Exposure to polyvinyl chloride. (PVC) plastics as a risk factor for testicular cancer was investigated. In total, 981 cases who were 20-75 years old and had reported to the Swedish Cancer Registry during 1993-1997 were included. One matched control from the population registry was used. Exposure was assessed by a questionnaire that was supplemented over the phone. Furthermore, an occupational hygi

A suite of analyses was performed on sediments accumulated during the last 10 700 years in Lake Spaime, a small, hydrologically open water body in the modern alpine tundra zone of the Scandes Mountains, west-central Sweden. The study aimed to evaluate (1) the nature of climate changes that forced the late-Holocene lowering of altitudinal tree limit in the region, the timing of which is known from

The problem of controlling delayed systems has been widely studied in the control community. The Smith predictor (SP) scheme was the most famous and efficient technique to cope with this problem. Afterwards, robustness problems and those related to the control of integrating and unstable delayed processes were resolved. This work presents an interactive tool for studying and understanding the diff

The incidence of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury remains high in young athletes. Because female athletes have a much higher incidence of ACL injuries in sports such as basketball and team handball than male athletes, the IOC Medical Commission invited a multidisciplinary group of ACL expert clinicians and scientists to (1) review current evidence including data from the new Scandinavian AC

The inherent limitations of a specific pencil beam model have been studied when applied to a cylindrical geometry simulating the neck region. A comparison is made between measured and calculated absorbed dose in a cylindrical phantom. The goal is to quantify the deviations in the absorbed dose level, i.e., the dose per monitor unit, when photons are used for the treatment of head and neck tumours.

An algebraic integer is called an epsilon-Pisot number (epsilon > 0) if its Galois conjugates have absolute value less then epsilon. Let K be any real algebraic number field. We prove that the subset of K consisting of epsilon-Pisot numbers which have the same degree as that of the field is relatively dense in the real line R. This has some applications to non-stationary products of random matrice

In order to improve the forecasts of the impact of solar activity on the terrestrial environment on time scales longer than days, improved understanding and forecasts of the solar activity are needed. The first results of a new approach of modelling and forecasting solar activity are presented. Time series of solar activity indicators, such as sunspot number, group sunspot number, F10.7, E10.7, so

Potato is one of the world's most widely grown tuber crop, in which starch is the predominant form of carbohydrates. Potatoes can be prepared in many ways: boiled, fried or roasted. Frying and roasting potatoes at high temperatures result in an appetizing crust, but at the same time acrylamide can form. In this study, the concentrations of the acrylamide precursors, asparagine and sugars, were det

The dynamics of a swirl-stabilized premixed flame is studied using large eddy simulation (LES). A filtered flamelet model is used to account for the subgrid combustion. The model provides a consistent and robust reaction-diffusion expression for simulating the propagation of turbulent premixed flames correctly. The numerical results were found to be relatively insensitive to small changes in the i

In 1985 Siegenthaler introduced the concept of correlation attacks on LFSR based stream ciphers. A few years later Meier and Staffelbach demonstrated a special technique, usually referred to as fast correlation attacks, that is very effective if the feedback polynomial has a special form, namely, if its weight is very low. Due to this seminal result, it is a well known fact that one avoids low wei

Investment appraisal concerned with investments in fire safety systems is discussed. Particular attention is directed at evaluating, in terms of the Bayesian decision theory, the risk reduction that investment in a fire safety system involves. It is shown how the monetary value of the change from a building design without any specific fire protection system to one including such a system can be es

A small population of Primula elatior has recently been found in a virgin swampy forest close to the southeastern shore of lake Ringsjon in Stehag parish. Here it grows in fully natural vegetation together with e.g. Anemone ranunculoides, Paris quadrifolia, Listera ovata, Ranunculus auricomus and Viola epipsila and there are no reasons to suspect that the population is anything but spontaneous. Un

To every analytic function $g$ in the unit disk $\bold D$ one associates the integral operator $T_g(f)(z)\coloneq z^{-1}\int^z_0f(\xi)g'(\xi)d\xi$ on spaces of analytic functions in $\bold D$. Operators of this form appear naturally in complex analysis. For instance, the choice $g(z)\equiv z$ leads to the integration operator, and the choice $g(z)=\log(1/(1-z))$ leads to the Cesàro operator. The

Ontological analysis facilitates microarray data interpretation. We describe new ontological analysis methods which, unlike existing approaches, are threshold-free and statistically powerful. We perform extensive evaluations and introduce a new concept, detection spectra, to characterize methods. We show that different ontological analysis methods exhibit distinct detection spectra, and that it is