| 1. |
- Balogh, Péter, 1982-
(författare)
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Perpetual borders : German-Polish cross-border contacts in the Szczecin area
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Borderlands are often peripheral geographically, administratively, and economically. A particularly illustrative case is the Szczecin area at the border between Poland and Germany, where a large city on one side neighbours to a sparsely populated hinterland on the other. There is a number of similar cases throughout Europe, but studies on them point to a mixed level of linkages following the opening and removal of the physical border.At the project’s start there were few if any studies on the Szczecin area per se, which was here studied through various methods. On the one hand, different pre-EU enlargement plans and visions for the area’s development were compared with practices and realities of recent years. This shows that earlier imaginations on the development potentials have not quite materialised, although some of them were probably too optimistic and ambitious from the beginning. Some of the area’s potentials following EU-enlargement have been more successfully exploited than others, and disproportionately by actors coming from outside. On the other hand, cross-border contacts were studied in the discourses on and attitudes towards the other side among local and regional elites, and among local residents more generally. This revealed a polarised attitudinal landscape, not least when compared to country-wide opinion surveys in both Germany and Poland. This is in line with other studies showing that identities are particularly accentuated in border situations, where the Other is more frequently encountered.These results support recent investigations pointing to a continued relevance of the border even after the physical barriers are removed. At the same time, another contribution of this work to border studies is that the time and contingency of the importance of identities and of the border needs more attention. In the Szczecin area, awareness of national identities and of the boundary appeared to be particularly high just after changes in the border’s status occurred – i.e. in 1989–1991, and then around the years 2007–2010. But while its importance may be fluctuating over time, given the opportunities and resources the boundary provides it will always be maintained in some forms.
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| 2. |
- Likic-Brboric, Branka
(författare)
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Democratic Governance in the Transition from Yugoslav Self-Management to a Market Economy : The Case of the Slovenian Privatization Debates 1990-1992
- 2003
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The main object of this doctoral dissertation is the Slovenian transition to a market economy with a focus on the genesis of the Slovenian privatization model and the political and legislative process behind its formulation. Starting from a presentation of the international context and historical legacies, the study investigates the almost three-year-long Slovenian theoretical, parliamentary, economic, political and public debates (1990-1992) concerning the choice of model and institutional framework for large-scale privatization. In particular the legislative and discursive shaping of the text of the Law on Ownership Transformation of Enterprises is analyzed. The thesis addresses the design of a property rights regime as a genuinely political meta-process of structuring that involves a redistribution of social assets, with important economic and social consequences for different groups in society, through which the conception of a just society is redefined. The study applies the heterodox institutional approach to analyze institutional choices in the "transition to market". Such a perspective questions the simple causal explanations of the mechanisms of diffusion and the role of dominant ideas and ideologies in shaping institutions. Furthermore, the conventional understanding of institutions and history as structural constraints is challenged in order to open for the exploration of the conditions, mechanisms and processes of institutional change in terms of actors' contingencies for development of new institutions and path shifts through learning and problem-solving processes, interaction and interpretation. The influence of the Slovenian experience with Yugoslav self-management on institutional change is explored.
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| 3. |
- Murray, Lawrence, et al.
(författare)
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Delayed sampling and automatic Rao-Blackwellization of probabilistic programs
- 2018
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), Lanzarote, Spain, April, 2018. - : PMLR.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We introduce a dynamic mechanism for the solution of analytically-tractable substructure in probabilistic programs, using conjugate priors and affine transformations to reduce variance in Monte Carlo estimators. For inference with Sequential Monte Carlo, this automatically yields improvements such as locallyoptimal proposals and Rao–Blackwellization. The mechanism maintains a directed graph alongside the running program that evolves dynamically as operations are triggered upon it. Nodes of the graph represent random variables, edges the analytically-tractable relationships between them. Random variables remain in the graph for as long as possible, to be sampled only when they are used by the program in a way that cannot be resolved analytically. In the meantime, they are conditioned on as many observations as possible. We demonstrate the mechanism with a few pedagogical examples, as well as a linearnonlinear state-space model with simulated data, and an epidemiological model with real data of a dengue outbreak in Micronesia. In all cases one or more variables are automatically marginalized out to significantly reduce variance in estimates of the marginal likelihood, in the final case facilitating a randomweight or pseudo-marginal-type importance sampler for parameter estimation. We have implemented the approach in Anglican and a new probabilistic programming language called Birch.
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| 4. |
- Ronquist, Fredrik, et al.
(författare)
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Universal probabilistic programming offers a powerful approach to statistical phylogenetics
- 2021
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Ingår i: Communications Biology. - : Springer Nature. - 2399-3642. ; 4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Statistical phylogenetic analysis currently relies on complex, dedicated software packages, making it difficult for evolutionary biologists to explore new models and inference strategies. Recent years have seen more generic solutions based on probabilistic graphical models, but this formalism can only partly express phylogenetic problems. Here, we show that universal probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) solve the expressivity problem, while still supporting automated generation of efficient inference algorithms. To prove the latter point, we develop automated generation of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms for PPL descriptions of arbitrary biological diversification (birth-death) models. SMC is a new inference strategy for these problems, supporting both parameter inference and efficient estimation of Bayes factors that are used in model testing. We take advantage of this in automatically generating SMC algorithms for several recent diversification models that have been difficult or impossible to tackle previously. Finally, applying these algorithms to 40 bird phylogenies, we show that models with slowing diversification, constant turnover and many small shifts generally explain the data best. Our work opens up several related problem domains to PPL approaches, and shows that few hurdles remain before these techniques can be effectively applied to the full range of phylogenetic models.
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