Coming dissertations at Uppsala university
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Energy planning for islands : Guiding island energy transition and decision-making
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-510328
The importance and benefits of transitioning away from fossil fuel based energy systems is becoming ever clearer. The transition is especially crucial for geographic islands that typically have limited, or no, access to mainland energy networks. This limited access means that they must rely on costly, economically and environmentally, imported fossil fuels for energy production. This isolation and reliance on imported fuels makes islands particularly energy insecure, which is only expected to worsen because of climate change. At the same time, much of the current guidance and policy developed to help plan for islands’ energy transition is based on the conditions and circumstances present on the mainland or on energy planning that focuses primarily on technical or economic parameters. To plan for a smoother, more successful transition away from fossil fuel based energy production on islands, more data is needed about islanders themselves and their local circumstances as well as planning guidance flexible enough to fit the variable needs of island planners that goes beyond a techno-economic focus.
In this PhD Thesis and in response to these transition issues, an energy planning platform, REACT-DECARB, has been developed to specifically address the needs of island energy planners. This platform seeks to be holistic in its approach to facilitate the island energy transition planning procedure by considering typical island characteristics and energy transition processes while also including key technical, social, environmental and economic dimensions and granting planners flexibility in how they incorporate them. Additionally, surveys and interviews with island residents are conducted to gain an understanding of islanders’ motivations, priorities and awareness in relation to energy and energy transition as well as to determine if these can be of guidance to island energy transition planners.
The applications of the REACT-DECARB platform on geographic islands representing eight different countries from around the EU with varying populations, land areas and climates identified energy transition opportunities and obstacles specific to the islands where the platform was applied as well as to other islands seeking to transition their energy systems. Moreover, these applications of the planning platform demonstrated its ability to help island planners in the development of holistic energy transition paths. The platform takes island energy transition planning beyond a focus on techno-economics by including a wider range of planning dimensions allowing them to decide the methods best suited to their island’s needs. Further, the interactions with island residents demonstrated that their relationships to energy could be informative in the development of energy transition plans as well as likely being critical to their success. Islanders’ understandings, motivations, priorities and awareness were found to be not only directly useful in guiding planners during the designing of island energy transition plans but can also serve to inform planners in how best to educate local residents about and engage them in local energy transition projects. Ultimately, the work in this Thesis contributes to the efforts to make sure islands’, and islanders’, needs and perspectives are considered and included as a part of the wider energy transition.
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Quest for Sociology : Revisiting Prevailing Understandings of a Discipline with Computational Text Analyses of Dissertations
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-521096
What is sociology? For centuries sociologists have struggled to answer this question and repeatably proclaimed that their discipline is in crisis. The problem has generated a field of its own, the sociology of sociology, where sociologists of knowledge offer concepts for how the paradigmatic status of discipline and its crisis ought to be understood. Yet, the foundation of these understandings has often been limited to conceptual reasonings, historical exposes, and anecdotes from prominent scholars. Following the increasing availability of digitized texts and the development of computational techniques, new venues have been opened for investigating the empirical bearing of what sociology is. This dissertation offers a synthesis of, and a contribution to, this growing literature at the intersection of the sociology of knowledge and computational social science.
The starting point is a review of literature in the sociology of sociology that has found that our discipline is believed to exist in a state of fragmentation, lacks a paradigm, and is conditioned by the context of its production. Akin to the supposed crisis, these conceptualizations are often taken for granted rather than being empirically put to test. This is why this dissertation aims to shed new light on the crisis of sociology by empirically scrutinizing prevailing disciplinary understandings with an interpretative and theory-driven methodological approach to computational text analysis (i.e., word correlation networks, topic modeling, stylometry, and shallow neural networks).
To account for textual representations of sociological knowledge that are firmly institutionalized and exist across different local contexts, hundreds of dissertations in this discipline published in Sweden between 1980 and 2019 by five main universities have been digitized to form two corpora – 380 full-texts and 850 abstracts. Using these corpora, the conceptualizations are operationalized to be able to scrutinize, and trace, reoccurring instances where dissertations allude to certain images of sociology, which, drawing on the work of Margaret Masterman, can be regarded as crude replicas of paradigms. The study design allows us to problematize prevailing understandings of what sociology is.
In contrast to the notion of fragmentation, the corpora are constituted by a core conditioned by local institutions attuned to different paradigmatic images of sociology. A discrepancy is also found between the two corpora where the abstracts appear to follow a divide between qualitative and quantitative research, and the full-texts are characterized by five paradigms with distinct methodological, epistemological, and ontological positions. These results suggest that the coexistence of multiple paradigms has been conflated with fragmentation and that sociologists tend to present their knowledge along the lines of simplified dichotomies. In response to the crisis, a more fruitful approach might be to embrace paradigm pluralism.
As a contribution to the sociology of knowledge, this dissertation is an example of how the methodological divide can be overcome by merging insights from the conceptual strand with a hermeneutical take on computational methods to empirically explore taken-for-granted assumptions behind the production of disciplinary knowledge.
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Risk factors for incident heart failure and atrial fibrillation in an elderly population : The role of cardiac conduction and heart rate variability
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-518489
Heart failure (HF) and atrial fibrillation (AF) are epidemic diseases, frequently coexisting, sharing risk factors and conferring poor prognosis. Identification of individuals at high risk of HF and AF may enable early treatment and improve the prognosis. Reliable prediction models for daily clinical practice are lacking. Early modification and treatment of risk factors may reduce the incidence of AF and HF. Because atrial structure and function abnormalities increase the risk of AF, ECG indices reflecting atrial pathology may prove useful in predicting AF and HF.
The main objectives were to evaluate whether:
- P-wave duration (Pdur) and PR-interval in V1 predicted incident HF and incident AF (Paper I-II)
- low frequency/high frequency (L-F/H-F) ratio, a marker of autonomic balance, predicted incident HF (Paper IV)
- combining selected ECG variables or the L-F/H-F ratio with traditional risk factors improved the performance of the traditional HF prediction model (Paper III-IV).
The Prospective Investigation of the Vasculature in Uppsala Seniors (PIVUS) with 15 years of follow-up was used for all four studies. After applying the exclusion criteria, 836 subjects were evaluated for incident HF (Paper I, III-IV) and 877 subjects for incident AF (Paper II). Cox proportional hazard analysis related ECG-derived variables to incident HF and incident AF. Study III used machine learning to determine which ECG variables correlated to incident HF. C-statistic was used to test whether adding selected ECG variables to traditional HF risk factors improved the performance of the HF prediction model.
Short Pdur was significantly associated with incident HF (Paper I) and incident AF (Paper II). Of 134 ECG variables, high R-wave amplitude variation (SD Ramp) had the highest predictive value for HF (Paper III). A decreased L-F/H-F ratio significantly predicted HF (Paper IV). Adding eight selected ECG variables (Paper III) and the L-F/H-F ratio (Paper IV) to the traditional risk factors significantly improved HF predictive performance by 11.7% and 3.3%, respectively.
In conclusion, the ECG may prove useful for predicting incident HF and AF beyond the traditional risk factors. An autonomic imbalance may precede the development of HF.