Browsing by study line "no specialization"

The spread of antibiotic resistance is a global health threat. Hospitals are a potential source of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), which may disseminate into the environment via wastewater. Hospital water environments, such as sink traps and shower drains, are known to harbor antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which might spread from the drains to the patients causing nosocomial infections that are hard to treat because of the limited number of treatments available. However, the current understanding of antibiotic resistance in the drains of residences, and how it relates to the situation in hospitals is limited. The aim of this study was to compare the microbial communities and ARGs in the water environments of homes and hospitals. The sink traps and shower drains of three hospital rooms and eighteen homes were sampled for metagenomic sequencing, and bioinformatic tools were used to detect the microbial taxa and ARGs in the metagenomes. The resistomes of hospital environments were distinct from those of homes and exhibited a higher diversity of ARGs. On the other hand, the microbial communities of homes and hospital rooms could not be clearly distinguished, although there were some differences in the abundances of certain taxa. The abundance of ARGs was higher in the hospital shower drains than in the corresponding samples in homes, but there was no statistical difference in the abundance of ARGs between the sink traps of homes and the hospital. Although the study had limitations, such as the low number of hospital samples, it indicates that the water environments of hospitals have a resistome that is distinct from that of homes and highlights the role of hospital sink traps and shower drains as potential hotspots of antibiotic resistance.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a new respiratory virus capable of transmitting between interspecies and has caused outbreaks in mink farms since April 2020. The infection in mink farms has been a concern due to the overcrowded mink population which allows viral transmission and mutation to rapidly develop. The development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for mink is needed to prevent an outbreak in mink farms. In this study, we tested the safety and efficacy of our SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in a mink model. Our vaccine tests reveal no side effects of the vaccine on vaccinated mink, of which 40 mg/dose was found to be the optimal dosage, and was used as a standard for the later infection experiments. Microneutralization tests indicated that the neutralizing antibodies from vaccinated mink can protect cells line against early 2020 dominant variants (Wuhan, and Alpha), but poorly against later dominant strains (Beta, and Delta). The vaccinated mink were further observed the changes in antibody levels by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and the results suggested that the antibodies could be detected in sera samples of vaccinated subjects for at least 23 weeks after receiving two dosages of the vaccine. The presence of the virus was monitored in collected saliva samples throughout the infection days to study the effect of the vaccine on preventing the mink from SARS-CoV-2 infection by reverse transcription (RT)PCR. The quantification cycles (Cq) values were similar between vaccinated and non-vaccinated mink of both genders and between different gender, indicating that the vaccine could not help with preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection. Although the vaccine does not protect the vaccinated mink from the infection, the monitoring of clinical signs suggested that it helps the mink by reducing the severity of the disease. In conclusion, the vaccine showed promising results in inducing the mink body to produce neutralizing antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 and relieved the symptoms of the disease.

The aim of the study. Conduct disorder and antisocial behaviour are externalizing symptoms. Furthermore antisocial behaviour is associsiated with substance use. Conduct disorder at adolescence have continuity with antisocial behaviour in adulthood and alcohol misuse in adolescence predict alcohol misuse in adulthood. This study examines association between conduct disorder and alcohol use in adolescence and antisocial behaviour and alcohol use in adulthood. Additionally this study examines ADHD symptoms effect to potential association. Methods. The data of this study is a part of a Finnish FinnTwin12 longitudinal study. The sample of this study consists of 1336 person. This study used 14 years and early adulthood (ages between 21 and 26 years) follow-up. Conduct symptoms, alcohol use and ADHD symptoms at adolescence were assessed with the C-SSAGA -psychiatric interview method for children. Antisocial behaviour and alcohol use at early adulthood were assessed with SSAGA -psychiatric interview method. Association between antisocial behaviour and alcohol use were analyzed with cross-lagged panel model. Results and conclusions. Conduct symptoms in adolescence is connected with antisocial behaviour and alcohol use at adulthood. However, alcohol use in adolescence is not connected with antisocial behaviour in adulthood. According to this study, support methods would be important to focus to children and youth with conduct symptoms. This create a possibility to prevent future problems related with alcohol use and antisocial behaviour.

Application Performance Management (APM) is a growing field, and APM tools on the market tend to be complex enterprise solutions with features ranging from traffic analysis and error reporting to real- user monitoring and business transaction management. This thesis is a study done on behalf of Veikkaus Oy, a Finnish government-owned game company and betting agency. It serves as a look into the current state-of-the-art field of leading APM tools as well as a requirements analysis done from the perspective of the company’s IT personnel. A list of requirements was gathered and scored based on perceived importance, and four APM tools on the market—Datadog APM, Dynatrace, New Relic and AppDynamics—were each compared to each other and scored based on the gathered requirements. In addition, open-source alternatives were considered and investigated. Our results suggest that the leading APM vendors have products very similar to each other with marginal differences between them, feature-wise. In general, APMs were deemed useful and valuable to the company, able to assist in the work of a wide variety of IT personnel, as well as able to replace many tools currently in use by Veikkaus Oy and simplify their application ecosystem.

In recent years, consumer interest for probiotic products has significantly grown due to their health benefits, however challenges regarding viability and controlled release of probiotic bacteria during their processing and storage still exist. Microencapsulation of probiotics by spray drying with a suitable protective material could alleviate these challenges. This research aims to assess the viability of utilizing wood hemicelluloses recovered from forest industry side-streams, specifically galactoglucomannans (GGM) and glucuronoxylans (GX), as protective agents for the probiotic strain Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG) during spray drying. The study results were compared to those of maltodextrins, considering varying solid concentrations (15 and 20%) and inlet air drying temperatures (105 and 140 oC). Feed dispersion properties including viscosity, pH, particle diameter and physical stability were determined. The probiotic's viability pre- and post-spray drying was evaluated, alongside powder characterization for moisture content, water activity, particle size, morphology and structure. Results indicated that both GGM and GX effectively shield LGG from heat impact during spray drying, yielding microcapsule powders with desirable attributes such as amorphous structure and low water activity. High encapsulation efficiency (>90%) comparable to maltodextrins suggested hemicelluloses as sustainable alternatives for conventionally used wall materials. Inlet air temperature or solid concentration did not affect encapsulation efficiency of hemicelluloses. Probiotic counts met a recommended level for probiotic products, signifying potential applications in food and pharmaceuticals. Powder yield, which varied between 35 and 58%, was significantly influenced by the encapsulating material. Morphological studies demonstrated well-formed, spherical particles at a specific drying temperature. The study proposes the potential use of wood hemicelluloses for effective probiotic protection, offering new possibilities for synbiotic powder applications in diverse industries due to their prebiotic properties which have been well reported in literature. Despite promising results, long-term stability and process optimization to improve the process yield and achieve lower moisture content for the microcapsule powders require further investigation. Adjusting feed dispersion parameters and exploring varied concentrations of hemicelluloses could enhance product yield. Meanwhile, increasing outlet air temperature possibly reduces the moisture content. This research fosters sustainable development in the forest industry, presenting a novel avenue for natural functional ingredient production.

Aim of the study. In Finland, the number of multilingual children referred to speech and language therapy assessment is relatively higher than monolingual children. However, distinguishing abnormal linguistic development from typical multilingual development is not straightforward due to the lack of multilingual tests and speech therapists. This study aimed to provide information on the morphosyntactic structures of the expressions of typically developing and language- impaired children aged 4–5 years who speak Arabic as their mother tongue and the deviations that occur in them. The aim was also to assess whether the morphosyntactic deviations produced show a transfer effect of Arabic language. The study is significant from the point of view of differential diagnosis. The qualitative information produced makes it possible to reduce the over- and underdiagnosis of developmental language disorder in native Arabic-speaking children who successively acquire Finnish language. Methods. The study examined 18 children aged 4–5 who speak Arabic as their mother tongue and who successively acquire Finnish language from the broader material of the Multilingua-project. Six of the children were suspected of having developmental language disorder. The study material consisted of recorded assessment situations that were transcribed to evaluate the morphosyntactic structures produced. Three different semi-structured play situations and The Cat Story picture sequencing narrative task were included in the analysis for each subject. The morphosyntactic forms and structures produced by the subjects were analyzed using the FIN-LARSP method. In addition, the morphosyntactic deviations in the expressions and the transfer effect of Arabic language were examined from a qualitative point of view. Results and conclusions. There was great variation in the inflectional repertoires of typically developing and language-impaired children. However, the inflectional repertoires of typically developing children proved to be broader than those of language-impaired children in terms of nouns and verbs. The groups differed in the use of adessive case, the accuracy of verb inflection, the regularity of morphosyntactic deviations, and the use of atypical wordings. In addition, expressions of typically developing subjects appeared to have a more versatile effect of Arabic language transfer compared to language-impaired children. The results help Finnish-speaking speech therapists detect morphosyntactic features that may be signs of a language disorder in Arabic-speaking children acquiring Finnish language.

Image captioning is the task of generating a natural language description of an image. The task requires techniques from two research areas, computer vision and natural language generation. This thesis investigates the architectures of leading image captioning systems. The research question is: What components and architectures are used in state-of-the-art image captioning systems and how could image captioning systems be further improved by utilizing improved components and architectures? Five openly reported leading image captioning systems are investigated in detail: Attention on Attention, the Meshed-Memory Transformer, the X-Linear Attention Network, the Show, Edit and Tell method, and Prophet Attention. The investigated leading image captioners all rely on the same object detector, the Faster R-CNN based Bottom-Up object detection network. Four out of five also rely on the same backbone convolutional neural network, ResNet-101. Both the backbone and the object detector could be improved by using newer approaches. Best choice in CNN-based object detectors is the EfficientDet with an EfficientNet backbone. A completely transformer-based approach with a Vision Transformer backbone and a Detection Transformer object detector is a fast-developing alternative. The main area of variation between the leading image captioners is in the types of attention blocks used in the high-level image encoder, the type of natural language decoder and the connections between these components. The best architectures and attention approaches to implement these components are currently the Meshed-Memory Transformer and the bilinear pooling approach of the X-Linear Attention Network. Implementing the Prophet Attention approach of using the future words available in the supervised training phase to guide the decoder attention further improves performance. Pretraining the backbone using large image datasets is essential to reach semantically correct object detections and object features. The feature richness and dense annotation of data is equally important in training the object detector.

In recent years, a concern has grown within the NLG community about the comparability of systems and reproducibility of research results. This concern has mainly been focused on the evaluation of NLG systems. Problems with automated metrics, crowd-sourced human evaluations, sloppy experimental design and error reporting, etc. have been widely discussed in the literature. A lot of proposals for best practices, metrics, frameworks and benchmarks for NLG evaluation have lately been issued to address these problems. In this thesis we examine the current state of NLG evaluation – focusing on data-to-text evaluation – in terms of proposed best practices, benchmarks, etc., and their adoption in practice. Academic publications concerning NLG evaluation indexed in the Scopus database published in 2018-2022 were examined. After manual inspection 141 of those I deemed to contain some kind of concrete proposal for improvements in evaluation practices. The adoption (use in practice) of those was again examined by inspecting papers citing them. There seems to be a willingness in the academic community to adopt these proposals, especially ”best practices” and metrics. As for datasets, benchmarks, evaluation platforms, etc., the results are inconclusive.

Objectives. Different biases induced by stimulus and response history have been identified in the field of perceptual psychology. Serial dependence is a bias in the perception of objects caused by previous stimuli. Perception can also be biased towards the average of previous stimuli. This is called central tendency bias. The interdependence of responses in a serial task is serial response bias. These history biases have mostly been studied separately despite their effects being similar. This thesis aims to unravel the independent effects of the biases on observers’ responses in a perceptual task and the effect of working memory delay on their magnitude. Methods. The biases were studied with two experiments. Eleven subjects took part in the first experiment which used colored patches with different hues as stimuli. The second experiment had 7 subjects and used grating patches differing in orientation. Subjects were presented with a continuous stream of reference and comparison stimuli. In each trial, they had to respond if the comparison stimulus, presented second, was bluer or greener or was oriented more to the left or the right than the reference stimulus, presented first. Inter-stimulus interval was either short or long in two blocked conditions. The independent effects of the history biases on responses were tested using a generalized linear mixed model with a probit link function. Results and conclusions. In the hue experiment, independent effects were found for all history biases. Previous stimuli attracted the perception of subsequent stimuli and this effect lasted for 12-16 seconds. Independently of this, the percept was also biased towards the average of previous stimuli. In addition, subjects tended to change their response between trials. Working memory delay had no observable effect on the magnitude of the biases. In the orientation experiment, results on serial dependence were mixed, likely due to more noise in the data. Central tendency bias was not observed. Response bias was dependent on the inter-stimulus interval in such a way that with a short delay, subjects were more likely to repeat their choices and with a long, delay they were more likely to alternate between choices. The results clarify the relationships between previously reported history biases. Neither central tendency bias nor serial response bias can explain serial dependence. Furthermore, the results suggest that serial dependence cannot originate solely from the inertia of responses.

Tutkielman aiheena on asiakasvaikuttavuuden huomioiminen julkisissa sosiaali- ja terveyspalveluhankinnoissa. Asiakasvaikuttavuudella tarkoitetaan tavoitellun suuntaisen vaikutuksen aikaansaamista asiakkaan hyvinvoinnissa. Laadun käsite linkittyy asiakasvaikuttavuuteen, koska laadukkaan palvelun nähdään edesauttavan vaikutusten aikaansaamista. Tutkielma kytkeytyy tieteelliseen keskusteluun julkisen palvelutuotannon tulos- ja vaikutusperusteisuudesta, palvelutuotannon johtamisesta sekä julkisen hallinnon reformeista. Tutkielman tarkoitus on ymmärtää asiakasvaikuttavuuden mittaamista ja sitä koskevan tiedon hyödyntämistä julkisissa sosiaali- ja terveyspalveluhankinnoissa. Tutkielma on tapaustutkimus Hämeenlinnan ikäihmisten tehostetun palveluasumisen ja välimuotoisten asumispalvelujen hankinnasta vuodelta 2020. Tutkimuskysymys on, miten tapauksessa on huomioitu asiakasvaikuttavuus. Alakysymyksinä tarkastellaan, mitä laatu ja asiakasvaikuttavuus merkitsevät hankinta-asiakirjoissa ja hankintaan osallistuneiden ammattilaisten näkökulmasta, miten asiakasvaikuttavuutta mitataan ja mitkä asiat edistävät ja rajoittavat asiakasvaikuttavuuden huomioimista hankinnassa. Tutkielman aineistona ovat hankinta-asiakirjat sekä hankitaan osallistuneiden tilaajan edustajien ja palveluntuottajien edustajien haastattelut. Aineiston analyysimenetelmänä hyödynnettiin laadullista sisällönanalyysia. Tapauksena olevassa hankinnassa laatua ja vaikuttavuutta arvioidaan asiakastyytyväisyyskyselyn ja RAI-vertailutiedon perusteella. Laadun ja vaikuttavuuden arviointia hyödynnetään vuosittaisessa minikilpailutuksessa, jossa määritetään hankintajärjestys. Vaikuttavuus koostuu haastattelu- ja asiakirja-aineiston perusteella toimintakyvystä ja voimavaroista, terveydestä, ravitsemuksesta ja hyvinvoinnista, omannäköisestä elämästä, sosiaalisesta elämästä sekä kuntoutumisesta ja palvelutarpeen vähenemisestä. Oman näköinen elämä nousi analyysissä esiin tärkeänä teemana, johon liittyvät asiakkaan tapojen ja tottumusten huomioiminen, arvokkuus ja merkityksellisyys, kodinomaisuus ja viihtyisyys sekä asiakkaan toimijuus. Saman kaltaisia havaintoja kunnioituksen tarpeesta ja autonomiasta on tehty hoivakotien asukkaiden kokemuksia kartoittavissa tutkimuksissa. Asiakasvaikuttavuuden huomioimista edistävät haastattelujen perusteella hankintayksikön osaaminen, tahto ja kokemus, hankintojen strategisuus, yhteistyö palveluntuottajien kanssa, luotettavat mittarit, palveluntuottajien kannusteet sekä osaltaan myös julkisuus ja asiakkaan valinnanvapaus. Palvelun järjestäjä voi kannustaa palveluntuottajia eri tavoin tuottamaan laadukasta ja vaikuttavaa palvelua. Tapauksessa taloudellisina kannusteina ovat rahalliset sanktiot ja bonukset sekä ostojärjestyksen määrittäminen vuosittain laatupisteiden perusteella. Myös yrityksen maine potentiaalisten työntekijöiden ja asiakkaiden silmissä on merkittävä kannustin hyvälle ja vaikuttavalle toiminnalle. Bio-psyko-sosiaalinen ihmiskäsitys on tutkielman tulosten ja aiemman tutkimuskirjallisuuden perusteella keskeistä ikääntyneiden hoivan asiakasvaikuttavuutta määritettäessä. Hoivan vaikutukset näkyvät kaikilla ihmiselämän osa-alueilla, joten myös vaikutusmittareiden kehittämisessä pitää huomioida hyvinvointi ja elämänlaatu laajasti. Käytössä olevia vaikutusmittareita tulisi kehittää, jotta ne tunnistaisivat paremmin asiakkaan autonomian, elämän merkityksellisyyden ja ympäristön kodinomaisuuden. Asiakastyytyväisyyskyselyn ja RAI-vertailutiedon yhdistäminen mahdollistaa eri näkökulmien huomioimisen vaikutusten arvioinnissa. Kehittämiskohteena on yhteisen käsityksen muodostaminen mittarien luotettavuudesta tilaajan, palveluntuottajien ja asiakkaiden välillä.