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Esi- ja perusopetuksen digitalisaation tilannekuva 2025
No full textThis report describes the current state of digitalisation in pre-primary, primary and lower secondary education in Finland mainly from the perspective of education providers. It discusses the strategic management of digitalisation, the implementation of statutory obligations, the digital operating environment in schools, the development of staff competence, the organisation of support and the future of digitalisation.While the level of hardware is mostly satisfactory in schools, extra effort is required to assess applications and learning environments and to implement statutory obligations. Schools need clear instructions and cooperation to implement statutory requirements.School personnel need both targeted continuing education and support in theireveryday work. The discontinuation of project funding and state-funded continuing education are a cause for concern in municipalities. Some municipalities offer digital pedagogical support as a legacy of earlier projects. Networks also play an important role. The report identifies a number of current development needs, such as data protection, information security and the use of artificial intelligence.When implementing strategies, education providers need to make sure that pupils have equal opportunities to get the digital competence they need in further studies and at work. Pupils must have equal opportunities to practise digital skills in a modern and safe environment.Publication was updated on 30th May 2025, p. 81.Non peer reviewe
Biallelic Variants in the DARS2 Gene as a Novel Cause of Axonal Charcot–Marie–Tooth Disease
No full textObjective: Charcot–Marie–Tooth (CMT) disease is a heterogeneous group of genetic neuropathies, with >90 genes identified. Several aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases have been linked to CMT. DARS2, encoding the mitochondrial aspartyl-tRNA synthetase, has been typically associated with leukoencephalopathy with brainstem and spinal cord involvement and lactate elevation. This study aimed to investigate the association between biallelic DARS2 variants and axonal CMT. Methods: We investigated 5 individuals from 3 unrelated families with axonal CMT and biallelic DARS2 variants. Functional studies in fibroblasts assessed their effects on DARS2 expression, localization, and mitochondrial function. Enzymatic activity was evaluated in HEK293 cells. Results: The 5 individuals, including 4 adults, presented with childhood-onset progressive axonal CMT. None had leukoencephalopathy, but one showed central nervous system involvement, with intellectual disability and epilepsy. Genetic analysis identified compound heterozygous DARS2 variants: family A, p.Ser238Phe and p.Arg336Cys; family B, p.Ser238Phe and p.Ile25Thrfs*38; family C, c.492+2T>C and p.Pro503Leu. Functional studies revealed reduced DARS2 protein levels, mitochondrial network abnormalities, and impaired mitochondrial function. p.Ser238Phe behaves as a hypomorphic allele, whereas p.Pro503Leu reduced DARS2 enzymatic activity by 75%. Interpretation: Our findings expand the DARS2-related disease spectrum, establishing a novel association with axonal CMT. Hypomorphic variants, such as p.Ser238Phe, when paired with more deleterious variants, result in isolated axonal CMT, whereas more severe combinations—although not as deleterious as those seen in leukoencephalopathy with brainstem and spinal cord involvement and lactate elevation—result in axonal CMT with central nervous system involvement, albeit without leukoencephalopathy. These observations raise the possibility that DARS2-associated diseases form a continuum rather than representing strictly distinct central or peripheral nervous system disorders. ANN NEUROL 2025.Peer reviewe
Edge-PRUNE: A Dataflow-based Framework for Distributed Signal Processing and Machine Learning
No full textDistributed sensing through video, audio, radar and other sensors is strongly growing with application areas such as smart homes and Internet of Things. The concept of edge computing proposes shifting signal and data analysis from centralized servers close to the sensors, providing reduction in data communication bandwidth requirements and centralized server computation load as well as improving data privacy. Previous works in the domain of edge computing have paid little attention to formal modeling of computing across devices. This work proposes the VR-PRUNE-E model of computation that is based on the well-known dataflow abstraction. Within VR-PRUNE-E, a specific type of resilient network graph is introduced, which allows the distributed system to continue its operation after the failure of any single node or connection. Besides the formal model, the manuscript introduces the Edge-PRUNE software framework that supports the proposed dataflow abstraction, as well as concrete experimental results on real edge computing scenarios. The explored setups cover networks with up to 128 endpoint nodes and two servers. Application examples cover popular machine learning applications of image classification, object detection and radar signal processing, built on CNN and transformer architectures, extended with redundant system configurations that provide fault tolerance. The proposed work is also benchmarked in terms of processing time and shown to outperform previous work by 34% in computation efficiency.Peer reviewe
Collaboration and control: insights into principals’ role in establishing teacher mentoring in Finnish schools
No full textPeer reviewe
‘It’s All About Money’ – News Users’ Folk Theory of Audience Data Utilisation in Journalism
No full textJournalism scholars have extensively explored the implications of audience analytics for journalistic work and content. However, the audience’s perspective on this issue has received relatively little scholarly attention. This study investigates news users’ understandings of the role of audience data in journalism by employing folk theories as an analytical approach. In particular, it highlights news users’ beliefs regarding why audience data are collected and the resulting implications for journalism. The research material consists of five focus group interviews and instant messaging group chats conducted with 21 readers of the Finnish tabloid Iltalehti. The findings reveal that participants primarily perceive the utilisation of audience data as commercially driven. Consequently, in their view, this influences journalists’ relationships with both advertisers and audiences, as well as the production of journalistic content. Notably, news users associate the increased influence of advertisers and news business owners with the utilisation of user data, leading to a heightened commercial role for the audience. Furthermore, they see that commercial motivations negatively impact the quality of journalistic content. This research highlights the complex interplay among audience data, commercial interests, and journalistic practices, emphasising the need for a more nuanced understanding of audience analytics in contemporary journalism.Peer reviewe
Nurturing Relations after Forced Migration : A practice-theory perspective on participation, inclusion and belonging in the lives of unaccompanied young people
Get PDFThe overarching aim for this study is to understand how former unaccompanied refugee minors’ social participation unfolds in their networks of family and friends as they build new lives in Finland. As these young people move to a new country without their family, they undergo simultaneous transitions in terms of their age and development, country and culture, and security. During these transitions, family and friends can be significant sources of support but at the same time, these transitions pose new conditions of how relationships can be accessed and maintained. Using the theory of practice architectures as a theoretical lens, this research explores past (pre-migration) and present practices which these young people engage in as part of their social participation. It investigates how these practices persist or evolve within the new conditions of Finland and explores how young refugees contribute to their own and others’ wellbeing and build belonging in their new home country.
The research answers the following questions:
1. How do unaccompanied young people’s social participation change within new conditions in Finland ?
a. How do their ways of being together change through their transitions into new material-economic arrangements?
b. How do their ways of communicating change through their transitions into new cultural-discursive arrangements?
c. How do their ways of relating to family and friends change through their transitions into new social-political arrangements?
2. How is reciprocal support generated through participation in practices with family and friends?
The participants were 17 refugees who had arrived as unaccompanied asylum- seeking minors in Finland and who, after receiving permission to stay, have begun building independent lives as adults there. They participated in the international Drawing Together Project which investigated relational wellbeing in the lives of young refugees in Finland, Norway and Scotland. This study examines the Drawing Together project’s Finnish data, which consists of semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and participant-generated artworks.
Findings suggest that participants’ social participation was prefigured, but not pre- determined, by the new cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements in Finland. The most noteworthy arrangements include geographical distance from the past relationships, reliance on communication technology, language barriers when creating new relationships, and the need to adapt one’s practices to new gender norms. Drawing on existing and new skills and knowledge, participants were often, but not always, able to overcome barriers by engaging in new practices or adapting old ones to new conditions in order to make and maintain relationships based on reciprocal support, understanding and trust
Responding to Embodied Injustices: Introducing Critical Thinking and Empathy in Architectural Education
No full textThe climate emergency has forced architects to rethink how and what we design. If we continue to practise and teach architecture like we always have, we will only further contribute to the climate emergency and its social and environmental consequences, enforcing “embodied injustices” in architecture. The foundation of our practices is established in education. In this chapter we unfold the key issues of the status quo of architecture education by analysing the mechanisms of the design studio and the current implementation of problem-based learning. The typical top-down culture of defining design problems generally prevents students from engaging in critical thinking that may hinder developing a skill set for empathy, solidarity and collaboration. Instead, students are often encouraged to develop themselves as individual(istic) designers. Combined together, this creates a lack of engagement in holistic thinking and transformational behaviour, which is necessary to tackle current challenges. To help students in this and in treating sustainability as a way of thinking instead of a distinct phenomenon, critical thinking and empathy need to be better integrated into architectural education. We suggest that Design Thinking is a potential approach for both creating a framework for acquiring holistic knowledge and evaluating and transforming one’s own values and attitudes. Together with blended learning strategies, Design Thinking can help integrate optimal learning methods and mindsets into the architecture curricula.Peer reviewe
A recursive formula for the general scattering analysis of electrically small multilayer spherical scatterers
No full textThe electromagnetic scattering characteristics of single-layer and multilayer spherical scatterers are obtained through the calculation of Mie scattering coefficients. However, the physically interpretable mathematical forms of Mie coefficients are acquired through different approximation methods. This paper presents a concise recursive formula achieved by Taylor approximants of Mie scattering coefficients for electrically small multilayer spherical scatterers. This formula determines the general conditions in attaining resonant or transparent inclusions; the features that are of the essence in designing metasurfaces with unconventional electromagnetic properties. Also, it is unveiled by this formula that the occurrence of some special cases is probable, where the thickness of the outermost layer does not affect the resonance and transparency conditions. These special cases are examined for the classical core-shell structure.Peer reviewe