Invitation systems and identification in Late Iron Age southern Scandinavia? The gold foil figures from a new perspective

The ability to identify oneself has always been important, because people in all periods entered into relationships in which their role depended upon their identity. This must have been of great importance to long-distance connections in prehistory, in cases where people did not know the appearance of the foreign individuals they were to connect with. The aim of this article is to present an idea of how a system of identification may have been established. It is intended as ‘food for thought’ on the subject. Gold foil figures could have played a role in prehistoric invitation systems, the identification of a person’s true identity and in the dependency upon magnates in southern Scandinavia during the 6th–8th centuries AD. The gold foil figures may have been tokens issued by the magnate and served as invitations to special events, at a time when there was apparently a preoccupation with organising cult activities at the elite residences and restricting places at and admission to such events. The figures did not guarantee that it was the right guests who arrived on these occasions, but presenting this type of token may have minimised the risk of allowing in impostors

CAUSE: Learning Granger Causality from Event Sequences using Attribution Methods

We study the problem of learning Granger causality between event types from asynchronous, interdependent, multi-type event sequences. Existing work suffers from either limited model flexibility or poor model explainability and thus fails to uncover Granger causality across a wide variety of event sequences with diverse event interdependency. To address these weaknesses, we propose CAUSE (Causality from AttribUtions on Sequence of Events), a novel framework for the studied task. The key idea of CAUSE is to first implicitly capture the underlying event interdependency by fitting a neural point process, and then extract from the process a Granger causality statistic using an axiomatic attribution method. Across multiple datasets riddled with diverse event interdependency, we demonstrate that CAUSE achieves superior performance on correctly inferring the inter-type Granger causality over a range of state-of-the-art methods

Case Studies of Six Social Enterprises in Kenya

As part of the greater focus on the role of firms and entrepreneurship in development, spotlight has recently fallen upon so-called ‘social enterprises’. Social enterprises are organizations that operate in the borderland between the for-profit and non-for-profit spheres. The inherent purpose of social enterprises is generation of social change through commercial means which is effectuated through innovative business model hybrids. At the bottom of pyramid (BOP) in developing Sub-Saharan Africa, the need for sustainable solutions is greater than ever and social enterprises are increasingly in focus as key players in sustainable development. Kenya constitutes a suitable location for the collection of empirical evidence on social enterprises at the BOP, partly because Kenya is a regional forerunner in the promotion of an entrepreneurial business culture, partly because Kenya displays many of the poverty related development challenges endemic to Sub-Saharan Africa. Hence, this paper presents six tales of social enterprises from the Kenyan BOP, who all have managed to pursue a social agenda while at the same time achieving commercial viability. While the cases contribute to the BOP literature as each constitutes solid evidence of social routes to success at the BOP, they also reveal important dilemmas facing managers who each day are forced to make difficult decisions in order to strike the right balance between achieving both commercial and social goals. Thereby the paper also adds significant value to the ongoing discussions in the social enterprise literature. Besides constituting important empirical evidence from the inadequately investigated area of social enterprises at the BOP, the cases provide basis for raising important conceptual issues related to the boundaries of social and traditional commercial enterprises