Sick of your colleagues' absence?

We utilize a large-scale randomized social experiment to identify how coworkers affect each other’s effort as measured by work absence. The experiment altered the work absence incentives for half of all employees living in Göteborg, Sweden. Using administrative data we are able to recover the treatment status of all workers in more than 3,000 workplaces. We first document that employees in workplaces with a high proportion treated co-workers increase their own absence levels significantly. We then examine the heterogeneity of the treatment effect in order to explore what mechanisms are underlying the peer effect. While a strong effect of having a high proportion of treated coworkers is found for the nontreated workers, no significant effects are found for the treated workers. These results suggest that pure altruistic social preferences can be ruled out as the main motivator for the behaviour of a nonnegligible proportion of the employees in our sample.Social interactions; employer emkloyee data; work absence; fairness; reciprocal preferences

Applications using estimates of forest parameters derived from satellite and forest inventory data

From the combination of optical satellite data, digital map data, and forest inventory plot data, continuous estimates have been made for several forest parameters (wood volume, age and biomass). Five different project areas within Sweden are presented which have utilized these estimates for a range of applications. The method for estimating the forest parameters was a ”k-Nearest Neighbor” algorithm, which used a weighted mean value of k spectrally similar reference plots. Reference data were obtained from the Swedish National Forest Inventory. The output was continuous estimates at the pixel level for each of the variables estimated. Validation results show that accuracy of the estimates for all parameters was low at the pixel level (e.g., for total wood volume RMSE ranged from 58-80%), with a tendency toward the mean, and an underestimation of higher values while overestimating lower values. However, when the accuracy of the estimates is assessed over larger areas, the errors are lower, with best results being 10% RMSE over a 100 ha aggregation, and 17% RMSE over a 19 ha aggregation. Applications presented in this paper include moose and bird habitat studies, county level planning activities, use as input information to prognostic programs, and computation of statistics on timber volume within drainage basins and smaller land holdings. This paper provides a background on the kNN method and gives examples of how end users are currently applying satellite-produced estimation data such as these

Sick of Your Colleagues' Absence?

We utilize a large-scale randomized social experiment to identify how coworkers affect each other's effort as measured by work absence. The experiment altered the work absence incentives for half of all employees living in Göteborg, Sweden. Using administrative data we are able to recover the treatment status of all workers in more than 3,000 workplaces. We first document that employees in workplaces with a high proportion treated coworkers increase their own absence level significantly. We then examine the heterogeneity of the treatment effect in order to explore what mechanisms are underlying the peer effect. While a strong effect of having a high proportion of treated coworkers is found for the nontreated workers, no significant effects are found for the treated workers. These results suggest that pure altruistic social preferences can be ruled out as the main motivator for the behaviour of a nonnegligible proportion of the employees in our sample.social interactions, employer employee data, work absence, fairness, reciprocal preferences

An action for the super-5-brane in D=11 supergravity

An alternative path is taken for deriving an action for the supersymmetric 5-brane in 11 dimensions. Selfduality does not follow from the action, but is consistent with the equations of motion for arbitrary supergravity backgrounds. The action involves a 2-form as well as a 5-form world-volume potential; inclusion of the latter makes the action, as well as the non-linear selfduality relation for the 3-form field strength, polynomial. The requirement of invariance under kappa-transformations determines the form of the selfduality relation, as well as the action. The formulation is shown to be equivalent to earlier formulations of 5-brane dynamics.Comment: plain tex, 8pp. Essential correction to the selfduality equation. Added paragraph showing equivalence to other formulation

Delegation Success and Policy Failure: Collective Delegation and the Search for Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction

Tierney argues that international delegation can have important consequences, even for powerful states. In particular, he contends that the US delegation of inspection authority to United Nations weapons inspectors and to the International Atomic Energy Association after the Gulf War of 1990-91 entailed significant sovereignty costs by affecting the timing and costliness of the subsequent 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Among other things, he notes that the inspectors\u27 independent behavior made it much more difficult for the US to assemble the type of multilateral coalition that would share the costs as it had in the earlier Gulf War. Tierney also notes that this example shows how different states can pay different costs as the result of the same episode of international delegation

Tourism in Cold Water Islands: A Matter of Contract? Experiences from Destination Management in the Polar North

Lack of local understanding and low preparedness for tourism characterise many remote communities of the Polar North, thus undermining positive attitudes towards tourism even if tourism is seen as a development force. The relatively new interest in Arctic regions as a tourist destination combined with different exogenous forces like globalization and climate change make the situation even more complex. The peripheral and insular location often renders cruise tourism as the only option. Under these circumstances, the readiness to accept tourism as a development tool varies from destination to destination, ranging from being seen as a passport to development to a threat to local culture and traditional life. In order to bridge these perception gaps, the idea of a mental or written contract between tourists and local residents is discussed

Development and Demonstration of New Technology for the use of Wind Turbines on Ships

Technology to substantially reduce commercial ship fuel consumption by harnessing sea winds for simultaneous generation of electricity and thrust, has been developed by the company PROPit AB. The basic idea is to apply conventional wind turbine technology for the marine environment, where the turbine will also take the function of sails. Primary target market is tankers or bulk ships with a large and open deck space. Chalmers, in a study co-sponsored by the Swedish Energy Agency and Chalmers Energy Centre, 2011, confirmed fuel saving estimates around 15-30 % for optimal routes, but with higher uncertainties

Lower secondary school students’ reasoning about compound probability in spinner tasks

In this paper we investigate the different ways in which students in lower secondary school (14–15 year-olds) reason about compound stochastic events (CSE). We ask students during clinical interviews to respond to CSE-tasks in a spinner context, where two linked spinners display equal or different sizes of red and white areas. We seek to enrich our knowledge of how students make sense of CSE by not focusing exclusively on sample-space grounded reasoning. We open up the analysis to how students’ reasoning can reflect aspects of multiplicative reasoning in relation to The Product Law of Probability. Our results show that students have difficulty in applying well-grounded combinatorial reasoning as well as multiplicative reasoning to the tasks, but they do show intuitive reasoning that reflect aspects of The Product Law of Probability. Two ways of reasoning identified in the current study are area-based part-whole reasoning and lowest-chance reasoning.publishedVersionUnit Licence Agreemen

“Be Brave Like Ukraine”: Strategic Communication and the Mediatization of War

This article synthesizes the authors’ earlier research on strategic communication in Ukraine during its first year of enduring Russia’s full-scale invasion and the subsequent war of aggression in 2022. The analysis is framed within the academic fields of strategic communication, military innovation theory, and theories on the mediatization of war. It aims to provide a nuanced understanding of Ukrainian strategic communication by focusing on how it is shaped and functions within specific historical, cultural, political, and social milieus, thus offering a holistic view of its evolution and impact during wartime. The article highlights the importance of approaching strategic communications as an all-encompassing task, engaging government bodies and the wider academic society for an evidence-based policy-based lessons-learned approach. It is argued that the Ukrainian case illustrates that effective strategic communication is deeply intertwined with consistent action, societal unity, political strategy, and national identity