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The paper explores how a post-cognitive approach to human perception can help the design of wearable technologies that augment sense-making. This approach relies on the notion of pure experience to understand how we can make sense of the world without interpreting it, for example through our body, as claimed by phenomenology. In order to understand how to design wearable technologies for pure experience, we first held interviews with experts from different domains, all investigating how to express and recognise pure experience. Subsequently, we had a focus group with professional dancers: given their heightened sense of bodily cognition in their experience, we wanted to verify the extent to which the experts’ practice could be claimed back into the dancers’ experience. In this paper, we will present our preliminary findings.

Seniors with dementia living in nursing homes are often faced with boredom and loneliness due to lack of meaningful engagement and personalized activities. We applied Montessori method to design an interactive table for elderly home residents and evaluated the design with four female residents and a nurse. This method offers a range of levelled interactions to meet the needs at different stages and cognitive decline levels of the residents with dementia. The table initiates interaction with an increasing level of complexity that magnifies the rewarding effects and social connectedness among the residents. The qualitative evaluation during a pilot study indicated that the interactions with the table reduced agitation of the elderly participants and increased the instances of positive social behaviours.

Past agricultural responses to climate variability can helps us to better understand the current and future impacts of climate change on agricultural production. We studied rye (Secale cereale) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) yield responses to temperature fluctuations in Finland during the period 1861–1913. Our analyses demonstrate the high sensitivity of non-industrialised northern agriculture to temperature anomalies. We found evidence of a strong relationship between monthly and seasonal mean temperatures and crop yields. In particular, high spring temperatures were associated with higher yields. Additionally, we tested temperature-sensitive tree-ring series for their value in indicating previous agricultural outputs. The results imply that tree-ring proxies (in particular, maximum latewood density) can provide novel material for studies of historical periods and locations where instrumentally measured climate and harvest data are not available.

The global environmental awareness has become the most important driver for sustainable development also in the forestry sector, which has reproduced interest in Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) and Certified Forest Products (CFPs). However, the initial objectives set for the forest certification have not been met on a large-scale and markets for CFPs have developed unequally in different countries, as will become apparent in this review. As the underlying assumption behind the forest certification is that consumers are concerned about the state of forests and that such attitudes are reflected in their purchase decisions, it is reasonable to concentrate on consumer behaviour when examining the market creation for CFPs. The review shows that even though more elaborate consumer research methods have been applied recently, many of the empirical results are from the 1990s and up-to-date comprehensive results do not exist. Furthermore, the existing literate on consumer research on CFPs offer widely conflicting results. This review tries to build understanding on the fundaments in the market creation for CFPs and to include some new dimensions to existing consumer surveys from other disciplines in order to find missing factors determining consumer behaviour and purchase of CFPs. Based on this review, some of the factors that could be better incorporated in the consumer research on CFPs include 1) competitive product characteristics from consumer perspective, 2) consumer awareness over the forest certification and sustainable forest management, and 3) consumer perceptions on the different institutions and actors involved in forest certification including supplier characteristics. In order to make more realistic comparisons between the different market areas also 4) country-wise economic and social indicators and 5) cultural factors could be better incorporated in the future research on consumer preferences and dissemination of forest certification. Further knowledge about the consumers’ preferences and perceptions on CFPs in Scandinavian markets and on forest certification in general could be utilised to develop the attributes of certified products and services of forest certification associations. Furthermore, an in-depth knowledge about the nature of consumer preferences could be used in marketing CFPs.

In this paper, we are concerned with how a real-world social situation shapes the interaction with a novel technology that combines collocated mobile phone and public display use for groups of people. We present a user study of a system that allows collaborative creation and sharing of comic strips on public displays in a social setting such as a pub or cafe. The system utilizes mobile phones and public displays for shared collaborative expression between collocated users. A user study spanning three sessions was conducted in real-world settings: one during the social event following a seminar on games research and two in a bar on a regular weekday evening. We present and discuss our findings with respect to how the larger social situation and location influenced the interaction with the system, the collaboration between participants of a team, how people moved between different roles (i.e., actor, spectator and bystander), and the privacy issues it evoked from participants.

Dendrochronological and sclerochronological records are mean series of arboreal and molluscan increments that are correctly aligned in time by rigorous dating. These records of tree rings and annual shell-growth increments exhibit climate signals that can be used to reconstruct fluctuations and trends in past climates. Here we present a multi-proxy reconstruction of temperature histories using a combination of dendrochronological and sclerochronological evidence. Regional curve standardization (RCS) was used to remove the non-climatic variations from dendrochronological and sclerochronological series prior to palaeoclimatic interpretation. Conventional and signal-free methods of RCS were compared. It was found that the signal-free methods produced more reliable chronologies and systematically higher climate-proxy correlations. Consequently, the temperature reconstructions were derived using the chronologies constructed by this method. Proxy-based histories of summer (July-August) temperatures were reconstructed from AD 1767 onwards. The compound use of proxies resulted in reconstructions that were of higher quality than single-proxy reconstructions. Further improvement of reconstructions was accomplished by the inclusion of lagging increment values in the transfer functions. The final multi-proxy model explained 58% of the temperature variance over the instrumental period. The multi-proxy temperature reconstruction correlated well with the long records of instrumental temperatures from Tornedalen, St. Petersburg, Uppsala and Stockholm. Overall, the reconstruction for the past 250 years agreed reasonably well with borehole temperature reconstructions obtained in northern Finland. In general, this study demonstrates the benefits of the compound use of several proxies in reconstructing climate histories. In particular, the study emphasizes the so far largely unexploited advantages of multi-proxy data sets obtained by rigorously cross-dated incremental chronologies to produce more robust palaeoclimatic reconstructions. © 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2010 The Boreas Collegium.

If the concordance $\Lambda$CDM model is a true description of the universe, it should also properly predict the properties and structure of dark matter haloes, where galaxies are born. Using N-body simulations with a broad scale of mass and spatial resolution, we study the structure of dark matter haloes, the distribution of masses and the spatial distribution of subhaloes within the main haloes. We carry out three $\Lambda$CDM simulations with different resolutions using the AMIGA code. Dark matter haloes are identified using an algorithm that is based on the adaptive grid structure of the simulation code. The haloes we find encompass the mass scales from $10^8\mathrm{M}_{\sun}$ to $10^{15}\mathrm{M}_{\sun}$. We find that if we have to study the halo structure (search for subhaloes), the haloes have to contain at least $10^4$ particles. For such haloes, where we can resolve substructure, we determined the subhalo mass function and found that it is close to a power law with the slope -0.9 (at present time), consistent with previous studies. This slope depends slightly on the redshift and it is approximately the same for main haloes. The subhalo mass fraction ($M_{\s subH}/M_{\s MH}$) is between 0.08 and 0.2, increasing slightly with redshift and with the mass of the main halo. Its distribution is approximated using the Weibull distribution at different epochs. The mean values of subhalo mass are independent of the main halo mass. The spatial density of subhaloes, scaled to the virial radius of the main halo ($r_{\s vir}$), is independent of redshift and follows the $r^{1/3}$ rule., Comment: 11 pages, 16 figures