Johan Wennström

Magnus Henrekson

This open access book examines the challenges and issues caused by a move to a marketized education system in Sweden. Observing the introduction of the school voucher system and a postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge, the move away from objective knowledge is identified as the core reason for Sweden’s current education crisis. The impact of declining education standards on the labor market is also discussed. This book highlights the issues seen in Sweden and suggests policies that can improve education in the rest of the Western world as well. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in education and labor economics.

The Crisis of Quality and Equity in a Once-Great School System—and How to Reverse the Trend

Dumbing Down

Dan Johansson

The formalism of probabilistic graphical models provides a unifying framework for capturing complex dependencies among random variables, and building large-scale multivariate statistical models. Graphical models have become a focus of research in many statistical, computational and mathematical fields, including bioinformatics, communication theory, statistical physics, combinatorial optimization, signal and image processing, information retrieval and statistical machine learning. Many problems that arise in specific instances-including the key problems of computing marginals and modes of probability distributions-are best studied in the general setting. Working with exponential family representations, and exploiting the conjugate duality between the cumulant function and the entropy for exponential families, Graphical Models, Exponential Families and Variational Inference develops general variational representations of the problems of computing likelihoods, marginal probabilities and most probable configurations. It describes how a wide variety of algorithms- among them sum-product, cluster variational methods, expectation-propagation, mean field methods, and max-product-can all be understood in terms of exact or approximate forms of these variational representations. The variational approach provides a complementary alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo as a general source of approximation methods for inference in large-scale statistical models.

Competencies and Institutions Fostering High-growth Firms

Olle Häger

Benny Grünfeld

A Romanian man recalls his survival during the Holocaust, when as a sixteen-year-old he and his family were sent first to Auschwitz and later on to two other concentration camps.

Magnus Henrekson

About

Books

Join the club