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AbstractThousands of Roma were killed in Ukraine by the Nazis and auxiliary police on the spot. There are more than 50,000 Roma in today’s Ukraine, represented by second and third generation decendants of the genocide survivors. The discussion on Roma identity cannot be isolated from the memory of the genocide, which makes the struggle over the past a reflexive landmark that mobilizes the Roma movement. About twenty Roma genocide memorials have been erected in Ukraine during last decade, and in 2016 the national memorial of the Roma genocide was opened in Babi Yar. However, scholars do not have a clear picture of memory narratives and memory practices of the Roma genocide in Ukraine. A comprehensive analysis of the contemporary situation is not possible without an examination of the history and memory of the Roma genocide before 1991.

‘Public health’ investigates the determinants of health, born during the Enlightenment in the seventeenth/eighteenth century. But ‘public health’ is also policies, aiming at the improvement of a population’s health. There is a mutual interchange between public health as science and as politics. A brief historical background is followed by an analysis of the impacts of political changes during the first two decades of the twenty first century in Sweden. In 2005, a policy document accepted by all political parties except for the Moderate Party highlighted socio-economic factors and structural reforms to decrease the health gaps in the population. The general election in September 2006 resulted in a new majority in the parliament and a center-right coalition government, including the Moderates and three parties that had approved of the 2005 document. In 2007 a “new public health policy” was introduced. Its priority lists stressed individual behavior and the new policy should be incentives to work instead of “allowances”. The Public Health Institute got instructions in accordance with the new policy. The ten years following this policy change has seen public health policies and attitudes to research shifting almost year by year. The new policy met a counter-stream from the very beginning. Influenced by Michael Marmot’s WHO Commission on health inequalities, regional commissions started in Sweden, Recommendations how to decrease social health gaps was adopted with almost no opposition by regional health boards in 2012–2013. But new problems were now occupying politicians and media—how to finance the growth of the old, multi-sick part of the population and increasing costs for new medical technologies and drugs. Public health as an academic discipline was in the middle of this fluctuating political landscape with direct effects on what has been considered worth listening to or support by public money.

Generalization from a case study is a perennial issue in the methodology of the social sciences. The case study is one of the most important research designs in many social scientific fields, but no shared understanding exists of the epistemic import of case studies. This article suggests that the idea of mechanism-based theorizing provides a fruitful basis for understanding how case studies contribute to a general understanding of social phenomena. This approach is illustrated with a reconstruction of Espeland and Sauder's case study of the effects of rankings on US legal education. On the basis of the reconstruction, it is argued that, at least with respect to sociology, the idea of mechanism-based theorizing captures many of the generalizable elements of case studies. Peer reviewed

The aim of this paper is to revise a standard narrative about governance of the Swedish school system in the period of 1910-1908. According to this narrative, the Swedish school system was centralized during this period. However, this narrative does not fit the history of Swedish mathematics education (years 7-9). The research questions are: where in the school system was change initiated and how was change enforced? On the basis of studies of syllabi, textbooks, teaching literature, teacher journals and reports from investigations and development projects, different modes of governance of school mathematics are identified. The main results are that textbook producers rather than national syllabi and exams were drivers of change in the period 1910-1960. Moreover, the centralized attempts to change school mathematics, prepared in the 1960s, were soon abandoned in the early 1970s. Thus, centralized governance of Swedish school mathematics, with the ambition to achieve change, was something that took effect relatively late and during a very short period of time.

In a Swedish context, Jewish women’s experiences and actions have gone unrecorded and unrecognised; most narratives of Swedish Jewish history offer only a partial account of their past. Marginalised or ignored, or absorbed into universalised categories of ‘Jews’, ‘women’ or ‘survivors’, the experiences and histories of Jewish women are in general not represented in previous Swedish research on the history of the Jewish minority, the Swedish Jewish response to the Nazi terror and the Holocaust or the history of the women’s movement in general. Previous research on the Swedish Jewish response and assistance for the Jewish refugees and survivors of Nazi persecution has mainly dealt with the Jewish community in Stockholm and its relief committee, where the women were absent from leadership positions. The purpose of this study is to explore if and how the Jewish women’s club in Stockholm initiated or was involved in relief activities for and with the persecuted Jews of Europe. Specifically, this is investigated in the context of how the club was established and manifested in public by examining what questions the club raised and what activities it organised in the 1930s and 1940s.

We present an online API to access a number of Natural Language Processing services developed at KTH. The services work on Swedish text. They include tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, shallow parsing, compound word analysis, word inflection, lemmatization, spelling error detection and correction, grammar checking, and more. The services can be accessed in several ways, including a RESTful interface, direct socket communication, and premade Web forms. The services are open to anyone. The source code is also freely available making it possible to set up another server or run the tools locally. We have also evaluated the performance of several of the services and compared them to other available systems. Both the precision and the recall for the Granska grammar checker are higher than for both Microsoft Word and Google Docs. The evaluation also shows that the recall is greatly improved when combining all the grammar checking services in the API, compared to any one method, and combining services is made easy by the API. QC 20230328

Saint Erik was King of Sweden for a few years up to 1160, when he was killed. A skeleton attributed to him is kept in Uppsala Cathedral. It underwent scientific reappraisal in 2014. The analyses included computer tomography, Xray absorptiometry, isotope analysis and DNA sampling. Radiocarbon confirms the alleged age of the bones. They belong to a 35-40-year-old man in excellent physical shape. The many wounds that he received in connection with his death fit surprisingly well with the saint's legend, whose preserved version was written 130 years after the event. English title in Web of Science: Saint Erik's skeleton.

Southern Africa was likely exclusively inhabited by San hunter-gatherers before ~2000 years ago. Around that time, East African groups assimilated with local San groups and gave rise to the Khoekhoe herders. Subsequently, Bantu-speaking farmers, arriving from the north (~1800 years ago), assimilated and displaced San and Khoekhoe groups, a process that intensified with the arrival of European colonists ~350 years ago. In contrast to the western parts of southern Africa, where several Khoe-San groups still live today, the eastern parts are largely populated by Bantu speakers and individuals of non-African descent. Only a few scattered groups with oral traditions of Khoe-San ancestry remain. Advances in genetic research open up new ways to understand the population history of southeastern Africa. We investigate the genomic variation of the remaining individuals from two South African groups with oral histories connecting them to eastern San groups, i.e., the San from Lake Chrissie and the Duma San of the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg. Using ~2.2 million genetic markers, combined with comparative published data sets, we show that the Lake Chrissie San have genetic ancestry from both Khoe-San (likely the ||Xegwi San) and Bantu speakers. Specifically, we found that the Lake Chrissie San are closely related to the current southern San groups (i.e., the Karretjie people). Duma San individuals, on the other hand, were genetically similar to southeastern Bantu speakers from South Africa. This study illustrates how genetic tools can be used to assess hypotheses about the ancestry of people who seemingly lost their historic roots, only recalling a vague oral tradition of their origin. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00439-016-1729-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.