| 1. |
- Backteman, Richard, 1985-
(författare)
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Industrialization of Services : Technology and Routinization in the 21st Century
- 2022
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Sweden has a long tradition of process improvements, productivity increments, waste reduction in manufacturing, continuing a mode of industrialization that helped achieve prosperity. With growing urban centers, mechanization of agriculture, outsourcings by manufacturing and the public sector with subsequent acquisitions, large service firms have appeared in an ever-growing service sector. Some firms with a previously simple operation have become employers of hundreds of thousands of people in what can be described as a Nordic phenomenon in its origin when looking at the roots of the largest firms.With this development in mind, the aim of the thesis is to explore the factors that can be found in the case study of industrialization of services in Nordic based firms. Using an abductive approach and mixed methods, the theoretical focus has been on the organization, routines, and knowledge. The data used in this thesis originates from three embedded contexts ranging from power and telecom infrastructural services, facility management, and a payment service provider. Summarily, the research questions touch upon (1) tacit knowledge and its transfer; (2) technology adoption; and (3) the grander implications of technology and industrialization in services.The thesis has four main contributions. First, the first paper provides a unique empirical insight into firms that rarely see any academic attention, a domain dominated by craftmanship to some degree, and with that an environment saturated with tacit knowledge. Secondly, the results indicate that while tacit knowledge is a significant part of service firms, recent technological advancement can overcome difficulties of transferring certain somatic aspects it. Capturing tacit knowledge digitally and transforming it into rich data, turns it into a crystallized artifact that is separated from time and space. High bandwidth enables the transfer of these crystallized artifacts of rich data, to any place, at any time. Thirdly, looking at the adoption of automation technology in various firms, it becomes clear that firm leadership has the pivotal role when it comes to technology adoption in contrast to the user. Depending on firm characteristics the readiness varies. Furthermore, technology itself may provide more opportunities than it originally intended. However, there are further dimensions that come into play such as network effects. Finally, the thesis can summate that technology has an incredible importance in industrializing services, but also posits that it may change the concept of what services truly are.For practitioners it is important to appreciate that technology has an increasingly important role in Services. Service firms that are geographically dispersed, or plan to become so via growth, do not necessarily need to be constrained in terms of knowledge transfer. However, adoption of technology requires a deliberate strategy from an enabling and proactive senior leadership.
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| 2. |
- Claudino, Mauro
(författare)
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Thiol−ene Coupling of Renewable Monomers : at the forefront of bio-based polymeric materials
- 2011
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Plant derived oils bear intrinsic double-bond functionality that can be utilized directly for the thiol–ene reaction. Although terminal unsaturations are far more reactive than internal ones, studies on the reversible addition of thiyl radicals to 1,2-disubstituted alkenes show that this is an important reaction. To investigate the thiol–ene coupling reaction involving these enes, stoichiometric mixtures of a trifunctional propionate thiol with monounsaturated fatty acid methyl esters (methyl oleate or methyl elaidate) supplemented with 2.0 wt.% Irgacure 184 were subjected to 365-nm UV-irradiation and the chemical changes monitored. Continuous (RT– FTIR) and discontinuous (NMR and FT–Raman) techniques were used to follow the progress of the reaction and reveal details of the products formed. Experimental results supported by numerical kinetic simulations of the system confirm the reaction mechanism showing a very fast cis/trans-isomerization of the alkene monomers (<1.0 min) when compared to the total disappearance of double-bonds, indicating that the rate-limiting step controlling the overall reaction is the hydrogen transfer from the thiol involved in the formation of final product. The loss of total unsaturations equals thiol consumption throughout the entire reaction; although product formation is strongly favoured directly from the trans-ene. This indicates that initial cis/trans-isomer structures affect the kinetics. High thiol–ene conversions could be easily obtained at reasonable rates without major influence of side-reactions demonstrating the suitability of this reaction for network forming purposes from 1,2-disubstituted alkenes. To further illustrate the validity of this concept in the formation of cross-linked thiol–ene films a series of globalide/caprolactone based copolyesters differing in degree of unsaturations along the backbone were photopolymerized in the melt with the same trithiol giving amorphous elastomeric materials with different thermal and viscoelastic properties. High thiol–ene conversions (>80%) were easily attained for all cases at reasonable reaction rates, while maintaining the cure behaviour and independent of functionality. Parallel chain-growth ene homopolymerization was considered negligible when compared with the main coupling route. However, the comonomer feed ratio had impact on the thermoset properties with high ene-density copolymers giving networks with higher glass transition temperature values (Tg) and a narrower distribution of cross-links than films with lower ene composition. The thiol–ene systems evaluated in this study serve as model example for the sustainable use of naturally-occurring 1,2-disubstituted alkenes at making semi-synthetic polymeric materials in high conversions with a range of properties in an environment-friendly way.
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| 3. |
- Eckeskog, Helena, 1952-
(författare)
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Varför knackar han inte bara på? : en studie om arbete med läsförståelse i åk 1-2
- 2013
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this study was to describe, analyze and explore how five teachers work with reading comprehension in grade one and grade two, ages 7 and 8. My approach was ethnographically inspired and data was collected through observations, teachers´ diaries and interviews. The findings indicate that in the observed teachers´ classroom students' language skills were central. In order to teach the students how to use strategies in their own reading, teachers trained the students to use strategies while reading aloud to them. When reading aloud to the students, focus was on reading comprehension but sometimes texts were used by the teachers as tools to teach strategies. The teachers seemed to think that students first have to learn to read (decode) before working with strategies for reading comprehension during individual reading. In the classrooms a substantial amount of time was spent on dialogue, both before as well as during reading texts aloud. When the teachers asked questions, vocabulary was often focused. The teachers also asked about spelling and punctuation in the text. The questions were mostly aimed at controlling or inferencing the children but the teachers also asked questions where factual knowledge was needed. Regardless of the type of questions the teacher poses, the students respond with comments or inferences. The types of questions that the teacher asked of a text tend to be dominant when the children were invited to ask questions themselves. The teachers in the study were pleased with the students' development and performance in reading comprehension and the students seemed interested to read themselves and to listening to the teachers reading aloud. Children used reading comprehension strategies when listening to teachers reading, but it is unclear to what extent they use it to their individual reading.
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| 4. |
- Jonsson, Anna-Paula, 1982-
(författare)
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Sustainable tourism development : Social sustainability, planning and strategic development for better cities
- 2022
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The main goal of this thesis has been to contribute towards improved understanding of how cities can influence tourism development. A great deal of earlier tourism studies has been concerned with aspects of social sustainability. This has naturally concentrated on potential as well as real anomalies and conflicts related to urban tourism. Inherent in many of such contributions is a dichotomy consisting of residents and social sustainability on the one hand, and negative impacts of tourism development (e.g. overtourism) on the other. Research and practice have over time gravitated towards an increased focus on how urban tourism development contributes to desired social impact. This has led to new perspectives in both policy contexts and tourism research. Perspectives for how to manage tourism to mitigate negative impact are therefore being complemented by new, more strategic, questions about how tourism can contribute towards urban development goals. Such questions, together with evidence that tourism development and urban development are mutually constitutive processes, motivate integrating policies that influence tourism into processes of urban planning. The research in this thesis has sought to contribute towards this emerging space by studying the intersections of tourism development and urban development and planning. The research questions that have emerged from this goal relate to the decision and policy making that take place in processes of urban planning when they intersect (necessarily or potentially) with tourism development. The thesis comprises one cover essay and two research articles. The first article is based on a single case-study of a new urban development in one of the most visited places of Stockholm. The other article is a comparative case-study of Vienna and Amsterdam that studies policy development and practices for sustainable tourism developments. Data was collected primarily through semi-structured interviews with stakeholders from municipalities, academia and Destination Management Organizations in respective city. Results suggest that there are important variations in how different stages of tourism development and corresponding impact influence policy making and vice-versa. The cases studied suggest that strategic choices for sustainable tourism development are available up to a certain point. If negative impact on factors related to social sustainability are excessive, policy making aimed at influencing tourism development becomes constrained mainly to mitigating impact. Given the intersection of planning theory and tourism studies in this thesis, it can be considered a cross-disciplinary research project. Similarly, the results can hopefully contribute to a development of the understanding of how planning theory and tourism studies intersect in theories of both schools of thought.
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| 5. |
- Jonsson, Anna, 1992-
(författare)
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Towards semantic language processing
- 2018
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The overall goal of the field of natural language processing is to facilitate the communication between humans and computers, and to help humans with natural language problems such as translation. In this thesis, we focus on semantic language processing. Modelling semantics – the meaning of natural language – requires both a structure to hold the semantic information and a device that can enforce rules on the structure to ensure well-formed semantics while not being too computationally heavy. The devices used in natural language processing are preferably weighted to allow for comparison of the alternative semantic interpretations outputted by a device.The structure employed here is the abstract meaning representation (AMR). We show that AMRs representing well-formed semantics can be generated while leaving out AMRs that are not semantically well-formed. For this purpose, we use a type of graph grammar called contextual hyperedge replacement grammar (CHRG). Moreover, we argue that a more well-known subclass of CHRG – the hyperedge replacement grammar (HRG) – is not powerful enough for AMR generation. This is due to the limitation of HRG when it comes to handling co-references, which in its turn depends on the fact that HRGs only generate graphs of bounded treewidth.Furthermore, we also address the N best problem, which is as follows: Given a weighted device, return the N best (here: smallest-weighted, or more intuitively, smallest-errored) structures. Our goal is to solve the N best problem for devices capable of expressing sophisticated forms of semantic representations such as CHRGs. Here, however, we merely take a first step consisting in developing methods for solving the N best problem for weighted tree automata and some types of weighted acyclic hypergraphs.
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| 6. |
- Palbom, Anna, 1971-
(författare)
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On Approximating Asymmetric TSP and Related Problems
- 2006
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this thesis we study problems related to approximation of asymmetric TSP. First we give worst case examples for the famous algorithm due to Frieze, Gabiati and Maffioli for asymmetric TSP with triangle inequality. Some steps in the algorithm consist of arbitrary choices. To prove lower bounds, these choices need to be specified. We show a worst case performance with some deterministic assumptions on the algorithm and then prove an expected worst case performance for a randomised version of the algorithm. The algorithm by Frieze et al. produces a spanning cactus and makes a TSP tour by shortcuts. We have proven that determining if there is a spanning cactus in a general asymmetric graph is an NP-complete problem and that finding a minimum spanning cactus in a complete, directed graph with triangle inequality is equivalent to finding the TSP tour and the problems are equally hard to approximate. We also give three other results; we show a connection between asymmetric TSP and TSP in a bipartite graph, we show that it is NP-hard to find a cycle cover in a bipartite graph without cycles of length six or less and finally we present some results for a new problem with ordered points on the circle.
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| 7. |
- Svensson, Anna
(författare)
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Nanocomposites made from nanoporous cellulose fibre
- 2012
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores how to use the dry nanoporous structure of cellulosic fibres in new types of composite materials. A large effort was also given on how to correctly characterize the structure of fibres where the wet structure has been preserved also in the dry state.Delignified wood fibres have an open fibrillar structure in their water-swollen state. In the present work, this open fibrillar structure was preserved in the dry state by performing a liquid exchange procedure and the samples were thereafter carefully dried with Ar(g). The samples of never-dried TEMPO-oxidized dissolving pulp had a specific surface area of 130 m2/g in the dry state, as measured using the Brunauer, Emmet, and Teller (BET) Nitrogen gas adsorption method. This open structure was also revealed using field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM).The water-swollen and dry open structures were thoroughly characterized for various pulps. A new method for determining the pore size of water-swollen delignified cellulosic fibres is presented. By combining the results from solid state nuclear magnetic resonance NMR, measuring the specific surface area [m2/g] in the water-swollen state, with fibre saturation point (FSP), measuring the pore volume of fibres in water-swollen state [mass water/mass fibre], the average pore size can be determined without the need of assuming a certain pore geometry.The dry nanoporous structure was then used as a scaffold for in-situ polymerization, to demonstrate how the properties of the fibrils in the fibre wall can be exploited without the need to disintegrate the fibre wall. Both poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA) and poly(butylacrylate) (PBA) were successfully used as the polymeric matrix, and both nanocomposites (i.e., fibre/PMMA and fibre/PBA) had a fibre content of approximately 20 w%. The structure of the composites was characterized using SEM and Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) operated in the phase imaging mode. The AFM results indicate that the cellulose aggregates and polymeric matrix were successfully mixed on a nanoscale, creating a nanocomposite of interpenetrating polymer molecules and cellulose fibrils, rather than a microcomposite, when using microscopic cellulose fibres. The water absorption capacity of the nanocomposites was reduced significantly, indicating that almost all nanopores in the fibre wall were successfully filled with matrix polymer. The mechanical properties were investigated, showing the importance of nanosized reinforcement compared to fibres of micrometer size.
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| 8. |
- Ångström, Lars, 1965-
(författare)
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Aerobic capacity in rheumatoid arthritis : aspects of associations with cardiovascular risk factors and disease activity
- 2018
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a systemic and inflammatory disease that has been associated with an increased morbidity and mortality in cardiovascular disease (CVD). Low aerobic capacity is one of the strongest independent risk factors for CVD and all-cause mortality in the general population. In patients with longstanding RA, low aerobic capacity has been related with a worse cardiovascular profile and an increased risk of CVD mortality. As a consequence of this, low aerobic capacity might provide an additional risk factor for CVD in patients with RA. The aim of this thesis was to describe the associations between aerobic capacity and risk factors for CVD as well as disease activity in patients with early RA, and also the effects of intensive exercise therapy on traditional risk factors for CVD and disease activity in patients with longstanding RA.Paper I, a cross-sectional study including 67 patients with early RA, mean (SD) age 53.1 (14.4), assessments of aerobic capacity, CVD risk factors, disease activity and functional ability were taken. Data were analysed for the associations between aerobic capacity and CVD risk factors and disease activity. In paper II, an intervention study, including 13 patients with RA, median age (Q1-Q3) 57 (44-64) years, aerobic capacity, pulse wave analysis (PWA), CVD risk factors, and disease activity were analysed for changes after 10 weeks of intensive exercise therapy. Additional follow-up was made after 25 weeks.In paper I, the mean (SD) aerobic capacity was 31.6 (8.7) ml O2/kg/min. CVD risk factors and disease activity were all in favour of patients with higher aerobic capacity. In a multiple regression model, adjusted for age and sex, aerobic capacity was significantly associated with percent body fat (β=-0.502, 95%CI=-0.671;-0.333) and triglycerides (β=-2.365, 95%CI=-4.252;-0.479). In paper II, intensive exercise over ten weeks was shown to be a feasible method to significantly improve aerobic capacity (p=≤0.05), systolic blood pressure (p=≤0.01) and the number of tender joints (p=≤0.05). No detrimental effect on disease activity was recorded.This thesis adds further knowledge of aerobic capacity and its associations with CVD risk factors and disease activity in patients with RA. Also, intensive exercise therapy was a feasible intervention to improve CVD risk factors. To include assessment of aerobic capacity in regular clinical practice may improve patient management as well as patient outcome in patients with RA.
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