Vauhtikausi. Autoilun sukupuoli 1920-luvun Suomessa

The Age of Speed:Automobility’s Gender in the 1920s Finland The aim of this study is to analyze the connections between automobility and gender in Finland in the 1920s. In this study it is argued that the 1920s was the significant era in the Finnish history of automobility when many of the long-lasting gendered notions and cultural understandings were constructed. This study combines cultural history of technology with gender analysis. As the previous research on gender and technology has recognized, technology is a significant site of gender negotiations. Both from the cultural historical perspective and a gender perspective it is important to understand both technology and gender as cultural constructions. They were linked together and constructed each other. In other words: technology shapes gender and gender shapes technology. Historians of technology like Nina Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel and Arwen Mohun have argued that both gender and technology are about power: social, cultural, economic and political. In this study automobility means technology that can be analyzed in layers of identity, structures, institutions and representations. The source material consists of various types of historical sources, magazines and journals, advertisements, archival material together with films and literature. In the previous studies of the history of automobility gender has often been neglected. The term “gender” has also quite often been misunderstood. Some studies in the field have only focused on the early female drivers. However, far too little attention has been paid to the question, why automobility was considered as masculine sphere only. This study aims to give new insights to the previous interpretations of the history of automobility. As in various other countries also in Finland, the decade of the 1920s is characterized as a period of “modern times.” It was also the era of the automobiles. Although the number of cars in Finland was still low compared to the other European countries and the USA, in press, films and literature, images of automobiles and new women – and men – on the wheel became as an emblem of a new era. The thesis consists of three main chapters. The first main chapter focuses on the conflicts between drivers and non-drivers. The study shows how in the debate of the automobility “a driver” was constantly referred as a man and “a pedestrian” accordingly a woman, even though in the reality there were as much men and women walking on the streets and the roads. Thus, the public debate constructed and reconstructed the gendered traffic system where men were playing the key role. The second main chapter of the study analyses the automobile clubs and the cultural representations. The chapter answers the question how the concept of a driver was gendered. The Automobile clubs and the organizations of professional drivers were in a significant role in developing the early history of traffic in Finland. The Finnish Automobile Club (Suomen Automobiili Klubi, founded in 1919) was the oldest and the most powerful of all automobile organizations. The Finnish Automobile Club accepted women as members from the very beginning. The membership was strictly limited to the upper class and the very first female members were wives and daughters of the male members. However, Doctor of medicine and surgery 316 Karolina Eskelin (1867-1936) the founding member of the Club was an exception to that convention. The male members of the Finnish Automobile Club attended official international meetings and consulted Finnish authorities in traffic and road questions, whereas, female members joined car trips, picnics and social gatherings arranged by the club. Few young female members of the club drove in races and gross-country-tours. The cultural representations of drivers in the Finnish media in the 1920s both deconstructed and reconstructed the concept of gender. In Finnish press in general, motoring was seen as male dominated area. Men were represented as the experts of the automobility. The drivers’ uniforms and the automobile clubs underlined professionalism and expertise which, thus, got masculine meaning. Women were beautiful accessories in the car ads, but they were also becoming a new consumer group in the market. The representations of the female and the male drivers influenced and shaped actively the understandings of femininity and masculinity. In the third main chapter the analysis focuses on the automobile as an artifact.The automobile was considered as an artifact that primarily belonged to the masculine domain. However, the representations of the automobiles were ambivalent. The automobile was both masculine and feminine depending on the context. The representations of the automobile were also used to construct the discourse of heteronormativity.

Industrial-Scale hydrothermal carbonization of waste sludge materials for fuel production

Hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) is a thermochemical process used in the production of charred matter similar in composition to coal. It involves the use of wet, carbohydrate feedstock, a relatively low temperature environment (180 °C-350 °C) and high autogenous pressure (up to 2,4 MPa) in a closed system. Various applications of the solid char product exist, opening the way for a range of biomass feedstock materials to be exploited that have so far proven to be troublesome due to high water content or other factors. Sludge materials are investigated as candidates for industrial-scale HTC treatment in fuel production. In general, HTC treatment of pulp and paper industry sludge (PPS) and anaerobically digested municipal sewage sludge (ADS) using existing technology is competitive with traditional treatment options, which range in price from EUR 30-80 per ton of wet sludge. PPS and ADS can be treated by HTC for less than EUR 13 and 33, respectively. Opportunities and challenges related to HTC exist, as this relatively new technology moves from laboratory and pilot-scale production to an industrial scale. Feedstock materials, end-products, process conditions and local markets ultimately determine the feasibility of a given HTC operation. However, there is potential for sludge materials to be converted to sustainable bio-coal fuel in a Finnish context.

Aircraft tracking and classification with vhf passive bistatic radar

Since the times preceding the Second World War the subject of aircraft tracking has been a core interest to both military and non-military aviation. During subsequent years both technology and configuration of the radars allowed the users to deploy it in numerous fields, such as over-the-horizon radar, ballistic missile early warning systems or forward scatter fences. The latter one was arranged in a bistatic configuration. The bistatic radar has continuously re-emerged over the last eighty years for its intriguing capabilities and challenging configuration and formulation. The bistatic radar arrangement is used as the basis of all the analyzes presented in this work. The aircraft tracking method of VHF Doppler-only information, developed in the first part of this study, is solely based on Doppler frequency readings in relation to time instances of their appearance. The corresponding inverse problem is solved by utilising a multistatic radar scenario with two receivers and one transmitter and using their frequency readings as a base for aircraft trajectory estimation. The quality of the resulting trajectory is then compared with ground-truth information based on ADS-B data. The second part of the study deals with the developement of a method for instantaneous Doppler curve extraction from within a VHF time-frequency representation of the transmitted signal, with a three receivers and one transmitter configuration, based on a priori knowledge of the probability density function of the first order derivative of the Doppler shift, and on a system of blocks for identifying, classifying and predicting the Doppler signal. The extraction capabilities of this set-up are tested with a recorded TV signal and simulated synthetic spectrograms. Further analyzes are devoted to more comprehensive testing of the capabilities of the extraction method. Besides testing the method, the classification of aircraft is performed on the extracted Bistatic Radar Cross Section profiles and the correlation between them for different types of aircraft. In order to properly estimate the profiles, the ADS-B aircraft location information is adjusted based on extracted Doppler frequency and then used for Bistatic Radar Cross Section estimation. The classification is based on seven types of aircraft grouped by their size into three classes.