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Shaping events at the microlevel of rhythm is an important aspect of many groove-based musics. In the present study, we explore the interconnectedness of musical parameters such as timing, attack shape, timbre and relative intensity in creating groove through investigating musicians and producers’ discourse in five genres (jazz, samba, electronic dance music, hip-hop and traditional Scandinavian fiddle music). Through semi-structured interviews, we found both genre-specific accounts of how such musical features interact at the microlevel of rhythm and a cross-generic focus on inducing movement by shaping sound and generating rhythmic friction. The study empirically substantiates the multiparameter nature of musical performance and experience, and that particular genre-typical configurations of temporal and sonic features are needed to create the experience of groove. It thereby adds to the scholarly discourse on groove, which has often taken a more general and time-oriented view of rhythm.

ObjectiveTo compare long-term survival, reinterventions and risk factors using strict definitions of neonatal critical and non-critical valvular aortic stenosis (VAS).DesignA nationwide retrospective study using data from patient files, echocardiograms and the Swedish National Population Registry.Setting and patientsAll neonates in Sweden treated for isolated VAS 1994–2018. We applied the following criteria for critical aortic stenosis: valvular stenosis with duct-dependent systemic circulation or depressed left ventricular function (fractional shortening ≤27%). Indication for treatment of non-critical VAS was Doppler mean gradient >50 mm Hg.Main outcome measuresShort-term and long-term survival, aortic valve reinterventions need of valve replacements, risk factors for reintervention and event-free survival.ResultsWe identified 65 patients with critical VAS and 42 with non-critical VAS. The majority of the neonates were managed by surgical valvotomy. Median follow-up time was 13.5 years, with no patients lost to follow-up. There was no 30-day mortality. Long-term transplant-free survival was 91% in the critical stenosis group and 98% in the non-critical stenosis group (p=0.134). Event-free survival was 40% versus 67% (p=0.002) in the respective groups. Median time from the initial treatment to reintervention was 3.6 months versus 3.9 years, respectively (p=0.008).ConclusionsCritical VAS patients had significantly higher need for reintervention during the first year of life, lower event-free survival and lower freedom from aortic valve replacement at age ≥18 years, compared with neonates with non-critical stenosis.

An in-depth characterization of PDMAEMA prepared by ATRP was conducted, with a focus on end group analysis. This work discusses analytical tools providing essential information about the extent of control over DMAEMA polymerization and chain extension.

NMR-techniques coupled with morphological and electrochemical analysis revealed the chemical and physical interactions within polymer-based hybrid electrolytes.

Both the Swedish verb hinna and the Norwegian verb rekke have been shown to encode complex sufficiency meanings involving temporal sufficiency and ability (‘have enough time to be able to do sth’) (Johansson & Nordrum, 2016, 2021), but differ in that hinna always encodes temporal meaning while rekke also has spatial meaning. Interestingly, a third Mainland Scandinavian language, Danish, can also encode complex sufficiency meanings, and is similar to Norwegian rekke in having both spatial and temporal meanings. In this paper, featuring a short background and a multimodal presentation, we explore the meaning and use of the three Scandinavian verbs, hinna, rekke, and nå, in the multilingual parallel corpus OPUS2 (available through the Sketch Engine Web based interface) using English as the pivot language (see Tiedemann, 2012). In the spirit of Johansson (2007), the English correspondences of the Scandinavian verbs are used to shed light on semantic distinctions that may be difficult to spot in monolingual data. The multimodal presentation discusses the possibility that the three verbs in the Scandinavian languages are on a path towards grammaticalization, but at different stages in the process, a discussion which is related to an observation in the literature that verbs with ‘reach’ type meanings tend to grammaticalize into modals (see e.g., Bybee et al, 1994).

A series of different technical hardwood lignin-based resins have been successfully synthesized, characterized, and utilised to produce thiol-ene thermoset polymers. Firstly, technical lignin was fractionated and allylated, whereafter it was crosslinked with a trifunctional thiol. Structural and morphological characteristics of the lignin fractions were studied by $^{1}$H NMR, $^{31}$P NMR, SEC, FTIR, DSC, TGA, and WAXS. The hardwood lignin fractions have a high content of C5-substituted OH groups. The WAXS studies on lignin fractions revealed the presence of two π-π stacking conformations, sandwiched (4.08–4.25 Å) and T-shaped (6.52–6.91 Å). The presence of lignin superstructures with distances/sizes between 10.5 and 12.8 Å was also identified. The curing reaction of the thermosets was investigated by RT-FTIR. Almost all thermosets (excepting one fraction) reached 95% of the thiol conversion in less than 17 h, revealing the enhanced reactivity of the allylated hardwood lignin samples. The mechanical properties of the thermosets were investigated by DMA. The curing performance, as well as the final thermoset properties, have been correlated to variations in chemical composition and morphological differences of lignin fractions. The described results clearly demonstrate that technical hardwood lignins can be utilized for these applications, but also that significant differences compared to softwood lignins have to be considered for material design.

Kunstskapte fellesskap inviterer til en samtale om hva fellesskap i og rundt kunsten er og kan være. Hvilke former for samvær og samhørighet preger ulike kunst- og kulturoffentligheter, og hva slags offentligheter bidrar til at det dannes nye kunstskapte fellesskap? Hva skjer når kunst skaper friksjon ved å utfordre etablerte virkelighetsoppfatninger? Hvilke begreper og teorier tas i bruk for å forstå hva fellesskap kan innebære i en kunstnerisk sammenheng? Gjennom 12 artikler undersøker boka slike spørsmål i en nordisk kontekst. Den begrenser seg imidlertid ikke til profesjonell kunstutøvelse og kunstfeltets egne arenaer, men retter også blikket mot estetiske praksiser som utfolder seg innenfor kulturen i en bredere forstand. Boka er delt inn i tre tematiske deler: fellesskap som ambisjon, fellesskap som praksis og fellesskap under forhandling. Kunstskapte fellesskap springer ut av forskningsprogrammet «Kunst og sosiale fellesskap», som er et samarbeid mellom Statens Kunstfond i Danmark og Kulturrådet i Norge. Boka presenterer bidrag fra prosjekter som mottok finansiering fra den første fasen av forskningsprogrammet, i tillegg til bestilte artikler.

It has been argued that a generous family policy aimed at a gender-equal division of childcare and economic responsibility will have a positive impact on childbearing. In this study, we investigate whether fathers’ parental leave use is related to continued childbearing and whether there has been a policy effect on fertility behavior due to the introduction of the father’s quota in Norway and Sweden. Fathers’ parental leave use may affect fertility by easing women’s work burden at home and thus enhancing the degree of compatibility between childrearing and female employment, and it may increase fathers’ interest in children and childcare. To distinguish causality from selection in the effects observed, we use the natural experiment of the introduction of the father’s quotas. The results indicate that the reforms did not influence fertility in Norway but that Swedish couples with a lower income had a temporary higher third-birth risk. Fathers in this group showed the greatest increase in leave use after the reform.

Musical expertise improves the precision of timing perception and performance – but is this expertise generic, or is it tied to the specific style(s) and genre(s) of one’s musical training? We asked expert musicians from three musical genres (folk, jazz, and EDM/hip-hop) to align click tracks and tap in synchrony with genre-specific and genre-neutral sound stimuli to determine the perceptual center (“P-center”) and variability (“beat bin”) for each group of experts. We had three stimulus categories – Organic, Electronic, and Neutral sounds – each of which had a 2 × 2 design of the acoustic factors Attack (fast/slow) and Duration (short/long). We found significant effects of Genre expertise, and a significant interaction for both P-center and P-center variability: folk and jazz musicians synchronize to sounds typical of folk and jazz in a different manner than the EDM/hip-hop producers. The results show that expertise in a specific musical genre affects our low-level perceptions of sounds as well as their affordance(s) for joint action/synchronization. The study provides new insights into the effects of active long-term musical enculturation and skill acquisition on basic sensorimotor synchronization and timing perception, shedding light on the important question of how nature and nurture intersect in the development of our perceptual systems.

This chapter considers the Norwegian verb rekke ('reach') and its English correspondences in a bi-directional translation corpus (ENPC), as well as occurrences of rekke in Norwegian monolingual corpora. We suggest that rekke is undergoing grammaticalization from a concrete lexical spatial verb towards a (semi-)auxiliary that contains a component of time sufficiency, similar to Swedish hinna (Johansson & Nordrum 2016), but that rekke is at an earlier stage in this development. We base this suggestion on the following observations: (1) Swedish hinna was earlier polysemous between space and time, but can only denote time in present-day Swedish. (2) Norwegian rekke is still polysemous between space and time, but seems to always denote time when used as a (semi-)auxiliary. The study contributes to the semantic description of Norwegian rekke, but also has implications for grammaticalization studies as well as for studies of modality. (Less)

The burdens of resource constraints in publicly funded healthcare systems urge decision makers in countries like Sweden, Norway and the UK to find new financial solutions. One proposal that has been put forward is co-payment—a financial model where some treatment or care is made available to patients who are willing and able to pay the costs that exceed the available alternatives fully covered by public means. Co-payment of this sort has been associated with various ethical concerns. These range from worries that it has a negative impact on patients' wellbeing and on health care institutions, to fears that co-payment is in conflict with core values of publicly funded health care systems. This article provides an overview of the main ethical issues associated with co-payment, and ethical arguments both in support of and against it will be presented and analyzed.

This work demonstrates a versatile and environmentally friendly route for the development of new orthogonal monomers that can be used for postfunctionalizable polymer networks. A monomer containing both vinyl ether (VE) and cyclic disulfide moieties was synthesized via enzyme catalysis under benign reaction conditions. The bifunctional monomer could be polymerized to form macromolecues with differing architectures by the use of either cationic or radical photo polymerization. When cationic polymerization was performed, a linear polymer was obtained with pendant disulfide units in the side chain, whereas in the presence of radical initiator, the VE reacted with the disulfide to yield a branched structure. The monomer was thereafter used to design networks that could be postfunctionalized; the monomer was cross-linked with cationic initiation together with a difunctional VE oligomer and after cross-linking the unreacted disulfides were coupled to Rhodamine-VE by radical UV-initiation.

A synthesis protocol was identified to produce covalent grafting of poly(dimethyl siloxane) from cellulose, based on prior studies of analogous ring opening polymerizations. Following this polymer modification of cellulose, the contact adhesion was anticipated to be modified and varied as a function of the polymer molecular mass. The synthetic details were optimized for a filter paper surface before grafting the polymer from bulk cellulose spheres. The adhesion of the unmodified and grafted, bulk cellulose spheres were evaluated using the Johnson–Kendall–Roberts (JKR) theory with a custom build contact adhesion testing setup. We report the first example of grafting poly(dimethyl siloxane) directly from bulk cellulose using ring opening polymerization. For short grafting lengths, both the JKR work of adhesion and the adhesion energy at the critical energy release rate (Gc) were comparable to unmodified cellulose beads. When polymer grafting lengths were extended sufficiently where chain entanglements occur, both the JKR work of adhesion and Gc were increased by as much as 190%. Given the multitude of options available to graft polymers from cellulose, this study shows the potential to use this type of cellulose spheres to study the interaction between different polymer surfaces in a controlled manner.

Transforming biomass derived components to materials with controlled and predictable properties is a major challenge. Current work describes the controlled synthesis of starcopolymers with functional and degradable arms from the Lignoboost® process. Macromolecular control is achieved by combining lignin fractionation and characterization with ring-opening copolymerization (ROCP). The cyclic monomers used are e-caprolactone (eCL) and a functional carbonate monomer, 2-allyloxymethyl-2-ethyltrimethylene carbonate (AOMEC). The synthesis is performed at ambient temperature, under bulk conditions, in an open flask, and the graft composition and allyl functionality distribution are controlled by the copolymerization kinetics. Emphasis is placed on understanding the initiation efficiency, structural changes to the lignin backbone and the final macromolecular architecture. The present approach provides a green, scalable and cost effective protocol to create well-defined functional macromolecules from technical lignins.

Ferulic acid (FA) is an unsaturated hydroxycinnamic acid that can be isolated from lignin. In this study, the biorenewable FA was allylated to result in a library of mono- or diallylated monomers, either having the inherent cinnamoyl double bond intact or saturated through hydrogenolysis. All monomers were photo-chemically cured with trimethylolpropane tris(3-mercaptopropionate) (TRIS) into crosslinked films in the presence of a photoinitiator (Irgacue 819). The reactivity of the FA-derived monomers toward TRIS was investigated in detail by photorheology and FT-IR spectroscopy to reveal details on the relative reaction rates for the different alkene groups. The thermo-mechanical properties of the crosslinked films were fully characterized by means of dynamic mechanical analysis (DMTA) and thermal calorimetry (DSC). It was demonstrated that the glass transition temperature of the final crosslinked network could be controlled by the addition of a monoallylated monomer. By increasing the content of the monoallylated compound, it was possible to observe a linear decrease of the Tg-values of the crosslinked films.

A versatile method to produce metallic nickel nanoparticles is demonstrated. Metallic Ni nanoparticles have been synthesized from aqueous solution of NiCl2 using γ-radiation induced reduction. To prevent Ni re-oxidation, post-irradiation treatment was elaborated. Structural and compositional analyses were executed using X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. These studies reveal that the synthesized material consists of fcc Ni particles having size of 3.47 ± 0.71 nm. The nanoparticles have a tendency to agglomerate to the larger clusters. The latter are partially oxidized to form thin amorphous/poor-crystalline Ni(OH)2/NiO layers at the surface. Magnetization measurements demonstrate that the nanomaterial exhibit ferromagnetic-like behaviour with magnetization 30% lower than that in bulk Ni. The large active surface area (ECSA, 39.2 m2 g−1) and good electrochemical reversibility, confirmed by the electrochemical studies, make the synthesized material a potential candidate as an active component for energy storage devices.

Allocating on the basis of need is a distinguishing principle in publicly funded health care systems. Resources ought to be directed to patients, or the health program, where the need is considered greatest. In Sweden support of this principle can be found in health care legislation. Today however some domains of what appear to be health care needs are excluded from the responsibilities of the publicly funded health care system. Corrections of eye disorders known as refractive errors is one such domain. In this article the moral legitimacy of this exception is explored. Individuals with refractive errors need spectacles, contact lenses or refractive surgery to do all kinds of thing, including participating in everyday activities, managing certain jobs, and accomplishing various goals in life. The relief of correctable visual impairments fits well into the category of what we typically consider a health care need. The study of refractive errors does belong to the field of medical science, interventions to correct such errors can be performed by medical means, and the skills of registered health care professionals are required when it comes to correcting refractive error. As visual impairments caused by other conditions than refractive errors are treated and funded within the public health care system in Sweden this is an inconsistency that needs to be addressed.

Communications chemistry 3(1), 88 (2020). doi:10.1038/s42004-020-0335-9, Photopolymerization is a key enabling technology offering spatial and temporal control to allow for future functional materials to be made to meet societal needs. However, gaining access to robust experimental techniques to describe the evolution of nanoscale morphology in photo-initiated polymeric systems has proven so far to be a challenging task. Here, we show that these physical transformations can be monitored and quantified at the nanoscale in situ and in real-time. It is demonstrated that the initial structural features of the liquid precursors significantly affect the final morphology and the physical properties of the resulting solid via the occurrence of local heterogeneities in the molecular mobility during the curing transformation. We have made visible how local physical arrestings in the liquid, associated with both cross-linking and vitrification, determine the length scale of the local heterogeneities forming upon curing, found to be in the 10–200 nm range., Published by Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature, [London]

After a brief sketch of the historical background, the current political situation in Sweden is outlined. Since 1985 the National Council on Medical Ethics (Smer) has played an important role in the biopolitical debate in Sweden, and its activities and influence are described. Religious teachings are often combined with moral precepts. But what makes a statement religious is not easy to say, especially in societies where religious concerns have been intertwined with humanitarian common sense morality for a long time. Summing up, it can be said that the debate in Sweden on biopolitical issues has not shown many signs of the influence of religious arguments, though some religious actors are active in this debate.

The aim of reserving months for fathers in the Swedish parental leave system was to increase fathers' use of leave as well as encourage gender equality in the home and labor market. Using data from ...

The performance of different esterification catalysts was studied for the use in synthesis of renewable polyesters from dimethyl itaconate (DMI), dimethyl succinate (DMS) and 1,4-butanediol (BD). I ...

The fabrication of antibacterial films based on renewable materials (e.g., chitosan) has attracted significant interest in fields such as food packaging, health care and medicine. However, exploiting the antibacterial properties of cinchona alkaloids to design active nanostructured films able to release quinine-based antimicrobial compounds has not been considered previously. Herein, we develop two different routes to produce active quinine-based nanostructured cross-linked films by exploiting the multiple reactive sites of quinine and, specifically, both the nitrogen atom and the vinyl group of the quinuclidine portion of the molecule, as well as their corresponding orthogonal quaternization and thiol-ene coupling reactions. The first synthetic strategy produces stiff and brittle nanostructured quinine-based films of limited utility for practical applications. Conversely, the second approach produces active, flexible and nanostructured quinine-based films (T = -14 °C, Young's modulus = 1.3 GPa), which are able to release antimicrobial compounds against E. coli that, remarkably, are noncytotoxic against mouse macrophage and human dermal fibroblast cells. These kinds of active cinchona alkaloid-based coatings are easy to prepare by means of simple, solvent-free, melt quaternization/spreading procedures at a relatively low temperature (120 °C), making this second approach one of the most facile reported procedures to date to produce active nanostructured bio-based films., Financial support by the Spanish Ministry ‘‘Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad’’, MAT2015-63704-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE) and the Basque Government, IT-654-13 is acknowledged. A. L.-S. is grateful to the University of the Basque Country for his UPV/EHU pre-doctoral grant, and to both MPC and Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia for financial support during his stay at KTH.