Det finns en ojämn fördelning företagsägare i Sverige där andelen är 70% män och 30% kvinnor. Syftet med denna studie är att få en ökad förståelse för kvinnor som är företagsägare. Delvis genom att undersöka faktorer som påverkade kvinnorna att bli företagsägare, och delvis vilka karriärmöjligheter och utmaningar kvinnorna upplevde vid starten av företaget, upplever nu och ser i framtiden. Teoretiska begrepp som används är brytpunkter och livsdesign. Brytpunkter är ett begrepp inom Careership-teorin om karriärbeslut från Hodkinson och Sparkes och livsdesign är ett begrepp från Savickas et al. och innehåller delar av karriärkonstruktion, självkonstruktion och livslång själv-konstruktion. Det finns ett socialkonstruktivistiskt perspektiv i studien och metoden som har använts är kvalitativ genom narrativa intervjuer. I resultatet kommer fyra teman att presenteras; faktorer som påverkade att bli företagsägare, utmaningar då och nu, karriärmöjligheter då och nu, och utmaningar och karriärmöjligheter i framtiden. Resultatet visar att det finns påtvingande brytpunkter, självinitierande brytpunkter och ibland en kombination av båda inför karriärvalet att bli företagsägare. Vidare visar resultatet att personer oavsett ålder behöver göra övergångar inom arbetslivet och en livsdesign är en förutsättning för att klara sig i en ständigt föränderlig och turbulent arbetsmarknad. Resultatet visar att de flesta kvinnorna har en förälder som är företagsägare och några har även andra personer inom sitt nätverk. Det framkommer även att intervjupersonerna har fått lära sig hantera olika utmaningar och nya aktiviteter inom sitt företagande vilken har stärkt deras självförtroende och har lett till ett ökat självledarskap. De har också behövt hantera att själva skapa arbetstillfällen för att kunna försörja sig, något som är annorlunda från en löneanställning. De lyfter vidare nätverkets betydelse där andra företagsägare ger en kompetenshöjande och stöttande funktion. Samtliga vill fortsätta vara företagsägare trots olika framtidsutmaningar inom klimatomställning och pågående inflation. De ser fortfarande karriärmöjligheter och har olika mål inom sitt företagande i framtiden. / There is an uneven level of business owners in Sweden where the proportion is 70% men and 30% women. The purpose of this study is to gain an increased understanding of women who are business owners. Partly by examining factors that influenced the women to become business owners, and partly what career opportunities and challenges the women experienced at the start of the company, experiencing now and thoughts about the future. Theoretical concepts that are used are turning-points and life-design. Turning-points is a concept within the Careership theory of career decision from Hodkinson and Sparkes and life-design is a concept from Savickas et al. and includes elements of career construction, self-construction, and lifelong self-construction. There is a social constructivist perspective in the study and the method that has been used is qualitative through narrative interviews. In the result four themes will be presented; factors that influenced becoming a business owner, challenges then and now, career opportunities then and now, and challenges and career opportunities in the future. The result shows that there are forced turning-points, self-initiating turning-points and sometimes a combination of both before the career choice of becoming a business owner. Furthermore, the results show that people regardless of age need to do transitions in working life and a life-design is a necessity for coping in a constant changing and turbulent labor market. The result shows that most of the women have a parent who are business owners and some also have other people within their network. It also appears that the women have learned to deal with different challenges and new activities within their business, which has strengthened their self-confidence and has led to increased self-leadership. They have also had to deal with creating job opportunities to make a living, which is different from a salaried employment. They further highlight the importance of the network where other business owners provide an enhancing in competence and supportive function. Everyone wants to continue being business owners despite various future challenges in climate change and ongoing inflation. They still see career opportunities and have different goals in their business in the future.

Thesis advisor: Kevin S. Bedell / We present several results based upon non-trivial extensions of Landau-Fermi liquid theory. First proposed in the mid-20th century, the Fermi liquid approach assumes an adiabatic “switching-on” of the interaction, which allows one to describe the collective excitations of the many-body system in terms of weakly-interacting quasiparticles and quasiholes. At its core, Landau-Fermi liquid theory is often considered a perturbative approach to study the equilibrium thermodynamics and out-of-equilibrium response of weakly-correlated itinerant fermions, and therefore non-trivial extensions and consequences are usually overlooked in the contemporary literature. Instead, more emphasis is often placed on the breakdown of Fermi liquid theory, either due to strong correlations, quantum critical fluctuations, or dimensional constraints. After a brief introduction to the theory of a Fermi liquid, I will first apply the Landau quasiparticle paradigm to the theory of itinerant Majorana-like fermions. Defined as fermionic particles which are their own anti-particle, traditional Majorana zero modes found in topological materials lack a coherent number operator, and therefore do not support a Fermi liquid-like ground state. To remedy this, we will apply a combinatorical approach to build a statistical theory of self-conjugate particles, explicitly showing that, under this definition, a filled Fermi surface exists at zero temperature. Landau-Fermi liquid theory is then used to describe the interacting phase of these Majorana particles, from which we find unique signatures of zero sound in addition to exotic, non-analytic contributions to the specific heat. The latter is then exploited as a “smoking-gun” signature for Majorana-like excitations in the candidate Kitaev material Ag3LiIr2O6, where experimental measurements show good agreement with a sharply-defined, “Majorana-Fermi surface” predicted in the underlying combinatorial treatment. I will then depart from Fermi liquid theory proper to tackle the necessary conditions for the applicability of Luttinger’s theorem. In a nutshell, Luttinger’s theorem is a powerful theorem which states that the volume of phase space contained in the Fermi surface is invariant with respect to interaction strength. In this way, whereas Fermi liquid only describes fermionic excitations near the Fermi surface, Luttinger’s theorem describes the fermionic degrees of freedom throughout the entire Fermi sphere. We will show that Luttinger’s theorem remains valid only for certain frequency and momentum-dependencies of the self-energy, which correlate to the exis- tence of a generalized Fermi surface. In addition, we will show that the existence of a power-law Green’s function (a unique feature of “un-particle” systems and a proposed characteristic of the pseudo-gap phase of the cuprate superconductors) forces Luttinger’s theorem and Fermi liquid theory to be mutually exclusive for any non-trivial power of the Feynman propagator. Finally, we will return to Landau-Fermi liquid theory, and close with novel out-of-equilibrium behavior and stability in unconventional Fermi liquids. First, we will consider a perfectly two- dimensional Fermi liquid. Due to the reduction in dimension, the traditional mode expansion in terms of Legendre polynomials is modified to an expansion in terms of Chebyshev polynomials. The resulting orthogonality conditions greatly modifies the stability and collective modes in the 2D system. Second, we will look at a Fermi liquid in the presence of a non-trivial gauge field. The existence of a gauge field will effectively shift the Fermi surface in momentum space, resulting in, once again, a modified stability condition for the underlying Fermi liquid. Supplemented with a modernized version of Mermin’s condition for the propagation of zero sound, we outline the full effects a spin symmetric or anti-symmetric gauge would have on a Fermi liquid ground state. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Physics.

<pre>The degree of freedom brought about by breaking the directional symmetry of space through the use of anisotropic media finds applications in numerous photonic systems. Almost all these systems are based on physical principles that are generalized extensions of their isotropic counterparts, much in the same way an ellipse is related to a circle. However, as we show, there are examples where, in the presence of loss, disorder or even coupling to the measurement apparatus, emerges a completely new behavior which is qualitatively different from the isotropic case. In this work we study these emergent phenomena found in open anisotropic photonic systems.</pre> <pre><br></pre> <pre>We demonstrate that open systems based on biaxial anisotropic medium can support exceptional points which are singularities in the parameter space of the system where the mode frequencies as well as the modes themselves coalesce. We also show that topological insulators, which are novel materials that behave as dielectric in the bulk but metallic in the surface and exhibit bianisotropy through the coupling of their electric and magnetic response, can emit thermal radiation that carries nonzero spin angular momentum. Next, after describing how the strong anisotropy of hyperbolic metamaterial can support electromagnetic fields propagating with high wavenumbers unbounded by the frequency, we show that a super-resolution imaging scheme based on such material is quite robust against substantial loss and disorder. Finally, we consider an example of an incoherent perfect absorber and show that loss and anisotropy in this case can work together to recover the ideal lossless limit for the absorbing performance. In addition to making new conceptual connections between photonics and other branches of science such as condensed matter physics, biotechnology and quantum mechanics, these new emergent phenomena are shown to have thermal, imaging and sensing applications.</pre>

This thesis primarily addresses the quantities and distributions of Fremont projectile points in the Parowan Valley. First, I review previous research performed in Parowan Valley and outline currently accepted projectile point analysis and typology methods. I also review ethnographic data surrounding the function and value of projectile points. Then, I provide the results of an analysis of all projectile points in the Parowan Valley Archaeological Project collection. I note the large amount of projectile points in this collection and compare it to projectile point counts from other large Fremont sites.I also note chronological patterns in Parowan Valley using projectile points as relative temporal markers. With this data and the data provided by other theses on Parowan Valley, I argue that sites in Parowan Valley served as centers for aggregation and other socio-economic practices in the Late Formative Period.

The Gauss circle problem in classical number theory concerns the estimation of N(x) = { (m1;m2) in ZxZ : m1^2 + m2^2 <= x }, the number of integer lattice points inside a circle of radius sqrt(x). Gauss showed that P(x) = N(x)- pi * x satisfi es P(x) = O(sqrt(x)). Later Hardy and Landau independently proved that P(x) = Omega_(x1=4(log x)1=4). It is conjectured that inf{e in R : P(x) = O(x^e )}= 1/4. I. K atai showed that the integral from 0 to X of |P(x)|^2 dx = X^(3/2) + O(X(logX)^2). Similar results to those of the circle have been obtained for regions D in R^2 which contain the origin and whose boundary dD satis fies suff cient smoothness conditions. Denote by P_D(x) the similar error term to P(x) only for the domain D. W. G. Nowak showed that, under appropriate conditions on dD, P_D(x) = Omega_(x1=4(log x)1=4) and that the integral from 0 to X of |P_D(x)|^2 dx = O(X^(3/2)). A result similar to Nowak's mean square estimate is given in the case where only "primitive" lattice points, {(m1;m2) in Z^2 : gcd(m1;m2) = 1 }, are counted in a region D, on assumption of the Riemann Hypothesis.

No description available.

Keypoint detection and description is the first step of homography and essential matrix estimation, which in turn is used in Visual Odometry and Visual SLAM. This work explores the effect (in terms of speed and accuracy) of using different deep learning architectures for such keypoints. The fully convolutional networks — with heads for both the detector and descriptor — are trained through an existing self-supervised method, where correspondences are obtained through known randomly sampled homographies. A new strategy for choosing negative correspondences for the descriptor loss is presented, which enables more flexibility in the architecture design. The new strategy turns out to be essential as it enables networks that outperform the learnt baseline at no cost in inference time. Varying the model size leads to a trade-off in speed and accuracy, and while all models outperform ORB in homography estimation, only the larger models approach SIFT’s performance; performing about 1-7% worse. Training for longer and with additional types of data might give the push needed to outperform SIFT. While the smallest models are 3× faster and use 50× fewer parameters than the learnt baseline, they still require 3× as much time as SIFT while performing about 10-30% worse. However, there is still room for improvement through optimization methods that go beyond architecture modification, e.g. quantization, which might make the method faster than SIFT. / Nyckelpunkts-detektion och deskriptor-skapande är det första steget av homografi och essentiell matris estimering, vilket i sin tur används inom Visuell Odometri och Visuell SLAM. Det här arbetet utforskar effekten (i form av snabbhet och exakthet) av användandet av olika djupinlärnings-arkitekturer för sådana nyckelpunkter. De hel-faltade nätverken – med huvuden för både detektorn och deskriptorn – tränas genom en existerande själv-handledd metod, där korrespondenser fås genom kända slumpmässigt valda homografier. En ny strategi för valet av negativa korrespondenser för deskriptorns träning presenteras, vilket möjliggör mer flexibilitet i designen av arkitektur. Den nya strategin visar sig vara väsentlig då den möjliggör nätverk som presterar bättre än den lärda baslinjen utan någon kostnad i inferenstid. Varieringen av modellstorleken leder till en kompromiss mellan snabbhet och exakthet, och medan alla modellerna presterar bättre än ORB i homografi-estimering, så är det endast de större modellerna som närmar sig SIFTs prestanda; där de presterar 1-7% sämre. Att träna längre och med ytterligare typer av data kanske ger tillräcklig förbättring för att prestera bättre än SIFT. Även fast de minsta modellerna är 3× snabbare och använder 50× färre parametrar än den lärda baslinjen, så kräver de fortfarande 3× så mycket tid som SIFT medan de presterar runt 10-30% sämre. Men det finns fortfarande utrymme för förbättring genom optimeringsmetoder som övergränsar ändringar av arkitekturen, som till exempel kvantisering, vilket skulle kunna göra metoden snabbare än SIFT.

Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), might have earlier primarily found industrial use, improving production chains, efficiency and the like but are now an integral part of private and commercial application. Many systems are using, or are claiming to use, machine learning to improve the end user's experience. This study aims to explore applications that are using creative ML, in which output might have a plethora of solutions instead of a single correct one. More specifically the focus is to evaluate which Key Tension Points, central lesser components of a complex and bigger issue, arise for researchers, designers and users coming into contact with this technology. The goal is to draw upon these Key Tension Points and attempt to frame guidelines which researchers and designers can use to further their understanding of the relationship between ML and design and how they can be accounted for to build and develop better application. The study found that these tension points (Impersonality, passive consumers &amp; transparency) vary considerably depending on the application and presents how designers can account for them. / Maskininlärning (ML) och artificiell intelligens (AI) har sedan tidigare oftast använts på en industriell skala, för att effektivisera produktionskedjor eller förfina dessa. Dock har det skett ett skifte och nuförtiden är ML en betydande del i applikationer som har privatpersoner som målgrupp. Den här studien undersöker kreativa maskininlärningslösningar, sådana som kommer med fler än ett förslag. Mer specifikt så undersöker den här studien vilka Key Tension Points, dvs. betydande mindre komponenter av komplexa stora problem, som forskare, designers eller användare kommer i kontakt med. Målet är att ta fram Key Tension Points och sedan undersöka huruvida riktlinjer kan formuleras som underlättar för forskare och designers att hantera frågor rörande design och tillgänglighet av ML. Dessutom underlättar användandet av Key Tension Points vid byggandet och utvecklingen av kreativa ML applikationer. Studien fann att Key Tension Points varierar betydande beroende på vilken typ av applikation som används av konsumenten.

Gaze tracking has already shown to be a popular technology for desktop devices. When it comes to gaze tracking for mobile devices, however, there is still a lot of progress to be made. There’s still no high accuracy gaze tracking available that works in an unconstrained setting for mobile devices. This work makes contributions in the area of appearance-based unconstrained gaze estimation. Artificial neural networks are trained on GazeCapture, a publicly available dataset for mobile gaze estimation containing over 2 million face images and corresponding gaze labels. In this work, Siamese neural networks are trained to learn linear distances between face images for different gaze points. Then, during inference, calibration points are used to estimate gaze points. This approach is shown to be an effective way of utilizing calibration points in order to improve the result of gaze estimation. / Ögonblickspårning har redan etablerat sig som en populär teknologi för stationära enheter. När det dock gäller mobila enheter så finns det framsteg att göra. Det saknas fortfarande en lösning för ögonblickspårning som fungerar i en undantagsfri miljö för mobila enheter. Detta examensarbete ämnar att bidra till en sådan lösning. Artificiella neurala nätverk tränas på GazeCapture, en allmänt tillgänglig datasamling som består av över 2 miljoner ansiktsbilder samt korresponderande etikett för ögonblickspunkt. I detta examensarbete tränas Siamesiska neurala nätverk för att lära sig det linjära avståndet mellan två ögonblickspunkter. Sedan utnyttjas en samling med kalibreringsbilder för att estimera ögonblickspunkter. Denna teknik visar sig vara ett effektivt sätt att nyttja kalibreringsbilder med målet att förbättra resultatet för ögonblicksestimering.

Syftet med denna undersökning är att öka kunskapen om vuxnas lärande av matematik och att förstå vikten av vändpunkter i lärande av matematik. I detta arbete har berättelser från 29 studerande på två folkhögskolor analyserats med en hermenuetiskt inspirerad metod och ett sociokulturellt perspektiv. Många av de 29 som studerar på allmän linje på två folkhögskolor har ett problematiskt förhållande till lärande av matematik. Många beskriver att de hade bekymmer med matematiklärande redan under grundskolans första år, för vissa leder dessa bekymmer till ohälsa. I denna undersökning framkommer det att det finns tydliga vändpunkter när det gäller lärande av matematik, då ett gammalt mönster kan brytas. Några orsaker till vändpunkter som nämns i berättelserna är: en ny social miljö, en annan typ av undervisning, gemensam stöttning från behandlingshem och klok lärare i skolan, hemundervisning, nyfunnen inlärningsstrategi, avslutat missbruk, inre motivation mm. I samband med vändpunkterna sker en förändring av inställning till matematikämnet eller den egna förmågan, orsakerna till den förändrade inställning kommer inifrån den studerande själv eller utifrån via exempelvis en lärare. Kunskapen om att dessa vändpunkter finns ger hopp och kan underlätta när det gäller att ställa krav på kvalitativa åtgärder när personer hamnar i svåra inlärningssituationer.Nyckelord: berättelser, folkhögskola, matematik, specialpedagogik, vuxnas lärande, vändpunkter. / The purpose of this investigation is to increase the knowledge of adult learning of mathematics and to understand the importance of turning points in the learning of mathematics. In this study interviews from 29 students at two folk high schools (for adult education) have been analyzed using a hermeneutic inspired method. Many of the 29 that study the “general oriented education” at two folk high schools have a problematic relationship toward learning of mathematics. Many describe that they had “problems/concerns/anxiety” with the learning of mathematics already during the first years of elementary school, for some these “problems/concerns/anxiety” lead to illness. In this investigation it is shown that there are clear turning points when it comes to learning of mathematics, when an old pattern can be broken. Some of the reasons for turning points that are mentioned in these interviews are: a new social environment, a different type of education, common support from treatment centers and wise teachers in school, home schooling, newfound learning strategy, ended drug abuse, inner motivation, amongst others. Knowledge that these turning points exist gives hope and can facilitate when it comes to putting “requirements/demands” on qualitative measures when persons end up in difficult learning situations..