Popular education and the digital citizen: a genealogical analysis

This paper historicises and problematises the concept of the digital citizen and how it is constructed in Sweden today. Specifically, it examines the role of popular education in such an entanglement. It makes use of a genealogical analysis to produce a critical ‘history of the present’ by mapping out the debates and controversies around the emergence of the digital citizen in the 1970s and 1980s, and following to its manifestations in contemporary debates. This article argues that free and voluntary adult education (popular education) is and has been fundamental in efforts to construe the digital citizen. A central argument of the paper is that popular education aiming for digital inclusion is not a 21st century phenomenon; it actually commenced in the 1970s. However, this digitisation of citizens has also changed focus dramatically since the 1970s. During the 1970s, computers and computerisation were described as disconcerting, and as requiring popular education in order to counter the risk of the technology “running wild”. In current discourses, digitalisation is constructed in a non-ideological and post-political way. These post-political tendencies of today can be referred to as a post-digital present where computers have become so ordinary, domesticized and ubiquitous in everyday life that they are thereby also beyond criticism. (DIPF/Orig.

Early Nordic compilers and autocodes

Abstract. The early development of compilers for high-level program-ming languages, and of so-called autocoding systems, is well documented at the international level but not as regards the Nordic countries. The goal of this paper is to provide a survey of compiler and autocode development in the Nordic countries in the early years, roughly 1953 to 1965, and to relate it to international developments. We also touch on some of the historical societal context

PRIMA — Privacy research through the perspective of a multidisciplinary mash up

Based on a summary description of privacy protection research within three fields of inquiry, viz. social sciences, legal science, and computer and systems sciences, we discuss multidisciplinary approaches with regard to the difficulties and the risks that they entail as well as their possible advantages. The latter include the identification of relevant perspectives of privacy, increased expressiveness in the formulation of research goals, opportunities for improved research methods, and a boost in the utility of invested research efforts

The fate of the missing spores

It is well-known that many species with small diaspores can disperse far during extended temporal scales (many years). However, studies on short temporal scales usually only cover short distances (in, e.g., bryophytes up to 15 m). By using a novel experimental design, studying the realized dispersal, we extend this range by almost two orders of magnitude. We recorded establishment of the fast-growing moss Discelium nudum on introduced suitable substrates, placed around a translocated, sporulating mother colony. Around 2,000 pots with acidic clay were placed at different distances between 5 m and 600 m, in four directions, on a raised bog, with increased pot numbers with distance. The experiment was set up in April-May and the realized dispersal (number of colonized pots) was recorded in September. Close to the mother colony (up to 10 m), the mean colonization rates (ratio of colonized pots) exceeded 50%. At distances between 10 and 50 m colonization dropped sharply, but beyond 50 m the mean colonization rates stabilized and hardly changed (1-3%). The estimated density of spores causing establishments at the further distances (2-6 spores/m2) was realistic when compared to the estimated spore output from the central colonies. Our study supports calculations from earlier studies, limited to short distances, that a majority of the spores disperse beyond the nearest vicinity of a source. The even colonization pattern at further distances raises interesting questions about under what conditions spores are transported and deposited. However, it is clear that regular establishment is likely at the km-scale for this and many other species with similar spore output and dispersal mechanism

European Arctic Initiatives Compendium

Julkaistu versi

“You Feel The Threat From Asia”. Onshore Experiences of IT Offshoring To India

This article investigates the experiences of employees and managers in Swedish companies that offshore IT services to India, focusing on how implementation of offshoring is changing the work organization and working conditions for software developers onsite. Our analysis highlights the fact that the working conditions have been significantly redesigned in several different ways because of offshoring, most obviously due to the need for knowledge transfer between the onshore and the offshore working sites. The study illustrates how employees and managers onsite utilized different strategies for knowledge transfer and how these strategies were more or less successful, sometimes due to resistance from employees. The article concludes that, although offshoring contributed to a separation of conception from execution in these companies, there were few signs of routinization of daily work tasks for onsite employees. Instead, it was the routinized and noncore tasks that were offshored while project management tasks were taken over by onsite staff, which meant that they ended up in a superior position vis-à-vis their Indian colleagues as new global hierarchies were created. Power relations at work, both within firms and between firms, are thus brought to light

Historical floras reflect broad shifts in flowering phenology in response to a warming climate

Organisms across the globe are experiencing shifts in phenological events as a result of ongoing climate change. Recently, a variety of novel methods have been applied in order to fill gaps in the phenological data set, in which records often have a patchy temporal, spatial, and/or taxonomic resolution. Here, I tested whether changes in flowering phenology could be detected through the months of flowering stated in 11 guides to the Swedish flora published over a period of 220 yr (1798-2018), focussing on 241 plant species (approximately 8% of the Swedish flora), and accounting for the large increase in herbarium records that have occurred over the same period. Despite the coarse, monthly scale of flowering times reported, historical floras and wildflower guides may hold potential to fill temporal and taxonomic gaps in the plant phenological data set. However, factors other than climate may also influence any apparent phenological shifts over time. Here, flowering was found to start earlier (0.49 d/decade), end later (0.71 d/decade), and carry on longer (1.19 d/decade), with flowering length also associated with increases in the regional temperature anomaly during the 20th century (0.11 months/degrees C). First flowering occurring earlier in 71% of species (14% showing a significant negative trend), 68% of species ceased flowering later (20%), and 80% flowered for longer (29%). Detected phenological shifts also appeared to be related to species' flowering seasonality. Later-flowering species were found to flower later and for longer, while increasing temperatures appeared to drive stronger responses both in flowering onset in early-flowering species and in flowering cessation in later-flowering species. Although potential issues exist regarding the largely unknown ways by which authors have determined flowering times and the coarseness of the data, historical floras may be a useful resource in phenological and climate change research, with the potential to both identify and compare the broad climatic responses of a region's entire flora over long time periods, as well as filling gaps in an otherwise patchy data set

Pregnancy-related risk factors for sex cord-stromal tumours and germ cell tumours in parous women : a registry-based study

Background Non-epithelial ovarian cancers are divided into sex cord-stromal tumours (SCSTs) and germ cell tumours (GCTs). Whereas parity and other pregnancy-related factors are protective for epithelial ovarian cancer, their associations with SCSTs and GCTs remains unclear. Methods Using data from the medical birth registries from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, we compared all parous women with a diagnosis of SCSTs (n = 420) or GCTs (n = 345) 1970-2013 with up to 10 parous controls (SCSTs n = 4041; GCTs n = 2942) matched on the cases' birth year and country. We used conditional logistic regression to estimate odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of associations between pregnancy-related factors and SCSTs and GCTs. Results The risk of SCSTs, but not GCTs, decreased with higher age at last birth [>= 40 versusPeer reviewe

Chapter 4: The Swedish Model

This chapter tries to explain the strong performance of public finances in Sweden and looks at what lessons for other countries can be drawn. Section 4.2 reviews the development of public finances over time. Section 4.3 begins by surveying the research on why fiscal policy in modern democracies may be subject to a deficit bias and then discusses how the fiscal framework established in Sweden may have helped to contain such tendencies. The importance of output growth to fiscal consolidation is highlighted in Section 4.4. Section 4.5 sums up the conclusions.