Academy of Finland

About: Academy of Finland is a government organization based out in Helsinki, Finland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Health care. The organization has 286 authors who have published 419 publications receiving 15304 citations. The organization is also known as: Finlands Akademi & Suomen Akatemia.

Uncertainty in health risks due to anthropogenic primary fine particulate matter from different source types in Finland

Abstract: The emission-exposure and exposure-response (toxicity) relationships are different for different emission source categories of anthropogenic primary fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ). These variations have a potentially crucial importance in the integrated assessment, when determining cost-effective abatement strategies. We studied the importance of these variations by conducting a sensitivity analysis for an integrated assessment model. The model was developed to estimate the adverse health effects to the Finnish population attributable to primary PM 2.5 emissions from the whole of Europe. The primary PM 2.5 emissions in the whole of Europe and in more detail in Finland were evaluated using the inventory of the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP) and the Finnish Regional Emission Scenario model (FRES), respectively. The emission-exposure relationships for different primary PM 2.5 emission source categories in Finland have been previously evaluated and these values incorporated as intake fractions into the integrated assessment model. The primary PM 2.5 exposure-response functions and toxicity differences for the pollution originating from different source categories were estimated in an expert elicitation study performed by six European experts on air pollution health effects. The primary PM 2.5 emissions from Finnish and other European sources were estimated for the population of Finland in 2000 to be responsible for 209 (mean, 95% confidence interval 6–739) and 357 (mean, 95% CI 8–1482) premature deaths, respectively. The inclusion of emission-exposure and toxicity variation into the model increased the predicted relative importance of traffic related primary PM 2.5 emissions and correspondingly, decreased the predicted relative importance of other emission source categories. We conclude that the variations of emission-exposure relationship and toxicity between various source categories had significant impacts for the assessment on premature deaths caused by primary PM 2.5 .

A multilingual natural-language interface to regular expressions

Abstract: This report explains a natural-language interface to the formalism of XFST (Xerox Finite State Tool), which is a rich language used for specifying finite state automata and transducers By using the interface, it is possible to give input to XFST in English and French, as well as to translate formal XFST code into these languages It is also possible to edit XFST source files and their natural-language equivalents interactively, in parallel The interface is based on an abstract syntax of the regular expression language and of a corresponding fragment of natural language The relations between the different components are defined by compositional interpretation and generation functions, and by corresponding combinatory parsers This design has been inspired by the logical grammar of Montague The grammar-driven design makes it easy to extend and to modify the interface, and also to link it with other functionalities such as compiling and semantic reasoning It is also easy to add new languages to the interface Both the grammatical theory and the interface facilities based on it have been implemented in the functional programming language Haskell, which supports a declarative and modular style of programming Some of the modules developed for the interface have other uses as well: there is a type system of regular expressions, preventing some compiler errors, a denotational semantics in terms of lazy lists, and an extension of the XFST script language by definitions of functions

Visual Experience and Access to Spatial Knowledge

Abstract: Persons who were congenitally blind, late blind, and blindfold sighted learned an object-array by being guided within it in cardinal directions towards walls. Subjects then judged the near, far, le...

New foundations for metascience

Abstract: The objective of the present paper is to introduce a new approach to the study of the logical structure of scientific theories. We shall consider, in broad outline, a basic framework for handling theories and for analyzing a number of key metatheoretical concepts. The framework itself may be formally captured within a suitable system of set theory. However, its major innovative and heuristic thrust derives from some notions em ployed in modern abstract logic; in particular, it encourages the application of model-theoretic concepts and results to questions con cerning the structure and dynamics of empirical theories. The viewpoint adopted here shares some features in common with previous attempts at framing metascientific concepts, especially with the 'logistic' or model-theoretic, and with the so-called structuralist ap proaches. Like the former, it stresses the use of formal semantics in metascience; with the latter, it also appeals to some of the more abstract and structural characteristics of theories. However, it differs from these and other traditional approaches, notably in the role in which logic is portrayed. The nature and function of logic in scientific theorizing is here construed in an unusually liberal fashion: it is neither seen as a constraint on the syntactical form of theories, nor viewed as imposing limitations on the kinds of inferences permitted in science. This flexible and versatile conception of logic will be seen to amount to a somewhat radical departure from traditional usage. It also constitutes what the authors believe to be the clearest grounds for upholding the present framework. It should be mentioned at the outset that no new formal results are brought in this paper;1 nor do we pretend to offer a complete and polished semantical machinery whose fine details are fully developed at each point. Instead, we shall attempt to present something of the flavour of this framework with a minimum of technical fuss.2 We shall also try to provide some arguments in its support, and to indicate how it may lead to some fresh insights on a range of familiar, and sometimes controversial,

Information-seeking dialogues: Some of their logical properties

Abstract: The dialogical games introduced in Jaakko Hintikka, “Information-Seeking Dialogues: A Model,” (Erkenntnis, vol. 14, 1979) are studied here to answer the question as to what the “natural logic” or the logic of natural language is. In a natural language certain epistemic elements are not explicitly indicated, but they determine which inference rules are valid. By means of dialogical games, the question is answered: all classical first-order rules have to be modified in the same way in which some of them are modified in the transition to intuitionistic logic. (Furthermore, in some cases quantificational rules have to be modified further.) The rules that are left unmodified by intuitionists are applicable only to the output of certain game rules, but not to others. In. this sense, neither classical nor yet intuitionistic logic is the logic of natural language. We need a new type of nonclassical logic, justified by our information-seeking dialogues.