Den 25 maj 2014 valde Sverige, likt resterande medlemsländer inom EU, parlamentariker till Europaparlamentet för perioden 2014-2019. Detta val tenderar att engagera långt färre väljare än nationella parlamentsval trots att det är ett av få reella verktyg en väljare har att påverka EU:s arbete och inriktning. Fenomenet kan exemplifieras med Sverige som i riksdagsvalet 2010 uppnådde ett valdeltagande på 84,63% av den röstberättigade befolkningen, men i valet till Europaparlamentet 2009 röstade endast 45.3%. Generellt i EU röstar 20 procentenheter färre i valet till Europaparlamentet. I och med valet 2004 föll det sammanlagda valdeltagandet till under 50 % för första gången. I boken ”What’s wrong with the European union & how to fix it” påvisar Simon Hix denna problematik och kallar Europaparlaments-valet ett ”second-order election”. Han menar att valet är underordnat de nationella valen. Hix problematiserar EU:s bristande legitimitet till Europas befolkning och påvisar ett demokratiskt underskott. Han skriver även att det existerar en allmän uppfattning att EU lider av ett stort underskott gällande demokratiska värden. Frågetecken kring EU:s demokratiska underskott väcktes ursprungligen av länder med en stark historia av demokratiska institutioner, exempelvis Sverige och Storbritannien. Frågan har dock på senare tid fått alltmer fokus även från andra länder. Ytterligare ett betydande problem är EU:s svårigheter att skapa kontakter och konkreta relationer till Europas befolkning. Stödet för EU har stadigt minskat, främst efter 90-talet. Som motåtgärder till detta har parlamentet getts mer makt och generellt fattas beslut numera med en större transparens än tidigare. Tanken är att öka medborgarnas förtroende, och känsla att kunna påverka ett EU som tidigare känts distanserat för vanliga människor. Hix presenterar en mängd olika faktorer för det lägre valdeltagandet i EU- valet. En av flera förklaringar kan vara bristen på socialt kapital. Skiftande kultur och en ansträngd gemensam historia kan antas göra det svårt att skapa ett starkt socialt kapital mellan EU:s medborgare och därmed forma en gemensam och stark europeisk identitet. Detta kan i sin tur påverka valdeltagandet till Europaparlamentet vilket undergräver EU:s demokratiska legitimitet. Robert Putnam har i sin forskning uppmärksammat ett minskande socialt kapital i USA. Kan en liknande utveckling skönjas inom EU med ett minskande valdeltagande till EU-valet som följd? Med bakgrund i EU:s bristande legitimitet, demokratiska underskott och de åtgärder om tagits för att åtgärda detta kan antas att EU:s medborgare tillvarar tar möjligheten att påverka vid valen till EU. Trots att parlamentet fått en mer framskjuten roll inom EU visar verkligheten att valdeltagandet fortsatt är lågt runt om i Europa. Medborgarnas rösträtt är den centrala symbolen för den västerländska demokratin. Alla människor ska ha samma makt, en röst, oberoende status och rikedom. Med bakgrund i tankar kring ett demokratiskt underskott inom EU behandlar uppsatsen vad som kan tänkas ligga bakom skillnaden mellan nationella val och valet till Europaparlamentet.

During the last centuries the alleged democratic deficit in the European Union has been discussed within the area of European studies. This deficit is, according to previous research, present on the national political arena where parties fail to discuss European issues. To describe the democratic link between national political parties and their voters, this essay answers the following question: How do the Swedish political parties discuss issues concerning the European Union in their manifestos for the Swedish parliamentary election of 2018? This is answered by a text analysis of the election manifestos of the Swedish parliamentary parties of 2018. The result is that the “second-order national elections”-hypothesis fail to explain the discussion about EU on the Swedish political arena. Furthermore, the essay finds that the Swedish parliamentary parties to a large extent act as predicted by the theory regarding “issue evolution” presented by Hobolt and de Vries.

Outcomes of innovative designing are frequently described as enabling us in achieving more desirable futures. How can we design and innovate so as to enable future processes of design and innovation? To investigate this question, this thesis probes the conditions, possibilities and limitations of toolmaking for novelty and knowledge generation, or in other words, it examines designing for designing. The focus of this thesis is on the development of digital design tools that support the reconciliation of conflicting criteria centred on architectural geometry. Of particular interest are the roles of methodological approaches and of biological analogies as guides in toolmaking for design, as well as the possibility of generalising design tools beyond the contexts from which they originate. The presented investigation consists of an applied toolmaking study and a subsequent reflective analysis using second- order cybernetics as a theoretical framework. Observations made during the toolmaking study suggest that biological analogies can, in informal ways, inspire designing, including the designing of design tools. Design tools seem to enable the generation of novelty and knowledge beyond the contexts in and for which they are developed only if their users apply them in ways unanticipated by the toolmaker. Abstract The reflective analysis offers theoretical explanations for these observations based on aspects of second-order cybernetics. These aspects include the modelling of designing as a conversation, different relationships between observers (such as designers) and systems (such as designers engaged in their projects), the distinction between coded and uncoded knowledge, as well as processes underlying the production and the restriction of meaning. Initially aimed at the development of generally applicable, prescriptive digital tools for designing, the presented work results in a personal descriptive model of novelty and knowledge generation in science and design. This shift indicates a perspective change from a positivist to a relativist outlook on designing, which was accomplished over the course of the study. Investigating theory and practice of designing and of science, this study establishes an epistemological model of designing that accommodates and extends a number of theoretical concepts others have previously proposed. According to this model, both design and science generate and encode new knowledge through conversational processes, in which open-minded perception appears to be of greater innovative power than efforts to exercise control. The presented work substantiates and exemplifies radical constructivist theory of knowledge and novelty production, establishes correspondences between systems theory and design research theory and implies that mainstream scientific theories and practices are insufficient to account for and to guide innovation. Keywords (separated by commas) Digital design tools, geometry rationalisation, second-order cybernetics, knowledge generation

Supply chain network design involves location decisions for production facilities and distribution centers. We consider a make-to-order supply chain environment where distribution centers serve as crossdocking terminals. Long waiting times may occur at a cross-docking terminal, unless sucient handling capacity is installed. In this study, we deal with a facility location problem with congestion eects at distribution centers. Along with location decisions, we make capacity allocation (service rate) and demand allocation decisions so that the total cost, including facility opening, transportation and congestion costs, is minimized. Response time to customer orders is a critical performance measure for a supply chain network. The decisions like where the plants and distribution centers are located aect the response time of the system. Response time is more sensitive to these decisions in a make-to-order business environment. In a distribution network where distribution centers function as cross-docking terminals, capacity or the service rate decisions also aect the response time performance. This study is closely related to a recent work Vidyarthi et al. (2009) which models distribution centers asM/G/1 queuing systems. They use the average waiting time formula ofM/G/1 queuing model. Thus, the average waiting time at a distribution center is a nonlinear function of the demand rate allocated to and the service rate available at the distribution center. The authors Vidyarthi et al. (2009) propose a linear approximation approach and a Lagrangian based heuristic for the problem. Dierent than the solution approach proposed in Vidyarthi et al. (2009), we propose a closed form formulation for the problem. In particular, we show that the waiting time function derived from M/G/1 queuing model can be represented via second order conic inequalities. Then, the problem becomes a mixed integer second order cone programming problem which can be solved by using commercial branch-and-bound software such as IBM ILOG CPLEX. Our computational tests show that proposed reformulation can be solved in reasonable CPU times for practical size instances.

This dissertation theorizes the ramifications of new media forms of narrative on subjectivization by tracing the evolution of the observer through its permutations as second-order observer, witness, director, and narrative agent and demonstrating the various interacting processes involved in the recursive feedback loops between and among, self, world, and story. In this project, I ex-plore novels by contemporary U.S. authors John Barth, Richard Powers, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace, as well as two televisual texts, Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse. Drawing from several seemingly disparate theories, I situate my argument in the interstices of systems theory (Luhmann, Clarke), psychoanalysis (Lacan, Butler), media theory (Ellis, Fiske, Buonanno), and posthuman theory (Hayles, Badmington), putting forth a theoretical lens I call posthuman narrative onto-epistemology. The study thus fits into overlapping critical conversations. The extended treatment of five contemporary American novels situates Storied Subjects in conversations surrounding postmodernism and posthumanism as well as conversations surrounding these particular authors. For example, in the first chapter, I argue that the John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy and Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 incorporate the observer from systems theory into the narrative frame, catalyzing an ontological and epistemological shift. In the second chapter, I show the ways in which Don DeLillo’s novels White Noise and Underworld demonstrate what John Ellis calls the “witness” ontology as well as the evolution of that ontology into what I call the “direc-tor” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In addition, the chapter devoted to televisual texts intervenes in an important, though often marginalized, conversation surrounding the importance of situating televisual narratives in dialogue with print fiction, arguing that we must attend to TV texts if we are to understand the texture of contemporary print fiction, which is saturated with the language of TV. In the final chapter, I explore the development of the “narrative agent” ontology, examining both form and content of the televisual texts Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse in order to argue that, once second-order observation reaches a prolonged critical awareness, the observer’s observation runs alongside her or his ability to intervene in the narrative, which allows for changing the story itself.

Ice sheet modeling is an important tool both for reconstructing past ice sheets and predicting their future evolution, but is complex and computationally costly. It involves modeling a system including the ice sheet, ice shelves and ice streams, which all have different dynamical behavior. The governing equations are non-linear, and to capture a full glacial cycle more than 100,000 years need to be simulated. To reduce the problem size, approximations of the equations are introduced. The most common approximation, the Shallow Ice Approximation (SIA), works well in the ice bulk but fails in e.g. the modeling of ice streams and the ice sheet/ice shelf coupling. In recent years more accurate models, so-called higher order models, have been constructed to address these problems. However, these models are generally constructed in an ad hoc fashion, lacking rigor. In this thesis, so-called Second Order Shallow Ice Approximation (SOSIA) equations for pressure, vertical shear stress and velocity are implemented into the ice sheet model SICOPOLIS. The SOSIA is a rigorous model derived by Baral in 1999 [3]. The numerical solution for a simple model problem is compared to an analytical solution, and benchmark experiments, comparing the model to other higher order models, are carried out. The numerical and analytical solution agree well, but the results regarding vertical shear stress and velocity differ from other models. It is concluded that there are problems with the model implemented, most likely in the treatment of the relation between stress and strain rate.

Using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MCFA) and multiple-indicator-multiple-cause (MIMIC) to investigate group difference in the context of the second-order factor model with either the unparceled or parceled data had never been thoroughly examined. The present study investigated (1) the difference of MCFA and MIMIC in terms of Type I error rate and power when testing the mean difference of the higher-order latent factor (delta kappa) in a second-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model; and (2) the impact of data parceling on the test of (delta kappa) between groups by using the two approaches. The methods were introduced, including the design of the models, the design of Monte Carlo simulation, the calculation of empirical Type I Error and empirical power, the two parceling strategies, and the adjustment of the random error variance. The results suggested that MCFA should be favored when the compared groups were when the different group sizes were paired with the different generalized variances, and MIMIC should be favored when the groups were balanced (i.e., have equal group sizes) in social science and education disciplines. This study also provided the evidence that parceling could improve the power for both MCFA and MIMIC when the factor loadings were low without bringing bias into the solution when the first-order factors were collapsed. However, parceling strategies might not be necessary when the factor loadings were high. The results also indicated that the two approaches were equally favored when domain representative parceling strategy was applied.

The Composite Rule Induction System proposed by Liang (1992) that uses the tabular approach and statistical inference to process qualitative and quantitative attributes separately for generating better classification rules. Yang (2007) extended the method by incorporating the second-order rules. This Study further extends the previous method by including a mechanism for detecting the existence of interaction effects. The detection method checks the degree of independence between attributes to determine whether the second-order rules should be processed. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, an enhanced prototype system was developed and both real and simulated data were used to compare its accuracy and rule complexity with existing systems. The result shows that the enhanced system performs at least as accurate as the existing system but is significantly better in the complexity of the resulting knowledge base.

The second-order least squares (SLS) method in regression model proposed by Wang (2003, 2004) is based on the first two conditional moments of the response variable given the observed predictor variables. Wang and Leblanc (2008) show that the SLS estimator (SLSE) is asymptotically more efficient than the ordinary least squares estimator (OLSE) if the third moment of the random error is nonzero. We apply the SLS method to variable selection problems and propose the adaptively weighted L1 regularized SLSE (L1-SLSE). The L1-SLSE is robust against the shape of error distributions in variable selection problems. Finite sample simulation studies show that the L1-SLSE is more efficient than L1-OLSE in the case of asymmetric error distributions. A real data application with L1-SLSE is presented to demonstrate the usage of this method. / October 2015

We introduce real second-order freeness in second-order noncommutative probability spaces. We demonstrate that under this definition, independent ensembles of the three real models of random matrices which we consider, namely real Ginibre matrices, Gaussian orthogonal matrices, and real Wishart matrices, are asymptotically second-order free. These ensembles do not satisfy the complex definition of second-order freeness satisfied by their complex analogues. This definition may be used to calculate the asymptotic fluctuations of products of matrices in terms of the fluctuations of each ensemble. We use a combinatorial approach to the matrix calculations similar to genus expansion, but in which nonorientable surfaces appear, demonstrating the commonality between the real ensembles and the distinction from their complex analogues, motivating this distinct definition. We generalize the description of graphs on surfaces in terms of the symmetric group to the nonorientable case. In the real case we find, in addition to the terms appearing in the complex case corresponding to annular spoke diagrams, an extra set of terms corresponding to annular spoke diagrams in which the two circles of the annulus are oppositely oriented, and in which the matrix transpose appears. / Thesis (Ph.D, Mathematics & Statistics) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-09 11:07:37.414