Stalking and violence victimization among Finnish university students

This study examined the nature and lifetime prevalence of two types of victimization among Finnish university students: stalking and violence victimization (i.e. general violence). This study was a cross-sectional study using two different datasets of Finnish university students. The stalking data was collected via an electronic questionnaire and the violence victimization data was collected via a postal questionnaire. There were 615 participants in the stalking study (I-III) and 905 participants in the violence victimization study. The thesis consists of four studies. The aims regarding the stalking substudies (Studies I-III) were to examine the lifetime prevalence of stalking among university students and to analyze how stalking is related to victim and stalker characteristics and certain central variables of stalking (victim-stalker relationship, stalking episodes, stalking duration). Specifically, the aim was to identify factors that are associated with stalking violence and to factors contributing to the stalking duration. Furthermore, the aim was also to investigate how university students cope with stalking and whether coping is related to victim and stalker background characteristics and to certain other core variables (victim-stalker relationship, stalking episodes, stalking duration, prior victimization, and stalking violence). The aims for the violence victimization substudy (Study IV) were to examine the prevalence of violence victimization, i.e. general violence (minor and serious physical violence and threats) and how violence victimization is associated with victim/abuser characteristics, symptomology, and the use of student health care services. The present study shows that both stalking and violence victimization (i.e. general violence) are markedly prevalent among Finnish university students. The lifetime prevalence rate for stalking was 48.5% and 46.5% for violence victimization. When the lifetime prevalence rate was restricted to violent stalking and physical violence only, the prevalence decreased to 22% and 42% respectively. The students reported exposure to multiple forms of stalking and violence victimization, demonstrating the diversity of victimization among university students. Stalking victimization was found to be more prevalent among female students, while violence victimization was found to be more prevalent among male students. Most of the victims of stalking knew their stalkers, while the offender in general violence was typically a stranger. Stalking victimization often included violence and continued for a lengthy period. The victim-stalking relationship and stalking behaviors were found to be associated with stalking violence and stalking duration. Based on three identified stalking dimensions (violence, surveillance, contact seeking), the present study found five distinct victim subgroups (classes). Along with the victim-stalker relationship, the victim subgroups emerged as important factors contributing to the stalking duration. Victims of violent stalking did not differ greatly from victims of non-violent stalking in their use of behavioral coping tactics, while exposure to violent stalking had an effect on the use of coping strategies. The victim-offender relationship was also associated to a set of symptoms regarding violence victimization. Furthermore, violence victimization had a significant main effect on specific symptoms (mental health symptoms, alcohol consumption, symptom index), while gender had a significant main effect on most symptoms, yet no interaction effect was found. The present results also show that victims of violence are overrepresented among frequent health care users. The present findings add to the literature on the prevalence and nature of stalking and violence victimization among Finnish university students. Moreover, the present findings stress the importance of violence prevention and intervention in student health care, and may be used as a guideline for policy makers, as well as health care and law enforcement professionals dealing with youth violence prevention.

Semanttisen webin ontologisen tekstiilikäsitteistön kehittäminen ja liittäminen museoiden luettelointitietoihin

DEVELOPING A TEXTILE ONTOLOGY FOR THE SEMANTIC WEB AND CONNECTING IT TO MUSEUM CATALOGING DATA The goal of the Semantic Web is to share concept-based information in a versatile way on the Internet. This is achievable using formal data structures called ontologies. The goal of this re-search is to increase the usability of museum cataloging data in information retrieval. The work is interdisciplinary, involving craft science, terminology science, computer science, and museology. In the first part of the dissertation an ontology of concepts of textiles, garments, and accessories is developed for museum cataloging work. The ontology work was done with the help of thesauri, vocabularies, research reports, and standards. The basis of the ontology development was the Museoalan asiasanasto MASA, a thesaurus for museum cataloging work which has been enriched by other vocabularies. Concepts and terms concerning the research object, as well as the material names of textiles, costumes, and accessories, were focused on. The research method was terminological concept analysis complemented by an ontological view of the Semantic Web. The concept structure was based on the hierarchical generic relation. Attention was also paid to other relations between terms and concepts, and between concepts themselves. Altogether 977 concept classes were created. Issues including how to choose and name concepts for the ontology hierarchy and how deep and broad the hierarchy could be are discussed from the viewpoint of the ontology developer and museum cataloger. The second part of the dissertation analyzes why some of the cataloged terms did not match with the developed textile ontology. This problem is significant because it prevents automatic ontological content integration of the cataloged data on the Semantic Web. The research datasets, i.e. the cataloged museum data on textile collections, came from three museums: Espoo City Museum, Lahti City Museum and The National Museum of Finland. The data included 1803 textile, costume, and accessory objects. Unmatched object and textile material names were analyzed. In the case of the object names six categories (475 cases), and of the material names eight categories (423 cases), were found where automatic annotation was not possible. The most common explanation was that the cataloged field was filled with a long sentence comprised of many terms. Sometimes in the compound term, the object name and material, or the name and the way of usage, were combined. As well, numeric values in the material name cataloging field prevented annotation and so did the absence of a corresponding concept in the ontology. Ready-made drop-down lists of materials used in one cataloging system facilitated the annotation. In the case of naming objects and materials, one should use terms in basic form without attributes. The developed textile ontology has been applied in two cultural portals, MuseumFinland and Culturesampo, where one can search for and browse information based on cataloged data using integrated ontologies in an interoperable way. The textile ontology is also part of the national FinnONTO ontology infrastructure. Keywords: annotation, concept, concept analysis, cataloging, museum collection, ontology, Semantic Web, textile collection, textile material

Trends and Explanations for Socioeconomic Differences in Physical Activity

Very limited scientific knowledge exists on the trends and explanations of socioeconomic differences in physical activity among adults. There is a paucity of studies examining whether determinants vary across socioeconomic position and different life stages. This study examines a) how socioeconomic differences in leisure-time and commuting physical activity have changed in Finland from 1978 to 2002 and b) the contribution of childhood socioeconomic position, adolescence sports and exercise, adulthood socioeconomic position, working conditions and other adulthood health behaviours to socioeconomic differences in leisure-time physical activity. This study utilised three population-based datasets collected by the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL, formerly National Institute for Public Health): the Health Behaviour and Health among the Finnish Adult Population Study from 1978 to 2002 (N=96 105), the National FINRISK Study 2002 and its physical activity sub-study (N= 9 179), and the Health 2000 Study (N=8 028). Survey information was collected by self-administered questionnaires, interviews at home, and measurements made at the study site. The response rates varied from 69 to 89 per cent. Several socioeconomic measures were linked from the national population registers. Based on the results, those with low income were physically inactive during leisure-time and while commuting from 1978 to 2002. Manual worker women, however, were more physically active commuters compared to their counterparts. Parental socioeconomic position contributed directly to adulthood educational differences in leisure-time physical inactivity but also indirectly through adulthood socioeconomic position (occupation, household income) and other unhealthy behaviours (mainly smoking). Among those with low education participation in competitive sports in youth and among those with high education exercise in late adolescence contributed to leisure-time physical activity in adulthood. Long exposure to physically strenuous working conditions in men and current job strain in women contributed to occupational class differences in leisure-time physical activity. Socioeconomic differences in physical activity have remained similar for twenty years in Finland. Educational career seems to have a strong contribution to physical activity. To adopt a lifelong physically active life-style, one should participate in a range of different sports and exercise in adolescence and in youth, have a low exposure to physically and mentally strenuous working conditions in later life and have other healthy behaviours in later life.

The success of the diversified farm : resource-based view

Farms and rural areas have many specific valuable resources that can be used to create non-agricultural products and services. Most of the research regarding on-farm diversification has hitherto concentrated on business start-up or farm survival strategies. Resource allocation and also financial success have not been the primary focus of investigations as yet. In this study these specific topics were investigated i.e. resource allocation and also the financial success of diversified farms from a farm management perspective. The key question addressed in this dissertation, is how tangible and intangible resources of the diversified farm affect the financial success. This study’s theoretical background deals with resource-based theory, and also certain themes of the theory of learning organisation and other decision-making theories. Two datasets were utilised in this study. First, data were collected by postal survey in 2001 (n = 663). Second, data were collected in a follow-up survey in 2006 (n = 439). Data were analysed using multivariate data analyses and path analyses. The study results reveal that, diversified farms performed differently. Success and resources were linked. Professional and management skills affected other resources, and hence directly or indirectly influenced success per se. In the light of empirical analyses of this study, tangible and intangible resources owned by the diversified farm impacted on its financial success. The findings of this study underline the importance of skills and networks for entrepreneur(s). Practically speaking all respondents of this study used either agricultural resources for non-farm businesses or non-farm resources for agricultural enterprises. To share resources in this way was seen as a pragmatic opportunity recognised by farmers. One of the downsides of diversification might be the phenomenon of over-diversification, which can be defined as the situation in which a farm diversifies beyond its optimal limit. The empirical findings of this study reveal that capital and labour resource constrains did have adverse effects on financial success. The evidence indicates that farms that were capital and labour resource constrained in 2001 were still less profitable than their ‘no problems’ counterparts five years later.

Spatial and temporal variability in midge (Nematocera) assemblages in shallow Finnish lakes (60−70 °N) : community-based modelling of past environmental change

Multi- and intralake datasets of fossil midge assemblages in surface sediments of small shallow lakes in Finland were studied to determine the most important environmental factors explaining trends in midge distribution and abundance. The aim was to develop palaeoenvironmental calibration models for the most important environmental variables for the purpose of reconstructing past environmental conditions. The developed models were applied to three high-resolution fossil midge stratigraphies from southern and eastern Finland to interpret environmental variability over the past 2000 years, with special focus on the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), the Little Ice Age (LIA) and recent anthropogenic changes. The midge-based results were compared with physical properties of the sediment, historical evidence and environmental reconstructions based on diatoms (Bacillariophyta), cladocerans (Crustacea: Cladocera) and tree rings. The results showed that the most important environmental factor controlling midge distribution and abundance along a latitudinal gradient in Finland was the mean July air temperature (TJul). However, when the dataset was environmentally screened to include only pristine lakes, water depth at the sampling site became more important. Furthermore, when the dataset was geographically scaled to southern Finland, hypolimnetic oxygen conditions became the dominant environmental factor. The results from an intralake dataset from eastern Finland showed that the most important environmental factors controlling midge distribution within a lake basin were river contribution, water depth and submerged vegetation patterns. In addition, the results of the intralake dataset showed that the fossil midge assemblages represent fauna that lived in close proximity to the sampling sites, thus enabling the exploration of within-lake gradients in midge assemblages. Importantly, this within-lake heterogeneity in midge assemblages may have effects on midge-based temperature estimations, because samples taken from the deepest point of a lake basin may infer considerably colder temperatures than expected, as shown by the present test results. Therefore, it is suggested here that the samples in fossil midge studies involving shallow boreal lakes should be taken from the sublittoral, where the assemblages are most representative of the whole lake fauna. Transfer functions between midge assemblages and the environmental forcing factors that were significantly related with the assemblages, including mean air TJul, water depth, hypolimnetic oxygen, stream flow and distance to littoral vegetation, were developed using weighted averaging (WA) and weighted averaging-partial least squares (WA-PLS) techniques, which outperformed all the other tested numerical approaches. Application of the models in downcore studies showed mostly consistent trends. Based on the present results, which agreed with previous studies and historical evidence, the Medieval Climate Anomaly between ca. 800 and 1300 AD in eastern Finland was characterized by warm temperature conditions and dry summers, but probably humid winters. The Little Ice Age (LIA) prevailed in southern Finland from ca. 1550 to 1850 AD, with the coldest conditions occurring at ca. 1700 AD, whereas in eastern Finland the cold conditions prevailed over a longer time period, from ca. 1300 until 1900 AD. The recent climatic warming was clearly represented in all of the temperature reconstructions. In the terms of long-term climatology, the present results provide support for the concept that the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index has a positive correlation with winter precipitation and annual temperature and a negative correlation with summer precipitation in eastern Finland. In general, the results indicate a relatively warm climate with dry summers but snowy winters during the MCA and a cool climate with rainy summers and dry winters during the LIA. The results of the present reconstructions and the forthcoming applications of the models can be used in assessments of long-term environmental dynamics to refine the understanding of past environmental reference conditions and natural variability required by environmental scientists, ecologists and policy makers to make decisions concerning the presently occurring global, regional and local changes. The developed midge-based models for temperature, hypolimnetic oxygen, water depth, littoral vegetation shift and stream flow, presented in this thesis, are open for scientific use on request.

Reconstructions of past climates from documentary and natural sources in Finland since the 18th century

In this paper both documentary and natural proxy data have been used to improve the accuracy of palaeoclimatic knowledge in Finland since the 18th century. Early meteorological observations from Turku (1748-1800) were analyzed first as a potential source of climate variability. The reliability of the calculated mean temperatures was evaluated by comparing them with those of contemporary temperature records from Stockholm, St. Petersburg and Uppsala. The resulting monthly, seasonal and yearly mean temperatures from 1748 to 1800 were compared with the present day mean values (1961-1990): the comparison suggests that the winters of the period 1749-1800 were 0.8 ºC colder than today, while the summers were 0.4 ºC warmer. Over the same period, springs were 0.9 ºC and autumns 0.1 ºC colder than today. Despite their uncertainties when compared with modern meteorological data, early temperature measurements offer direct and daily information about the weather for all months of the year, in contrast with other proxies. Secondly, early meteorological observations from Tornio (1737-1749) and Ylitornio (1792-1838) were used to study the temporal behaviour of the climate-tree growth relationship during the past three centuries in northern Finland. Analyses showed that the correlations between ring widths and mid-summer (July) temperatures did not vary significantly as a function of time. Early (June) and late summer (August) mean temperatures were secondary to mid-summer temperatures in controlling the radial growth. According the dataset used, there was no clear signature of temporally reduced sensitivity of Scots pine ring widths to mid-summer temperatures over the periods of early and modern meteorological observations. Thirdly, plant phenological data with tree-rings from south-west Finland since 1750 were examined as a palaeoclimate indicator. The information from the fragmentary, partly overlapping, partly nonsystematically biased plant phenological records of 14 different phenomena were combined into one continuous time series of phenological indices. The indices were found to be reliable indicators of the February to June temperature variations. In contrast, there was no correlation between the phenological indices and the precipitation data. Moreover, the correlations between the studied tree-rings and spring temperatures varied as a function of time and hence, their use in palaeoclimate reconstruction is questionable. The use of present tree-ring datasets for palaeoclimate purposes may become possible after the application of more sophisticated calibration methods. Climate variability since the 18th century is perhaps best seen in the fourth paper study of the multiproxy spring temperature reconstruction of south-west Finland. With the help of transfer functions, an attempt has been made to utilize both documentary and natural proxies. The reconstruction was verified with statistics showing a high degree of validity between the reconstructed and observed temperatures. According to the proxies and modern meteorological observations from Turku, springs have become warmer and have featured a warming trend since around the 1850s. Over the period of 1750 to around 1850, springs featured larger multidecadal low-frequency variability, as well as a smaller range of annual temperature variations. The coldest springtimes occurred around the 1840s and 1850s and the first decade of the 19th century. Particularly warm periods occurred in the 1760s, 1790s, 1820s, 1930s, 1970s and from 1987 onwards, although in this period cold springs occurred, such as the springs of 1994 and 1996. On the basis of the available material, long-term temperature changes have been related to changes in the atmospheric circulation, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation (February-June).

Controls on trace metals in urban stream sediments : implications for pollution monitoring using sediment chemistry data

Contamination of urban streams is a rising topic worldwide, but the assessment and investigation of stormwater induced contamination is limited by the high amount of water quality data needed to obtain reliable results. In this study, stream bed sediments were studied to determine their contamination degree and their applicability in monitoring aquatic metal contamination in urban areas. The interpretation of sedimentary metal concentrations is, however, not straightforward, since the concentrations commonly show spatial and temporal variations as a response to natural processes. The variations of and controls on metal concentrations were examined at different scales to increase the understanding of the usefulness of sediment metal concentrations in detecting anthropogenic metal contamination patterns. The acid extractable concentrations of Zn, Cu, Pb and Cd were determined from the surface sediments and water of small streams in the Helsinki Metropolitan region, southern Finland. The data consists of two datasets: sediment samples from 53 sites located in the catchment of the Stream Gräsanoja and sediment and water samples from 67 independent catchments scattered around the metropolitan region. Moreover, the sediment samples were analyzed for their physical and chemical composition (e.g. total organic carbon, clay-%, Al, Li, Fe, Mn) and the speciation of metals (in the dataset of the Stream Gräsanoja). The metal concentrations revealed that the stream sediments were moderately contaminated and caused no immediate threat to the biota. However, at some sites the sediments appeared to be polluted with Cu or Zn. The metal concentrations increased with increasing intensity of urbanization, but site specific factors, such as point sources, were responsible for the occurrence of the highest metal concentrations. The sediment analyses revealed, thus a need for more detailed studies on the processes and factors that cause the hot spot metal concentrations. The sediment composition and metal speciation analyses indicated that organic matter is a very strong indirect control on metal concentrations, and it should be accounted for when studying anthropogenic metal contamination patterns. The fine-scale spatial and temporal variations of metal concentrations were low enough to allow meaningful interpretation of substantial metal concentration differences between sites. Furthermore, the metal concentrations in the stream bed sediments were correlated with the urbanization of the catchment better than the total metal concentrations in the water phase. These results suggest that stream sediments show true potential for wider use in detecting the spatial differences in metal contamination of urban streams. Consequently, using the sediment approach regional estimates of the stormwater related metal contamination could be obtained fairly cost-effectively, and the stability and reliability of results would be higher compared to analyses of single water samples. Nevertheless, water samples are essential in analysing the dissolved concentrations of metals, momentary discharges from point sources in particular.

Topographical, structural and geophysical characterization of fracture zones: implications for groundwater flow and vulnerability

The main objective of this study is to evaluate selected geophysical, structural and topographic methods on regional, local, and tunnel and borehole scales, as indicators of the properties of fracture zones or fractures relevant to groundwater flow. Such information serves, for example, groundwater exploration and prediction of the risk of groundwater inflow in underground construction. This study aims to address how the features detected by these methods link to groundwater flow in qualitative and semi-quantitative terms and how well the methods reveal properties of fracturing affecting groundwater flow in the studied sites. The investigated areas are: (1) the Päijänne Tunnel for water-conveyance whose study serves as a verification of structures identified on regional and local scales; (2) the Oitti fuel spill site, to telescope across scales and compare geometries of structural assessment; and (3) Leppävirta, where fracturing and hydrogeological environment have been studied on the scale of a drilled well. The methods applied in this study include: the interpretation of lineaments from topographic data and their comparison with aeromagnetic data; the analysis of geological structures mapped in the Päijänne Tunnel; borehole video surveying; groundwater inflow measurements; groundwater level observations; and information on the tunnel s deterioration as demonstrated by block falls. The study combined geological and geotechnical information on relevant factors governing groundwater inflow into a tunnel and indicators of fracturing, as well as environmental datasets as overlays for spatial analysis using GIS. Geophysical borehole logging and fluid logging were used in Leppävirta to compare the responses of different methods to fracturing and other geological features on the scale of a drilled well. Results from some of the geophysical measurements of boreholes were affected by the large diameter (gamma radiation) or uneven surface (caliper) of these structures. However, different anomalies indicating more fractured upper part of the bedrock traversed by well HN4 in Leppävirta suggest that several methods can be used for detecting fracturing. Fracture trends appear to align similarly on different scales in the zone of the Päijänne Tunnel. For example, similarities of patterns were found between the regional magnetic trends, correlating with orientations of topographic lineaments interpreted as expressions of fracture zones. The same structural orientations as those of the larger structures on local or regional scales were observed in the tunnel, even though a match could not be made in every case. The size and orientation of the observation space (patch of terrain at the surface, tunnel section, or borehole), the characterization method, with its typical sensitivity, and the characteristics of the location, influence the identification of the fracture pattern. Through due consideration of the influence of the sampling geometry and by utilizing complementary fracture characterization methods in tandem, some of the complexities of the relationship between fracturing and groundwater flow can be addressed. The flow connections demonstrated by the response of the groundwater level in monitoring wells to pressure decrease in the tunnel and the transport of MTBE through fractures in bedrock in Oitti, highlight the importance of protecting the tunnel water from a risk of contamination. In general, the largest values of drawdown occurred in monitoring wells closest to the tunnel and/or close to the topographically interpreted fracture zones. It seems that, to some degree, the rate of inflow shows a positive correlation with the level of reinforcement, as both are connected with the fracturing in the bedrock. The following geological features increased the vulnerability of tunnel sections to pollution, especially when several factors affected the same locations: (1) fractured bedrock, particularly with associated groundwater inflow; (2) thin or permeable overburden above fractured rock; (3) a hydraulically conductive layer underneath the surface soil; and (4) a relatively thin bedrock roof above the tunnel. The observed anisotropy of the geological media should ideally be taken into account in the assessment of vulnerability of tunnel sections and eventually for directing protective measures.

Methods for Answer Extraction in Textual Question Answering

In this thesis we present and evaluate two pattern matching based methods for answer extraction in textual question answering systems. A textual question answering system is a system that seeks answers to natural language questions from unstructured text. Textual question answering systems are an important research problem because as the amount of natural language text in digital format grows all the time, the need for novel methods for pinpointing important knowledge from the vast textual databases becomes more and more urgent. We concentrate on developing methods for the automatic creation of answer extraction patterns. A new type of extraction pattern is developed also. The pattern matching based approach chosen is interesting because of its language and application independence. The answer extraction methods are developed in the framework of our own question answering system. Publicly available datasets in English are used as training and evaluation data for the methods. The techniques developed are based on the well known methods of sequence alignment and hierarchical clustering. The similarity metric used is based on edit distance. The main conclusions of the research are that answer extraction patterns consisting of the most important words of the question and of the following information extracted from the answer context: plain words, part-of-speech tags, punctuation marks and capitalization patterns, can be used in the answer extraction module of a question answering system. This type of patterns and the two new methods for generating answer extraction patterns provide average results when compared to those produced by other systems using the same dataset. However, most answer extraction methods in the question answering systems tested with the same dataset are both hand crafted and based on a system-specific and fine-grained question classification. The the new methods developed in this thesis require no manual creation of answer extraction patterns. As a source of knowledge, they require a dataset of sample questions and answers, as well as a set of text documents that contain answers to most of the questions. The question classification used in the training data is a standard one and provided already in the publicly available data.

Construction of a global map of human gene expression : the process, tools and analysis

This thesis studies human gene expression space using high throughput gene expression data from DNA microarrays. In molecular biology, high throughput techniques allow numerical measurements of expression of tens of thousands of genes simultaneously. In a single study, this data is traditionally obtained from a limited number of sample types with a small number of replicates. For organism-wide analysis, this data has been largely unavailable and the global structure of human transcriptome has remained unknown. This thesis introduces a human transcriptome map of different biological entities and analysis of its general structure. The map is constructed from gene expression data from the two largest public microarray data repositories, GEO and ArrayExpress. The creation of this map contributed to the development of ArrayExpress by identifying and retrofitting the previously unusable and missing data and by improving the access to its data. It also contributed to creation of several new tools for microarray data manipulation and establishment of data exchange between GEO and ArrayExpress. The data integration for the global map required creation of a new large ontology of human cell types, disease states, organism parts and cell lines. The ontology was used in a new text mining and decision tree based method for automatic conversion of human readable free text microarray data annotations into categorised format. The data comparability and minimisation of the systematic measurement errors that are characteristic to each lab- oratory in this large cross-laboratories integrated dataset, was ensured by computation of a range of microarray data quality metrics and exclusion of incomparable data. The structure of a global map of human gene expression was then explored by principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering using heuristics and help from another purpose built sample ontology. A preface and motivation to the construction and analysis of a global map of human gene expression is given by analysis of two microarray datasets of human malignant melanoma. The analysis of these sets incorporate indirect comparison of statistical methods for finding differentially expressed genes and point to the need to study gene expression on a global level.

Identifying Meaningful Places

Place identification refers to the process of analyzing sensor data in order to detect places, i.e., spatial areas that are linked with activities and associated with meanings. Place information can be used, e.g., to provide awareness cues in applications that support social interactions, to provide personalized and location-sensitive information to the user, and to support mobile user studies by providing cues about the situations the study participant has encountered. Regularities in human movement patterns make it possible to detect personally meaningful places by analyzing location traces of a user. This thesis focuses on providing system level support for place identification, as well as on algorithmic issues related to the place identification process. The move from location to place requires interactions between location sensing technologies (e.g., GPS or GSM positioning), algorithms that identify places from location data and applications and services that utilize place information. These interactions can be facilitated using a mobile platform, i.e., an application or framework that runs on a mobile phone. For the purposes of this thesis, mobile platforms automate data capture and processing and provide means for disseminating data to applications and other system components. The first contribution of the thesis is BeTelGeuse, a freely available, open source mobile platform that supports multiple runtime environments. The actual place identification process can be understood as a data analysis task where the goal is to analyze (location) measurements and to identify areas that are meaningful to the user. The second contribution of the thesis is the Dirichlet Process Clustering (DPCluster) algorithm, a novel place identification algorithm. The performance of the DPCluster algorithm is evaluated using twelve different datasets that have been collected by different users, at different locations and over different periods of time. As part of the evaluation we compare the DPCluster algorithm against other state-of-the-art place identification algorithms. The results indicate that the DPCluster algorithm provides improved generalization performance against spatial and temporal variations in location measurements.

Human genetic variation in the Baltic Sea region: Features of population history and natural selection

In this thesis, the genetic variation of human populations from the Baltic Sea region was studied in order to elucidate population history as well as evolutionary adaptation in this region. The study provided novel understanding of how the complex population level processes of migration, genetic drift, and natural selection have shaped genetic variation in North European populations. Results from genome-wide, mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomal analyses suggested that the genetic background of the populations of the Baltic Sea region lies predominantly in Continental Europe, which is consistent with earlier studies and archaeological evidence. The late settlement of Fennoscandia after the Ice Age and the subsequent small population size have led to pronounced genetic drift, especially in Finland and Karelia but also in Sweden, evident especially in genome-wide and Y-chromosomal analyses. Consequently, these populations show striking genetic differentiation, as opposed to much more homogeneous pattern of variation in Central European populations. Additionally, the eastern side of the Baltic Sea was observed to have experienced eastern influence in the genome-wide data as well as in mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomal variation – consistent with linguistic connections. However, Slavic influence in the Baltic Sea populations appears minor on genetic level. While the genetic diversity of the Finnish population overall was low, genome-wide and Y-chromosomal results showed pronounced regional differences. The genetic distance between Western and Eastern Finland was larger than for many geographically distant population pairs, and provinces also showed genetic differences. This is probably mainly due to the late settlement of Eastern Finland and local isolation, although differences in ancestral migration waves may contribute to this, too. In contrast, mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomal analyses of the contemporary Swedish population revealed a much less pronounced population structure and a fusion of the traces of ancient admixture, genetic drift, and recent immigration. Genome-wide datasets also provide a resource for studying the adaptive evolution of human populations. This study revealed tens of loci with strong signs of recent positive selection in Northern Europe. These results provide interesting targets for future research on evolutionary adaptation, and may be important for understanding the background of disease-causing variants in human populations.

Microbial communities in Pb contaminated boreal forest soil

Lead contamination in the environment is of particular concern, as it is a known toxin. Until recently, however, much less attention has been given to the local contamination caused by activities at shooting ranges compared to large-scale industrial contamination. In Finland, more than 500 tons of Pb is produced each year for shotgun ammunition. The contaminant threatens various organisms, ground water and the health of human populations. However, the forest at shooting ranges usually shows no visible sign of stress compared to nearby clean environments. The aboveground biota normally reflects the belowground ecosystem. Thus, the soil microbial communities appear to bear strong resistance to contamination, despite the influence of lead. The studies forming this thesis investigated a shooting range site at Hälvälä in Southern Finland, which is heavily contaminated by lead pellets. Previously it was experimentally shown that the growth of grasses and degradation of litter are retarded. Measurements of acute toxicity of the contaminated soil or soil extracts gave conflicting results, as enchytraeid worms used as toxicity reporters were strongly affected, while reporter bacteria showed no or very minor decreases in viability. Measurements using sensitive inducible luminescent reporter bacteria suggested that the bioavailability of lead in the soil is indeed low, and this notion was supported by the very low water extractability of the lead. Nevertheless, the frequency of lead-resistant cultivable bacteria was elevated based on the isolation of cultivable strains. The bacterial and fungal diversity in heavily lead contaminated shooting sectors were compared with those of pristine sections of the shooting range area. The bacterial 16S rRNA gene and fungal ITS rRNA gene were amplified, cloned and sequenced using total DNA extracted from the soil humus layer as the template. Altogether, 917 sequenced bacterial clones and 649 sequenced fungal clones revealed a high soil microbial diversity. No effect of lead contamination was found on bacterial richness or diversity, while fungal richness and diversity significantly differed between lead contaminated and clean control areas. However, even in the case of fungi, genera that were deemed sensitive were not totally absent from the contaminated area: only their relative frequency was significantly reduced. Some operational taxonomic units (OTUs) assigned to Basidiomycota were clearly affected, and were much rarer in the lead contaminated areas. The studies of this thesis surveyed EcM sporocarps, analyzed morphotyped EcM root tips by direct sequencing, and 454-pyrosequenced fungal communities in in-growth bags. A total of 32 EcM fungi that formed conspicuous sporocarps, 27 EcM fungal OTUs from 294 root tips, and 116 EcM fungal OTUs from a total of 8 194 ITS2 454 sequences were recorded. The ordination analyses by non-parametric multidimensional scaling (NMS) indicated that Pb enrichment induced a shift in the EcM community composition. This was visible as indicative trends in the sporocarp and root tip datasets, but explicitly clear in the communities observed in the in-growth bags. The compositional shift in the EcM community was mainly attributable to an increase in the frequencies of OTUs assigned to the genus Thelephora, and to a decrease in the OTUs assigned to Pseudotomentella, Suillus and Tylospora in Pb-contaminated areas when compared to the control. The enrichment of Thelephora in contaminated areas was also observed when examining the total fungal communities in soil using DNA cloning and sequencing technology. While the compositional shifts are clear, their functional consequences for the dominant trees or soil ecosystem remain undetermined. The results indicate that at the Hälvälä shooting range, lead influences the fungal communities but not the bacterial communities. The forest ecosystem shows apparent functional redundancy, since no significant effects were seen on forest trees. Recently, by means of 454 pyrosequencing , the amount of sequences in a single analysis run can be up to one million. It has been applied in microbial ecology studies to characterize microbial communities. The handling of sequence data with traditional programs is becoming difficult and exceedingly time consuming, and novel tools are needed to handle the vast amounts of data being generated. The field of microbial ecology has recently benefited from the availability of a number of tools for describing and comparing microbial communities using robust statistical methods. However, although these programs provide methods for rapid calculation, it has become necessary to make them more amenable to larger datasets and numbers of samples from pyrosequencing. As part of this thesis, a new program was developed, MuSSA (Multi-Sample Sequence Analyser), to handle sequence data from novel high-throughput sequencing approaches in microbial community analyses. The greatest advantage of the program is that large volumes of sequence data can be manipulated, and general OTU series with a frequency value can be calculated among a large number of samples.

Species-based and community-level approaches to conservation prioritization

One major reason for the global decline of biodiversity is habitat loss and fragmentation. Conservation areas can be designed to reduce biodiversity loss, but as resources are limited, conservation efforts need to be prioritized in order to achieve best possible outcomes. The field of systematic conservation planning developed as a response to opportunistic approaches to conservation that often resulted in biased representation of biological diversity. The last two decades have seen the development of increasingly sophisticated methods that account for information about biodiversity conservation goals (benefits), economical considerations (costs) and socio-political constraints. In this thesis I focus on two general topics related to systematic conservation planning. First, I address two aspects of the question about how biodiversity features should be valued. (i) I investigate the extremely important but often neglected issue of differential prioritization of species for conservation. Species prioritization can be based on various criteria, and is always goal-dependent, but can also be implemented in a scientifically more rigorous way than what is the usual practice. (ii) I introduce a novel framework for conservation prioritization, which is based on continuous benefit functions that convert increasing levels of biodiversity feature representation to increasing conservation value using the principle that more is better. Traditional target-based systematic conservation planning is a special case of this approach, in which a step function is used for the benefit function. We have further expanded the benefit function framework for area prioritization to address issues such as protected area size and habitat vulnerability. In the second part of the thesis I address the application of community level modelling strategies to conservation prioritization. One of the most serious issues in systematic conservation planning currently is not the deficiency of methodology for selection and design, but simply the lack of data. Community level modelling offers a surrogate strategy that makes conservation planning more feasible in data poor regions. We have reviewed the available community-level approaches to conservation planning. These range from simplistic classification techniques to sophisticated modelling and selection strategies. We have also developed a general and novel community level approach to conservation prioritization that significantly improves on methods that were available before. This thesis introduces further degrees of realism into conservation planning methodology. The benefit function -based conservation prioritization framework largely circumvents the problematic phase of target setting, and allowing for trade-offs between species representation provides a more flexible and hopefully more attractive approach to conservation practitioners. The community-level approach seems highly promising and should prove valuable for conservation planning especially in data poor regions. Future work should focus on integrating prioritization methods to deal with multiple aspects in combination influencing the prioritization process, and further testing and refining the community level strategies using real, large datasets.

Measuring the Cosmic Microwave Background : Topics along the analysis pipeline

The first quarter of the 20th century witnessed a rebirth of cosmology, study of our Universe, as a field of scientific research with testable theoretical predictions. The amount of available cosmological data grew slowly from a few galaxy redshift measurements, rotation curves and local light element abundances into the first detection of the cos- mic microwave background (CMB) in 1965. By the turn of the century the amount of data exploded incorporating fields of new, exciting cosmological observables such as lensing, Lyman alpha forests, type Ia supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations and Sunyaev-Zeldovich regions to name a few. -- CMB, the ubiquitous afterglow of the Big Bang, carries with it a wealth of cosmological information. Unfortunately, that information, delicate intensity variations, turned out hard to extract from the overall temperature. Since the first detection, it took nearly 30 years before first evidence of fluctuations on the microwave background were presented. At present, high precision cosmology is solidly based on precise measurements of the CMB anisotropy making it possible to pinpoint cosmological parameters to one-in-a-hundred level precision. The progress has made it possible to build and test models of the Universe that differ in the way the cosmos evolved some fraction of the first second since the Big Bang. -- This thesis is concerned with the high precision CMB observations. It presents three selected topics along a CMB experiment analysis pipeline. Map-making and residual noise estimation are studied using an approach called destriping. The studied approximate methods are invaluable for the large datasets of any modern CMB experiment and will undoubtedly become even more so when the next generation of experiments reach the operational stage. -- We begin with a brief overview of cosmological observations and describe the general relativistic perturbation theory. Next we discuss the map-making problem of a CMB experiment and the characterization of residual noise present in the maps. In the end, the use of modern cosmological data is presented in the study of an extended cosmological model, the correlated isocurvature fluctuations. Current available data is shown to indicate that future experiments are certainly needed to provide more information on these extra degrees of freedom. Any solid evidence of the isocurvature modes would have a considerable impact due to their power in model selection.