Language Learning in Task Management and Task Accomplishment

In this paper we study student interaction in English and Swedish courses at a Finnish university. We focus on language choices made in task-related activities in small group interaction. Our research interests arose from the change in the teaching curriculum, in which content and language courses were integrated at Tampere University of Technology in 2013. Using conversation analysis, we analysed groups of 4-5 students who worked collaboratively on a task via a video conference programme. The results show how language alternation has different functions in 1) situations where students orient to managing the task, e.g., in transitions into task, or where they orient to technical problems, and 2) situations where students accomplish the task. With the results, we aim to show how language alternation can provide interactional opportunities for language learning. The findings will be useful in designing tasks in the future.

Anthropomorphic model observer performance in three-dimensional detection task for low-contrast computed tomography.

X-ray medical imaging is increasingly becoming three-dimensional (3-D). The dose to the population and its management are of special concern in computed tomography (CT). Task-based methods with model observers to assess the dose-image quality trade-off are promising tools, but they still need to be validated for real volumetric images. The purpose of the present work is to evaluate anthropomorphic model observers in 3-D detection tasks for low-contrast CT images. We scanned a low-contrast phantom containing four types of signals at three dose levels and used two reconstruction algorithms. We implemented a multislice model observer based on the channelized Hotelling observer (msCHO) with anthropomorphic channels and investigated different internal noise methods. We found a good correlation for all tested model observers. These results suggest that the msCHO can be used as a relevant task-based method to evaluate low-contrast detection for CT and optimize scan protocols to lower dose in an efficient way.

A Hierarchical Approach for Multi-task Logistic Regression

Peer-reviewed

IEA Bioenergy Task 40 “Sustainable International Bioenergy Trade: Securing supply and demand” Country report of Finland 2008

This study considered the current situation of biofuels markets in Finland. The fact that industry consumes more than half of the total primary energy, widely applied combined heat and power production and a high share of solid biomass fuels in the total energy consumption are specific to the Finnish energy system. Wood is the most important source of bioenergy in Finland, representing 21% of the total energy consumption in 2006. Almost 80% of the wood-based energy is recovered from industrial by-products and residues. Finland has commitment itself to maintaining its greenhouse gas emissions at the 1990 level, at the highest, during the period 2008–2012. The energy and climate policy carried out in recent years has been based on the National Energy and Climate introduced in 2005. The Finnish energy policy aims to achieve the target, and a variety of measures are taken to promote the use of renewable energy sources and especially wood fuels. In 2007, the government started to prepare a new long-term (up to the year 2050) climate and energy strategy that will meet EU’s new targets for the reduction of green house gas emissions and the promotion of renewable energy sources. The new strategy will be introduced during 2008. The international biofuels trade has a substantial importance for the utilisation of bioenergy in Finland. In 2006, the total international trading of solid and liquid biofuels was approximately 64 PJ of which import was 61 PJ. Most of the import is indirect and takes place within the forest industry’s raw wood imports. In 2006, as much as 24% of wood energy was based on foreignorigin wood. Wood pellets and tall oil form the majority of export streams of biofuels. The indirect import of wood fuels increased almost 10% in 2004–2006, while the direct trade of solid and liquid biofuels has been almost constant.

Microstructural Brain Differences Predict Functional Hemodynamic Responses in a Reward Processing Task

Many aspects of human behavior are driven by rewards, yet different people are differentially sensitive to rewards and punishment. In this study, we showthat white matter microstructure inthe uncinate/inferiorfronto-occipitalfasciculus, defined byfractional anisotropy values derived from diffusion tensor magnetic resonance images, correlates with both short-term (indexed by the fMRI blood oxygenation level-dependent response to reward in the nucleus accumbens) and long-term (indexed by the trait measure sensitivity to punishment) reactivityto rewards.Moreover,traitmeasures of reward processingwere also correlatedwith reward-relatedfunctional activation in the nucleus accumbens. The white matter tract revealed by the correlational analysis connects the anterior temporal lobe with the medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortex and also supplies the ventral striatum. The pattern of strong correlations suggests an intimate relationship betweenwhitematter structure and reward-related behaviorthatmay also play a rolein a number of pathological conditions, such as addiction and pathological gambling.

Market of biomass fuels in Finland : IEA Bioenergy Task 40 and EUBIONET III - Country report of Finland 2009

This study considered the current situation of solid and liquid biomass fuels in Finland. The fact that industry consumes more than half of the total primary energy, widely applied combined heat and power production and a high share of solid biomass fuels in the total energy consumption are specific to the Finnish energy system. Wood is the most important source of bioenergy in Finland, representing 20% of the total energy consumption in 2007. Almost 80% of the woodbased energy is recovered from industrial by-products and residues. As a member of the European Union, Finland has committed itself to the Union’s climate and energy targets, such as reducing its overall emissions of green house gases to at least 20% below 1990 levels by 2020, and increasing the share of renewable energy in the gross final consumption. The renewable energy target approved for Finland is 38%. The present National Climate and Energy Strategy was introduced in November 2008. The strategy covers climate and energy policy measures up to 2020, and in brief thereafter, up to 2050. In recent years, the actual emissions have exceeded the Kyoto commitment and the trend of emissions is on the increase. In 2007, the share of renewable energy in the gross final energy consumption was approximately 25% (360 PJ). Without new energy policy measures, the final consumption of renewable energy would increase to 380 PJ, which would be approximately only 31% of the final energy consumption. In addition, green house gas emissions would exceed the 1990 levels by 20%. Meeting the targets will need the adoption of more active energy policy measures in coming years. The international trade of biomass fuels has a substantial importance for the utilisation of bioenergy in Finland. In 2007, the total international trading of solid and liquid biomass fuels was approximately 77 PJ, of which import was 62 PJ. Most of the import is indirect and takes place within the forest industry’s raw wood imports. In 2007, as much as 21% of wood energy was based on foreign-origin wood. Wood pellets and tall oil form the majority of export streams of biomass fuels. The indirect import of wood fuels peaked in 2006 to 61 PJ. The foreseeable decline in raw wood import to Finland will decrease the indirect import of wood fuels. In 2004– 2007, the direct trade of solid and liquid biomass fuels has been on a moderate growth path. In 2007, the import of palm oil and export of bio-diesel emerged, as a large, 170 000 t/yr biodiesel plant came into operation in Porvoo.

Blocking and unblocking in a navigation task

Rodrigo, Chamizo, McLaren, & Mackintosh (1997) demonstrated the blocking effect in a navigational task using a swimming pool: rats initially trained to use three landmarks (ABC) to find an invisible platform learned less about a fourth landmark (X) added later than did rats trained from the outset with these four landmarks (ABCX). The aim of the experiment reported here was to demonstrate unblocking using a similar procedure as in the previous work. Three groups of rats were initially trained to find an invisible platfom in the presence of three landmarks: ABC for the Blocking and Unblocking groups and LMN for the Control group. Then, all animals were trained to find the platform in the presence of four landmarks, ABCX. In this second training, unlike animals in the Blocking group to which only a new landmark (X) was added in comparison to the first training, the animals in the Unblocking group also had a change in the platform position. In the Control group, both the four landmarks and the platform position were totally new at the beginning of this second training. As in Rodrigo et al. (1997) a blocking effect was found: rats in the Blocking group learned less with respect to the added landmark (X) than did animals in the Control group. However, rats in the Unblocking group learned about the added landmark (X) as well as did animals in the Control group. The results are interpreted as an unblocking effect due to a change in the platform position between the two phases of training, similarly to what is normal in classical conditioning experiments, in which a change in the conditions of reinforcement between the two training phases of a blocking design produce an attenuation or elimination of this effect. These results are explained within an error-correcting connectionist account of spatial navigation (McLaren, 2002).

Social tagging within task management

Social tagging evolved in response to a need to tag heterogeneous objects, the automated tagging of which is usually not feasible by current technological means. Social tagging can be used for more flexible competence management within organizations. The profiles of employees can be built in the form of groups of tags, as employees tag each other, based on their familiarity of each other’s expertise. This can serve as a replacement for the more traditional competence management approaches, which usually become outdated due to social and organizational hurdles, and obsolete data. These limitations can be overcome by people tagging, as the information revealed by such tags is usually based on most recent employee interaction and knowledge. Task management as part of personal information management aims at the support of users’ individual task handling. This can include collaborating with other individuals, sharing one’s knowledge, both functional and process-related, and distributing documents and web resources. In this context, Task patterns can be used as templates that collect information and experience around tasks associated to it during run time, facilitating agility. The effective collaboration among contributors necessitates the means to find the appropriate individuals to work with on the task, and this can be made possible by using social tagging to describe individual competencies. The goal of this study is to support finding and tagging people within task management, through the effective exploitation of the work/task context. This involves the utilization of knowledge of the workers’ expertise, nature of the task/task pattern and information available from the documents and web resources attached to the task. Vice versa, task management provides an excellent environment for social tagging due to the task context that already provides suitable tags. The study also aims at assisting users of the task management solution with the collaborative construction of light-weight ontology by inferring semantic relations between tags. The thesis project aims at an implementation of people finding & tagging within the java application for task management that consumes web services, which provide the required ontology for the organization.

Interference of age and repetition of the same noxious stimulus on hyperalgesia

Pain in animals has been recognized for less than one century. Several authors confirm that animals are capable to process, register and modulate nociceptive stimuli in a very similar way to human kind and there are several evidences registering the impact of pain sensation over vital systems interfering on disease outcome. Nevertheless, despite some evidences that animals, as human beings, can store information from past painful experiences less is known about how this so called pain memory works. The aims of this study were: to evaluate if the response to a painful stimuli differs during different stages of life and if repetition of a same acute stimuli in the same animal interferes with expression of hyperalgesia. Thus, 60 rats were selected and arranged in 3 equal groups: 3 months, 6 months, and 9 months of age. All animals were injected 5% formalin solution in the plantar face of hind paw under volatile general anesthesia. Von Frey filaments were applied at 1h, 24h and 48h after sensitization. Injection was repeated twice with a 30-day interval, each time in a different hind paw. Results showed that younger rats express lower hyperalgesia thresholds in the first stimulation compared to elder animals and that repetition of same stimulus diminishes hyperalgesia thresholds when it begins during infant period and augments hyperalgesia thresholds when it begins during elder ages.

Initialism as a mechanism of weed interference: can a crop plant be blinded?

Initialism is a new word proposed to indicate the "shade-avoidance syndrome". Plants detect the presence of neighbor plants very early in the growing season through changes in light quality. They modify the allocation of photosynthesis products privileging shoot growth over the roots. One of the hypotheses of the authors is that, when weed management is timely scheduled, a "blind" crop could be more productive because it would avoid an imbalance on the shoot:root ratio (S:R). Two strategies were developed to test this hypothesis: a) to use the classical Yoda's Law to screen several crops for insensitivity to S:R imbalance; b) to evaluate several growth regulators to control the plant responses to crowding. Experimental results confirm that both strategies can yield insensitive plants. The possibilities of the use of this knowledge are discussed.

Modeling of weeds interference periods in bean

The research objective was to determine the effects of spacing and seeding density of common bean to the period prior to weed interference (PPI) and weed period prior to economic loss (WEEPPEL). The treatments consisted of periods of coexistence between culture and the weeds, with 0 to 10, 0 to 20, 0 to 30, 0 to 40, 0 to 50, 0 to 60, 0 to 70, and 0 to 80 days and a control maintained without weeds. In addition to the periods of coexistence, there were still studies with an inter-row of 0.45 and 0.60 m, 10 and 15 plants m-1. The experimental delineation used was randomized blocks with four repetitions per treatment. The grain productivity of the culture had a reduction of 63, 50, 42 and 57% when the coexistence with the weed plants was during the entire cycle of the culture for a row spacing of 0.45 m and a seeding density of 10 and 15 plants per meter; and a row spacing of 0.60m and a seeding density of 10 and 15 plants per meter, respectively. The PPI occurred in 23, 27, 13, and 19 days after crop emergence and WEEPPEL in 10, 9, 8, and 8 days, respectively.

Effect of weed interference on soybean cultivars at two sowing times

This study aimed to evaluate the effects of weed interference on soybean cultivars at two sowing times in Urutaí, GO. The treatments were arranged in split-plots, and the sowing times (November 16 and December 16, 2009) were allocated in the plots; the soybean cultivars [BRSGO Amaralina, P98C81 (semi-late cycle) BRSGO Raissa, BRSGO Indiara, P98Y11 (median cycle) and BRSGO 7560, BRSGO Caiapônia, Emgopa 302RR (early cycle)] were allocated in the split-plots; and the coexistence or non coexistence of soybean cultivars with weeds, throughout their cycle, was allocated in the split-plots. Non coexistence was established by manual weeding. The experiment was arranged in randomized blocks with four replications. It was verified that the optimal time for sowing soybeans was the month of November, and that under these conditions, the cultivars had higher competitive ability against weeds. Late sowing affected the cycle, development, and yield of the soybean cultivars; this effect was greater under the influence of the weed community.

Weed interference periods in the 'Fécula Branca' cassava

This study aimed to determine the periods of weed interference in the first cycle of 'Fécula Branca' cassava. The experiment was arranged in a randomized block design, with four repetitions. The treatments consisted of eight periods of weed control (25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, and 175 days after planting - DAP) and eight periods of coexistence between the weed community and the crop (25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, and 175), besides control without weeds and control with weeds until harvest (322 DAP). The predominant weed species with higher relative importance were: Avena sativa, Sorghum halepense, Conyza Canadensis, Euphorbia heterophylla, Raphanus raphanistrum, and Commelina benghalensis. It was concluded that, accepting losses of 1% for root and starch production, the period before interference (PBI) was 66 and 70 DAP; the total period of interference prevention (TPIP) was 88 and 91 DAP and the critical period of interference (CPI) was between 66-88 and 70-91 DAP, respectively. For losses of 5% for root and starch production, the PBI was 87 and 88 DAP, and the TPIP 80 and 81 DAP, respectively; in this case, there was no CPI. Considering the average prices of R$ 218.90 t-1 and R$ 1,191.84 t-1, paid in 2012 for root and starch production, respectively, and control cost of R$ 300.00 ha-1 , the root and starch production for the period prior to economic loss (WEEPPEL) could be estimated to be 20 and 24 DAP, respectively.

Interference of Sorghum sudanense and Eleucine indica in the soybean and corn cultivation

The natural infestations are composed of numerous species that compete for environmental resources such as water, light, nutrients and space. The objective of this study was to evaluate the interference of mixed infestations Sorghum sudanense (sudangrass) and Eleusine indica (goosegrass) in the presence of soybean and corn. The experimental design was completely randomized with four replications and the experimental units consisted of plastic pots with a volume capacity of 8 L. The treatments were associations of plants S. sudanense and E. indica in the proportions 8:0, 6:2, 4:4,2:6 and 0:8, respectively, corresponding to 100, 75, 50, 25 and 0% S. sudanense and the reverse for E. indica. In all treatments remained constant four soybean or corn plants per experimental unit. The variables analyzed in the weeds were shoot dry weight, root, total and height of plants. The competitive analysis was accomplished through diagrams applied to replacement series experiment and indexes of competiveness. The results indicated that E. indica was more competitive than S. sudanense in mixed infestations with corn. Rather, S. sudanense was more competitive than E. indica, in mixed infestations with soybean, demonstrating differences in competitiveness among the weeds.

Weed interference on growth and yield of transgenic maize

Plants kept under competition tend to modify their morphology to optimize the use of production factors. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of competition between transgenic maize and five weed species on the growth and yield of transgenic maize hybrid. The experiment used a randomized block design with four replicates in a factorial 5 x 2 + 6 scheme consisting of a combination of maize under competition with five weed species (Bidens pilosa, Commelina benghalensis, Brachiaria brizantha, Sorghum arundinaceum and Ipomoea triloba) in two weed densities (15 or 30 plants m-2) plus six treatments corresponding to maize and weed species without competition. All the means for dry matter accumulated by maize plants in the stem and leaf in the density of 15 plants m ² were higher than the means for plants in coexistence with 30 plants m-². Number of kernels, diameter and length of cob were not affected by competition with weeds. The weeds that most interfered with maize biomass production were S.arundinaceum and B.brizantha. Leaf dry mass accumulation was more sensitive than the production of stem. It was observed that maize was usually very competitive with weeds, and there was a strong decrease in dry matter accumulation of all the weeds in the study when in coexistence with the crop.