Sweden

The course reviews vision and other types of photoreception, olfaction, taste, hearing, equilibrium, mechanoreception, pressure reception, electroreception, magnetoreception, and senses for temperature and heat radiation. All senses are studied comparatively across the animal kingdom. A range of methods in physiology, ethology, and human psychophysics are taught and used during the course. The course is divided into sections covering different levels of organization. The sections include: the molecular machinery of sensory receptors; the design and function of sensory organs; neuroanatomy, neural processing, and integration of sensory information; and the role of sensory information in behavior and in the adaptation of animals to their environment (sensory ecology). Towards the end of the course, each student carries out a major practical project specializing in one area of sensory biology. The project results are discussed at a full-day symposium organized at a field station.

The course intends to extend Swedish vocabulary and the ability to adapt the use of language to different communicative situations while developing the ability to engage in debates and discussions in Swedish. Written proficiency and the knowledge of stylistic variation in Swedish are practiced through the study of factual texts and text analysis. Active vocabulary is enlarged through reading modern Swedish literature. The pronunciation and grammar exercises are assisted by computer-based language programs in a language laboratory.

The course offers a basic introduction to methods for the evaluation of health promotion activities. Half of the course specializes in health economic evaluations (cost-effectiveness) with a focus on prevention, interventions, and treatments to improve or protect the health of the individual or the population. Why and how economic evaluations are made, with special focus on assessing current examples in the literature are reviewed. The other half of the course focuses on effect evaluations in non-controlled research designs by means of quasi-experimental methods, which are used when randomization has not been carried out and tries to replicate a randomized experiment. The course introduces the most common methods, discusses their advantages and disadvantages, and how one can assess the application of the method in current examples from the literature. The course has an international perspective with respect to applications and analyses.

The course establishes a foundation for understanding and analyzing information and information systems in organizations. It provides an overview of technical and organizational aspects of decision support systems (DSS), including individual, group, and organizational DSS as well as executive information systems (EIS). Management of DSS and EIS within the end-user computing environment are also discussed. The course covers more recent technologies, including Data Warehouse / Data Mining, and OLAP technologies. The course is design-oriented and emphasizes conceptual foundations of DSS and EIS, but DSS software reviews, demonstrations, laboratory lessons, and case examples are also included.