This thesis is a study of how energy use and air pollution in Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have been affected by the economic transition after 1989. It consists of six articles, which examine three different aspects of these changes. The first group of articles analyses the structure of energy use in the Baltic states (Article I) and Poland Articles II and III) at the outset of transitio

This thesis describes experiments performed using different methods to produce aerosol nanoparticles with control over size and composition. The process included differential mobility analyzers (DMAs) as size-selecting instruments and tube furnaces for particle synthesis. A method to estimate the degradation of the DMA performance from the ideal case for individual DMAs was proposed and tested ex

In this thesis the phenomenology of Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) is studied in a variety of circumstances from both perturbative and non-perturbative perspectives. The main emphasis is on the production and hadronization of heavy particles, specifically heavy quarks, gauge bosons, leptoquarks and supersymmetric particles. In the hadroproduction of long-lived heavy quarks (i.e. charm and bottom)

This thesis investigated emotional communication in experimentally created face-to-face interaction situations. The hypotheses were based on the conception of a process which leads to emotional empathy, assuming that automatic mimicking tendencies are involved in an automatic part of the process. Subjects were categorised as high- or low-empathic according to results on the Questionnaire Measure O

Around 1750 a German chemist discovered it to be possible to extract sugar crystals from beet juice. Since then, breeding and improved agricultural practices have increased the concentration of sucrose per root from around 4% to around 18%. Sugar content is still one of the most important characters in sugar beet breeding, but breeders of today are also faced with many more characters, many of a c

Animal models of Parkinson’s disease and L-DOPA-induced dyskinesia are essential to explore pathophysiological hypotheses and to test new treatment options. There are many different animal models of Parkinson's disease, which differ greatly with respect to species, mechanisms of nigral cell death, and extent of dopamine-dependent motor deficits. My work has been performed in rats and mice with uni

In this dissertation I will discuss horror film as a genre and study how Hellraiser relates to its themes and problems. First I describe the production of the film and after that I present Clive Barker - his background, authorship, film-making and artwork. Next I study the problems of the genre and the different ways in which this genre is defined. I look at narrative characteristics as well as, f

It it of great importance to increase the knowledge of various cell cycle kinetic parameters and the objective of this thesis is to use stochastic models to interpret Bromodeoxyuridine (BrdUrd) DNA Flow Cytometry (FCM) derived data in order to estimate such parameters. The cell cycle is the process of growth and division that is essential for an organism to increase in size. The cell cycle consist

During the last decades, coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy (CARS) has been an important tool in combustion research. The focus of this thesis is the improvement of the capability of the pure rotational CARS (RCARS) technique for this type of applications. The technique is used to measure temperatures and relative species concentrations in the gas phase and thermometry is performed by fitting

Emissions from anthropogenic combustion sources, such as light duty vehicles and small scale biomass combustion, contribute significantly to ambient aerosol particle concentrations both on local and global scales. These emissions have controlling impacts on public health and global climate. The overall aim of this thesis was to investigate how atmospheric transformation and combustion conditions a

Title. Contested streets. Political marches in Stockholm, 1887–1920.Abstract. Repertoires of contention change. It is clear that during the 19th and early 20th century, swedes learned to stage marches to make political claims, something that was virtually unknown in Sweden before the mid-19th century. At first, the oligarchy that held power in Sweden mostly accepted political marching in the stree

It is commonly argued that the private sector needs to become actively involved for society to stand a chance of solving the most pressing global problems. This thesis, consisting of five articles previously published in refereed journals and an introductory essay, studies one case of private actor participation in global environmental governance: the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (

This thesis deals with signal processing algorithms for analysis of the electrocardiogram (ECG) during atrial fibrillation (AF). Such analysis can be used for diagnosing patients, and for monitoring and predicting their response to various treatment. The thesis comprises an introduction and five papers describing methods for ECG-based modeling and characterization of AF. Paper I--IV deal with meth

This thesis makes a contribution to strategy-proof social choice theory, in which one investigates the conditions under which it is possible to construct social choice functions (i.e., voting procedures) that can never be manipulated in the sense that some voter, by misrepresentation of his true preferences, can change the outcome of a voting and obtain an alternative he prefers to the one that ho

The objective of this thesis is to contribute to improved performance of district heating systems by focusing on three items. Item 1: Study of three methods for improving the performance of sub-systems within buildings connected to the distribution network. The methods can be considered as more or less innovative. Results from two of these measures are quantified in terms of so-called Primary Ener

The Class Aves (birds) is generally divided into two main groups - the Palaeognathae and the Neognathae. Paleognathous birds are the flightless ratites and the tinamous, while Neognathae include all other extant birds (more than 9,000 species). This opinion has prevailed for more than a century and is primarily based on morphological studies of the avian bony palate. In this study, the relationsh

Abstract The efficiency of different leachate treatment methods for the removal of refractory organic compounds and ammonium-nitrogen was investigated. The methods evaluated were nitrification, denitrification, adsorption onto activated carbon, precipitation by ferric chloride or aluminum sulphate and oxidation by ozone or Fenton´s reagent. Furthermore, analyses were performed on leachates from mu

Two non-thermal regimens of light interaction with biological tissue, that are in a natural way connected, are discussed in the present thesis. These are photodynamic therapy (PDT) for the treatment of malignant tumours and laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) for tissue characterization. In PDT, a photochemical reaction is induced by non-ionizing electromagnetic irradiation in tissue where photosens

The issue of higher education and its relation to the working life of graduates has been intensely discussed since the beginning of the 1990’s. There have been constant complaints about an alleged mismatch between graduate competence and competence required by potential employers, regardless of field. On the other hand, representatives of higher education have stressed the independent role of univ

The chloroplast-localized small heat shock protein (sHsp) Hsp21 belongs to the family of alpha-crystallin like sHsps which form large oligomeric structures and protect partly unfolded aggregation-prone proteins against aggregation. The main focus for this thesis has been on the highly conserved methionines in Hsp21. These methionine residues are situated on one side of an amphipathic alpha-helix.