In line with the global trend of increased language requirements for naturalization, the Swedish government decided in 2019 to introduce a language test for citizenship. Drawing on Norton Peirce’s (1995) notion of investment and Fraser’s (2000) definition of participatory parity, this study investigates adult second language learners’ attitudes towards the test and analyzes how investment in language learning and perception of possibilities for participatory parity influence their views. Furthermore, the study considers some of the potential consequences of the new policy, for example, for acts of linguistic citizenship (Stroud, 2018). Eighteen SFI-students at level 3C, one of the highest levels at the language course, responded to a questionnaire. Nine respondents favored the test, four opposed it, four were neutral, and one was unsure. Interviews were conducted with six volunteers out of these participants, five out of six were supporters of the language test. The qualitative data was analyzed thematically. While all participants were motivated to learn Swedish, the findings indicate how diverse forms of capital, ideologies, and desired or actual identities in Swedish, that is, the nature of their investment and perceived possibilities for economic and social participation, influenced their attitudes towards the language test. Furthermore, supporters of the test considered that the language requirement would improve possibilities for participatory parity, whereas the opponents emphasized the risk of misrecognition and misrepresentation. The policy redefines Swedish citizenship: by making a test of Swedish language mandatory for prospective citizens, it formally demands that immigrants learn Swedish provided they want to integrate. As the results suggest, however, the participants in this study were engaged in a wide range of acts of linguistic citizenship in Swedish and had similar reported proficiency levels, regardless of their opinions of the Swedish test. The study calls for more research on the effects of language requirements for naturalization to examine to what extent and in what ways a language test for citizenship affects already motivated language learners.

The research conducted intends to examine how unexpected changes in employment may affect both exchange rates and interest rates. The results used in the analysis are extracted by running two ordinary least squares regressions with data structured as an unbalanced panel. Furthermore, a two stage least squares regression has been constructed to evaluate how interest rates, instrumented by unexpected outcomes of employment, affect exchange rates through the uncovered interest rate parity condition (UIP). In contradiction to the UIP, relative percentual changes in interest rates had no effect on exchange rates, hence no support could be presented for a causative relationship between unexpected changes in employment and exchange rate movements. In line with previous studies, results are thought to lack significance due to exchange rate movements being measured as the total intraday change, constituting too long of an interval.

With environmental concerns and energy needs increasing, many regions in the world are promoting renewable energy technologies making use of various policy instruments. Although today the PV systems price is decreasing, which gives it a competitive edge; we see the technology still being dependent on policy instruments for its dissemination.   The aim of this study is to research on whether or not a solar PV system is economically viable under certain circumstances. The study analyzes this by performing a cost beneficial analysis for the lifetime of the solar PV system making use of a discounted savings model. The systems being considered in this study are from California and Germany as these regions are leading in solar PV dissemination in their respective regions. The policies that are aiding the deployment of solar PV technologies are varied and thus this study compares benefits from different policy instrument for a residential customer investing in a solar PV system.   The research objectives in this study are pursued making use of major concepts such as Grid Parity, Levelized Cost of Electricity and financial methods such as discounting.  Further, to understand how the different independent variables such as retail electricity prices, PV system pricing, WACC, self-consumption rate and storage availability are having an impact and how the results change with variation in these variables, a sensitivity analysis is conducted.   The results obtained in this study show that a solar PV system installed in California and Germany both make net benefits over their lifetime. When compared, the Californian solar PV system under the Net Energy Metering policy is making more net economic benefits in the range of $ 40,351 in Eureka and $53,510 in San Francisco; when compared to the German solar PV systems under the Feed in Tariff ranging $4,465 in Berlin and $11,769 in Munich. Furthermore the Californian solar PV systems still prove to be more beneficial even when compared to the German solar PV systems under the self-consumption law of the Feed in Tariff ranging $ 6,443 in Berlin and $ 13,141 in Munich.  But when the self-consumption rate is increased in the German case, it is noted that the associated benefits increase.   The study at hand thus results in the California Net Energy Meter policy instrument proving to be more beneficial to a residential customer than the German Feed in tariff with and without self-consumption. Another important finding made in this study is that despite the German solar PV system making lesser benefits than the Californian ones, they attain Grid Parity before the ones in California.

Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs) have gained popularity due to their abilities to generate an absolute return strategy. Little is known about how CTAs work and what variables are important to tune in order to create a profitable strategy. Some investors use CTA-like strategies to leverage their portfolio and create positive returns in times when the spot market is falling. The report is written for Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken and aims to give the bank and readers an understanding on how changes of parameters in a CTA strategy change the outcome of it with focus on three main measurements: Sharpe ratio, drawdown and total return.  The foundation of CTAs is that they rely on signals from some given sets of assets and make investments decisions solely based on them. CTAs can be rule-based with a binomial signal, or they can use a continual signal, like in the report. The thesis aims to recreate a CTA using a continuous momentum signal and with the signal, invest accordingly. Some different variables were tested, most importantly the report focuses on the weights of the assets and investigates if the momentum signal is good as it is or if a risk parity weighting is needed on top of the signal in order to generate a return that matches the expectations of a low drawdown and a high Sharpe ratio.  Beyond the weight allocation, different lookback periods of both the signal and weight were tested. A shorter lookback generated a quicker return that was more sensible to short trends on the market. Which in some cases was profitable but it also lost more of it accumulated return when the trend was "false". The equally weighted signal that only takes the trend into account when allocating the weights of the assets was more volatile it its returns and benefited from a long signal. The CTA results presented can only be seen as an index since it is rebalanced every rebalancing point, the frequency of those points was examined and the strategy was performing well if rebalanced once a week or once a month, every day and once a year did not yield a better result.  As expected, the CTA benefits from trend on the market, no matter the direction of it. The best periods for the CTA were when the market was very volatile, mainly 2008 and 2022. When there is no clear trend, the CTA reacts too slowly and often loses money. One important conclusion is that the CTA never should be used as an investment strategy on its own, rather as a hedging strategy that allocates a fraction of a total long-only portfolio.

A diagnosis procedure is an algorithm to detect and locate (isolate) faulty components in a dynamic process. In 1994 the California Air Resource Board released a regulation, called OBD II, demanding a thorough diagnosis system on board automotive vehicles. These legislative demands indicate that diagnosis will become increasingly important for automotive engines in the next few years. To achieve diagnosis, redundancy has to be included in the system. This redundancy can be either hardware redundancy or analytical redundancy. Hardware redundancy, e.g. an extra sensor or extra actuator, can be space consuming or expensive. Methods based on analytical redundancy need no extra hardware, the redundancy here is generated from a process model instead. In this thesis, approaches utilizing analytical redundancy is examined. A literature study is made, surveying a number of approaches to the diagnosis problem. Three approaches, based on both linear and non-linear models, are selected and further analyzed and complete design examples are performed. A mathematical model of an SI-engine is derived to enable simulations of the designed methods.

[pt] A paridade do poder de compra da moeda (“PPP”), uma das teorias mais discutidas no meio acadêmico, sustenta que a taxa de câmbio nominal entre duas moedas deve ser igual à relação dos níveis de preços agregados entre os dois países, de modo que uma unidade de moeda de um país terá o mesmo poder de compra em um país estrangeiro. O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar a validade da teoria de PPP e a inovação que trazemos para a literatura é a aplicação desta teoria para o desenvolvimento de uma estratégia quantitativa de compra/venda de pares de moedas utilizando as séries diárias de preços calculadas pela PriceStats. Os resultados encontrados aqui sugerem que, apesar de identificarmos uma relação entre o diferencial de inflação e movimentos da taxa de câmbio nominal nas séries do PriceStats, observamos um desempenho quantitativo pior das nossas estratégias de investimento em moedas baseadas no modelo de Paridade do Poder de Compra da Moeda (PPP) vis à vis outros modelos padrão dentro da literatura financeira. Por outro lado, para pares específicos de moedas, encontramos números interessantes quando baseamos nossa estratégia nos modelos de PPP, observando Hit Ratio superior a 50% e retorno acumulado positivo da estratégia. / [en] The Purchasing power parity (PPP), one of the most consolidated theories in academia, holds that the nominal exchange rate between two currencies must be equal to the ratio of aggregate price levels between the two countries, so that a currency unit of one country will have the same purchasing power in a foreign country. The objective of this work is to investigate the validity of the PPP theory and the innovation that we bring to the literature is using this theory to the develop a quantitative strategy to buy/sell currency pairs using the daily price series calculated by PriceStats. The results found here suggest that, despite identifying a relationship between the inflation differential and nominal exchange rate movements in the Price Stats series, we observe a worse quantitative performance of our currency investment strategies based on the Power Parity model of Purchase vis a vis the standard models within the financial literature. On the other hand, for specific currency pairs, we found interesting numbers when we based our strategy on PPP models, observing a Hit Ratio above 50% and a positive cumulative return of the strategy, results very similar to those found for the reference models already mentioned within the financial literature.

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yes / The present article proposes to re-examine the parity-of-reasoning or double-standard fallacy argument, which favours a time-symmetric Gold universe model over a cosmological arrow of time. There are two reasons for this re-examination. One is empirical: 1) the recent discovery of an expanding and accelerating universe questions the symmetry assumption of the Gold universe on empirical grounds; 2) the other is theoretical: the argument from t-symmetry fails to take into account some important aspects of the topology of phase space and recently developed typicality arguments. If the parity-of-reasoning argument, which depends on the t-symmetry of probability, is reconsidered in terms of the topology of phase space and typicality arguments, the double-standard fallacy argument loses much of its appeal. The Gold universe model itself suffers from unexplained dynamic asymmetries. The upshot of this paper is that the Gold universe model is implausible or far less plausible than asymmetric models.