Symptoms of anxiety and depression as risk markers of incident myocardial infarction:

Hjertesykdom er den vanligste dødsårsaken i verden. Å identifisere psykologiske risikofaktorer for hjertesykdom er viktig for å kunne redusere antall dødsfall og funksjonshemminger forårsaket av hjertesykdom. Dette gjelder spesielt for kvinner, hvor hjerteinfarkt ofte inntreffer uten de mest vanlige symptomene. Det overordnede målet for denne avhandlingen var å undersøke om symptomer på angst og depresjon målt med instrumentet Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, HADS (Zigmond & Snaith, 1983) kan benyttes for å identifisere risiko for å få et hjerteinfarkt. I artikkel I kombineres et etiologisk og prognostisk perspektiv for å identifisere symptomer på angst og depresjon som årsak til, og ikke bare som en konsekvens av hjerteinfarkt. Høyere nivå av symptomer på depresjon (HADS-D) utgjorde en økt risiko for å få et hjerteinfarkt. Funnene indikerte at det å ha et hjerteinfarkt ikke hadde lang-tidskonsekvenser på symptomnivå når det gjelder angst og depresjon. Formålet med artikkel II var å identifisere kjønns-spesifikke psykologiske risikoprofiler for å optimalisere risikovurdering. Resultatene viste at forhøyet skåre på depresjon målt med HADS utgjorde en signifikant større risiko for kvinner enn menn. Det å ha hatt en depressiv episode tidligere, var en signifikant risikofaktor for hjerteinfarkt blant menn, men ikke kvinner. Det å ha en forhøyet angst-skåre (HADS-A) var assosiert med en redusert risiko for hjerteinfarkt både for kvinner og menn. I artikkel III fokuseres det på innholdet i HADS og hvordan dimensjonene er knyttet til mer generelle emosjonelle disposisjoner. Både angst (HADS-A)- og depresjonsskalaen (HADS-D) var relatert til personlighetstrekk. De kunne derimot differensieres ved at kun HADS-D var relatert til positiv affekt og ekstroversjon. Relasjonen mellom HADS-D, ekstroversjon og positiv affekt var betydelig. Funnene støtter antagelsen om at HADS-D representerer en anhedonisk subtype av depresjon; kjennetegnet ved redusert glede seg over ting i hverdagen og manglende evne til å se fram til hendelser. Artikkel I og II er basert på data fra helseundersøkelsen i Nord-Trøndelag. Resultatene har betydning for forskning på sammenhengen mellom psykologiske variabler og hjertesykdom, men også for estimering av risiko for å få et hjerteinfarkt. Viktigheten av nøyaktige og spesifikke mål, kjønns-spesifikke psykologiske risikoprofiler og betydningen av personlighet blir vektlagt i avhandlingen

The Future of Production is Hyperlocal and Open Source

Profit is at the core of production today. We see that businesses and leading industries are driven by expanding profits while minimizing labor costs. They export pollution and maximize production, while advertising for products we don’t really need. Moreover, they manufacture products with materials, and resources extracted in exploitative ways, with both social and environmental consequences. At the core of these issues lies the way in which we consume, produce and dispose of. We need to turn our focus away from individual responsibility, to the root of the manufacturing process and the systems these processes operate within. This diploma looks at how we, as creators of products, might look at materials through a radically different lens. The way in which we source these materials, and utilize them in the products we design and manufacture. The aim of this project is to demonstrate the potential of using locally sourced materials in the production of new products. I hope to inspire and motivate entrepreneurs to seek out novel materials or consider existing materials in radically different ways. Additionally, I aim to encourage these actors to share their knowledge and information about these methods of production, material sourcing and product development openly, so that others may replicate, learn from, and build upon them. A result of this is a backpack, a proof of potential, made from bicycle inner tubes, milk bottle caps and plastic packaging. All sourced from within five kilometers of its final assembly.submittedVersio

Uniting Music and Painted Art Using Emotion Categories and Metadata

Kunst i form av lyd kan fremprovosere audiell stimulus og visuell kunst kan provosere frem visuell stimulus. Begge disse typene av stimuli kan fremkalle følelser hos den som lytter eller observerer. Å se på malerier mens du lytter til musikk kan virke enda mer innflytelsesrikt enn å nyte kun én av kunstformene. Denne masteroppgaven prøver å finne en måte å forene auditiv og visuell kunst gjennom følelser. Motivasjonen for denne oppgaven handler om musikkens og kunstens eekt på mennesker og måter å fremprovosere visse følelser ved å bruke disse to kunstformene. Systemet som er beskrevet i denne oppgaven kan være nyttig for eksempel for å velge riktige malerier og musikk for en leges eller terapeuts venterom for å sette pasientene i det rette humøret. Musikkplattformer som Spotify kan også bruke dette systemet for å vise frem et passende maleri til lytteren som skal gi de samme følelsene som sangen. Det er opprettet et system som mottar en sang-ID fra TheAudioDB-databasen som input og gir malerier fra ulike datasett som output. Russells fire kvadranter (Q1 – glad, Q2 – sint, Q3 – trist og Q4 – avslappet) som er basert på “valence” og “arousal” har lagt grunnlaget for klassifisering av følelser. Sangen er kategorisert i en av Russells kvadranter basert på metadataene. Et datasett som inneholder informasjon om 900 sanger og deres valgte kvadranter er brukt til å trene opp en modell som kan kategorisere aldri-før-sett sanger basert på deres metadata. To datasett med bilder er brukt. Den første er WikiArt Emotions, som inkluderer over 4000 malerier og bilder og metadata om bildenes følelser. Det andre datasettet inkluderer fotografier av landskap i forskjellige årstider og er laget fra bunnen av ved hjelp av oentlige bilder fra Flickr. Bilde-til-bilde-oversettelse med CycleGAN har forvandlet disse fotografiene til Monet-lignende malerier. Bildene fra begge datasettene har blitt plassert i Russells fire kvadranter. Informasjonen om følelsene har blitt brukt til å bestemme bildenes kvadranter for det første datasettet. For det andre datasettet ble en hypotese brukt som grunnlag i kategorisering. Hypotesen sier at sommer- og vårlandskap passer godt inn i Q1 og Q4, mens høst- og vinterlandskap er bedre egnet i kvadrantene Q2 og Q3. Resultatene fra oppgavens system støtter forsiktig opp under denne hypotesen. Systemet er evaluert gjennom en brukerundersøkelse. Fem sanger ble valgt ut for å teste systemet. Totalt fire bilder ble valgt som output for hver testsang. Resultatene viser at deltakerne er uenige med systemet i de fleste av kategoriseringene til sangene. Bare én sang fikk samme kvadrant fra systemet og deltakerne i undersøkelsen. Noen av de intervjuede deltakerne nevnte at det var vanskelig å pare moderne poplåter med malerier fra det forrige århundre. Mer justering av parametere og bedre bruk av datasett kan forbedre teknologien og skape en morsom og spennende måte å koble musikk med kunst.Auditory art may provoke auditory stimuli, and visual art may provoke visual stimuli. Both of these types of stimuli can evoke emotions in the observer. Looking at paintings while listening to music can be even more influential than simply enjoying one art form. This Master’s Thesis researches a way to unite auditory and visual art through emotions. The motivation for this Master’s Thesis links to music and art’s eect on people and ways to provoke certain feelings using these two art forms. The system described in this thesis may be helpful, for example, in selecting the correct paintings and music for a doctor’s or therapist’s waiting lounge and setting the patients in the correct emotional space. Music platforms such as Spotify may also use the system to display a suitable painting to the listener that should evoke the same emotion as the song. A system is created which receives a song ID from TheAudioDB database as input and provides paintings from dierent image datasets as output. Russell’s four quadrants (Q1 – happy, Q2 – angry, Q3 – sad, and Q4 – relaxed) which are based on valence and arousal, provided the foundation of emotion classification. The song is categorised into one of Russell’s quadrants based on its metadata. A dataset containing information about 900 songs and their selected quadrants are used to train a model that can categorise never-before seen songs based on their metadata. Two image datasets are used. The first is WikiArt Emotions, which includes over 4000 paintings and pictures and metadata about the images’ labelled emotions. The second dataset includes photographs of landscapes in dierent seasons and is created from scratch using public images from Flickr. Image-to-image translation with CycleGANs is used to transform the photographs into Monet-like paintings. The images from both datasets are categorised into Russell’s quadrants. The emotion labels have been used to determine the images’ quadrant in the first dataset. For the second dataset, a hypothesis is used as the foundation in quadrant categorisation. The hypothesis states that summer and spring landscapes fit well into Q1 and Q4, while autumn and winter landscapes are better suited in the Q2 and Q3 quadrants. The results from the thesis slightly support this hypothesis. The system has been evaluated through a user survey. Five songs were selected to test the system, and a total of four images were selected as the output for each test song. The results show that the participants disagree with most of the system’s song categorisations. Only one song received the same quadrant from the system and the survey participants. Some interviewed participants mentioned that it was dicult to pair modern pop songs with paintings from the last century. More tuning of system parameters and better use of datasets could improve this technology and create a fun and exciting way to pair music with art

Sex-specific psychological risk profiles of CVD in the HUNT study: the role of neuroticism and extraversion

Objective The aim was to investigate psychological risk profiles of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Depression and anxiety have been linked to CVD, but research has not incorporated personality and sex-specific analyses are warranted. In this study, we examine the role of sex, neuroticism, extraversion, anxiety and depression on the risk of CVD. Method Using data from the HUNT-study and the mortality register, 32,383 (57.10% men) participants were followed for an average of 10.48 years. During this time, 142 died of myocardial infarction (MI) and 111 of stroke. Results Cox regression showed that depression (HR = 1.07, 95% CI = [1.00, 1.14]) and neuroticism (1.23 [1.08, 1.40]) were significantly related to an increased risk of MI. One standard unit increase in depression and neuroticism was associated with 1.22 [CI 1.01, 1.47] increase and 1.43 [CI 1.14, 0.78] increase in the risk of MI respectively. For stroke, there was no significant effect of anxiety, depression or personality. However, we found a significant interaction effect between sex and extraversion where higher extraversion was associated with greater risk of stroke for women only. Conclusions Both neuroticism and depression were related to MI. We observed an interaction between extraversion and sex with stroke, but the effect size was small. The role of extroversion as a risk factor for CVD remains inconclusive.publishedVersio

Optimization of Oil Production - Applied to the Marlim Field

This thesis considers short-term petroleum production planning at the Marlim field operated by the Brazilian energy company, Petrobras. The production asset to be optimized is an Floating Production and Storage Operating unit, including several oil producing wells and gas lift technology. Current practice for oil companies is to optimize the different parts of a production system separately. To avoid sub-optimal decisions, there is a need for integrated optimization models that consider all relevant decision variables simultaneously. The objective of the models presented in this thesis is to maximize total oil production extracted from the reservoir. It is assumed that producing as much oil as possible is always economically preferable. The decisions to be made include production rate allocation of water, oil and gas from each well. In addition, allocation of lift gas to wells and pressure at different components of the system are important outcomes. Routing of flow adds further complexity to the model. The optimization problem studied has integer requirements, in addition to several non-linear flow and pressure relationships. These have been approximated using piecewise linearization with special ordered sets of type 2, resulting in a mixed integer linear programming model. Different methods are implemented to solve the problem and evaluated to find the most appropriate optimization method. The optimization model was initially solved using Branch & Bound. Due to the block-angular structure of the problem, Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition was implemented to improve solution efficiency. Further, different heuristics were added to reduce the duality gap.Generating realistic datasets was done with the PIPESIM simulator. The algorithms were implemented in Mosel, which is a high-level modelling and programming language, and solved with the Xpress-MP solver.The results show that decomposing the model has a huge effect when the complexity of the system increases. Adding heuristics to the decomposed model is found to be an effective way of generating good integer programming solutions. When deciding what method to use, the trade-off between model realism and solution time must be weighted. A good, heuristically obtained solution could often be more useful than using exact solution methods that are very time consuming

The Protective Effect of Fair and Supportive Leadership against Burnout in Police Employees

Background This study investigated the association between fair and supportive leadership and symptoms of burnout and insomnia in police employees. Burnout and insomnia can have negative consequences for health, performance, and safety among employees in the police profession, and risk and protective factors should be thoroughly investigated. Methods Data were collected in a police district in Norway through questionnaires administered in October 2018 and May 2019. The sample consisted of 206 police employees (52% males), with an average age of 42 years and 16 years of experience in the police occupation. Results The results showed that a high degree of fair and supportive leadership was associated with lower levels of burnout and insomnia six months later. Fair and supportive leadership explained a greater amount of variance in burnout compared to insomnia. This finding indicates that fair and supportive leadership is a more important buffer factor against burnout than it is against insomnia. Stress was positively associated with burnout and insomnia, whereas quantitative job demands had no significant association with the concepts. Conclusion Fair and supportive leadership can help protect employees from adverse consequences of stress and contribute to improved occupational health, whereas a low degree of support and fair treatment from leaders can both represent a stressor by itself and contribute to poorer coping of stressful events at work. The important role of leadership should be incorporated in measures aimed at preventing and reducing burnout and sleep problems.publishedVersio

Anhedonic depression, history of depression, and anxiety as genderspecific risk factors of myocardial infarction in healthy men and women: The HUNT study

This prospective study examines gender-specific psychological risk factors of myocardial infarction. Out of 41,248 participants free of coronary heart disease at baseline, 822 cases of myocardial infarction were identified in the Nord- Trøndelag Health Study or the mortality register. The participants completed the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Cholesterol, blood pressure, and waist–hip ratio were measured by medical staff. Smoking, diabetes, non-fatal myocardial infarction, and history of depressive episode were self-reported. Anhedonic depression (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale-D ≥8) was a significant predictor of myocardial infarction in women but not in men. Gender difference in risk estimate based on Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale-D was significant (p < .01). History of depressive episode was a significant predictor of myocardial infarction in men. Symptoms of anxiety (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale-A ≥8) reduced the risk of having a myocardial infarction.This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/aboutus/openaccess.htm)

Uncovering the Value of Green Innovation in the Context of Cost of Equity : An Empirical Study of how Green Innovation Efforts Impact the Cost of Equity

This thesis investigates the relationship between green innovation and the cost of equity for the 500 largest European public firms from 2000 to 2019. The findings show that more green innovation is associated with a lower cost of equity, although the effect is small. The results are robust to alternative measures of green innovation but sensitive to the definition of cost of equity. We use a 2SLS regression with initial green innovation as an instrument to address endogeneity, and the results remain robust. Previous literature discuss two main mechanisms (increased investor base and lower risk), but we find weak support. In conclusion, green innovation can reduce the cost of equity, but further research is needed to understand the mechanisms behind the relationship.nhhma

Evaluation of Possible PV System Solutions for Streetlight´s Care Center in Tagpuro, Philippines

This thesis has evaluated different photovoltaic (PV) system solutions applicable for Streetlight in Tagpuro. The evaluation has consisted of on-grid and off-grid system designs. Streetlight operates a care center in Tacloban and Tagpuro, on the island Leyte in the Philippines. The Philippines is located at one of earth´s most exposed and vulnerable areas considering earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and typhoons. Socio-economic challenges are products of the environmental challenges in the area. The local energy situation is characterised by frequent power outages and voltage drops - blackouts and brownouts. This is a challenge for Streetlight´s operation, and a more reliable electricity supply is desired. According to the local grid operator, the situation will improve in the future due to implementation of a new sub-station in the area. However, there is projected a power deficit in the coming years for the region. The Philippines has the highest electricity tariff compared to their neighbouring countries and Streetlight wishes to evaluate whether it is feasible to invest in a PV system to reduce energy costs. Further Streetlight wishes to be self-sufficient with renewable energy as the energy source. The solar potential in the Philippines is high and there are several governmental instruments providing benefits for investors in solar energy. The benefits include net-metering, feed-in tariff, tax and fiscal incentives. However, feed-in tariff is not yet implemented in Tacloban or Tagpuro. The annual load demand of Streetlight Tagpuro was theoretically estimated to 54.94 MWh and annual critical load demand was estimated to 32.22 MWh. This is based on daily load profiles for Monday-Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The daily profiles illustrate a peak power demand during day-time 08:00-17:00 and lower power demand during the night. The power demand at night is related to outside lighting which is categorised as a critical load regarding safety concerns. The on-grid cases evaluated PV modules located at all buildings (Office, Study Center and Orphanage), two buildings (Office and Study Center) and one building (Office), separately. The off-grid case evaluated PV modules at all buildings with different battery capacity and a maximised roof area. The on-grid an off-grid cases provides different possibilities and limitations, and the most feasible solution will depend on which factors Streetlight highlights. A Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) analysis was conducted for all the cases, emphasising the sensitivity of the input parameters discount rate, battery price and net-metering rate. With a discount rate of 10 %, the PV system with modules at the Office at 7.71 PhP/kWh proved to be profitable compared to today´s situation with energy from utility at 7.93 PhP/kWh. Further, when utilising all buildings the LCOE was 8.79 PhP/kWh for the on-grid system compared to 30.32 PhP/kWh for the off-grid system

Personality Traits and the Use of Manual, Alternative, and mental Healthcare Services and medication in Norwegian Musicians

To investigate the association between personality traits and use of analgesic medication, anti-depressants and sedatives, mental health services, manual and alternative healthcare services among Norwegian musicians, 1607 musicians from the Norwegian Musicians Union answered an online questionnaire. Based on logistic regression analysis, adjusting for age, sex, education and general health, we investigated a possible dose-response relationship between the personality traits neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness and the use of these services and types of medication. As hypothesized, Neuroticism was positively associated with excess use of all types of the before mentioned health care services and medications. A higher score on openness to experience was positively associated with use of alternative and complementary healthcare services. Contrary to our expectations, extraversion was positively associated with the use of mental health care services and unrelated to other type of health care and medication use. Conscientiousness was negatively associated with the use of mental health care services. The results suggest that the relationship between personality and healthcare use cannot be attributed to occupation alone. The findings address the importance of differentiating behavior outcome (i.e. the use of health care services) from other outcome like symptom reporting or attitudes towards help seeking.acceptedVersion© 2018. This is the authors’ accepted and refereed manuscript to the article. Locked until 1.5.2020 due to copyright restrictions. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0