According to medieval canon law a marriage secretly contracted, by mutual consent only, was perfectly valid. It was however difficult to prove tha such a marriage had taken place, if one of the parties denied it. This problem was fairly common and a number of such cases are recorded in medieval Court rolls. In this article I study if/to what extent the parties previous sexual activities and/or rep

A sustainable development of the built environment asks for changes in urban residents’ mobility patterns. The extensive use of the car contributes to sedentary lifestyle and negative environmental impact in many respects. Children living in urban areas are faced with limits of their independent use of the environment both in terms of travel and outdoor play. Many parents hold favourable attitudes

Stigma and discrimination are still prominent features of the life situation of persons with mental illness, adding to the burden of the illness, causing a lowered self-esteem, quality of life and affecting possibilities of adequate housing and work. It is also a major barrier to help seeking. The deinstitutionalization of mental health services has led to a significant increase in contacts betwee

The Biomass Action Plan (BAP) for Europe outlines how to achieve the targets for bioenergy and energy crops defined by the European Commission and member states. However, it is the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that shapes the utilisation of agricultural land. This paper therefore reviews the supportive measures for energy crops in recent CAP reforms and investigates the effects on farmers in ‘

The overall aim of this thesis is to examine how walking as a transport mode is constructed in the planning realm, affected by the built environment and perceived by the individual. This aim is related to the following research questions: (1) How are pedestrians and walking understood, constructed and perceived in the planning context? (2) How does individual traits and the built environment affec

We introduce a general decomposition method applicable to all forms of bivariate rank dependent indices of socioeconomic inequality in health, including the concentration index. The technique is based on recentered influence function regression and requires only the application of OLS to a transformed variable with similar interpretation. Our method requires few identifying assumptions to yield va

This work presents a robotic implementation of Christmas gift wrapping. Handling paper is a challenging task for an industrial robot as it easily tears and folds in unexpected ways. In this application, a dual-arm industrial robot with simple two-finger grippers was used, and the robot was programmed using a standard position-based approach. The wrapping was accomplished with the help of plastic s

Background Although associated with severe clinical complications, phosphate remains a neglected ion. Additionally, phosphate balance during continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) is complex and multifunctional. The present retrospective study investigated the effects of phosphate-containing CRRT fluid on phosphate homeostasis. Methods We retrospectively analysed 112 patients treated with CRR