Rock Hellsinki, Marketing Research

This paper is a qualitative research about rock and heavy metal music tourism in the capital city of Finland, Helsinki. As Helsinki can be considered the city of contrasts, the silent nature city mixed with urban activities, it is important to also use the potential of the loud rock and heavy metal music contrasting the silence. Finland is known abroad for bands such as HIM, Nightwish, Korpiklaani and Children of Bodom so it would make sense to utilize these in the tourism sector as well. The cultural tourism possibilities of heavy metal and rock music visitors are discussed in this thesis, and whether there are products and services already available for this type of visitors or not. In this paper the research method was mainly qualitative research method and also the project method was used in combination to achieve the results. This is because the thesis first started out as the researchers’ own project, which is referred to in this paper as the piloting project, and grew into an idea of a thesis. This project that started the thesis process created a heavy metal oriented marketing video which would also be a virtual tour guide for visitors. The video was planned, all the contents discussed, and filmed, edited and the finally published by the research team in the fall of 2011. This thesis is a project with the aim to find out how the video could be improved, to find out more concrete evidence of what kind of content this type of video service and product should contain according to the interviews conducted for this thesis. Furthermore, the thesis is about finding out whether products and services exist for these types of travelers. Or do these services exist at all. Yet another thing this paper discusses is whether it is a good idea to publish this sort of service and product via online communities, or if there are some other ways to share this information in this video product to these travellers; or if there is potentially another network to show the video to these customers. Contrary to the expectations the researchers had about only improving the marketing video, the theme interview answers indicated something even more. The results from the research were more than the researchers had predicted. Instead of only a marketing video, the subjects’ answers to the theme interviews predicted that there should also be a website with social features

An assessment of prevalence of Type 1 CFI rare variants in European AMD, and why lack of broader genetic data hinders development of new treatments and healthcare access

PurposeAdvanced age-related macular degeneration (AAMD) risk is associated with rare complement Factor I (FI) genetic variants associated with low FI protein levels (termed ‘Type 1’), but it is unclear how variant prevalences differ between AMD patients from different ethnicities.MethodsCollective prevalence of Type 1 CFI rare variant genotypes were examined in four European AAMD datasets. Collective minor allele frequencies (MAFs) were sourced from the natural history study SCOPE, the UK Biobank, the International AMD Genomics Consortium (IAMDGC), and the Finnish Biobank Cooperative (FINBB), and compared to paired control MAFs or background population prevalence rates from the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD). Due to a lack of available genetic data in non-European AAMD, power calculations were undertaken to estimate the AAMD population sizes required to identify statistically significant association between Type 1 CFI rare variants and disease risk in different ethnicities, using gnomAD populations as controls.ResultsType 1 CFI rare variants were enriched in all European AAMD cohorts, with odds ratios (ORs) ranging between 3.1 and 7.8, and a greater enrichment was observed in dry AMD from FINBB (OR 8.9, 95% CI 1.49–53.31). The lack of available non-European AAMD datasets prevented us exploring this relationship more globally, however a statistical association may be detectable by future sequencing studies that sample approximately 2,000 AAMD individuals from Ashkenazi Jewish and Latino/Admixed American ethnicities.ConclusionsThe relationship between Type 1 CFI rare variants increasing odds of AAMD are well established in Europeans, however the lack of broader genetic data in AAMD has adverse implications for clinical development and future commercialisation strategies of targeted FI therapies in AAMD. These findings emphasise the importance of generating more diverse genetic data in AAMD to improve equity of access to new treatments and address the bias in health care.</p