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Det är ett ansträngt ekonomiskt läge i Sverige, både för hushåll och näringsverksamheter som drabbats av höjda kostnader till följd av inflation, energikris och kriget i Europa. Lantbrukarna är några av dem som drabbats hårt då priset på insatsvaror inom jordbruket ökat kraftigt (Jordbruksverket 2022). Följaktligen har Sveriges ridskolor som är beroende av varor från lantbrukarna i sin tur drabbas hårt när priset på foder och strömaterial stigit till följd av det höjda priset på insatsvaror. Ridskolorna uppges vilja hålla nere ridavgifterna nu när köpkraften hos hushållen minskat, för att ge så många som möjligt chansen att rida, men måste samtidigt klara av att bedriva en hållbar verksamhet (SVT 2023a). Således är syftet med uppsatsen att diskutera samt analysera hur ridskolor strategiskt kan bemöta utmaningar och möjligheter vid ökade kostnader. För att besvara studiens syfte har vi i denna undersökning använt oss av beslutsteori och strategic cost management (SCM), då ekonomiska företagsbeslut ofta är förknippade med effektiv hantering och kontroll av kostnader. I uppsatsen har en kvalitativ forskningsmetod använts där semistrukturerade intervjuer genomförts med tre ridskoleverksamheter för att öka förståelsen för vilket sätt ridskoleverksamheterna drabbats av kostnadsökningarna samt vilka strategier de använder sig av. Efter att ha analyserat respondenternas svar genom en tematisk analysmetod vittnar alla tre verksamheterna om tuffa tider med stora kostnadsökningar där det finns både likheter och skillnader i hur de väljer att hantera de ökade kostnaderna. Gemensamt för verksamheterna är att kunder, medlemmar och långsiktiga relationer utgör viktiga komponenter för att klara svåra ekonomiska tider och att det emotionella värdet till verksamheten är större än kostnadsmarginalerna., There is a strained economic situation in Sweden, both for households and businesses that have been affected by increased costs as a result of inflation, the energy crisis and the war in Europe. Farmers have been affected as the price of input goods in agriculture has increased (Jordbruksverket 2022). Consequently, Sweden's riding schools, which are dependent on goods from farmers, have also been affected when the price of feed and bedding material rose because of the increased price of input goods. The riding schools want to keep the fees low now that the purchasing power of households has decreased in order to give as many people as possible the chance to ride horses. At the same time, they must manage to maintain a sustainable business (SVT 2023a). Thus, the purpose of the essay is to discuss and analyze how riding schools can strategically respond to challenges and opportunities in the event of increased costs. In order to answer the purpose of the study, this thesis has used decision theory and strategic cost management (SCM), as financial business decisions are often associated with effective management and control of costs. A qualitative approach was used where semi-structured interviews were conducted with three riding school businesses to increase the understanding of how the riding school businesses were affected by the cost increases and which strategies they use. After analysing the respondents' answers through a thematic analysis, all three businesses agree that times are tough with todays increased costs. The analysis also shows that there are both similarities and differences in how they choose to handle the increased costs. What the businesses have in common is that customers, members, and long-term relationships are important components for managing difficult economic times and that the emotional value to the business is greater than the cost margins.

Paracrine factors can induce cardiac regeneration and repair post myocardial infarction by stimulating proliferation of cardiac cells and inducing the anti-fibrotic, antiapoptotic, and immunomodulatory effects of angiogenesis. Here, we screened a human secretome library, consisting of 923 growth factors, cytokines, and proteins with unknown function, in a phenotypic screen with human cardiac progenitor cells. The primary readout in the screen was proliferation measured by nuclear count. From this screen, we identified FGF1, FGF4, FGF9, FGF16, FGF18, and seven additional proteins that induce proliferation of cardiac progenitor cells. FGF9 and FGF16 belong to the same FGF subfamily, share high sequence identity, and are described to have similar receptor preferences. Interestingly, FGF16 was shown to be specific for proliferation of cardiac progenitor cells, whereas FGF9 also proliferated human cardiac fibroblasts. Biosensor analysis of receptor preferences and quantification of receptor abundances suggested that FGF16 and FGF9 bind to different FGF receptors on the cardiac progenitor cells and cardiac fibroblasts. FGF16 also proliferated naive cardiac progenitor cells isolated from mouse heart and human cardiomyocytes derived from induced pluripotent cells. Taken together, the data suggest that FGF16 could be a suitable paracrine factor to induce cardiac regeneration and repair., QC 20200131

In fluorescence optical tomography, many works in the literature focus on the linear reconstruction problem to obtain the fluorescent yield or the linearized reconstruction problem to obtain the absorption coefficient. The nonlinear reconstruction problem, to reconstruct the fluorophore absorption coefficient, is of interest in imaging studies as it presents the possibility of better reconstructions owing to a more appropriate model. Accurate and computationally efficient forward models are also critical in the reconstruction process. The SPN approximation to the radiative transfer equation (RTE) is gaining importance for tomographic reconstructions owing to its computational advantages over the full RTE while being more accurate and applicable than the commonly used diffusion approximation. This paper presents Gauss-Newton-based fully nonlinear reconstruction for the SP3 approximated fluorescence optical tomography problem with respect to shape as well as the conventional finite-element method-based representations. The contribution of this paper is the Frechet derivative calculations for this problem and demonstration of reconstructions in both representations. For the shape reconstructions, radial-basis-function represented level-set-based shape representations are used. We present reconstructions for tumor-mimicking test objects in scattering and absorption dominant settings, respectively, for moderately noisy data sets in order to demonstrate the viability of the formulation. Comparisons are presented between the nonlinear and linearized reconstruction schemes in an element wise setting to illustrate the benefits of using the former especially for absorption dominant media.

The dynamic reconstruction problem in tomographic imaging is encountered in several applications, such as species determination, the study of blood flow through arteries/veins, motion compensation in medical imaging, and process tomography. The reconstruction method of choice is the Kalman filter and its variants, which, however, are faced by issues of filter tuning. In addition, since the time-propagation models of physical parameters are typically very complex, most of the time, a random walk model is considered. For geometric deformations, affine models are typically used. In our work, with the objectives of minimizing tuning issues and reconstructing time-varying geometrically deforming features of interest with affine in addition to pointwise-normal scaling motions, a novel level-set-based reconstruction scheme for ray tomography is proposed for shape and electromagnetic parameters using a regularized Gauss-Newton-filter-based scheme. We use an implicit Hermite-interpolation-based radial basis function representation of the zero level set corresponding to the boundary curve. Another important contribution of the paper is an evaluation of the shape-related Frechet derivatives that does not need to evaluate the pointwise Jacobian (the ray-path matrix in our ray-tomography problem). Numerical results validating the formulation are presented for a straight ray-based tomographic reconstruction. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first tomographic reconstruction results in these settings. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America

The aim of this three year project, which is part of the WoodWisdom-Net researchprogram, is to develop an innovative load bearing building system composed of timberglasscomposites. The structural loads applied onto these composites will be transferred to, andsupported by, the glass component, in contrary to today’s traditional solutions where glass elementsonly function as an environmental shield. Using such structural elements will make itpossible to largely increase the glass surface in buildings, allowing the presence of more naturallight in personal homes and office buildings. Timber-glass shear walls and beams will be developed taking into consideration long-term behaviorand seismic performance. Design concepts, feasibility studies and performance assessmentsof these components will be performed in order to improve the overall performance. Theproject also includes the development of new design calculations as well as the optimization ofmanufacturing methods. Material properties of timber, glass and adhesives will be determined from small and large scaleexperimental investigations, and will be used as input for theoretical calculations and modelingwork. The projects industrial partners will function as expertise and take part in the developmentand construction of demonstration objects. The project consortium is composed of academic and industrial partners from Austria, Sweden,Germany, Turkey, Slovenia, Chile, and Brazil. This paper presents material specifications andresults from small scale testing performed by the Swedish project partners.

In a reconstruction problem for subsurface tomography (modeled by the Helmholtz equation), we formulate a novel reconstruction scheme for shape and electromagnetic parameters from scattered field data, based upon an implicit Hermite interpolation based radial basis function (RBF) representation of the boundary curve. An object's boundary is defined implicitly as the zero level set of an RBF fitted to boundary parameters comprising the locations of few points on the curve (the RBF centers) and the normal vectors at those points. The electromagnetic parameter reconstructed is the normalized (w.r.t. the squared ambient wave number) difference of the squared wave numbers between the object and the ambient half-space. The objective functional w.r.t. boundary and electromagnetic parameters is set up and required Frechet derivatives are calculated. Reconstructions using a damped Tikhonov regularized Gauss Newton scheme for this almost rank-deficient problem are presented for 2D test cases of subsurface landmine-like dielectric single and double-phantom objects under noisy data conditions. The double phantom example demonstrates the capability of our present scheme to separate out the two objects starting from an initial single-object estimate. The present implicit-representation scheme thus enjoys the advantages (and conceptually overcomes the respective disadvantages) of current implicit and explicit representation approaches by allowing for topological changes of the boundary curve, while having few unknowns respectively. In addition, the Hermite interpolation based RBF representation is a powerful method to represent shapes in three dimensions, thus conceptually paving the way for the algorithm to be used in 3D.

Compared to unicast traffic, multicast is not protected by any ARQ mechanism in 802.11 networks: collisions with other multicast and unicast transmissions are not detected and senders will not adapt to the contention situation by backing off. This results in an unreliable service for multicast transmissions. We propose early multicast collision detection (EMCD), an algorithm with the purpose of increasing the reliability of multicast transmissions in the MAC layer of an IEEE 802.11 network. A multicast sender using it will introduce an early pause in a transmission, perform a clear channel assessment (CCA), and if a collision is detected abort the transmission after a fixed time and schedule a retransmission. This allows for detecting collisions with both multicast and unicast transmissions but also adapting to the contention situation. A probabilistic analysis is provided showing that EMCD is more efficient than ordinary multicast and can be made even more efficient by tuning parameters.

Mobile TV is a new interesting area in the telecommunication industry. The technology for sending live video to mobile clients is characterized by relatively low CPU processing power, low network resources, and low display resolution. In this paper we discuss a solution to all of these problems by using application layer multicasting. This can significantly reduce the needed bitrate and required computing resources for each client. At the same time the received video quality is increased. Several different methods for splitting the video into substreams are discussed. Simulations for the local wireless ad-hoc network are performed. A system for application layer multicasting using layered H.264 is also presented.

Connectivity in ad-hoc networks is a fundamental, but to a large extend still unsolved problem. In this paper we consider the connectivity problem when a number of nodes are uniformly distributed within a unit square. We limit our problem to the one-hop and two-hop connectivity. For the one-hop connectivity we find the exact analytically solution. For the two-hop connectivity we find the lower and upper bound for connectivity.

In this paper we investigate important issue for real-time video over wireless ad-hoc networks on different layers. Many error control methods for this approach use multiple streams and multipath routing. Thus the new proactive, link-state routing protocol have been developed, where the protocol finds the available route in the network and also it will not cause any interruption in the video traffic between the source and the destination. The open source MPEG-4 is also implemented to get the efficient video quality for the picture.

Two implementations of the bundle adjustment problem were applied to a subset of the Zurich City Hall reference data set. One implementation used the standard Euler angle parameterisation of the rotation matrix. The second implementation used all nine elements of the rotation matrix as unknowns and six functional constraints. The second formulation was constructed to reduce the non-linearity of the optimisation problem. The hypothesis was that a lower degree of non-linearity would lead to faster convergence. Furthermore, each implementation could optionally use the line search damping technique known from optimisation theory. The algorithms were used to solve the relative orientation problem for a varying number of homologous points from 33 different camera pairs. The results show that the constrained formulation has marginally better convergence properties, with or without damping. However, damping alone halves the number of convergence failures at a minor computational cost. The conclusion is that except to avoid the singularities associated with the Euler angles, the preferred use of the constrained formulation remains an open question. However, the results strongly suggest that the line search damping technique should be included in standard implementations of the bundle adjustment algorithm.

A nonlinear least squares problem with nonlinear constraints may be ill posed or even rank-deficient in two ways. Considering the problem formulated as $min_{x} 1/2Vert f_{2}(x) Vert _{2}^{2}$subject to the constraints $f_{1}(x) = 0$, the Jacobian $J_{1} = partial f_{1}/ partial x$ and/or the Jacobian $J = partial f/ partial x$, $f = [f_{1};f_{2}]$, may be ill conditioned at the solution. We analyze the important special case when $J_{1}$ and/or $J$ do not have full rank at the solution. In order to solve such a problem, we formulate a nonlinear least norm problem. Next we describe a truncated Gauss-Newton method. We show that the local convergence rate is determined by the maximum of three independent Rayleigh quotients related to three different spaces in $mathbb{R} ^{n}$. Another way of solving an ill-posed nonlinear least squares problem is to regularize the problem with some parameter that is reduced as the iterates converge to the minimum. Our approach is a Tikhonov based local linear regularization that converges to a minimum norm problem. This approach may be used both for almost and rank-deficient Jacobians. Finally we present computational tests on constructed problems verifying the local analysis.