Exterior Colours at Rural Dwellings in Southern Sweden during the 19th Century - To increase knowledge regarding local differentiations

Abstract The project’s main objective is to verify the existence of local colours and colour schemes in the exteriors of buildings. The research focused on 19th century dwellings in the rural areas of southern Sweden. The results and furthermore the conclusions are presumed to reveal locally differentiated colours used and to indicate rules governing the way in which the colours were combined during different periods within the delimited time and in various geographical local areas. One point of specific interest concerns the possibility of presenting the original layer of paint, since this could be considered as the choice indicating the expressions of the architectural grammar of the façades at the time when the building was erected. To find out of the colours during the 19th century, certain geographical areas containing adequate building objects had to be chosen. Short interviews with building archaeologists took place to find out of the right geographical areas. The criterion was façades with building materials covered with paint that could be assumed to date from the delimited time. Ten geographical areas were established and, on the strength of findings from the ocular investigations, four geographical areas were selected for further investigation. This final part of the thesis is based on an investigation conducted in local areas in Lister hundred, Blekinge County. The investigations mainly involved studies of archival materials, iconographic materials, short interviews, Scanning Electronic Microscopic analyses, colour steps and microscopic analyses of cross-sections. When co-ordinated, the different sources indicated the presence of local colours and colour schemes. To corroborate the thesis, further research was undertaken. The investigations were therefore intensified within one of the geographical areas identified. In this area more microscopic analyses were performed of cross-sections, partly on new buildings in the areas but also on new structural details of buildings investigated previously. Through this deepened investigation it was possible to make the results more distinct and reliable. To reach a deeper understanding of the context at the time when the buildings were erected, actor network theory was tried out. This made it possible to achieve a wider interpretation of the materials from the other sources and so to draw conclusions with a clearer relation to the situation underlying the decision to paint the dwellings. The results will be used to discern rules for local differentiations, presented as reconstructions of the colour schemes from the local areas within the project’s delimitations. Though the colour schemes will be indicated at the building objects within the project's delimitations, the results will be applicable to new colour schemes for different settlements, both new and historical, and the method of investigating groups of buildings is an approach amenable to generalisation in other areas as well

Deep representation learning for human motion prediction and classification

Generative models of 3D human motion are often restricted to a small number of activities and can therefore not generalize well to novel movements or applications. In this work we propose a deep learning framework for human motion capture data that learns a generic representation from a large corpus of motion capture data and generalizes well to new, unseen, motions. Using an encoding-decoding network that learns to predict future 3D poses from the most recent past, we extract a feature representation of human motion. Most work on deep learning for sequence prediction focuses on video and speech. Since skeletal data has a different structure, we present and evaluate different network architectures that make different assumptions about time dependencies and limb correlations. To quantify the learned features, we use the output of different layers for action classification and visualize the receptive fields of the network units. Our method outperforms the recent state of the art in skeletal motion prediction even though these use action specific training data. Our results show that deep feedforward networks, trained from a generic mocap database, can successfully be used for feature extraction from human motion data and that this representation can be used as a foundation for classification and prediction.Comment: This paper is published at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 201

On the continuity of old Saami religion

The purpose of my paper is to draw attention to the fact that old Saami religion is not entirely extinct. For example, sacrificial traditions, continued to live on long after the arrival of missionaries and other such activities among the Saamis. The question now is whether such sacrificing customs and similar traditions were current even later than what research has suggested and if so, how late in time. I wish to cast some light on this problem by presenting a number of examples taken in part from the literature about the Saamis, in part from personal communications from other scholars and in part from my own interviews observations in the field. What we can note is that certain traditional elements of Saami religion—at least in a few individual cases and in part perhaps in somewhat changed form—have continued to exist right up to quite recent times and, indeed, still live on, above all in the southerly parts of the region inhabited by the Lapps. In cases where the practice of making offerings ceased, the people still continued to show respect and veneration for the religious sites and could even experience something of the force emanating from them. They therefore felt a need to shield themselves from these forces and consequently followed the traditional practices. Early Saami religion and Christianity undoubtedly continued to exist side by side. It is possible that in their traditional livelihoods and even in life in general they resorted to their former well-tried religion, especially when all else failed

Traditional Saami hunting in relation to drum motifs of animals and hunting

The focus of this paper is on the traditional Saami hunting in relation to the animal and hunting motifs on their drum, more specifially the southern Saami drums. One may wonder if it is possible for anyone to interpret a picture unconditionally. One has a certain ground of one's own to stand on and the question arises of whether this is the correct position, when -as in the present case — we approach another culture. We naturally include the experiences of our own culture in interpretations of another culture. The animal which is the commonest species on the southern Saami drums, is the reindeer. Other animals that occur are elks, wolves, beavers, foxes, snakes, among others. Considering the Saamis' hunting weapons, the most important of these were the bow and arrow, and the spear or spear shaft. Of these weapons it is the bow which is most often portrayed on drums. Also some trapping implement like a gin may appear on a drum, but in general we have little or no information about hunting or trapping methods at all

A stately affair? The clash of national and supranational institutions in a post-compliance process – the case of Swedish interconnectors

The area of electricity is politically poorly explored. Yet, it is something that affects citizens of the European Union daily. In 2003 the electricity market became a part of the internal market project. This thesis is a case study of the case of Swedish interconnectors, which principal-supervisor-agent analysis to illustrate the institutional conflicts that arise when national and European institutions cooperative in a post-compliance process. Due to a complaint in 2006 the Swedish transmission operator, Svenska Kraftnät, was reported to the European Commission for possible breach of article 102 Treaty of the functioning of the European Union. This eventually led to a division of the Swedish electricity market’s core grid system into four bidding zones. This thesis explores the interaction between the different actors of the case, Svenska Kraftnät, the European Commission and the Swedish state, and how the interaction affected the institutions’ ability to reach an internal market. This thesis will find that even though the institutions strive towards the same objective, conflict tend to arise nonetheless, which affects the institutions’ ability to fulfil the political ambition of an internal market. Instead the turnout is politically suboptimal, where a lack of objectives, possible accountability and information can be noted