Lunch eating patterns during working hours and their social and work-related determinants : Study of Finnish employees

Work has a central role in the lives of big share of adult Finns and meals they eat during the workday comprise an important factor in their nutrition, health, and well-being. On workdays, lunch is mainly eaten at worksite canteens or, especially among women, as a packed meal in the workplace s break room. No national-level data is available on the nutritional quality of the meals served by canteens, although the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health laid out the first nutrition recommendations for worksite canteens in 1971. The aim of this study was to examine the contribution of various socio-demographic, socioeconomic, and work-related factors to the lunch eating patterns of Finnish employees during the working day and how lunch eating patterns influence dietary intake. Four different population-based cross-sectional datasets were used in this thesis. Three of the datasets were collected by the National Institute for Health and Welfare (Health Behaviour and Health among the Finnish Adult Population survey from 1979 to 2001, n=24746, and 2005 to 2007, n=5585, the National Findiet 2002 Study, n=261), and one of them by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (Work and Health in Finland survey from 1997, 2000, and 2003, n=6369). The Health Behaviour and Health among the Finnish Adult Population survey and the Work and Health in Finland survey are nationally representative studies that are conducted repeatedly. Survey information was collected by self-administered questionnaires, dietary recalls, and telephone interviews. The frequency of worksite canteen use has been quite stable for over two decades in Finland. A small decreasing trend can be seen in all socioeconomic groups. During the whole period studied, those with more years of education ate at worksite canteens more often than the others. The size of the workplace was the most important work-related determinant associated with the use of a worksite canteen. At small workplaces, other work-related determinants, like occupation, physical strain at work, and job control, were also associated with canteen use, whereas at bigger workplaces the associations were almost nonexistent. The major social determinants of worksite canteen availability were the education and occupational status of employees and the only work-related determinant was the size of the workplace. A worksite canteen was more commonly available to employees at larger workplaces and to those with the higher education and the higher occupational status. Even when the canteen was equally available to all employees, its use was nevertheless determined by occupational class and the place of residence, especially among female employees. Those with higher occupational status and those living in the Helsinki capital area ate in canteens more frequently than the others. Employees who ate at a worksite canteen consumed more vegetables and vegetable and fish dishes at lunch than did those who ate packed lunches. Also, the daily consumption of vegetables and the proportion of the daily users of vegetables were higher among those male employees who ate at a canteen. In conclusion, life possibilities, i.e. the availability of a canteen, education, occupational status, and work-related factors, played an important role in the choice of where to eat lunch among Finnish employees. The most basic prerequisite for eating in a canteen was availability, but there were also a number of underlying social determinants. Occupational status and the place of residence were the major structural factors behind individuals choices in their lunch eating patterns. To ensure the nutrition, health, and well-being of employees, employers should provide them with the option to have good quality meals during working hours. The availability of worksite canteens should be especially supported in lower socioeconomic groups. In addition, employees should be encouraged to have lunch at a worksite canteen when one is available by removing structural barriers to its use.

Selective-Area Atomic Layer Deposition

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a method to deposit thin films from gaseous precursors to the substrate layer-by-layer so that the film thickness can be tailored with atomic layer accuracy. Film tailoring is even further emphasized with selective-area ALD which enables the film growth to be controlled also on the substrate surface. Selective-area ALD allows the decrease of a process steps in preparing thin film devices. This can be of a great technological importance when the ALD films become into wider use in different applications. Selective-area ALD can be achieved by passivation or activation of a surface. In this work ALD growth was prevented by octadecyltrimethoxysilane, octadecyltrichlorosilane and 1-dodecanethiol SAMs, and by PMMA (polymethyl methacrylate) and PVP (poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) polymer films. SAMs were prepared from vapor phase and by microcontact printing, and polymer films were spin coated. Microcontact printing created patterned SAMs at once. The SAMs prepared from vapor phase and the polymer mask layers were patterned by UV lithography or lift-off process so that after preparation of a continuous mask layer selected areas of them were removed. On these areas the ALD film was deposited selectively. SAMs and polymer films prevented the growth in several ALD processes such as iridium, ruthenium, platinum, TiO2 and polyimide so that the ALD films did grow only on areas without SAM or polymer mask layer. PMMA and PVP films also protected the surface against Al2O3 and ZrO2 growth. Activation of the surface for ALD of ruthenium was achieved by preparing a RuOX layer by microcontact printing. At low temperatures the RuCp2-O2 process nucleated only on this oxidative activation layer but not on bare silicon.

Housing the skilled migrants in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area : International attractiveness of housing, neighbourhoods and the city region

The aim of this thesis is to examine the skilled migrants’ satisfaction with the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. The examination is executed on three scales: housing, neighbourhoods and the city region. Specific focus is on the built environment and how it meets the needs of the migrants. The empirical data is formed of 25 semi-structured interviews with skilled migrants and additionally 5 expert interviews. Skilled and educated workforce is an increasingly important resource in the new economy, and cities are competing globally for talented workers. With aging population and a need to develop its innovational structure, the Helsinki Metropolitan Area needs migrant workforce. It has been stated that quality of place is a central factor for skilled migrants when choosing where to settle, and from this perspective their satisfaction with the region is significant. In housing, the skilled migrants found the price-quality ratio and the general sizes of apartments inadequate. The housing market is difficult for the migrants to approach, since they often do not speak Finnish and there are prejudices towards foreigners. The general quality of housing was rated well. On the neighbourhood level, the skilled migrants had settled in residential areas which are also preferred by the Finnish skilled workers. While the migrants showed suburban orientation in their settlement patterns, they were not concentrated in the suburban areas which host large shares of traditional immigrant groups. Migrants were usually satisfied with their neighbourhoods; however, part of the suburban dwellers were unsatisfied with the services and social life in their neighbourhoods. Considering the level of the city region, the most challenging feature for the skilled migrants was the social life. The migrants felt that the social environment is homogeneous and difficult to approach. The physical environment was generally rated well, the most appreciated features being public transportation, human scale of the Metropolitan Helsinki, cleanliness, and the urban nature. Urban culture and services were seen good for the city region’s size, but lacking in international comparison.

Elämää keskustassa ja kaupunkiseudun reunoilla. Urbaani ja jälkiesikaupungillinen elämäntyyli asumisen valinnoissa ja arkiliikkumisessa Helsingin seudulla.

The lifestyles of people living in single-family housing areas on the outskirts of the Greater Helsinki Region (GHR) are different from those living in inner city area. The urban structure of the GHR is concentrated in the capital on the one hand, and spread out across the outskirts on the other. Socioeconomic spatial divisions are evident as well-paid and educated residents move to the inner city or the single-family house dominated suburban neighbourhoods depending on their housing preferences and life situations. The following thesis explores how these lifestyles have emerged through the housing choices and daily mobility of the residents living in the new single-family housing areas on the outskirts of the GHR and the inner city. The study shows that, when it comes to lifestyles, residents on the outskirts of the region have different housing preferences and daily mobility patterns when compared with their inner city counterparts. Based on five different case study areas my results show that these differences are related to residents values, preferences and attitudes towards the neighbourhood, on the one hand, and limited by urban structure on the other. This also confirms earlier theoretical analyses and findings from the GHR. Residents who moved to the outskirts of Greater Helsinki Region and the apartment buildings of the inner city were similar in the basic elements of their housing preferences: they sought a safe and peaceful neighbourhood close to the natural environment. However, where housing choices, daily mobility and activities vary different lifestyles develop in both the outskirts and the inner city. More specifically, lifestyles in the city apartment blocks were inherently urban. Liveliness and highest order facilities were appreciated and daily mobility patterns were supported by diverse modes of transportation for the purposes of work, shopping and leisure time. On the outskirts, by contrast, lifestyles were largely post-suburban and child-friendliness appreciated. Due to the heterachical urban structure, daily mobility was more car-dependent since work, shopping and free time activities of the residents are more spread around the region. The urban structure frames the daily mobility on the outskirts of the region, but this is not to say that short local trips replace longer regional ones. This comparative case study was carried out in the single-family housing areas of Sundsberg in Kirkkonummi, Landbo in Helsinki and Ylästö in Vantaa, as well as in the inner city apartment building areas of Punavuori and Katajanokka in Helsinki. The data is comprised of residential surveys, interviews, and statistics and GIS data sets that illustrate regional daily mobility, socio-economic structure and vis-à-vis housing stock.

Area Optimized H.264 Intra Prediction Architecture for 1080p HD Resolution

High performance video standards use prediction techniques to achieve high picture quality at low bit rates. The type of prediction decides the bit rates and the image quality. Intra Prediction achieves high video quality with significant reduction in bit rate. This paper present an area optimized architecture for Intra prediction, for H.264 decoding at HDTV resolution with a target of achieving 60 fps. The architecture was validated on Virtex-5 FPGA based platform. The architecture achieves a frame rate of 64 fps. The architecture is based on multi-level memory hierarchy to reduce latency and ensure optimum resources utilization. It removes redundancy by reusing same functional blocks across different modes. The proposed architecture uses only 13% of the total LUTs available on the Xilinx FPGA XC5VLX50T.

Enhancement in Bath Mixing and Plume area in a New Degassing Process - A Computational Fluid Dynamic Study

Reaction between the various species in slag and metal phase is usually mass transfer controlled. There have been continuous efforts to increase the reaction efficiency in slag-metal system, especially during decarburization of steel to produce the ultra low carbon steel (ULCS) in secondary steelmaking. It has been found that the surface reaction is a dominant factor in the final stage of decarburization. In the initial stage, the inner site reaction is major factor in the refining process. The mixing of bath affects the later reaction. However, the former reaction (surface reaction) is affected by the plume size area at the top of the metal surface. Therefore, a computational study has been made to understand the fluid dynamics of a new secondary steelmaking process called Revolutionary Degasser Activator (REDA) to study the bath mixing and plume area. REDA process has been considered as it is claimed that this process can reduce the carbon content in steel below 10ppm in a less time than the other existing processes such as RH and Tank degasser. This study shows that both bath mixing and plume area are increased in REDA process facilitating it to give the desired carbon content in less time. Qualitative comments are made on slag-metal reaction system based on this finding.

Recovery of copper from vanadiferrous magnetite ore of Masanikere area, Shimoga district

Studies have been carried out to recover copper from vanadiferrous magnetite ores by a novel reaction with lime in the presence of water vapour. The ore, mixed with different proportions of lime, has been roasted in the presence of steam. The roasted product is either directly leached with dilute mineral acids or subjected to magnetic separation and then leached. The effect of various parameters such as amount of lime added, temperature and duration of roasting and time of leaching on the recovery of copper has been investigated. The results indicate that over 90% copper could be recovered under optimum conditions of roasting and leaching.

Aromatic, microporous polymer networks with high surface area generated in Friedel-Crafts-type polycondensations

A series of novel, microporous polymer networks (MPNs) have been generated in a simple, acid catalysed Friedel-Crafts-type self-condensation of A(2)B(2)- and A(2)B(4)-type fluorenone monomers. Two A2B4-type monomers with 2,7-bis(N, N-diphenylamino) A or 2,7-bis [4-(N, N-diphenylamino) phenyl] D substitution of the fluorenone cores lead to MPNs with high S(BET) surface areas of up to 1400 m(2) g(-1). Two MPNs made of binary monomer mixtures showed the highest Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface areas S(BET) of our series (SBET of up to 1800 m(2) g(-1)) after washing the powdery samples with supercritical carbon dioxide. Total pore volumes of up to 1.6 cm(3) g(-1) have been detected. It is observed that the substitution pattern of the monomers is strongly influencing the resulting physicochemical properties of the microporous polymer networks (MPNs).

INTACTE: An Interconnect Area, Delay, and Energy Estimation Tool for Microarchitectural Explorations

Prior work on modeling interconnects has focused on optimizing the wire and repeater design for trading off energy and delay, and is largely based on low level circuit parameters. Hence these models are hard to use directly to make high level microarchitectural trade-offs in the initial exploration phase of a design. In this paper, we propose INTACTE, a tool that can be used by architects toget reasonably accurate interconnect area, delay, and power estimates based on a few architecture level parameters for the interconnect such as length, width (in number of bits), frequency, and latency for a specified technology and voltage. The tool uses well known models of interconnect delay and energy taking into account the wire pitch, repeater size, and spacing for a range of voltages and technologies.It then solves an optimization problem of finding the lowest energy interconnect design in terms of the low level circuit parameters, which meets the architectural constraintsgiven as inputs. In addition, the tool also provides the area, energy, and delay for a range of supply voltages and degrees of pipelining, which can be used for micro-architectural exploration of a chip. The delay and energy models used by the tool have been validated against low level circuit simulations. We discuss several potential applications of the tool and present an example of optimizing interconnect design in the context of clustered VLIW architectures. Copyright 2007 ACM.

Speed and Area Optimized Implementation of H.264 8X8 DCT Transform and Quantizer

H.264 is a video codec standard which delivers high resolution video even at low bit rates. To provide high throughput at low bit rates hardware implementations are essential. In this paper, we propose hardware implementations for speed and area optimized DCT and quantizer modules. To target above criteria we propose two architectures. First architecture is speed optimized which gives a high throughput and can meet requirements of 4096x2304 frame at 30 frames/sec. Second architecture is area optimized and occupies 2009 LUTs in Altera’s stratix-II and can meet the requirements of 1080HD at 30 frames/sec.

An Area-Efficient Noise-Adaptive Neural Amplifier in 130 nm CMOS Technology

Chronic recording of neural signals is indispensable in designing efficient brain–machine interfaces and to elucidate human neurophysiology. The advent of multichannel micro-electrode arrays has driven the need for electronics to record neural signals from many neurons. The dynamic range of the system can vary over time due to change in electrode–neuron distance and background noise. We propose a neural amplifier in UMC 130 nm, 1P8M complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology. It can be biased adaptively from 200 nA to 2 $mu{rm A}$, modulating input referred noise from 9.92 $mu{rm V}$ to 3.9 $mu{rm V}$. We also describe a low noise design technique which minimizes the noise contribution of the load circuitry. Optimum sizing of the input transistors minimizes the accentuation of the input referred noise of the amplifier and obviates the need of large input capacitance. The amplifier achieves a noise efficiency factor of 2.58. The amplifier can pass signal from 5 Hz to 7 kHz and the bandwidth of the amplifier can be tuned for rejecting low field potentials (LFP) and power line interference. The amplifier achieves a mid-band voltage gain of 37 dB. In vitro experiments are performed to validate the applicability of the neural low noise amplifier in neural recording systems.