1- Introduction

2- Method

3- Results

4- Discussion

References

Abstract

The aim of the study was to investigate the benefits of favourite physical places for well-being based on the idea of environmental self-regulation. It proposes that everyday favourite places are used as a “coping mechanism” to enhance subjective well-being through reflection, emotion regulation and withdrawal. We investigated the connection between reasons for visiting the favourite place, consequent experiences and perceived well-being (satisfaction with life and perceived health) through structural equation modelling. We also analysed the reversed model, where well-being affects the reasons for visiting and experiences in favourite places. Finnish and Hungarian participants (N = 784) answered an internet-based questionnaire. Concerning the relationships between reasons, experiences and well-being variables, all of the three reason factors (“Sad, depressed”; ” Happy, well”; “Alone, reflective) were significantly and positively related to the factor “Experiences of positive recovery of self”. This indicates that favourite places do indeed facilitate self-regulation by transforming negative cognitions and feelings into positive ones. However, positive recovery experiences were not related to well-being but distress experiences were negatively related to life satisfaction and perceived health. The reversed model revealed a top-down relation of life satisfaction with positive and negative reasons.

Introduction

The aim of the present study is to investigate the benefits of favourite physical places for well-being based on an individual’s environmental self-regulation (Korpela, 1992). Well-being refers to hedonic (subjective or emotional) well-being focusing on happiness, pleasure attainment and pain avoidance and eudaimonic well-being focusing on meaning, self-realization and full functioning of the individual (Ryan & Deci, 2001). From a self-regulation perspective, people are considered as being active and making conscious and unconscious choices of and in their everyday physical settings based on preferences, emotions, memories, and habits (Russell & Snodgrass, 1987). Environmental self-regulation reflects the idea that maintaining a coherent conceptual system (through cognitive reflection) of oneself and an emotional balance between pleasure and pain is a fundamental aspect of environmental self-regulation taking place in a favourite place where reflection, emotion regulation and withdrawal are possible (Korpela, 1992). Thus, environmental self-regulation in favourite places includes reflection related to threats to self-experience and self-esteem (related to eudaimonic well-being), up- and downregulation of emotions (both mood and momentary feelings) and regulation of stress (related to hedonic well-being).

1- Introduction

2- Literature review

3- Data collection & methods

4- Results & discussio

5- Conclusio

References

Abstract

While Twitter has become an essential part of daily politics across Western countries, little research has focused on origins of politicians’ social circles on social media. This paper contributes to how structural, ideological and contextual factors affect tie formation between parliamentarians’ Twitter networks. The study focuses on Finland, where over 80 percent of parliamentarians are using the platform. For empirical analysis, we first extracted parliamentarians’ followee network connections from their Twitter accounts (36 294 nodes and 113 108 edges) and combined it with data from a national voting advice application, which includes information regarding parliamentarians’ societal position and opinions regarding social, cultural and economic issues. According to the explanatory analysis, we found that connections between parliamentarians and the share of mutual followees are clearly based on matching values, similar background and shared contextual factors. Additionally, we found that shared context had strong confounding effects on the function of value homophily in relations and shared networks between Finnish parliamentarians.

Introduction

Social media has become an essential part of daily politics globally (e.g. Larsson and Kalsnes, 2014; Vergeer, 2015) as political actors have set up profiles on various platforms. Yet, there is a growing concern that social media is working as an echo chamber which facilitates and even encourages ideological categorizations and political conflicts while reinforcing former opinions and blocking divergent views from spreading (Engesser et al., 2016; Hargittai et al., 2008; Lee et al., 2018). Although parliamentarians are at the core of political life, little research considers the construction of parliamentarians’ Twitter networks in multi-party systems (see however Del Valle and Bravo, 2018; Teernstra et al., 2018). Earlier Finnish research has focused on politicians’ social media networks in general, (see Laaksonen et al., 2017; Marttila et al., 2015; Railo and Vainikka, 2017; Vainikka and Huhtamäki, 2015), but research seeking to clarify mechanisms that explain the premises from which these networks are formed remains scarce. In this article, we narrow this research gap by addressing the extent to which Finnish parliamentarians are directly and intermediately connected to one another on Twitter. More importantly, we examine how shared background, shared values, and shared contexts affect the formation of Finnish politicians’ social media networks. By doing so, we can evaluate the importance of homophily in parliamentarians’ social media networks and also assess how political cleavages and echo chambers manifest in social media interconnections in multi-party systems such as in Finland. Further, we focus on how shared offline contexts amplify and attenuate the effect of homophily on social media. Accordingly, we contribute to the wider discussion about contextual factors’ confounding effects in social tie formation.

1- Introduction

2- Insights into performance-based budgeting

3- Actors’ dynamics in the practice of PBB: a theoretical backdrop

4- Research setting and method

5- Actors’ dynamics in PBB

6- Discussion

7- Conclusions

References

Abstract

Purpose
This article analyzes the under-investigated role played by different key organizational actors engaged in the practice of performance-based budgeting (PBB) (e.g., Ministry of Finance, National Audit Office, Sectoral Agencies) to explore how they influence the practice of PBB, contributing to lead the change or create resistance towards it.
Design
The empirical evidence has been collected through a multiple case study based on semi-structured interviews and document analysis in Sweden and Finland, which have long traditions with PBB, and has been interpreted through the lens of institutional and organizational change theory.
Findings
The results show that, despite the lengthy experiences with PBB, the lack of sound dynamics across key actors makes the budgetary use of performance information limited and partial, placing the reform in a “grey area” between the complete implementation of the practice and the total resistance towards it.
Originality/Value
The knowledge obtained from the exploratory analysis has relevant implications for understanding differences and similarities across key organizational actors and underlining their crucial role in making a change feasible. Indeed, PBB may represent a radical change even in presence of embedded performance management systems.

Introduction

Performance-oriented reforms, including performance-based budgeting (hereafter PBB), have been proposed as potential solutions to the problems of efficiency, effectiveness, and/or accountability in the public sector. The rationale of PBB is to produce and use performance information in the budgeting process to improve allocation of resources (Budding et al., 2015; Jordan and Hackbart, 2005; Robinson and Brumby, 2005). Specifically, the practice of PBB refers to the practice of integrating performance measurement information into the budgetary process (Lu et al., 2015), where this integration can take different forms ranging from the reporting of performance information in budgeting documents to their use to allocate resources among different programs. The practice of PBB is thus in line with the performance management movement in the public sector. However, while this latter movement refers more broadly to the production of performance measures and information and their use to monitor, assess and report performance influencing organizational decision-making, PBB is characterized by the ambition of influencing the budgetary decision-making. It has been thought as a practice suitable for paying more attention to how available resources are used and which results should be achieved compared to traditional public budgets, which have been focused on cost control and adopted an input-based rather than outputs and outcomes- based approach (Macnab and Mitchell, 2014).

1- Introduction

2- Methods

3- Results

4- Discussion

5- Conclusions

References

Abstract

Ideal cardiovascular health has been defined by the American Heart Association as the absence of clinically manifest cardiovascular disease together with the presence of favorable levels of cardiovascular health metrics. The ideal metrics are hard to achieve and the aim of this study was to assess the association between favorable cardiovascular health and perceived overall quality of life (QoL).
A cross-sectional study was conducted in Finland among 836 employees in 2014 (732 women, 104 men, mean age 48 (SD 10) years) from ten municipal work units. The ideal metrics were evaluated with a physical examination, laboratory tests, medical history and self-administered questionnaires. The cardiovascular health was categorized into three groups by achievement of the ideal metrics. QoL was assessed with the EUROHIS-QOL 8-item index.
The prevalence of having 5–7 of the ideal metrics was 25.1% (210), of having 3–4 it was 53.6% (448) and for 0–2 it was 21.3% (178). The EUROHIS-QOL mean score among all participants was 3.92 (SD 0.54). The EUROHIS-QOL mean score had a positive association with the sum of ideal metrics, and was 3.72, 3.91 and 4.10 among subjects with 0–2, 3–4 and 5–7 ideal metrics, respectively. Furthermore, poor sleep quality and disease burden had a significant negative association with QoL.
A favorable cardiovascular health status together with good sleep quality seems to have a clear association with overall quality of life among employees in municipal work units.

Introduction

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause of deaths worldwide and the majority of these deaths are caused by cardiovascular disease (CVD) (Mendis et al., 2015). To prevent and control NCDs, the World Health Organization (WHO) has launched a global action plan focusing on major risk factors for CVD (World Health Organization, 2013). Furthermore, the American Heart Association (AHA) has introduced a concept of ‘Ideal cardiovascular health’, with cut-off values for optimal levels of cardiovascular (CV) health metrics. The concept is defined by the absence of clinically manifest CVD together with the presence of favorable health behaviors and health factors. To achieve optimal levels of all these health metrics, the person should be non-smoking, have a normal body mass index (BMI), a healthy diet and fulfil the recommendations for physical activity. He/ she should have untreated blood pressure < 120/80 mmHg, untreated total cholesterol < 5.18 mmol/l (< 200 mg/dl) and a fasting plasma glucose of < 5.55 mmol/l (< 100 mg/dl) (Lloyd-Jones et al., 2010). However, the ideals of CV health are hard to achieve. In the US only 0.1% – 2% of adults reach the ideal levels in all 7 metrics (Folsom et al., 2011; Yang et al., 2012). In Finland 9% of women and 3% of men aged 25–74 years reach at least 5 ideal metrics (Peltonen et al., 2014). The benefit of striving for these ideals seems to be significant, with reference to CVD and even all-cause mortality (Yang et al., 2012). Positive association between favorable CV health and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in the US adult population has also been reported previously (Allen et al., 2015; Odom et al., 2016).

Lean management is a potential way to develop management practices and strategies in the health-care environment in Finland. However, further research is necessary to find out how the Lean management model manifests itself in Finland and to develop the model for this particular national context. There have been studies on the Lean method’s effectiveness in terms of management and development work in the Finnish health-care environment. In addition, there is evidence that teamwork increased in Lean workplaces (Jorma et al., 2016). There are numerous research articles about Lean thinking and plenty of literature reviews. There is also research examining evidence of outcomes of using Lean by identifying the facilitating factors in Lean initiatives (Andersen et al., 2014). Research articles also exist which focus on dividing articles according to the area of application of Lean and various study purposes and criteria (Mazzocato et al., 2010; de Souza, 2009). In Finland, we only have a few research papers regarding knowledge and understanding of managerial experience using the Lean method. The aim of this research is to discuss health service managers’ experiences of management in a special health-care unit and their development efforts from the point of view of the Lean method. Additionally, the aim is to deepen the knowledge of the managers’ work and the nature of the Lean method development processes in the workplace. The research focuses on those aspects and results of the Lean method that are currently being used in health-care environments in Finland. Health care has its own special characteristics: the work is client-oriented, different professionals work together for the benefit of the client, financial resources may vary and be limited, and medical care is improving (Stenvall and Virtanen, 2012; Clarke, 2009). There are also increases in cooperation and networking (Morrow et al., 2007) between organizations and institutions to provide public health services, and health care is always overseen and controlled by some type of steering group. In the health-care services, management is defined as the management of employees working under a manager in a unit (Aarva, 2009). This research look at specialized health-care settings in Finland in which Lean method and management principles have been implemented and applied to the delivery of health care. Management is a relatively new concept in Finnish health, and it refers to overseeing daily operations in the workplace. A manager is responsible for the services provided to customers and is, in charge of the staff, as well as having responsibility for operating budget (Aarva, 2009). According to Virtanen and Stenvall (2010), a manager oversees daily operational activities of a health-care unit while taking into consideration the whole organization through interactions at various interfaces.

Energy security is a multidimensional and evolving concept. Moreover, it is increasingly popular as a research subject. A large body of research concentrates on defining and measuring energy security, e.g. (Ang et al., 2015) and (Månsson et al., 2014), but no academic consensus has been reached in either composing a clear definition or an indicator that would be useful for political decisionmaking. The latter is largely due to the lack of a money-metric translation between different dimensions of energy security (Bohringer and Bortolamedi, 2015 € ). Therefore, it is sensible to take into account inter alia the unique geographical, political and economic environment of a nation and analyse energy security of the system per se instead of analysing the complex issue through an indicator. In November 2016 Finland updated its National Energy and Climate Strategy (the Strategy), which includes targets on e.g. increasing the share of renewable energy sources (RES) by 2030. Concurrently, the issue of generation adequacy1 during winter demand peaks has been present in the political discourse and in media especially since the record-high demand peak in early 2016 and the cautionary adequacy forecast in 2017 by The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSOE) (ENTSO-E, 2017a). The authors have previously analysed the resilience of the Finnish power system in 2016 (Ja€askel € € ainen et al., 2017; Ja€askel € ainen and Huhta, 2017 € ) with the conclusion that the system still had enough generation capacity and measures of intervention to cope with severe unexpected faults. However, several simultaneous market trends amplify the stresses regarding security of supply, inter alia the increasing share of weather dependent power production, prolonged low level of electricity market price and decreasing installed capacity of thermal power plants. Moreover, the national strategic objectives of further increasing the share of RES and phasing out coal in energy use both amplify the phenomenon. Thus, the issue of generation adequacy in the Finnish electricity market in the coming decades remains open for debate. This paper analyses the development of generation adequacy in Finland until 2030 in the energy policy scenarios of the Strategy by modelling the implications of similar conditions as were experienced in early 2016 with the EnergyPLAN simulation tool. In addition to the scenarios in the Strategy, we analyse a third scenario with pessimistic Assumptions regarding investments in power plants and cross-border transmission lines. Moreover, as the Nordic energy system is so heavily dependent on hydropower production, we analyse the interdependence between hydrological situation in the Nordic countries and generation adequacy in Finland by applying the effects of a severe drought in the Nordic energy system in the analysed scenarios. In order to assess the implications of a severe drought on the Finnish energy system, we model the hydrology during the worst drought in the 20th century (1939e1942) with the current hydropower capacity using Finnish Environment Institute’s Watershed Simulation and Forecasting System (WSFS). Furthermore, we briefly analyse the environmental impacts of hydropower operations during drought and peak demand in Finland.

Together with Scandinavian countries and Canada, Finland belongs to the northernmost countries utilizing ground source heat pump (GSHP) technology on a large scale (Nowak & Murphy, 2012: 73, 101, 118, 132, 140). According to the Finnish Heat Pump Association nearly 8500 GSHP units were sold in Finland in 2016 (SULPU, 2017). GSHPs are installed in new buildings, and retrofitted in place of oil burners, electrical heating, wood furnaces and district heating. Since 2013 more than half of new detached houses in Finland have had a GSHP installed (Motiva, 2016: 11). A typical GSHP system in Finland consists of a borehole heat exchanger (BHE) and a vapor compression heat pump with either an inbuilt or a separate domestic hot water tank. Single U-pipes are most commonly used in BHEs. The GSHP system is connected to hydronic heat distribution, which is usually underfloor heating in new buildings and newer retrofit sites, or wall mounted water radiators in older retrofit sites. Horizontal ground heat exchangers (GHEs), in which a single, linear pipe is installed in series, are also used, while slinky or trench collectors are not used (cf. Florides and Kalogirou, 2007; Omer, 2008). Surface water heat exchangers are installed to a lesser extent, mainly in lakes and coastal areas of the Baltic Sea. Open loop heat exchangers are very rare in Finland. Ethanol is the most commonly used antifreeze in the GHEs whereas glycols are rarely used. Boundary conditions for the sizing and design of GHEs in Finland are set by the northern climate and distinctive geological conditions. The annual average ambient temperature in Finland varies from over 5 °C on the south coast to below −2 °C in parts of northern Finland, where the temperature may drop below −40 °C in wintertime (FMI, 2016a,b). Correspondingly, the annual average temperature of the ground surface varies from 8 °C on the south coast to 2 °C in the far north of Finland (GTK, 2017). The thermal conductivity of Finnish rocks is typically over 3 W/(m*K), and the geothermal gradient is 8–15 K/km (Kukkonen and Peltoniemi, 1998; Kukkonen, 2000). The bedrock in Finland generally consists of hard crystalline rocks, and sedimentary rocks are rare. Practically all of Finland is located on the Fennoscandian Shield, which is relatively unbroken and tectonically stable (Korsman and Koistinen, 1998; Plant et al., 2005). Due to the hard rocks in Finland, down-the-hole (DTH) drilling method is economically superior, and more efficient than any other method (cf. Rebouças, 2004). In practice, it is the only method applied to drill boreholes for BHEs in Finland. The rotating DTH hammer’s percussion is powered by compressed air (typical working pressure 35 bar), and the exhaust air is used to flush the drill cuttings out of the borehole (Jouni Lehtonen, personal communication 12 Nov 2016; Jimmy Kronberg, personal communication 24 May 2017). Another consequence of the hard rocks is that boreholes are mostly left ungrouted and usually remain open. The need for grouting is also decreased by the fact that groundwater table is in most cases within ten meters from the ground surface (Karro and Lahermo, 1999). A completely dry borehole indicates that the rock is solid enough to prevent groundwater movement, in which case the borehole is filled with water. Environmental and functional issues related to GSHP construction and use have been studied since the 1970s.

Empirical research finds that tens of millions of citizens spend tens of billions of dollars annually developing and modifying consumer products to better serve their own needs (von Hippel et al., 2011). Driven by the ever-increasing quality of freely available design and communication tools, single and collaborative user innovation is expected to become even more prominent in the future (Baldwin and von Hippel, 2011). The social welfare benefits of single and collaborative user innovation by citizens will be considerably enhanced if citizendeveloped innovations of general value diffuse to others who can benefit from them. However, from microeconomic theory, there is reason to hypothesize thatfree, peer-to-peer diffusion of user innovation will be inefficiently low from a social welfare perspective. As von Hippel et al. (2014) have argued, when innovation diffusion involves free revealing rather than market transactions, innova tors will find the benefits that accrue to adopters to be partially or entirely an externality from their point of view. As a result, user innovators can be expected to invest less than might be socially desirable to inform or assist others to adopt, even when their innovations would be highly valuable to others – a market failure. In the specific circumstances focused upon here, we say that a market failure exists if user innovators and adopters, taken together, would have higher net benefits from the user innovation if the user innovator invested more in diffusion. This type of market failure is novel in the innovation literature. In this paper, we empirically explore the market failure hypothesis just described via a sample of 176 innovations developed for personal use by individual consumers in Finland. In overview, we found that 85% of the consumer developers report that what they had developed highly satisfied their own needs. Moreover, drawing on multiple questions, we concluded that, in our respondents’ view, 61% of their innovations are deemed useful to some or many others. Still, actual commercial and/or peer-to-peer diffusion only occurred for 19% of the innovations.

مقاله سال 2016

Statistical agencies, central banks, and numerous public and private entities collect hundreds, if not thousands, of economic time series every year. This ever-growing amount of data has helped policymakers and researchers with key activities such as forecasting, evaluating the performances of economic models, and designing fiscal and monetary policies. Unfortunately, this wealth of data is not matched by a high degree of timeliness. Most notably, variables measuring economic activity are generally published with long lags. For example, the first estimates of the US and UK quarterly GDP are published four weeks after the end of each quarter, while the lag is usually six weeks for the Euro area (see Banbura, Giannone, & Reichlin, 2011).

In recent years, this problem of the timeliness of data releases has been addressed in the literature on nowcasting models and coincident economic indicators (for the latter, see e.g. Altissimo, Cristadoro, Forni, Lippi, & Veronese, 2010; Stock & Watson, 1989). Nowcasting methods have been applied chiefly in the prediction of low frequencydata, and quarterly data in particular, by exploiting the release of monthly data (see, e.g., Aastveit & Trovik, 2014; Banbura et al., 2011; Evans, 2005; Giannone, Reichlin, & Small, 2008). In these papers, the focus has been on the creation of early estimates of the quarterly GDP growth, which are updated as new information is released. These revisions are analyzed by checking the contributions of the news carried by additional data. Most of the nowcasting papers are interested in quarterly variables, though Modugno (2013) and Proietti (2011) focus on computing monthly nowcasts of GDP. Aruoba, Diebold, and Scotti (2009) propose a real-time economic activity indicator that is built on data observed at mixed frequencies, including daily data. Recent examples of nowcasting applications are those of Camacho and Garcia-Serrador (2014) and Camacho and Perez-Quiros (2010), who use a single-index dynamic factor model based on both real and financial indicators, and Foroni and Marcellino (2014), who apply various different approaches (bridge equations, state space and mixed data sampling models) to the nowcasting of Euro area GDP components. Finally, a recent survey on nowcasting with parsimonious mixed-frequency methods is provided by Camacho, Perez-Quiros, and Poncela (2013).

The novel idea introduced in this study is to exploit the information contained in large firm-level datasets in order to compute early estimates of economic activity. In particular, we compute nowcasts of the Finnish monthly economic activity indicator, the Trend Indicator of Output (TIO), using a two-step procedure. In the first step, we extract common factors from a large firm-level dataset of turnovers, then in the second step we use these common factors as predictors for nowcasting regressions. The estimates constructed for TIO are also used subsequently to compute early figures of the Finnish quarterly GDP.