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(2014)Tutkimuksessa pohdittiin kellumiseen ja uppoamiseen liittyvien ennakkokäsitysten hyödyntämisen mahdollisuuksia nosteen opetuksessa. Oppimisen tavoitteiden kannalta validien ennakkokäsitysten lisäksi pohditaan myös virhekäsitysten hyödyntämistä. Tässä tutkimuksessa tutkittaville 50 oppilaalle suoritettiin ennakkokäsitystesti, jonka jälkeen haastateltiin yhdeksää oppilasta. Haastattelut olivat kahden keskisiä opetustilanteita, joissa keskustelu aloitettiin oppilaan lomakevastauksien ja vastausten perusteluiden pohtimisesta. Keskustelua vietiin eteenpäin kysymysten ja havainnollistavien esimerkkien avulla. Oppilaan käsityksiä nosteesta pyrittiin siis kehittämään oppilaan lähtökohdat huomioon ottaen. Tämän tutkimuksen perusteella yläkouluikäiset voidaan luokitella karkeasti kolmeen ryhmään ennen nosteen opetusta. Haastavimmat oppilaat selittävät nostetta fysikaalisen painon avulla; painava kappaleet uppoavat ja kevyet kelluvat. Tässä ryhmässä noste saatettiin jopa nähdä väliaineen vastuksen kaltaisena vastusvoimana, jolloin esim. väliaineen viskositeetti tai väliaineeseen asetetun kappaleen terävyys vaikuttaa kellumiseen. Keskimmäinen ja suurin ryhmä ovat oppilaat, jotka selittivät nostetta ominaispainon avulla. Selityksellä pärjää jo monissa tilanteissa, mutta siitä puuttuvat käsitteet massa, tilavuus ja tiheys sekä paino ja noste fysikaalisina voimina. Osa keskimmäisen ryhmän oppilaista omaa selityksen nosteen aiheuttajalle; maa vetää väliainetta joko kovempaa tai hiljempaa kuin väliaineessa olevaa kappaletta. Opetuksen kannalta vaivattomin ryhmä ovat oppilaat, jotka käyttivät päättelyissään fysikaalisia suureita kuten massa, tilavuus ja tiheys. Nämä oppilaat ymmärsivät myös, että noste syntyy paineesta, mutta paine-eron käsite ei ollut heilläkään käytössä. Virhekäsitystestin perusteella tavallisin virhekäsitys oppilailla oli kappaleen pinta-alan yhdistäminen nosteen suuruuteen; kappale kelluu helpommin mikäli paino on jakautunut suuremmalle alalle. Nesteellä on siis jonkinlainen kelluttavat ominaisuus, joka on levittäytynyt sen pinnalle. Kyseinen virhekäsitys ei ole täysin huono, sillä noste on paineesta syntyvä voima ja paineesta syntyvät voimat riippuvat usein pinta-alasta. Virhekäsitys häviää, jos oppilas oppii ymmärtämään nosteen syntymekanismia paremmin. Pinta-alan ja paine-eron välisen yhteyden oppiminen vaatii ymmärrystä siitä, että noste syntyy kappaleen ylä- ja alapuolen välisestä paine-erosta. Kun kappaleen pinta-ala kasvaa, paine-ero pienenee. Kolme haastateltua oppilasta olivat valmiita vastaanottamaan edellä mainitun päättelyn heidän omista lähtökohdistaan. Ennakkokäsitystesti synnytti tai toi esiin myös paljon muita virhekäsityksiä. Tämä johtui osittain siitä, että testin kysymyksissä esiintyi tarkoituksella ominaisuuksia, jotka intuitio saattaa yhdistää uppoamiseen ja kellumiseen. Oppilaat tukivat perusteluitaan näillä konkreettisilla ominaisuuksilla huolimatta siitä, että jokaisesta kysymyksestä pystyi päättelemään minkälainen kysytyn kappaleen tiheys on. Tiheyden sijaan perustelut oli helpompi muotoilla mm. kappaleen painon, kaasupitoisuuden, reikäisyyden, litteyden, terävyyden, asennon, kovuuden, täytemateriaalin, väliaineen määrän ja väliaineen viskositeetin perusteella. Tämän työn tulokset osoittavat että on vaikea tunnistaa, missä vaiheessa ja miten ennakkokäsitykset syntyvät. Perinteisesti on ajateltu että ennakkokäsitykset syntyvät opetusta edeltävistä havainnoista ja sosiaalisesta vuorovaikutuksesta. Osa ennakkokäsityksistä saattaa kuitenkin syntyä vasta opetustilanteessa. Virhekäsityksiä ei tarvitse kauhistella, sillä ne saattavat olla oppilaan ensimmäisiä yrityksiä ratkaista jokin fysikaalinen ongelma tieteellisessä kontekstissa.
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(2018)The trending of urban living during recent years can be seen both in public debate and in growth statistics of cities. The most attractive areas in addition to regions’ central cities are those surrounding municipalities which have good transportation connections to the central city and have managed to highlight their urban features. The trend can clearly be seen in the city of Järvenpää, which was, with annual population growth of 2,5 %, the fastest growing municipality in continental Finland in 2016–2017. As the popularity of urban living is growing, the focus of construction in Järvenpää has shifted from traditional single-family and low-rise housing to apartment buildings located close to train stations. This Master’s thesis looks at the pull factors of the new urban residential areas in Järvenpää as well as factors encouraging to settle down in the areas. The reasons for moving to the areas are compared to current social, demographic and migration trends. The study addresses the residents' point of view to housing phenomena. The aim is to pay attention to the connections between household decision-making processes and broader migration phenomena. In addition, the aim is to supplement the field of housing and migration studies in Finland, in which the focus has been in the dynamics between the urban areas of the regional centers and the suburbs of the surrounding municipalities, while less attention has been payed to the differing characteristics of the surrounding areas. The research problem is approached through the following questions: who are the residents of the new residential areas located near train stations in Järvenpää; which factors most significantly guide the housing choices of these residents; and how do the residents’ housing pathways form regionally and structurally. The analysis and discussion are supported by the contextual framework of housing chains, developed in the theory section of the thesis. The data was collected through a survey in spring 2018. The survey was targeted to certain new areas close to the train stations of Järvenpää and Ainola. The survey was sent to altogether 1548 residents. 400 replies were received, which makes the response rate 26 %. Based on an analysis of possible non-response bias, the data was observed to be relatively representative to the population, apart from the elderly being somewhat overrepresented. The main analysis methods where statistical analyses (frequency analysis, cross tabulation and factor analysis) as well as content analysis of the open-ended questions. The data was mainly analyzed through comparisons of different kinds of residential areas as well as demographic groups. The results of the study can be summarized in three main points. Firstly, the new residential areas located near train stations in Järvenpää reflect broader social and demographic trends as well as current trends in housing . In the areas close to the city, majority of the residents live alone and are young adults or elderly. Similar to national trends, the housing preferences included single-family housing and peaceful living environment, but at the same time, services, central location and good transportation were valued. Secondly, the attractiveness of the area in all study areas was based on central location and good transportation and in the fact that the apartments were new. However, there were differences in the importance of services and nature when comparing the apartment building areas closest to the center and the apartment building areas and detached house areas farther from the center. Thirdly, it was observed that the areas not only bring new residents to the city, but also pull a notable amount of people to move within the city. The new areas thus connect to the existing housing stock and start vacancy chains by opening vacancies in both detached houses and older apartment buildings. Various housing chains also occurred in how the social contacts outside households, the stage of family life-cycle, previous experiences and values affect housing choices. Based on the results, it can be noted that successful urban apartment building housing in the surrounding municipalities is characterized by good commercial and public services and efficient transportation, whereas in detached housing, the desired environment is centrally and transportation-wise well located but peaceful and close to nature. The significance of the services and transportation in housing satisfaction should be acknowledged early on when planning and building new areas . Also, lifestyles and situations change, and that affects housing choices. The results indicate that diverse housing options will have demand alongside the high-rise building boom. Additionally, it is important to acknowledge the interrelations between new construction and the existing housing stock to avoid making simplified interpretations about the logic of growth sustained by the trend of urban living.
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(2020)The themes of this thesis are alternative, informal, and uncommercial cultural spaces, the scenes using the spaces, and the individual scene participants. The study’s frame is Helsinki between 2000–2019. The study combines relevant theoretical discussion from subculture research tradition and urbanism. The key concepts of the thesis are ‘scenes,’ a cultural definition of ‘subculture,’ ‘alternative cultural spaces,’ ‘DIY culture’ (‘do it yourself’), and ‘enclaves.’ The thesis presents Helsinki’s ‘DIY landscape’ to consist of interconnected actors—scene participants—who are part of a network that revolves around making, performing and facilitating music in a specific urban infrastructure—the city, Helsinki—and in which the alternative cultural spaces create physical ‘hubs’ for the scene. The data has been collected online via a combination of oral history recollections and qualitative surveying. The data was collected in collaboration between Helsinki City Museum and Music Archive Finland in fall 2019. The data consist of 70 individual responses. The data is treated through the epistemology of qualitative research and oral history, and therefore is seen to include both ‘factual’ information and the informant’s subjective interpretations, their experience. On a practical level, the analysis has been conducted mainly via qualitative content analysis (QCA), but also geographic information system (GIS) has been used. The study aims to explicate a widely recognized but poorly known cultural phenomenon. The study’s key results are as follows. Four types of alternative cultural spaces have existed: dedicated buildings, rooms, outdoor venues, and even a ship. All of the study’s 34 spaces have hosted live music events and a variety of other cultural, political, and social activities. The spaces have been acquired for use by renting, squatting, and asking permission, and in two cases are owned by the facilitator. With some exceptions, they are located in the fringe areas of Helsinki’s city center, have a relatively short lifespan (maximum of five years in a set location) and share ‘aesthetics of necessity’ that roots meager or non-existent funding and the use of subcultural symbols and art. The spaces follow certain ‘DIY operating principles’ that aim to create an encouraging and inclusive atmosphere for DIY participation. The spaces, and their users, have faced a variety of challenges, setbacks, and problems. These are rooted in funding, the deficits of the buildings and their facilities, and to other citizens, the police, and the City of Helsinki. The City’s role emerges from the data as ambivalent—a constrainer and enabler. According to the responder’s experience, the City does not have a uniform policy towards the use of vacant urban space, and DIY culture overall is not recognized. For the scenes, the alternative cultural spaces function as platforms where cherish—often ‘marginal’—music and subcultures. Some of the participants connect political and societal ideals to the spaces and DIY activities. DIY activities emerged as—sometimes self-purposefully—social and communal by their nature. In the spaces between scene participants take place socio-cultural ‘cross-fertilization,’ which sometimes leads to new organizational groups and even scenes forming. These might relocate their practices elsewhere, and thus DIY culture spreads to new locations in the urban infrastructure. For the individual scene participants, crossing with the scene represents an important part of finding a social reference group. Some of the responders described going through a ‘DIY phase,’ which is a several yearlong period in their youth when life orientations and identity are intensively connected to DIY culture. The meaningfulness of scene participation lasts to later life, even if the participant’s active years are foregone. For some, the skills and knowledge acquired in the scene creates a basis for a more professional career in cultural production. As the reasons for the diminish or end of the DIY participation are given the closure of an alternative cultural space focal for the participant, challenges in activities, and major life events. In the discussion, the thesis suggests the concept of ‘urban DIY enclaves’ in the toolboxes of urban planners and designers. The DIY enclaves differentiate from the broader urban landscape by their condition, aesthetics, political messages, and subcultural symbols. Socially they have been constructed to advance DIY culture and cherish the creative lifestyle associated with it. The concept is suggested as a device for acknowledging the existence of DIY culture; in other words, its need for space, and its participants’ eagerness to participate in the construction of the urban and cultural landscape.
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(Helsingin yliopistoHelsingfors universitetUniversity of Helsinki, 2009)Inadvertent climate modification has led to an increase in urban temperatures compared to the surrounding rural area. The main reason for the temperature rise is the altered energy portioning of input net radiation to heat storage and sensible and latent heat fluxes in addition to the anthropogenic heat flux. The heat storage flux and anthropogenic heat flux have not yet been determined for Helsinki and they are not directly measurable. To the contrary, turbulent fluxes of sensible and latent heat in addition to net radiation can be measured, and the anthropogenic heat flux together with the heat storage flux can be solved as a residual. As a result, all inaccuracies in the determination of the energy balance components propagate to the residual term and special attention must be paid to the accurate determination of the components. One cause of error in the turbulent fluxes is the fluctuation attenuation at high frequencies which can be accounted for by high frequency spectral corrections. The aim of this study is twofold: to assess the relevance of high frequency corrections to water vapor fluxes and to assess the temporal variation of the energy fluxes. Turbulent fluxes of sensible and latent heat have been measured at SMEAR III station, Helsinki, since December 2005 using the eddy covariance technique. In addition, net radiation measurements have been ongoing since July 2007. The used calculation methods in this study consist of widely accepted eddy covariance data post processing methods in addition to Fourier and wavelet analysis. The high frequency spectral correction using the traditional transfer function method is highly dependent on relative humidity and has an 11% effect on the latent heat flux. This method is based on an assumption of spectral similarity which is shown not to be valid. A new correction method using wavelet analysis is thus initialized and it seems to account for the high frequency variation deficit. Anyhow, the resulting wavelet correction remains minimal in contrast to the traditional transfer function correction. The energy fluxes exhibit a behavior characteristic for urban environments: the energy input is channeled to sensible heat as latent heat flux is restricted by water availability. The monthly mean residual of the energy balance ranges from 30 Wm-2 in summer to -35 Wm-2 in winter meaning a heat storage to the ground during summer. Furthermore, the anthropogenic heat flux is approximated to be 50 Wm-2 during winter when residential heating is important.
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(2022)As biodiversity loss is identified to be one of the pressing environmental challenges today, Finnish cities have begun to follow in the footsteps of many European cities by creating urban greening plans in the form of increasing meadow habitats. The ecological and economic benefits of urban meadows are well understood, but when meadow habitats are brought into people’s everyday environments, it is important to consider how it affects people’s environmental aesthetic experiences. ‘Aesthetics’ is often understood solely as individual preferences, but the aim of this thesis was to address the aesthetic appreciation of meadows through the field of environmental aesthetics. Combining the fields of environmental aesthetics and ecology, this study provides a fresh perspective to the value debate over urban meadows. The analysis of the work approached the topic from the perspective of Finnish cities. After compiling the operational programs that solely consider urban meadows, qualitative content analysis was used to analyze what ecological and aesthetic aspects are brought up in the documents and how they are valuated. To emphasize the aesthetic perspective, it was further investigated through discourse analysis whether there are consistent ways in which cities construct an image of the aesthetic values of urban meadows. The content analysis showed that the documents have both ecological and aesthetic viewpoints. The ecological content emphasized that meadows are important tool in increasing biodiversity and also provide recreational possibilities for people. The aesthetic content focused on the cultural-historical role of the meadows as well as the experiences provided by the meadows. Based on the content analysis, three uniform discourses were identified throughout the documents. The first relates to meadows which are the remains of cities’ agricultural history, and their cultural and ecological values are easily recognizable. The second refers to meadows that are currently emerging from other green types such as lawns and grasslands reverting to woodland. They are seen as having ecological and recreational value, but as they are unlikely to meet the expectations for flowering meadows, city officials want to inform citizens about the ecological qualities of these meadows to avoid negative feedback. The last discourse focuses on the experiential side of meadows, but instead of talking about the environmental aesthetic experience as understood in theoretical research, the argumentation is restricted to visual and recreational experiences. The way in which the aesthetic qualities, values and experiences of urban meadows are understood in a professional context reflects the way in which they are presented to the users of green areas. This thesis has revealed that the terminology used in the documents referring to environmental aesthetics is insufficient and does not correspond to the concepts presented in the theory of the work. Expanding the debate on environmental aesthetics would turn the goal of ‘people tolerating unordered ecosystems’ to ‘how can unordered ecosystems be aesthetically appreciated’. While informing citizens about the ecological benefits of urban meadows, they should also be informed about the potential aesthetic values of urban meadows, such as wildness, aesthetic diversity, and how the ordinary environment becomes extraordinary.
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(2014)Lagos is the biggest city not just in Nigeria but also in the Sub-Saharan Africa. This megacity has a reputation of being the most dangerous and chaotic city in the world. Despite that Lagos is facing an infrastructural crisis and most of the city acts through informal means, it has its own way to survive and operate. The purpose of this study is to create a picture of the urban structure of Lagos Metropolitan Area and compare it with the existing urban structure models. The purpose is also to discover the possible affects of existing zoning plans on the current structure and dynamism of the city. Again, the aim of this research is to study the characteristics of the metropolis and reflect them to the postmodern concepts of Myers's that intend to explain the nature of modern African cities. This study tries to provide new perspectives on the image of the study area. However, this study tries not to draw a detailed picture of every district of the metropolis but aims at highlighting the dominant features of the city. This study adopts qualitative research methods and is descriptive by its nature. The primary data consists of researches, maps, scientific articles, project documents and different kinds of publications concerning the for example landuse and dominant features of different districts and neighborhoods of Lagos. The data collected from these sources is combined and analyzed in order to create a visualization over the urban structure of Lagos. The secondary data was collected during the field trip in Lagos in 2009 and consists of observation notes. It serves as a supportive tool in the descriptive part of the work. The study concludes that the city structure in Lagos consists much of poor residential districts and slum areas. Most of the citizen live in poverty as medium- or high-grade districts do not exist nearly at all. Lagos is often described as industrial centre of Nigeria, but in reality the industrial activity is not particularly high since the weak infrastructure and low security situation of the city does not attract investors. Again, the structural analysis discovers that the city has currently just one clear core area. The large area of the metropolis would demand several central business districts to improve the mobility and selection of public services of the city. This study suggests that Lagos can be very easily described and expressed with the concepts presented by Myers. On the grounds of his concepts, Lagos has several features typical of modern African city. Colonial era has left its fingerprints both on the city structure and dynamics. The informal sector has a remarkable role in Lagos and violence is a constant part of the streets. Despite that, Lagos has slowly found its place among the global urban centres. Its significance as a centre of trade and culture keeps growing in the future. On the basis if this research it can be argued that there is a great need for urban structure studies in Africa. Often areas that appear as disorganized shantytowns include some structures and operating models of their own. By creating updated structure models and studies it is possible to affect positively on urban planning trends and also local development.
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(2023)With the growing concerns over data privacy and new regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there has been increased attention to privacy-preserving synthetic data generation methods. However, the usability of these methods has received limited attention. This thesis focuses on the usability challenges associated with privacy-preserving synthetic data generation methods based on probabilistic graphical models. This thesis addresses usability challenges related to running time efficiency, applicability with continuous data and query selection with experiments conducted on different datasets. This thesis aims to bridge the gap between cutting-edge privacy-preserving synthetic data generation methods and their practical implementation with real-world datasets. Proposed solutions have the potential to make these methods more accessible and usable, thereby facilitating their broader adoption. The thesis concludes by summarizing the key results and emphasizing the importance of addressing usability challenges in privacy-preserving synthetic data generation methods.
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(2020)With the new trends in advanced healthcare equipment and innovation, the healthcare industry is now focused more on efficiency and improving quality. Devices record events in event log files that represent the program or application's actual usage. The log file of the event is like an operation history which shows what occurred in the program. Since devices have the log of real-time events, real-time processes can be tracked, and data analysed from different aspects. The details about the event log file can be used to create a process model and analyse the data to know its strengths and weaknesses. This thesis aimed to develop a tool for usability analysis used for GE healthcare. The design science approach has been used as an overall research method. To achieve the research goal, ideas was taken from already developed process mining algorithms and used in making algorithms that solves the problem of software process mining. In this thesis, already used process mining algorithm techniques were examined that can be used to answer the problem of software process mining. Software process mining was used to analyse the deployed software behavior. The study focused on making the process discovery algorithm along with structured algorithm. The outcome of the thesis was the tool that was used by the GE Healthcare to do the usability analysis on log files. The tool produces the events in the form of flow chart diagram.
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(2018)Since data-driven business and decision making have ben trending, data has found to be a valuable part of organizations capital. Centralized data warehouse has typically been a solution for organizations to collect, manage and exploit data. While data volumes have gained, also data warehouse technologies have evolved over time and technical architectures have become more complex. In the process of that, metadata has become more essential instrument for managing large-scale data warehouse and analytics environments. Though metadata-based data warehouse architecture and automation have become quite common concepts, there are still potential areas and subsets of metadata left that has been quite out of the spot. One of those is metadata generated by the usage of data warehouse and analytics platform. Capability to measure a product and its usage is one of the key things to improve product technically, but also get insights to the ways that data has been consumed by end users. Before usage metadata and metrics can be analysed and results can be exploited, data must be collected and stored in a format that facilitates its further utilization purposes. That raises questions: how usage-related metadata and metrics should be modelled and stored to facilitate its utilization with other metadata of the data warehouse environment? How that collected usage metadata should be managed? Depending on the technical environment and setup, how usage metadata and metrics can be collected in the first hand? As a result of this study, design process to model database usage by analysing requirements and conceptualizing usage in a hierarchical model is presented. Also logical level reference model for usage metadata and methods for usage metadata management are presented. In addition, concepts for usage metadata and metrics collection process are discussed in the context of Amazon Redshift data warehouse service. Though presented reference model is an example outcome of the design process, phases of the design process can be generalized and exploited when designing usage metadata model in different use cases and technical environments.
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(2012)Henkivakuutuksia käsiteltäessä tarkastelun alla on aina vakuutetun jäljellä oleva elinaika, jota kuvaa positiivinen satunnaismuuttuja T. Usean vakuutetun henkivakuutuksen ollessa kyseessä, oletetaan, että vakuutettujen jäljellä olevat elinajat ovat toisistaan riippumattomia. Toinen henkivakuutusten käsittelyssä olennainen käsite on kuolevuus(intensiteetti), jonka avulla saadaan laskettua todennäköisyyksiä vakuutetun jäljellä olevalle elinajalle. Henkivakuutuslaskennassa vakuutuskaudet voivat olla pitkiä, jopa useita kymmeniä vuosia. Yhtiön kannalta tärkeää on, että vakuutuksen antaminen on kannattavaa. Perusperiaatteena vakuutusyhtiöllä on aina ekvivalenssiperiaate eli vakuutusmaksujen täytyy vastata vakuutetulle maksettavia korvauksia koko vakuutuskauden ajalta. Koska maksuhetkien välillä saattaa olla paljonkin eroa, täytyy vakuutuksien hinnoittelussa ottaa huomioon korkoutuvuus. Usean vakuutetun elämänvaravakuutuksessa korvaus S maksetaan vakuutuskauden lopussa hetkellä n. Korvauksen suuruus riippuu siitä, ketkä vakuutetuista ovat tällöin elossa. Yleensä ensin tiedetään halutun korvauksen suuruus S. Vakuutusmaksun P suuruus saadaan laskemalla hetkeen nolla diskontatun korvauksen S odotusarvo. Usean vakuutetun kuolemanvaravakuutuksessa korvaus maksetaan aina kuoleman sattuessa ennen hetkeä n. Korvaushetkiä voi siis olla yhtä monta kuin on vakuutettujakin. Kuolemanvaravakuutuksen osalta periaate on sama kuin elämänvaravakuutuksessakin, mutta käytännössä laskeminen on paljon haastavampaa, johtuen nimenomaan maksuhetkien lukumäärästä ja ajankohdista. Riskien hallitsemiseksi yhtiölle tärkeä käsite on vastuuvelka, joka on määritelmän mukaan tulevien korvausten ja tulevien vakuutusmaksujen nykyarvojen erotus. Vastuuvelka kertoo siis sen, kuinka paljon yhtiöllä pitää olla varallisuutta, jotta se selviäisi tulevaisuudessa tapahtuvien vakuutustapahtumien seurauksena maksettavista korvauksista. Usean vakuutetun henkivakuutuksia käsiteltäessä vastuuvelan suuruuteen vaikuttaa erityisesti se, missä tilassa prosessi on tarkasteluhetkellä eli ketkä vakuutetuista on elossa ja ketkä kuolleet. Tärkeä apuväline vastuuvelan suuruuden ennustamisessa on Thielen yhtälö, joka kuvaa vastuuvelan muutoksia. Thielen yhtälöä muodostettaessa tarkastellaan virtauskaavion avulla millaisia muutoksia vakuutettujen tiloissa mahdollisesti tapahtuu pienellä aikavälillä. Mahdollisten tapahtumien seurauksena maksettavien korvausten ja maksujen suuruus painotetaan vastaavan tapahtuman todennäköisyydellä, jolloin summasta saadaan muodostettua Thielen differentiaaliyhtälö. Usean vakuutetun henkivakuutuksia on mahdollista lähestyä myös Markov -prosessin näkökulmasta. Tällöin oletetaan, että prosessi siirtyy tilasta toiseen intensiteeteillä, joka vastaa vakuutettujen kuolevuuksia. Nyt prosessin siirtymätodennäköisyydet saadaan laskettua näiden avulla ja vakuutuksen nettokertamaksua laskettaessa sovelletaan samaa periaatetta kuin aikaisemminkin. Markovilainen lähestymistapa helpottaa erityisesti kolmen tai useamman hengen vakuutuksien käsittelyä.
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(2022)The demand for natural and man-made cellulosic-based materials is in an increase continually due to the world population growth. Cotton production does not meet this demand. Consequently, a rational strategy to close this “cellulosic products gap” is to increase the production of man-made cellulosic products, following the principles of green chemistry. Cellulose is an essential skeletal component in plants and is a nearly limitless polymeric raw material with intriguing structure and properties. Due to its inherent insolubility, this crystalline and stiff homopolymer has not yet reached its full application potential. The diversity of regenerated cellulose materials formed through physical dissolution and regeneration has been remarkable in recent decades, showing tremendous possibilities in the fields of textiles, packaging, biomedicine, water treatment, and optical/electrical devices. Since most of the agents used in the physical dissolution and regeneration process can be recycled and reused and the nature of cellulose is preserved, no chemical reactions take place. This method is therefore environmentally friendly and holds the promise of bringing about a new Green Revolution in the widespread use of cellulose-like natural resources. Given the fabrication of new materials using an ecologically benign technology and the replacement of petroleum-based materials, the effects and advantages of such physical processes on society are very fascinating. This thesis includes the dissolution of microcrystalline cellulose (MCC), which represents a highly crystalline and pure cellulose model substrate by 7-methyl-1,5,7- triazabicyclo [4.4.0] dec-5-enium acetate [mTBDH] [OAc] superbase ionic liquid (SIL), which has an extreme dissolution power for cellulose. Cellulose can be first dissolved in IL at 80 ◦C and then regenerated, upon cooling, with the addition of n-propanol as an antisolvent for cellulose, leading to a phase separation. The second part of the thesis is the regeneration of cellulose in the form of films from cellulose-IL solutions. [mTBDH] [OAc] IL was used for the first time as a plasticizer for the preparation of transparent cellulose films.
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(2018)In the case of remote inspection and maintenance operations, the quality and amount of information available to the operator on demand plays a significant role. In knowledge-intensive tasks performed remotely or in a hazardous environment, augmented and virtual reality technologies are often seen as a solution capable of providing the required level of information support. Application of these technologies faced many obstacles over the years, mostly due to the insufficient maturity level of their technical implementations. This thesis contains a description of the research work related to the usage of augmented and virtual reality in remote inspection and maintenance operations, and is aimed at solving some of the most common problems associated with the application of these technologies. During the project, an optical see-through augmented reality glasses calibration method was developed, as well as a virtual reality application for robotic teleoperation. The implemented teleoperation system was tested in two different simulated scenarios, and the additional questions of the immersive environment reconstruction, spatial user interface, connection between virtual and real worlds are addressed in this thesis report.
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(2019)Monitoring of indoor air quality (IAQ) is important because IAQ is directly related to human health and comforts. The purpose of this study was to develop a non-targeted approach for the screening of organic compounds present in indoor air. The sampling was done using cryogenic active and passive samplers, and the separation and analysis were done by using a liquid chromatograph coupled with a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer (LC-QQQ-MS). First, experimental design for sampling by variables, cooling temperature and sampling period was made and optimized to -15 ˚C and 120 minutes respectively to ensure efficient sample collection. For mass spectrometry in both positive and negative ionization modes, the ion source parameters, gas temperature, gas flow, nebulizer pressure and capillary voltage were optimized to 300 ˚C, 10 L/min, 45 psi and 4000 V respectively to enable as much detector response as possible facilitating detection and analysis of the compounds in the sample. The concentration of compounds in the raw sample being very low, one important step was to optimize the sample preparation method to enrich the sample for smooth detection and further analysis. Since the sample was collected in the form of condensate water, different sample preparation methods such as evaporation, liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) and solid-phase extractions (SPEs) with different cartridges were adopted for preconcentration. Comparing the outcomes from different sample preparation methods, it was found that sequential SPE using C2 and C18 cartridges gives maximum compound recovery, e.g., 1.5 and 2.6 times compared to evaporation and LLE respectively in positive ion mode, and 2.6 and 4.1 times in negative ion mode. Therefore, this methodology was adopted to analyze the condensate water samples from two sick houses in Finland. The results from the sick houses were compared with a reference house having no sick building syndrome (SBS) to look for potential compounds causing health issues. The data analysis was done using MZmine 2.3.4 software. Additionally, tandem mass spectrometric (MS/MS) acquisition parameters were optimized and product ions were determined as the initial step of identification of compounds in the sample of the first house. The methods developed in this work would be useful to analyze various natural samples including the analysis of outdoor air also.
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(2023)Catechol is widely produced platform chemical, and many fine chemicals, including pharmaceuticals and pesticides, contain catechol moieties. Catechols are nucleophilic, but their polarity can be reversed by oxidizing them into electrophilic o-benzoquinones (OBQs). OBQs are highly reactive and react readily with nucleophiles but also with dienes, dienophiles and ylides. However, OBQs have many reactive sites, which often leads to lack of selectivity in reactions. In the literature review of this thesis, the methods to control selectivity in nucleophilic additions, cycloadditions and Wittig reactions of OBQs are reviewed. Selectivity is often increased by blocking undesired reactive sites by substituents. If substituents can’t be altered, it is possible to control selectivity by choice of catalysts and substrates as well as stoichiometric ratios of substrates. In addition, the literature review will also focus on how the use of o-benzoquinones have been utilized in organic synthesis. In the experimental part, nucleophilic additions of amino acids and silyl enol ethers to o-benzoquinones are studied in practice. Reactions of amino acids with OBQs resulted only in polymerization despite the efforts to control the selectivity. However, ZnCl2 catalysed addition of silyl enol ethers into OBQs yielded only 1,4-addition products. The method was then optimized with two model reactions after which 30 different 1,4-addition products were successfully synthesized. For most of these products this method is the only proven synthesis route.
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(2016)The work includes research in the fields of information visualization, eye tracking and information retrieval. The emphasis is put on visualization techniques which raise the level of a user's attention for performing search tasks more efficiently. The visualization technique that is described in the work is a visual cue. Visual cues direct users' attention to the relevant information on the screen. By tracking eye gaze data common user behavior patters are defined and eye gaze metrics are calculated. By analyzing eye gaze patterns we get an insight on possible design solutions which include the implementation of visual cues for improving a user's performance. By aiming at increasing user performance we propose introducing visual cues which would reduce the time spent on the search task and facilitate the attention switching within areas of interest. One of the key metrics which we get based on eye gaze data is the time spent on reading activities during the search session. In the work we calculate the duration of each type of a reading activity and suggest ways of decreasing the overall time spent, as well as means of enhancing the attention switching. ACM Computing Classification System (CCS): B.2.2 Performance Analysis and Design Aids D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
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(2023)Zooplankton are an important link in marine pelagic food webs as they transfer energy from primary producers to higher trophic levels such as planktivorous fish. They migrate vertically in the water column, ascending to feed near the surface at night and descending to hide from visual predators for the day (diel vertical migration, DVM). Zooplankton are detected with Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs). These devices were developed for measuring water currents using acoustic pulses, a technique which requires particles such as zooplankton in the water column to scatter the sound. As a by-product of the velocity measurements, it provides information of these scatterers as echo intensity. This method has been used in researching zooplankton DVM, however, not in the northern Baltic Sea prior to this study. In this thesis, the data processing steps required to analyze echo intensity were examined for the specific environment of the Finnish Archipelago Sea. A one-year-long time-series was processed and averaged seasonally to investigate different patterns in zooplankton DVM. Vertical velocity data were used in estimating migration speed, and available reference measurements were combined to the data to examine the environmental factors affecting zooplankton DVM. Synchronized DVM was observed especially in autumn, however, indications of other migration patterns such as unsynchronized and reverse migration were detected during summer and winter, respectively. The primary cue behind zooplankton DVM was light, but additional contributing factors such as phytoplankton and currents were identified and discussed. The maximum migration speeds detected were approximately 10 cm/s downwards and 4 cm/s upwards. ADCP data are a good indicator of zooplankton migration in the northern Baltic Sea and in the future, it could prove beneficial in zooplankton monitoring and biomass estimates.
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(2024)Foundation models have the potential to reduce the level of supervision required for medical image segmentation tasks. Currently, the medical image segmentation field still largely relies on supervised, task specific models. The aim of this thesis is to investigate if a foundation model, the Segment Anything Model (SAM), can be used to reduce the level of supervision needed for medical image segmentation. The main goal of this thesis is to see if the annotation workload required to generate labeled medical segmentation datasets can be significantly reduced with the help of Segment Anything Model. The second goal of this thesis is to validate the zero-shot performance of the Segment Anything Model on a medical segmentation dataset. A UNet model is used as a baseline. The results of this thesis give positive feedback on SAM's ability to be used as a tool for medical image annotation. During the experiments, it was found that especially for homogeneous, clearly outlined tasks, like organs, using ''pseudo labels'' generated by SAM for training a UNet model resulted in comparable accuracy with training a UNet model on human-annotated labels. Furthermore, the results show that zero-shot SAM has somewhat comparable performance to UNet, and even beats UNet in two of the experimented tasks. For one complexly structured task, SAM and UNet with pseudo labels, trained using SAM's masks, fail to produce accurate results. It is notable that some of the tasks have small training dataset sizes, which limits the test accuracy of UNet. The results are in accordance with recent literature which shows that zero-shot SAM can have comparable performance to state-of-the-art models with large and distinct objects, but when it comes to small, complex structures, SAM is not up to par accuracy-wise to the state-of-the-art medical segmentation models.
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(2017)The Internet of Things is a proliferating industry, which is transforming many homes and businesses, making them smart. However, the rapid growth of these devices and the interactions between these devices, introduces many challenges including that of a secure management system for the identities and interactions of the devices. While the centralized model has worked well for many years, there is a risk of the servers becoming bottlenecks and a single point of failure, thereby making them vulnerable to Denial-of-Service attacks. As a backbone of these interactions, Blockchain is capable of creating a highly secure, independent and distributed platform. Blockchain is a peer to peer, distributed ledger system that stores all the transactions taking place within the network. The main purpose of the servers that form a part of the distributed system is to provide a consensus, using various consensus algorithms, on the state of the blockchain at any given time and to store a copy of all the transactions taking place. This thesis explores the Blockchain technology in general and investigates its potential with regard to access management of constrained devices. A proof of concept system has been designed and implemented that demonstrates a simplified access management system using Ethereum Blockchain. This was done to check whether the concept can be applied at a global level. Although the latency of the network depends on the computing power of the resources participating in the Blockchain, an evaluation of the proof of concept system has been made, keeping in mind the smallest device that can be involved in the consensus process. Docker containers have been used to simulate a cluster of the nodes participating in the Blockchain, in order to examine the implemented system. An outline of the various advantages and the limitations of Blockchains in general, as well as the developed proof of concept system, has also been provided.
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(2017)In this study we use element-level usage data that was collected from the online learning material of an university level introductory programming course for identification of areas-of-interest in the course material as well as for prediction of student learning outcomes. The data was collected in-situ using a JavaScript component embedded in the online learning material, which recorded which HTML elements were visible on the user's screen after each interaction (movement and click) and if the user's screen had been still for at least 2500 milliseconds. A visual analysis indicates that students spend large amounts of time on material sections that discuss special syntactic structures that they are unable to infer from previous experience. Overall, the analysis was able to identify areas of the online learning material that seem to be too long and in-depth for the concepts they are discussing, when the things the students have previously learned are taken into account. This high-level analysis also revealed that the time the students spent viewing an assignment's prompt was statistically significantly correlated with the perceived workload, difficulty and educational value of that same assignment. We observe that when partial correlations are considered, and multiple comparisons are corrected for, time spent with an assignment's prompt on the screen is no longer statistically significantly correlated with the three variables. The same usage data was used to investigate whether material usage statistics can predict learning outcomes or identify strong and at-risk students. The results indicate that based on just three to four weeks of data, it is possible to identify strong and at-risk students with some accuracy. Furthermore, it seems possible to identify student programming assignment scores and total course scores with a somewhat high accuracy. Models based on material usage statistics also displayed some light predictive power in predicting student exam scores. It was also shown that the predictive powers of these models are not based solely on student effort or time-on-task. All told, this thesis demonstrates that fine-grained online learning material usage data is feasible to collect and useful in understanding both the students and the learning material. The results suggest that very simple and almost entirely domain-independent data sources can be used to predict student performance to a relatively large degree, suggesting that a combination of such simple domain-independent metrics could match highly domain dependent and more complex metrics in predictive power, giving raise to more widely usable educational analytics tools.
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(2020)Tropes are storytelling devices or conventions that can be found in storytelling media, for example in movies. DBTropes is an RDF-dataset with media-trope connections extracted from Tv Tropes, which is a community-edited wiki listing tropes for various creative works. This study investigates whether the tropes of films can be used to cluster similar movies. First, we extracted film-trope connections from the DBTropes dataset. We then took four samples from the dataset, three for clustering films, and one for clustering tropes. We used the film–trope connections to calculate euclidean and cosine distances between movies and for the last sample between tropes. Then we clustered the samples with hierarchical clustering using complete and ward linkage. Our results show that hierarchical clustering can group similar films together using this dataset. For calculating distances the cosine distance method works significantly better than euclidean distance. Both hierarchical clustering methods complete and ward work well. It depends on the chosen sample, which of them results in a clearer and more interpretable output. We conclude that the data works well for clustering similar films or similar tropes.
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