Browsing by Subject "ympäristö"
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(2020)This study addresses the ways in which environmental challenges and power relations are manifested through tourism in the easternmost province of Panama, Darién. Historically, the area of Darién has remained relatively isolated from the rest of the country and tourism in the area is of small-scale. However, the high biodiversity and natural resources have drawn increasing attention, thus resulting in tensions and competing interests between different stakeholders. Local perceptions of tourism bring insight about how people make sense of and engage with touristic activities, and how geopolitical and ecological discourses contribute to environmental inequalities. The theoretical background draws from geopolitical ecology, which states the role and impact of the environment in the shaping of political space and power relations. The research is based on 37 thematic interviews and participant observation carried out during a one-month ethnographic fieldwork in Darién. The findings indicate that tourism has contributed to exposing the environmental challenges in Darién, but also caused controversy over the use of resources for tourism. Tourism brings forward power relations and demonstrates that different players are in an uneven position. The results show that tourism in Darién has been influenced by its remoteness and the nowadays largely misleading assumption of its unstable security situation. Darién faces a broad range of environmental problems, resulting mainly from the State´s weak presence and poor environmental policies. However, tourism has been locally able to enhance environmental awareness and interest towards conservation. Different tourism actors have unequal possibilities in making use of natural resources depending largely on their wealth and social networks. Further geopolitical interests appear through territorial issues and questions concerning land ownership. The findings indicate that by looking at tourism, many underlying tensions related to existing social inequalities, power relations and distribution of ecological benefits can be revealed.
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(Helsingin yliopistoUniversity of HelsinkiHelsingfors universitet, 2006)The study examines various uses of computer technology in acquisition of information for visually impaired people. For this study 29 visually impaired persons took part in a survey about their experiences concerning acquisition of infomation and use of computers, especially with a screen magnification program, a speech synthesizer and a braille display. According to the responses, the evolution of computer technology offers an important possibility for visually impaired people to cope with everyday activities and interacting with the environment. Nevertheless, the functionality of assistive technology needs further development to become more usable and versatile. Since the challenges of independent observation of environment were emphasized in the survey, the study led into developing a portable text vision system called Tekstinäkö. Contrary to typical stand-alone applications, Tekstinäkö system was constructed by combining devices and programs that are readily available on consumer market. As the system operates, pictures are taken by a digital camera and instantly transmitted to a text recognition program in a laptop computer that talks out loud the text using a speech synthesizer. Visually impaired test users described that even unsure interpretations of the texts in the environment given by Tekstinäkö system are at least a welcome addition to complete perception of the environment. It became clear that even with a modest development work it is possible to bring new, useful and valuable methods to everyday life of disabled people. Unconventional production process of the system appeared to be efficient as well. Achieved results and the proposed working model offer one suggestion for giving enough attention to easily overlooked needs of the people with special abilities. ACM Computing Classification System (1998): K.4.2 Social Issues: Assistive technologies for persons with disabilities I.4.9 Image processing and computer vision: Applications
Now showing items 1-2 of 2