Balance of Power Policy of the Asia-Pacific Region States in the Context of the Rise of China’s Power

Tematem rozprawy doktorskiej pod tytułem Polityka równowagi sił państw regionu Azji i Pacyfiku w kontekście wzrostu potęgi Chińskiej Republiki Ludowej jest polityka równowagi sił (polityka równoważenia – ang. balancing) oraz jej prowadzenie przez państwa regionu Azji i Pacyfiku wobec wzrostu potęgi Chińskiej Republiki Ludowej. Celem pracy jest określenie czynników, które sprawiają, że jedne państwa regionu Azji i Pacyfiku sięgają do polityki równowagi sił/polityki równoważenia a inne nie. Zagadnienie to częściowo wyjaśnia opisana w rozdziale I pracy teoria „równowagi zagrożenia” Stephena M. Walta stanowiąca, iż to czy państwo zdecyduje się na prowadzenie polityki równoważenia, zależy od tego czy postrzega ono inne państwo za zagrożenie. Z kolei uznanie jakiegoś państwa za groźne wynika z takich czynników, jak: całkowita siła, bliskość geograficzna, zdolności ofensywne, ofensywne intencje, z czego najważniejszym pozostaje ten ostatni. Ponieważ, jak wskazano w pracy, w przypadku państw sąsiedzkich Chin trzy pierwsze czynniki w zasadzie pokrywają się o tym, czy będą one prowadzić wobec ChRL politykę równoważenia, musiałby zdecydować czynnik czwarty, czyli agresywne intencje. Pytaniem jakie postawiono w pracy jest jednak, dlaczego jedne państwa uznają dany kraj za agresywny i mający ofensywne intencje, a inne państwa tak go nie postrzegają. Odpowiedź, zdaniem autora pracy, na to pytanie leży w percepcji państwa umacniającego swoją pozycję w układzie sił opartej się na historycznych doświadczeniach i opinii społeczeństwa oraz przede wszystkim elit politycznych, które rozstrzygają o kształcie polityki wobec danego problemu. Na podstawie celu badawczego pracy i w oparciu o powyższe wnioski sformułowano następujące zadania badawcze: • określenie czy pojęcie polityki równowagi sił jest aktualne we współczesnym świecie; • określenie jak wybrane, najistotniejsze państwa regionu Azji i Pacyfiku postrzegają Chiny i wzrost chińskiej potęgi; • określenie, które państwa prowadzą wobec Chin politykę tożsamą lub zbliżoną do polityki równoważenia; • określenie, dlaczego jedne państwa prowadzą wobec Chin politykę równoważenia a inne nie; • ustalenie istnienia zależności między percepcją Chin i chińskiej potęgi a prowadzeniem polityki równowagi sił przez państwa sąsiednie

Kylpylöiden uusi aika : elämyksiä ja sisältömarkkinointia : case Break Sokos Hotel Bomba

Tässä opinnäytetyössä suunnitellaan uudistuvalle kylpylälle markkinointisuunnitelma. Toimeksiantaja on matkailu- ja ravitsemisalalla toimiva matkailukeskus Break Sokos Hotel Bomba. Opinnäytetyö on suoritettu toiminnallisena opin-näytetyönä, joka sisältää raportointi osion ja produktion eli tässä tapauksessa markkinointisuunnitelman. Raportointi osiossa luodaan teoriapohjaa. Aiheet on jaettu kahteen ryhmään: kylpylät osana hyvinvointi- ja wellness matkailua ja markkinoinnin suunnittelu. Ensimmäisessä teoria osuudessa kartoitetaan hyvinvointimatkailun termejä, niiden määritelmiä ja ymmärrettävyyttä. Tähän osioon on kerätty myös kylpylätoiminnan kannalta oleellista historiaa ulkomailla ja Suomessa sekä matkailuun ja kylpylöihin kohdistuvia trendejä. Markkinoinnin suunnittelussa esitetään strategisessa järjestyksessä toimenpiteet markkinointisuunnitelman toteutta-miseksi. Siinä yhdistetään yrityksen nykyinen liiketoiminta ja lähtökohta-analyysit, markkinoiden kysyntä potentiaali, kilpailijat ja asiakasprofiilit, markkinoinnin strategiset valinnat, konkreettisen toimintasuunnitelman, toiminnan riskien arvioinnin sekä markkinoinnin oikean suunnan ja vaikutusten seurannan. Näiden teorioiden pohjalta on rakennettu yritykselle kylpylän markkinointisuunnitelma. Suunnitelmassa painotetaan kahta jo olemassa olevaa asiakasprofiilia sekä luodaan yksi kokonaan uusi. Nämä asiakasprofiilit huomioon ottaen on kylpylälle luotu uudet tuotteet ja markkinointiviestinnän kanavat. Opinnäytetyön vaiheissa on esitelty toiminnallinen opinnäytetyö, tavoitteet, tiedonhakumenetelmät sekä produktin eri vaiheet. Päätelmässä arvioidaan oppimistavoitteet ja niiden täyttyminen sekä työn tuloksia.The purpose of this thesis is to create a marketing plan for a renewable spa. The client organisation is a holiday cen-ter Break Sokos Hotel Bomba which is working in the tourism- and catering industry. The thesis is done as a function-al thesis which consists from a report and a production which in this case is a marketing plan. In the report the main idea is to create the foundation of the theory. The subjects are divided in two groups: spas as part of the health and wellness tourism and marketing planning. Mapping of the terms, definitions and intelligibility of the health industry is in the first theory part. There is also substantial information about the Finnish and foreign spa history along with the trends regarding the tourism and spas. In the marketing planning the actions are presented in strategic way in order to carry out the marketing plan. It com-bines the present area of business and starting point-analyses, the demand potential of the market, competition, cus-tomer profiles, strategic options of the marketing, plan of action, risk analysis and the follow-up to ensure the right direction and effects of the marketing. The marketing plan for the spa have been carried out on the basis of these theories. The emphasis of the marketing plan is on the two already existing customer profiles and the creation of a new profile. New products and marketing channels of the spa has been created by taking in concern of these customer profiles. The functional thesis, objectives, information retrieval and the stages of the production are presented in the stages of thesis. The conclusion part consists from the evaluation and fulfilling of the learning objectives but also from the re-sults of the work

Enhanced Viral Metagenomics with Lazypipe 2

Viruses are the main agents causing emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. It is therefore important to screen for and detect them and uncover the evolutionary processes that support their ability to jump species boundaries and establish themselves in new hosts. Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) is a high-throughput, impartial technology that has enabled virologists to detect either known or novel, divergent viruses from clinical, animal, wildlife and environmental samples, with little a priori assumptions. mNGS is heavily dependent on bioinformatic analysis, with an emerging demand for integrated bioinformatic workflows. Here, we present Lazypipe2, an updated mNGS pipeline with, as compared to Lazypipe1, significant improvements in code stability and transparency, with added functionality and support for new software components. We also present extensive benchmarking results, including evaluation of a novel canine simulated metagenome, precision and recall of virus detection at varying sequencing depth, and a low to extremely low proportion of viral genetic material. Additionally, we report accuracy of virus detection with two strategies: homology searches using nucleotide or amino acid sequences. We show that Lazypipe2 with nucleotide-based annotation approaches near perfect detection for eukaryotic viruses and, in terms of accuracy, outperforms the compared pipelines. We also discuss the importance of homology searches with amino acid sequences for the detection of highly divergent novel viruses

Sulphur cement pre-composition and process for preparing such sulphur cement pre-composition

The invention provides a process for the preparation of a sulphur cement pre-composition comprising reacting sulphur modifier with polysulphide-containing organosilane to obtain in the presence of sulphur the sulphur cement pre-composition, wherein the organosilane has the general molecular formula: (X 3 Si) m H (2n+1) C n -S a -C n' H (2n'+1-m') (SiX' 3 ) m' (1) wherein a is an integer in the range of from 2 to 8, X and X' each are, independently, a hydrolysable group, n and n' each are, independently, an integer in the range of from 1 to 4, and m and m' each are, independently, an integer in the range of from 1 to (2n+1)

Chikungunya virus infections in Finnish travellers 2009-2019 : Infection Ecology & Epidemiology

ABSTRACT The mosquito-borne chikungunya virus (CHIKV) causes an acute febrile illness with rash, joint and muscle pain.A realtime RT-PCR assay for CHIKV detecting non-structural protein (nsP2; CHIKV nsP2-RT-qPCR) was set up. All the serodiagnosed CHIKV cases detected during 2009-2019 in Finland were screened with the assay, followed by isolations attempts and sequencing using Sanger and next generation sequencing (NGS). To validate the assay external and in-house quality control samples were used and all were correctly identified. Specificity of the assay was 100%. Assay was sensitive to detect CHIKV RNA in dilution of 10-8.During years 2009-2019 34 patients were diagnosed for acute CHIKV infection. Twelve out of 34 cases were positive by CHIKV nsP2-RT-qPCR.Two CHIKV isolations succeeded from two individuals infected originally in Thailand, 2019. From 12 CHIKV nsP2-RT-qPCR positive samples, five (42%) CHIKVs were successfully sequenced. In this study, CHIKVs from year 2019 clustered with CHIKV ECSA-lineage forming sub-cluster with strains from ones detected in Bangladesh 2017, and the ones from Jamaica (2014) within Asian lineage showing highest similarity to strains detected in Caribbean outbreak 2013-15.  Majority of the CHIKV infections detected in Finland originates from Asia and virus lineages reflect the global circulation of the pathogen.Peer reviewe

ClusTRace, a bioinformatic pipeline for analyzing clusters in virus phylogenies

Background: SARS-CoV-2 is the highly transmissible etiologic agent of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and has become a global scientific and public health challenge since December 2019. Several new variants of SARS-CoV-2 have emerged globally raising concern about prevention and treatment of COVID-19. Early detection and in-depth analysis of the emerging variants allowing pre-emptive alert and mitigation efforts are thus of paramount importance. Results: Here we present ClusTRace, a novel bioinformatic pipeline for a fast and scalable analysis of sequence clusters or clades in large viral phylogenies. ClusTRace offers several high-level functionalities including lineage assignment, outlier filtering, aligning, phylogenetic tree reconstruction, cluster extraction, variant calling, visualization and reporting. ClusTRace was developed as an aid for COVID-19 transmission chain tracing in Finland with the main emphasis on fast screening of phylogenies for markers of super-spreading events and other features of concern, such as high rates of cluster growth and/or accumulation of novel mutations. Conclusions: ClusTRace provides an effective interface that can significantly cut down learning and operating costs related to complex bioinformatic analysis of large viral sequence sets and phylogenies. All code is freely available from https://bitbucket.org/plyusnin/clustrace/Peer reviewe

HAVoC, a bioinformatic pipeline for reference-based consensus assembly and lineage assignment for SARS-CoV-2 sequences.

Background SARS-CoV-2 related research has increased in importance worldwide since December 2019. Several new variants of SARS-CoV-2 have emerged globally, of which the most notable and concerning currently are the UK variant B.1.1.7, the South African variant B1.351 and the Brazilian variant P.1. Detecting and monitoring novel variants is essential in SARS-CoV-2 surveillance. While there are several tools for assembling virus genomes and performing lineage analyses to investigate SARS-CoV-2, each is limited to performing singular or a few functions separately. Results Due to the lack of publicly available pipelines, which could perform fast reference-based assemblies on raw SARS-CoV-2 sequences in addition to identifying lineages to detect variants of concern, we have developed an open source bioinformatic pipeline called HAVoC (Helsinki university Analyzer for Variants of Concern). HAVoC can reference assemble raw sequence reads and assign the corresponding lineages to SARS-CoV-2 sequences. Conclusions HAVoC is a pipeline utilizing several bioinformatic tools to perform multiple necessary analyses for investigating genetic variance among SARS-CoV-2 samples. The pipeline is particularly useful for those who need a more accessible and fast tool to detect and monitor the spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern during local outbreaks. HAVoC is currently being used in Finland for monitoring the spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants. HAVoC user manual and source code are available at and , respectively.Peer reviewe

High Seroprevalence of Enterovirus Infections in Apes and Old World Monkeys

To estimate population exposure of apes and Old World monkeys in Africa to enteroviruses (EVs), we conducted a seroepidemiologic study of serotype-specific neutralizing antibodies against 3 EV types. Detection of species A, B, and D EVs infecting wild chimpanzees demonstrates their potential widespread circulation in primates

Adsorption of Halogenated Fire-Extinguishing Agents on Powders

The amounts of four different Freons adsorbed by carbon, silica gel, alumina, and molecular sieves were determined at pressures up to 225 lb/sq in. The carbon adsorbed 50 to 100 percent and the silica gels, 30 to 50 percent of their own weight of Freon. Several adsorbed systems were tested in a standard dry-powder extinguisher on a 5-sq-ft gasoline fire for their effectiveness in putting out a fire. One of the Freons (bromotrifluoromethane) and carbon extinguished fires about as well as bicarbonate powder and nitrogen

Diversity and transmission of Aleutian mink disease virus in feral and farmed American mink and native mustelids

Aleutian mink disease virus (AMDV), which causes Aleutian disease, is widely spread both in farmed mink and wild mustelids. However, only limited data are available on the role of wild animals in AMDV transmission and spread. Our aim was to shed light on AMDV transmission among wild mustelids and estimate the effect of intense farming practices on the virus circulation by studying AMDV prevalence and genetic diversity among wild mustelids in Poland. We compared AMDV seroprevalence and proportion of PCR-positive individuals in American mink, polecats, otters, stone martens, and pine martens and used the phylogenetic analysis of the NS1 region to study transmission. In addition, we used a metagenomic approach to sequence complete AMDV genomes from tissue samples. In eastern Poland, AMDV seroprevalence in wild mustelids varied from 22 per cent in otters to 62 per cent and 64 per cent in stone martens and feral mink, respectively. All studied antibody-positive mink were also PCR positive, whereas only 10, 15, and 18 per cent of antibody-positive polecats, pine martens, and stone martens, respectively, were PCR positive, suggesting lower virus persistence among these animal species as compared to feral mink. In phylogenetic analysis, most sequences from feral mink formed region-specific clusters that have most likely emerged through multiple introductions of AMDV to feral mink population over decades. However, virus spread between regions was also observed. Virus sequences derived from farmed and wild animals formed separate subclusters in the phylogenetic tree, and no signs of recent virus transmission between farmed and wild animals were observed despite the frequent inflow of farmed mink escapees to wild populations. These results provide new information about the role of different mustelid species in AMDV transmission and about virus circulation among the wild mustelids. In addition, we pinpoint gaps of knowledge, where more studies are needed to achieve a comprehensive picture of AMDV transmission.Peer reviewe