New markers of bulk milk quality in relation to mastitis

All dairy processors depend on a continuous supply of high-quality bulk milk from milk producers to be able to distribute liquid milk and dairy products. Mastitis, inflammation of the bovine udder, is the most common disease in dairy cows, and leads to altered milk composition and impaired milk quality. The somatic cell count (SCC) is currently used as a marker for udder health, and indirectly, for bulk milk quality, but because it is somewhat insensitive and unspecific, there has been an interest to find alternative markers. The main objective of this thesis was to acquire more knowledge about two potential markers for bulk milk quality: polymorphonuclear leukocyte count (PMNC) and α-lactalbumin (α-LA). Another objective was to study if the combination of α-LA, haptoglobin (Hp) and serum amyloid A (SAA) in an acute phase index (API) could be useful as an alternative marker for bulk milk quality. Bulk milk samples were collected from Swedish dairy farms and analyzed for PMNC, α-LA, SCC, haptoglobin (Hp), serum amyloid A (SAA), fat, lactose, total protein and casein contents, casein number, protein composition, proteolysis and coagulating properties. An API was calculated for each sample by combining results on α-LA, Hp and SAA. Samples with high PMNC had a lower casein number than samples with low PMNC, while samples with high SCC had lower lactose and casein contents, lower casein number and more proteolysis than low SCC samples. There was no significant difference in the inflammatory markers SCC, PMNC, Hp and SAA between milk samples containing low, medium or high concentrations of α-LA. Differences between α-LA groups were, however, found in some milk quality parameters as high α-LA concentration was related to low concentrations of αs1-, αs2- and β-casein, and high concentrations of lactose and β-lactoglobulin. High API was related to low lactose content and casein number. In conclusion, PMNC and α-LA were not considered more useful markers of inflammation and milk quality in bulk milk than SCC, which is currently used

The Optimal Babel - An Economic Framework for the Analysis of Dynamic Language Rights

We analyze various normatively determined distributions of language rights in multilingual settings. A general model for the analysis of language rights over time in a model with overlapping generations is set up. This model is then first used to find efficient allocations of rights in the tradition of Wicksell. It is shown that, when rights today influence the status of a language in the future, the “naïve” static analysis has to be augmented in favor of further-reaching minority rights in order to take into account the dynamic aspect. It is then demonstrated that a traditional welfare-economic analysis generally goes even further in the support of minority rights. If a possible externality on other communities is taken into account, however, these results are reversed in a pure efficiency analysis. If redistribution arguments are taken into account, this provides an effect in the opposite direction again.equivalence principle, minority rights, changeable preferences, dynamic preferences, welfare economics, overlapping generations

Welfare-optimal Status Planning of Minority Languages: An Economic Approach

We analyze normatively determined distributions of language rights in multilingual settings. It is shown in a welfare-maximizing model where rights today influence the status of a language in the future, that the “naïve” ex ante cost-benefit analysis has to be augmented in various directions. This has its roots in the dynamic aspect of the rights and the resulting endogeneity of preferences as well as in the discrete character of rights. It is shown how efficiency and distribution considerations are affected by these considerations.minority rights, changeable preferences, dynamic preferences, welfare function, second-best analysis, overlapping generations

Coffee, Country-of-Origin and China – A closer look at Chinese consumption and perception of foreign and domestic coffee in Kunming

Being one of the most valuable commodities in the world, coffee is of great importance to the world economy, producing countries and the daily lives of millions of people. China is one of the largest and fastest growing consumer markets in the world and is experiencing an increasing demand for coffee. Very little research has been carried out concerning China’s growing appreciation for the commodity but also in its role as a producer of coffee. This thesis was intended to contribute to the existing knowledge by examining Chinese consumers’ coffee-buying behavior, and especially, how important the country-of-origin of coffee is for the perceived quality of a coffee product. This was done using an online-survey, a focus group discussion and two interviews where the interviewees both had their own company in the coffee business. The results showed, among other things, that Chinese coffee consumers do appear to be influenced by country-of-origin and that this influence differs between groups of people

Navigating the delivery of a service

In a world where environmental pressure on companies is increasing, environmental consultancy services are a valued commodity. This study set out to investigate environmental consultants’ practice of delivering an environmental service and what obstacles that practice encounters. This was achieved through a qualitative interview study with environmental consultants. The practice perspective was provided by Cook & Wagenaar’s (2012) Epistemology of Practice, comprised of Actionable understanding, Ongoing business and the Eternally unfolding present. Two inductive concepts were also introduced, used here as a tool to reposition the original practice perspectives lens to better illustrate the researched phenomenon. The result of the study showed how environmental consultants’ (EC) actions are constituted by the practice of delivering a service. These actions were shown to first generate a practice rather than applying knowledge to the situation. The practice perspective also revealed the taken-for-granted stuff of everyday life of environmental consultants’ and how the practice is generated and sustained through them. The study also detailed how the ECs handle challenges and sustain their practice by living in the present, where past and current practices inform the ECs about their situation and partially informs them about future practices. Showing how well utilized experiences was created and used through the present and applied in future practices. The inductive concepts highlighted the unpredictable nature of delivering ECs services. Environmental consultants’ roles were difficult to predict before a practice was finished, forcing environmental consultants to handle the unpredictability of role assignment in the present. Cooperation was shown to be an important coping mechanism for the unpredictable nature of delivering environmental services. The intrinsic unpredictability of environmental consultancy services was met with practices of sharing knowledge and experience between environmental consultants to increase understandings, improve services and to better handle disruptions in practices. The practice perspective provides an account for what is there and how what is there creates reality through engagement with it. How the practice is not only a result of agency or structures but generated through social relationships and the material context when engaged with. Providing an account for the reality environmental consultants are situated in when performing their practice. Also, how the practice makes sense and are acted upon by the environmental consultants involved and how the challenges that arise are coped with. Providing practitioners and academics with an insight into a previously unexplored field of study

Contemporary environmentalism as a current of spiritual post-secular practice

Contemporary spirituality often bears the stamp of an eco-discourse. It is characteristic of post-spiritual practices that there is a blurring of the boundaries between the sacred and profane and in this sphere, influenced by the eco-consciousness, nature and the body can be sacralised. In this article the author looks into environmentalism as a current in spirituality. First spirituality as a concept is discussed. Second follows a section on aspects of contemporary environmentalism, dealing with new social movements, new identity and the main directions of environmentalism. After that, the distinction between environmentally motivated spirituality and spir­itually motivated environmentalism is presented. At the end there is a short discussion of post-secular issues concerning environmentalism. Worldviews are no longer necessarily either religious or secular, but may also combine elements of rational secularity with enchanted spirituality. The blurring of the boundaries between secular and religious views and motives occur, as well as the separation of mind and body, rationality and belief, and human and nature

Secular and Religious Environmentalism in Contemporary Turkey

Turkish environmentalism is gaining ground but has not yet become a serious source of influence in society. The environmental movements have long been held as left wing politics and less religious, but today environmental awreness is also reaching the religious establishment. This article presents some of the secular and religious environmental currents in contemporary Turkey based on fieldwork mainly conducted in 2011. The main research questions are: who are the central environmental actors in Turkey, are there differences ragarding ideology and way of working between the secular and reigious field, and why there is no strong environmental scene in Turkey

Warmer and Wetter Winters over the high-latitude North Atlantic : an atmospheric circulation perspective

The high-latitude North Atlantic -especially the Svalbard archipelago and its surrounding seas - has undergone remarkable changes in the last half-century. These regions are recognized as a hotspot of the Arctic Amplification, referring to the faster warming rates in the Arctic when compared to lower latitudes, manifested in the form of rapid warming and sea ice loss. The most pronounced changes occur in winter, when the sun remains below the horizon, and heat transport from lower latitudes in both atmosphere and ocean is the main energy source. The relationship between atmospheric circulation changes and the AA is not fully understood, and there are knowledge-gaps in particular on the regional scale. This thesis is motivated by the wish to quantify cyclone track changes and increase the knowledge of their role in the documented rapid temperature increases in Svalbard and the sea ice losses in north and east of this archipelago. We utilized an automated cyclone tracking algorithm to create a seasonal cyclone climatology for the high-latitude North Atlantic in the period 1979-2016 based on the mean sea-level pressure from the reanalysis product ERA-Interim from the European Centre of Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). When calculating the trends over this period we find an increase of cyclone densities around Svalbard and a corresponding decrease in the southeastern Barents Sea of a magnitude (+/- 3 cyclones/winter per decade). Based on composite analysis, we find that these changes are in line with a trend towards warmer and wetter winter conditions in the northern Barents Sea and over Svalbard. The opposing trends, i.e. no significant changes in cyclogenesis and an increase in local baroclinicity north of Svalbard, all speak for a shift towards a more meridional winter cyclone track in the seas around Svalbard. To advance the understanding of local 2-m air temperature and precipitation sensitivity to atmospheric circulation in the recent climate, with more winter cyclones around Svalbard, we studied the period 2013-2018 with a high-resolution numerical weather prediction model. The main finding of this study, forming a part this thesis, is that in the current climate, potentially high societal impact, rain-on-snow (ROS) events are 10 common phenomena in the recent Svalbard winters with up to 11 events per winter in the southwestern parts of the archipelago. The clear majority of events with widespread ROS (in this study defined as more than 3% of Svalbard's land grid points experiencing ROS) occur with southerly and southwesterly flow over Svalbard. These flow directions occur in situations with a cyclone in southern Fram Strait - a region with a positive cyclone trend in the 1979-2016 winter climatology. On a regional scale the warming has been largest in the northern and eastern parts of the Svalbard archipelago. We report extreme winter warming rates up to 3 K/decade in the north accompanied by significant (p <0.05) increases in both accumulated precipitation (+ 44.6 mm/decade) and the number of precipitation days (+5.2 days/decade ) over the period 1960-2017 based on the Norwegian hindcast product NORA10. The warming is significant, but only half of that in magnitude in the southern and western parts of the archipelago. We found the local warming and wettening in the north to correlate well with sea ice changes north of the archipelago and this is attributed to upwind changes of northeasterly flow. This effect is, however, further enhanced by a moderate, but significant increase in northerly winds aligning with the increased frequency of winter season meridional flow

Pressure Measurements, Lesion Distribution and Outcome in Peripheral Artery Disease

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) causes increased all-cause and cardiovascular (CV) mortality. These increases have been associated with abnormal ankle-brachial indices and the extent of atherosclerotic lesions as measured by radiological imaging. Reported associations of outcome in regard to systolic toe pressure (TP) are scarce, and those associations in regard to lesion distribution have been ambiguous. This thesis has two aims. First, to clarify the relationship of TP with outcome in patients with symptomatic PAD. Second, to clarify the association of anatomical distribution and extensiveness of angiographically detected lower extremity atherosclerotic lesions with outcome in the same patients. This thesis retrospectively reviews 887 patients whom underwent digital subtraction angiography (DSA) for the following: peripheral pressure measurements, DSA images and causes of death. Within a median 4.6 years followup, almost half of the patients had died, and of these deaths 60% had been due to CV causes. Angiographic lesion distribution, severity and TP were independently associated with increased all-cause and CV mortality. A predominantly or exclusively crural distribution of atherosclerotic lesions in the lower extremities and widespread lesions in the crural arteries predicted increased CV and all-cause mortality in symptomatic PAD patients undergoing DSA. Estimated cumulative survival and freedom from CV death could be stratified according to TP categories < 30 mmHg, 30–49 mmHg and ≥ 50 mmHg in the affected lower extremity. TP < 30 mmHg was independently associated with increased all-cause and CV mortality and decreased amputation-free survival. Bilaterally low TP was associated with a particularly poor outcome.Alaraajojen tukkiva valtimotauti johtaa lisääntyneeseen kokonais- ja kardiovaskulaarikuolleisuuteen. Poikkeavan nilkka-olkavarsipaineindeksin ja kuvantamistutkimuksissa määritetyn tautimuutosten laajuuden on osoitettu liittyvän tähän. Lopputuleman yhteyksiä systoliseen varvaspaineeseen on raportoitu niukalti ja sen raportoidut yhteydet tautimuutosten sijainnin jakautumiseen ovat ristiriitaisia. Tämän väitöskirjan tarkoitus on selventää varvaspaineen ja angiografisten tautimuutosten anatomisen jakauman sekä laajuuden yhteyttä oireista perifeeristä valtimokovettumatautia sairastavien potilaiden ennusteeseen. Väitöskirjassa tarkasteltiin retrospektiivisesti perifeerisiä valtimopainemittauksia, varjoainekuvia ja kuolinsyitä 887:lla oireisella alaraajojen tukkivaa valtimotautia sairastavalla potilaalla, joille tehtiin alaraajojen varjoainekuvaus. Keskimäärin 4,6 vuoden seurannan aikana lähes puolet potilaista kuoli, joista 60 % kardiovaskulaarisista syistä johtuen. Angiografisten tautimuutosten sijainnin jakautuminen ja vaikeusaste, sekä varvaspaine assosioituivat itsenäisesti lisääntyneeseen kokonaisja kardiovaskulaarikuolleisuuteen. Valtaosin tai yksinomaan säären tasoon paikantuvat valtimotautimuutokset ja laaja-alainen säärivaltimoiden tauti ennustivat lisääntynyttä kardiovaskulaari- ja kokonaiskuolleisuutta oireista alaraajojen valtimokovettumatautia sairastavilla potilailla, joille tehtiin alaraajojen varjoainekuvaus. Kumulatiivinen elossaolo ja kardiovaskulaarikuolemalta välttyminen voitiin ryhmittää oireisen alaraajan varvaspaineluokkien < 30 mmHg, 30–49 mmHg ja ≥ 50 mmHg perusteella. Varvaspaine < 30 mmHg oli itsenäinen riskitekijä lisääntyneelle kokonais- ja kardiovaskulaarikuolleisuudelle. Molemminpuolisesti alhaisiin varvaspaineisiin liittyi erityisen huono ennuste

Challenges in understanding, measuring, and managing technical debt

Abstract. Technical debt as a concept is vast and somewhat abstract area. The most basic definition of it is that it is analogous to a bank loan, which must be paid back so you don’t get stated bankrupt. Number of activities required to manage the debt are numerous, as 15 different sources of possible debt are identified. Technical debt management activities, possible sources, and outcomes that unpaid debt might bring are documented in this paper’s background section. Results section contains challenges that technical debt management processes are encountering in understanding, measuring, and managing the debt. Even with existing empirical research on technical debt management, research and industry are having hard time in trying to find the right tools and areas to measure to gain meaningful information on numerous types of technical debt. Without the right metrics, the monitoring tools are not able to provide useful information to aid in communication and decision-making. Currently, the tools focus mainly on code smells (code debt) and are not able to measure the most important aspects of the debt, design, and architectural debt. This research suggests future research topics to improve existing knowledge on certain areas such as the previously mentioned ability to meaningfully measure different kinds of debts