Factors controlling the surface energy budget over snow and ice

Polar Regions are an energy sink of the Earth system, as the Sun rays do not reach the Poles for half of the year, and hit them only at very low angles for the other half of the year. In summer, solar radiation is the dominant energy source for the Polar areas, therefore even small changes in the surface albedo strongly affect the surface energy balance and, thus, the speed and amount of snow and ice melting. In winter, the main heat sources for the atmosphere are the cyclones approaching from lower latitudes, and the atmosphere-surface heat transfer takes place through turbulent mixing and longwave radiation, the latter dominated by clouds. The aim of this thesis is to improve the knowledge about the surface and atmospheric processes that control the surface energy budget over snow and ice, with particular focus on albedo during the spring and summer seasons, on horizontal advection of heat, cloud longwave forcing, and turbulent mixing during the winter season. The critical importance of a correct albedo representation in models is illustrated through the analysis of the causes for the errors in the surface and near-surface air temperature produced in a short-range numerical weather forecast by the HIRLAM model. Then, the daily and seasonal variability of snow and ice albedo have been examined by analysing field measurements of albedo, carried out in different environments. On the basis of the data analysis, simple albedo parameterizations have been derived, which can be implemented into thermodynamic sea ice models, as well as numerical weather prediction and climate models. Field measurements of radiation and turbulent fluxes over the Bay of Bothnia (Baltic Sea) also allowed examining the impact of a large albedo change during the melting season on surface energy and ice mass budgets. When high contrasts in surface albedo are present, as in the case of snow covered areas next to open water, the effect of the surface albedo heterogeneity on the downwelling solar irradiance under overcast condition is very significant, although it is usually not accounted for in single column radiative transfer calculations. To account for this effect, an effective albedo parameterization based on three-dimensional Monte Carlo radiative transfer calculations has been developed. To test a potentially relevant application of the effective albedo parameterization, its performance in the ground-based retrieval of cloud optical depth was illustrated. Finally, the factors causing the large variations of the surface and near-surface temperatures over the Central Arctic during winter were examined. The relative importance of cloud radiative forcing, turbulent mixing, and lateral heat advection on the Arctic surface temperature were quantified through the analysis of direct observations from Russian drifting ice stations, with the lateral heat advection calculated from reanalysis products.

Sosiaalipalveluja kaikille ja kaiken ikää? : Tutkimus suomalaisten mielipiteistä ja kokemuksista sosiaalipalveluista sekä niiden suhteesta legitimiteettiin

This research analyses opinions on the system of social welfare services from the point of view of clients and the public in general in Finland. The approach is quantitative, drawing on theories of the welfare-state tradition. The data used comes from the comprehensive Welfare and Services in Finland survey compiled by STAKES. While previous research on the welfare state has predominantly focused on surveying public opinion on social protection, this research focuses on social welfare services. The main focus of this research is on publicly funded care provided by municipal social welfare services. In this research, social welfare services include child day care, services for people with disabilities, home-help services, counselling by social workers and social assistance. The research considered in particular whether the clients or the population has different opinions towards social welfare services or social benefits. In addition, the research partly covers areas of informal care provided by family and friends. The research material consisted of the STAKES Welfare and Services in Finland survey. The data was compiled in 2004 and 2006 by Statistics Finland. The research comprises five articles. Additional data have been extracted from social welfare statistics and registers. Multiple approaches were applied in the survey on welfare and services the methods in this research included interviews by phone and mail, and register data. The sample size was 5 810 people in 2004 and 5 798 in 2006. The response rates were 82.7% and 83.7%, respectively. The results indicate that a large majority (90%) of the Finnish population is of the opinion that the public sector should bear the main responsibility for organising social and health services. The system of social welfare services and its personnel have strong public support 73% and 80% respectively. However, new and even negative tones have emerged in the Finnish debate on social welfare services. Women are increasingly critical of the performance of social welfare services and the level of social protection. Furthermore, this study shows that women more often than men wish to see an increase in the amount of privately organised social welfare services. Another group critical of the performance of social welfare services are pensioners. People who had used social welfare services were more critical than those who had not used them. Thus, the severest criticism was received from the groups who use and gain most from public services and benefits. However, the education and income variables identified in earlier studies no longer formed a significant dividing line, although people with higher education tend to foster a more positive view of the performance of social welfare services as well as the level of social protection. Income differences did not bear any significance, that is, belonging to a high or low income group was not a determining factor in the attitude towards social welfare services or social benefits. According to the research, family and friends still form an informal yet significant support network in people's everyday lives, and its importance has not been diminished by services provided by the welfare state. The Finnish public considers child day care the most reliable form of social welfare services. Indeed, child day care has become the most universal sector of our system of social welfare services. Other services that instil confidence included counselling by social workers and services for people with disabilities. On the other hand, social assistance and home-help services received negative feedback. The negative views were based on a number of arguments. One argument contends that the home-help service system, which was originally intended for universal use, is crumbling. The preventive role of home-help services has been reduced. These results mirror the increasingly popular opinion that social welfare services are not produced for all those who need them, but to an increasing extent for a select few of them. Municipalities are struggling with their finances and this, combined with negative publicity, has damaged the public's trust in some municipal social welfare services. A welfare state never achieves a stable condition, but must develop over time, as the world around it changes. Following the 1990's recession, we are now in a position where we can start to develop a system that responds to the needs of the next generation. Study results indicating new areas of dissatisfaction reflect the need to develop and improve the services provided. It is also increasingly essential that social welfare services pay attention to the opinions of clients and the public. Should the gap between opinions and actual activities increase, the legitimacy of the whole system would be questioned. Currently, the vast majority of Finns consider the system of social welfare services adequate, which provides us with the continuity required to maintain and improve client-oriented and reasonably priced social welfare services. Paying attention to the signals given by clients and the general public, and reacting to them accordingly, will also secure the development and legitimacy of the system in the future.

On the Problem of Participation in Strategy: A Critical Discursive Perspective

We still know little of why strategy processes often involve participation problems. In this paper, we argue that this crucial issue is linked to fundamental assumptions about the nature of strategy work. Hence, we need to examine how strategy processes are typically made sense of and what roles are assigned to specific organizational members. For this purpose, we adopt a critical discursive perspective that allows us to discover how specific conceptions of strategy work are reproduced and legitimized in organizational strategizing. Our empirical analysis is based on an extensive research project on strategy work in 12 organizations. As a result of our analysis, we identify three central discourses that seem to be systematically associated with nonparticipatory approaches to strategy work: “mystification,” “disciplining,” and “technologization.” However, we also distinguish three strategy discourses that promote participation: “self-actualization,” “dialogization,” and “concretization.” Our analysis shows that strategy as practice involves alternative and even competing discourses that have fundamentally different kinds of implications for participation in strategy work. We argue from a critical perspective that it is important to be aware of the inherent problems associated with dominant discourses as well as to actively advance the use of alternative ones.

Critical Incidents in Internal Relationships

Critical incidents have had an important role in service quality and service management research. The focus of critical-incident studies has gradually shifted from separate acts and episodes towards relationships, and even switching from one relationship to another. The Critical Incident Technique has mainly been used when studying the service sector, concentrating on the customer's perception of critical incidents. Although some studies have considered the perceptions of employees important, critical incidents have not been considered a tool for studying internal relationships to any larger extent. This paper takes a process approach and shifts the focus from an external to an internal setting. It puts forward a new technique for analysing internal relationships from a critical-incident perspective. The technique captures the dynamism in relationships through considering internal critical incidents as micro-processes affecting not only internal but also external relationships.

Acidification of lakes in Finland : regional estimates of lake chemistry and critical loads

Yhteenveto: Järvien happamoituminen Suomessa: Alueellinen vedenlaatu ja kriittinen kuormitus

Tests for Cointegration Rank and the Initial Condition

Many economic events involve initial observations that substantially deviate from long-run steady state. Initial conditions of this type have been found to impact diversely on the power of univariate unit root tests, whereas the impact on multivariate tests is largely unknown. This paper investigates the impact of the initial condition on tests for cointegration rank. We compare the local power of the widely used likelihood ratio (LR) test with the local power of a test based on the eigenvalues of the companion matrix. We find that the power of the LR test is increasing in the magnitude of the initial condition, whereas the power of the other test is decreasing. The behaviour of the tests is investigated in an application to price convergence.

On the force potential of strategy texts: a critical discourse analysis of a strategic plan and its power effects in a city organization

Despite increasing interest in the discursive aspects of strategy, few studies have examined strategy texts and their power effects. We draw from Critical Discourse Analysis to better understand the power of strategic plans as a directive genre. In our empirical analysis, we examined the creation of the official strategic plan of the City of Lahti in Finland. As a result of our inductive analysis, we identified five central discursive features of this plan: self-authorization, special terminology, discursive innovation, forced consensus and deonticity. We argue that these features can, with due caution, be generalized and conceived as distinctive features of the strategy genre. We maintain that these discursive features are not trivial characteristics; they have important implications for the textual agency of strategic plans, their performative effects, impact on power relations and ideological implications.

On the Discursive Construction of Corruption: A Critical Analysis of Media Texts

While extant studies have greatly advanced our understanding of corruption, we still know little of the processes through which specific practices or events come to be labeled as corruption. In a time when public attention devoted to corruption and other forms of corporate misbehavior has exploded, this thesis raises – and seeks to answer – crucial questions related to how the phenomenon is socially and discursively constructed. What kinds of struggles are manifested in public disputes about corruption? How do constructions of corruption relate with broader conceptions of (il)legitimacy in and around organizations? What are the discursive dynamics involved in the emergence and evolution of corruption scandals? The thesis consists of four essays that each employ different research designs and tackle these questions in slightly different theoretical and methodological ways. The empirical focus is on the media coverage of a number of significant and widely discussed scandals in Norway in the period 2003-2008. By illuminating crucial processes through which conceptions of corruption were constructed, reproduced, and transformed in these scandals, the thesis seeks to paint a more nuanced picture of corruption than what is currently offered in the literature. In particular, the thesis challenges traditional conceptions of corruption as a dysfunctional feature of organizations in and of itself by emphasizing the ambiguous, temporal, context-specific, and at times even contradictory features of corruption in public discussions.

Critical leg ischaemia with tissue loss : a challenge for the vascular surgeon

There is a widespread reporting habit of combining the outcomes for patients with rest pain (Fontaine III) and tissue loss (Fontaine IV) under the single category of critical leg ischaemia (CLI). This study focused on patients with ischaemic tissue loss treated with infrainguinal bypass surgery (IBS). All patients included in the study were treated at Helsinki University Central Hospital in 2000-2007. First, ulcer healing time after IBS and factors influencing healing time were prospectively assessed in 2 studies including 148 and 110 patients, respectively. Second,the results of redo IBS were retrospectively evaluated in 593 patients undergoing primary IBS for CLI with tissue loss . Third,long-term outcome were retrospectively analysed in 636 patients who underwent IBS for CLI with tissue loss . Fourth, the outcome of IBS was retrospectively compared with endovascular treatment (PTA) of the infrapopliteal arteries in 1023 CLI patients. Fifth, the influence multidrug resistant Pseudomans aeruginosa (MDR Pa) bacteria contamination in CLI patients treated with IBS was retropectively assessed. Sixty-four patients with positive MDR Pa -culture were matched with 64 MDR Pa - negative controls. Complete ulcer healing rate, including the ischemic ulcers and incisional wounds, was 40% at 6 months after IBS and 75% at one year. Diabetes was a risk factor for prolonged complete ulcer healing time. Ischaemic tissue lesions located in mid-and hindfoot healed poorly. At one year after IBS 50% of the patients were alive with salvaged leg and completely healed ulcers. The absence of gap between tertiary graft patency and leg salvage rates indicates the importance of a patent infrainguinal graft to save a leg with ischaemic tissue loss. Long-term survival for patients with ischaemic tissue loss was poor, 38% at 5 years. Only 30% of the patients were alive without amputation at 5 years. Several of the patient comorbidities increased independently the mortality risk; coronary artery disease, renal insufficiency, chronic obstructive lung disease and high age. When both PTA and bypass is feasible, infrapopliteal PTA as a first-line strategy is expected to achieve similar long-term results to bypass surgery in CLI when redo surgery is actively utilized. MDR Pa in a patient with CLI should be considered as a serious event with increased risk of early major amputation or death. Conclusion: Despite a successful infrainguinal bypass healing of the ischaemic ulcers and incisional wounds ulcer healing is a slow process especially in diabetics. Bypass surgery and PTA improve the outcome of the ischaemic leg but the mortality rate of the patients is high due to their severe comorbidities.

The effectiveness of infrainguinal percutaneous transluminal angioplasty in the treatment of critical limb ischaemia

Critical chronic lower limb ischaemia (CLI) is the most severe form of peripheral arterial disease. Even though the treatment of CLI has evolved during the last decade, CLI is still associated with considerable morbidity, mortality and a decreased quality of life, in addition to a large financial impact on society. ---- Bypass surgery has traditionally been considered the approach of choice to treat CLI patients in order to avoid amputation. However, there are increasing data on the efficacy of endovascular revascularization procedures, such as percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA), to achieve good leg salvage rates as well. Data gathered on all the 2,054 CLI patients revascularized at the Helsinki University Central Hospital between 2000 and 2007 were retrospectively analyzed. This patient cohort was used to compare the results of infrainguinal PTA and bypass surgery as well as to investigate predictors of failure after PTA. This study showed that infrainguinal PTA and bypass surgery yielded rather similar results in terms of survival, amputation-free survival and freedom from any re-intervention. When the femoropoliteal segment was treated, leg salvage was significantly better in the bypass surgery group, whereas no significant difference was observed between the two treatment methods when the revascularization extended to the infrapopliteal segment. PTA resulted in a significantly lower freedom from surgical re-interventions when compared to surgical revascularization. In this study the most important predictors of poor outcome after PTA for CLI were cardiac morbidity, nonambulatory status upon hospital arrival, and gangrene as a manifestation of CLI. Thus, when feasible, PTA seems to be a valid alternative for bypass surgery in the treatment of CLI provided that active redo-surgery is utilized. The optimal revascularization strategy should always be sought for each CLI patient individually considering the clinical state of the leg, the occlusive lesions to be treated, co-morbidities, life-expectancy, and the availability of a suitable vein for bypass.

High-risk patients and high-risk grafts in infrainguinal bypass for critical limb ischaemia

The main purpose of revascularization procedures for critical limb ischaemia (CLI) is to preserve the leg and sustain the patient s ambulatory status. Other goals are ischaemic pain relief and healing of ischaemic ulcers. Patients with CLI are usually old and have several comorbidities affecting the outcome. Revascularization for CLI is meaningless unless both life and limb are preserved. Therefore, the knowledge of both patient- and bypass-related risk factors is of paramount importance in clinical decision-making, patient selection and resource allocation. The aim of this study was to identify patient- and graft-related predictors of impaired outcome after infrainguinal bypass for CLI. The purpose was to assess the outcome of high-risk patients undergoing infrainguinal bypass and to evaluate the usefulness of specific risk scoring methods. The results of bypasses in the absence of optimal vein graft material were also evaluated, and the feasibility of the new method of scaffolding suboptimal vein grafts was assessed. The results of this study showed that renal insufficiency - not only renal failure but also moderate impairment in renal function - seems to be a significant risk factor for both limb loss and death after infrainguinal bypass in patients with CLI. Low estimated GFR (PIENEMPI KUIN 30 ml/min/1.73 m2) is a strong independent marker of poor prognosis. Furthermore, estimated GFR is a more accurate predictor of survival and leg salvage after infrainguinal bypass in CLI patients than serum creatinine level alone. We also found out that the life expectancy of octogenarians with CLI is short. In this patient group endovascular revascularization is associated with a better outcome than bypass in terms of survival, leg salvage and amputation-free survival especially in presence of coronary artery disease. This study was the first one to demonstrate that Finnvasc and modified Prevent III risk scoring methods both predict the long-term outcome of patients undergoing both surgical and endovascular infrainguinal revascularization for CLI. Both risk scoring methods are easy to use and might be helpful in clinical practice as an aid in preoperative patient selection and decision-making. Similarly than in previous studies, we found out that a single-segment great saphenous vein graft is superior to any other autologous vein graft in terms of mid-term patency and leg salvage. However, if optimal vein graft is lacking, arm vein conduits are superior to prosthetic grafts especially in infrapopliteal bypasses for CLI. We studied also the new method of scaffolding suboptimal quality vein grafts and found out that this method may enable the use of vein grafts of compromised quality otherwise unsuitable for bypass grafting. The remarkable finding was that patients with the combination of high operative risk due to severe comorbidities and risk graft have extremely poor survival, suggesting that only relatively fit patients should undergo complex bypasses with risk grafts. The results of this study can be used in clinical practice as an aid in preoperative patient selection and decision-making. In the future, the need of vascular surgery will increase significantly as the elderly and diabetic population increases, which emphasises the importance of focusing on those patients that will gain benefit from infrainguinal bypass. Therefore, the individual risk of the patient, ambulatory status, outcome expectations, the risk of bypass procedure as well as technical factors such as the suitability of outflow anatomy and the available vein material should all be assessed and taken into consideration when deciding on the best revascularization strategy.

Microbiological characterisation of soils : Evaluation of some critical steps in data collection and experimental design

The study of soil microbiota and their activities is central to the understanding of many ecosystem processes such as decomposition and nutrient cycling. The collection of microbiological data from soils generally involves several sequential steps of sampling, pretreatment and laboratory measurements. The reliability of results is dependent on reliable methods in every step. The aim of this thesis was to critically evaluate some central methods and procedures used in soil microbiological studies in order to increase our understanding of the factors that affect the measurement results and to provide guidance and new approaches for the design of experiments. The thesis focuses on four major themes: 1) soil microbiological heterogeneity and sampling, 2) storage of soil samples, 3) DNA extraction from soil, and 4) quantification of specific microbial groups by the most-probable-number (MPN) procedure. Soil heterogeneity and sampling are discussed as a single theme because knowledge on spatial (horizontal and vertical) and temporal variation is crucial when designing sampling procedures. Comparison of adjacent forest, meadow and cropped field plots showed that land use has a strong impact on the degree of horizontal variation of soil enzyme activities and bacterial community structure. However, regardless of the land use, the variation of microbiological characteristics appeared not to have predictable spatial structure at 0.5-10 m. Temporal and soil depth-related patterns were studied in relation to plant growth in cropped soil. The results showed that most enzyme activities and microbial biomass have a clear decreasing trend in the top 40 cm soil profile and a temporal pattern during the growing season. A new procedure for sampling of soil microbiological characteristics based on stratified sampling and pre-characterisation of samples was developed. A practical example demonstrated the potential of the new procedure to reduce the analysis efforts involved in laborious microbiological measurements without loss of precision. The investigation of storage of soil samples revealed that freezing (-20 °C) of small sample aliquots retains the activity of hydrolytic enzymes and the structure of the bacterial community in different soil matrices relatively well whereas air-drying cannot be recommended as a storage method for soil microbiological properties due to large reductions in activity. Freezing below -70 °C was the preferred method of storage for samples with high organic matter content. Comparison of different direct DNA extraction methods showed that the cell lysis treatment has a strong impact on the molecular size of DNA obtained and on the bacterial community structure detected. An improved MPN method for the enumeration of soil naphthalene degraders was introduced as an alternative to more complex MPN protocols or the DNA-based quantification approach. The main advantage of the new method is the simple protocol and the possibility to analyse a large number of samples and replicates simultaneously.