On administrative borders and accessibility to public services: : The case of hospitals in Sweden.

An administrative border might hinder the optimal allocation of a given set of resources by restricting the flow of goods, services, and people. In this paper we address the question: Do administrative borders lead to poor accessibility to public service such as hospitals? In answering the question, we have examined the case of Sweden and its regional borders. We have used detailed data on the Swedish road network, its hospitals, and its geo-coded population. We have assessed the population’s spatial accessibility to Swedish hospitals by computing the inhabitants’ distance to the nearest hospital. We have also elaborated several scenarios ranging from strongly confining regional borders to no confinements of borders and recomputed the accessibility. Our findings imply that administrative borders are only marginally worsening the accessibility.

Källkritik på Internet : En kvalitativ studie av den källkritiska medvetenheten hos gymnasieelever på samhällsprogrammet

This essay is an ideographic study over the capacity of high school students to use the Internet with source criticism, and their attitudes towards this media. It’s a qualitative study whose main purpose is to seek out how the students reflect upon the problems facing them when searching facts and information over the internet.The focus group is six 18 year old high school students, who are studying in a normal sized town in the middle of Sweden, and are about to finish their studies in the program for social sciences. The study was made through interviews, one on one with the students,The results of the analysis have shown that even if students not necessarily use a pre meditated method when searching for information over the internet, they do have a basic understanding of the matter, especially concerning the nature of the source, who published it and why. Not all students made any thorough comparison with other, already established media, such as TV or books, but the analysis made it clear that they more or less deliberately saw the established media as more trustworthy in general. Individuals publishing on the internet, such as bloggers and Wikipedia, are seen with the utmost skepticism while public institutions such as universities and public service TV, are generally trusted as being honest and objective, also when publishing on the internet.

Optimization heuristic solutions, how good can they be? : With empirical applications in location problems

Combinatorial optimization problems, are one of the most important types of problems in operational research. Heuristic and metaheuristics algorithms are widely applied to find a good solution. However, a common problem is that these algorithms do not guarantee that the solution will coincide with the optimum and, hence, many solutions to real world OR-problems are afflicted with an uncertainty about the quality of the solution. The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the usability of statistical bounds to evaluate the quality of heuristic solutions applied to large combinatorial problems. The contributions of this thesis are both methodological and empirical. From a methodological point of view, the usefulness of statistical bounds on p-median problems is thoroughly investigated. The statistical bounds have good performance in providing informative quality assessment under appropriate parameter settings. Also, they outperform the commonly used Lagrangian bounds. It is demonstrated that the statistical bounds are shown to be comparable with the deterministic bounds in quadratic assignment problems. As to empirical research, environment pollution has become a worldwide problem, and transportation can cause a great amount of pollution. A new method for calculating and comparing the CO2-emissions of online and brick-and-mortar retailing is proposed. It leads to the conclusion that online retailing has significantly lesser CO2-emissions. Another problem is that the Swedish regional division is under revision and the border effect to public service accessibility is concerned of both residents and politicians. After analysis, it is shown that borders hinder the optimal location of public services and consequently the highest achievable economic and social utility may not be attained.