Swedish labour market and the free movement of labour

Ever since Sweden decided to join the EU in 1995 the debate regarding effects of the free movement of labour has been discussed. This discussion intensified when the union were faced with its largest expansion, to date, in 2004. Not only were ten new countries becoming members, and thus allowed to use the right of free movement of labour, but most of these were geographically close to Sweden and at the same time they were significantly poorer. This caused scholars, politicians and trade unions to raise a flag of warning that this would be unfavourable to the Swedish labour market. This study aims to examine how the Swedish labour market actually reacts to immigration from the EU/EES countries. By regressing the effects of percentage EU/EES immigrants in a municipality on average yearly wages and unemployment the effects of the free movement of labour will be assessed. The report concludes that the labour market is not negatively affected by EU/EES immigration, on the contrary it shows positive effect on total and female employment

Population-based study of antiepileptic drug exposure in utero—Influence on head circumference in newborns

AbstractPurposeTo study the effect of AED exposure on head circumference in the newborn.MethodsData on all Swedish singletons births between 1995 and 2005, over 900,000 births, were obtained from the Swedish Medical Birth Registry. The effects of AEDs on birth-weight-adjusted mean head circumference (bw-adj-HC) were estimated by comparison with data from all births in an analysis which was adjusted for year of birth, maternal age, parity, maternal smoking, and maternal body mass index.ResultsA significant reduction of mean bw-adj-HC was seen after both carbamazepine (CBZ) (standard deviation scores (SDS)=0.15, p<0.001) and valproic acid (VPA) (SDS=0.10, p=0.04) in monotherapy. No effect on mean bw-adj-HC was seen for phenytoin, clonazepam, lamotrigine and gabapentin. There was a significant increase in the occurrence of microcephaly (bw-adj-HC smaller than 2 SD below the mean) after any AED polytherapy (OR=2.85, 95% CI: 1.74–4.78) but not after AED monotherapy or monotherapy with CBZ or VPA. CBZ or VPA was taken by 71% of the pregnant mothers on AED, and the usage increased over time.ConclusionsCBZ and VPA in monotherapy during pregnancy reduce mean bw-adj-HC. AED polytherapy increases the rate of microcephaly but no significant effect is seen of AED monotherapy. The possible significance for the further development of the child is uncertain but should be explored

Towards Higher Code Quality in Scientific Computing

In scientific computing and data science, computer programs employing mathematical and statistical models are used for obtaining knowledge in different application domains. The results of these programs form the basis of among other things scientific papers and important desicions that may e.g. affect people's health. Consequently, correctness of the programs is of great importance. To reduce the risk of defects in the source code, and to not waste human resources, it is important that the code is maintainable, i.e. not unnecessarily hard to analyze, test, modify or reuse. For these reasons, this thesis strives towards increased maintainability and correctness in code bases for scientific computing and data science. Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm that facilitates writing maintainable code, by providing mechanisms for reuse and for division of code into smaller components with restricted access to each others data. Further, it makes extending a code base without changing the existing code possible, increasing flexibility and decreasing the risk of breaking existing functionality. However, in many cases, object-orientation trades its benefits for performance. For some scientific computing programs, performance is essential, e.g. because the results are unusable if they are produced too late. In the first part of this thesis, it is shown that object-oriented programming can be used to improve the quality of an important group of scientific computing programs, with only a small impact on performance. The aim of the second part of the thesis is to contribute to understanding of, and improve quality in, source code for data science. A large corpus of Jupyter notebooks, a tool frequently used by data scientists for writing code, is studied. Results presented suggest that cloned code, i.e. identical or close to identical code that recurs in different places, is common in Jupyter notebooks. Code cloning is important from a perspective of maintenance as well as for research. Additionally, the most frequently called library functions from Python, the language used in the vast majority of the notebooks, are studied. A large number of combinations of parameters for which it is possible to pass values that may lead to unexpected behavior or decreased maintainability are identified. The existence and consequences of occurrences of such combinations of values in the corpus are evaluated. To reduce the risk of future defects in source code calling these functions, improvements are suggested to the developers of the functions

Towards Higher Code Quality in Scientific Computing

In scientific computing and data science, computer programs employing mathematical and statistical models are used for obtaining knowledge in different application domains. The results of these programs form the basis of among other things scientific papers and important desicions that may e.g. affect people's health. Consequently, correctness of the programs is of great importance. To reduce the risk of defects in the source code, and to not waste human resources, it is important that the code is maintainable, i.e. not unnecessarily hard to analyze, test, modify or reuse. For these reasons, this thesis strives towards increased maintainability and correctness in code bases for scientific computing and data science. Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm that facilitates writing maintainable code, by providing mechanisms for reuse and for division of code into smaller components with restricted access to each others data. Further, it makes extending a code base without changing the existing code possible, increasing flexibility and decreasing the risk of breaking existing functionality. However, in many cases, object-orientation trades its benefits for performance. For some scientific computing programs, performance is essential, e.g. because the results are unusable if they are produced too late. In the first part of this thesis, it is shown that object-oriented programming can be used to improve the quality of an important group of scientific computing programs, with only a small impact on performance. The aim of the second part of the thesis is to contribute to understanding of, and improve quality in, source code for data science. A large corpus of Jupyter notebooks, a tool frequently used by data scientists for writing code, is studied. Results presented suggest that cloned code, i.e. identical or close to identical code that recurs in different places, is common in Jupyter notebooks. Code cloning is important from a perspective of maintenance as well as for research. Additionally, the most frequently called library functions from Python, the language used in the vast majority of the notebooks, are studied. A large number of combinations of parameters for which it is possible to pass values that may lead to unexpected behavior or decreased maintainability are identified. The existence and consequences of occurrences of such combinations of values in the corpus are evaluated. To reduce the risk of future defects in source code calling these functions, improvements are suggested to the developers of the functions

Political consequences of free trade: Chinese imports and the shift of political views in the EU

This study analyses the effect of an exogenous increase in Chinese imports on political views in 9 EU countries over the period 2000-2009 by exploiting initial regional variation in industry specialization of labour markets. The labour market data is combined with data on industry specific Chinese imports to create a measurement of region-specific exposure to import penetration. To avoid endogeneity, I instrument Chinese imports to the EU countries by Chinese imports to six extra-EU countries. By using information on respondents’ occupations, I decompose the effect by those directly, mainly manufacturing industries, and those indirectly affected by increased import penetration. Those directly affected become generally less trusting of established institutions as well as more likely to place their political views to the left on the political scale. The results also show the discontent arising from import penetration to be very general, suggesting that the change in political views is more populist in nature than aimed specifically anti-globalization

"Stress är både hur man har det och hur man tar det" : En kritisk diskursanalys av stress i dokument om arbetsmiljöarbete

I denna uppsats redogörs för en kritisk diskursanalytisk studie om konstruktionen av stress, vars syfte är att undersöka hur stress språkligt konstrueras i olika dokument om arbetsmiljöarbete. Vid analysförfarandet användes diskursanalytikern Norman Faircloughs tredimensionella analysmodell för lingvistisk och sociologisk forskning. Dennes kritiskt diskursanalytiska tankar utgör även studiens teoretiska referensram. Det analyserade materialet består av dokument om arbetsmiljöarbete mot stress, som Arbetsmiljöverket och Prevent har producerat. Uppsatsen innefattar en kartläggning över fältet för arbetsmiljöarbete och fenomenet stress, samt en presentation kring den tidigare forskning som studerats i studiens initierande fas. Denna forskning framställs genom de tre temana diskursiv påverkan, den normaliserande diskursen och individuella faktorer. Studiens resultat presenteras i de två delarna text och diskursiv praktik från Faircloughs analysmodell. Sammantaget innefattar den första resultatdelen text de fyra temana typ av text, modalitet, hyponymer och antonymer samt transitivitet. Under den andra resultatdelen diskursiv praktik återfinns de fyra diskurserna den utbildande diskursen, den arbetsrättsliga diskursen, den ohälsosamma diskursen och den vetenskapliga diskursen

Cesarean delivery and risk for postoperative adhesions and intestinal obstruction: a nested case-control study of the Swedish Medical Birth Registry

OBJECTIVE: The objective of the study was to estimate the risk for postoperative adhesions and intestinal obstruction after cesarean delivery and to estimate whether the rate remains stable over time. STUDY DESIGN: Women who had the aforementioned diagnoses in the Swedish Hospital Discharge Registry were linked to the Swedish Medical Birth Registry. Women with diagnoses increasing the risk for adhesions were excluded. More than 900,000 women were investigated. Risks were calculated and were adjusted for age, parity, body mass index, and smoking. RESULTS: Women delivered by cesarean delivery had an increased risk of adhesions: adjusted odds ratio, 2.1 (95% confidence interval, 1.8-2.4) and intestinal obstruction: adjusted odds ratio, 2.0 ( 95% confidence interval, 1.7-2.4). The number needed to harm was 360. Multiple caesarean deliveries increased the risk of adhesions. The risk did not increase over time. CONCLUSION: The absolute risk of postoperative adhesions and intestinal obstruction after cesarean section are low but should be included when counseling women requesting cesarean delivery

Jupyter Notebooks on GitHub : Characteristics and Code Clones

Jupyter notebooks has emerged as a standard tool for data science programming. Programs in Jupyter notebooks are different from typical programs as they are constructed by a collection of code snippets interleaved with text and visualisation. This allows interactive exploration and snippets may be executed in different order which may give rise to different results due to side-effects between snippets. Previous studies have shown the presence of considerable code duplication – code clones – in sources of traditional programs, in both so-called systems programming languages and so-called scripting languages. In this paper we present the first large-scale study of code cloning in Jupyter notebooks. We analyse a corpus of 2.7 million Jupyter notebooks hosted on GitHJub, representing 37 million individual snippets and 227 million lines of code. We study clones at the level of individual snippets, and study the extent to which snippets are recurring across multiple notebooks. We study both identical clones and approximate clones and conduct a small-scale ocular inspection of the most common clones. We find that code cloning is common in Jupyter notebooks – more than 70% of all code snippets are exact copies of other snippets (with possible differences in white spaces), and around 50% of all notebooks do not have any unique snippet, but consists solely of snippets that are also found elsewhere. In notebooks written in Python, at least 80% of all snippets are approximate clones and the prevalence of code cloning is higher in Python than in other languages. We further find that clones between different repositories are far more common than clones within the same repository. However, the most common individual repository from which a Jupyter notebook contains clones is the repository in which itself resides

Experimental Investigation of CaMnO3−δ Based Oxygen Carriers Used in Continuous Chemical-Looping Combustion

Three materials of perovskite structure, CaMn1−xMxO3−δ (M = Mg or Mg and Ti), have been examined as oxygen carriers in continuous operation of chemical-looping combustion (CLC) in a circulating fluidized bed system with the designed fuel power 300 W. Natural gas was used as fuel. All three materials were capable of completely converting the fuel to carbon dioxide and water at 900°C. All materials also showed the ability to release gas phase oxygen when fluidized by inert gas at elevated temperature (700–950°C); that is, they were suitable for chemical looping with oxygen uncoupling (CLOU). Both fuel conversion and oxygen release improved with temperature. All three materials also showed good mechanical integrity, as the fraction of fines collected during experiments was small. These results indicate that the materials are promising oxygen carriers for chemical-looping combustion