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The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of physical devices, such as temperature sensors and lights, that are connected to the Internet. The devices are typically battery powered and are constrained by their low processing power, memory and low bitrate wireless communication links. The vast amount of IoT devices can cause heavy congestion in the Internet if congestion is not properly addressed. The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is an HTTP-like protocol for constrained devices built on top of UDP. CoAP includes a simple congestion control algorithm (DefaultCoAP). CoAP Simple Congestion Control/Advanced (CoCoA) is a more sophisticated alternative for DefaultCoAP. CoAP can also be run over TCP with TCP's congestion control mechanisms. The focus of this thesis is to study CoAP's congestion control. Shortcomings of DefaultCoAP and CoCoA are identified using empirical performance evaluations conducted in an emulated IoT environment. In a scenario with hundreds of clients and a large buffer in the bottleneck router, DefaultCoAP does not adapt to the long queuing delay. In a similar scenario where short-lived clients exchange only a small amount of messages, CoCoA clients are unable to sample a round-trip delay time. Both of these situations are severe enough to cause a congestion collapse, where most of the link bandwidth is wasted on unnecessary retransmissions. A new retransmission timeout and congestion control algorithm called Fast-Slow Retransmission Timeout (FASOR) is congestion safe in these two scenarios and is even able to outperform CoAP over TCP. FASOR with accurate round-trip delay samples is able to outperform basic FASOR in the challenging and realistic scenario with short-lived clients and an error-prone link.

Conifers are used for forest plantations and as landscape trees. Norway spruce is the main softwood species in Finland and can occasionally be observed in urban areas. However, root rots of conifer trees caused by Heterobasidion annosum leads to huge economic losses not only in Finland but also in other European countries. Due to the availability of complete genome sequence for both host and pathogen, in this study using Norway spruce and its root rot pathogen (Heterobasidion annosum) as an experimental model, the host-pathogen interaction was investigated. Conifer trees have established a variety of defense mechanisms to repel microbial infections, including constitutive barriers, accumulation of antimicrobial chemicals, activation of signaling pathways and induction of defense-related compounds resulted from an intra-organismic response including cell death. In the conifer pathosystem, cell death associated necrotic browning reactions promote tissue colonization by necrotrophic pathogens such as Heterobasidion annosum. By contrast, in crop plants, cell death associated hypersensitive response (HR) is known to inhibit invasive growth of biotrophic pathogens. However, not much is known about the chemical and molecular characteristics of necrotic cell death responses observed in different developmental stages of conifers from seedlings to mature trees. In addition, the term reaction zone is often used to describe responses of tree tissues bordering the heartwood to pathogenic infections, but nothing is known on whether there are any similarities between the necrosis response and reaction zone. To investigate this, Norway spruce at different developmental stages (seedlings, young trees and mature trees) were challenged with Heterobasidion parviporum. Six major indicators were assayed: necrosis lesions, cell death, pH, reaction zone, reactive oxygen species (ROS) and expressions of defense-related genes (Per1, Per2, LAC, JAZ1, OPR, and STS2). Increased transcript levels of the following genes Per1, Per2, LAC and JAZ1 were documented in seedlings but higher expression of Per2 and LAC was recorded in mature trees. Results revealed that all infected tissues were strongly necrotic or had increased lesion size. This is accompanied by increasing pH units up to 6.0 similar to levels documented in the reaction zone. Furthermore, ROS-generating peroxidase activity increased in infected tissues compared to the control. All these changes were found to be similar to observations in the reaction zone of woody trees. However, cell death was only measured in seedling roots and the method needs to be optimized for woody tissues. Further tests are therefore required for the clarification of relationship between necrotic cell death in seedling plants and reaction zone responses in mature woody tissues.

Connections between organizational engagement and internal communication have gained much interest in recent years, due to existing evidence suggesting that employees who engage with their organization affect organization’s effectiveness and that, in turn, internal communication can influence organizational engagement. However, there is little evidence about such connection seen from an employee perspective and therefore, this study sought to explore linkages between employee organizational engagement and internal communication, on the basis of experiences of employees. This thesis draws on theoretical concepts such as knowledge workers, internal communication and organizational engagement as well as on an empirical research inspired by principles of grounded theory. The research analyzed twelve semi-structured interviews to employees working for a global knowledge-based organization; aiming at exploring the factors that had the potential to influence their engagement with the organizational; their key expectations towards internal communication and the implications that their overall experiences suggest for the practice of internal communication. Key findings indicated that organizational engagement can be influenced by organization-level internal communication and suggested that, while there cannot be a universal internal communication strategy to engage employees with their organization, the responsibility to engage and to achieve effective internal communication which supports engagement needs to be shared by all members of the organization, whereby employees’ accountability and empowerment is central. The findings also suggested a revision of the role of leaders and managers of the organization and the role of the function of internal communication. Overall, this study suggested that, in the relationship between organizational engagement and internal communication, seen from an employee perspective, both the organization and the employees could have significant gains.

This thesis is an ethnographic exploration into co-production evaluation. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate outcomes of a knowledge co-production workshop in the context of Finnish urban planning using a co-production evaluation framework. For the context of the research, the status of allotment gardens in urban planning was studied. Central concepts also include participation and the status of knowledge in the urban planning context. I collected my research data by participating in the workshop process as a co-facilitator and co-producer in a garden workshop held in Pähkinärinne allotment plots in June 2022. I carried out the research using qualitative research methods, participatory observation. Field notes and the material and data the garden workshop produced are the main body of data. The results show that the workshop did produce a tangible outcome, a usable concept for the Pähkinärinne allotment gardens. When situated in the Finnish urban planning context, analysis shows that implementation may be difficult due to institutional and governance barriers. Intangible impacts were produced in the form of social learning. This entailed the identification of existing social networks in and outside of the allotment plots and their development through social capital. These effects fare better in the Finnish context through self-governance and self-organization. As a conclusion, it can be said that the knowledge co-production process was a successful process but in the Finnish urban planning context bottom-up initiatives can be difficult to implement due to institutional barriers and city-led planning and participation.

In the past decades, sanctions have become a vital part of the European Union’s (EU) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). To better understand decision-making within the CFSP, this work focuses on how the EU sanctions against Russia are upheld. It does so through the lens of the Netherlands and Finland, two small countries in the EU. The study concentrates on the way small countries participate in sanctions regimes, which is important due to the required unanimity for upholding sanctions. Both domestic dynamics for participating in sanctions as well as attitudes towards European cooperation are taken into account. By conducting a Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) on parliamentary debates in Finland and the Netherlands from 2016, the study compares the interests and focus of national politicians when sanctions are under discussion. The material consists of approximately 170 units of coding per country, which originate from around 15 debates throughout the year. The results offer new insight into some of the factors affecting decision-making of small states in sanctions. The data shows that the Netherlands has a stricter stance towards upholding sanctions on Russia, whereas Finnish politicians highlight the impact of sanctions on Finland. In general, both the Netherlands and Finland are in favour of upholding sanctions, but strongly differ domestically in the way they go about the sanctions. In conclusion, this study finds that small EU countries present themselves as strongly supporting EU unity when sanctions are in place. Nevertheless, these countries differ significantly in domestic preferences, meaning that they participate in sanctions regimes through different means.

Health apps that are used by individuals in multiple ways to improve their health and wellbeing are promoted as empowering the individual to control their health. Their increasing use means that they also gather more data concerning the health of the users. This data could be used for research or other public interest purposes, but its availability for secondary use is limited. In the EU there is also political interest to both increase availability of personal data in the inner market, as well as facilitate the use of eHealth solutions, including health apps. In this thesis, I will use legal dogmatics as a method to analyse how health apps could be used to gather data for public interest purposes. I look at what type of data is gathered by the health apps and why it is useful, how the GDPR sets criteria for the gathering of data through the apps and it’s secondary use, and how in special cases of research and other public interests, the rights of the data subject can be derogated. I will also compare this to the planned regulatory framework for data sharing, of the proposal for the Data Governance Act has been published. The main conclusion of the thesis is that that the framework for processing data for public interest purposes does not, in most cases, suit either gathering data by health apps, or secondary use of this data. This is both because the public interest as a processing basis needs to be based on law and needs to be balanced similar to a limitation of fundamental rights in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. This approach would in most cases be too heavy for this purpose. Instead, the processing is mainly possible on a consent basis. This could, even with the possibility of easier mechanisms for data sharing through data altruism organisations, affect the quality of the data gained, as the willingness to share data – and to even use a health app - vary between different demographic groups.

Deforestation is the main threat to biodiversity, ecological integrity and socio-ecological resilience of the of the Amazon biome, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth and home to at least 2 million people. A complex network of diverse protection strategies exists across the Amazon as key component of the global strategy to halt biodiversity loss. Biosphere reserves are a part of this network that aims to create spaces to learn how human communities can develop sustainably, while the protecting the environment, by implementing a zonation system with different degrees of protection We consider that it is necessary to produce relevant efficiency assessments on area-based conservation strategies in this region, and to understand how different protection strategies affect conservation outcomes. We used state-of-the-art matching methods to create a counterfactual deforestation avoidance measure of seven Biosphere reserves the western Amazon: Yasuní, Podocarpus-El Cóndor, Sumaco, Manu, BIOAY, Pilón Lajas and Beni. We obtained diverse efficiency results, some of the studied reserves avoiding large quantities of deforestation to reserves that were attracting deforestation. We found that more strictly protected zones were subjected to significatively lower relative pressure levels and did not have higher deforestation avoidance values. Representativity of the matched treatment area was also lower for these zones, meaning that the matching analysis was more difficult to perform in these areas. These research findings add to growing evidence about the important role of biosphere reserves in buffering against deforestation in one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots.

The aim of this thesis is to study from a theoretical point of view the core and main changes of conservatism and its doctrine by analysing how this has developed during time in two countries: Great Britain and Romania. This study comes as a reaction of curiosity aimed to be yielded academically. After the events of 2013 in Great Britain when the activists from the Conservative Party put pressure on the Prime Minister David Cameron to extend the immigration controls on the citizens of Romania and Bulgaria living and working in UK. As at the end of December 2013 the controls barring most Romanians and Bulgarians working in UK were to expire, the chairman of the constituency parties along with the activists from the Conservative Party, urged David Cameron to extend the ban based on a provision from the EU law. This provision allows the extension of the ban against new member states in order to prevent those citizens to come and work in another EU country if this may cause serious disturbances on the labour market. Consequently, this ban is an act against the free movement of labour, one of the central pillars of EU and the European single market. As EU allows temporary restrictions on new member states in order to prevent mass immigration due to better economic benefits, under the EU law these are considered transitional controls and can only last up to seven years just like in the case of Great Britain and the ban over Romanian and Bulgarian citizens, taken into consideration that both countries joined EU in 2007 and the restriction to work in UK was to expire on the 31st of December 2013 at midnight. As a Romanian national myself, living and studying political science in Finland I have found this matter as a crucial subject to analyse from an academic and political theory point of view. My method of analysing the subject is purely theoretical and I provide a unique approach by just comparing how conservatism is portrayed by its thinkers in Great Britain with the one in Romania, having as main focus the changes the doctrine in both countries suffered along time, or how it actually adapted to modern times in order to survive as ideology put in practice. Needless to say why I have chosen to analyse the conservative thought of Great Britain, considering that this is the country where it was born, but of more importance is why this comparison is done with Romania, a country where nowadays there is no conservative party as such. As time frame I have chosen for Great Britain the 18th and 19th centuries and for Romania, as the conservative thought developed later, the second half of the 19th century up to 1921. Between 1880 and 1925 Romania went through numerous and fast changes. The country suffered modifications not only in terms of territorial extent and population, but also experienced deep alterations in its internal structures. However, the conservatives were not able to keep pace with the rate of change, and they struggled to direct the process of change according to their own doctrine and ideas. Nevertheless, the solutions they provided were not so appealing and comprehensive in order to attract a great number of people. Therefore, the main reason for the vanishing of the conservatives from the political scene is not only their particular reluctance to change, but especially the social and political context which was in such a manner that it did not allow them to develop and to go further with their traditional ideals. In Romania after 1921 the conservative party only survived with its name but no practical conservative approach as it did not manage to adapt to modern times and attract supporters. The method used consists of an analysis of the major works that define the conservative doctrine. Moreover, an analytical approach is also used to make the difference between theory and practice-especially for the Romanian case.

Korkeasaari Zoo has several large ruminants adapted to distinct climates and habitats. It is well known, that ensuring the possibility of the animals to live in captivity, that resemble their natural habitat, is important for their welfare. However, thermal environment of zoo-housed animals is not often studied, even though it can have major impact on animal welfare. Especially for cold-adapted species the shade availability during hot, sunny days is essential and therefore needs high attention. In my thesis, I monitored the shade use and behaviour of musk ox (Ovibos moschatus), yak (Bos grunniens), takin (Budorcas taxicolor), wisent (Bison bonasus), Przewalski’s wild horse (Equus przewalskii) and kulan (Equus hemionus kulan) in their enclosures in Korkeasaari zoo by using ZooMonitor application. Species were chosen by their different level of warm adaption for comparison. I found out the shade availability in each enclosure during different times of the day with aerial photographs. The purpose was to find out if there is a need to enhance the shaded areas to ensure animal welfare. Research questions were 1) How much shade is available in each enclosure? 2) Is shade use dependent on a) temperature b) time of the day? 3) Are less warm adapted species (musk ox, yak, takin) seeking shade more obviously than more warm adapted species (wisent, kulan, wild horse)? To analyse, behavioural space use data was assessed in the form of a heat map with aerial photographs to evaluate location preferences for each animal in each enclosure. Behaviour Budget reports were used to display the percent of time engaged in behaviours. In conclusion, musk ox has shade in their enclosure 43% in the morning, 18% in the noon and 36% in the afternoon. Its shade use is dependent on time. Yak, kulan and wild horse has shade 33% in the morning, 18% in the noon and 21% in the afternoon. Shade use of yak and kulan is dependent on temperature. Shade use of wild horse is dependent on time. Takin has shade 93% in the morning, 73% in the noon and 77% in the afternoon. Its shade use is dependent on temperature and time. Wisent has shade 57% in the morning, 43% in the noon and 14% in the afternoon. Its shade use is dependent on time. Less warm adapted species are seeking shade more frequently than more warm adapted species, but surprisingly kulan stronger than wisent and almost equally as yak. Combined, shaded areas are important for zoo-housed animals to thermoregulate. The least warm adapted musk ox needs more shaded areas as they are scarce in their enclosure. Providing more shaded areas increases the space available for the animals.

This study analyzes the United Nation Security Council (SC) counter-terrorism measures, giving focus to the 1267 sanctions regime against individuals associated with terrorism. The procedures of the 1267 sanctions regime are critically reviewed, with the aim of indicating the human rights concerns, particularly relating to the fundamental procedural rights. The tension between human rights and the security interest behind the counter-terrorism measures is analyzed. Special importance is given to the nature of the sanctions measures, arguing them to be punitive and not only preventative measures. Thus, this study aims to argue that procedural rights should be guaranteed in the 1267 sanctions regime in accordance with human rights law. Secondly, this study aims to present constitutionalization of international community based on legal responsibility, which is reviewed through the progressive work of the International Law Commission. Firstly, the question of responsibility of the United Nations (UN) for the breaches of human rights obligations is analyzed, including the initial question of whether or not the human rights norms are binding towards the UN. Secondly, the focus is turned to the responsibility of the bodies implementing the SC 1267 sanctions measures. The question of responsibility for the implementation will be analyzed from two perspectives: first, from an international constitutionalist approach advocating for the hierarchy of norms in the international community. While the traditional hierarchy of norms invests supremacy to the UN Charter, the constitutionalist approach will lead to the question of responsibility for the implementation in accordance with the UN Charter obligations. When implementation measures, taken by another international or regional organization, are not in accordance with the 1267 sanctions regime obligations, the rules on responsibility will become applicable towards the organization. The second perspective for the responsibility of the implementation measures is the international pluralist approach relying on different legal orders acting parallel to each other. In connection with this perspective the question of State responsibility for circumventing its international obligations is analyzed. Third part of this study presents today’s international community after the improvements the UN has taken under the pressure of the decentralized challenges it has encountered concerning the 1267 sanctions regime. This study argues that even though the UN procedures regarding the 1267 sanctions regime have improved, they are still inadequate to accommodate the human rights concerns, particularly fundamental procedural rights, and that the constitutionalization of the international community requires rules on legal responsibility such as the ones the International Law Commission has drafted.