  In this paper we use the results of our previous work in order to compute the
phase of the torsion of an Euler structure in terms of its characteristic
class. Also, we introduce here a new notion of an absolute torsion, which does
not require a choice of any additional topological information (like an Euler
structure). We prove that in the case of closed 3-manifolds obtained by
0-framed surgery on a classical knot the absolute torsion is equivalent to the
Conway polynomial. Hence the absolute torsion can be viewed as a
high-dimensional generalization of the Conway polynomial.
