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The study set to investigate the Finnish matriculation examination with a focus on the social studies. The goal was to examine how well the subject-specific exams of the examination measure students’ attainment in the courses of the respective subject across upper secondary studies. The data was drawn form a longitudinal study of 6,172 Southern-Finland upper secondary students in 62 schools who passed their matriculation examination in spring 2017. Data on course choices and attainment was received from school and matriculation examination results from the Finnish Matriculation Examination Board. Key finding of the study is the unanimity between the two assessments: students’ grades in the subject-specific exams of the matriculation examination correlated strongly with their respective grades across the courses during their three years of upper secondary studies. The findings give strong support for the matriculation examination as an exit exam and for its use in student admission to higher education. Corresponding author: Najat Ouakrim-Soivio, Mannerheiminkatu 2, 06100 Porvoo, Finland. najat@arviointi.fi: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9139-4145 Suggested citation: Kantasalmi, K., & Kupiainen, S. (2021). Classes with selective intake in Finnish Comprehensive School: A Problem of Societally Equal Opportunity for Schooling or a Boost for Learning and Equity in Pedagogical arrangements? International Journal of Educational Research, 109, 101857. Kupiainen, S. & Hotulainen, R. (2017). Metropolialueen nuoret toisen asteen opiskelijoina: osaamisen ja oppimisasenteiden kehitys yläkoulun alusta lukion ja ammatillisten opintojen toisen opiskeluvuoden kevääseen. [The metropolitan youth as upper secondary students: The development of learning and learning attitudes from the beginning of lower secondary studies to the second year of general or vocational upper secondary studies]. In A. Toom, M. Rautiainen & J. Tähtinen (Eds.) Toiveet ja todellisuus – Kasvatus osallisuutta ja oppimista rakentamassa. Kupiainen, S., Marjanen, J., & Hautamäki, J. (2016). The problem posed by exam choice on the comparability of results in the Finnish matriculation examination Journal for Educational Research Online, 8(2), 87. Retrived 15.10.2022 at https://www.waxmann.com/index.php?eID=download&id_artikel=ART102868&uid=frei Kupiainen, S., Marjanen, J. & Ouakrim-Soivio, N. (2018). Ylioppilas valintojen pyörteessä. [The matriculate in the whirlwind of choices]. Suomen ainedidaktisen tutkimusseuran julkaisuja. Ainedidaktisia tutkimuksia 14. Retrived 15.10.2022 at https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/231687 Ouakrim-Soivio, N., Kupiainen, S., & Marjanen, J. (2017). Toimivatko oppilas- ja opiskelija-arvioinnin kriteerit? Oppiaineiden välinen ja sukupuolen mukainen vaihtelu perusopetuksen ja lukion päättöarvosanoissa ja arvosanojen yhteys nuorten oppiainevalintoihin. [How do the criteria for student assessment work? Subject and gender-based variation in students’ final grades and their relation to students’ subject choices]. In V. Britschgi, & J. Rautopuro Rantala, J. & Ouakrim-Soivio, N. (2020). Why does changing the orientation of History teachingtake so long? A case study from Finland. In, Berg, C. & Christou, T. (Eds.) The Palgrave handbook of History and Social Studies education. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 471–494. Kupiainen, S. & Ouakrim-Soivio, N. (2019). Do centralised upper secondary school exit examinations offer added value? Presentation on NOFA7-konference13.–15.5.2019. Retrieved 15.10.2022 at https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1347552/FULLTEXT01.pdf Declaration of conflicts of interests: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. JSSE - Journal of Social Science Education, Bd. 22 Nr. 2 (2023): Assessment and National Exams in Social Studies and Social Sciences

This article examines the institutional pathology of corruption within the Nigerian Navy, and its broader manifestation and implications within Nigeria’s maritime industry. Beginning with an examination of the disappearance of the vessel, MT African Pride, in October 2003, the article reflects on the African Pride case to show that far from being a one-off incident, it was indicative of the opportunism and criminality that naval operations within the oil-rich Niger Delta have generated. Other primary case studies relevant to corruption within Nigeria’s maritime industry, and interrogated by the article, include the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA). The article shall also examine a range of secondary case studies. These are relatively brief meditations on incidents, individuals and maritime industry private contractors and government parastatals, which are relevant to the debate to naval and maritime corruption in Nigeria.

As World War II came to an end, the United States of America had boosted its food production to such a level, that they could be seen as having a food regime, a dominating status in the world market for food. During the Cold War, The United States of America used its massive quantities of food surplus to create a system of global food aid to countries in need, under the program known as Public Law 480. This program was used to provide food aid assisting these countries to fight famine and poverty, but simultaneously it was used to persuade, blackmail, and force them into political and economic dependency of the United States during the Cold War era. The purpose of this thesis was to study how Public Law 480 came to be, and how it was used during the Cold War as a political tool to influence other nations. This study covers the founding of Public Law 480 and how that ties in with the American food regime, how American food aid effected the recipient countries development and economy, in what ways was food aid used to gain political leverage and dependency, and how this all ties into the larger picture of the Cold War. This goal was achieved by studying food aid delivered under Public Law 480 to different countries, and the decision making behind those deals, and then looking into how the food delivered from these deals impacted the recipient nations in different cases. The findings of the study showed that Public Law 480 food aid was in many cases continued far beyond the initial goal of famine prevention, and used to create dependency, and influence political behavior, decision making and development of the recipient countries in order to serve Cold War goals of U.S. foreign politics. This was most blatant in Asian countries, as their strategic value during the Cold War was high, and food aid was an effective tool considering these countries developmental state and need for food aid. The overflow of American food delivered to the recipient countries in most cases caused them to neglect their local food production, as the recourse freed up by American food was in most cases directed towards industrialization or military projects, depending on the individual country’s current needs. This strategic leverage gained from Public Law 480 food aid was used to block Soviet or other communist influence in these countries and to make these countries align themselves more strongly to the U.S. The study shows that food aid deals done under Public Law 480 during the era of American food regime that lasted until the 1970’s were used in multiple ways to achieve political goals of the United States during the Cold War. Public Law 480 deals were used to either directly influence the policies and decision making of the recipient country, or to create a relationship of dependency towards the United States, that would affect the recipient’s behavior in a more naturally evolving way. Public Law 480 food aid deals also had a long lasting and a significant impact on the recipient countries development and industrialization, altering much of the geopolitical landscape of Asia. Public Law 480 food deals were used to create and uphold multiple nations alliance status towards the United States, therefore playing a role in the Cold War era global politics, and how our world politics would be in the modern era.

Developing and operating machine learning systems is associated with uncertainties incomparable to traditional software engineering. Managing and mitigating these uncertainties is critical especially when creating machine learning systems for clinical healthcare use. By incorporating processes and tools to develop and deploy machine learning systems in a controlled, automated, and monitored manner, machine learning operations aims to ensure quality and reliability in machine learning systems. This study provides an examination of machine learning operations in the context of healthcare and big data. First, a study project was conducted to design a machine learning operations architecture for building a machine learning based NLP solution to be integrated into an existing clinical healthcare software application. Two separate model deployment and inference architectures were designed. To test the applicability of these architectures in the context of big data, an empirical study was conducted. The results showed the batch inference architecture using Spark NLP had better performance compared to a Docker container based online inference architecture. In conclusion, the study project involving the design of a machine learning operations architecture, as well as the empirical comparison of batch inference and online inference, offer insights into the field of machine learning operations. The proposed model and the results of the comparison can be used to develop machine learning systems and make informed decisions on the selection of an inference architecture.

Video is an important format of information. Humans use videos for a variety of purposes such as entertainment, education, communication, information sharing, and capturing memories. To this date, humankind accumulated a colossal amount of video material online which is freely available. Manual processing at this scale is simply impossible. To this end, many research efforts have been dedicated to the automatic processing of video content. At the same time, human perception of the world is multi-modal. A human uses multiple senses to understand the environment and objects, and their interactions. When watching a video, we perceive the content via both audio and visual modalities, and removing one of these modalities results in less immersive experience. Similarly, if information in both modalities does not correspond, it may create a sense of dissonance. Therefore, joint modelling of multiple modalities (such as audio, visual, and text) within one model is an active research area. In the last decade, the fields of automatic video understanding and multi-modal modelling have seen exceptional progress due to the ubiquitous success of deep learning models and, more recently, transformer-based architectures in particular. Our work draws on these advances and pushes the state-of-the-art of multi-modal video understanding forward. Applications of automatic multi-modal video processing are broad and exciting! For instance, the content-based textual description of a video (video captioning) may allow a visually- or auditory-impaired person to understand the content and, thus, engage in brighter social interactions. However, prior work in video content description relies on the visual input alone, missing vital information only available in the audio stream. To this end, we proposed two novel multi-modal transformer models that encode audio and visual interactions simultaneously. More specifically, first, we introduced a late-fusion multi-modal transformer that is highly modular and allows the processing of an arbitrary set of modalities. Second, an efficient bi-modal transformer was presented to encode audio-visual cues starting from the lower network layers allowing more rich audio-visual features and stronger performance as a result. Another application is the automatic visually-guided sound generation that might help professional sound (foley) designers who spend hours searching a database for relevant audio for a movie scene. Previous approaches for automatic conditional audio generation support only one class (e. g. “dog barking”), while real-life applications may require generation for hundreds of data classes and one would need to train one model for every data class which can be infeasible. To bridge this gap, we introduced a novel two-stage model that, first, efficiently encodes audio as a set of codebook vectors (i. e. trains to make “building blocks”) and, then, learns to sample these audio vectors given visual inputs to make a relevant audio track for this visual input. Moreover, we studied the automatic evaluation of the conditional audio generation model and proposed metrics that measure both quality and relevance of the generated samples. Finally, as video editing is becoming more common among non-professionals due to the increased popularity of such services as YouTube, automatic assistance during video editing grows in demand, e. g. off-sync detection between audio and visual tracks. Prior work in audio-visual synchronization was devoted to solving the task on lip-syncing datasets with “dense” signals, such as interviews and presentations. In such videos, synchronization cues occur “densely” across time, and it is enough to process just a few tens of a second to synchronize the tracks. In contrast, opendomain videos mostly have only “sparse” cues that occur just once in a seconds-long video clip (e. g. “chopping wood”). To address this, we: a) proposed a novel dataset with “sparse” sounds; b) designed a model which can efficiently encode seconds-long audio-visual tracks in a small set of “learnable selectors” that is, then, used for synchronization. In addition, we explored the temporal artefacts that common audio and video compression algorithms leave in data streams. To prevent a model from learning to rely on these artefacts, we introduced a list of recommendations on how to mitigate them. This thesis provides the details of the proposed methodologies as well as a comprehensive overview of advances in relevant fields of multi-modal video understanding. In addition, we provide a discussion of potential research directions that can bring significant contributions to the field.

Finland’s early childhood education system has been in existence for over 135 years. There are many books and articles written about its history, but most of them are written in Finnish, leaving very few options for those, who are not fluent enough in the language. To offer further insight to those interested, the aim of the study is to investigate, how the early childhood was discussed in Finnish newspapers during 1960s and present the findings in English. This study was conducted as a secondary, qualitative research. The newspaper data was collected from Helsingin Sanomat’s digitalized archives, and then analysed according to content analysis approach. The data was examined through historical and media perspectives. The analysis shows that the early childhood education was a reoccurring topic within Helsingin Sanomat during the 1960s. Most of the discussions focused on the formal kindergarten system, with varying concerns and general information being accorded markedly prominent spaces. Non-formal care and other related circumstances were another regularly featured topic, although to a lesser extent than the formal care. These findings also give an overview of the newspaper coverage tendencies from the 1960s. Newspapers reported the matters which were felt to be important or pressing enough by the public opinion, with particular attention being given to drama-filled aspects. Suomen varhaiskasvatusjärjestelmä on ollut olemassa vuodesta 1888 lähtien, yli 135 vuoden ajan. Järjestelmän pitkästä historiasta on kirjoitettu useita kirjoja ja artikkeleita, mutta suurin osa niistä on kirjoitettu suomeksi, muunkielisen tarjonnan jäädessä hyvin suppeaksi. Koska nykyaikaa ja tulevaisuutta on mahdollista ymmärtää syvemmin tiedostamalla historian ja sen annin, tämän tutkimuksen tarkoituksena on tarkastella, kuinka varhaiskasvatuksesta keskusteltiin suomalaisissa 1960-luvun sanomalehdissä, ja esittää tulokset englanniksi. Tutkimus toteutettiin sekundäärisenä, kvalitatiivisena tutkimuksena. Tutkimusaineistoksi valikoitui 1960-luvun merkittävä sanomalehti, Helsingin Sanomat. Aineisto kerättiin Helsingin Sanomien digitaalisista arkistoista, jonka jälkeen aineisto analysoitiin laadullisen sisältöanalyysin periaatteilla. Aineiston tarkastelussa otettiin huomioon sekä historiallinen että median perspektiivit. Tutkimustulokset paljastavat, että päivähoito ja varhaiskasvatus olivat toistuvia aiheita 1960-luvun Helsingin Sanomissa, aikakauden asenteiden heijastuessa kirjoituksissa. Suurin osa keskustelusta keskittyi julkiseen päivähoitojärjestelmään, erinäisten huolten ja yleisen informaation ollessa erityisessä keskiössä. Julkisen järjestelmän ulkopuolinen hoito, sekä muut päivähoitoon liittyvät asiahaarat saivat myös oman tilansa uutisissa, vaikkakin huomattavasti pienemmässä mittakaavassa kuin mitä julkinen järjestelmä. Tutkimustulokset antavat myös yleiskatsauksen 1960-luvun sanomalehtien tavasta raportoida uutisia ja aiheita. Sanomalehtien uutisraportointien keskiössä olivat yleisimmin aiheet ja tapahtumat, jotka koettiin kansan parissa tärkeiksi. Myöskin dramaattisille, usein negatiivissävytteisille aiheille annettiin erityishuomiota.

This article reissues a call for the recuperation of a particular, non-substantive, approach to the category of Utopia in the current cultural debates about the future. I examine the usefulness of Utopia as a future-making category via a discussion of how Utopian desire manifests itself in the narrative structure of the literary text and what kind of formal and political consequences this manifestation implies. My case study, a prominent example of Ukrainian post-2014 fiction, Ivan Semesiuk’s satire Farshrutka (2016) presents a critical-satirical Utopian reaction to the realities and futural repercussions of the Russian-Ukrainian war, formalized in a literary form.

Muisti Centre of War and Peace opened in June 2021, being the first science centre in Finland to focus on humanities and social sciences. Muisti, then, breaks the conventional divisions between science centres and museums and presents something new in the field. The first exhibition, State of Emergency, focuses on the Second World War in Finland, its human cost, and its societal effects. This research focuses on Muisti’s peace education agenda and how historical empathy is constructed to support it. New museum theory is used to explain the changes the museum field has undergone in the past decades as well as to contextualise Muisti among these so-called ‘new’ museums. The research is based on the State of Emergency exhibition and three expert interviewees with employees of Muisti. Museum exhibition analysis is used to capture all aspects of State of Emergency for analysis, and the interviews shed light on the thought processes and decision-making behind the exhibition design and content. Finally, a thematic analysis of the interview and the exhibition data is conducted to identify the reoccurring topics and concepts. The research finds that Muisti’s current peace education agenda relies on telling visitors about the past so they would be motivated to act for peace today. Historical empathy is used as a tool that allows visitors to see the similarities between themselves and the people of the past, creating a better understanding of how it felt to live through the Second World War. This more affective, personal understanding of what type of consequences the war has on individuals is assumed to lead to people opposing violence. These lines of thinking are common in new museums focusing on violent pasts and connect Muisti to this wider international group of museums. The research also finds that there are certain uncertainties on how to conduct peace education in practice, and how to handle its political connotations in the Finnish context. It argues that including a wider range of voices in the exhibition would be a practical act of peace education. Finally, the research also concludes that the current conceptualisation of peace education in the Nordics reflects only the perspective of the majority, requiring a revision to portray the true state of affairs in the region.

Commentators claim that drug repositioning (ie developing new uses for authorised drugs) significantly slows when generics are authorised and, therefore, law reform is necessary to encourage more R&D. This study empirically examines this claim by analysing records of clinical trials. It finds that once generics are authorised: i) commercial trials continue at ‘active’ rates for approximately half of the drugs studied, and ii) the number of hospital and university trials actually increases. These findings cast doubt on whether additional incentives are needed. They also indicate that a more effective way to reposition drugs is for recently established government programmes to embrace IP strategies and leverage the hospital and university trials as an R&D pipeline.Keywords: drug repositioning, patent law, regulatory protection, clinical trials, empirical study, generic drugs.

The temporal aspects of politics have been discussed extensively by political theorists, but have not been explored using grammatically parsed textual datasets. This paper explores the ways in which future, present and past are projected and referred to in speeches in the Finnish parliament that talk about ideologies. Ideologies are crucial categories of thinking about the political past and future and therefore serve as a case in which temporality is expressed in a variety of ways. We use a dataset drawn from Finnish parliamentary records from 1980 to 2021 and operationalize morpho-syntactic information on clause structures and grammatical tense system to explore the different temporal profiles of ideologies. We show how some isms, like communism and fascism, are much more likely to appear in the context of the past, whereas others, like capitalism and racism, tend to appear in the present tense. We further develop a framework for analyzing temporality based on clause structures and grammatical tense and relate that to how the study of politics has approached time in parliamentary speaking. Peer reviewed