Our world is changing and cities and regions are increasingly understood not only as places, but also as vital hubs in national and global networks, through which people, capital, goods and services flow to ensure the functioning of society, as we know it. People and capital are increasingly concentrated in these hubs, which aside of positive effects on efficiency also is associated with challenge

Length and area regularization are commonplace for inverse problems today. It has however turned out to be much more difficult to incorporate a curvature prior. In this paper we propose several improvements to a recently proposed framework based on global optimization. We identify and solve an issue with extraneous arcs in the original formulation by introducing region consistency constraints. The

The Sun and the solar magnetic activity is responsible for a variety of effects in space and on the Earth. High energy radiation and charged particles are constantly being emitted from the solar atmosphere interacting with our atmosphere and technological systems in space and on the ground. The research papers included in this thesis cover analysis of solar magnetic activity, solar indices, solar

The latest insights on financial contagion and how both nations and investors can effectively deal with it The domino-style structure in which the financial system exists is a perilous one. Although historically, the financial system has been able to deal with major shocks, the fact remains that our financial system is not as secure as it should be. Recent years have brought about too many exam

A novel method developed to increase the temporal resolution of x-ray streak cameras is described. The method is analogous to the time-correlated single-photon-counting technique, which is commonly used in atomic physics. By use of short-pulse x-ray radiation from a laser-produced plasma, generated by an ultrafast laser, it is shown that a standard x-ray streak camera with a nominal temporal resol

Popular Abstract in Swedish I gröna växters kloroplaster finns ett s.k. sHsp-protein (small Heat shock protein) som betecknas Hsp21. Det tillhör en grupp av hjälpar-protein som kallas molekylära chaperoner. Chaperoner hjälper andra proteiner så att de inte klibbar ihop, aggregerar och blir inaktiva. Två vattenskyende ytor som sammanförs aggregerar. Genom att särskilt aggregerings-benägna (vattenskThe 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.

Popular Abstract in Swedish Metoder utvecklade inom den statistiska fysiken har visat sig vara användbara även i andra forskningfält såsom datalogi, statistik, ekonomi och molekylärbiologi. I den här avhandlingen undersöks hur en variationell metod, utvecklad för statistisk fysik, kan användas när man löser kombinatoriska optimeringsproblem och när man försöker rekonstruera evolutionsträd. I den Algorithms based on the variational approach, as used in statistical physics, are developed. For constraint satisfaction problems a novel cost function, based on information-theoretic arguments, is introduced, and an algorithm similar to the mean-field annealing algorithm is proposed. It outperforms the conventional mean-field algorithm, and its performance is comparable to good problem-dedicated