Finland on Michael’s Domain

Inauguration of the new professors

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We - the new professors in the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Helsinki - gave our inaugural lectures yesterday!

Vantaa Blue

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Swedish Blue Stone is a synthetic jewelry stone made from blast-furnace slag. They were not made on purpose, but have been cast away as a byproduct of metal ore smelting during the last centuries. While in Sweden these stones are commercially used , nobody in Finland bothers to make a business out of them. A few hobbyist gemstone hunters - like me - have been gathering these stones over the last 50 years or so, but you can still find quite a few of these. One deposit of these blue stones is near the Pitkäkoski Rapids on the Vantaa River. I have polished a few and use them occasionally as presents.

The Study Voucher

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Since I am working at the University of Helsinki (UH), I should probably know a bit more about the upcoming Study Voucher pilot (Finnish: opintoseteli), as UH will offer a lot of courses within this program, including some of mine, e.g. the Recombinant DNA Technology (aka “Cloning”) course. I did some reading, and here is the gist of it:

You know you've been in Finland too long…

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You know you’ve been in Finland too long when… is an old Facebook thread from 2010 , but I have had quite a few of these moments realizing that I would no longer pass as a normal German.

Still wondering what to study?

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is what I would do if I were 20 years old today: I would enter an interdisciplinary study program. My favorite among the programs offered in Finland is the International Master’s Programme in Pharmacy (officially “Master’s Programme in Pharmaceutical Research, Development and Safety”, abbreviated MPHARM) at the University of Helsinki. I give you 5 compelling reasons:

The Finnish Dream: A Pipe Dream?

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A reality check for international students

Finland has been celebrated as the world’s happiest country for now eight years in a row . However, Finland is not only the happiest country, but also the country with one of the lowest fertility rates . In order to stabilize the pension system , Finland decided that it needs immigration, an idea very radical for a country that was 30 years ago almost as isolated from the rest of Europe as North Korea is nowadays from the rest of Asia. At that time, the international car sign for Finland was still SF for Soviet Finland (just kidding, the S obviously stands for Sweden). Finland wants to increase immigration by attracting foreign students to pursue degrees in Finland, hoping that some of them will stay in the country after graduation. Hence, Finland has become an increasingly popular destination for international students, particularly from Asia. Lured by promises of a high-quality life, excellent education, and abundant opportunities, many invest big time to pursue a degree in one of the Finnish universities . Ten years ago, university education was free for everybody (including all foreigners), but since since 2017, students from non-EU/EEA countries have needed to pay tuition fees . This was not the universities’ own decision, but mandated by the government.

Just another type of fish

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I still dream of improving my Finnish language skills, and as a consequence, I occasionally do irrational things. Now, with much help from two amazingly patient editors, I have tried to write a popular science article in Finnish about our scientific excursion into fish biology territory. The article just appeared in the mene & tiedä online magazine of the Young Academy Finland ( Nourten Tiedeakatemia ).

Thank you, Aalto-Helsinki iGEM team!

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am extremely proud of you, Aalto-Helsinki iGEM team ( https://www.aaltohelsinki.com )! Although being in survival mode all year long, the results are truly exceptional: Gold Medal achieved, nominated for Best Therapeutics Project (overgrad series, tightly beaten by the equally exceptional Toronto University’s Mystiphage project), and two special prizes for Best Measurement and Best Sustainable Development Impact! I would have loved to be in Paris for the Grand Jamboree, but teaching duties and grant application deadlines took priority. Judging from the videos, I was not required at all. An oral vitamin B12 supplement that also works for all patients currently requiring injections is one step closer. We will keep you informed about our progress, this is only the beginning!

Paprika harvest is starting soon

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For the first time, we will have a decent paprika harvest from our balcony garden. We have had success with cucumbers and tomatoes , but our paprika plants were always attacked early on in the growing season by some spider mites, which seem to be indigenous to our balcony. However, the fruits are just now starting to get their red color. Hopefully, all will get red before the first night temperatures fall below zero on our balcony, but that is often only the case in late December, since the balcony is glassed. Of course, green paprika is also edible, but the red ones just contain more vitamins (at least more vitamin C and folic acid/vitamin B9 . Do you want to know which breed we seeded? We used the seeds from the red Ramiro paprika that you can buy from Prisma: https://www.s-kaupat.fi/tuote/coop-makea-suippopaprika-300g/6438574276493 .

Academic career

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A tiny job market but the best European country to live in (considering global warming)

This month, I transitioned from Associate to Full Professor at my university. Trusting the opinion of my doctoral supervisor Kari Alitalo , my current supervisor , and mostly everybody else, I did not prepare a plan B, in case I would be denied tenure. As a Gen Xer on the Finnish job market, what could have been a realistic plan B? Looking at the international job market would make it easier to solve the problem by increasing opportunities by a factor of 100, even when considering only English- and German-speaking countries. Finland’s population is only about 5.6 million, and its job market is tiny. However, going abroad is not that easy if the rest of your family is opposed to a change of scenery. And why would I leave the only country in Europe whose summer temperatures are not health-threatening? Sure, global warming also hits the Nordic countries: We just had the longest uninterrupted heatwave in Finland since people are taking measurements (22 days of >30°C). But 30°C beats 40°C hands down. For my American friends & family: 30°C = 86°F, 40°C = 104°C.

Same place, 38 years later (part A)

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I visited Tallinn for the first time in 1987. It was also my first and last visit to the Soviet Republic of Estonia. I took a few photographs at the time (I had one roll of 35-mm film with 36 exposures). Last week, I went back after more than 25 years of not having been there to take re-shots of some of the places. I received help from an expert, who pinpointed the exact locations, down to a few meters, where I had taken the shots in 1987. However, it was still difficult to get the perspective right, and I clearly failed in three of the four pictures. I thought I had taken my 28-100 mm Zoom objective in 1987, but after looking at the pictures, I am not so sure anymore. I also had a 70-210 mm Zoom, and I might have used that one. It’s somehow clear from the 1987 images that I must have been far away from the people I photographed, since nobody took notice. I should have used the same camera (which I still have in a drawer that I hadn’t opened for a decade or longer), but I didn’t manage to get photographic (“chemical”) film on short notice. Shot #3 was especially challenging since none of the buildings visible in the 1987 image still exist. Happy to get feedback for my next visit!

Same place, 38 years later (part B)

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

#Not necessary! # #

Same place, 38 years later (part C)

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This was the most tricky image and I am not sure at all whether the new image captures the correct place. Again, I think the 1987 shot must have been taken with a focal length of more than 100 mm. There was no building that could have served as a clearly identifiable fixpoint.BTW: All the 2025 images were taken with the mobile phone camera of a Samsung Galaxy A35. Taking the original camera (Ricoh XR-P) with me would have approximately doubled the weight of my luggage.

Same place, 38 years later (part D)

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Next time I’ll take my old SLR camera and the 70-210 zoom objective. I guess I could have used the digital zoom of my mobile phone…

A better Levodopa

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Saku Renunanen’s manuscript about novel inhibitors of levodopa decarboxylases was published in the European Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences . It is a textbook example of drawing from the expertise of many different people to make progress. We all know that levodopa provides only symptomatic treatment and that the real breakthrough in Parkinson’s Disease treatment probably has to come from a molecular understanding of the formation of the alpha synuclein and tau protein aggregates and how to interfere with or reverse it. However, disentangling the molecular aetiology of Parkinson’s disease and finding a way to interfere with it will still take us many years. Therefore, improving existing treatment strategies can have a bigger impact on patients’ lives in the short term, and exploring new approaches to improve dopamine deficiency-addressing strategies is thus worthwhile.Levodopa is still the go-to drug for Parkinson’s disease, but a lot of it gets broken down before it ever reaches the brain. While we already use drugs like carbidopa (Lodosyn) to help prevent this, recent research suggests that gut bacteria may also be contributing to the issue. Specifically, Enterococcus faecalis and similar bacteria can interfere with their tyrosine decarboxylase enzymes.To address this, in this paper, over 150,000 compounds were screened computationally looking for ones that could block this bacterial enzyme. After a series of in silico and lab tests, three promising compounds were selected that can inhibit both the bacterial TyrDC and human AADC (the enzyme is already targeted in patients).Why does this matter? These compounds could lead to more effective symptomatic treatments for Parkinson’s Disease. Due to differences in the gut microbiome, some patients might benefit more than others, notably those with high levels of levodopa-hungry gut bacteria. Check out the full study here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejps.2025.107133 . I always learn a lot of new, super-interesting things in these types of collaborations. Which is one of the reasons why I chose to do science for a living in the first place.

ProxyJump

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Since OpenSSH 7.3, it has been much easier to connect from the outside to Linux computers inside the UH network. With older ssh versions, you needed to use a complicated “ProxyCommand”, but now it is straightforward:

Nobody to rescue us

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have been frustrated with the fact that it is almost impossible to live ecologically in Finland. Everything seems to work against this goal. Even when considering a fairly radical lifestyle, I cannot reach anything close to sustainable. The biggest (but not the only) item in the catalog of my unsustainable habits is that I am living in an apartment. And I have the luxury of 30 square meters per person (120 square meters total). When searching for items to further improve my personal carbon footprint, the only option was to move to a smaller apartment or to move to a country where less energy is needed for heating. Unfortunately, Finland requires heating for a large part of the year. I wrote a letter about my frustration to our local newspaper (Helsingin Sanomat , which happens to be the biggest daily in Scandinavia). When it was published, many people chimed in with their opinions. It was eye-opening to see how many were trying to argue away or justify the fact that Finland has - per capita - one of the largest carbon footprints among comparable countries (e.g. Sweden or Switzerland have lower carbon footprints than we do, see here ). There was (as usual) the typical (and wrong) blaming of the population-rich countries. Some just told me to be satisfied with what I am doing, while others told me to get help from a shrink. Lots of defensive rationalization and compartmentalization. The smarter we are, the better we are at rationalizing. I think we all know deep down that we are just pretending to rescue the planet. Most of the Germans also knew deep down that these factories, where all the Jews had been ordered to work, were not just producing soap. The US came to rescue Europe in WWII, but no US is coming to rescue the planet.

English or Finnish?

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am teaching to Bachelor, Master and PhD students at the University of Helsinki . While almost all Master’s and PhD theses in the life sciences are written in English, I am always discussing with BSc students the question of whether to write the thesis in Finnish or English. I am comfortable with both Finnish and English, but when you need to decide, you might want to consider a few things:

140% too much

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Finland, the average person hit Earth Overshoot Day in 2024 on March 12th. If everyone on this planet lived like the average Finnish person, we would need 3.5 planets to sustain that level of consumption. This always has struck me as improbable because compared to many other developed countries I have visited, Finland is not particularly rich, nor is our lifestyle particularly extravagant or consumption-oriented.However, according to the statistics, our consumption has always been up there with the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and other rich countries like Luxemburg and the United States. We are using more resources than many other well-off countries such as Sweden, Germany, or Switzerland. This year (2025), we did a bit better: we dropped from March 12 to April 6. Maybe it’s our new atomic power plant or the recession, but we are not damaging our planet with the same vigor as in previous years. My personal Earth Overshoot DayOthers do not always appreciate my frugal lifestyle, and to see whether I am truly exaggerating, I wanted to know on which date my personal Earth Overshoot Day falls. I took the test , and the result was a bummer: Despite

Sweden, my genetic data and our collective inability to keep secrets

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The UK has recently set a precedent, and the mighty Apple has caved into UK requirements. Apple is removing the possibility of switching on secure end-to-end encryption from UK-based devices . This means that the UK government has a backdoor into iPhone users’ private communications via iCloud backup. Almost everybody knowledgeable thinks this is a bad idea because backdoors are usually more quickly cracked open by Russian or Chinese hackers than King Charles III can give his Royal Assent for the law to come into force (see e.g. the Financial Times reporting here ).

Goodbye Finland

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If there is a minister in our current government who rubs me the wrong way, then it’s probably Arto Satonen, our Minister of Economic Affairs and Employment. I mean, the guy is right in his view that Finland needs much more work-based immigration, but he is delusional when he thinks that Finland will be able to compete with other European countries for the most wanted and most valuable immigrants. How otherwise could he have supported the “three-months-rule”, a law that would kick immigrants out of the country who lost their jobs and did not find a new employment within three months. This rule has been criticized by many ( https://www.hs.fi/politiikka/art-2000010770898.html ). If our incompetent Arto Satonen doesn’t think that this is a problem ( https://www.hs.fi/politiikka/art-2000010770898.html ), then it is probably because he does not know or talk with foreigners who are working in jobs with low job security. Sure, there are always immigrants willing to come to Finland (”Suomeen on kyllä tulijoita”), but why does Mr. Satonen want the rat’s tail of all potential immigrants? Other countries with better conditions and a more welcoming attitude will scoop the creme from the top. Finland starts already with massive disadvantages in the fight for the best talent: A peripheral location, dark and dirty winters, and an incomprehensible language. Mr. Satonen must have a very distorted picture of Finland’s attractiveness for highly educated foreign workers. Similar to most incompetent politicians, he generally seems not overly interested to base his policies and decisions on facts and research ( https://www.hs.fi/mielipide/art-2000011074278.html ). No, Finland is not a very attractive country for most foreigners. We have not only problems attracting international talent but also problems retaining the talent we already have within the country.Being half Finnish, I tend to forget how incompetently this country can behave towards its guests. Please read the article on Yle.fi “Kiitos Suomi ja näkemiin” ( https://yle.fi/a/74-20143543 ), if you want to know what is going wrong in this country. If we want to be able to make this country more attractive for foreigners, we first have to put a stop to the unacceptable behaviour of people who don’t understand that the future of this country depends on immigration. The current government led by prime minster Petteri Orpo is unable to help in any meaningful way, because it relies on the support of “The Finns Party” (formerly known as True Finns), a party with an arguably dangerously high percentage of convicts, ex-Nazis and other suspect individuals (similar to the AfD in Germany).According to the report by Etla (the Finnish Institute of Economic Research), higher educated foreigners are the first to leave Finland. Is this ever going to change? Mr. Satonen now gets unexpected help from President Trump. In the past, the US has been very successful in attracting and integrating foreign top talent, but the climate towards foreigners seems to be changing. Many of my colleagues working in the US are very worried about what is going on. If you happen to be both a scientist and a foreigner, you get a double hit from the current US administration. Maybe more of the talent will divert to Europe in the future.I have recently started thinking about moving back from Finland to Germany due to climate change. When the AMOC stops, Finland will freeze over, and we’ll fall back into a new ice-age with possible snow cover all year round for most of the country. Meanwhile, Germany is located precisely where global warming and the loss of the AMOC-mediated South-to-North heat transfer will likely balance out. Germany won’t be spared from extreme weather events like storms and flooding, but at least you won’t freeze to death, nor will you be grilled to death. According to the current predictions for the weakening of the AMOC and my life expectancy, I will likely still be around when this s**t hits the fan. UPDATE: A very recent analysis published in Nature concludes that a complete collapse of the AMOC is unlikely this century. Predicting the future is difficult, but at least there is hope for Finland!

Billion-dollar gamble

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last December, Forbes published a feature article about Megan Baldwin’s work to improve the antiangiogenic treatment of eye diseases. I hope she wins her billion-dollar gamble not only because the drug in question was invented here at the University of Helsinki. The drug is called OPT-302 or with its INN name sozinibercept. The patent lists Kari Alitalo and me as the inventors. The drug was initially designed (under the name VGX-300) for cancer treatment, but - perhaps luckily - never really took off as such because it inhibits not only VEGF-D but also VEGF-C, which is needed in the body’s immune response against the cancer. So far, nobody has been able to separate the prometastatic and the proimmunogenic propeties of VEGF-C.

Our lab won't go bancrupt in 2025!

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Our lab has been so unlucky with its recent grant applications that I was already seriously considering alternative career paths. Like becoming a tram driver. Helsinki and its surrounding cities are expanding their tram networks, and good drivers are rare. However, the Cancer Foundation Finland has now ended our unlucky streak! Although it is only a modest amount, I am hopeful for the future. Not all research is equally expensive: some methods need more money than others, and ours are at the budget end of that spectrum. What project got funded? Well, it’s not our novel protein expression system, but a project to answer a question that has been bugging many vascular biology researchers since 2001, when the Achen/Stacker lab published a paper showing that mouse and human VEGF-D do NOT share the same receptors, but that mouse VEGF-D does not bind mouse VEGFR-2 ( Baldwin et al., 2001 ). We showed in 2011 and 2019 , that the proteolytic activation of VEGF-D by cathepsin D leads to a loss of all VEGFR-3 binding in human VEGF-D. If this was true for mouse VEGF-D as well, it would be a growth factor without a receptor! This is not impossible, but it would be exceptional. It is important to get these molecular details right because we are testing our future cancer drugs always in mice. If there is a big difference in the angiogenic signaling between mice and men, this could render much mouse data very difficult to interpret and perhaps even explain why drugs that work well in mice fail in humans. Notably, among all drugs, oncology drugs have the worst success rates in clinical trials. There is reasonable evidence to believe that VEGF-D is the “bad boy” in the VEGF family, i.e., the one that is responsible for cancers developing resistance against antiangiogenic cancer therapies, that are based on blocking VEGF-A. In any case, a big shout-out to the Cancer Foundation Finland! Read here about the award.

JuFo ranking: A Worse Impact Factor?

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Changes to the Finnish PhD educationAll Finnish universities are lowering the requirements for a doctoral thesis. Instead of 3 to 4 publications, you can now defend your thesis with 2 to 3. One argument favoring this change was to create a level playing field with other countries. None of the big European countries requires any publications to get a PhD: Neither Great Britain, Germany, France, or Italy do. The other Scandinavian countries are the only other European countries that have (or have had) similar requirements with respect to the number of required publications, with Sweden being almost on par with the Finnish system.If international harmonization was the goal, the change should have been more radical, i.e., get rid of any requirement for publications. However, the new rules just ensure that we lose in quality what we gain in quantity. I prefer fewer but better-educated PhDs, but our current government apparently just wants to bump up the number of PhDs that Finland produces. Publish of perishI fear that the push towards a shorter PhD might decrease the quality of the publications. PhD students are now under pressure to get three papers out in 3 to 4 years. As soon as the “smallest publishable unit” has been produced, it is pushed out into the world. Few research groups have the luxury of postponing publishing research results for a long time because the publish-or-perish culture is still flourishing. While Finland has abandoned the impact factor (good), we have replaced it with a less transparent system (bad). The currently used metric in Finland is the JuFo system, where journals get ranked into classes 0-3 based on “expert consensus opinion.” JuFo is the abbreviation of Julkaisufoorumi (“Publication forum”).Since everybody (including experts) has their preferred go-to journals, this opens the door to bias and even manipulation. There are plentiful examples of highly respected, 10+ impact factor journals with astronomically high rejection rates that were for a long time classified as JuFo 1, until - after a rotation of members in the respective JuFo panel - they were finally bumped to level 2. Why is there such a thing as JuFo rankings in the first place? One argument is that the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) does not account for the individual differences in the publication and citation cultures between different research fields. These differences are huge, but after classifying all journals into individual categories (e.g., clinical medicine versus languages versus agriculture, etc.), one could develop a compensation formula (perhaps even including manually assigned compensation factors) to adjust the JIF for such inter-discipline differences. A software script could do all the work of the JuFo panels automatically and transparently. Bibliometrics researchers have proposed such better alternatives to the JIF. Please drop me an email if you think that I am missing something here! Anecdotes versus dataHaving a system that allows for “manual” downgrading of journals is certainly a good thing. I also endorse JuFo’s attempt to solicit individual researchers’ feedback. However, when you count the number of journals JUFO needs to evaluate, you will see that gathering feedback from 180 individual scientists’ experiences and then downgrading 60 journals based on this feedback has issues. That’s what happened a few years back. If we assume that ALL feedback has been negative and ALL negative feedback has resulted in a downgrade, there will be a tiny number of cases for each journal. In the parlor of evidence-based medicine, some of these cases might be anecdotes. Don’t get me wrong: These decisions are probably not wrong, and neither is it wrong to gather feedback from researchers. In fact, my own experience with one of the downgraded journals (International Journal of Molecular Sciences) is pretty much indicative of predatory publishing. However, the data underlying these decisions is not the best, and it would be surprising if every single one of these decisions would hold up to scrutiny. It is difficult to imagine how such feedback could avoid bias. It’s self-reporting, and researchers might be incentivized to report negative experiences. Grading on the curveAnother little-known fact is that JuFo is a zero-sum game. Journals cannot be freely distributed over the four categories, but JuFo uses a variation of “grading on a curve”: No more than 10% of the articles published in journals for a specific JuFo panel (e.g., for Chemical sciences) are allowed to fall into JuFo category 3. This accounts for differences in publication volume between fields. However, if we - the scientific community - improve the quality of our publication output generally, this will not be reflected in the JuFo ranking. That is, in my opinion, wrong (for the same pedagogical reasons that schools are discouraged from grading pupils on a curve). **Decisions behind closed doors?**The second big issue is transparency. The fact that I have to speculate in the paragraph above about the numbers that have led to the downgrades is worrisome:

Teaching ”Biological Drugs” in Finnish

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 2022, the steering group of the International Master’s Programme in Pharmaceutical Research, Development and Safety (MPHARM) collectively received the Innoopeli prize 2022 for developing teaching at the Faculty of Pharmacy . As a member of the steering group, I was a bit surprised as none of our students had graduated yet. However, the preliminary laurels received approval earlier this year, when the first batch of the students graduated .

Producing proteins better than the pros

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Congratulations, Laura & Akseli! Your article in Scientific Reports ( https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-77104-3 ) is a solid piece of work that has not only relevance for cardiovascular diseases but also for the work that we are doing on lipedema/lipoedema (and therefore, potentially even for lymphedema, which has been the main focus of our research in the past). There are astonishing similarities between coronary artery disease and lipedema, because both can be regarded as lipid storage disorders.And thanks to Khushbu and Betül for helping Laura produce and purify such a high-quality LCAT protein that worked better than the protein preps that are commercially available! Perhaps much of the secret was the high expression levels that we could reach compared to other systems. For the first time, we tried out HEK293T cells with a custom CHO vector ( pCHOKE-B-LCAT-H6 ), and it worked surprisingly well. pCHOKE-B was assembled from scratch and we incorporated several advancements made over the years compared to regular CHO expression vectors. The vector contains

Ouriginal fails more often than not to detect plagiarism

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ouriginal , the plagiarism detection service formerly known as Urkund, has been in use at the University of Helsinki for a very long time. Because of Ouriginal’s inability to process some of our students’ Master’s thesis, I spent a little bit of time investigating Ouriginal and its problems. Here’s what I found out. From Swedisch to European to US-AmericanIt is unclear to me which software we are really using since Ouriginal is a merger of the Swedish Urkund and the German PlagScan, and in 2021 Ouriginal was acquired by the American Turnitin . I don’t need any of such software, but our university mandates that theses must be scanned by the software. Since I read and evaluate an increasing number of theses every year, I also increasingly use Ouriginal. Ouriginal supports many document formats, but support is buggy Looking at the history of submissions, I realized that until about mid-May 2024, all submitted PDFs had been dutifully analyzed. But last week, something changed since about half of the submitted documents were not processed. The usual tricks (submitting in another format such as .docx, .odt, .ps, .rtf) did work for some, but not all of the theses. One thesis was especially stubborn, and neither our “experts” nor the Original helpdesk staff had any clue why their software could not process it (which makes me again wonder what software their backend is actually using). Ouriginal is investigating already for a month without getting back to me with answers… Our university receives funding from the Ministry of Education based on graduating students, and we lose thousands of Euros for each student who fails to graduate on time. Fee-liable students also have a strong incentive to graduate on time in order to avoid additional costs. Therefore, every delay in the graduation schedule is unacceptable. Ouriginal’s performance disappoints with a shocking detection rate Since there are dozens of ways how to turn a Word document into a PDF, I tried to isolate the problem by submitting test documents to the Ouriginal service. I used manuscripts that we had published over the last few years. I was shocked when I realized that Ouriginal failed to detect plagiarism in more than half of all cases. Paywalls are not to blame since almost all our publications are freely available. Neither the novelty of the publication nor the quality of the journal made a perceivable difference. However, it seems evident that Ouriginal has more problems with non-English documents. It is very difficult to explain why so many freely available scientific texts from reputable journals ( Scientific Reports , Angiogenesis , Annals of Anatomy ) are not indexed by Ouriginal. Failure to detect plagiarism from Helsinki University’s own thesis repository Original does not even index our own university’s freely available PhD theses ( https://ethesis.helsinki.fi ). None of the PhD thesis written in my own lab was recognized. I also checked my own PhD thesis , and it was the only one that was recognized (Ouriginal found it on docslib.org , not our own university’s official thesis repository). Does it make any sense to pay for such an imperfect service? I don’t think so. The omission of freely available texts from important journals seems inexcusable since a simple Google search does a better job. I did Google searches for sentences from the unrecognized texts, and in most cases, Google identified the original source without problems. A Python script to split texts into sentences for individual Google searches and to aggregate the results can be written by any programmer in an afternoon. Why would you maintain your own database if Google does a better job than you can? Plagiarism to the following published manuscripts/theses/proceedings was NOT detected:*

Admission interview

Thu, 09 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

An increasing number of MSc study programs at our university are incorporating an interview into the admission procedure. Tiina Immonen from the TRANSMED program was the pioneer at the University of Helsinki who ventured first into this territory. If you are invited to an interview at the University of Helsinki, you have already taken the biggest hurdle, which is the evaluation of your application. To be accepted, you have to make sure not to screw up the interview. You don’t need to be stellar, but you need to meet expectations. The reason is that interviews are notoriously tricky to evaluate, and therefore, many programs use them primarily to screen for red flags.

MPHARM milestone

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Helsinki University’s International Master’s Programme in Pharmaceutical Research, Development and Safety (MPHARM) is close to another milestone: Our first graduates are soon to submit their theses. On Thursday, we were celebrating after the MSc Theses seminar, where the first batch of students presented the results of their thesis work. At the center is Leena , our benevolent director. Not in the picture is Tomi , who deserves much of the credit for making the Drug Design and Pharmacology track such a success!

If you have a "green card" (S-etukortti), you can vote for me*!

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I want to advance an aggressively green, science-based agenda. And I want Finland to feel like home not only for the indigenous but for everyone committed to Scandinavian values. Look at my values at the candidate finder website .Given that close to 20% of the capital region’s population has a foreign background, foreigners are - with about 5% - massively under-represented among the candidates in the upcoming cooperative elections (osuuskauppavaalit) . Unsurprisingly, you cannot find any foreigners among the candidates of the “True Finns” (Perussuomalaiset). Still, other lists were not excelling in their complete or near absence of foreign candidates, such as the Center party (Keskusta). Due to this lack of inclusion and diversity, I signed up as a candidate in the capital region’s subsection of the S Group (HOK-Elanto).The purpose of the “osuuskauppavaalit” is to elect a 60-member representative body (and deputy members) of the representative body of the HOK-Elanto cooperative for the next four years. HOK-Elanto is the section of the S Group that operates in the capital region. The S Group is the biggest Finnish retailing cooperative. Unlike its most significant competitor (Kesko), it is not listed on the Finnish stock market. But the goal of the S Group and Kesko is the same: making their owners rich. Just that the owners of the S Group are the customers, while the owners of Kesko are the shareholders. In 2020, there were more than 2 million S Group customer-owners in Finland, but only about 60000 Kesko shareholders.

Mia Sivén, the world's first professor of sustainable pharmacy

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When we were asking our foreign students what made them join the University of Helsinki, several of them mentioned sustainability aspects. Many of the research groups at the Faculty of Pharmacy study topics that are highly relevant to a sustainable future. For example, tackling the increasing threat of antibiotic resistance is a high priority for our faculty. And my group works on the planet’s most environmentally friendly protein production system. There is no part of a drug’s life cycle that could not be approached from a sustainability angle. Therefore, it was high time that this over-arching theme was finally acknowledged by establishing a dedicated professor position. To our knowledge, next month Mia Sivén will start her job as the world’s first professor of sustainable pharmacy . You are probably not surprised that I am very happy about this appointment.

Finished with Finnish?

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In her opinion piece in Helsingin Sanomat , Annikka Mutanen picked up on the predicted population decline in the numbers of Finnish people : At the end of this century, the number of people in Finland with Finnish roots will have fallen below 2 million. I won’t be around anymore to experience this, but my children have a good chance to.

Overstretched IT support

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The problem: Crash during boot

More than a year ago, a few weeks after receiving my new work computer, it failed to reboot after a system update and got stuck early in the boot process. I soon realised I could still start the computer using “safe mode”. Strangely, nothing seems to be wrong because when I manually exit safe mode at the end of the boot process, the computer works fine. Our IT department has tried to fix the problem many times without success. I even had to work without a computer for about 3 weeks while it was “under repair”. You probably know how much work you can get done without a computer: close to zero.My computer runs Cubbli 20.04.06LTS, an unofficial Ubuntu spin maintained by the University of Helsinki for internal use. Although you can do bioinformatics on a Windows or macOS computer, Linux is hands-down the first choice. Many bioinformatics developers don’t even bother to release their software for Windows. MacOS works mostly fine (since it is also UNIX-compliant OS), but I would have to pay twice the price for the same calculating power.The computer is a Lenovo P350 with an NVIDIA T1000 graphics card, which I use to address two screens. I mainly need the graphics card for 3D modelling, phylogenetics analysis and similar tasks. This graphics card may have caused the trouble. I initially did not want to buy this model, but since there was a shortage of graphic cards at the time, IT convinced me to swap out my original choice against the T1000.

Back to the monograph?

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Finland had become internationally known for producing highly qualified PhD graduates in the STEM fields. This was a result of the requirement to publish 4 to 5 scientific manuscripts in renowned scientific journals. Not surprisingly, it took, on average, about seven years to accomplish that feat. Today, Finnish PhD graduates are perhaps internationally more known for being relatively old once they graduate. I myself was 34 years old when I received my doctoral hat . It took me a bit less than six years.On the other hand, my supervisor was so smart to let me do what I wanted, and I spent quite a bit of time with side projects that did not really advance me on my trajectory towards the degree certificate. However, it also meant that I acquired skills, knowledge, and connections that I otherwise would not have. If you take the 10000-hours-rule literally, 10000 hours equal pretty much a six-year PhD education.At the moment, the Finnish Ministry of Education wants to lower the time required for achieving the PhD goal down to 3 years. This article in World University News is to date the most extensive English information piece that has surfaced about this project.My questions are: Why? and How? The why is pretty obvious: Finland has fallen behind in the OECD statistics of highly educated professionals. To polish these numbers, Finland needs more PhD graduates. And since attention-span-reduced politicians cannot be expected to wait six years, it is only logical that they would agree to spend money to increase the degree numbers, provided this would happen fast.But what about the how? How can PhD students learn in 3 years what they normally used to learn in 6 years? If that were possible, it would mean our current PhD education is massively inefficient. Can we squeeze it down to three years without compromising quality? There is clearly an opportunity for optimization. Especially when it comes to the funding of the studies. There has been a constant lack of university-salaried PhD positions. As a consequence, many PhD students spend a significant chunk of their time applying for grants or - even worse - working part-time in order to make ends meet. However, while absolutely a step in the right direction, paying a salary will not cut down the required time by 50%.There is something annoying about science that politicians might not fully understand: It is impossible to predict the outcome of scientific experiments. This very fact is the only reason you do them in the first place! However, if you cannot predict the outcome of experiments, you cannot predict how long it’ll take to get the work done and publish the results. In order to straight-jacket the process of obtaining a PhD degree into a three-year predictable journey, we need to dig deeply into our academic bag of tricks and resurrect the “monograph”. The monograph is an alternative way to attain a PhD degree. Although alive on paper, it had practically died in the STEM fields decades ago, with more than 99% of all STEM PhD theses being publication-based. In some fields and faculties, the monograph has held on to a higher share, but its popularity has been diminishing everywhere for very good reasons. But now it is back!With the monograph, you don’t open up your scientific output to the scientific community for peer review, improvement, and appreciation (in the form of citations). Instead, you write up your research results in a hundreds of pages thick manuscript that is only scrutinized by your supervisors and two external experts appointed by the faculty council. What could possibly go wrong? I hope that I am wrong, but a three-year PhD education will likely not be able to offer the same as a six-year PhD education. Besides, there are other factors that unnecessarily slow down PhD education, which are not addressed in the current pilot. The most notably ignored factor is the supervisor-to-student ratio. Due to the sustained relative decrease in the funding of the basic university functions, teachers and supervisors at Finnish universities are already very thinly stretched, and the current “suboptimal” supervisor-to-student ratio will deteriorate with 1000 additional PhD students who will enter Finish universities over the next year. I fully understand the desire to harmonize the PhD degree at the European level (something that we have done more-or-less successfully with the BSc and MSc degrees starting with the Bologna process in 1999). We don’t know many of the implementation details for this pilot yet. But very clearly, most of the real stakeholders were never asked when this pilot had been cooked up.UPDATEThere have been two articles in the Finnish daily newspaper “Helsingin Sanomat” about this pilot that talk about the two most important points of criticism that have been targeted at the 1000-PhD-students project, namely the decrease in PhD education quality that seems to be inevitable and the very unequal distribution of the funding between different disciplines: https://www.hs.fi/politiikka/art-2000010217525.html https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/art-2000010242698.html UPDATEThe University of Helsinki has finally posted some information about the upcoming call. The page is not available from the news feed, but you have to know what you are looking for in order to find it. This his is counterproductive given the fact that the application period is only two weeks: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/research/doctoral-school/doctoral-education-pilot

The Finnish 1000 PhDs pilot

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Finnish government is going to finance 1000 additional new fully funded doctoral positions, which would start in the academic year 2024/2025.The money (85000€/year for each PhD student) will be competitively distributed between Finnish universities, and some of that money will be used to pay for the salary of the PhD students for three years. Perhaps one of the triggers for this initiative is that Finland has been falling behind in the OECD statistics in the number of highly educated workers. The question is whether this one-time expense will really increase the level of education or only boost the numbers.The average duration of a PhD education is around seven years in Finland. In order to pull off a 3-year PhD education at such a large scale, it is expected that the requirements for the PhD will be lowered. As a matter of fact, the requirements have already been lowered, but further “easings” might still come. Together with these, universities are aiming to streamline the kafkaesque absurd and medieval administration process, which can easily take half a year from the time of completing the last manuscript to receiving the actual PhD certificate.Many other outlets have reported about this pilot; here’s one that is available also in English: https://acatiimi.fi/2023/11/28/for-once/Although most people are happy about the additional money, almost everybody is sceptical to some degree. Good intentions are not enough, and there are many serious issues with this pilot:

Helsinki University dropped from top 100

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The largest Scandinavian daily, Helsingin Sanomat, reported the last week that the University of Helsinki had dropped from the top 100 universities in the Shanghai ranking . Now several Finnish academicians have responded . The take-home message of the response could be summarized as *Don’t take these rankings seriously!*Are these rankings really a meaningless indicator of university quality, just a part of the “attention economy”? This is certainly true for those rankings that are not completely transparent about how the ranking procedure works. And for those that are opening up their methodology completely, Goodhart’s Law still applies: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Everything is good then, despite Helsinki University’s downfall from the upper echelons of academic research, right? Perhaps not. The many university rankings ( Shanghai , THE , and QS being perhaps the most influential) are just one of many targets that Finnish universities aim at. Another - and perhaps a practically much more important one - is the scheme according to which the Finnish Ministry of Education distributes money among Finnish universities. This scheme might be the secret driver behind the decline of Helsinki University. Under the Sipilä government (2015-2019), the distribution criteria were changed so that the number of produced degrees increased in importance while scientific research (as measured by publication output) became less important. Helsinki University is very research-focused. As a matter of fact, after the changes to the money distribution scheme, Helsinki University’s research output reaches the maximum yearly points that can be given typically at the end of the summer. All publications after that until the end of the year do not improve Helsinki University’s standing compared to the other domestic universities. In Finland, the money from the ministry is very important since they do not operate on multi-billion-dollar endowments as most large US universities do. The HS article specifically mentions that these rankings are not a good way to measure the quality of teaching and, thus, should not influence students’ decisions about where to study. However, some rankings do have meaningful metrics. For instance, the THE ranking compares the ratio between students and teachers. Obviously, if a university does not have enough teachers, it will not be able to deliver good teaching. Bad teaching is neither good for students nor the NYT ranking. I agree that some rankings include questionable practices, such as asking more-or-less randomly selected scientists about what universities they think are the best in their fields. I myself have been contributing to such a ranking in 2021. I tried to skew the needle in favour of Finland and Germany as much as I ethically could justify to myself. Although flawed, I would not completely dismiss rankings. The HS article concludes with a similar sentiment: that the displacement of Helsinki University from the top 100 should be a warning sign to the present government to finally put Finnish Universities on equal grounds with the other Scandinavian (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) universities which have not suffered from nearly two decades of declining funding. However, this warning sign comes very late, although the decline has been obvious for quite some time for those following university news. The funding situation has already resulted in irreversible losses of human capital. When the purchase-power-adjusted funding for the University of Helsinki went down for the first time, everybody knew that it would take many years before the effects of the funding cuts would become blatantly evident. It finally happened, with a delay of more than ten years. Thanks to all the politicians that have contributed since 2005 by not doing anything, doing not enough or even actively supporting the dismantlement of Finnish academic research. 2005 was the year when I realized that university funding had declined for the first time in real terms.

Bicycle parking on the Viikki campus

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We have new bicycle storage spaces in Viikki, about 400 of them. While this sound good at first, let’s look at the details:The access-controlled parking spaces are subject to a fee. I assume it is still “allowed” to park your bicycle outside these access-controlled spaces. However, the Flamma text seems to implicate that all parking on campus areas requires a permit: “There is a fee for parking on all Helsinki campuses.” ( https://flamma.helsinki.fi/en/group/tilat/pyoraily-pysakointi-ja-julkinen-liikenne ). This could have been written a bit more clearly, but I guess the writer had (only?) cars in mind.The Flamma article claims that 36 free-to-use bicycle racks were also installed in the non-heated, outside space in the underpass behind Biocenter 2 (which used to be the gathering space for electric and electronic waste). Yes, but that possibility existed before and has been used before. It’s right next to the smallest (48-rack) access-controlled parking space, the only one where I finally spotted a bicycle. Using the access-controlled parking makes sense if you have an expensive bicycle. If you do, you likely don’t care about the yearly 30€ fee either: expensive bicycle parking for the rich. You pay for your parking via an app. I installed the app on my phone but did not pay the 30€/year fee. Why not? I have two issues with the fee:

Congratulations, Dr. Khushbu Rauniyar!

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Defending a PhD thesis is a BIG thing in Finland, and you just did it. Unlike the rest of the world (perhaps except for Sweden), no other country requires as much demonstration of perseverance from PhD candidates as Finland does. On average, it takes four publications and 7 years. The long duration and the lack of well-defined requirements are two problems the Finnish Ministry of Education wants to address over the next few years to level the playing field for Finnish PhD graduates in the international job market. Completing a PhD in Finland takes a lot of Sisu. Sisu is a Finnish word which cannot be translated into any other language, but the recent movie with the same title can give you an idea. Wikipedia defines Sisu as extraordinary determination in the face of extreme adversity .In the “old times”, drugs were discovered based on their effects while not knowing their mechanism of action. This paradigm is more and more turned on its head. Researchers try to understand the mechanism that leads to disease before they start developing or finding a drug. Much of Khushbu’s thesis is about better understanding the mechanisms that govern the action of the primary lymphangiogenic growth factor VEGF-C: The evolutionary origin, activation, and potential as a drug target . Prof. Eckhard Lammert did a great job as the opponent, and Prof. Kari Keinänen did the same as the custos. Dear Khushbu , we wish you all the best for your next big project!

Bad vibes from the new tram

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Our showers were banned from use due to the new tram line running in front of my workplace, the Helsinki University Viikki campus. During the trial runs of the tram, I noticed cracks in the changing room’s wall and the showers. I reported these cracks sometime in February to our janitors. Apparently, the structural damage includes the wastewater pipes, and that’s why we can’t have showers anymore. That is a bummer, especially in the summer. To my understanding, the condition of the university buildings had been documented before the construction of the tram line started. Now the investigation is underway to determine whether the additional damage was caused by the construction or the trial runs (and who has to pay for the damage repair).Since I either cycle or run to work, I need to take a shower every morning. My morning routine has become more difficult since the replacement showers have no place where I can hang my wet clothes and towel for drying. While this causes some inconvenience, there will be more serious consequences if there is a causal connection to the tram operation: The university has expensive research equipment, which is sensitive to vibrations. It is incomprehensible how the top university administration could have agreed with the city of Helsinki to run the tram line directly in front of the University building. In fact, the tram now makes a detour to go along Viikinkaari. The more natural and shorter route would have been about 200 meters South of the current track (along Viikintie), avoiding all this trouble. In order to build the tracks directly in front of Biocenter 1 and 2, millions of additional Euros were wasted on vibration-dampening elements to protect our high-end equipment from vibrations. And perhaps all that money was wasted if it should appear that the efforts were insufficient.

Inflation of Finnish postal service prices

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Finnish Postal Service (“posti”) justifies the sharp rises in letter postage prices with the sharp decline in letter volume. On the other hand, the volume of parcels has been compensating for the decline in the letter business. Notwithstanding their lucrative parcel business, Posti has also kept increasing prices for parcels. Unfortunately, equally neat statistics for parcel prices are impossible to assemble because Posti has constantly been changing the pricing structure. If you ask me, they also did this to obscure the price increase. With the last increase (19.04.2022), they, e.g., lowered the maximally allowed weight for parcels. Other previous changes include the maximum parcel dimensions and buying from the post office (versus the web), which has become significantly more expensive.The above graph shows the prices for the so-called “ikimerkki”. The ikimerkki is a stamp that pays for a regular letter up to a weight of 20g. This stamp has no fixed value but pays for the service also after future price increases. The pricing structure has also been changed a few times for letters, but much less so than for parcels. The last significant change was in 2017 when the postal service abolished the difference between priority and economy transport for domestic letters (the above statistics were assembled using the pre-2017 prices for priority letters).

Innoopeli Prize 2022

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We - the steering group of the International Master’s Programme in Pharmaceutical Research, Development and Safety - received the Innoopeli Prize 2022 !The Innoopeli Prize is given for a significant contribution to teaching in our Faculty. Although biased, I think the award is well justified since we offer many new courses, update existing courses, and translate courses from Finnish into English. It’s been heavy lifting, but we can already see some results in the form of really smart and engaged students, which we managed to recruit!From our programme director Leena Hanski: “In January 2021, we started the work as a steering group, with no learning objectives, curriculum, admission criteria, or even website, not to mention a single decision on practical arrangements for running the programme. We still have plenty of work in front of us, but I am convinced we can keep up the pace and make this programme a great place to polish the future stars of pharmaceutical research, development and safety. Our first set of students has been a great source of inspiration and motivation for many of us, and I also want to specifically thank them for their openness and willingness to share their stories, thoughts and expectations.”

Winter cycling is not for the faint of heart

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Helsinki planned to make private car ownership unnecessary by 2025 . In the image, you can see reason no. #534 why this won’t work: The streets and pavements are kept snow-free in winter, but the bicycle roads are made for storing snow and parking cars. Cycling to the city center is always a pain, but in winter, it’s only for suicidal masochists. About every 50 meters, you encounter an obstacle that requires utmost alertness and creativity to bypass unharmed. Helsinki city center is dying as a result of Covid-19. Good so! The less I have to visit it, the better. The cycling conditions South of Sörnäinen are prohibitively appalling, with the only exception of the 1.3 km long baana between Kiasma and the edge of Ruoholahti (where I rarely need to go). Transport and food are the two biggies when it comes to the responsibility of the individual for global warming. Consequently, Helsinki - a pioneer in sustainable urban development - will increase ticket prices for public transport next year to encourage people to switch from car to bus or metro.

Bioactive VEGF-C from E. coli without in-vitro folding!

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Our article Bioactive VEGF-C from E. coli has been published in Scientific Reports. Read here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-22960-0.As a matter of fact, I did the first experiments expressing VEGF-C in E. coli in 1999, but never got active protein. In the following 15+ years, we exclusively used eukaryotic cells (yeast, S2/Sf9/Hi5 insect cells, CHO) to produce VEGF-C. We reactivated the “VEGF-C in E. coli” project a few years back and we finally reached our goal last year. However, it was much more work than we originally anticipated. In the beginning, all attempts went South, and to rescue the project, we developed an in-vitro folding protocol. It was perhaps more luck than ability that we stumbled upon a combination of solubility tag and redox-modified E. coli strain that can pull off the trick to produce directly bioactive VEGF-C without the need for an in-vitro folding step. We decided to include also our unsuccessful attempts (CyDisCo and periplasmic expression) in the results section to avoid the file drawer effect.

Putin wants you to drive fast and much!

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I drive rarely, and these days, I rent when I need a car. This summer we decided to spend a two-week vacation in a cottage at a lake in the middle of the Finnish forest. You need a car if you want to get around in the Finnish countryside. Public transport might be working well in the Finnish capital Helsinki, but it is for all practical purposes absent from the Finnish countryside. Filling up the tank of our rental car cost me more than 150€.Given that I could fill up the same tank for less than 75€ still a year ago, I expected that people adjusted their driving habits to save energy, the planet, and their wallets. But I was mostly wrong.Driving slower and driving lessEverybody, who has not been living under a stone, knows that the most efficient driving speed is somewhere between 50 and 90 km/h. The air resistance increases with the speed. This increase is not linear, but exponential. By speeding, you save a minimal amount of time by wasting an incredible amount of energy. Even though most drivers complain about the horrific gas prices, hardly anybody seems to adjust their behavior either by driving slower or by driving less. I would like to know what the reason is for this paradoxical behavior, it’s inexplicable to me. I know that some drivers like to drive fast (I belonged to this category when I was 18). But hey: then you should shut up and just pay for the “fun”!Infantile requests for state subsidiesSuddenly, people who usually defend our market economy are calling for state intervention to lower gas prices. WTF? Just because for the first time you realize that you yourself are subjected to the powers of demand and supply you forget your free market values and call for state intervention. The only way to solve the problem of rising gas prices is to trust the market. Unfortunately, in many countries, the governments are exactly acting against all experts’ advice and are artificially trying to lower gas prices, e.g. by lowering taxation (e.g. France, Austria, Netherlands). That keeps the demand artificially high, further widening the gap between supply and demand, which was causing the high prices in the first place.

PhD thesis defense about hepsin's role in breast cancer

Sun, 24 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Last Saturday, Denis Belitškin defended his Ph.D. thesis. The topic was The role of type II serine protease hepsin in breast cancer signaling . I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion with the opponent Karin List , which happened over Zoom with only a small real-life audience. Proteases have slowly become one of my favorite protein classes. In the old days, they mostly were appreciated for their degradation function, but it is meanwhile clear that they are much more complex. My own interest is their role in the activation of signaling molecules. In this context, proteases are signaling molecules, playing at the same level as hormones, cytokines, and growth factors. Thanks, Denis for a convincing performance and the karonkka!

Best poster award for Khushbu (annual GeneCellNano flagship meeting)

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, with a delay of 2.5 years, the GeneCellNano flagship partners finally met for the first time in real life. This meeting was overdue, and there were many very interesting talks among others from the Finnish Red Cross (about cancer immunotherapy) and UPM Biomedicals (about their biocompatible cellulose products). Lots of new ideas and some concrete plans for further collaboration. We participated with two posters, and - a bit unexpectedly since the project is still in its infancy - Khushbu Rauniyar from our lab won the best poster prize. Congratulations!

University helpdesk recommends Zotero, but does not provide meaningful support

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

With the end of last year (31.12.2021), the University of Helsinki discontinued licensing its default bibliographic software tool RefWorks . Strangely, you cannot license RefWorks as an individual. That means when your academic affiliation ends, there is no way for you to continue using the software. Perhaps, the current owner of RefWorks (Clarivate) will kill it completely because RefWorks is a direct competitor of Endnote , which is the reference management solution that Clarivate is focussing on, given Endnote’s integration with Publons and the Web of Science (WoS), which is best known for its Impact Factor . Not coincidentally, Clavivate is owned by Thomson Reuters, which is the company that litigated against Zotero for offering its users the possibility to convert proprietary EndNote citation style sheets into the interoperable and standard CSL format . The recommended replacement for RefWorks is Zotero . I have no problem with this since I like Zotero and have been using it as my default bibliography management tool for now more than 10 years. On top of the fact that it is free, it combines two important features, which make it unique and superior to commercial solutions:

Northern lights everywhere

Sun, 13 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Northern lights seem to be normal these days in Helsinki, Finland. The frequency and visibility of the Northern lights are directly correlated with the 11-year solar cycle. It has been known for many hundreds of year that the number of sunspots waxes and wanes in a cyclic fashion with an average time of about 11 years.Even though we are far from the maximum of the solar cycle (which is predicted to be sometime between 2023 and 2026), the number of observable Northern lights in Helsinki seems to be increasing. Maybe the Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel was not entirely correct in predicting that cycle 25 would be similar to cycle 24. So far, the number of sunspots is well above the predictions . Cycle 24 was by the way the weakest cycle since cycle 14 (which peaked in 1906).An unpleasant and dangerous side effect of a strong solar activity is a coronal mass ejection (CMEs). A CME happens when the sun spits out large amounts of sun plasma (hundreds to thousands of billion tons). Such ejections happen during the peak of the solar cycle a couple of times per day, but during the solar minimum once every couple of days. Because these CMEs are directional, most of them more or less miss our earth. The magnitude of coronal mass ejections (CME) and thus the intensity and visibility of the Northern lights at lower latitudes is not dependent on the solar cycle, but the frequency of such events is.A big CME can become problematic because it can interfere with our electric grid. A couple of smaller grid outages have already occurred over recent years (e.g. in Denmark and in Canada) as a consequence of smaller CMEs. It is assumed that a big enough CME might be able to take down the electric grid of most of the planet. During the period 2010-2020 (encompassing much of the weak solar cycle 24) the probability of a large CME had been estimated by scientists to be around 12% ( https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2011SW000734 ). The last big CME happened in 1859, and it is known as the Carrington event after the astronomer who first detected it. During the Carrington Event, the “Northern lights” could be seen as far south as Colombia (8° North of the equator; https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06365).Our problem is not that all electronic devices will stop working when a Carrington-size solar storm hits the earth. Rather a few important but difficult to replace pieces of infrastructure will be knocked out. This might initiate the falling of dominoes eventually reaching every aspect of our life. If the CME is big enough, Covid-19 will appear to have been a walk in the park. Even small solar storms can sometimes cause trouble: The same solar storm that caused the Northern lights seen in the image (from Thursday 10th of February) knocked out 40 of the 49 most recently launched SpaceX satellites for good.

Happiness or life satisfaction?

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

No pressure to be happy

Finland is perhaps the only country in the world where you can be yourself. If you don’t have a reason to smile, you don’t have to smile here. Especially in the US, everybody wants you to be happy. After all, the persuit of happiness is written into their constitution! At times, people might even feel offended if you don’t show outwardly that you are cheerful and positive. In Finland, there is no social pressure to be happy. Maybe that lack of pressure makes you a little bit happy, too…

Finding the annual return on investment (ROI) for assets at OP bank

Sun, 09 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I am a customer of the Finnish OP bank . Like many other people, I had more leftover money than normally during the coronavirus pandemic. And like many others, I also invested some of that money into the stock market. I do not follow the stock market, but at the end of the year, I want to know how my investments performed: I want to know the annual return on investment (ROI) or the IRR (internal rate of return) for my whole portfolio and also for my individual stocks.

Meet the teacher!

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Almost 30 years after starting my academic career, I started to teach at the Faculty of Pharmacy (without much pedagogic experience and education). Mostly, I teach stuff that I have real-life research experience and expertise with: Recombinant DNA technology, genetic engineering, protein production and purification, and - most notably - protein drugs. Following the University of Helsinki motto Researchers teach, teachers research . Despite my lack of experience, I was part of the Helsinki University “Meet the teacher!” feature, which is aiming at the prospective International Master’s students: https://www.facebook.com/HelsinkiUniversity/posts/10160122296028083

Language boost

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I am having a new attempt at learning Finnish! Until very recently, my career has progressed in Meilahti at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki. After the Research Fellow period financed by the Academy of Finland, my career prospects at Meilahti were meager at best, as almost all vacancies require good Finnish or Swedish language skills. In Finnish medical schools - unlike in many other study programs - you have to be able to teach in Finnish or Swedish. In other EU countries, there are many universities where you can study medicine without knowing a word of the local language, but Finland does not (yet) recruit foreign students for medical degrees.Before I started to study at the university, I was already once in similar language trouble. In the autumn of 1989, when the political changes in Eastern Europe made free travel possible, I decided to visit Hungary. My interest in Hungary originated from several Hungarian friends of mine, who were living in exile in former West Germany. When I arrived in Hungary in the spring of 1990, I did not speak a single word Hungarian. However, none of my Hungarian friends ever spoke anything to me but Hungarian. I remember with particular fondness Tomi and Timea and all their family and friends who patiently listened to my ramblings and corrected grammatical errors in my speech. Learning Finnish in Finland is different. Why does nobody want to put up with my bad Finnish? I have come across the idea that Finnish people are not used to foreign accents. I don’t subscribe to this explanation. The former Eastern European countries were at the time also isolated and linguistically homogeneous - in much the same way as Finland. Is it perhaps because nowadays nobody seems to have time for anything? In the autumn semester, I took part in a Finnish language course offered by the University of Helsinki. The course was part of the language boost (kielibuusti) project. Studying languages takes time. We always wonder how young children are so good at learning languages, but we forget that they are learning full-time. The Finnish language course has certainly affected my other work, and for this reason, I fully understand those foreign researchers who do not even waste a single second learning Finnish.As far as learning Finnish is concerned, I think the problem is not so much with the course offerings, although they could be better. The problem is rather that you don’t get to exercise your Finnish in real life because there is always someone around who - for very good reasons - doesn’t know Finnish or doesn’t want to learn it. In my own lab, all the native languages of the lab members - including Finnish - are minority languages. And without exception, all the people I talk to speak excellent English. It takes real effort to use any other language than English (that also applies to my own mother tongue, German). One of the goals of the Language Boost course was to get ourselves a language buddy, someone with whom we could communicate regularly in Finnish. After half a year, I am still without a language buddy. Although the teachers on the course were excellent, two hours of Finnish a week is unfortunately not enough.I know several researchers who have come to Finland from abroad and who speak excellent Finnish. However, most of them have family ties to Finland. Therefore, they have had to deal with Finns who do not speak English. They were forced to learn to speak Finnish. The same thing happened to me in Hungary 30 years ago: most people did not learn English at school. We had only one language of communication, and I used it all day long in all situations.This post was inspired by Reetta Vairimaa's article "Claudia and Celia" in the magazine Yliopistolainen (1/2018), which unfortunately is not available online.``Here is another aspect of the problem: There is simply not enough time to study Finnish for most foreign researchers. Compared to their native counterparts, they have already a higher workload even without learning Finnish. Building up a network - both professionally and privately - is lots of work. The numbers of Finnish learners at universities (20-30%) that were mentioned in this Acatiimi article ([Too few people study Finnish or Swedish](https://acatiimi.fi/2022/02/07/too-few-people-study-finnish-or-swedish/)) sound very high to me. I know lots of foreign researchers but very few of them have substantial knowledge of Finnish (but perhaps that is only true for Ph.D. students, which are overrepresented in my distorted view).

Competing with immigration country heavy weights

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There are about 10-11 Mio. foreigners living in Germany (12/2019) which is about 13% of the population. On top of this, there are 1.4 Mio refugees (statistics) .The new German government has serious plans to ease work-based immigration to Germany. There is hardly any country in Central or Northern Europe, which has not recognized the need to import workforce. Germany has experience with importing workforce. In fact, the 13% number feels low to me, but many of those foreigners that have entered Germany a long time ago have meanwhile German passports. Over the last centuries, there have been several massive waves of work-based immigration to Germany (the last major one between 1955-1975 mainly from Turkey and Italy). Perhaps that’s why you get the World’s best döners and pizzas not in Turkey or Italy, but in Germany (New Yorkers might disagree concerning the pizza).For me, it is unbelievable that the question of work-based immigration is even asked these days in Finland. There is no expert who disagrees that Finland needs work-based immigration*. Not in the future, but now. The problem is that Finland seemed to have competed successfully for being the least attractive place for work-based immigration in Western/Northern Europe. I am not talking about the weather (yes: the cold and dark are occasionally a PITA), but I am talking about the bureaucratic hurdles that even highly educated foreigners have to face when they want to come to Finland. Some progress is being made (e.g. students’ residence permits can be now as long as their studies last), and the current government’s goal is to double the rate of work-based immigration. But in the competition for the workforce, all other European countries up the ante. In order to be remotely competitive, much more has to change as Tuula Haatainen wrote in a recent opinion piece for the largest Scandinavian daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat . Unfortunately, the present system does not serve the industry well as another opinion piece from an affected entrepeneur demonstrates.*Experts who claim otherwise let their ideological biases trump their expertise. Because of their conflict of interest, their opinion should not count. It’s only an opinion; unbiased experts have the facts on their side.

Cycling to the airport

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Helsinki international airport is located about 14 km North of our apartment. Actually, the airport is not located in Helsinki, but in its Northern neighboring city Vantaa. Already on my last conference trip before the pandemic I had decided not to use the taxi, but instead to cycle to the airport. This was easier said than done for two reasons:1. There is not dedicated parking space for bicycles at the airport. The whole concept of an airport seems to be built on the premise that nobody ever cycles to the airport. I was asking the Finnavia customer service and they suggested the bicycle parking space of the Hotel Hilton Airport .2. While there are plenty of bicycle roads, the road signs are so infrequent, wrong or missing, that it is impossible to find your way without using the navigation app from your mobile phone. The situation gets worse if you make the trip in the dark which is almost guaranteed since most of the planes leaving to and arriving from continental Europe do so in the early morning or late evening.However, I have cycled to and from the airport three times by now. Every time I try to find my way without the Google Navigator, and every time I loose my way. One problem with the voice navigation is that the Google navigator cannot pronounce any Finnish road names. Another problem is that Google maps are simply not kept up to date. Due to the constant construction, many of the suggested routes are impossible to ride. And it’s not fun to stop every 500 meters and pull out the phone from my pocket, rip off my gloves in order to use the touch screen, which does not react properly because it is raining cats and dogs.The problem with missing and wrong road signs on major bicycle roads is apparently wide spread. A similar impossible area to navigate for cyclists is the Helsinki Central Park. If you know Finnish, you can read about it in the daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat ( https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/art-2000008227424.html ). The story is about the futile attempts of a Finnish politician from the Greens Party, who tried to cross the Central Park by bike. Despite millions of Euros being poured into updating the park’s road signs, help from the indigenous population is apparently necessary to make it from one side to the other without getting lost. I always calculate 2 hours for the 14 km ride, which would be enough for me to make it even by foot - provided I do not get lost. I have not found the bicycle parking space of the Hilton Hotel yet. I will have another try next time…

Kilometrikisa

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Kilometrikisa (“kilometre competition”) is a cycling competition for workplaces, which aims to encourage bicycle commuting and cycling in general. Team members record their daily cycled distance on the website https://www.kilometrikisa.fi and the team with the most kilometers wins. Additional prizes are raffled between all participants (I actually for the first time got lucky this year and won a free massage at UniSport ).There is a summer competition, running from May to September, and a winter competition (“talvikilometrikisa”), running mostly throughout January and February. Do not ask me why there are no spring and autumn events. I have been riding throughout all year for the last decade, with the exception of winter 2012/2013, because I broke my leg when cycling home from work. For me, October, November and December as as good cycling months as January and February. Actually they are better because due to global warming they tend to be snow-free in the recent years. If you commute early in the morning, before the snowplough has removed 30 cm of fresh snow, you know that you will get stuck many times, even with the 57-622 Schwalbe Ice Spiker Pro tires.My performance in this competition has collapsed since my lab moved from Biomedicum in Meilahti to the Biocenter 2 in Viikki, because my commute has shrunk from 14 km/day down to a meager 4.5 km/day. I still score very high on the list when it comes to the number of cycling days (109 for the last season), but according to the cycled distance, I am just slightly above average (place 58 with 1031 km). Our team (“Helsingin Yliopisto”, University of Helsinki) placed 143th this year in the competition for big workplaces.I am always wondering whether the total amount of cycled kilometres and the number of participants are increasing over the years, which should be the case if we are serious about combatting global warming. The first kilometrikisa event was held in 2014, so there is enough data to see trends. Unfortunately, the website does not give this information. It would be possible to scrape it and calculate it from the individual results, but I have enough other things to do atm. Maybe sometime in the future.

Web tools to learn Finnish

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Tools for learning Finnish

https://deepl.com DeepL
https://presidencymt.eu/#/text
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/sanastorm?hl=en
Not for Finnish: https://conjugator.reverso.net/conjugation-english.html

How attractive is Finland for international students?

Sun, 29 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One apology upfront: All the links in this post are to Finnish sites, demonstrating one of the problems that foreign students face in Finland: a language that doesn’t resemble any other European language (apart from Estonian and Hungarian, which also belong to Finno-Ugric language family ).Foreign students are generally having a good time in Finland. Although not everything is perfect, the University of Helsinki (and Finland in general) is worth considering when you want to study abroad. This is the bottom line from a feedback survey among more than 800 international students from the years 2020 and 2021. Especially the high quality of the teaching was appreciated. Other points in which Helsinki University excelled were the safe environment and the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.However, the latter has also a downside, as more encounters and discussions with the academic staff were on the wish list of the students as well as more social support. This is hardly surprising given that international students cannot fall back on the same networks as the locals when they arrive in the country. The worst single issue appeared to be the reception of the students. Arriving and dealing with an unknown and incomprehensible bureaucracy is often too much for newcomers. Discrimination was only experienced by 4% of the respondents and among them, language discrimination and loneliness were the most common.I always warn students who tell me that they plan to apply to the University of Helsinki. You want an honest opinion on whether to start your studies in Finland? Ok: It can get pretty cold and it will get REALLY dark in the winter. However, Helsinki is still one of the more livable places when it comes to the cold and dark season. It rarely gets below 0°F (-17.8°C), and being on the South coast it’s also one of the least dark places. And global warming is doing its best to increase the temperatures. Finland is already the insider’s bet for long-term real estate investments: still cheap enough, but with extreme growth potential once climate change converts Southern Europe into a smelting furnace. However, these scenarios will fully realize only the current political decision-makers have already kicked the bucket. But if you are in for the long haul, Finland might be THE place to be. But again, if the gulf stream collapses, you’ll be thrown back to square one. Thank your parents for the mess they have left you ( https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/05/climate-crisis-scientists-spot-warning-signs-of-gulf-stream-collapse ).Unfortunately, as good as Finland might be for studying, staying in Finland for good is a different story. Even though Finland needs to boost immigration to make up for its declining and aging population, there are still unfortunately too many hurdles to overcome before settling down becomes a realistic option for most foreigners. The language is only one of them, others being mentioned in a recent article in the largest Finnish daily newspaper (Helsingin Sanomat) are the difficulty to become integrated into the Finnish society, the for foreigners incomprehensible bureaucracy, and the low salary levels. But also growing resentments towards foreigners within the Finnish population, manifested in the success of the “Finns Party” (formerly known as “True Finns”), are not helping. Most other European countries also fight with right-wing political currents. In my home country Germany, the AfD (roughly equivalent to the Finns Party) is not considered by any of the democratic parties as a possible coalition partner (wishful thinking on my part?). But here in Finland, the Finns Party has been already in a coalition government, and only the social democrats and the leftist coalition have a clear “no” position in this matter.Just recently, the newly elected major of Helsinki Juhana Vartiainen commented on the attractivity of the Finnish labor market for foreigners:“A miserable failure on Finland’s part. The political consciousness has been very slow to even grasp that we need labor immigration at all.” ( Helsingin Sanomat, 28.08.2021 ).But all that aside, academic teaching is at a very high level. And it is free for EU/EFTA residents (and holders of qualifying degrees from those countries). For paying students, the tuition fees are a bargain compared to many other universities that play in the same league (between 13000 and 18000 Euros per year, depending on the study program). However, the university staff will have to pay a high price to maintain this quality. For the current decade (2020-2030), the ministry of education has the goal to increase the number of completed university degrees by 100000 ( https://www.acatiimi.fi/4_2021/15.php ). At the same time, the university budget has been cut. The government will probably compensate for the cuts in a media-attraction gathering “rescue the university” move to distract from the fact, that we need dozens of millions on top of this to provide the same high level of teaching for those 100000 additional degrees over the coming years. At the research level, academic staff has been fighting an uphill battle since 2005, when the inflation-adjusted budget for R&D decreased for the first time. But meanwhile, students start to feel the lack of sufficient funding e.g. when their teachers simply do not have anymore the same amount of time for them as they used to.I have no other choice than to advise students against an academic career in general. Most other European countries have similar problems, but perhaps not at the same level as Finland. And the students know that academic funding is especially bad in Finland .

Where the Soviet Union was conceived

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We did a bit of historic sightseeing in summer. In July we went for a city vacation to Tampere, the third biggest city in Finland and the biggest Scandinavian inland city. Tampere has a very industrial history and some important decisions influencing world history have been made here, such as the decision to found the Soviet Union. The latter took place when Lenin and Stalin met each other for the first time in 1905 in the Tampere Worker’s Hall, which today hosts the perhaps (?) only Lenin Museum in the world. Finland was an autonomous part of the Russian Empire at the time and enjoyed more freedom than perhaps any other part of the Empire. For that reason, many of the early communist leaders operated out of the Grand Duchy of Finland.

50 cucumbers and counting

Sat, 03 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Pandemic + staycation = balcony gardening. While our tomatoes are all still green, the cucumber harvest has started about 2 weeks ago. So far, we have harvested 50 cucumbers, 25 of them today. There is at least the same amount still hanging on the plants. Last year, the cucumbers got infested early in the season with spider mites and we harvested only very few. The only thing I did differently from last year is that I included fertilizer with every watering. I tried two different biological fertilizers, but they did not fly for two reasons: the nettle-based (fermented) fertilizer was so stinky that we could not use the balcony for three days after I had applied it. The second fertilizer I tried was worm tea, a byproduct of our worm farm . It is essentially odor-neutral, but our worm farm is too small to produce enough fertilizer for the cucumbers and tomatoes, which both have high nutrient demands. So I used essentially only the Biolan liquid fertilizer and I am happy with it. It contains apart from the usual NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) also a lot of microminerals.

Master's Programme in Pharmaceutical Research, Development and Safety

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The University of Helsinki is expanding its repertoire by offering a new International Master’s Programme in Pharmaceutical Research, Development and Safety . The year 2020 has shown how immensely important pharmaceutical science is for human societies. And this importance will only grow in the future! Besides emerging novel viruses, there are many challenges in front of us. The list below is just a start…* *

Why Finland should take on more debts

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The financial deficit of the state has been rising steadily since the financial crisis of 2007/2008. So it is incomprehensible that the same parties that are responsible for the growing state deficit are now arguing AGAINST taking more debts. The Corona-caused increase in state deficit might be much higher than the increases in previous years, although until Q3/2020 I see no change in the rate increase, yet.In order to have enough money to keep the country alive through the pandemic, the state SHOULD take on new debt. Anybody arguing against new debts (be it national debts or integrated into a European solution) MUST present a feasible alternative plan. In my opinion, all possible alternatives are much worse than taking on new debts. Comparing the state budget to a private person’s budget is not fair. As a private person, you cannot continuously increase your debts. But a state is not a private person as it has many more financial tools at its disposal than any private person. That is even more true for the EU and the European Central bank.What alternatives do we have to increasing the state financial deficit?InflationInflation is already part of the EU strategy to handle the increased debts. This doesn’t reduce the nominal value of the debts, but their real value. In a high inflation environment (NOT hyperinflation, but something like 5%, which was a quite “normal” inflation rate in my home country Germany in the early 1970s, 80s, and 90s), the state can easily reduce its debts. There are two problems with this solution: 1. The European Central Bank has not even managed to reach its 2% inflation target despite trying for many years. 2. In the long run inflation is not a good solution, because it increases the advantage of those who own substantial tangible assets (real estate, shares, precious metals, etc.). If you have the majority of your savings in the stock market, real estate, precious metals or other tangible assets, you do not need to be afraid of inflation. On average, all these things will maintain or even increase their value during times of high inflation. However, those without tangible assets cannot compensate for the inflation. The number of those that need to be supported by the state will rise, thus money will be spent anyway (but just after a delay). Inflation also worsens the wealth gap: The rich get richer. The poor do not always get poorer, but the rich get richer much faster than the poor and thus the income gap is widening. For the same reason, the poor did not profit much from the financial rally at the stock markets which has lasted now for more than 10 consecutive years. So what are the alternatives to increasing the budget deficit?Higher taxesReally? We already have a fairly high level compared to many other countries. But from whom do you want to take? You only can take money from those who have money. A dedicated tax for the rich is a question of definition. Who is rich? 99% of the population would not oppose increasing taxes for the 1% of the population that profited most from the bull market of the last 10 years. There are many more millionaires today in Finland than still 10 years ago. Most of these people have skimmed the cream and it seems appropriate that they would contribute back to a country that has enabled their success. While this sounds very leftist, most people would probably consent, if they only agreed with what the taxpayers’ money is spent on. Close to nobody in this country would oppose investing into the future, into better infrastructure, better schools, research and development, etc. But as long as this remains a pain point, higher taxes can be only a tiny part of the solution.Reducing spendingThis is essentially the same issue as the previous one. Wait, it’s actually even worse because we started from the premise that we need MORE money to get the country through the pandemic. Being too hesitant and not spending enough is considered to be the reason why Europe did not recover as quickly as the US from the 2007/2008 financial meltdown. Unfortunately, there are some signs that the same mistake is about to happen again.**Four possibilities: Inflation, higher taxes, spending cuts, new debtsThe problem won’t go away by sticking your head into the sand, but it rather will get worse. Austerity policy is the opposite of investing in the future. We have an investment deficit, which has built up in Finland over the last 15 years. We have it in education, in digitalization, in research, and in infrastructure.At the moment, new debts are the only possibility. Debts are cheap (actually with negative interest rates, the state even wins when taking on more debts). Even Germany got rid of their black-zero policy. Finland should not be Europe’s wrong-way driver. For this reason alone, it would be stupid to be the exception. And - dear Finns Party - it is an illusion that any country can exit the Euro-zone at this moment. Instead of arguing whether or not to take new loans or lamenting the ever-increasing public deficit, we should discuss how to use the money wisely. We should be using it with the goal to increase the GNP sustainably in the long term.UPDATE: One day after writing this, the major Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat was publishing a story which was discussing very much the same issues: https://www.hs.fi/visio/art-2000007843750.html

Eduroam installation on Linux

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This morning it took me an hour to get Eduroam working. Eduroam is the international WLAN roaming service for university students and staff. I brought in my (non-university managed) laptop to work and tried to get connected. I finally found the instructions on the IT Helpdesk site on place place 19 (from 21 results shown on the first page when searching for “Eduroam Linux”): https://helpdesk.it.helsinki.fi/en/instructions/logging-and-connections/networks/installation-eduroam-network-on-ubuntuAs usual, the instructions are from many years back and no longer work on a “recent” system such as Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. On top of this, I had some old, dysfunctional Eduroam settings lingering around from a previous failed attempt. For the instructions below, you will need the Eduroam configuration tool, which you can download from https://cat.eduroam.org . To make it work, I had to do the following things:

Cycling during the Finnish winter

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Finally, snow has arrived in Helsinki! So far I was using my summer bicycle and it does not look nice. My daily commute has only perhaps one kilometer of dirt road, but during the mud months, that’s enough to undo any cleaning in a few seconds and to remove any lubrication from the chain. The mud months are nowadays in Helsinki at least three - thanks to global warming: October, November, and December. Cyclists who advise cleaning one’s bike weekly have just too much time on their hands… Most of the bicycles that are sold are not really built to be used all-season and I am still looking for something, that is really low-maintenance also during the mud months. And I am getting worried about the amount of chain lubrication that I distribute into the environment. I have heard that some cyclists are using biodegradable chain saw lubricant, and I will probably try that out.

GeneCellNano Flagship

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The GeneCellNano program was selected as an Academy of Finland Flagship. The idea behind the flagship is to make progress in the treatment of important diseases using advanced biologic technologies. Target diseases include ischemic heart disease, selected cancers, and retinopathy. The application was spearheaded by Seppo Ylä-Herttuala from the University of Eastern Finland and Seppo Vainio from the University of Oulu. In addition to groups from these two universities, the consortium features also groups from Aalto University (Olli Ikkala) and the University of Helsinki (groups Marjo Yliperttula, Timo Laaksonen, Hélder A. Santos, Tatu Lajunen, and my own).Link to the Academy of Finland press release: https://www.aka.fi/en/about-us/whats-new/press-releases/20202/academy-of-finland-selects-four-new-finnish-flagships/

For Science to Finland

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When you think about going abroad to learn or do science, you mostly think of Anglo-American countries. Although still very attractive, the US and England have been losing some of their appeal. Staying in Europe is not anymore a dead-end for your scientific career. Finland is certainly not on the top of the list when looking at potential European destinations. However, especially among students, Finland gained a reputation as an insider’s tip for exchange periods abroad. Among these, German students form the biggest group, followed by French, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian students. Most of these come via the European Union-sponsored Erasmus exchange program. I recently wrote a guest blog on Claudia’s Helsinki about coming to Finland as a scientist. The blog post is in German, but its bottom line can be summarized in one sentence: there are several scientific areas, where Finland does world-class research. And Finnish universities are increasingly offering international study programs (mostly M.Sc. and Ph.D. programs). These study programs have a tuition fee, but if you come from an EU country (or the degree you apply with is from an EU country) you are exempt from the tuition fee. See what M.Sc. and Ph.D. programs are offered at the University of Helsinki: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/admissions/explore-our-international-masters-programmeshttps://www.helsinki.fi/en/research/doctoral-education/doctoral-schools-and-programmes

Medical research in Finland

Sun, 11 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Want to become a researcher in Finland? Why not? At the University of Helsinki , there are quite a few professors from German-speaking countries. Increasing the proportion of foreign researchers is an explicit goal of all Finnish universities. As far as the quality of academic research is concerned, Finland ranks in the middle of the pack in Europe. Only one of Finland’s 10 universities ranks among the world’s top 100: the University of Helsinki (74th in the 2020 Shanghai Ranking ). In contrast, four German universities make it onto the list, which is otherwise dominated by Anglo-American institutions (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Technical University of Munich, Heidelberg University, and the University of Bonn, ranked 51st, 54th, 57th, and 87th, respectively). It should be noted, however, that these rankings represent an average across all of a university’s research fields.

University Pedagogy (UP2.2, 2019): Assessment of Learning and Giving Feedback

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Becoming a qualified teacher in FinlandThe degree requirements for the 60-credit module in University Pedagogy (UP) consist of 25 credits of basic studies and 35 credits of intermediate studies. Although UP focuses on teaching at the university, the completed module qualifies you also for teaching at schools. The Pedagogy Center of the University of Helsinki organizes the courses of the basic study modules (25 ECTS credits) in English. However, if you want to complete the whole module, you will need to take courses which are only offered in Finnish or Swedish. That means you cannot become a qualified (“pätevä”) teacher without knowing Finnish or Swedish. I do not know whether my Finnish is meanwhile good enough to be able to do that. For the time being I stick to the courses taught in English.**University Pedagogy 2.2 (2019)**In the 2019 autumn term, I took the UP2.2 course (without taking UP2.1 first). We had a very nice teacher (Jokke Häsä), but I still don’t understand why he switched from doing Mathematics to teaching Pedagogy. Certainly a gain for pedagogy since he understands the statistics and we had some interesting forth-and-back about the statistics of the Johnston & Miles paper that we were reading. They paper is also attached to this post and the reporting about their statistical methods leaves much room for interpretation. I actually sent an email to the first author, but she had just retired a few months ago. Although I did not get an failure-of-delivery error, she perhaps did not anymore feel the need to respond.Blind flyingFor me, one of the biggest issues was, that I had nothing to compare too when I was preparing my assignments. When I am writing manuscripts for journals, I have thousands of examples which I can study and to which I can compare. So I decided during the course that I would make all my assignments public. Embarrassment included. But maybe some future participants of UP2.2 will have something to compare to. Sort of an exemplar. Not perfect, but passable. I only post my own assignments.**All my assignments available under CC0 (= no strings attached)**All this stuff is shared under the CC0 : Use it as you wish, no need to acknowledge me. The group assignment is the only thing missing here since I would need to get everybody’s green light, which is not going to happen. I should have done this 9 months ago, but I simply forgot. There was just too much other stuff happening.I did ok in the course, but I still don’t know anythingWhat grade did I get? Our group assignment got a 5 (on the scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is the best grade) and my own stuff a 4. Thanks to all the great members of team Carbonara! That averaged out as a 5 for the whole course. For some strange reason, the Moodle course page still shows that I only completed 66% of the course assignments, but WebOodi shows that I received the credits. So much for the wonders of our IT systems…

Nudossi, what else?

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I do not know exactly when Nutella appeared on the shelves of Finnish super markets. However, I remember clearly that when I first moved to Finland in 1989 to work at Rajamäen kalkkitiilitehdas, the quintessential German bread spread Nutalla was unknown here. However, guessing from its two main ingredients (sugar and palm oil), Nutella is a heart-attack in a jar. In Germany, there is a slightly more expensive, but massively better product available: Nudossi. It’s like Nutella, but instead of a meager 13% nuts, Nudossi has 36% hazelnuts. Although I had promised to myself to minimize my use of Amazon (see here why: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/21/is-amazon-unstoppable) , I ordered a big (1 kg) jar of Nudossi during the corona spring. However, when I clicked “Order this again” in summer, I received the dreaded “This article cannot be shipped to the selected address. You can either change the delivery address or delete the item from your order.“While Amazon can be life saver for niche products that never will reach a peripheral market like Finland, both Amazon’s own and their seller’s bottom line is profit and not to serve the customer. Luckily, often, but not always, these two goals go hand-in-hand. However, this was not the first time that I only once was able to order an Amazon product, after which Finland promply disappeared from its list of possible delivery destinations. I have the feeling that some malevolent AI is behind this pattern.What did I do? I ordered it directly from the Vadossi factory ( https://www.vadossi.de/shop/kategorien/nudossi/ ). Although the factory’s web shop did not explicitly mention shipment to international destinations, I had not problems to arrange this via email. On top of this, the final price was much below what I would have paid at Amazon.de.I know that Amazon will open an Amazon.se to serve the Scandinavian market and they also have already bought a warehouse in Finland ( https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hs.fi%2Ftalous%2Fart-2000006611380.html ). But given their malevolent AI, I probably should continue to minimize the amount of my orders.

Dr. Sawan K. Jha: Mechanism of VEGF-C Activation […]

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My first Ph.D. mentee successfully defended his thesis on the topic Mechanism of VEGF-C Activation and Effect on Lymphatic Growth and Regeneration . Due to the COVID-19 situation, we organized the event remotely and used the Zoom virtual meeting software. The opponent was Prof. Jonathan Sleeman from the University of Heidelberg. Both the defendant and the opponent did a fantastic job, and the discussion brought to light several new directions for future research, which I had not been thinking about before. VEGF-C is a tricky protein and I am sure it still holds some surprises for the diligent researcher. Unfortunately, there was no reception, no dinner, and no karonkka (after-dinner graduation party), but we are planning to have a party later this year when the COVID-19 situation permits!

Lymphatics and the eye

Wed, 12 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Our shared review about the eye lymphatics has been accepted for publication by Duodecim . In addition to review our current understanding about the eye lymphatics, it focuses on proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR). PDR is the advanced stage of diabetic retinopathy, which is one of the slowly developing complications of diabetes and which can result in blindness.It has been known for a long time that damage to the blood vessels in the retina is a central event in the disease development. Antiangiogenic therapy, targeting the major angiogenic growth factor VEGF-A, is a cornerstone of the therapy. However, the recent discovery of lymphatic-type vessels in the disease indicates, that it might be helpful to target also the lymphatic growth factors VEGF-C and VEGF-D. This is my first contribution to an article that is written in Finnish. While I even wrote some of the sentences in Finnish myself, big thanks go to Ani and Timo for weeding out the mistakes. However, my take-home message for similar future endeavors (i.e. writing with a team where key members are not very proficient in the target language) is that one should write everything first in English and then have it translated into the target language. If common languages are concerned, the best tool for the automated translation of scientific articles is DeepL . However, DeepL does not know Finnish, and adding Finnish is certainly not high on the developer’s priority list…

HSL indirectly increases ticket prices

Thu, 16 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

According to the news, the most popular point of sale for HSL tickets (the R-kioski chain) will start to take a commission for loading travel cards. Travel cards are the RFID cards that you need to use Helsinki public transport.However, in reality, this is a hidden price increase, because HSL decided in 2019 that they will stop paying their distribution partners a fee for their service of loading the travel card. No commercial enterprise can offer services for free, hence this is an indirect price jump initiated by HSL.According to changes mandated by the law, HSL had to start competing the sales of their tickets. However, in their call for tender, HSL announced from now on not to pay any commission to any of their distribution partners. This was entirely their own decision, and hence, it is justified to regard it as a covert but deliberate price increase. Besides, there is not much information about these service fees. I could neither find any specific service fee lists from the S-group nor from the K-group. Only R-kioski’s information was easy to find and concise: R-kioski: kausi: 3.5% of ticket price, max. 5 €; arvolippu: 1€/kpl, kertalippu/vuorokuasilippu 3€ 40 cents.The K-group (K-citymarket, K-market) had announced that the fees would range between 0.5-2€, but still, as of today, I could not find more specific information. I even contacted the S-group, but - typically for such companies - they take their time. I would be surprised to get a reply within a week. Considering the big picture, the negative aspect of making environmentally-friendly transport more expensive is dominating the small improvement of increasing the amount of POS for HSL tickets.Read about it in Finnish in Helsingin Sanomat: https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/art-2000006355404.htmlRead about it in English on the HSL pages; https://www.hsl.fi/en/news/2019/hsls-ticket-sales-network-set-expand-beginning-next-year-18242UPDATE (01.07.2020): Meanwhile the number of HSL-operated ticket vending machines has increased. These machines support topping off the balance of your travel card WITHOUT taking a commission. Additionally, you can also now (something that had been promised for years) top off your balance online . The system has still lots of bugs (according to HSL still about 1% of transactions fail), but hopefully HSL will work out these kinks over the next few decades.

Bullying from the top

Fri, 22 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Some numbers from the Nature 2019 graduate survey ( https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03535-y ) are discomforting. Very few of the respondents were from Finland, and therefore the aggregate from Finland has to be taken with a grain of salt. But every single incidence is one incidence too much. What worries me most is a) that bullied PhD students in Finland feel that they cannot speak out about their experiences without repercussions, and b) that bullying from the top might be more prominent in Finland as opposed to bulling from peers (if one includes other academic staff into the “top”). One student reportedly experienced bullying from the programme director (which falls under “other”, which was not separately listed by Nature in the graph). Numbers do not add up to 100% due to rounding and multiple mentionings.

University of Helsinki loses court battle about lawfulness of 2015 mass layoff procedures

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In 2015, the University of Helsinki sacked around 370 of its employees (and did not prolong temporary contracts of perhaps as many). Many survived only because their contracts did not end around the time when the “central committee” of the university administration overreacted when they realized how bad the university’s financial situation really had become. About 10 years of conservative financial austerity culminated in the spring 2015-elect government led by Finnish businessman Juha Sipilä, who was jointly responsible for the massive funding cuts that led to the massive layoffs at the end of 2015.Last month, a Finnish district court ruled that the layoffs had not been legal in the sense that the University of Helsinki did not adhere to the Finnish law on several accounts (" Yhteistoimintamenettelylaki ", in English something like “Act on Collaboration in Businesses”). Notably, the court rebuked the university for its information policy and their lack of attempts to negotiate alternatives to the layoffs. This was exactly the feeling of most employees at the time: The central administration had cooked up a “solution” in some backroom meetings without consulting any of the stakeholders, and then it carelessly pushed this solution regardless of the consequences.The compensations that were granted to the plaintiffs were 5000 or 6000€ depending on the length of their employment. One can argue about the pros and cons of the US-American legal view on compensations (which aim at deterrence rather than compensation), but even for a financially challenged University, 64000€ (including 35000€ legal costs and 29000€ compensation to the five plaintiffs) will neither help the plaintiffs very much nor deter any university from repeating such actions. And judging from the response, the university’s central administration does not agree with the view of the district court, that the procedure did not follow the law.The largest Scandinavian daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported about this case: https://www.hs.fi/politiikka/art-2000006245821.html and also many other magazines, e.g. http://www.acatiimi.fi/6_2019/12.php .

PoGo

Sun, 22 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you are looking for the identity of PoGo players MarMiJe or JelMicMar in order to organize an exchange or a raid, just e-mail me at michael@jeltsch.org ! Although PoGo was touted to be a community game, it is paradoxically not possible to send any messages to friends within the software itself. That is not a problem for those friends that are part of your real life, but how can you contact a best friend from another country, with whom you have exchanged presents every single day for 3 months?

Finnish abstract of our recent work about PSA (Prostate-specific antigen) in Duodecim

Sun, 25 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

There is a nice Finnish language abstract about our recent finding that PSA (Prostate-specific antigen) activates VEGF-C and VEGF-D in the Finnish medical journal Duodecim: Eturauhassyövän merkkiaine PSA aktivoi syövän leviämiseen osallistuvia veri- ja imusuonikasvutekijöitä ( https://www.duodecimlehti.fi/lehti/2019/15/duo15024 ). Given the dominant position of the English language in medical science (and life science in general). Duodecim is arguably the only relevant, remaining Finnish language medical journal. Duodecim is the publication of the homonymous Association of Finnish Medical Doctors.

Protein Purification Course 2019

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We are again hosting the DPBM protein purification course this December in our lab. Secure your place as this practical course is popular and there are only 16 seats. You can bring your own protein and we will individualize the course program based on your needs!More information: http://research.med.helsinki.fi/corefacilities/b3p/teaching.htmlRegistration : https://courses.helsinki.fi/en/dpbm-135/131042336

No quantum leap towards a car-free city

Fri, 14 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The public transport company of the Finland’s capital region (HSL) has moved to a new fare system . The system was previously based on the city borders. This was unjust: A one-kilometre trip cost you more than 4 Euros if it happened to cross a city border while a 20-km trip (e.g. from Lauttasaari to Vuosaari) might have been only 2.2 €. Now the capital region is divided into concentric zones around the city center of Helsinki and the fare is determined which and how many zones you are entering during the trip. The trips are paid with an electronic travel card, which can be loaded with “time” (weekly, monthly or seasonal ticket) or “value” (to pay individual journeys).Insignificantly cheaper for most, but not allThe implied promise was that the system does not get more expensive, but this is obviously not true for everybody. For those people that use single tickets, the rise is noticeable. The price of a single ticket within the AB zone rose from 2.2€ to 2.8€ which is more than 27%. On the other hand the ticket is now valid for 80 minutes (instead of 60 minutes) and the region that can be travelled with the new ticket has expanded (mostly into the Western direction to Espoo). However these additional improvements are relevant only for a limited number of customers since the bulk amount of journeys stay within 60 minutes and within the Helsinki area of the AB zone. Moreover, the single tram-only tickets have been abolished. These tram tickets were much cheaper then the regular tickets that entitle you to ride any type of public transport. There are several media stories about the loosers of the ticket reform in the Finnish press, e.g. at Talouselämä: https://www.talouselama.fi/uutiset/hsln-lippu-uudistuksen-haviajat-ratikkamatkustajat-kolmannen-vyohykkeen-kautta-kulkevat-ja-vain-helsingissa-matkustavat/703ca51a-c6b8-3b71-9804-9f35ad89eeaa . PromisesMy own public transport expenses have been sharply rising (by about 25%) as I primarily used single tickets within the Helsinki part of the AB zone. This wouldn’t be a big issue if HSL had kept its promise to offer a substantial discount on users that keep the auto-renewing subscription ticket valid for a year or longer. However, I cannot even find this promise any more on the HSL website. When I asked the customer support of HSL, they told me that they are working on the implementation of such a discount, but they cannot say when it will be ready. This reminded me of the previous fare system update, when HSL promised to introduce a supplementary ticket for owners of monthly tickets valid within Helsinki in order to extend its range without the need to buy a full-price ticket for the whole greater Helsinki Region (“seutulippu”).No quantum leap towards a car-free cityWhile overall perhaps a tiny step into the right direction, the fare-system renewal is far from an attractive offer for car drivers to become public transport users. Much more courage and bigger steps are needed if Helsinki seriously wants to make private car ownership pointless by 2025 . For families with children living in the C zone, the car is even financially still too competitive compared to public transport (ABC ticket for 2 adults & 2 children for one year: ~3500€).

Apply successfully to the University of Helsinki

Sun, 28 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

What are my chances to be accepted into a Helsinki University Master’s Program?

This differs greatly from year to year and between the different programs. The admission rates for most individual programs have been anywhere between 5% and 40%, with popular programs like Environmental Change and Global Sustainability or Economics at the low end and e.g. Forest Sciences and Theoretical and Computational Methods at the high end.

ChemBio Finland

Thu, 28 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The biyearly ChemBio Finland event at the Helsinki Fair Center is taking place on this week’s Wednesday and Thursday. I presented our key project at the booth of the Academy of Finland ( http://www.aka.fi/fi/akatemia/media/Ajankohtaiset-uutiset/2019/tervetuloa-suomen-akatemian-osastolle-chembio-messuille/) . Many people showed up to listen to our work on how to move in-vitro antibody generation technologies into the 21st century using synthetic biology and Crispr.

The battle between the big publishers and the scientific community

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I participated in last week’s Townhall discussion Mikä on avoimen tiedon hinta? (“What’s the price to access knowledge?”), which was precipitated by the recent discontinuation of Finnish universities’ access to journals published by the Tyler & Francis group. Mikael Laakso introduced the audience to the open access issue and the problems of rising prices, and Arja Tuuliniemi reported about the ongoing negotiations with Tyler & Francis and the Wiley group. While publishers like to portrait themselves as the researcher’s friend and ally, fact is that most of the scientific publishing industry is owned by big multinational stock market-listed corporations, which primarily answer to their share holders and researchers needs play a secondary role in the best case. While one would think that electronic publishing is driving down the prices of publishing and accessing published material, the reality shows exactly the opposite.In the current situation, where many Finnish universities are struggling with shrinking budgets, these millions of Euros could be spend better and the FinElib consortium is constantly trying to negotiate fair deals with publishing giants like Elsevier, Springer, Tyler & Francis, Wiley and SAGE . If the negotiations do not yield results before the old agreements expire, Finnish universities are sometimes cut of from access to some journals. This has happened now again (after a similar crisis in 2016). At the beginning of February this year journals published by the Taylor & Francis group have been inaccessible for Finnish researchers. Plans S (i.e. the initiative of the European Research Council to mandate open access for all state-funded research by 2020) is certainly strengthening the negotiation position of the FinElib consortium, because all European customers are essentially lining up their requests according to the Plan S requirements. However, it is still unclear how Plan S will affect smaller, not-for-profit publishers like scientific societies ( https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/12/06/why-society-and-not-for-profit-journals-are-worth-preserving-better-economic-and-continuing-value-for-the-community ). My personal opinion is that there is no reason to panic. A similar shutdown of Elsevier access happened at the beginning of this year (2019) at all Max-Planck-Institutes and and seems to be tolerated by scientists quite well. Even though I might not be able to instantly access all content, this situation should be rather viewed as an opportunity. You can still access all the content that you need (perhaps with extremely rare exceptions).

Mounting group directories via the fstab

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At the University of Helsinki, one can apply for group directories, which is simply disk space on a NAS. These are easily mounted when you use a university-managed computer via the university menu, but what about if you use your own machine? At least for Ubuntu Linux, the way to mount these directories has changed multiple times during the years and it again broke recently. The current entry in the /etc/fstab file in my (Vanilla, non-university-managed) Ubuntu 16.04 is as follows:# HY group directories//group2.ad.helsinki.fi/h204 /home/local_username/GROUP-drive cifs noauto,user,user=hy_username,nobrl,uid=1000,gid=1000,file_mode=0666,dir_mode=0777 0 0Then you can simply execute “mount /home/local_username/GROUP-drive” and you will be asked for your HY password. The number 2 and the string “h204” in the server address (group2.ad.helsinki.fi/h204) are specific for the cost center which is in this case H2042 (taking the first digit from the cost center string and first four characters from the cost center string, respectively).And here are some instruction on how to do it manually on a Macintosh:https://helpdesk.it.helsinki.fi/en/instructions/saving-and-sharing/group-storage-space/remote-access-home-and-group-directory-mac

Sourdough whole wheat bread

Sat, 09 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Traditional Finish bread is made from rye and sourdough. This requires expertise, especially when you follow the “purist” approach and only use whole rye flour, water, salt, and sourdough. Most rye bread that is produced for commercial sale has not been baked by these purist rules. Different from rye, wheat is much less problematic when it comes to baking. However, the reputation of wheat has recently suffered due its high gluten content. This is mostly unjustified because a high gluten content of wheat was one of the major goals of hundreds of years of breeding. Not only is gluten a protein (and therefore important in a grain-heavy diet), but wheat gluten is especially gluey and thus maintains the structure of the bread.I have some 30 years experience with baking wholegrain wheat bread using yeast as raising agent. But last week, I did challenge myself with preparing a sourdough bread. Not yet rye, but wheat sourdough. I prepared the sourdough myself. I added some yeast and yogurt at the beginning hoping that they would keep the bad bacteria away until the good microorganisms have settled in. Although we own an electric grinding mill, I mostly have bought flour for my baking so far because I find the price for wheat grains unacceptable (>2.5€/kg). Luckily I have finally found a farm, that is directly selling wheat grain for a very competitive price and that is (almost) reachable by public transport from Helsinki: Krannin Tila . The result of my experiment was not bad. Even my biggest critics - my kids - did eat the bread (however only when it was oven-fresh). Its taste reminds me more of rye bread than of wheat bread. I guess it is more important how you bake the bread than whether rye or wheat is used.And here is the recipe:

Finland: Paradise for cross-country skiing

Sun, 03 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At the moment, Finland is a paradise for cross-country skiing. Lots of snow and thousands of kilometers of cross-country ski-tracks (in the capital region almost 1000 km, most of which are easy to reach by public transport). A 13 km circular track starts just in front of my apartment at the old city district (Vanhakaupunki), and the picture for this post has been taken from this track. My sister Claudia maintains an excellent blog about Helsinki ( https://claudiashelsinki.com ) which mainly targets tourists and her last blog post featured cross-country skiing in Finland (and specifically in Helsinki). Her blog is very informative for everybody who wants to visit Finland and specifically Helsinki. However, Claudia writes in German ( https://claudiashelsinki.com/2019/02/02/langlaufparadies-helsinki-und-finnland ), but of course, there is Google Translate, which makes the information available, albeit it sometimes hurts: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fclaudiashelsinki.com%2F2019%2F02%2F02%2Flanglaufparadies-helsinki-und-finnland%2F

Internationalization in everyday operations at Meilahti campus

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Meet the rectors at MeilahtiLast Thursday (18.10.2018), the new rector of Helsinki University Jari Niemelä and the four vice-rectors (Sari Lindblom, Paula Eerola, Hanna Snellman, Tom Böhling) visited the Meilahti campus for an open question and answer event. Hardly any foreigners were present during the event. Consequently, the language of communication was Finnish. Obviously, foreigners won’t participate if they do not understand and speak the language of the event. And since foreigner’s don’t participate, there is no reason to change the language of the event, and so the circle continues… Traditionally Finnish and Swedish onlyThe Meilahti campus holds a special position when it comes to language use since until very recently, it was impossible to receive a degree from Meilahti without knowing Finnish or Swedish since the only degree programs were not offered in English. However, the situation has been changing (e.g. with the move of the Psychology Department to Meilahti and the establishment of new degree programs like TRANSMED ), but old habits die hard. Trailblazers RPU and HiLIFEThe trailblazers for internationalization at the Meilahti campus are the Research Programs Unit and HiLIFE. The postgraduate students and postdocs of the Research Programs Unit (RPU) and the HiLIFE recruitments are the two most internationalized parts of the Meilahti campus and consequently, Hannu Sariola (previous vice dean for research at Meilahti) and Tomi Mäkelä (the HiLIFE director) brought up the topic of internationalization pointing out that the rules of the university allow for more language flexibility than is actually implemented. To date, the only official languages at the University of Helsinki are Finnish and Swedish, although more English-speaking than Swedish-speaking students are enrolled. English is also the de-facto language of almost all scientific endeavors. Balancing the domestic languages with English likely has no perfect solution. If the university wants to optimize its international impact and success, the role of Finnish and Swedish inevitable has to decline unless massively more resources become available.**Separate events?**In order to engage the foreign staff as well, the dean of the faculty recently organized the faculty staff meeting twice: once in English and once in Finnish. I am not sure whether such separation is a long-term good idea, but it addresses the issue pragmatically and gets the job done. If someone suggested separating the faculty X-mas party according to language, that would be considered discriminatory, but for a working meeting, nobody seems to object…**PS:**I am not the only one who is aware that internationalization has a long way to go. There is a nice article on the Helsinki University intranet portraying the new vice rector Hanna Snellman and her take on the issue: https://flamma.helsinki.fi/en/HY377022 . However, the university keeps most of its interesting web content behind locked doors (inside their Flamma service), inaccessible to the general public, who is paying the university’s bills… What does the university fear? More transparency?

International Vascular Biology Meeting 2018 organizational feedback

Wed, 20 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As member of the local organizing committee for the IVBM 2018 , I was asking conference participants for direct feedback. I received lots of praise, which I do not want to iterate here. If we are ever going to organize a large international conference again, here are the things that we should do differently next time. Maybe this list can also help other first-time organizers of large, international conferences. If this list gives you the impression that the conference was badly organized, you would be mistaken! All the important stuff worked smoothly and some of the issues below were solved before any of the participants noticed. However, there is always room for improvement of the details! And - as always - some of the issues were out of our control as we had outsourced some of the work, most notably to Confedent International . And some decisions were a compromise between the optimal and what the conference budget could accommodate. I also encourage you to contact me if you want to add something to this list; it could make things better in the future!

IVBM 2018 & 2020 (poster, talk, and virtual poster walk through)

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

IVBM 2018The International Vascular Biology Conference 2018 in the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki has been a big success so far. We received lots of positive feedback for the organization from the participants. Also my talk (“Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Proteolytic Processing of VEGF-C”) and my poster received good attention.Below the poster as a PDF download.IVBM 2020The IVBM 2020 in Seoul, South Korea, moved completely online. Unfortunately, some talks are only available for a very short time (one day), and I missed already a few of those. A physical conference has the advantage that it makes sure that you can pay full attention to the event. An online event has to compete with many other issues that are trying to grab your attention.

Jeltsch Lab participates in Helsinki Running Day 2018

Wed, 23 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Our lab participated in the Helsinki Running Day with great results! The “Biomedicum Runners” marathon relay team: Sawan Kumar Jha, Timo Lehti, Khushbu Rauniyar, Rustem Kasymov. Individual performances by Zalina Magomedova, Michael Jeltsch (both marathon) and Alish GM (5k). Missing from the picture is Alisha GM.

Strike at the University of Helsinki

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A strike warning has been issued for tomorrow (28.2.) for the University of Helsinki. The reason is that the negotiations about between the employers and employees about the wages and working conditions are stuck and the strike is used as a means to speed up the movement of the employer’s negotiation position towards an acceptable compromise. Business as usual? After all, there hasn’t been a strike at the university for a very long time…While almost everybody agrees that Finland’s future is built on knowledge and innovation, the appreciation of the very people that are generating knowledge and innovation seems to have hit an all-time low if appreciation is reflected by working conditions and payment levels.I guess the underlying cause is not so much the concrete offerings of the employer (or the lack thereof), but the disregard and disrespect for academic education, research, and development that has been growing over the years, accelerated by the 2015-elect government, which refuses to invest into the future. Universities should not behave like companies trying to maximize their profit on the cost of their employees and the quality of their product. With some exceptions , everybody with a little bit of self-respect is participating. All major unions, including the students’ and professors’ union, are supporting this action. Apparently, professors will go on strike for the first time in the history of this country ( https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finnish_professors_walk_out_in_first-ever_strike/10095355 ).

Running on the Baltic Sea

Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

For a change, I did my running training last weekend on the Baltic Sea. After two weeks of Siberian cold here in Helsinki, I reckoned that the ice cover on the Baltic Sea was thick enough to be safe for running. That’s one of the few attractions of the Helsinki winter. If you want to get to know more about Helsinki and Finland, have a look at my sister’s blog. Unfortunately, the blog is in German, but maybe I can convince her to make it bilingual: https://claudiashelsinki.wordpress.com/

Remote desktop sessions to your Helsinki University work computer

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

If you have a work laptop, you can take it home to do work. But what if you have a desktop computer and need to access it from home? The technology to make this possible exists for more than 20 years, but if you think that University IT has made this easy for you, you would be wrong. In fact, I don’t know anybody who knows how to do this (let alone how to make the process easy). Even with the setup explained below, some things do not work well (e.g. I never could figure out how to get the file sharing to work with a Mac-to-Mac connection and thus I still use Fugu with a separate tunnelled sftp connection to transfer files). You have several options:

Brain drain from Finland continues

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Finland is educating its citizens to a very high level, but is not able to keep this highly educated work force in the country. The net balance of university degree holder migration has been negative throughout the last decade and the trend is worsening, especially at the Bachelor’s and Master’s level. At the highest level, the interpretation is not very straightforward, since this group contains Licentiate* holders, PhDs, postdocs as well as professors. However, the negative trend is also stable, but not accelerating as fast as at the lower education levels. In this group the brain drain occurs selectively to the best countries with just 5 top countries absorbing 66% of the most highly educated migrants (USA, Great Britain, Switzerland, Germany and Sweden), while the lower degree holders are not as selective (52% of MSc and 41% of BSc holders migrate to the same top countries). Unfortunately, this statistic only reports the migration of Finnish citizens. In order to get a complete picture, one would need the same data for the migration of non-Finnish citizens. For this graph, the data from Statistics Finland was used ( http://www.stat.fi/til/muutl/2016/02/muutl_2016_02_2017-12-18_tie_001_fi.html) . All countries were grouped according to better or worse scientific output than Finland in the comparison (Nature Index, Weighted fractionalcount, https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/All/global/All/weighted_score) . Countries that performed better thanFinland in 2016 were: USA, China, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, France, Canada, Switzerland, South Korea, Spain, India, Italy,Australia, Netherlands, Israel, Sweden, Singapore, Russia, Taiwan, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Brazil, Poland.* Licentiate is a degree specific to Finland and a several other countries, which is somewhere between a MSc and a PhD. In Finland, it has been decreasing in importance over the years since there is no equivalent in many other countries.

20th International Vascular Biology Meeting in Helsinki, Finland

Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The 20th International Vascular Biology Meeting 2018 (IVBM2018) will take place in Helsinki, Finland on June 3-7. Registration has opened ( https://b3p.it.helsinki.fi/IVBM/ ) and I hope to see you in Helsinki in June! I have been living here in Helsinki for about 20 years, hence feel free to ask me anything! If I cannot answer, I at least know who knows the answer.

Acatiimi article about our lab

Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

However - unlike in the previous story - this time there is a group image, showing who does the real work!

TRANSMED - the most medical research education for your buck

Sat, 25 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from this autumn term, even Finnish universities, so far the strongholds of free education, have started to demand study fees from students from outside the European Union (EU) and European Economic Area (EEA). Between 13k€ and 18k€ per year, the tuition fees are still modest compared to some other universities. At the moment, compared with other universities, you probably get the best returns for your money at the University of Helsinki .The TRANSMED Master’s Program is perhaps the best example. Given the real costs of a research-oriented medical MSc education in a world class environment, the 15k€ tuition fee per year is a bargain compared to similar programs at other universities. And even better: the chances to be accepted are surprisingly good. Some have proposed to increases the fees, but no concrete plans exist at the moment.So what is keeping foreign students from flocking to Finland? The cold winters cannot be blamed anymore. Thanks to global warming, most of the recent Christmases have been snow-free here in Helsinki. In fact, global warming seems to hit Finland harder than most other countries. Need more reasons to come? Have a look here: http://www.visitfinland.com/article/greatest-things-about-finland/

Featured again…

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, our research seems to get lots of public interest: https://50tieteentekijaa.fi/tieteentekija/michael-jeltsch/ . And there is more to come… It would be nice if our government would show a similar interest in science and education. And it would be even better if they had a reasonable plan how to secure the future of science and research in Finland. The government spending for some research areas (in other words the investment into Finland’s future) has been shrinking so dramatically, that even the tabloids have picked up the topic: http://www.iltalehti.fi/kotimaa/201710122200451078_u0.shtml

Our key project featured

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Our key project was featured in Tietyssti.fi . Katri Pajusola wrote the story and (at least from what I understand from the Finnish text) it seems to be a quite accurate description of what we try to do: http://www.aka.fi/fi/tietysti/luonto-ja-ymparisto/nyt-pinnalla1/tautien-hoitoon-laakitysta-ei-ainoastaan-diagnostiikkaa/

The Heart Beats on the Left

Fri, 15 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The heart points to the left and most people’s heart is about one-third right, two-thirds left. I just joined the Finnish Social Democrats ( SDP ). I had seriously contemplated joining the German Socialdemocratic party (SPD) in 1994, but I happened to leave Germany because of a DAAD scholarship I received. Shortly after I had moved to Finland, Germany managed to get rid of its conservative government. Gerhard Schröder replaced Helmut Kohl as federal chancellor and started moving things which Kohl had been afraid to touch for 16 years. I think a country, in which the son of a cleaning lady and a single mother can work up his way to become head of the government, is principally ok.A major reason for joining the SDP was also my dissatisfaction with the present Finnish coalition government, that stubbornly keeps refusing to invest into Finland’s future: into the education of our kids. The cutbacks in the budgets from kindergartens to universities show an unprecedented ideologic egoism for a short-term balanced budget, which is unprecedented among all Scandinavian countries.The good thing about the SDP (and the German SPD) is that there is more room for different opinions than in most other parties.

About the agility of large organizations

Thu, 15 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A decade for the switchI don’t remember exactly, but the idea to deploy a decent content management system for the entire web presence of the University of Helsinki is probably 10 years old. I had reserved the domain jeltsch.org in May 2003 (after I had completed my PhD) to host my private web site. The oldest snapshot of my web site on the internet archive dates back to December of the same year. Like the Helsinki University IT staff, I realized that updating a web site by updating individual html pages is very time-consuming. In 2006, I was - exactly like the University of Helsinki IT services - looking for a content management system (CMS). At the university, they used Dreamweaver to generate the html pages; I used whatever text editor I had available. After comparing different options, both Helsinki University IT and myself came to the same conclusion to chose Drupal as the content management system for our web sites.Moving to DrupalMoving to Drupal (version 4.6) took me a few weeks, but in the end of 2006, my first Drupal site went online. Starting from that time, adding content to my web site became very easy. I avoided upgrading Drupal and skipped version 6. As I had anticipated, the upgrade to version 7 caused me a major headache (upgrading is supposedly much easier nowadays). Moving to drupal took the University of Helsinki many years, but finally in 2016/2017, the move was/is happening. Barack Obama was much faster: in the autumn of 2009, hardly half a year after he had become president, the switch of whitehouse.gov from a proprietary solution to Drupal was complete.*Is Drupal 7 old?*Here at our university, dead lines must have been moved multiple times and similar to the Western Metro Extension to Espoo , the move likely became much more expensive than planned. The university is using at the moment Drupal version 7, which was relased more than 6 years ago in January 2011. While Drupal 8 is already out since November 2015, the good new is that Drupal 7 remains officially the Long Term Support (LTS) version and thus will receive security updates for many years to come (I would guess for at least five years or so). About 85% of all Drupal sites are still running Drupal 7 and apparently, this number has not shown any signs of decline yet .The move is not complete yetI moved my lab’s web pages in the beginning of this year when the possibility was made available. However, our B3P core facility still runs on “handwritten” html code as we have not gotten permission to move these sites to Drupal (IT is waiting for the HiLIFE research infrastructure funding decisions).Meanwhile, 2.3% of all web sites worldwide use Drupal.*Problems?*However, the system is not free of bugs. Owing to security concerns (PHP security is considered to be porous like a sponge), most of the flexibility that Drupal offers is not available to the content providers: e.g. full HTML or PHP code within node bodies is disabled, which makes the implementation of dynamic content challenging. Luckily, the system has an achilles heel and that is its use of RSS feeds.RSS fees to the rescueRSS feeds with user-provided URLs can be integrated into most pages and surprisingly they allow unfiltered display of html content (including images and css styles). This is the way how I implemented our dynamically updated list of enzymes ( https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/lymphangiogenesis-research-and-antibody-development/services-and-resources ) and our list of publications (which displays separate feeds from zotero.org , e.g. a list of featured publications or a list of review articles . Unfortuantely, the feed module doesn’t accept standard atom feeds, but only “old-fashioned” RSS feeeds, which required me to pipe the Atom feed from Zotero through a python script before it can be fetched by the site visitor’s browser.Varnish CacheThe other problem is that the site loads fairly slow. If visitors look for content the site must load with 3 seconds or the visitor is lost. Hopefully the site will scale well since many research groups have not made the switch yet. And it loads slowly despite it using a Varnish Cache . Unfortuantely, the Varnish Cache delays updates from becoming public sometimes for many hours (sometimes even over night). In the 21st century, that is not acceptable. I have set the maximal cache life time to 1 hours for my private Drupal site. The 3 second loading time is likely the best compromise they could find…

Barriers to Electronic Lab Notebook adoption

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Our lab has been interested in electronic lanb notebooks (ELNs) for a while. A recent publication in the Journal of Cheminformatics has focused on the barriers to ELN adoption. Especially in the academic world, more than 90% of scientists are still using the traditional paper lab notebook. Biggest barrier to adoption was the cost in terms of money and learning of new habits. Close runner-ups on places 3 and 4 were the implementation effort and security concerns. While the authors are clearly biased (they are developing the open source ELN ELN SciNote ), the barriers to adoption are the same that I experience in my lab and at the University of Helsinki.I was stunned when about 2 months ago I received an e-mail with the news that the University of Helsinki had negotiated a framework agreement with the LabVantage LIMS/ELN vendor Software Point. While I think a university-wide ELN solution is necessary, this deal seems anything but optimal for most research-oriented laboratories at the University of Helsinki. Several labs at the university are using ELNs already for a while and none of them have been aware of the efforts to provide a university-wide agreement for a LIMS/ELN solution. And none of those that already use a LIMS/ELN have been choosing LabVantage, but other solutions ( Labguru , SciNote , eLabFTW ). It would have been helpful to have somebody in the evaluation team, who has actual experience with LIMS/ELNs use (or somebody who has participated in LIMS/ELN development), especially since such expertise exists at the University of Helsinki.Only a few people have been involved in the negotiations while the majority of the stakeholders were not even asked for their input. When I asked explicitly about this secluded operation, the answer was: Very few units (mainly the chronology unit and a person from dept of chemistry) were involved with the purchase at the time even though the information was spread around the university and anyone was welcome to participate and state their needs. However, even though I try to actively follow the IT infrastructure developments, I did not see any announcements anywhere and also searching retrospectively, I could not find anything that would have alerted me and allowed me to participate. The labs contributing most to the international success of Helsinki University are the main stakeholders, but they were ignored. Maybe a little bit more active search for the stakeholdres would have been appropriate.The base package that was negotiated with LabVantage seems to be geared towards routine and clinical lab work, but not towards innovative research. Among the two modules that are mostly necessary for life science research work are the ELN and the storage management. Unfortunately, many life-science specific routines (searching for DNA and protein sequences with blast-like search algorithms) are totally absent from the offer, but are very much needed for life science. The lack of a free API (like eLAbFTW features or SciNote soon will feature) prevents users from incorporating their own, existing code or their own database systems. Every small change would require to involve the LabVantage developers and that will be a very slow and costly process. In reality, this means that shortcomings of the system will never be addressed. The base package can be taken into use by any lab at the university after a single payment of 200€ for each user (no floating licenses, only dedicated users). For our lab that would amount to 2000€, but a low price tag is not a selling point in itself.Within the framework agreement, any lab can pay for the additional modules on its own, but the heft price tag of 17500€ make it unlikely that anybody will do so. I am unwilling to lobby for a joint purchase, because there is no way of knowing, whether these modules would be suitable for everyday lab work. Unlike most other vendors, LabVantage doesn’t offer a free trial of the system. It makes me suspicious, if a vendor doesn’t offer a trial. If the product is good, a trial will convince potential customers to buy. If the product is good, what could be the downside of a trial for the vendor? We have ourselves tested several ELN solutions over the last two years and some systems received very bad feedback by those people who use them every day (e.g. cumbersome data import, unintuitive interface, slow server responses). As a matter of fact, for oligonucleotide management and protein/enzyme storage, we still use the absolutely outdated open source LIMS that I co-authored about 15 years ago as a PhD student ( http://phplabdb.sourceforge.net , now at https://github.com/mbekaert/phplabdb) . In my lab, we use eLabFTW . We have a local installation on the Helsinki University intranet (which can be accessed via VPN from everywhere) and anybody from Helsinki University can get an account there. If you are interested in trying it out, please contact me!The key question remains unanswered: Why were the majority of stakeholders not pulled into the decision-making process?

Gemstone hunting in Finnish Carelia

Wed, 31 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Last Sunday, we participated in the spring excursion of the Finnish Gemstone Hobbyists’ Society ( Suomen Jalokiviharrastajain Yhdistys ) to a spectrolite quarry near Ylämaa in Finnish Carelia. Spectrolite is a variety of labradorite , which shows a rich iridescense. The Finnish spectrolite is peculiar because of its dark base color. Strictly speaking, the term “spectrolite” applies to the Finnish variety of iridescent labratorite only. The trip was a success as we returned tired and with many kilograms of specimens.

Forever Young

Sun, 30 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I was asked by the Novo Nordisk Foundation (specifically by Dr. John Peter Wittschieben) to say a few words from the successful applicants’ perspective during the “ How to Get Funding from International Foundations ” info event, which took place on April 26th in Biomedicum Helsinki.Useful informationTo be clear: The event was very useful. Specifically it was useful due to the detailed information provided by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and JDRF , who presented during the event. In the very beginning, I was surprised to hear our Dean talk in his introduction about the “lucky ones that received the funding”. In my naïveté, I always assumed that funding was distributed according to excellence and ability, not according to luck. While more experienced researchers like Mikael Knipp were able to give good advice, I could not. Obviously, I cannot boast with my own funding rates (which are about 5%, one of 20 applications being successful).**No time for science, too much time for grant proposal writing?**Some participants expressed surprise about the current widespread complaints of researchers about low funding rates, arguing that a rejected application leads to an improved renewed application in the next round. I agree, that the improvement might be substantial for the first few rounds, but then it becomes a game of diminishing returns. I write an average of 20 grant applications in order to get one accepted, and for 15 of these, I rather agree with E.P. Diamandis, who in Clinical Chemistry complained about the $20+ billion loss due to unsuccessful application writing.**Who is a “Young Investigator?”*The other question that - interestingly - was discussed (and which I had wondered about already for years), was the term of “young investigator”. The bottom line was, that everybody is a young investigator who does not hold a full professorship. This might be the only sensible definition, as the average age of principal investigators has been steadily rising during the last decades (see e.g. here ). Many investigators will therefore stay forever young (or at least until they retire).It is difficult to be creative if you are struggling with fundingAlthough I could not convince many (maybe nobody), I objected to the notion that is is desirable to combine the goal of creativity and applicability in academic research. True creativity originates mostly from a primary motivation and utilitarian aspects actually get in the way of creativity. This is not to say, that creative research cannot be very useful. To make them an important criteria in the distribution of funds is just asking too much from the money source, namely to be able to predict the future. Creativity and the push towards “applicability/impact” of research are not only orthogonal to each other, but are pushing into opposite directions. If the research is struggling with funding, it is difficult to be creative. The basic needs for survival need to be met before people can realize their possibilities. In addition, when foundation ask for short term applicability, they appear to me like politicians, who think in terms of the 4 or 5-year election cycle. For much of academic research, we cannot predict its future uses. In addition, potential applications are mostly MUCH more than 5 years into the future. If the push towards applicability results in shifting the balance from basic towards applied science, the pipeline (basic research > applied research > engineering) will dry out from its source. Maybe this push towards applicability will also accelerate the blurring of the lines between the traditional universities and the universities of applied sciences. *I have to side with Marx this time: Nicht das Bewußtsein bestimmt das Leben, sondern das Leben bestimmt das Bewußtsein.

Finland still safest country for travellers

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In the 2017 Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index , Finnland scored in the global comparison rank 33 (11 places lower than two years ago ). However, Finland managed to keep its top position in the safety and security category. When looking at the raw numbers, the reason for the drop in competitiveness is not so much a worsening of the Finnish performance, but the improved performance of other countries, including Sweden and many non-European countries like Mexico, Malaysia or the United Arabic Emirates. Spain, France and Germany placed 1st, 2nd and 3rd, respectively, in both the 2015 and 2017 comparisons.

Overrun by the Big Wheel?

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Despite focus on internationalization English information about education reform incomplete and lateThe Big Wheel reform is rolling over me and I don’t notice it. There has been some information in English about the process on the University’s intranet . However, during the drafting, most of the documents were initially only available in Finnish and due to the delay caused by translation, foreign staff without English language proficiency was largely excluded from the process. Loosing this input was certainly not helpful, since several goals of the Big Wheel reform are related to internationalization, e.g. harmonizing the degree structures within Europe (“3+2+3 system”) and making the degree programmes internationally attractive and competitive.Excellent students potentially excluded from studying at our UniversityConcluding from the application numbers for the Master’s programmes that’ll start in September 2017, there is still much work to be done to make the programmes “internationally attractive and competitive”. Virtually all programmes reported a decline in applications from Non-EU/EEA countries, which probably will result in much less income from tuition fees than the university would like (Master’s thesis tuition fees at the University of Helsinki are between 13000 and 18000€/year depending on the programme). We probably loose potentially excellent students and there is a diffuse suspicion that the general level of education might suffer. 30 scholarships of varying amounts are available for Non-EU/EEA students. However, only about 10 of the recipients will be able to completely recoup the tuition fee with their scholarship (see here: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/studying/how-to-apply/scholarship-programme) . I also think that the advertisement for the study programmes could be definitely improved.Information about available scholarships: clear enough or confusing? I also fear that many potential applicants were confused about the scholarship programme (so was I, and still am). Our own Master’s programme’s web pages ( https://www.helsinki.fi/en/programmes/master/translational-medicine-transmed ) do not mention the scholarships prominently (or was that on purpose?). Even worse, the link on the Helsinki University’s pages to check whether or not a student is required to pay the tuition fee has been half dead for a while (“You can check this FAQ at the Studyinfo website whether or not you are required to pay tuition fees” (original on this page ). Hopefully it died only after the application deadline finished…Educational reform of the PhD degreeThe Big Wheel reform concerns all three degrees: Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctorate (PhD). Internationalization is especially relevant to the PhD degree and those Master’s programmes that are entirely in English (e.g. Translational Medicine or Life Science Informatics). Even though about half all PhD students in my unit (Research Programs Unit) are foreigners, hardly any of them knows what the “Big Wheel” is about. Big Wheel discussion at Meilahti campusAfter almost all is set and done, an info event about the Big Wheel was announced for the Meilahti campus (31.3.2017). The e-mail message was exclusively in Finnish. I often have given feedback when important events were not announced in English (more often than not getting no response). That’s why I wrote a message straight to the rector and the vice rector of the university. The e-mail conversation is attached below. Suffice to say that the university is still dedicated to increase internationalization despite this not being without problems…What was discussed at the hearingThe part of the discussion that happened in English was circling around the PhD education. A very valid request was not to fix something that is not broken. In the international comparison, PhD education is for the most part excellent in Finland and the only perceived problem is its length.At the moment a Finnish PhD thesis in life science requires the graduate student to publish in scientific journals. As a consequence, most of the research in Finland is done by PhD students. The exact number and quality of publications required differs between faculties as there is no formal consensus. Typical are 3-5 papers, sharing of authorship is accepted to a certain degree. Not all publications need to be first-author contributions.Finish PhD graduates are competitiveWhile a PhD from a Finnish University is internationally very competitive, PhD graduates are typically much older than those from most other countries. This begs the question: so what? The typical length of PhD studies in Finland has been generally assumed to be around 7 years. However, nobody knows exactly (not even the university itself, since tight rules to register PhD studies have not existed until recently), but there seems to be a very slow movement towards a shorter duration (and less requirements). Strong forces act against shortening of PhD studiesThe fact that the PhD studies last so long in Finland is the result of natural selection. Pushing with regulation for faster PhD education will have many unintended consequences. There are strong forces acting against shortening the PhD studies, especially for highly talented students that aim at an academic career: E.g. the relative ease to get scholarship funding during the PhD studies and the high unemployment among fresh PhDs in Finland.Age limits for PhD degrees for fundingPointed out by Kalle Saksela, a major obstacle to shorting the PhD education is the general funding situation of academic research. With every funding cycle, funding rates are pushing new all time lows. Successful applicants have a very compelling portfolio of high quality publications, which needs time to acquire. However, major competitive research funding (Academy of Finland, ERC) puts limits on applicants (e.g. “no more than 7 years after PhD completion”), which have no relationship to the quality of the application.Four yearsThe very clear message from vice rector Hämäläinen (Jukka Kola had already left the discussion, when it switched from Finnish to English) was that the PhD studies must be shortened in order to reach comparability with other countries. The target is 3+2+4 (3 years for the Bachelor’s studies, 2 more years for the Master’s studies, and then 4 years for the PhD studies). The idea put forward by the vice rector was to simply move some of the studies that are done at the moment under the PhD umbrella into the early postdoctoral period. A big question is obviously who is going to pay for this move? There needs to be a substantial increase in research funding to be able to pay salaries for postdocs unless we want to lower the overall domestic research output. Already now it borders to financial suicide to employ a postdoc with an Academy Research Fellow budget.

No interest (in retrospection and introspection)?

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

There was much talk about last years “changes” at the university. Surprisingly, nobody seems to be interested anymore in the topic. At least this is the impression that I first got, when I went to the public hearing event at the Meilahti campus. The lecture hall 1 of Haartman Institute, where the hearing was supposed to take place, was completely empty when I arrived. Because only a handful of people had bothered to show up, the hearing had been moved to a table in the nearby Cafeteria. Hardly noticed by anyone, a review group has started its work to analyze the “changes” at the University of Helsinki, which took place during the last one and a half years. I guess the idea was to figure out what preventable mistakes have been done. According to this university source , Jukka Kola, who is the public face for many of the controversial decisions during this period, got to decide himself about the members of the review group. Because of this, the review group will have to be very careful not to appear biased in their report.

1000 times too slow

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Helsinki University has outsourced parts of its IT infrastructure to Microsoft. Even if outsourcing is cheaper in the short term than generating equivalent services locally, the net effect is likely negative due to the lost jobs, know how and independence. It doesn’t need a conspiracy to explain this self-destructive behavior, just bad decision criteria, which do not include long term and externalized costs.In its push to upgrade to newer Windows versions, Microsoft ended extended support for Windows XP on April 8, 2014 and the university obeyed by denying network access to XP machines. The argument was that XP was becoming a security risk. At the same time, Windows XP accounted still for about 20% of all Windows installations on this planet ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ ). Even in October 2015, well above 100 Million computers did still run Windows XP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems and https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ ) without any catastrophic consequences.The ban of Windows XP was a problem, since four of our devices, that we need for research, are still running Windows XP. And there is no way to upgrade the OS without upgrading the equipment (which would cost thousands or tens of thousands of Euros and therefore is mostly impossible in the present tight financial situation of the university). And of course, the software that is needed to operate the devices is not compatible with Windows 7. As a consequence, we can neither remotely operate this machinery nor do automated backups. Even taking the data for analysis to another computer requires the Adidas network .I had contacted IT support well before the extended support of Windows XP ended and asked them to find a solution. Apparently there were different possible solutions and IT support did start to implement them, but because of personnel fluctuations, the project had to be “restarted” several times and different support professionals had different opinions on how to solve this problem. With the big “fire and hire” action at the university, the whole project disintegrated again. This autumn I again discussed our needs with the IT staff, but did not receive any concrete help so far.This Tuesday, I finally wanted to know how difficult it really is to connect a Windows XP machine to the network in a way that would not compromise security, but enable file distribution, backup and remote control. I went to the Institute’s garbage place where broken electronic equipment is gathered and took three old 10/100 NICs and a few ethernet cables. One card and one cable were still functioning and I dropped the NIC into a Ubuntu 16.04 computer and connected it via ethernet cable to one of the XP machines.After manually assigning an IP to the NIC and installing samba onto the Ubuntu machine, I was able to mount the samba share as a drive on the Windows XP machine. Then I just made the samba share available via a web page. All this took about one hour. Not being an IT professional, I spend maybe an additional three hours researching how to do it (samba setup, apache setup, configuration of a secondary NIC, which is not automatic on Ubuntu). This setup fulfills all of our requirements, didn’t cost anything and was implemented within one day.A write-up of the technical details will follow once I get around documenting what I did. Agility is perhaps what is mostly missing when I look at many of our university’s IT projects. Notably I think of switching to Drupal as content management system for the university’s web pages. Sadly, our faculty is still using Dreamweaver to create its web presence and as a consequence many web pages are never updated.

Key project funding

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post is inspired by our recent success in the Key Project Funding call of the Academy of Finland . One of the main time killers for scientists is to apply for money to finance their research. Scientists spend more and more time preparing grant applications because of the growing competition for the shrinking resources.After deducting the time for teaching and administration, they maybe able to spend a few hours each week doing research. Last week over lunch, a friend of mine ask me what our funding rates were. I did not know, because I have been avoiding the inconvenient truth. I calculated today and the depressing result is that they are in the low single digit range and this seems to be a quite average figure (for us, 2015 was an exceptionally successful year and the 2016 number might perhaps still improve since several decisions have not been made yet).Improving academical productivity by increasing the 1600 hours of yearly working time on paper is meaningless if 400 hours of this time are spent in vain, i.e. for unsuccessful grant applications. The financial damage and opportunity costs to the system are enormous and a colleague of my recently pointed me to this 2015 article in Clinical Chemistry , where the monetary value wasted by grant application writing was conservatively estimated for the US to be at least $20 billion per year.Our budget includes new positions for researchers, but we don’t know yet where and when these people will be able to start their work. In theory, the hosting organization (i.e. the Research Program of the University of Helsinki) guarantees the infrastructure. However, the Research Program cannot generate lab space from nothing. The university is just trying to save money by minimizing the floor space it rents. While some people celebrate successful grant applications, my view is more down-to earth: After the grant decision is before the grant decision*.*Citation modified after Sepp Herberger , coach of 1954 soccer world cup winner Germany, who famously stated “After the game is before the game.”

University rankings (and how to manipulate them)

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Whow. Helsinki University was again able to improve its position in the Shanghai Ranking and is now number 56. However, even the University’s own press release had kind of a gloomy tune as if this was the last blossom before the final decay. It is true that the basis of the current success has patiently been built by the researchers over the last decades. Nevertheless, when politicians now draw the conclusion that the cuts of the educational budget are responsible for this success, they are probably right.Perhaps the cuts actually did contribute to the surge in productivity: All the scientists that unexpectedly were suddenly unemployed obviously continued to work furiously on their current projects to get their current manuscripts ready for publication. Papers are the overwhelmingly dominant currency in the academic job market. And these unemployed scientists might publish faster than before since unemployed scientists have no teaching duties…However, more importantly, the Helsinki numbers of the individual Shanghai Ranking indicators for 2015 and 2016 differ significantly only the per capita academic performance (publications/number of academic staff) and the number of highly cited scientists. Since the job cuts at Helsinki Universities have been going on already for a while even before the massive cuts of this spring, it appears reasonable to claim, that the 56th position is partly due to the job cuts, which did influence directly and rapidly the number of academic staff.The Shanghai Ranking emphasizes research, whereas in other rankings, Helsinki has even been dropping. E.g. in the QS World University Rankings , Helsinki dropped from position 67 (2014/15) to 96 (2015/16). Between these two rankings, the QS team made “improvements” to their ranking system and these were almost exclusively responsible for the drop if you look at the data closely. They “normalized” the citation ratio per faculty according to the subject, and life science got badly punished by being a “high citation field”. Very simply put, a citation to a paper in Arts and Humanities now counts about 40 times as much as a citation to a paper in Life Science/Medicine. Each of the 5 big fields (Arts & Humanities, Engineering & Technology, Life Sciences & Medicine, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences & Management) contributes now equally with 20% to the final rating in the citation per faculty category (detailed explanation of the normalization from here: http://content.qs.com/qsiu/Faculty_Area_Normalization_-_Technical_Explanation.pdf).Why on earth do they punish a field for having a bigger impact? Papers in the humanities are not cited as much as papers in life science. Maybe this could be due to the fact that their average publication is not as relevant for their own field as is a life science publication for the life science field? I agree that there are cultural differences between fields, but who is to say how much is due to such cultural differences versus low quality or irrelevant research? Exactly that’s what QS World University Ranking’s did by making up “normalization” factors essentially claiming equal relevance.However, all such rankings are easily manipulated. E.g. the citation to faculty (member) ratio can easily improved by outsourcing services that were previously performed by faculty scientists (and that’s what Helsinki University is just doing at the moment). Similar to the impact factor for journals, university rankings are losing their relevance if the goal is to score high and not to excel at research and teaching ( Goodhart’s law : When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure).The Shanghai Ranking has been criticized much. It undervalues teaching since teaching performance doesn’t enter directly the calculation at all, and it favours big universities since 50% of the rating are based on sheer numbers which are not normalized to account for the size of the university. Nevertheless it it the only reproducible (and therefore scientific) dataset from the three big rankings ( https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-012-0801-y ) since both the QS and the Times Ranking rely heavily on opinion and reputation surveys, which are notoriously difficult to reproduce.What is the take-home message? Helsinki University is probably as good as it used to be during the last decade and the big fluctuations are just artifacts resulting from changed ranking methodologies or resulting from administrative adjustments to the financial realities brought upon us by the Finnish voters in the 2015 parliamentary elections.

Let's beat cancer together!

Sun, 07 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Sawan and me registered as “The Jeltsch Laboratory” team to the Helsinki Twilight Run , which is a charity event to support the Finnish Cancer Foundation . However, Sawan caught a summer flu and had to skip the whole event. My goal was to stay below 1 hour and I managed. There were actually more participants from the RPU (Research Programs Unit) ; I ran into Tiia and Julia. Maybe we should next year start as a joint RPU team (or whatever the RPU will be called if we really manage to change our name)?

Good leadership?

Mon, 02 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

When I started as a principal investigator at the University of Helsinki , I was advised to take the “Good leadership” course which was arranged by Personnel Training . Together with 14 other research group leaders, I learned between November 2013 and March 2014 from Sanna-Marja Heinimo and other experts i.a. the “skills for effectively developing, coaching, empowering and leading others to getting best results”.At the end of the course, we had a dinner with Jukka Kola , who is now credited for implementating the extensive (and according to many observers overboarding) cost savings that were forced upon the university by the budget cuts mandated by the prevailing political powers.I do not want to discuss here whether such drastic measures were necessary or a less extensive savings strategy would have been sufficient. Even the decision whether to save or to practise deficit spending in an economic downturn is mostly not based on facts but on ideology. In economics, fashion and Zeitgeist are at work in addition to hard data. Therefore, it is not surprising that prominent economists are holding opposing views concerning the effects of deficit spending. But I go off on a tangent here…I simply wanted to express my total disappointment. Not in the savings themselves, but in the way HOW the savings were implemented in relation to the “good leadership” practises that we have been advised to practise.The decisions were not sufficiently openly discussed. Still now, the grounds for many lay-offs remain incomprehensible and controversial (see e.g. this article in the major Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat). Since transparency was noticeably absent, the talk about good leadership by the top management of the university seemed to have been hardly more than lip service. I do not doubt that they have the best intentions in mind for the greater good of the university. Just who defines the greater good? Most oligarchs define it themselves, don’t they?So it is not surprising that in the recent workplace well-being survey, the satisfaction with the strategic leadership at the university level (rectors and vice-rectors) was at an all-time low. If the polls would be repeated now, the results would likely be much worse, especially if the fired people would still get a voice. Notably, it is not only the average employee of the University of Helsinki, who does not trust the leadership any more. My feeling is that the distrust now pervades researchers at all career stages. What future is possible with such a constellation?Google is consistently named among the best American companies to work for and they decided to spend millions of dollars and many years to research how to create the best work teams. The single most decisive factor in determining the innovation outcome, creativity and productivity of a team was psychological safety ( see this NYT Magazine article ). Guess how safe university employees are feeling at the moment.When we were talking with Jukka Kola, I was very impressed with his clear commitment towards increased internationalization at the University of Helsinki. However, I already wondered back then how realistic the goal to “actively recruit top international staff” is. Now it seems even more unlikely that this goal can be reached to a meaningful degree since universities start to experience a new wave of brain drain. Even at the students’ level, where the internationalization has made amazing progress in the last 20 years, we might see a decline with the introduction of tuition fees for non-EU/ETA students .

FPLC Protein purification course

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Eight postgraduate students registered for the FPLC protein purification course , which took place in December. If I learned anything, than that protein purification during a course should be done ALWAYS with a protein and a protocol, that has been used before successfully MANY times. Student-provided proteins are a great source for learning, but the time restraints of a course format did not allow us to finish the purification of these proteins during the course.Technical Problems with the new Äkta Avant 25In addition, the Äkta Avant 25 , that we newly purchased from GE Healthcare this summer, broke TWICE during the course. First the controlling computer broke (RAID failure). HP delivered the replacement drive within 24 hours and after the RAID had rebuilt itself, we could continue the course. However, during the first run after this incident, the Äkta ran into an overpressure problem. We identified a faulty flow restrictor as the cause, but we did not want to continue as we have had severe problems with air bubbles in previous runs. Therefore we performed the runs on the old Äkta Explorer 100 . GE Healthcare quickly had their service engineer check out the system, but since he did not have a spare with him, we had to wait until Monday 14.12. until the Äkta Avant was again fully functional.What we purified: soluble VEGFR-3 (VEGFR-3/Fc) and HepsinWe did purify soluble human VEGF receptor-3 (the first three domains of its extracellular domain connected to the constant Fc part of human IgG). This is a purification that we have done many times. It is equivalent to the purification of antibodies using Protein A sepharose.We had prepared in advance conditioned cell culture medium. We produce most of our proteins in insect cells (mostly Drosophila S2) and the VEGFR-3/Fc had been secreted by the S2 cells into the medium after induction of the metallothionein promoter with 1 mM Cu2+ for about 4.5 days. The preparation of the medium for purification consists only of 1) getting rid of the cells by centrifugation and 2) filtration to remove precipitates and other small particles that might clog the column. There is no need to adjust the pH.Rapid neutralization after low pH elution IS IMPORTANTWe ran the medium over a disposable 5-ml HiTrap recombinant Protein A column over night at about 1ml/min and eluted with a low pH buffer. The eluted 2-ml fractions were immediately neutralized with 400µl 1M Tris pH 8.5. Here we made a small mistake during one of the two purifications. GE Healthcare had not released the casettes for the 5-ml-collection tubes (they still have not done so even though they did promise them already for September 2015) and we used 15-ml Falcon tubes to collect 2-ml fractions, into which we had pre-aliqotted 400 µl of the neutralization solution. However, the mixing in these tubes was not efficient and the prolonged exposure to low pH resulted in a partial damage to our protein. This can be seen when comparing the size exclusion chromatograms of Group 2 versus Group 4: For Group 4 the first peak (aggregated protein) is much larger and more heterogenous compared to the same peak for Group 2.In fact, when VEGFR-3/Fc is eluted by low pH from protein A columns, it always precipitates at higher concentrations soon after elution, but dissolves again upon neutralization. This did not happen in the fractions 5.A.3 and 5.A.4 (Group 4) due to the inefficient mixing of elutate and neutralization buffer in the 15-ml-Falcon tube (the fraction size of 2 ml was probably to blame as well; 1 ml would have been better). During the run for Group 2, we removed the tubes immediately after the run had ended and thereby mixed the buffers, while for Group 4 the run finished during night time and the eluate remained largely unmixed until the morning.Alternatively, we could have eluted with a highly concentrated chaotropic salt at near-neutral pH (which we’ll do next time in case we have an automated run where the elution happens in the middle of the night). Pierce offers a (proprietary) “gentle” elution buffer of pH 6.6. I don’t know the Pierce buffer composiiton, but it is a highly concentrated solution of some chaotropic salt. 3M potassium/sodium thiocyanate or 4M magnesium chloride in buffered solutions around pH 7 are frequently used chaotropic salts for this purpose.HepsinThe student-provided proteins were challenging. First, their concentrations in the starting material was very low. While we can see clearly the protein when the VEGFR-3/Fc conditioned medium is run on a PAGE gel and stained with Coomassie, no such band is visible for the Hepsin. In addition, it appeared that a significant fraction of the protein seems not to contain the histag (anymore) and therefore is not captured with the first purification step. The fraction of Hepsin-H6 that does bind to the Ni2+ sepharose elutes already at an imidazole concentration of 20 mM, which makes washing the column challenging. The Hepsin with the longer histag (H10) survives the 20 mM imidazole wash, but it suffers also from low expression levels.Below are the chromatograms of the individual runs and the annoteded images of the Comassie-stained PAGE gels. The detailed protocol for the operation of the Äkta Avant 25 is still under preparation…

Know your rights

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In a series of articles in the magazine Acatiimi , Mia Weckman from the Finnish Union of University Researchers and Teachers (FUURT) was introducing the Finnish legal system and legislation concerning the work place. This series was specifically aimed at foreign new employees and written in English and is therefore one of the few sources of information if you don’t know the Finnish language. However, let’s keep in mind that paper and displays don’t blush. Many of the rules were developed and are well suited for work traditional work places but less so for academic research, which flourishes best when driven by enthusiasm and devotion and not by duty. Nevertheless, since we are far from that ideal, you should know your rights. Here are the topics and the links:

Managing OpenVPN with Network Manger

Thu, 05 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I just switched back from MacOSX to Ubuntu for work. Mostly for financial reasons. We need more computers at work and a really good PC laptop is just half as expensive as a MacbookPro or iMac. Today I wanted to connect from home to the University’s VPN network and I had a look at the instructions provided by the university.As usually, documentation was virtually absent and what was available was wrong. And exclusively in Finnish ( http://www.helsinki.fi/helpdesk/ohjeet/tietoliikenne_ja_etakaytto/yhteydet_yliopiston_ulkopuolelta/vpn_ubuntu-asennus.html) . From the image (Hardy Heron) it is clear that this page has not been updated for about at least 6 years (Hardy Heron was realased in the beginning of 2008).So what do you do if you downloaded and extracted the hy-vpn-config.tar.gz file from https://ohjelmistojakelu.helsinki.fi?First you need to install a plugin for the Network Manager: sudo apt-get install network-manager-openvpn network-manager-openvon-gnome. Then you go to the Network Manager via the icon in the menu bar on the top right of your Desktop. Below all the available wireless networks, there is an entry “VPN Connections”. Follow “VPN Connections” -> “Configure VPN” -> “Add” -> “Import a saved VPN configuration” -> “Create”. Then select the “openvpn.conf” from the downloaded and extracted files. After that, fill in the rest of the dialog box: User name, Password. For the CA Certificate, select the “HY-vpn-CA.pem” file from the downloaded files (you should have put it first somewhere safe, e.g. to “/etc/openvpn”).One problem that people are complaining about is the fact that the import does not honor the “redirect-gateway def1” directive and as a consequence you won’t be able to connect anywhere (I guess this is due to the Network Manager using dnsmasq and dnsmasq is apparently not smart enough to realize that it should send the queries somewhere else now). That’s why people are complaining that Network Manager doesn’t work to route all traffic via the VPN network. The box that you need to uncheck for this to work is well hidden: It’s in the connection editor dialog under the IPv4 Settings tab -> Routes (at the bottom right) -> “Use this connection only for resources on its network”. Why on earth do they have to call it in a way that nobody understands its meaning? Why not to call it “Do not route all traffic through this VPN connection”? I also had to check the box that said “Ignore automatically obtained routes”, although I don’t know why…As usual, setting up the OpenVPN sucks and the important tunneling back of VPN traffic needed to be added manually on the OpenVPN server:iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADEI did it by making an additional file called openvpn2 in the /etc/network/if-up.d/ directory with the following content:#!/bin/shiptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADEOf course you can still start and stop the VPN via the command line. However, since systemd, the password entry is not straightforward. When you execute sudo systemctl start openvpn.service you need to execute (e.g. in another terminal) sudo systemd-tty-ask-password-agent and enter your password there. That’s clearly a kludge until they get a decent password agent…

Difficult start

Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: I asked the Academy for the funding rates for the Academy Professor positions, but there are so few of these positions that you don’t get any usable statistics out of that data. I received a very transparent answer from the Academy (including the numbers I was asking for). The decision to preferentially cut funding from postdoctoral researchers was a conscious one by the Academy to preserve the means to do competitive research for projects and Academy Research Fellows. However, the trend to move funding from younger to older researchers seems to be general and has been going on already for half a century in the US (see e.g. here: http://metamodern.com/2009/11/27/great-science-great-scientists-and-icons/ or here: http://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/2012/02/13/age-distribution-of-nih-principal-investigators-and-medical-school-faculty/) . Our future depends on new ideas and innovations. I am not sure, whether it is true that younger investigators come up with more new ideas and innovations as claimed in the blog post above ( http://metamodern.com/2009/11/27/great-science-great-scientists-and-icons/) , but if that is the case, moving money away from them would a bad idea in the long run.Getting a research position funded by the Academy of Finland is becoming increasingly difficult. What worries me most is the fact that the savings are concentrated at the “lower” end of the academic career ladder: The success rate of applications for the postdoctoral researcher positions has been deteriorating most while Academy projects’ funding remained largely untouched in the Research Council for Health. This Tuesday, the Academy presented these numbers at the Ask & Apply event for this September’s funding call at the Medical Faculty. Academy Research Fellow funding was also stripped down, but much less than the postdoctoral researcher funding. Strangely enough, the slide omits the success rate of applications for Academy professor positions. Is this indicative of a generation conflict, where established researchers are successfully trying to secure the dwindling resources for themselves? I would need to know the application success rate for the Academy Professors and the granted amounts in order to draw any conclusions.

The new Finnish government cuts university funding by around 500 million € (or not?)

Thu, 11 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: It appears that some of the party representatives that were the source of the information in this article have not been reflecting the official positions of their respective parties (in other words: they were talking BS without having any authorization to do so). In reality, the coming cuts and their sizes are going to be determined only during this coming fall season.

Helkama Jääkäri - everything but the frame broke within the first 3 years

Thu, 07 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

For one last time, I have to write about the Finnish bicycle company Helkama . I own the Helkama Jääkäri , which is a military style bicycle and marketed as extremely tough. The frame has 25 years warranty. However, pretty much everything else has been braking within the first 3 years, which ridicules the whole concept. During this year’s spring overhaul, I had to replace three parts: The stand, the saddle and the bell. And I see already signs of future trouble… In none of my previous bikes, saddle or stand have been breaking that fast. And that includes cheap bikes for half the price that I paid for the Jääkäri. Apparently, Helkama does not vet its component suppliers sufficiently. My Jääkäri’s rear wheel had to be replaced already after the first winter and the carrier meanwhile two times. When it broke the third time, I did not even bother to get it replaced again, instead I repaired and reinforced it myself . I really hope that Helkama’s advertisement is just a lie and that the Finnish Army does not use this bicycle.

Helkama quality woes

Sun, 25 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a follow-up of my post from 2 years ago about my new bicycle, a Helkama Jääkäri . It had its fair share of problems, and even though the customer service was very responsive, the repetitive problems with its luggage carrier were too much for me. Last December, the third carrier broke. I had received also the this one as a free-of-charge replacement, but it is a nuisance when it breaks, even though replacing takes only about 10 minutes. It is not in very heavy use: the stuff I transport on it weighs about 2-3 kg, but apparently the welded/soldered connections are prone to fatigue breakage. Helkama knows that it has a quality problem with its carriers. When I asked for the second replacement carrier, the customer service told me, that they are trying to identify a suitable replacement for the subcontractor who makes these carriers. This time I thought to repair the carrier instead of asking for another replacement, which took less time and will probably last longer. I don’t know whether they have changed their component supplier. If my own repair breaks, I still have two old broken carriers I can repair, but most likely, my next bicycle is not going to be a Helkama .

Air humidifiers

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

What is the optimal relative humidity (RH) for humans? Opinions differ, but mostly the estimates for “optimal” indoor relative humidity are concerned about the house and not the people living in it. Optimal values for human health fall in between 40 and 70% ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1474709) . The humidity in a rain forest never falls below 80% and even in the savanna the RH is mostly above 50% if that is any reference of a RH that humans have become adapted to. But mostly people deploy air humidifiers when they observe symptoms and the requirements to relieve those symptoms might be different to the requirements for healthy people. Anecdotal evidence has it, that some types of cough only disappear under a hot shower above 37°C, where the RH is close to 100%. Under those conditions, water will probably condensate inside the airways thus thinning the mucus resulting in a better debris removal and reduced postnasal drip*. However, there is evidence that not all respiratory tract infections benefit from higher humidity, e.g. croup (Finnish: kurkunpääntulehdus) seems unaffected by humidity despite common longstanding believe of the opposite ( http://www.cjem-online.ca/v6/n5/p357 versus http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1906598) . Interestingly, the use of both humidifiers and dehumidifiers appears positively associated with childhood asthma ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2966669) , which could indicate a hygienical problem with such devices in general. Also for asthma too high humidity is contraindicated, although this recommendation seems to be based mostly on the indirect effect via increased mold and mite infestation or bacterial contamination. I could not find much evidence for a direct negative effect of high RH on asthma and some asthma experts have nothing against a reasonable increase of the RH by means of a humidifier provided that the device is maintained clean and that the humidity is kept within safe limits to ensure that it does not contribute to increased allergen exposure (e.g. http://asthma.ca/corp/services/pdf/asthma_humidifiers_vaporizers2_eng.pdf) . For more info about the relationship of relative air humidity and asthma see https://books.google.fi/books?id=ehuYVX2-hWYC&num=10.The problem with relative humidities between 40-70% is, that they can promote mold growth. However, the situation is a bit complicated. Even 70% RH is not much of a concern if there are no temperature differences between indoors and outdoors. Mold needs water to grow and water condensates when the RH reaches 100%. With relative humidities of 40-70%, that happens when cold surfaces meet warm air (windows, outer walls). When this condensation zone cannot buffer (wrong material) nor conduct the humidity away (airtight materials), you’ll have a problem (see e.g. http://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/a1416111843440 , article in Finnish). Therefore indoor mold is a more severe problem in colder climates and “optimal” air humidity for the house differs from season to season being the lowest for the cold season. For countries with cold winters even low relative humidities can cause mold to grow. At -30°C the recommendation is that the RH be not above 15%. That is a level so low that I guess that even otherwise healthy individuals will start to experience health problems*. Estimates are that about 20% of all buildings in Finland have a mold problem ( http://uutiset.hometalkoot.fi/component/dpcontentplugin/files/download/20/Kosteus-%20ja%20hometalkoot%20toimenpideohjelma.pdf , article in Finnish).Due to this, buildings in Finland use nowadays mostly forced circulation to ensure that dry air is constantly blown through all rooms. When the temperature drops to -20°C or lower, the relative air humidity can get indoors as low as 15%. This is so low that most people start to complain about respiratory symptoms and dry, cracking skin. Off they go to buy a humidifier. But do those really make a difference?There are mainly two different types of humidifiers for home use on the market: those that evaporate water by heating and those that create a water mist by ultrasound ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humidifier) . I found the heating type utterly useless: In order to achieve any appreciable increase of humidity (from the typical winterly 30% or less in Finnish apartments to anything above 40%), I had to reduce the air change rate by partially blocking the air vents that blow the air into the room like this . By doing this the room got unbearably hot because the humidifier not only evaporates water but also acts as a quite efficient heating element (I tried the UFOX 3S: http://www.ufox.fi/ilmankostuttimet with a power of 165W, which can evaporate up to 150 ml per hour.So the only alternative was an ultrasound evaporator. How well they raise the relative humidity depends mostly on the air change rate (ACH, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_changes_per_hour , in Finnish “ilmanvaihtokerroin”). That’s a number that tells you how many cubic meters of air are exchanged per hour for each cubic meter of room space (m3/h/m3). There is some provision here in Finland, that this number has to be at least 0.5, but mostly the real numbers in residential homes are nowadays much larger. However, in the context of this minimum, the health effects on the inhabitants are usually discussed (radon, gassing-out from furniture, etc.), but not the effects on the building (see e.g. here: https://www.rakennustieto.fi/Downloads/RK/RK070304.pdf , article in Finnish).I have made a quick and dirty calculation of how much water evaporation is needed to keep the RH in a small room above 40% and then checked these values against what I observed when we did use the air humidifier in my daughter’s room to reduce her coughing during the night. The data points:

The car is in the garage

Tue, 30 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Finally Claudia’s car is in our heated garage. After moving two thirds of our cellar’s content and half of our apartment’s content to our garage, it appeared questionable whether a car would still fit. I installed many additional shelves and relocated my and Marzena’s bicycles to the condo’s common bicycle storage. The other 7 bicycles and the bicycle trailer were hanged to hooks along the garage walls. Then we lifted Tobias’ 3.5 meter long cardboard rocket tightly under the garage ceiling. Finally I was able to drive it in. I drove in sort of blindly because the car had been snowed in so badly that me and Tobias could not really make any difference by scratching its windscreens half an hour (we had to stop because our fingers were too cold to continue). The snow and the cold had arrived here in Helsinki quite exactly together with the winter solstice.

1 hour 53 minutes 6 seconds

Tue, 13 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

21.0975 kilometres in 1 hour 53 minutes and 6 seconds, 3011th of 12120 runners in my age group, almost 5 minutes faster than last year: Helsinki City Run 2014 .

Being the boss

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Almost accidentally, I got promoted. I am now a principal investigator or group leader. I never have been especially keen on being the boss. There are enough cushy and mediocre PIs in this world and my (now former) boss Kari Alitalo with his level of devotion and excellence is a shadow probably impossible to step out of.Nevertheless, before I was too old to apply for a group leader position from the Academy of Finland , I decided in 2011 to give it a try. I might regret if I never even tried. The first attempt failed. One year later, my PhD was 9+ years old and I had to pledge special reasons to be able to compete again (I had taken long childcare time-outs for both of our children). Although I essentially submitted the same application I got lucky this time in what has been described by someone as the “Academy Lottery”.And my worst expectations became reality: Instead of doing research I mutated into a money acquisition machine. That is partly due to the Academy giving substantially less funding than I applied for. Every year the Academy has less and less money to distribute and faces the tough decision to fund fewer researchers or to fund the same number of researchers, but give everybody less… I once had an email conversation with Alexander Stubb (when he was still approachable for ordinary people like me) about the declining budget for research, but at least the present Finnish government seems to underestimate the long term effects of the continuously deteriorating financial situation of academic research in Finland. The situation is so bad, that most talented people are leaving this country at the first opportunity.Due to the full cost model , I am practically forced to stick to the budget when it comes to the labour cost. And that’s why there’s no money left to pay for the day-to-day expenses like chemicals and reagents. Until one of my grant applications is successful, we’ll have to do research on a shoestring budget…BTW: My lab’s new web pages hosted by the university’s servers are still not up. But since they’re ready, I put them up on my own server .

Prisma Viikki and customer's rights revisited

Wed, 03 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I bought a lamp from Prisma for 24,95€. Because it was named “plafondi”, I assumed it is a ceiling lamp: “plafond” is French for ceiling. But I was wrong. It was not for attachment to the ceiling, but for wall-mounting (strangely on Prisma’s website it is called “Plafondi-seinävalaisin” which is an oxymoron). I realised that when I saw that the plug was of the regular type and not for a ceiling socket. So I exchanged the plug and attached it to the ceiling. When I screwed in the bulb and turned the light switch, it remained dark. I had bought the bulb (Megaman Liliput 11W E14 thread) together with the lamp from Prisma. I was even more perplexed when another E14 bulb worked perfectly in that lamp.

Online food shopping in Helsinki

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If we want to replace our Saturday’s general food shopping trip with online ordering, there seem to be only two major options in Helsinki ruoka.net and Alepa kauppakassi . We had been using ruoka.net before, but we stopped, because their online store was very user-unfriendly and the prices quite high. But maybe we should have another look, because Alepa kauppkassi’s quality of service has deteriorated during the last few months.We have been ordering our food via Alepa kauppakassi already for more than a year, but now that I have broken my leg this service is essential for us. Unfortunately, it has never been working without problems. E.g. when they delivered a week ago, they forgot completely to deliver all the frozen foods that we had ordered. They had forgotten the frozen food already once before, but back then, it was promptly delivered at the next possible time. Not so this time: It took them one week to deliver the rest. And we had to complain multiple times before anything happened. And what was the compensation? One lousy free delivery (worth 6.9€). But today, things got even worse:Let me please reliably know if the delivery will be lateYesterday, my wife placed an order for about 150€ and the delivery was supposed to happen today between 9-12 am. However, until 1:30 pm nobody had been ringing the door bell and I skyped my wife whether she had received any SMS or phone call. She had received an SMS at 8:30 am that the goods had been gathered and were awaiting delivery. Later she had received a call attempt from an unknown number while she was talking on the phone with her doctor. Later it appeared that this had probably been the delivery driver trying to announce that he would be late. However, what should my wife have done? Call back an unknown number? This is one of the things that went wrong. The driver should have sent an SMS message or called again.**Stuck in traffic in Helsinki? - Give me a break!**When I called the customer service at 1:30 pm, they promised they would figure out why the delivery is late and call me back asap, what they did. They said that the delivery was delayed due to the traffic situation and that he will be delivering in about 15-20 minutes. In fact, at 13:50 the food was delivered. Some stuff was temporarily finished and therefore missing from the delivery, but more importantly, all frozen foods had already melted. No surprise, as they were simply delivered in a plastic bag. From 8:30 am to 1:50 pm is 5 hours and 20 minutes - long enough for pizza to melt completely.Traffic jams on Wednesday between 9 and 12 am in Helsinki? You must be kidding! You can pull this argument in New York or London, but in Helsinki? The driver told me that the delivery started only at 11:30 am… Apparently there was simply nobody available to start the delivery in time.**Don’t sell stuff you don’t have!**It is difficult to understand, why an online store would list food items that it cannot deliver. For example we have ordered already 5 or 6 six times frozen strawberries (including this order), but every single time the berries were not delivered due to “temporary shortage”. Such a situation is called “permanent shortage”. It is bad practise to list food items in the online store that the shop is never able to deliver. It makes frustrated customers.Some tips against the melting of frozen goodsNow for the melted foods: This is dangerous and avoidable. It can be avoided by not delivering too late (or by not gathering too early). If this overstrains the logistic capabilities, there is still another option: a styrofoam box and a few cooling elements. I was talking to the driver and he told me that he started delivery at 11:30 am, which was 3 hours after the food had been gathered. Why that late? According to the driver they are permanently understaffed.Customer serviceAlready during the first phone conversation I clearly indicated that my patience was already very stretched and that I did expect a decent apology and compensation. I received a phone call a bit later by Janina Henttilä (I hope I spelled her name correctly), asking me whether they can replace the frozen foods with a new delivery today in the evening between 7 and 9 pm. Yes, that would be ok. However, again a bit later, I got another call, telling me that they have run out of one of the pizzas that I have ordered and whether I want partial delivery today and the rest tomorrow or rather everything at once tomorrow. Tomorrow everything at once would be ok. Again a bit later, I got another call - they don’t have that pizza at all and whether I want a similar type. No, I don’t want replacements done by other people for me and we always check the box “don’t replace products by similar ones when the exact product is temporarily not available”. Bad things can happen: a Dr. Oetger pizza might get replaced by a Saarioinen pizza . That might be OK for some people but not for me. So I asked them to call back later, when I had the possibility to check from the computer what replacement options they offered. We also were promised some unspecified compensation for all the trouble. I was also asking for some names higher in the hierarchy to complain to, because I am very well aware, that the problems must be structural and not only due to somebody not doing his or her job. I got two names and two phone numbers which I will call once this online food shopping adventure is over.P.S.: The replacement delivery was scheduled the next day between 9 and 12 am and it really happened. The “compensation” (a 20€ gift card for any shop of the S group ) arrived timely 2 days later.P.P.S.: I did the next online shopping exactly one week later. This time delivery was in time (sheduled between 9 and 12 am, delivered at 10:30 pm). Almost everything was ok except from the bill which overcharged us by 61 cents: They billed one 250g frozen strawberry bag (2.3€) instead of one 200g raspberry bag (1.69€). I really didn’t feel like complaining again. It just shows how hard it is for them to get it right…

One firewall to block them all

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Helsinki University’s firewall prevents employees from workingWhile I was lying in hospital with a broken calf-bone I couldn’t get any work done because of the Helsinki University’s firewall. Even if the Android OpenVPN client would have allowed me in, I wouldn’t have been able to work. The purpose of a VPN is to allow remote clients the same access to the LAN resources as those machines, that are physically located in the LAN. Obviously Helsinki University doesn’t think so and doesn’t give VPN clients equal privileges. In my case it meant that I cannot ssh into my work computer. This makes remote work expensive, because it required my boss to buy a laptop for me just because the firewall between HY-VPN clients and local machines blocks ssh connections. Without this restriction I could do all the work from my 400€ tablet using e.g. nomachine Player).The work-arounds failed alsoIf I had managed to login into one of the University’s UNIX servers (myntti, kruuna, klaava or ruuvi), I could have logged into my work computer from there. However, my Android ssh client ConnectBot was not able to ssh into them. I presume this to be the fault of my mobile phone network provider Tele Finland , because I couldn’t log into my own ssh servers either (which I normally can, when my Android is connected via WLAN). Once I can connect via ssh to my work computer, I can establish a reverse ssh tunnel and use X Windows or the NoMachine Player to do all the work I usually can when sitting in the laboratory in front of my work computerPlex and no end of video playback troubleHowever, I couldn’t get the OpenVPN configuration right on Android and neither could the helpdesk support to this date. So I was totally bored in the hospital and since we use Plex at home as our media center, I decided to watch some movies. However, Plex is still after four years development in beta and we had our fair share of trouble with media playback. Also this time: I couldn’t play back a single movie or a single song using the Android client . It made the connection to our (Ubuntu 10.04) plexmediaserver without problems, but the only thing that worked was the “Photos” section. By trial and error, I found out that a part of the problem was, that the videos were in Apple’s QuickTime format (they had been encoded on a Mac). So I was looking for a way to batch-convert hundreds of files from .mov into .avi. Certainly this would be faster than filing a bug report and waiting that the Plex guys fix the problem. QuickTime is anyway dead, isn’t it? ffmpeg was certainly the way to go, but Google flooded me with hits concerning batch conversion and the problem was finding the one that works. There is unfortunately lots of crap and noise on the web. The following one-liner did work:find . -name '*.mov' -exec sh -c 'ffmpeg -i "$0" -sameq "${0%%.mov}.avi"' {} \;

What a bummer!

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I broke my distal calf-bone (fibula) in a bicycle accident. The street must have still been icy in the afternoon or maybe it was the wet leaves. It happened on the way home, so it is technically a work accident according to Finnish law. Nevertheless, it allowed me another peek into the local public health care system. I just was discharged today from Töölö hospital after spending there four nights in a mixed 6-bed room.Surprisingly little painAs long as keep my leg up, the pain is so profoundly absent that I skipped the last day’s pain medication completely after consulting with the doctor. I wanted to feel at least a little bit of pain. How else was I to know, that I should go easy on my leg?Keeping healthcare costs downThe first night I was in a two bed-room together with a bothersoom roommate, who didn’t even stop talking after I had clearly communicated that I wanted to sleep; that was around midnight. Then he repeatedly verbally attacked the nurses and later barricaded himself in the toilet. When the security guards came to resolve the situation I was first hurried out of the room to the corridor and later into the 6-bed room. It goes without saying that I didn’t sleep much. This is how Finland keeps its health care costs down: The facility is overcrowded and the nurses overworked. I was actually suprised how well they managed considering the circumstances and patients like my room mate. They were always very friendly and helpful.SurgeryMaybe and hopefully the health care cost savings have not yet reached the expertise of the personnel. I don’t mind sleeping in a 6-bed room for four nights as long as the surgery is performed according to the standard of care. Surgery was necessary, because although the fracture was not displaced, it was sufficiently angulated to result in suboptimal healing when treated without operation (just by casting). The surgery was not performed under general, but instead spinal anaesthesia. The surgery went well, but healing will take its time, but so far everything is looking good. I got 6 weeks of sickness leave. Hospital foodThe hospital food confirmed to its reputation: I had so profound constipation on day four, that I thought my hemorrhoids would burst and the sutures rip when I was trying to pop out my poo. The fresh veggies and fruits were mostly a few thin alibi slices of cucumber or tomato. No wonder there was too little fibre. **The biggest loosers: Helsinki University Helpdesk and Tele Finland **The biggest letdown during the hospital stay was Helsinki University computing helpdesk and my mobile phone provider Tele Finland: I had several experiments going on in the lab and in order to give instructions how to proceed I needed to connect to my desktop computer at work via ssh (and nomachine via ssh). I did not manage to get the VPN working form Android. The detailed instruction link on the University help page was (as usual) broken. But even if it wasn’t, I guess nobody bothered so far putting up instructions for an OS, that has as little installations as 500+ Million worldwide.Helsinki University uses OpenVPN and there is an official OpenVPN client for Android . However, when I mailed the helpdesk, they didn’t even read my mail. They said I could get to my files via the VPN web interface. This is of course only true if one uses the networked folder on a Windows machine to store ones files. My second e-mail, where I clearly point out again, that I need ssh access to my desktop computer from Android is unanswered to this date.In order to circumvent this problem, I tried tethering using my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy S3) and my Lenovo convertible S10-3t (dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04). And tethering didn’t work. I contacted Tele Finland to ask whether this is due to policy or whether there is just a bug somewhere. No answer until this date. So I presume its policy. Tethering has been working beautifully with my old HTC Desire (using CyanogenMod 7.1 ) and Saunalahti . I tried to update my Galaxy S3 from 4.04 to 4.1, but this process requires an online Windows machine (which I couldn’t get because thethering didn’t work).

Hobbies

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Running

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I have done it all between 1500 meters and 100 km. But that was 15 years ago, and now I only run to the fridge and back during the commercial brakes in my favourite TV show. Apart from that, I visit once in a while the home page of Runner’s World to get some inspiration.Believe it or not, I took part in the Helsinki City Marathon on August 2nd, 2003. I finished 1857th with a brutto time of 4:10:02 and a netto time of 4:06:50 .

My new Helkama Jääkäri bicycle

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

My Trek bicycle lasted 10 years and approximately 50000 kilometers before I had to retire it. I don’t do any preventive maintenance and fix things only when they are broken. In 2006 I bought a 450€ bicyle from Biltema . It lasted not even 5 years before it needed a major repair (including replacing the expensive bits like wheels, brakes, derailleurs, freewheel and many less expensive ones). Last June I decided to get a [Helkama Jääkäri]([img_assist|nid=581|title=Helkama Jääkäri|desc=|link=url,http://www.helkamavelox.fi/en/models/men/jaakari_3_gear-hmj3nhr_arv_k|align=left|width=240|height=160]) for about 700€. It’s an old style army bicycle and I hoped that it would last longer than the Biltema quality.This winter I cycled with my new Helkama bicycle several hundreds of kilometers on bumpy snow tracks and in February my rear wheel allmost fell of. The screws had not been tightened sufficiently and the thread was already badly damaged. To continue my way I had to remove the washer to expose some undamaged thread and tighted the screw. I contacted Helkama, because the bicycle was not even a year old. They responded quickly and I received a replacement rear wheel by post within a week. That’s good customer service and a reason to stick with the brand: When I bought a new bike for my son last month, I choose the Helkama Yoker , even though it was certainly not the cheapest choice.

½ year and 1000+€ for Win7 & Office 2010

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In the beginning of 2011 I bought a netbook ( Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t ). I bought it with my own money. It was preloaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition. Because I prefer to use Ubuntu , I shrank the Windows 7 partition and installed Ubuntu as my primary OS. I installed the University-licensed Microsoft Office XP, for which there were still installation media around in our research program. There are only two occasions when I boot into Windows: when I needed to work on collaborative publications or grant applications at home with my co-authors using Microsoft Word or when there is a program that has no equivalent on Linux (which has rarely happened during the last years).However, last October, more and more compatibility problems appeared between the aging Office XP and the newer versions of Office, that use the new XML format (.docx). On one occasion, after my boss had opened a Word file (created by Office XP), modified it and send it back to me (using compatibility mode), it became uneditable in Office XP. Word would crash whenever I tried to edit two of the three embedded images. In fact, I spent hours of recreating an editable version of that document from scratch.That was when I decided to upgrade my privately owned computer’s Windows and Office versions. Helsinki University’s license agreement with Microsoft allows staff and students to run Windows and Office on their home PC. To university researchers, it happens all the time that they need to work from home. In fact, I wrote almost a complete research paper ( Jeltsch et al, JBC 2006 ) from home. Thus it should not be difficult and not expensive to upgrade from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Ultimate and from Office XP to Office 2010, right? Helsinki University wants to get higher and higher in the [Alma intranet pages]( http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011?page=1>international rankings. Therefore, one might think the University would have made sure their researchers have easy access for the right tools to do their job. WRONG!Helsinki University has provided instructions on their Ohjelmistojakelu page of the university. Under the <a href=) (Home Use Program) link hides the “Microsoft Home Use Program and software delivery to members of the staff”. I downloaded the file (“koodi.txt”) which is a text file cotaining a code (something like “XXX0000”). With this code I went to the Microsoft Home use Program site. I had to type in my work e-mail address and the code and I received the following error message: “We are sorry, but we are unable to complete your request. the following problem(s) exist: - Please contact your benefit administrator to learn if you are eligible and to retrieve your program code.“I phoned the helpdesk of the University to ask what is wrong. The answer: “The University and Micorsoft are negotiating a new licensing deal and the old code doesn’t work anymore and the new code is not yet there.” How long will it approximately take for the new working codes codes to appear? “A few weeks.” I waited a few weeks. To be precise: I waited six weeks. I went through the same procedure as before. But the code still did not work. Retrospectively, I suppose that the helpdesk’s first answer was wrong: The codes were probably still fine, but the instructions on the university’s pages were wrong (they sent me to the wrong page to type in the code and at the time of this writing - 5 months later - the university’s pages are still wrong).In the beginning of the new year I submitted a formal support request to the helpdesk. I received the following answer:Hi MichaelUniversity of Helsinki has made a new agreement with Microsoft (moved from MSCA to EES) starting this month and now that our agreement is changing codes won't work. I assume we get new codes to our new agreement from Microsoft after all paper work is done, and this will take approx. couple of weeks or so.All we can do now is wait, you can check in february if Home Use Program -option is working. Sorry for the inconvenience.Best regards,Tommi also send me the Alma link with the instructions . I tried several of the links in the document (which were links to sites where one could order Windows and Office installation media/downloads), but already the first link was broken: Microsoft Windows operating systems: e-Academy (no CD/DVD option, only downloadable versions). It is still broken at the time of this writing.The other option (“Microsoft Home Use Program HUP (Digital River, also installation medias)”) linked only to the instructions that I already knew (and which do not work). Because apparently nobody had ever tried before to leaglly aquire Windows and Office for home use via this program, I went in March together with my computer to our physical help desk at Meilahti campus. Iivari was very friendly, but the only thing he managed to do was to replicate the problem and to convice somebody that there is a problem that should be looked at. A few days later he sent me the link to a page from where I could order Windows and Office for 20€/DVD: https://hup.atea.fi/ .This link I have never found anywhere in the university’s online instructions (as I learned later, it is somewhere there, but almost impossible to find). I am not surprised that otherwise law-abiding citizens of this country use illegal versions of Windows/Office at home if it is so difficult to be legal.I received the DVDs via Post a week later (I had to go to the post office and to pay there the 20€/DVD).Before I installed anything, I made a disk dumpdd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdbof my entire hard drive (250 GB hard disk, it took 20 hours via USB). Because I had Windows 7 Starter installed on my computer, I first tried to use the anytime upgrade . For this I actually only would have needed the license key, but not the physical installation disks. When I typed in the key, it started the upgrade, but failed without any details. So I decided to run the upgrade advisor (a program from Microsoft that determines whether your computer is “good” enough for the upgrade). The only thing it found was that I was short on disk space. So I freed another 5 GB by uninstalling software (mostly the bloatware that was put there by Lenovo). The second attempt also failed without any specific error message. I had no way of knowing what was the reason.So I tried a clean custom install. First I needed to transfer the Windows 7 install DVD to a USB stick (my computer has no CD/DVD drive and I or my lab doesn’t own an external CD/DVD drive). Fortunately this is easier with Windows 7 than with Windows XP. However, not all USB sticks seem to be equal and the first USB stick I tired (Verbatim) was rejected by the tool I used. I followed these instructions . Then I booted from the 4GB stick and started the upgrade. Everything went fine until the very end, when I needed to reboot and I was greeted with “Your Windows 7 install is broken. Do you want Windows to fix it?” Then I made a bad decision: I said yes. After fixing, nothing worked anymore. Upon rebooting, there was only a blinking black cursor.OK, if I cannot upgrade, I can do a fresh install. I wiped my hard drive clean and started the install. Everything went fine until I had to type in the product key. It complained that it is not a valid product key. Of course I had not thouroughly read and understood the pages at www.atea.fi . Probably because they are only in Finnish. Apparently, the University’s deal with Microsoft does not provide the staff with full installers, but only with upgrade installers. Consequently I need to keep my old Windows version around for the install. Luckily I had my diskdump. I wrote it back to the hard drive. This took only about 6 hours.This Monday I went (together with my laptop) to the local computing support. Perttu enlightened me about the possible upgrade paths to Windows 7 and tried to do the custom install using an external DVD drive. And it worked! Hallelujah! It took several reboots, but finally I had a running Windows 7 Ultimate. Installing the drivers took also about three hours. It took an eternity to download the drivers from Lenovo’s site, despite them being akamaized. Maybe they didn’t pay their bills. Now I just needed to create an iso image from the Office 2010 DVD, move it over to the computer and start the install, which went flawlessly this time.I presume that the first time I tried the custom install, the system was somehow compromised by the failed anytime-upgrade. Who knows. 500 Million lines of code, that nobody really understands anymore. It’s close to a miracle, that Microsoft is managing to keep Windows afloat.Of course the Windows installer had screwed up my grub boot loader and I had to start the machine from a System rescue CD on a USB stick and write back the MBR from my disk dump:dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1I still don’t exaclty know now, whether the Windows 7 Starter Edition does or doesn’t qualify for an upgrade using the University licensed upgrade plan. I stupidly assumed that if a 10 year old Windows XP Home qualifies, a Windows 7 Starter edition would too.The whole procedure lastet about half a year and taken together, I spent maybe seven to ten days of work for it (about half of this time during working hours, the other half during my weekends). Let’s estimate the real costs including the hours I had to put into this Windows 7 & Office 2010 installation: conservatively at least 1000€. The system is broken and the worst thing is, that there is nobody to blame and nobody who can fix it. Maybe Helsinki University should invest some energy and time into the development and adoption of open source Operating Systems. After all, the most popular one (Linux) was started by somebody from Helsinki University .

Adjunct Professor

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Since December 13th, 2011, I am an adjunct professor (Finnish: dosentti ) at the University of Helsinki. This is not a tenured position, but a title, which requires a certain amount of scientific success after completing the PhD and teaching experience ( more about this in Finnish ).

How I became an "Adjunct Professor" ("dosentti") at the University of Helsinki

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Compared to getting my PhD degree, the “dosentti” thingy was easy. I started in the beginning of 2011 and received the title the same year in December. I don’t know whether the process differs between different Finnish universities and some of the formalities might be specific to the University of Helsinki , but nevertheless, below I list the steps I took to get the title. There are also instructions available from here .

Rescue from the vacuum cleaner

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I have identified the top reason of LEGO pieces disappearing in our household: the vacuum cleaner. On suspicion I reluctantly decided to explore the bag’s content (Miele HyClean N/G) after it was full and here is what I extracted: Three LEGO pieces, three puzzle pieces, a screw driver head, a pinwall pin, a Mastermind pin and some yet to identify metal item.

Äkta Explorer FPLC core facility

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Nowadays I spend much of my time at work on the purification of proteins which regulate angiogenesis and lymphangiogenesis . Therefore, I am taking care of the necessary machinery that the Molecular Cancer Biology Research Program owns: the fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) machine. Prof. Jorma Keski-Oja acquired about 15 years ago one of the first (and in 2010 discontinued) Äkta Explorer machines from Swedish producer Pharmacia (who merged in 1997 with Amersham to become Amersham Pharmacia Biotech, who was in turn bought by GE Healthcare in 2004). In the year 2000 the equipment moved from the Haartman Institute into the Biomedicum Helsinki . While I have maintained web pages for this piece of research infrastructure for the last five years (including online reservation and data backup), they were only available from inside the Helsinki University network.Now, I managed to have web pages about the Äkta Explorer FPLC core facility added to the web site of the Medical Faculty . At the moment, we are adding the WAVE cell culture system to our facility to be able to produce large amounts of cells/cell culture supernatant (up to 25 liters of bacterial, insect or mammalian cell culture) for protein production.

Statistics about Finland

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Finland makes frequently headlines for its good rankings in international comparisons. Three recent notable rankings were the 2006 OECD PISA study , the yearly Corruption Perception Index and Newsweek’s best-country-to-live-in study . When Finland doesn’t fare that well in international comparisons, there is not that much to report. Here are some of the statistics that I have missed:

Old City Museum Power Plant

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since we have moved into our new apartment, we have been subscribing to environment-friendly electricity (“Ympäristöpennisähkö” from Helsingin Energia ). We decided to “receive” the energy from a hydropower plant which is located near our house at the rapids of Helsinki Vanhakaupunki . The Vanhakaupunki hydropower plant started its operation in 1876 and operated about 100 years before it was shut down about 40 years ago. Supported with EU money the power plant was restored and resumed operation in the year 2000 as a museum power plant which is free for visitors during the summer months.Buying environment-friendly electricity is mostly a statement towards your electricity supplier. All what it means is that your supplier is buying some certificates that guarantee that somewhere electricity is produced environment-friendly. Electricity is electricity is electricity. Once it is in the grid, there is no way to distinguish between electricity from nuclear power plants or coal-burning power plants and wind- or water-generated electricity. Physically, you get most of the power from the closest source. If you buy ecological electricity and you live close to a nuclear power plant, you’ll get most of your power from there whether you like it or not. Thus we have actually real chances to get some of our electricity from the museum power plant next to our house. That is: if it was working.The generator broke about two years ago and a spare part had to be ordered from Austria (the generator axle needed to be custom made). The spare part had been delivered in 2009, but for some reason, the generator was still not fully operational.The power plant’s operation is dependent on the water level in the Vantaa river. Low water levels were to blame e.g. during summer of 2010, but the generator has mostly not been operating even when when water levels did permit its use (the statistics can bee seen here ).I visit the power plant frequently together with my son and thus I can say that during the approximately 10 visits during 2010 we have never found the generator turning. In 2007 it was turning almost every time we visited. Even more disappointingly, the museum staff was only able to confirm that something must still be wrong with the machine despite the replacement axle; but they were not able to tell us any details.Most surprising is the fact that nobody from the operating company told us anything, although we were allegedly receiving our energy from this power plant. Therfore on August 24th I wrote a e-mail to Ulla-Maija Alander from Helsingin Energia asking about the situation and encouraging to make more information available for their customers. After not receiving any answer for three weeks I resent the mail on Sept. 15th and after waiting for another three weeks I finally phoned. During the phone conversation I was promised an answer which came via e-mail:Dear Mr Jeltsch,first I would like to apologize for not responsing to your feedback earlier, and also thank you for your interest in Vanhankaupunginkoski power plant.The reason why the generator is not operating at the moment is - as you correctly assumed - the lack of water, as it often has been. However, there has also been technical problems since the generator was repaired in May 2009. This year, the lack of water caused “zero production” in January and February. In May and June, unfortenately, there were problems in the turbine that prevented the use of the generator. After these problems were solved, the water level sunk again in August.I don’t know if the demonstration use has been a daily procedure, but I will get back to you as soon as I find more information about that and the reasons why this may have been changed.You are absolutely right about the lack of information on our website and towards our valuable Ympäristöpenni customers. And you are right that it is inexcusable. We clearly have to improve our performance. We will.Thank you for the feedback!Best regards,Anna-Maria AsellProduct ManagerHelsingin Energia00090 HelenKampinkuja 2, HelsinkiTel. 09 617 3168anna-maria.asell@helen.fiwww.helen.fi

HBGS course

Mon, 10 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

All documents related the the HBGS course Tags in protein expression, detection and purification. Most documents are available in both PDF and OpenOffice format. Feel free to repurpose the documents. They are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 1.0 License .

Customer rights at Prisma Viikki

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This January our Esprit/Sigikid Frog broke. It’s a musical toy to keep our baby occupied during diaper changes. It stopped playing its Schlaf, Kindlein schlaf melody after winding up its mechanism by pulling on the string that comes out of its bottom.The mechanism has been probably been operated about 300 times. Right from the date of purchase, there has always been a peculiarity with the winding mechanism, notably that when pulling on the retracted string, an initial resistance could be noticed that required very strong pulling to overcome. However, after the initial resistance, the string was easy to pull and we did not pay attention to this anymore after we got accustomed to it. Until the mechanism failed to operate after pulling. That’s when we realized that maybe it should not have been all that difficult to start pulling and maybe this was indicative of an initial problem that only manifested itself after sufficient usage.This frog was by no means cheap. In fact, the Finnish Prisma shop (Viikki branch) took a large margin of profit by selling it for almost 19 Euros while it can be purchased for less than 9€ online ( Baby-Markt or 12,97€ at amazon.de ). This, the EU directive that regulates such cases of seller liability ( Directive 1999/44/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 May 1999 on certain aspects of the sale of consumer goods and associated guarantees ) and the fact that it is a product designed (but not made) in Germany by Sigikid made me reason that I should get it replaced without any trouble after a mere 8 months of use (we really started to use it only after the birth of our daughter in June).However, what I encountered at the customer desk of Prisma Viikki , was completely different from my expectations. First I was told that this product has a warranty of 6 months and thus I won’t get it replaced. Since I insisted on a formal return of the product, the employee filled out the return form for me. I have to mention that the conversation went in Finnish which is not one of my strong languages. And retrospectively I realize, that I should have filled out the form myself (in English) to make my point that the product was most likely defective right from the start.A few days later I received a phone call where the “you don’t get the defective product replaced” was repeated. I mentioned the EU directive which requires 2 years of seller’s liability. And since Finland is a member of the EU I should be able to exercise my EU-given rights. The shop representative at the other end of the phone line surprisingly admitted that she does not know of such directive and that she would contact the Finnish customer protection services and come back to me later.Again a few days later, I had another long phone conversation about the topic where I finally had the opportunity to express the situation in detail in English. Actually it appeared that the Finnish law doesn’t have any time limit for seller’s liability, but handles every case individually. This could be bad or good for me, depending whether you argue that such a musical toy’s expected lifespan is substantially more or less that approximately 11 months. In the end of this conversation the Prisma representative admitted that the situation might be different from what she originally perceived.Again a few days later I received another call from somebody else who ask me to submit a detailed description of my request in written form, which I did via e-mail yesterday (March 9th). Now I am waiting for a mutually satisfying resolution. I actually think that the mechanical problem is probably minor and had the failure to function occurred a bit later I probably would have “operated on the frog” to fix it myself. This case has already consumed an unreasonable amount of my time and alone for this reason the incident will probably (independent of its outcome) leave me with some uneasy feeling about Prisma’s customer care.Comparing goodwill (is there a closer English translation of the German word “Kulanz”) of sellers between Finland and Germany makes most German expatriates here in Finland nostalgic and home-sick. About half of the money I spend, I spend in the exact same Prisma Viikki shop that refused to replace the Esprit/Sigikid frog. Luckily, we live exactly half-way between the Arabia shopping center and Prisma Viikki.UPDATE (April 14, 2010): Today - after more than 2 months - the importer sent us the repaired frog.

Internet services of Finnish TV stations (YLE Areena & Katsomo)

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Apparently a significant number of people (I guess about 1-2% of the Finnish households) did not succumb to the political and advertisement pressure to upgrade their TV to receive digital broadcasts. Here in Finland analog broadcast has stopped in 2007. Thus without purchasing a “digibox” or a new digital TV, one cannot receive any Finnish broadcasts anymore and one should not need to pay the TV license fee to support the national public TV station YLE (“YLE maksu”). Driven by the revenue loss of millions of Euros, the public broadcasters lobbied the politicians into a obligatory “media fee” for every household independently of their TV watching habits.One argument that I have heard was that those who did not upgrade their TVs are consuming the content produced by YLE via the internet or other means. While this is certainly true for many of them, it is no valid argument in the discussion as there are still many who don’t and who therefore should not have to pay. My household didn’t continue to pay the TV license fee after the analog signal was switched off: We don’t own a digibox, neither a digital TV nor any other digital receiver. Even before that we hardly watched the TV and every hour we watched cost us about 20 Euros TV license fee (yearly fee divided by yearly hours watched).I only started to use the (free of charge) internet TV services of the Finnish broadcaster YLE ( YLE Areena ) in the end of 2009 when I heard that the TV tax is a done deal and will be introduced next year or so. I sincerely hope that when the obligatory media fee is introduced, YLE’s internet services will not be restricted to a few selected series as they are now. I do not oppose pouring money into public broadcasting: The best documentaries on this planet are made by the BBC , a broadcasting monster that receives huge amounts of money from British taxpayers. Speaking of the quality of the public Finnish TV: The only program that I (or rather my son) is watching via the internet service of YLE Areena is not produced by YLE, but acquired from abroad. It’s the British childrens’ series Little Princess . And because of the limited availability (I think you can watch every episode only for 2 weeks after the initial broadcast) I have to record the streaming video, since there is no Download-to-disk option in the Flash player that YLE uses.Luckily, someone from the Technical University of Helsinki adapted the rtmpdump utility and made it work with YLE Areena ( rtmpdump-yle ). However, this is not for the faint of heart as you need to compile the program from source code yourself (it compiled smoothly on my Linux Ubuntu Hardy Heron system; UPDATE 10.5.2010: A Vanilla Lucid Lynx system required the libssl-dev package before it compiled). After compiling it is just opening the Yle Areena web page in your browser to play the program of your choice. Then you need to copy the id number of the program from the URL and insert it in the following command:rtmpdump-yle -r rtmp://flashk.yle.fi/AreenaServer/ --swfUrl http://areena.yle.fi/player/Application.swf -p http://areena.yle.fi/video/706793 -o /home/jeltsch/Multimedia/TV\ Shows/Kids\ \&\ Family/Little\ Princess/Pikku\ Prinsessa.flv UPDATE (10.5.2010): It got more user-friendly! yle-dl http://areena.yle.fi/video/950912[img_assist|nid=534|title=|desc=|link=url,http://katsomo.fi|align=left|width=160|height=90]The only other show I get via Finnish internet TV services is as well a foreign production: Mythbusters . However, I get this from Katsomo , the internet TV branch of MTV3 , a Finnish commercial TV channel. Also for Katsomo you need to resort to some command line wizardry to save it to disk. For Katsomo, you need the Mplayer : Open the Katsomo web page in your browser to play the program. Copy the id number of the program from the URL and insert it for the p variable in the following command. Sometimes the first version of the command doesn’t work (why not?).mplayer -playlist "http://www.katsomo.fi/metafile.asx?p=30911&bw=1000" -dumpstream -dumpfile mythbusters.avi``mplayer "mms://www.katsomo.fi/metafile.asx?p=30911&bw=1000" -dumpstream -dumpfile mythbusters.avi Sometimes this just won’t work due to network congestion and the connection is lost after a few (or two hundred) MBs. And even if it works you might get an error message (“Stream not seekable”), but you can ignore it, the stuff is downloaded nevertheless. However, it’s streamed in real time - saving takes the same time as watching, unlike the rtmpdump for YLE Areena, which downloads a 30 min series in about one to two minutes (provided your download speed allows for that).

Growing tomatoes on a balcony in Finland

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We live in Helsinki , Finland. Helsinki is something like 60° North and the climate is anything but favorable for anything except mushrooms, blueberries and reindeer lichen . But our apartment has a glassed balcony facing South and so I thought it should be possible to grow some veggies there. I seeded tomatoes inside in mid-April, which is a time when the temperatures can easily fall below 0°C and also snow storms are not unheard of during this time of the year.Not enough lightThat was too early as there was still not enough light and rank growth was the consequence: very thin, fragile and tall plants trying to reach more light. I don’t think it is very ecological to use artificial light, but it would have helped in this case. The other mistake was that the pots we used were much too small. We used 2 and 5 liter pots, harboring each 2 plants. Next time we’ll only use one plant per 10 liter pot. However, when the temperatures went up in the middle of May, we transferred the tomato plants to the balcony. Because now there was plenty of light they grew very fast and soon there were lots of yellow flowers.Pollination troublesHowever, there were no tomatoes. It appears that tomatoes need either insects or wind for pollination, none of which we had on our glassed balcony. To replace the wind one can shake the plants to release the pollen. Once we did that and opened the glass windows they promptly developed fruits. The tomato species was of the indeterminate type - meaning that it kept constantly growing and producing flowers. We had to support them with strings attached to the balcony ceiling. The one thing that was most laborious was the watering and fertilization. Since the plants had very little soil, they needed to be watered daily and fertilized twice a week with a dilute fertilizer. In addition we had to put the balcony blinds into use during the sunny hours of the summer days to prevent the plants from frying. Lots of work for a few tomatoes. I agree with Wise Bread that growing your own fruits and veggies is more of a hobby than a way to save money.Superior tasteAdmittedly, the tomatoes from our balcony taste better then those from the grocery store; my four year old son said today he only eats self-grown tomatoes. Especially in the Northern part of Western Europe, many people have never tasted really good tomatoes. The deprecatory name for a tomato that has no taste whatsoever is (in German language) “ Hollandtomate ”. I guess the lack of taste is due to the optimal conditions they are grown in, maybe also the specific strain. E.g. in order to develop full flavor, tomatoes need also dry periods. Dry periods, however, result in smaller fruits. And because commercial producers are paid by the kilogram their tomatoes never see any dry periods. Taste is much more difficult to measure than weight. The lack of flavor is probably not due to artificial fertilizer (as I suspected before). We used artificial fertilizer and the result was still superior to everything commercial I have tasted this year.YieldI harvested alltogether more than 70 tomatoes (about 7 kg) from the plants. The harvest started quite late (in the beginning of August) and lasted until mid-October, when I picked all tomatoes including the green ones to prevent them from freezing. All green tomatoes finally ripened inside and a few managed to rotten. The last own tomatoes we ate in the end of November. Even those that ripened after picking had a much better taste than the stuff from our supermarket.

The Molecular/Cancer Biology Lab 2008

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Giant soap bubbles

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There are hundreds of web pages describing recipes for giant soap bubbles. Some of the more interesting ones are The Bubblesphere , Bubble Town , Soap Bubbler , Riesenseifenblasen durch polymere Additive (in German) , Nanotech Kids . Why another web posting about soap bubbles? Because almost all of them use ingredients that are not available where I live (i.e. Finland). I got a recipe from a soap bubbler who performed at a kindergarden event in my neighbourhood and here is my modified version (including brand names which were absent from the original recipe):

The Molecular/Cancer Biology Lab 2008

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The Molecular/Cancer Biology Lab 10 years ago

Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I cleaned my computer files and I found this historical photo collage…

And here is another historical document. It’s an article about the Alitalo laboratory in the “Yliopisto” magazine from September 2002:

More of Tobi's kindergarten songs (Finnish X-mas songs)

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

METSÄMÖKIN TONTTU

Kas metsämökin ikkuna, sielt tonttu ulos kurkistaa.Ja jänö laukkaa laputtaa ja oveen kolkuttaa:Auta, auta pyydän sua, metsämies kun vaanii mua.Sulle suojan tarjoan siis kätes ojenna.

The 1998 Annual Lapland Awards (10 year anniversary repost)

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Good evening everybody and welcome to the 20th Annual Finland Alumni Lapland Awards. These awards are given in recognition of outstanding achievement in several fields of endeavour while on the 1998 Alumni trip to Lapland. The awards are judged by a panel of judges chosen because they said they would do it. This year it is MJ, MK and MS. The awards are of course only in the (perhaps warped) opinion of the judges, so all comments, congratulations and letter bombs should be sent to them and not to the Academy.

Tobi's kindergarten songs

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Pikkuiset kultakalat

Pikkuiset kultakalat lammessa uipikkuinen kalaäiti huolestuiuikaa, uikaa jos osaatteja he uivat ja uivat sen uskotteHop-hop-däbä-däbä-hop-hop-huiHop-hop-däbä-däbä-hop-hop-huiHop-hop-däbä-däbä-hop-hop-huiJa he uivat ja uivat sen uskotteAika isot kalanpojat lammessa uiaika iso isäkala huolestuiuikaa, uikaa jos osaatteja he uivat ja uivat sen uskotteHop-hop-däbä-däbä-hop-hop-huiHop-hop-däbä-däbä-hop-hop-huiHop-hop-däbä-däbä-hop-hop-huiJa he uivat ja uivat sen uskotteJättiläis kultakalat lammessa ui…Mini, mini kultakalat lammessa ui…

My family tree - Mein Stammbaum - Minun sukupuuni

Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some files with preliminary results of my family research. Two of the files below require a password to open! The password is the first name of the boy on the picture. If you have information, please help us to complete the genealogical tree! E-mail: michael@jeltsch.org . We are looking for pictures of all relatives!

My running achievements

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Distance	Time	Date	Event
800m	2:33	Oct. 9, 1986	Test run, Hemberg-Stadion
1500m	5:08,9	Sept. 19, 1984	Läuferabend, Hemberg-Stadion
5000m	18:05	Oct. 17, 1986	Test run, Hemberg-Stadion
10k	42:14	Dec. 31, 1984	4. Silvesterlauf "Rund um den Danzturm"
10k	41:55	Dec. 31, 1985	5. Silvesterlauf "Rund um den Danzturm"
10k	41:49	Oct. 5, 1986	17. Intern. Iserlohner Volkslauf
11k	43:18.1	Oct. 26, 1986	13. Intern. Gevelsberger Herbstwaldlauf
20k	1:25:17	Oct. 6, 1985	16. Intern. Iserlohner Volkslauf
Half marathon	1.53.26	May 17, 2003	Helsinki City Run
Half marathon	1.34.??	May 12, 2007	Helsinki City Run
Half marathon	1.39.36	May 30, 2004	Test run (Helsinki City Run Course)
Marathon	4:06:50	Aug. 2, 2003	Helsinki City Marathon
Marathon	3:45:54	Aug. 21, 2004	Helsinki City Marathon

Zu zweit

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Just the Two of Us

My little darling! I believe the streetlamps here are all mixed up. I believe not a single paving stone is in its proper place anymore. And the houses, look, the Lord in his wrath has knocked them on their sides. For the first time, it is just the two of us alone.

Literature

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Some interesting pieces of literature and related links

Excerpt from Zwierzoczłekoupiór by Tadeusz Konwicki (translated by Marzena Książkiewicz ).
Die Zeit-Bibliothek der 100 wichtigsten Bücher der Weltliteratur
P. Mustapää: Zu zweit
Attila József: Tiszta szívvel
The lyrics of the song Szívzuhogás by the Hungarian rap band Rapülök is assembled from several famous Hungarian poems. A Rapülök magyar rapegyüttes Szívzuhogás című dalának szövege több híres magyar versből származó részletekből áll össze:
- Szeptember végén
- Nagy Lázló: Én_fekszem itt
- Kosztolányi Dezső: Énekek éneke
- Juhász Gyula: Szerelem?
- József Attila: Óda
- Gyurkovics Tibor: Hajnal
- Kiss Dénes: Részem lettél
- Nagy Lázló: Jártam én koromban, hóban

My first appearance on Finnish TV (YLE1)

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The documentary Syövän nälkäkuolema (Starving Cancer to Death) was produced by the Finnish broadcasting company YLE within the series Tutkittu Juttu . It focuses on cancer, cancer research and new cancer therapies such as antiangiogenic therapy and aired on 1st of March, 2005.You can watch the video here .

Helsinki City marathon 2003

Thu, 16 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

I took part in the Helsinki City Marathon .

Placement	Nro.	Surname	Given name	Club	Series	½ marathon	Brutto time	Netto time
1857	3921	Jeltsch	Michael	Helsinki	Miehet yleinen	2:04:22	4:10:02	4:06:50

PhD Defence (November 29, 2002): Lectio praecursoria

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Jeltsch’s PhD thesis

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

My doctoral thesis has been published: Michael Jeltsch VEGFR-3 Ligands and Lymphangiogenesis, Helsinki 2002. The public defence will take place in Biomedicum, Helsinki, on November 29th, 2002.