The North in the Old English Orosius : A Geographical Narrative in Context

This doctoral dissertation examines the description of the North as it appears in the Old English Orosius (OE Or.) in the form of the travel accounts by Ohthere and Wulfstan and a catalogue of peoples of Germania. The description is discussed in the context of ancient and early medieval textual and cartographic descriptions of the North, with a special emphasis on Anglo-Saxon sources and the intellectual context of the reign of King Alfred (871-899). This is the first time that these sources, a multidisciplinary approach and secondary literature, also from Scandinavia and Finland, have been brought together. The discussion is source-based, and archaeological theories and geographical ideas are used to support the primary evidence. This study belongs to the disciplines of early medieval literature and (cultural) history, Anglo-Saxon studies, English philology, and historical geography. The OE Or. was probably part of Alfred s educational campaign, which conveyed royal ideology to the contemporary elite. The accounts and catalogue are original interpolations which represent a unique historical source for the Viking Age. They contain unparalleled information about peoples and places in Fennoscandia and the southern Baltic and sailing voyages to the White Sea, the Danish lands, and the Lower Vistula. The historical-philological analysis reveals an emphasis on wealth and property, rank, luxury goods, settlement patterns, and territorial divisions. Trade is strongly implied by the mentions of central places and northern products, such as walrus ivory. The references to such peoples as the Finnas, the Cwenas, and the Beormas appear in connection with information about geography and subsistence in the far North. Many of the topics in the accounts relate to Anglo-Saxon aristocratic culture and interests. The accounts focus on the areas associated with the Northmen, the Danes and the Este. These areas resonated in the Anglo-Saxon geographical imagination: they were curious about the northern margin of the world, their own continental ancestry and the geography of their homeland of Angeln, and they had an interest in the Goths and their connection with the southern Baltic in mythogeography. The non-judgemental representation of the North as generally peaceful and relatively normal place is related to Alfredian and Orosian ideas about the unity and spreading of Christendom, and to desires for unity among the Germani and for peace with the Vikings, who were settling in England. These intellectual contexts reflect the innovative and organizational forces of Alfred s reign. The description of the North in the OE Or. can be located in the context of the Anglo-Saxon worldview and geographical mindset. It mirrors the geographical curiosity expressed in other Anglo-Saxon sources, such as the poem Widsith and the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi. The northern section of this early eleventh-century world map is analyzed in detail here for the first time. It is suggested that the section depicts the North Atlantic and the Scandinavian Peninsula. The survey of ancient and early medieval sources provides a comparative context for the OE Or. In this material, produced by such authors as Strabo, Pliny, Tacitus, Jordanes, and Rimbert, the significance of the North was related to the search for and definition of the northern edge of the world, universal accounts of the world, the northern homeland in the origin stories of the gentes, and Carolingian expansion and missionary activity. These frameworks were transmitted to Anglo-Saxon literary culture, where the North occurs in the context of the definition of Britain s place in the world.

Archaean crustal evolution in eastern Finland : New geochronological and geochemical constraints from the Kuhmo terrain and the Nurmes belt

This thesis summarises the results of four original papers concerning U-Pb geochronology and geochemical evolution of Archaean rocks from the Kuhmo terrain and the Nurmes belt, eastern Finland. The study area belongs to a typical Archaean granite-greenstone terrain, composed of metavolcanic and metasedimentary rocks in generally N-S trending greenstone belts as well as a granitoid-gneiss complex with intervening gneissic and migmatised supracrustal and plutonic rocks. U-Pb data on migmatite mesosomes indicate that the crust surrounding the Tipasjärvi-Kuhmo-Suomussalmi greenstone belt is of varying age. The oldest protolith detected for a migmatite mesosome from the granitoid-gneiss complex is 2.94 Ga, whereas the other dated migmatites protoliths have ages of 2.84 2.79 Ga. The latter protoliths are syngenetic with the majority of volcanic rocks in the adjacent Tipasjärvi-Kuhmo-Suomussalmi greenstone belt. This suggests that the genesis of some of the volcanic rocks within the greenstone belt and surrounding migmatite protoliths could be linked. Metamorphic zircon overgrowths with ages of 2.84 2.81 Ga were also obtained. The non-migmatised plutonic rocks in the Kuhmo terrain and in the Nurmes belt record secular geochemical evolution, typical of Archaean cratons. The studied tonalitic rocks have ages of 2.83 2.75 Ga and they have geochemical characteristics similar to low-Al and high-Al TTD (tonalite-trondhjemite-dacite). The granodiorites, diorites, and gabbros with high Mg/Fe and LILE-enriched characteristics were mostly emplaced between 2.74 2.70 Ga and they exhibit geochemical characteristics typical of Archaean sanukitoid suites. The latest identified plutonic episode took place at 2.70 2.68 Ga, when compositionally heterogeneous leucocratic granitoid rocks, with a variable crustal component, were emplaced. U-Pb data on migmatite leucosomes suggest that leucosome generation may have been coeval with this latest plutonic event. On the basis of available U-Pb and Sm-Nd isotopic data it appears that the plutonic rocks of the Kuhmo terrain and the Nurmes belt do not contain any significant input from Palaeoarchaean sources. A characteristic feature of the Nurmes belt is the presence of migmatised paragneisses, locally preserving primary edimentary structures, with sporadic amphibolite intercalations. U-Pb studies on zircons indicate that the precursors of the Nurmes paragneisses were graywackes that were deposited between 2.71 Ga and 2.69 Ga and that they had a prominent 2.75 2.70 Ga source. Nd isotopic and whole-rock geochemical data for the intercalated amphibolites imply MORB sources. U-Pb data on zircons from the plutonic rocks and paragneisses reveal that metamorphic zircon growth took place at 2.72 2.63 Ga. This was the last tectonothermal event related to cratonisation of the Archaean crust of eastern Finland.

Middleware for Mobile Sensing Applications in Urban Environments

Sensor networks represent an attractive tool to observe the physical world. Networks of tiny sensors can be used to detect a fire in a forest, to monitor the level of pollution in a river, or to check on the structural integrity of a bridge. Application-specific deployments of static-sensor networks have been widely investigated. Commonly, these networks involve a centralized data-collection point and no sharing of data outside the organization that owns it. Although this approach can accommodate many application scenarios, it significantly deviates from the pervasive computing vision of ubiquitous sensing where user applications seamlessly access anytime, anywhere data produced by sensors embedded in the surroundings. With the ubiquity and ever-increasing capabilities of mobile devices, urban environments can help give substance to the ubiquitous sensing vision through Urbanets, spontaneously created urban networks. Urbanets consist of mobile multi-sensor devices, such as smart phones and vehicular systems, public sensor networks deployed by municipalities, and individual sensors incorporated in buildings, roads, or daily artifacts. My thesis is that "multi-sensor mobile devices can be successfully programmed to become the underpinning elements of an open, infrastructure-less, distributed sensing platform that can bring sensor data out of their traditional close-loop networks into everyday urban applications". Urbanets can support a variety of services ranging from emergency and surveillance to tourist guidance and entertainment. For instance, cars can be used to provide traffic information services to alert drivers to upcoming traffic jams, and phones to provide shopping recommender services to inform users of special offers at the mall. Urbanets cannot be programmed using traditional distributed computing models, which assume underlying networks with functionally homogeneous nodes, stable configurations, and known delays. Conversely, Urbanets have functionally heterogeneous nodes, volatile configurations, and unknown delays. Instead, solutions developed for sensor networks and mobile ad hoc networks can be leveraged to provide novel architectures that address Urbanet-specific requirements, while providing useful abstractions that hide the network complexity from the programmer. This dissertation presents two middleware architectures that can support mobile sensing applications in Urbanets. Contory offers a declarative programming model that views Urbanets as a distributed sensor database and exposes an SQL-like interface to developers. Context-aware Migratory Services provides a client-server paradigm, where services are capable of migrating to different nodes in the network in order to maintain a continuous and semantically correct interaction with clients. Compared to previous approaches to supporting mobile sensing urban applications, our architectures are entirely distributed and do not assume constant availability of Internet connectivity. In addition, they allow on-demand collection of sensor data with the accuracy and at the frequency required by every application. These architectures have been implemented in Java and tested on smart phones. They have proved successful in supporting several prototype applications and experimental results obtained in ad hoc networks of phones have demonstrated their feasibility with reasonable performance in terms of latency, memory, and energy consumption.

Monopolising Names? : The Protection of Geographical Indications in the European Community

Marketing of goods under geographical names has always been common. Aims to prevent abuse have given rise to separate forms of legal protection for geographical indications (GIs) both nationally and internationally. The European Community (EC) has also gradually enacted its own legal regime to protect geographical indications. The legal protection of GIs has traditionally been based on the idea that geographical origin endows a product exclusive qualities and characteristics. In today s world we are able to replicate almost any prod-uct anywhere, including its qualities and characteristics. One would think that this would preclude protec-tion from most geographical names, yet the number of geographical indications seems to be rising. GIs are no longer what they used to be. In the EC it is no longer required that a product is endowed exclusive characteristics by its geographical origin as long as consumers associate the product with a certain geo-graphical origin. This departure from the traditional protection of GIs is based on the premise that a geographical name extends beyond and exists apart from the product and therefore deserves protection itself. The thesis tries to clearly articulate the underlying reasons, justifications, principles and policies behind the protection of GIs in the EC and then scrutinise the scope and shape of the GI system in the light of its own justifications. The essential questions it attempts to aswer are (1) What is the basis and criteria for granting GI rights? (2) What is the scope of protection afforded to GIs? and (3) Are these both justified in the light of the functions and policies underlying granting and protecting of GIs? Despite the differences, the actual functions of GIs are in many ways identical to those of trade marks. Geographical indications have a limited role as source and quality indicators in allowing consumers to make informed and efficient choices in the market place. In the EC this role is undermined by allowing able room and discretion for uses that are arbitrary. Nevertheless, generic GIs are unable to play this role. The traditional basis for justifying legal protection seems implausible in most case. Qualities and charac-teristics are more likely to be related to transportable skill and manufacturing methods than the actual geographical location of production. Geographical indications are also incapable of protecting culture from market-induced changes. Protection against genericness, against any misuse, imitation and evocation as well as against exploiting the reputation of a GI seem to be there to protect the GI itself. Expanding or strengthening the already existing GI protection or using it to protect generic GIs cannot be justified with arguments on terroir or culture. The conclusion of the writer is that GIs themselves merit protection only in extremely rare cases and usually only the source and origin function of GIs should be protected. The approach should not be any different from one taken in trade mark law. GI protection should not be used as a means to mo-nopolise names. At the end of the day, the scope of GI protection is nevertheless a policy issue.

Molecular Tuning of Rhodopsins for High Visual Sensitivity in Different Light Environments : Variation in Absorbance Spectrum and Opsin Sequence within and between Species

Visual pigments of different animal species must have evolved at some stage to match the prevailing light environments, since all visual functions depend on their ability to absorb available photons and transduce the event into a reliable neural signal. There is a large literature on correlation between the light environment and spectral sensitivity between different fish species. However, little work has been done on evolutionary adaptation between separated populations within species. More generally, little is known about the rate of evolutionary adaptation to changing spectral environments. The objective of this thesis is to illuminate the constraints under which the evolutionary tuning of visual pigments works as evident in: scope, tempo, available molecular routes, and signal/noise trade-offs. Aquatic environments offer Nature s own laboratories for research on visual pigment properties, as naturally occurring light environments offer an enormous range of variation in both spectral composition and intensity. The present thesis focuses on the visual pigments that serve dim-light vision in two groups of model species, teleost fishes and mysid crustaceans. The geographical emphasis is in the brackish Baltic Sea area with its well-known postglacial isolation history and its aquatic fauna of both marine and fresh-water origin. The absorbance spectrum of the (single) dim-light visual pigment were recorded by microspectrophotometry (MSP) in single rods of 26 fish species and single rhabdoms of 8 opossum shrimp populations of the genus Mysis inhabiting marine, brackish or freshwater environments. Additionally, spectral sensitivity was determined from six Mysis populations by electroretinogram (ERG) recording. The rod opsin gene was sequenced in individuals of four allopatric populations of the sand goby (Pomatoschistus minutus). Rod opsins of two other goby species were investigated as outgroups for comparison. Rod absorbance spectra of the Baltic subspecies or populations of the primarily marine species herring (Clupea harengus membras), sand goby (P. minutus), and flounder (Platichthys flesus) were long-wavelength-shifted compared to their marine populations. The spectral shifts are consistent with adaptation for improved quantum catch (QC) as well as improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of vision in the Baltic light environment. Since the chromophore of the pigment was pure A1 in all cases, this has apparently been achieved by evolutionary tuning of the opsin visual pigment. By contrast, no opsin-based differences were evident between lake and sea populations of species of fresh-water origin, which can tune their pigment by varying chromophore ratios. A more detailed analysis of differences in absorbance spectra and opsin sequence between and within populations was conducted using the sand goby as model species. Four allopatric populations from the Baltic Sea (B), Swedish west coast (S), English Channel (E), and Adriatic Sea (A) were examined. Rod absorbance spectra, characterized by the wavelength of maximum absorbance (λmax), differed between populations and correlated with differences in the spectral light transmission of the respective water bodies. The greatest λmax shift as well as the greatest opsin sequence difference was between the Baltic and the Adriatic populations. The significant within-population variation of the Baltic λmax values (506-511 nm) was analyzed on the level of individuals and was shown to correlate well with opsin sequence substitutions. The sequences of individuals with λmax at shorter wavelengths were identical to that of the Swedish population, whereas those with λmax at longer wavelengths additionally had substitution F261F/Y in the sixth transmembrane helix of the protein. This substitution (Y261) was also present in the Baltic common gobies and is known to redshift spectra. The tuning mechanism of the long-wavelength type Baltic sand gobies is assumed to be the co-expression of F261 and Y261 in all rods to produce ≈ 5 nm redshift. The polymorphism of the Baltic sand goby population possibly indicates ambiguous selection pressures in the Baltic Sea. The visual pigments of all lake populations of the opossum shrimp (Mysis relicta) were red-shifted by 25 nm compared with all Baltic Sea populations. This is calculated to confer a significant advantage in both QC and SNR in many humus-rich lakes with reddish water. Since only A2 chromophore was present, the differences obviously reflect evolutionary tuning of the visual protein, the opsin. The changes have occurred within the ca. 9000 years that the lakes have been isolated from the Sea after the most recent glaciation. At present, it seems that the mechanism explaining the spectral differences between lake and sea populations is not an amino acid substitution at any other conventional tuning site, but the mechanism is yet to be found.

Combined Tevatron upper limit on gg->H->W+W- and constraints on the Higgs boson mass in fourth-generation fermion models

We combine results from searches by the CDF and D0 collaborations for a standard model Higgs boson (H) in the process gg->H->W+W- in p=pbar collisions at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider at sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV. With 4.8 fb-1 of integrated luminosity analyzed at CDF and 5.4 fb-1 at D0, the 95% Confidence Level upper limit on \sigma(gg->H) x B(H->W+W-) is 1.75 pb at m_H=120 GeV, 0.38 pb at m_H=165 GeV, and 0.83 pb at m_H=200 GeV. Assuming the presence of a fourth sequential generation of fermions with large masses, we exclude at the 95% Confidence Level a standard-model-like Higgs boson with a mass between 131 and 204 GeV.

Local systems, global impacts : Using life cycle assessment to analyse the potential and constraints of industrial symbioses

Human activities extract and displace different substances and materials from the earth s crust, thus causing various environmental problems, such as climate change, acidification and eutrophication. As problems have become more complicated, more holistic measures that consider the origins and sources of pollutants have been called for. Industrial ecology is a field of science that forms a comprehensive framework for studying the interactions between the modern technological society and the environment. Industrial ecology considers humans and their technologies to be part of the natural environment, not separate from it. Industrial operations form natural systems that must also function as such within the constraints set by the biosphere. Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a central concept of industrial ecology. Industrial symbiosis studies look at the physical flows of materials and energy in local industrial systems. In an ideal IS, waste material and energy are exchanged by the actors of the system, thereby reducing the consumption of virgin material and energy inputs and the generation of waste and emissions. Companies are seen as part of the chains of suppliers and consumers that resemble those of natural ecosystems. The aim of this study was to analyse the environmental performance of an industrial symbiosis based on pulp and paper production, taking into account life cycle impacts as well. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool for quantitatively and systematically evaluating the environmental aspects of a product, technology or service throughout its whole life cycle. Moreover, the Natural Step Sustainability Principles formed a conceptual framework for assessing the environmental performance of the case study symbiosis (Paper I). The environmental performance of the case study symbiosis was compared to four counterfactual reference scenarios in which the actors of the symbiosis operated on their own. The research methods used were process-based life cycle assessment (LCA) (Papers II and III) and hybrid LCA, which combines both process and input-output LCA (Paper IV). The results showed that the environmental impacts caused by the extraction and processing of the materials and the energy used by the symbiosis were considerable. If only the direct emissions and resource use of the symbiosis had been considered, less than half of the total environmental impacts of the system would have been taken into account. When the results were compared with the counterfactual reference scenarios, the net environmental impacts of the symbiosis were smaller than those of the reference scenarios. The reduction in environmental impacts was mainly due to changes in the way energy was produced. However, the results are sensitive to the way the reference scenarios are defined. LCA is a useful tool for assessing the overall environmental performance of industrial symbioses. It is recommended that in addition to the direct effects, the upstream impacts should be taken into account as well when assessing the environmental performance of industrial symbioses. Industrial symbiosis should be seen as part of the process of improving the environmental performance of a system. In some cases, it may be more efficient, from an environmental point of view, to focus on supply chain management instead.