Sense of Community in Web Environment

The study of social phenomena in the World Wide Web has been rather fragmentary, andthere is no coherent, reseach-based theory about sense of community in Web environment. Sense of community means part of one's self-concept that has to do with perceiving oneself belonging to, and feeling affinity to a certain social grouping. The present study aimed to find evidence for sense of community in Web environment, and specifically find out what the most critical psychological factors of sense of community would be. Based on known characteristics of real life communities and sense of community, and few occational studies of Web-communities, it was hypothesized that the following factors would be the most critical ones and that they could be grouped as prerequisites, facilitators and consequences of sense of community: awareness and social presence (prerequisites), criteria for membership and borders, common purpose, social interaction and reciprocity, norms and conformity, common history (facilitators), trust and accountability (consequences). In addition to critical factors, the present study aimed to find out if this kind of grouping would be valid. Furthermore, the effect of Web-community members' background variables to sense of community was of interest. In order to answer the questions, an online-questionnaire was created and tested. It included propositions that reflect factors that precede, facilitate and follow the sense of community in Web environment. A factor analysis was calculated to find out the critical factors and analyses of variance were calculated to see if the grouping to prerequisites, facilitators and consequences was right and how the background variables would affect the sense of community in Web environment. The results indicated that the psychological structure of sense of community in Web environment could not be presented with critical variables grouped as prerequisites, facilitators and consequences. Most factors did facilitate the sense of community, but based on this data it could not be argued that some of the factors chronologically precedesense of community and some follow it. Instead, the factor analysis revealed that the most critical factors in sense of community in Web environment are 1) reciprocal involvement, 2) basic trust for others, 3) similarity and common purpose of members, and 4) shared history of members. The most influencing background variables were the member's own participation activity (indicated with reading and writing messages) and the phase in membership lifecycle (from visitor to leader). The more the member participated and the further in membership life cycle he was, the more he felt sense of community. There are many descreptions of sense of community, but the present study was one of the first to actually measure the phenomenon in Web environment, and that gained well documented, valid results based on large data, proving that sense of community in Web environment is possible, and clarifying its psychological structure, thus enhancing the understanding of sense of community in Web environment. Keywords: sense of community, Web-community, psychology of the Internet

The Significance of Wild Plants in the Evolutionary Ecology of Three Major Viruses Infecting Cultivated Sweetpotato in Uganda

The studies presented in this thesis contribute to the understanding of evolutionary ecology of three major viruses threatening cultivated sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas Lam) in East Africa: Sweet potato feathery mottle virus (SPFMV; genus Potyvirus; Potyviridae), Sweet potato chlorotic stunt virus (SPCSV; genus Crinivirus; Closteroviridae) and Sweet potato mild mottle virus (SPMMV; genus Ipomovirus; Potyviridae). The viruses were serologically detected and the positive results confirmed by RT-PCR and sequencing. SPFMV was detected in 24 wild plant species of family Convolvulacea (genera Ipomoea, Lepistemon and Hewittia), of which 19 species were new natural hosts for SPFMV. SPMMV and SPCSV were detected in wild plants belonging to 21 and 12 species (genera Ipomoea, Lepistemon and Hewittia), respectively, all of which were previously unknown to be natural hosts of these viruses. SPFMV was the most abundant virus being detected in 17% of the plants, while SPMMV and SPCSV were detected in 9.8% and 5.4% of the assessed plants, respectively. Wild plants in Uganda were infected with the East African (EA), common (C), and the ordinary (O) strains, or co-infected with the EA and the C strain of SPFMV. The viruses and virus-like diseases were more frequent in the eastern agro-ecological zone than the western and central zones, which contrasted with known incidences of these viruses in sweetpotato crops, except for northern zone where incidences were lowest in wild plants as in sweetpotato. The NIb/CP junction in SPMMV was determined experimentally which facilitated CP-based phylogenetic and evolutionary analyses of SPMMV. Isolates of all the three viruses from wild plants were genetically similar to those found in cultivated sweetpotatoes in East Africa. There was no evidence of host-driven population genetic structures suggesting frequent transmission of these viruses between their wild and cultivated hosts. The p22 RNA silencing suppressor-encoding sequence was absent in a few SPCSV isolates, but regardless of this, SPCSV isolates incited sweet potato virus disease (SPVD) in sweetpotato plants co-infected with SPFMV, indicating that p22 is redundant for synergism between SCSV and SPFMV. Molecular evolutionary analysis revealed that isolates of strain EA of SPFMV that is largely restricted geographically in East Africa experience frequent recombination in comparison to isolates of strain C that is globally distributed. Moreover, non-homologous recombination events between strains EA and C were rare, despite frequent co-infections of these strains in wild plants, suggesting purifying selection against non-homologous recombinants between these strains or that such recombinants are mostly not infectious. Recombination was detected also in the 5 - and 3 -proximal regions of the SPMMV genome providing the first evidence of recombination in genus Ipomovirus, but no recombination events were detected in the characterized genomic regions of SPCSV. Strong purifying selection was implicated on evolution of majority of amino acids of the proteins encoded by the analyzed genomic regions of SPFMV, SPMMV and SPCSV. However, positive selection was predicted on 17 amino acids distributed over the whole the coat protein (CP) in the globally distributed strain C, as compared to only 4 amino acids in the multifunctional CP N-terminus (CP-NT) of strain EA largely restricted geographically to East Africa. A few amino acid sites in the N-terminus of SPMMV P1, the p7 protein and RNA silencing suppressor proteins p22 and RNase3 of SPCSV were also submitted to positive selection. Positively selected amino acids may constitute ligand-binding domains that determine interactions with plant host and/or insect vector factors. The P1 proteinase of SPMMV (genus Ipomovirus) seems to respond to needs of adaptation, which was not observed with the helper component proteinase (HC-Pro) of SPMMV, although the HC-Pro is responsible for many important molecular interactions in genus Potyvirus. Because the centre of origin of cultivated sweetpotato is in the Americas from where the crop was dispersed to other continents in recent history (except for the Australasia and South Pacific region), it would be expected that identical viruses and their strains occur worldwide, presuming virus dispersal with the host. Apparently, this seems not to be the case with SPMMV, the strain EA of SPFMV and the strain EA of SPCSV that are largely geographically confined in East Africa where they are predominant and occur both in natural and agro-ecosystems. The geographical distribution of plant viruses is constrained more by virus-vector relations than by virus-host interactions, which in accordance of the wide range of natural host species and the geographical confinement to East Africa suggest that these viruses existed in East African wild plants before the introduction of sweetpotato. Subsequently, these studies provide compelling evidence that East Africa constitutes a cradle of SPFMV strain EA, SPCSV strain EA, and SPMMV. Therefore, sweet potato virus disease (SPVD) in East Africa may be one of the examples of damaging virus diseases resulting from exchange of viruses between introduced crops and indigenous wild plant species. Keywords: Convolvulaceae, East Africa, epidemiology, evolution, genetic variability, Ipomoea, recombination, SPCSV, SPFMV, SPMMV, selection pressure, sweetpotato, wild plant species Author s Address: Arthur K. Tugume, Department of Agricultural Sciences, Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki, Latokartanonkaari 7, P.O Box 27, FIN-00014, Helsinki, Finland. Email: tugume.arthur@helsinki.fi Author s Present Address: Arthur K. Tugume, Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, Makerere University, P.O. Box 7062, Kampala, Uganda. Email: aktugume@botany.mak.ac.ug, tugumeka@yahoo.com

From trading to eCommunity management

"The increasing pressure for enterprises to join into agile business networks is changing the requirements on the enterprise computing systems. The supporting infrastructure is increasingly required to provide common facilities and societal infrastructure services to support the lifecycle of loosely-coupled, eContract-governed business networks. The required facilities include selection of those autonomously administered business services that the enterprises are prepared to provide and use, contract negotiations, and furthermore, monitoring of the contracted behaviour with potential for breach management. The essential change is in the requirement of a clear mapping between business-level concepts and the automation support for them. Our work has focused on developing B2B middleware to address the above challenges; however, the architecture is not feasible without management facilities for trust-aware decisions for entering business networks and interacting within them. This paper discusses how trust-based decisions are supported and positioned in the B2B middleware."

Use of Standards for CAD Layers in Building

One of the central issues in making efficient use of IT in the design, construction and maintenance of buildings is the sharing of the digital building data across disciplines and lifecycle stages. One technology which enables data sharing is CAD layering, which to be of real use requires the definition of standards. This paper focuses on the background, objectives and effectiveness of the International standard ISO 13567, Organisation and naming of layers for CAD. In particular the efficiency and effectiveness of the standardisation and standard implementation process are in focus, rather than the technical details. The study was conducted as a qualitative study with a number of experts who responded to a semi-structured mail questionnaire, supplemented by personal interviews. The main results were that CAD layer standards based on the ISO standard have been implemented, particularly in northern European countries, but are not very widely used. A major problem which was identified was the lack of resources for marketing and implementing the standard as national variations, once it had been formally accepted.

Trends in Pharmaceutical Product Development 2000-2010

Merkittävä osa alkuperäislääkevalmistajien tutkimus- ja tuotekehityskuluista näyttää olevan suunnattu olemassa olevien lääkkeiden kehittämiseen. Tämä voi oletettavasti johtaa kiinnostaviin formulaatiokehitysstrategioihin. Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena oli selvittää, voidaanko farmaseuttisen tuotekehityksen trendejä havaita myönnettyjen myyntilupien perusteella. Tutkimuksen mielenkiinnon kohteena olivat myös suurimpien lääkeyritysten käyttämät elinkaaren hallinnan keinot, joilla suojataan myyvimpiä tuotteita geneeriseltä kilpailulta ja varmistetaan markkinaosuus. Tutkimuksen painopiste oli kiinteissä oraalisissa lääkevalmisteissa. Laadullisten ja määrällisten menetelmien yhdistelmää käytettiin laajan näkökulman saamiseksi tutkittavaan aiheeseen. Suomalaisten myyntilupaviranomaisten haastatteluja käytettiin keräämään taustatietoa tutkimuksen määrällistä osaa varten. Määrällinen osa koostui myyntilupatietokannoista, jotka käsittivät kaikkien menettelyjen kautta Suomessa myönnetyt myyntiluvat, keskitetyn menettelyn kautta EU:ssa myönnetyt myyntiluvat ja maailman kymmenen suurinta lääkeyritystä USA:ssa. Tutkimustulosten perusteella rinnakkaislääkkeiden määrässä tapahtui merkittävä nousu Suomessa kaikkien menettelyjen kautta myönnetyissä myyntiluvissa ja EU:ssa keskitetyn menettelyn kautta myönnetyissä myyntiluvissa vuosina 2000-2010. Tämä muutos saattaa ainakin osaksi johtua lainsäädännöllisistä muutoksista, joilla luotiin kannustimia rinnakkaislääkkeiden käyttöön ja valmistukseen, kuten lääkevaihto ja viitehintajärjestelmä. USA:n tiedot osoittivat suurten lääkevalmistajien kiinnostuksen elinkaaren hallintaan: suurin osa maailman kymmenelle suurimmalle lääkeyritykselle myönnetyistä myyntiluvista vuosina 2005-2010 oli tähän tarkoitukseen. Elinkaaren hallinnan suhde uusiin lääkeaineisiin oli lähes 4:1. Kiinteä oraalinen lääkemuoto on kiistatta kaikista suosituin tapa annostella lääke, minkä vahvistivat sekä arvioijien haastattelut että myyntilupatiedot. Kiinteiden oraalisten rooli oli entistäkin korostuneempi rinnakkaislääkkeiden kohdalla. Kun innovatiivisuutta mitattiin epätyypillisten annosmuotojen määrällä, USA:n tiedot kiinteistä oraalisista lääkemuodoista osoittivat vahvaa innovatiivisuutta Suomen ja EU:n tietoihin verrattuna. Tämä saattaa heijastaa suurten lääkeyritysten innovatiivista tuotevalikoimaa. Epätyypillisten kiinteiden oraalisten annosmuotojen osuus oli huomattavasti pienempi rinnakkaislääkkeissä kuin alkuperäislääkkeissä kaikilla alueilla. Elinkaaren hallinnassa käytetyimmät strategiat olivat uusi formulaatio, uusi vahvuus ja uusi yhdistelmä olemassa olevasta valmisteesta. Kiinteiden oraalisten lääkemuotojen osalta kaksi kolmasosaa uusista elinkaaren hallinnan formulaatioista oli säädellysti vapauttavia valmisteita. Elinkaaren hallinta on olennainen osa suurten lääkeyritysten liiketoimintastrategiaa, ja sen tärkeyttä havainnollistettiin Coreg-tablettien tapausesimerkillä.

A Hub System for Cloud-Computing Based Business-Collaboration: Automating Ontology-Enabled Electronic Business-Service Discovery

The management and coordination of business-process collaboration experiences changes because of globalization, specialization, and innovation. Service-oriented computing (SOC) is a means towards businessprocess automation and recently, many industry standards emerged to become part of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) stack. In a globalized world, organizations face new challenges for setting up and carrying out collaborations in semi-automating ecosystems for business services. For being efficient and effective, many companies express their services electronically in what we term business-process as a service (BPaaS). Companies then source BPaaS on the fly from third parties if they are not able to create all service-value inhouse because of reasons such as lack of reasoures, lack of know-how, cost- and time-reduction needs. Thus, a need emerges for BPaaS-HUBs that not only store service offers and requests together with information about their issuing organizations and assigned owners, but that also allow an evaluation of trust and reputation in an anonymized electronic service marketplace. In this paper, we analyze the requirements, design architecture and system behavior of such a BPaaS-HUB to enable a fast setup and enactment of business-process collaboration. Moving into a cloud-computing setting, the results of this paper allow system designers to quickly evaluate which services they need for instantiationg the BPaaS-HUB architecture. Furthermore, the results also show what the protocol of a backbone service bus is that allows a communication between services that implement the BPaaS-HUB. Finally, the paper analyzes where an instantiation must assign additional computing resources vor the avoidance of performance bottlenecks.

Exploring a framework for advanced electronic business transactions

With the emergence of service-oriented computing technology, companies embrace new ways of carrying out business transactions electronically. Since the parties involved in an electronic business transaction (eBT) manage a heterogeneous information-systems infrastructure within their organizational domains, the collaboration complexity is considerable and safeguarding an interorganizational collaboration with an eBT is difficult, but of high significance. This paper describes a conceptual framework that pays attention to the complexities of an eBT and its differentiating characteristics that go further than traditional database transactions. Since the eBT is a framework that comprises separate levels, pre-existing transaction concepts are explored for populating the respective levels. To show the feasibility of the described eBT framework, industry initiatives that are aspiring to become business-transaction standards, are checked for eBT compatible characteristics. Since realizing an eBT framework raises many tricky issues, the paper maps out important research areas that require scientific attention. Essentially, it is required to investigate how the business semantics influences the nature of an eBT throughout its lifecycle.

Integrated climatic impacts of forestry and fibre-based packaging

The purpose of this study was to examine the integrated climatic impacts of forestry and the use fibre-based packaging materials. The responsible use of forest resources plays an integral role in mitigating climate change. Forests offer three generic mitigation strategies; conservation, sequestration and substitution. By conserving carbon reservoirs, increasing the carbon sequestration in the forest or substituting fossil fuel intensive materials and energy, it is possible to lower the amount of carbon in the atmosphere through the use of forest resources. The Finnish forest industry consumed some 78 million m3 of wood in 2009, while total of 2.4 million tons of different packaging materials were consumed that same year in Finland. Nearly half of the domestically consumed packaging materials were wood-based. Globally the world packaging material market is valued worth annually some €400 billion, of which the fibre-based packaging materials account for 40 %. The methodology and the theoretical framework of this study are based on a stand-level, steady-state analysis of forestry and wood yields. The forest stand data used for this study were obtained from Metla, and consisted of 14 forest stands located in Southern and Central Finland. The forest growth and wood yields were first optimized with the help of Stand Management Assistant software, and then simulated in Motti for forest carbon pools. The basic idea was to examine the climatic impacts of fibre-based packaging material production and consumption through different forest management and end-use scenarios. Economically optimal forest management practices were chosen as the baseline (1) for the study. In the alternative scenarios, the amount of fibre-based packaging material on the market decreased from the baseline. The reduced pulpwood demand (RPD) scenario (2) follows economically optimal management practices under reduced pulpwood price conditions, while the sawlog scenario (3) also changed the product mix from packaging to sawnwood products. The energy scenario (4) examines the impacts of pulpwood demand shift from packaging to energy use. The final scenario follows the silvicultural guidelines developed by the Forestry Development Centre Tapio (5). The baseline forest and forest product carbon pools and the avoided emissions from wood use were compared to those under alternative forest management regimes and end-use scenarios. The comparison of the climatic impacts between scenarios gave an insight into the sustainability of fibre-based packaging materials, and the impacts of decreased material supply and substitution. The results show that the use of wood for fibre-based packaging purposes is favorable, when considering climate change mitigation aspects of forestry and wood use. Fibre-based packaging materials efficiently displace fossil carbon emissions by substituting more energy intensive materials, and they delay biogenic carbon re-emissions to the atmosphere for several months up to years. The RPD and the sawlog scenarios both fared well in the scenario comparison. These scenarios produced relatively more sawnwood, which can displace high amounts of emissions and has high carbon storing potential due to the long lifecycle. The results indicate the possibility that win-win scenarios exist by shifting production from pulpwood to sawlogs; on some of the stands in the RPD and sawlog scenarios, both carbon pools and avoided emissions increased from the baseline simultaneously. On the opposite, the shift from packaging material to energy use caused the carbon pools and the avoided emissions to diminish from the baseline. Hence the use of virgin fibres for energy purposes, rather than forest industry feedstock biomass, should be critically judged if optional to each other. Managing the stands according to the silvicultural guidelines developed by the Forestry Development Centre Tapio provided the least climatic benefits, showing considerably lower carbon pools and avoided emissions. This seems interesting and worth noting, as the guidelines are the current basis for the forest management practices in Finland.

Laundry Symbols and License Management

One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license management. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the current European copyright system is designed to a large extent to satisfy the commercial actors, e.g. publishers, record companies etc. This means that the scope and duration of the rights are very extensive and there are even certain forms of protection that do not exist elsewhere in the world, e.g. database right. On the other hand, the exceptions for research and teaching are typically very narrow.