I'm a master student at the University of Tampere, in the second largest city of Finland, and doing management studies as my major. I was born in a tiny village called Sumiainen, in 1982, and spent my childhood and teenage years there in the middle of our lakes and forests. Of wildlife they were mainly elks, bears and wolves that were present but our coexistence was always peaceful. And although I may have been transformed to a somewhat urban citizen by now, I'm very much convinced of that the most characteristic places in any given country are usually found in the deep countryside. So far so correct; the most enjoyable places I have ever visited have been in the rural parts of Albania, Romania and Italian Mezzogiorno.

My relation to the blogsphere, at least if regarding the projects like Global Economy Matters and Demography Matters, could be described precisely by the words of Claus: a dry sponge in a pool of water. I found it really fascinating how blogging is blurring boundaries of knowledge; challenging first the old offline media, and now - as we believe - also some conventional forms of research and education. It's a learning process that doesn't recognise hierarchy, privilege or geography. It makes things fairer.

It is mostly organisations and public policies that I study, but the first thing I have learnt from these two projects is that you simply can't say "Nah, that's not my field" to anything. Issues are interrelated and they're many, and I hope I'm gonna grasp at least a bit of them. My personal attempt at a weblog is Aapotsikko; I couldn't make up a decent title and "otsikko" is Finnish for "title".

Of things non-societal, I have a great passion for Italian food and Finnish sauna. And since the uses of the word "sauna" - at least in some European countries, I have noted - simply verge on blasphemy by their context, and always invoking the Euroskeptic within myself, let me finally get that thing straight. Sauna is not a brothel!