Modelling fire performance of building fire barriers would allow optimising the design solutions before performing costly fire resistance tests and promote performance-based fire safety engineering. Numerical heat conduction analysis is widely used for predicting the insulation capability of fire barriers. Heat conduction analysis uses material properties and boundary condition parameters as the i

More than three decades ago, Thomas Alerstam initiated the study of orientation and navigation of migratory songbirds in southern Sweden. Stensoffa Ecological Field Station, located approx. 20 km east of Lund, has since been a primary location for orientation experiments. However, it has often been difficult to record well-oriented behaviour in the seasonal appropriate migratory directions, in par

Aim and objective: To describe and understand the meaning of living with persistent rheumatoid arthritis. Background: A considerable number of patients with rheumatoid arthritis live with an ongoing active and symptomatic illness despite access to potent antirheumatic treatment. There is, however, a lack of knowledge about the meaning of living with this severe long-term illness, defined as persis

A negative association between interval length and infant and child mortality has been consistently identified in modern developing countries. The reasons for this association are unclear, however. Leading hypotheses explain these differences as a result of sibling competition, maternal depletion, infection transmission, or unobserved maternal factors, but none has received overwhelming support. U

Water chemistry is important for the maintenance of wetland structure and function. Interpreting ecological patterns in a wetland system therefore requires an in-depth understanding of the water chemistry of that system. We investigated the spatial distribution of chemical solutes both in soil pore water and surface water, along island-floodplain-channel hydrological gradients in seasonally and pe

Svensk sammanfattningUnder de senaste hundra åren har kulturlandskapet i norra Europa genomgått en dramatisk förändring. Det småskaliga jordbrukslandskapet med sin mosaik av naturtyper har till stor del ersatts av vidsträckta monokulturer. Artrika naturtyper och naturområden har blivit ovanligare och ligger idag ofta isolerats från varandra. Som en följd av detta har många arter gått tillbaka, visPlant species often adapt to local environmental conditions, which can result in the formation of genetically and phenotypically distinct ecotypes. Ecotypes can evolve rapidly, and may be a first step in the process of ecological speciation. Consequently, ecotypes may constitute an important part of the biodiversity in regions with a young flora, where few endemic taxa at the species level have ha

A Fourier analysis of the magnitudes and timing of the Phanerozoic mass extinctions (MEs) demonstrates that many of the periodicities claimed in other analyses are not statistically significant. Moreover we show that the periodicities associated with oscillations of the Solar System about the galactic plane are too irregular to give narrow peaks in the Fourier periodograms. This leads us to conclu

We investigate the effects of organizational culture and personal values on performance under individual and team contest incentives. We develop a model of regard for others and in-group favoritism that predicts interaction effects between organizational values and personal values in contest games. These predictions are tested in a computerized lab experiment with exogenous control of both organiz

Bark beetles are among the most devastating biotic agents affecting forests globally and several species are expected to be favored by climate change. Given the potential interactions of insect outbreaks with other biotic and abiotic disturbances, and the potentially strong impact of changing disturbance regimes on forest resources, investigating climatic drivers of destructive bark beetle outbrea

We study statistical properties of the 0+ spectrum of 208Pb in the energy region Ex ≤ 20 MeV. We use the Skyrme interaction SLy4 as our model Hamiltonian to create a single-particle spectrum and to analyze excited states. The finite-rank separable approximation for the particle–hole interaction enables us to perform the calculations in large configuration spaces. We show that while the position of

In this article, core tenets and claims of the theory of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) are synthesized. EUE theory postulates a net flow of natural resources from peripheral developing to core industrialized countries through international trade, a situation which undermines the development of the periphery while enhancing that of the core. The key claims and EUE mechanisms are categorized a

The aim of the article is to explore the location and the meaning given to the rainbow flag in places outside the hegemonic centre. Through three case studies in the global North and South, held together by a multi-ethnographic approach, as well as a certain theoretical tension between the rainbow flag as a boundary object and/or a floating signifier, we seek to study where the flag belongs, to wh

This article introduces a Special Section on Ecologically Unequal Exchange (EUE), an underlying source of most of the environmental distribution conflicts in our time. The nine articles discuss theories, methodologies, and empirical case studies pertaining to ecologically unequal exchange, and address its relationship to ecological debt.

In the framework of the subspace-based identification of linear systems, the first step for the construction of a state-space model from observed input-output data involves the estimation of the output predictor. Such construction is based on projection operations of certain structured data matrices onto suitable subspaces spanned by the collected data. To the purpose of predictive control using s

Applications hosted in the cloud have become indispensable in several contexts, with their performance often being key to business operation and their running costs needing to be minimized. To minimize running costs, most modern virtualization technologies such as Linux Containers, Xen, and KVM offer powerful resource control primitives for individual provisioning - that enable adding or removing

Coincident with increased utilization of the Icelandic highlands, its image as a unique and pristine wilderness is gradually changing. People’s perception of wilderness is influenced by a number of factors relating to their culture and socio-economic background. Furthermore, how people value pristine land or define wilderness varies depending on the location and function of the assessment. Therefo