To make a difference : A study of Swedish international aid workers vision of Swedish development aid

This study is motivated by the needs to critically reflect upon development aid. Foreign aid work has since the 1950s expanded to become a large and complex enterprise, where every country is either an aid donor or aid recipient, or being both. Foreign aid has always been viewed as a moral issue and the benefits have been contested and challenged. There are few voices that are questioning the provision of emergency aid, however, development aid have had its critics since the modern idea was raised of providing aid continuously. The question is whether it could ever produce the desired effect. It has also been criticized because of the way that decisions about who to give it to are influenced by political, strategic and commercial interests of donors. The purpose of this essay was to review the ideas that international aid workers have of development aid. This essay is based on qualitative data, where I have interviewed seven respondents about their experiences of working with international development aid. The empirical data has been interpreted using development theories specifically theories of social capital and human resources, rationality and the ideas of empowerment. The conclusions of this essay shows that it is very complex to talk about any obvious results of development aid, though it all depends on the significance of development. What where noticeable in this essay where that hardly anyone of respondents was committed to national aid work of any kind before they took the assignment. Since they got home, most of the respondents were devoted to national aid work. In order to generate help to self-help, the result shows that essential for development aid is cooperation

Motion-related comfort in tilting trains : human responses and motion environments in a train experiment (SJ X2000)

Low frequency vertical accelerations can provoke motion sickness and nausea in ships and aeroplanes and probably, combined with horizontal (lateral) acceleration, also in cars and buses. However, tilting trains and banking aeroplanes generate roll motions, which may provoke motion sickness in motion sickness sensitive humans. Some seventy healthy volunteers were employed. They were tested in a high speed tilting train (X2000) with three different tilt control strategies during three days. Different ratios of tilt compensation were used. The test rides lasted about three hours. Four times per test ride the subjects answered a questionnaire concerning comfort and discomfort. The train motion environment was monitored and recorded during the test rides. Motion doses, for prediction of motion sickness, were calculated from vertical and also from lateral and roll accelerations for the different parts of the test track. The conditions with 55% ratio of tilt compensation instead of the normal 70%, reduced the discomfort from about 15% to about 8–10%. No reduction of subjective ride comfort or working ability was recorded in these conditions with 55 % compensation. Discomfort correlates fairly well with motion dose of roll acceleration but not with vertical or lateral motion doses. This means that an optimised tilt control system should reduce the motion dose from roll acceleration in order to minimise provocation of motion sickness. On the other hand, too small compensation ratios will cause discomfort by too large lateral accelerations