Jatkuuko yrittäminen? Kartoitus Mikkelin Seudun Uusyrityskeskus Dynamon asiakkaiden yritystoiminnasta

Mikkelin Seudun Uusyrityskeskus Dynamo ry. on toiminut vuodesta 2001 lähtien. Sen toimesta on perustettu n. 750 uutta yritystä ja luotu liki 900 uutta työpaikkaa (tieto 30.6.2009). Dynamon toiminta on ollut seudun kannalta myönteistä ja merkittävää. Uusyrityskeskus Dynamon hallitus päätti syksyllä 2008 selvittää, mitä vuosina 2002–2006 perustetuille yrityksille ja yrittäjille kuuluu. Selvityksen on laatinut ja nyt julkaistavan raportin kirjoittanut YTM Riitta Kaipainen. Tutkijan tukena toimi ryhmä Ruralia-instituutin asiantuntijoita: tutkimusjohtaja, HT Torsti Hyyryläinen, tutkimusjohtaja, professori Tapani Köppä, kehittämispäällikkö FM Manu Rantanen ja Uusyrityskeskus Dynamon toimitusjohtaja, projektipäällikkö Pekka Teittinen. Tutkimusavustajina toimivat Saila Ukkonen, Sirpa Hämäläinen, Mirja Marttinen ja Raija Alatalo, kaikki Ruraliainstituutin henkilöstöä. Ruralia-instituutin puolesta kiitän tutkijaa perusteellisesta työstä, asiantuntijaryhmää hyvästä tuesta ja haastattelijoita ahkeruudesta. Tutkimus kuuluu osana Etelä-Savon TE-keskuksen Euroopan unionin sosiaalirahastosta rahoittamaan ja Ruralia-instituutin toteuttamaan Kohti yrittäjyysyhteiskuntaa -hankkeeseen, joka on samalla Uusyrityskeskus Dynamon päärahoittaja. Tutkimuksen tulokset palvelevat Dynamon toiminnan edelleen kehittämistä. Uskon, että nyt julkaistava raportti sisältää hyödyllistä tietoa kaikille yritystoiminnan kehittäjille.

Thunderstorm climatology and lightning location applications in northern Europe

Thunderstorm is a dangerous electrical phenomena in the atmosphere. Thundercloud is formed when thermal energy is transported rapidly upwards in convective updraughts. Electrification occurs in the collisions of cloud particles in the strong updraught. When the amount of charge in the cloud is large enough, electrical breakdown, better known as a flash, occurs. Lightning location is nowadays an essential tool for the detection of severe weather. Located flashes indicate in real time the movement of hazardous areas and the intensity of lightning activity. Also, an estimate for the flash peak current can be determined. The observations can be used in damage surveys. The most simple way to represent lightning data is to plot the locations on a map, but the data can be processed in more complex end-products and exploited in data fusion. Lightning data serves as an important tool also in the research of lightning-related phenomena, such as Transient Luminous Events. Most of the global thunderstorms occur in areas with plenty of heat, moisture and tropospheric instability, for example in the tropical land areas. In higher latitudes like in Finland, the thunderstorm season is practically restricted to the summer season. Particular feature of the high-latitude climatology is the large annual variation, which regards also thunderstorms. Knowing the performance of any measuring device is important because it affects the accuracy of the end-products. In lightning location systems, the detection efficiency means the ratio between located and actually occurred flashes. Because in practice it is impossible to know the true number of actually occurred flashes, the detection efficiency has to be esimated with theoretical methods.

Contrast sensitivity for complex and random gratings

This thesis studied the effect of (i) the number of grating components and (ii) parameter randomisation on root-mean-square (r.m.s.) contrast sensitivity and spatial integration. The effectiveness of spatial integration without external spatial noise depended on the number of equally spaced orientation components in the sum of gratings. The critical area marking the saturation of spatial integration was found to decrease when the number of components increased from 1 to 5-6 but increased again at 8-16 components. The critical area behaved similarly as a function of the number of grating components when stimuli consisted of 3, 6 or 16 components with different orientations and/or phases embedded in spatial noise. Spatial integration seemed to depend on the global Fourier structure of the stimulus. Spatial integration was similar for sums of two vertical cosine or sine gratings with various Michelson contrasts in noise. The critical area for a grating sum was found to be a sum of logarithmic critical areas for the component gratings weighted by their relative Michelson contrasts. The human visual system was modelled as a simple image processor where the visual stimuli is first low-pass filtered by the optical modulation transfer function of the human eye and secondly high-pass filtered, up to the spatial cut-off frequency determined by the lowest neural sampling density, by the neural modulation transfer function of the visual pathways. The internal noise is then added before signal interpretation occurs in the brain. The detection is mediated by a local spatially windowed matched filter. The model was extended to include complex stimuli and its applicability to the data was found to be successful. The shape of spatial integration function was similar for non-randomised and randomised simple and complex gratings. However, orientation and/or phase randomised reduced r.m.s contrast sensitivity by a factor of 2. The effect of parameter randomisation on spatial integration was modelled under the assumption that human observers change the observer strategy from cross-correlation (i.e., a matched filter) to auto-correlation detection when uncertainty is introduced to the task. The model described the data accurately.

Of Marx and Makers: an Historical Perspective on Generative Justice

In Marxist frameworks “distributive justice” depends on extracting value through a centralized state. Many new social movements—peer to peer economy, maker activism, community agriculture, queer ecology, etc.—take the opposite approach, keeping value in its unalienated form and allowing it to freely circulate from the bottom up. Unlike Marxism, there is no general theory for bottom-up, unalienated value circulation. This paper examines the concept of “generative justice” through an historical contrast between Marx’s writings and the indigenous cultures that he drew upon. Marx erroneously concluded that while indigenous cultures had unalienated forms of production, only centralized value extraction could allow the productivity needed for a high quality of life. To the contrary, indigenous cultures now provide a robust model for the “gift economy” that underpins open source technological production, agroecology, and restorative approaches to civil rights. Expanding Marx’s concept of unalienated labor value to include unalienated ecological (nonhuman) value, as well as the domain of freedom in speech, sexual orientation, spirituality and other forms of “expressive” value, we arrive at an historically informed perspective for generative justice.