It has been shown in a large number of scientific studies that living or working in a building with mould and moisture damage increases the risk for asthmatic and allergic symptoms. However, there is a need to establish more valid methods to obtain a more nuanced picture of the wide range of different types of moisture related problems. Furthermore, the causal relationships and the biological mech

Lateglacial and Holocene shoreline displacement along the Baltic coast resulted from both the isostatic land uplift and the ice-volume-equivalent sea-level rise. Relative changes of these two components led to alternating contact/isolation of the Baltic Basin with the North Sea during the Holocene. The Littorina transgression was a significant palaeoceanographic change that took place during the m

The aim of this study was to reconstruct the Holocene vegetation history and the climate changes in a subarctic area. The results are based on pollen and macrofossil records from six lakes in the Torneträsk area. The lakes are situated at altitudes between 370 and 999 m a.s.l., along a transect from the boreal pine-birch forest to the alpine tundra with heath vegetation. The chronology in each lak

Wind erosion is a serious threat to soil resources as it causes depletion of the fine fractions that may result in a less fertile soil. Wind erosion encompasses several processes of which many are related to climate variables. To date, there is little work performed on how wind erosion relates to climate and climate change. In this thesis, atmospheric circulation and wind erosion were analysed to

This study shows that the mechanisms behind knowledge accumulation and the sources of productivity growth differ from industry to industry depending on what is produced and what technology is used. Although it is apparent to most researchers in the field that the only way to explain long-run growth in output per capita is through technological progress and accumulation of knowledge that counteract

Findings from a pilot study on the distribution, function and phonetic realization of the filler EH in interviews from SweDia2000 interviews are presented. The results show that EH occurs almost exclusively after function words at the beginning of constituents. The phonetic realization of EH was seen to be of three basic forms: a middle-high vowel (e.g. [e], [ɛ], [ə]), a vowel+nasal (e.g. [ɛm], [ə

Workers in the rubber industry have an increased risk of several diseases, such as airway disease, cancer and probably cardiovascular disease. The exposure is very complex; carbon disulfide (CS2) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) being two of the contaminants. The general aim of this thesis was to find exposure-response relationships usable for risk assessments in the rubber industry. U

Jawed polychaete annelid worms were abundant and diverse in the early Palaeozoic seas and their jaws (scolecodonts) are common microfossils in sedimentary rocks of that age. Despite their abundance, relatively little work has been focused on these fossils. One reason for this is that their taxonomy has been, and to some extent still is, in a state of disorder, mainly because of a parataxonomic tre

Background: Stroke is a major cause of death and disability. Investigations of the epidemiological trends for stroke might result in better understanding of stroke pathogenesis and prevention. Methods: The trends of first-ever stroke incidence and survival over 3 time periods (1983-85, 1993-95 and 2001/2002) in Lund-Orup health care district were studied. The first 2 study periods were retrospect

The issue of describing identity of sense relations that are used in contexts of anaphora to express contextually given information is discussed. In text-to-speech applictions, it is important to model given information, both linguistically and computationallly, since it is associated with tone accent patterns that differ from those on new information. The anlysis is illustrated using restricted t