobserved components take values in a complete separable metric space. We prove that the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the parameter is strongly consistent under a rather minimal set of assumptions. As special cases of our main result, we obtain consistency in a large class of nonlinear state space