Valuation of forest estates : how does the valuation process differ between different real estate agents

Idag värderas skogsfastigheter som ska ut till försäljning vanligtvis av fastighetsmäklare. Vid en värdering ska fastighetsmäklaren således bedöma ett marknadsvärde för den enskilda fastigheten. Vid värdering av skogsfastigheter finns det ett par olika teoretiska metoder att tillgå för att göra en bedömning av värdet. Frågan är om dessa används i praktiken? Eftersom marknaden bestämmer det slutgiltiga marknadspriset bör även deras efterfrågan på värdepåverkande faktorer tilläggas i värderingen. Exempel på dessa faktorer kan vara skogsfastighetens läge, virkesförråd och jaktvärden. Således föreligger en fråga i vilken hänsyn som tas till dessa värden i värderingen. Syftet med studien är att utröna om registrerade fastighetsmäklare nyttjar de teoretiska metoderna i praktiken då de värderar en obebyggd skogsfastighet. Fokus läggs även på vilka som är de mest avgörande värdepåverkande faktorerna vid värdering. Studiens resultat är baserat på kvalitativa intervjuer med registrerade fastighetsmäklare från olika mäklarfirmor vilka är verksamma i södra Sverige. De deltagande informanterna är specialiserade på skogsfastigheter och innehar över 10 års erfarenhet inom ämnet. Studiens resultat visar att det förekommer en informell värderingsmetod bland registrerade fastighetsmäklare som grundar sig i en av de teoretiska metoderna. Studien tyder också på att fastighetsmäklare fokuserar på att identifiera, räkna ut och värdesätta vissa nyckelindikatorer i form av bland annat virkesförråd, kapitaltäthet och areal. Ingen markant skillnad i vare sig värderingsmetod eller prioritering av värdepåverkande faktorer mellan olika fastighetsmäklare går att utröna vilket kan indikera på att arbetssättet är utbrett inom branschen.Today, forest properties that are sold on the open market are usually valued by real estate agents. The real estate agent must therefore assess a market value for the individual property. When valuing forest properties, there are a couple of different theoretical methods available to assess the value. The question is, are these used in practice? Since the market determines the final market price, their demand for value-influencing factors should also be added to the valuation. Examples of these factors can be the location of the forest property, timber storage and hunting values. Thus, there is a question in which account is taken of these values in the valuation. The purpose of the study is to determine whether registered real estate agents use the theoretical methods in practice when valuing an unsettled forest property. The focus will also be on the most decisive value factors in valuation. The results of the study are based on qualitative interviews with registered real estate agents from different brokerage companies operating in southern Sweden. The participating informants specialize in forest properties and have over 10 years of experience in the subject. The results of the study show that there is an informal valuation method among registered real estate agents based on one of the theoretical methods. The study also suggests that real estate agents focus on identifying, calculating, and valuing certain key indicators. These key indicators are, inter alia, timber storage, capital density and total area. No significant difference in either valuation method or prioritization of value-affecting factors between different real estate agents can be found, which may indicate that the working method is widespread in the industry

Three Generations of Participation Rights in European Administrative Proceedings

This paper develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the development of participation rights in Community administration from the early 1970\u27s to the present day. Procedural rights can be divided into three categories, each of which is associated with a distinct phase in Community history and a particular set of institutional actors. The first set of rights, the right to a fair hearing when the Commission inflicts sanctions or other forms of hardship on individuals, first emerged in the 1970\u27s in the context of competition proceedings and later in areas such as anti-dumping and structural funds. This phase was driven by the Court of Justice and an English, and to a lesser extent, German conception of the value of a fair hearing. The rise of transparency in the 1990\u27s-- the requirement of openness in all Community institutions, including administration--marks the second stage. The drive for transparency was led by certain member countries with longstanding traditions of open government--the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden--as well as the European Parliament. The most recent phase in the development of process rights is the debate on whether and under what conditions, individuals, firms, and their associations, billed civil society, should take part in Community legislative and rulemaking proceedings. The Commission and now the Convention on the Future of Europe have been the keenest proponents of giving citizens and their associations a right to participate in rulemaking and legislative proceedings. Civil society participation is then critically examined. Representation--not expertise or good management practices--is the only justification for allocating power, within the Community policymaking process, to individual citizens and their organizations. Yet there is no consensus in Europe, where republican, corporatist, and liberal traditions continue to flourish, on the legitimacy of representation outside of political parties and the electoral process. Without wider consensus, I conclude that associational participation in Community policymaking should not be entrenched and that the Commission should, in mediating the informal influence of civil society actors, act in awareness of its innate institutional bias toward liberal interest group pluralism

Tuberculosis and HIV Co-Infection

Tuberculosis (TB) and HIV co-infections place an immense burden on health care systems and pose particular diagnostic and therapeutic challenges. Infection with HIV is the most powerful known risk factor predisposing for Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection and progression to active disease, which increases the risk of latent TB reactivation 20-fold. TB is also the most common cause of AIDS-related death. Thus, M. tuberculosis and HIV act in synergy, accelerating the decline of immunological functions and leading to subsequent death if untreated. The mechanisms behind the breakdown of the immune defense of the co-infected individual are not well known. The aim of this review is to highlight immunological events that may accelerate the development of one of the two diseases in the presence of the co-infecting organism. We also review possible animal models for studies of the interaction of the two pathogens, and describe gaps in knowledge and needs for future studies to develop preventive measures against the two diseases

Inverkan av Na dopning på hål-tunneling vid bakkontakts passivering i Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solceller

In this thesis Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) solar cells with different sodiumdoping of the CIGS absorber and varying Al2O3 rear surface passivationlayer thickness have been manufactured and electrically characterised. Baseline samples and samples without passivation were used asreferences for the passivated samples. For the passivated samplesbetween 1 and 7 nm of Al2O3 were deposited by ALD. The electricalcharacterisation included current-voltage (IV, JV), quantum efficiency (QE, EQE), capacitance-voltage (CV) and temperature dependent currentvoltage (IVT, JVT) measurements. The results show that it is indeed possible to use a tunnel current toconstruct an electrical contact, but that the electrical contact isvery sensitive to sodium doping. The samples with post-depositiontreatment and without Na start to block the tunnel current when thepassivation layer reaches a thickness of about 2 nm, while no blocking of the tunnel current could be observed for the samples with Na pre-deposition. The samples with pre-deposition treatment showed acontinued increase in efficiency all the way to a passivation layerthickness of about 7 nm. When trying to construct samples with eventhicker passivation layer the CIGS started to peel off. For thisreason the optimal thickness for the pre-deposition treated samplescould not be found. The samples with the highest efficiency was thesamples with pre-deposition treatment and thick passivation layer. Those samples showed an increase of 3 percent (absolute) compared tothe unpassivated sample with the same deposition treatment and 1.6 percent higher efficiency compared to the baseline sample. Concluding that tunnelling passivation layer is comparable to the passivationlayer with point contact methods

Automation of Editorial Tasks on the Website Content Central

Content Central is a website that allows freelance journalists and photographers to upload their work so that media outlets can buy and publish them. Content Central must moderate the content uploaded to assure that everything is of high quality and that it can be published directly. Right now this is done manually with an editor that work at Content Central. The aim of this thesis is to automate the editorial process on Content Central with the use of natural language processing techniques. The focus of the automation is put on the tasks that consume the most time which is spell checking, formatting and word and sign replacement. The automation of these tasks is done by the development of prototypes. The spell checking task is handled with two prototypes, one prototype uses a dictionary and handles non-word errors and the other prototype uses probability and word trigrams and bigrams to handle real word errors. The formatting and sign replacement is handled by a rule-based prototype. These prototypes are tested on data from Content Central and compared with the results from the editor moderating the same data. Problems are found with the spell checkers, they give many false positives and are therefore deemed not so useful. The formatting and sign replacement prototype achieve a 52.8% recall and 98.6% precision which isestimated to decrease the time the editor spend on content with these errors with at least 51 seconds

Diversity of CD1d-restricted natural killer T cells

The present study deals with natural killer (NK) T cells restricted to the antigen presenting molecule CD1d. NKT cells have been suggested to play a role in many diverse immunological situations such as clearance of different pathogens, protection against certain tumors, regulation of autoimmune reactions and as a link between innate and adaptive immune responses. NKT cells are in many respects unique. They recognize lipid and glycolipid antigens associated with CD1d, rather than peptides. Furthermore, the frequency of CD1d-autoreactive NKT cells is high which suggests that self-antigens are the natural ligands for at least some NKT cells. Also, NKT cells are potent cytokine producers upon activation and they may play a role in the development of Th1 and Th2 immune responses. We have been able to show that the NKT cell population is very heterogeneous both regarding their phenotype and function. By generating a T cell receptor (TCR) transgenic mouse, we were able to show that NKT cells with a diverse TCR had the expected NKT cell phenotype and were potent cytokine producers. We demonstrate that the activity of potentially CD1d-autoreactive NKT cell subsets can be regulated with the help of inhibitory Ly49 receptor and that expression of Ly49 receptors correlate with a certain T cell receptor repertoire and cytokine profile. With the identification of functionally different NKT cell subsets regarding their cytokine profile, we will increase our understanding on how NKT cells are able to play such diverse immunological roles

Automation of Editorial Tasks on the Website Content Central

Content Central is a website that allows freelance journalists and photographers to upload their work so that media outlets can buy and publish them. Content Central must moderate the content uploaded to assure that everything is of high quality and that it can be published directly. Right now this is done manually with an editor that work at Content Central. The aim of this thesis is to automate the editorial process on Content Central with the use of natural language processing techniques. The focus of the automation is put on the tasks that consume the most time which is spell checking, formatting and word and sign replacement. The automation of these tasks is done by the development of prototypes. The spell checking task is handled with two prototypes, one prototype uses a dictionary and handles non-word errors and the other prototype uses probability and word trigrams and bigrams to handle real word errors. The formatting and sign replacement is handled by a rule-based prototype. These prototypes are tested on data from Content Central and compared with the results from the editor moderating the same data. Problems are found with the spell checkers, they give many false positives and are therefore deemed not so useful. The formatting and sign replacement prototype achieve a 52.8% recall and 98.6% precision which isestimated to decrease the time the editor spend on content with these errors with at least 51 seconds

Natural killer T-cell populations in C57BL/6 and NK1.1 congenic BALB.NK mice-a novel thymic subset defined in BALB.NK mice.

Natural killer (NK) T lymphocytes are a subpopulation of T lymphocytes regarded as early regulators of immune responses. The majority of NKT cells are restricted by the CD1d molecule. NKT cells have mostly been studied in one single mouse strain, C57BL/6 (B6), because of the absence of NK1.1 in other common mouse strains, and the lack of other reliable surface markers for CD1d-restricted cells. To investigate NKT cell subsets in a mouse strain of a genetic background different from B6, we have back-crossed the NKT cell marker NK1.1 from the B6 mouse to the BALB/c mouse strain. We show that NKT cells in the congenic BALB.B6-NK1.1b mouse share many characteristics with their B6 counterparts, but seem to be deficient in the functional NKT cell subtype characterized by low interleukin-4 and high interferon-γ production, and surface expression of CD49b but not CD69. Moreover, in the thymus but not the spleen of BALB.B6-NK1.1b mice we find a novel Vα14-Jα18 invariant NKT cell subset which is devoid of a set of NK markers, suggesting that these cells represent a less differentiated NKT cell stage, and carries high levels of the T-cell receptor and uses a skewed T-cell receptor Vβ-repertoire