Finland

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Antibiotics Given to Babies May Change Their Gut Microbes for Years

Anna Vlasits | STAT | June 15, 2016

Babies born by caesarean section, as well as those given antibiotics early in life, have a different balance of gut microbes than other babies, two new studies show. These differences could put them at higher risk for various health problems in childhood, including asthma, type 1 diabetes, and perhaps even autism. By the time children are 3 years old, their microbiomes are largely stable, said Dr. Ramnik Xavier, a lead author on one of two related studies published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine. So what happens early in life can have long-term implications for health...

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Data Management for Large-scale COVID-19 Immunization: This is all not as simple as it seems

There is a global race for the development of a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Finding a vaccine that works and receives approval is only part of the process. There are a series of other steps that need to be taken so that the vaccine can be delivered. These include the mass production of the vaccine, shipment, administration and record-keeping. This may be even more complex as there may be several vaccines. In this article we review some of these issues with a particular focus on the United States.

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Emphasizing Open Development, Open Data, & Open Knowledge

Press Release | Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland | September 15, 2012

Open knowledge and data will be the topic of the Open Knowledge Festival on 17-22 September. One of the topic streams of the event, jointly organised by Open Knowledge Foundation, the Finnish Institute in London and Aalto Media Factory, is openness and open data related to global development and financing. In the event, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs will launch a competition on visualising development cooperation statistics.

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Finland and IBM Partner to Develop Personalized Healthcare and Spark Economic Growth with Watson

Press Release | Tekes, IBM Watson Health | September 14, 2016

Tekes – the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation (Tekes) and IBM today announced a partnership that will enable Finland to utilize Watson cognitive computing to help doctors improve the health of its citizens, and strengthen and develop the Finnish innovation and business ecosystem in the fields of health and well-being...

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How Helsinki Became The Most Successful Open-Data City In The World

Olli Sulopuisto | The Atlantic Cities | April 29, 2014

...Helsinki Region Infoshare publishes all of its data in formats that make it easy for software developers, researchers, journalists and others to analyze, combine or turn into web-based or mobile applications that citizens may find useful. In four years of operation, the project has produced more than 1,000 "machine-readable" data sources such as a map of traffic noise levels, real-time locations of snow plows, and a database of corporate taxes...

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Lowering the Bar: Medicine in the 21st Century

John Fauber and Kristina Fiore | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and MedPage Today | May 22, 2016

As many as 16 million Americans are prone to screaming and pounding on the dashboard when someone cuts them off in traffic. There are 14 million men with low testosterone, 9 million women with low sexual desire -- and tens of millions of people with bladders that are too active and blood sugar that's a little too high. The common thread: All have non-life-threatening conditions that for most of the 20th century were not considered a part of mainstream medicine...

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OKFest in Finland to Study Benefits of Open Knowledge and Open Development

The Open Knowledge Festival (OKFest) happens this September 17-22 in Helsinki, Finland with the theme Open Knowledge in Action. OKFest will explore the benefits of opening up knowledge and information, look at the ecosystems of organisations that can benefit from openness, and discuss the impact that more transparency can have in our societies. OKFest will run 13 key Topic Streams, one of which will focus on the topic of ‘Open Development’.

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Research Symbiosis Makes Mathematical Crystal Ball to Gaze into Future of Prostate Cancer Treatment

Press Release | University of Colorado Cancer Center | August 4, 2017

The chemotherapy docetaxel is widely accepted as a standard therapy for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. But 10-20 percent of patients will have adverse side effects that force discontinuation of treatment. These patients may have been better off with another treatment in the first place, but who’s to know before trying the drug which patients will go on to experience debilitating side effects? A crowdsourced competition asked this as an open question. Today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology Clinical Cancer Informatics, competition organizers and participating teams report their findings...

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Researchers develop new method for analysing cell function

Press Release | Academy of Finland | June 26, 2012

Researchers in Finland and Germany have developed an open-source software that will make it significantly easier to process bioimaging data. The software, named BioImageXD, will help in analysing cell and tissue functions.

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Searching For Finland's Education Entrepreneurs

Tony Wan | edSurge | August 27, 2013

What's to solve when your education system is supposedly perfect? Last week, Annie Murphy Paul’s review of Amanda Ripley’s book, The Smartest Kids in the World, began with Ripley’s quote: “If you want the American dream, go to Finland.” It just so happened that I was there last week for a CICERO conference on digital learning...In addition to grokking with academics, I had another quest in mind: are there edtech entrepreneurs in Finland? And if so, what problems in this seemingly idyllic education environment are they trying to solve? Read More »

U.S. Ranks 23rd For Women’s Equality, Falling Behind Nicaragua, Cuba, and Burundi

Bryce Covert | Think Progress | October 25, 2013

In the 2013 World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report, which measures women’s economic, political, educational, and health equality, the United States ranks at number 23 out of 136 countries around the world. The country falls behind many Nordic countries as well as Nicaragua, Cuba, and Burundi, among others.

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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

Anu Partanen | The Atlantic | December 29, 2011

The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence. Read More »

Why Open Data Matters in Education

Similar to the way open source changed the way technology is built and used, open data has begun to change the way the world looks at data. Open data provides an opportunity to resolve some of the world's most complicated problems, whether in private sector or public sector.

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Winners Announced for Crowdsourcing and Data Sharing Competition to Drive Innovation in Prostate Cancer Research

Press Release | Sage Bionetworks, Project Data Sphere Initiative, DREAM Challenges Initiative | August 27, 2015

Industry leaders in biomedical research, oncology data sharing and computational science announced the winners of an innovative research challenge for prostate cancer using previously unavailable clinical data. The Prostate Cancer DREAM Challenge is the first research challenge in prostate cancer to marry crowdsourcing with data sharing, paving a new way to tackle key research questions about metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC), an advanced form of the disease with poor outcomes. The Challenge called upon the cancer research and computational biology community to find solutions to key open clinical research questions about mCRPC and explore innovative research and modeling approaches. The three specific questions posed were to: