Race: What is it good for? : a social constructionist analysis of the argumentation underlying the eventual discard of race from Swedish legislation

Recently former minister of integration Erik Ullenhag proclaimed the eventual discard of the concept of race from Swedish legislation. This is legitimized by referencing towards the potential harmful effects the existence of race in legislation has on combatting racism. The decision spawned support as well as resistance from several sources within Swedish society, both advocating for that the own understanding of race is the path forward in attaining racial equality. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an argumentative analysis of the argumentation underlying the eventual discard of race in two broadcasted debates, two interviews and two SOUs to initially determine how the function of race is depicted and how a discard is legitimized. A social constructionist analysis will then follow as an evaluative tool to discern if the argumentation can be considered legitimate. Initially I arrived at the conclusion that the function of race is contextualized by the arguments expressed with the effect of stipulatively defining it to solely function for negative and racist purposes. The social constructionist analysis deployed highlighted this simplified understanding of race with references towards how race might instead be viewed as an important part of a group’s collective history and identification. Certain attention was also paid to why ethnicity and skin-color are not adequate substitutes, the claim that race is different in Sweden and why a proclaimed lack of individuality within race might be beneficial. It was conclusively decided that the argumentation underlying the eventual discard should not be viewed as logically sound and thus not legitimate. Finally the need for further clarification in to how these different stipulative definitions meet the sufficient and not only the necessary conditions for combatting racism was highlighted

The Cerevoice Blizzard Entry 2007: Are Small Database Errors Worse than Compression Artifacts?

In commercial systems the memory footprint of unit selection systems is often a key issue. This is especially true for PDAs and other embedded devices. In this years Blizzard entry CereProc R○gave itself the criteria that the full database system entered would have a smaller memory footprint than either of the two smaller database entries. This was accomplished by applying speex speech compression to the full database entry. In turn a set of small database techniques used to improve the quality of small database systems in last years entry were extended. Finally, for all systems, two quality control methods were applied to the underlying database to improve the lexicon and transcription match to the underlying data. Results suggest that mild audio quality artifacts introduced by lossy compression have almost as much impact on MOS perceived quality as concatenation errors introduced by sparse data in the smaller systems with bulked diphones. Index Terms: speech synthesis, unit selection. 1

CSR Reporting in the Airline Industry - An Analysis of the Development of Airlines’ CSR Reporting

This thesis aims to track the development of CSR and sustainability reporting in the airline industry. The emphasis is set only on the reporting practices and not on the companies’ CSR and sustainability activities per se. To analyse the development, a qualitative content analysis with a longitudinal-comparative research design was adopted. This thesis uses an inductive approach, discussing potential reasons for certain trends and developments. The aspects to be considered in the analysis were determined based on general qualitative characteristics of accounting reports, based on the IASB and GRI frameworks. The empirical material consists of sustainability, environmental and annual reports that were available on the airlines’ websites. The sample contains 20 airlines, 12 network, six low-cost and two cargo airlines. The primary focus was to include airlines from the most significant aviation markets. One of the major results of the thesis is that the awareness of sustainability topics among airlines started to receive attention especially during the last decade. Even though airlines seem to have or still put efforts into making their own reports comparable, comparability across different carriers’ reports and the presented measures is not yet achieved and is not expected to do so in the near future. Other observations include the increased use of the GRI framework and the use of assurance for sustainability related information

The Error is the Feature: how to Forecast Lightning using a Model Prediction Error

Despite the progress within the last decades, weather forecasting is still a challenging and computationally expensive task. Current satellite-based approaches to predict thunderstorms are usually based on the analysis of the observed brightness temperatures in different spectral channels and emit a warning if a critical threshold is reached. Recent progress in data science however demonstrates that machine learning can be successfully applied to many research fields in science, especially in areas dealing with large datasets. We therefore present a new approach to the problem of predicting thunderstorms based on machine learning. The core idea of our work is to use the error of two-dimensional optical flow algorithms applied to images of meteorological satellites as a feature for machine learning models. We interpret that optical flow error as an indication of convection potentially leading to thunderstorms and lightning. To factor in spatial proximity we use various manual convolution steps. We also consider effects such as the time of day or the geographic location. We train different tree classifier models as well as a neural network to predict lightning within the next few hours (called nowcasting in meteorology) based on these features. In our evaluation section we compare the predictive power of the different models and the impact of different features on the classification result. Our results show a high accuracy of 96% for predictions over the next 15 minutes which slightly decreases with increasing forecast period but still remains above 83% for forecasts of up to five hours. The high false positive rate of nearly 6% however needs further investigation to allow for an operational use of our approach.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Goodwill - Efterföljande värderingsproblematik

Syfte: Att belysa de problem som finns vid värdeprövningen av goodwill. Tyngdpunkten ligger på problemen kring kassaflödesvärderingen av goodwill. Metod: Utifrån vår problemformulering har vi valt att använda oss av en kvalitativ metod. Vi har samlat in data från litteratur, intervjuer, regelverk samt artiklar och studier. Detta har vi bearbetat och analyserat för att komma fram till vår konklusion. Vi har utgått från en induktiv ansats då våra teorier har formats under arbetets gång. Teoretiska perspektiv: Vi har utgått från olika amerikanska och svenska studier som exemplifierar hur kreativ redovisning används vid nedskrivningsprövningar. Vi har även undersökt ett exempel på kassaflödesvärdering som kan användas ute i företagen. Empiri: Består av intervjuer som gjorts med två revisorsexperter inom området företagsvärdering samt en partner på en revisionsbyrå. I vår empiridel ingår även IFRS standarder IAS 36, IAS 38 och IFRS 3 samt basis for conclusion till den reviderade IAS 36 och en redogörelse för projektet Business combinations. Konklusion: Tanken bakom nedskrivningsprövningar var väl grundade i teorin men dess tillämpning i verkligheten medför att en jämförelse mellan företagen försämrats. Vi anser att tillförlitligheten kring nedskrivningsprövningar kan ifrågasättas. Att relevansen ska ha ökat ser vi inte några indikationer på p.g.a. informationen som ges är svår för användaren att förstå samt skapa sig en helhet av. Möjligheten till att goodwill ska värderas till något annat än en residualpost vid förvärvstillfället ser vi som en omöjlighet i praktiken. Tanken med nedskrivningsprövning av goodwill var att postens storlek skulle minska vilket inte inträffade. En identifiering av flera immateriella tillgångar av goodwillvärdet är ett sätt att minska goodwillpostens storlek. Standarden IAS 36 ger utrymme till att välja två beräkningssätt vid bestämmandet av nyttjandevärdet och denna svaghet bidrar också till en minskad jämförbarhet mellan företagen. Sedan kan företagen utgå från sin syn på verkligheten när de konstruerar de prognoser som ligger till grund för de siffror som finns i dessa beräkningar. Detta ökar ledningens möjlighet till påverkan på nedskrivningsprövningen där en förhoppningsfull framtidstro kan göra att goodwillvärdet ligger kvar på samma nivå. Vi anser att implementeringen av nedskrivningsprövningar inte fått den effekt som IASB avsedde

Critical Field Strength in an Electroclinic Liquid Crystal Elastomer

We elucidate the polymer dynamics of a liquid crystal elastomer based on the time-dependent response of the pendent liquid crystal mesogens. The molecular tilt and switching time of mesogens are analyzed as a function of temperature and cross-linking density upon application of an electric field. We observe an unexpected maximum in the switching time of the liquid crystal mesogens at intermediate field strength. Analysis of the molecular tilt over multiple time regimes correlates the maximum response time with a transition to entangled polymer dynamics at a critical field strength.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Repetitive DNA is associated with centromeric domains in Trypanosoma brucei but not Trypanosoma cruzi

Centromeres in Trypanosoma cruzi and Trypanosoma brucei can be localised to regions between directional gene clusters that contain degenerate retroelements, and in the case of T. brucei, repetitive DNA