Oral health in the family health strategy: a change of practices or semantics diversionism

OBJECTIVE:To evaluate public health dentistry practices of two different family health models. METHODS: Qualitative study conducted with data obtained from focus groups consisting of 58 dentists working in the Family Health Strategy for at least three years between August-October, 2006. The Paideia Family Health Approach was used in the city of Campinas and the Oral Health Initiative as part of the Family Health Strategy was implemented in the city of Curitiba, Southeastern and Southern Brazil, respectively. Data was analyzed using the hermeneutic-dialectic method. Analysis indicators were employed to indicate backwardness, stagnation or progress in oral health practices effective from the implementation of the strategies referred. The indicators used were: work process; interdisciplinary approach; territorialization; capacity building of human resources; health promotion practices; and responsiveness to users' demands. RESULTS: There was progress in user access to services, humanization of health care, patient welcoming and patient-provider relationship. The results related to health promotion practices, territorialization, interdisciplinary approach and resource capacity building indicated a need for technical and operational enhancements in both cities. CONCLUSIONS: Both models have brought about important advances in terms of increased access to services and humanization of health care. Universal access to oral health at all levels of complexity was not achieved in both cities studied. Local health managers and oral health program coordinators must bring more weight to bear in the arena that defines public policy priorities.

El predomínio del inglês en el lenguaje científico: características del lenguaje médico español en la actualidad

Sin lugar a dudas, el inglés se ha convertido en las últimas décadas en la lingua franca de la comunidad científica internacional, desplazando incluso a otras lenguas que tuvieron una gran importancia en otras épocas, caso del francés o del alemán. El lenguaje científico español también ha sucumbido a esta entrada masiva del inglés en las distintas disciplinas científico-técnicas, y presenta desde hace unas décadas ciertas características que no son propias de las reglas gramaticales del español y que son el fruto de una contaminación lingüística derivada de la penetración del inglés. El objetivo del presente artículo es analizar las características del lenguaje médico tal y como lo podemos encontrar en las publicaciones españolas actuales. Para ello, el artículo se divide en tres apartados: en primer lugar, haremos un breve recorrido por la historia del lenguaje médico como punto de partida para comprender la evolución de este lenguaje. En segundo lugar, analizaremos las características principales dentro de los niveles léxicosemántico, morfosintáctico y fonético-fonológico del lenguaje médico español y veremos la influencia que ha tenido el inglés en el proceso de evolución del mismo. En tercer lugar, examinaremos los procedimientos de creación y formación de términos médicos y cómo afectan al desarrollo lingüístico de la terminología.

Alright: a distinctive pathway of change from the 18th century to the present day

The origins of the vast majority of the words we use in contemporary English go back as far as Old or Middle English. In contrast, alright and all right in their present-day application appear to be the result of a more recent evolution, as there is no evidence of their use, not even in the two-word form, in the published fiction before the 18th century. Furthermore, there are not in the research literature, at least to my knowledge, any previous linguistic studies on this specific subject matter. The present article is simply an attempt to describe the various processes of diachronic change that brought about the emergence of alright.

Do fatigue, physical activity, handgrip strength and quality of life change between pre and post liver transplant?

Analisar: níveis de fadiga, força de preensão, HRQoL, níveis de actividade física. Será que se alteram em doentes PAF após o transplante de fígado? Dado que os níveis de actividade física se encontram abaixo dos valores mínimos recomendados deveria ser encontrada uma estratégia de aumento do tempo dispendido na actividade física leve a moderada idealmente no PRÉ TRANSPLANTE.

Ontology mapping evolution

Introdução Hoje em dia, o conceito de ontologia (Especificação explícita de uma conceptualização [Gruber, 1993]) é um conceito chave em sistemas baseados em conhecimento em geral e na Web Semântica em particular. Entretanto, os agentes de software nem sempre concordam com a mesma conceptualização, justificando assim a existência de diversas ontologias, mesmo que tratando o mesmo domínio de discurso. Para resolver/minimizar o problema de interoperabilidade entre estes agentes, o mapeamento de ontologias provou ser uma boa solução. O mapeamento de ontologias é o processo onde são especificadas relações semânticas entre entidades da ontologia origem e destino ao nível conceptual, e que por sua vez podem ser utilizados para transformar instâncias baseadas na ontologia origem em instâncias baseadas na ontologia destino. Motivação Num ambiente dinâmico como a Web Semântica, os agentes alteram não só os seus dados mas também a sua estrutura e semântica (ontologias). Este processo, denominado evolução de ontologias, pode ser definido como uma adaptação temporal da ontologia através de alterações que surgem no domínio ou nos objectivos da própria ontologia, e da gestão consistente dessas alterações [Stojanovic, 2004], podendo por vezes deixar o documento de mapeamento inconsistente. Em ambientes heterogéneos onde a interoperabilidade entre sistemas depende do documento de mapeamento, este deve reflectir as alterações efectuadas nas ontologias, existindo neste caso duas soluções: (i) gerar um novo documento de mapeamento (processo exigente em termos de tempo e recursos computacionais) ou (ii) adaptar o documento de mapeamento, corrigindo relações semânticas inválidas e criar novas relações se forem necessárias (processo menos existente em termos de tempo e recursos computacionais, mas muito dependente da informação sobre as alterações efectuadas). O principal objectivo deste trabalho é a análise, especificação e desenvolvimento do processo de evolução do documento de mapeamento de forma a reflectir as alterações efectuadas durante o processo de evolução de ontologias. Contexto Este trabalho foi desenvolvido no contexto do MAFRA Toolkit1. O MAFRA (MApping FRAmework) Toolkit é uma aplicação desenvolvida no GECAD2 que permite a especificação declarativa de relações semânticas entre entidades de uma ontologia origem e outra de destino, utilizando os seguintes componentes principais: Concept Bridge – Representa uma relação semântica entre um conceito de origem e um de destino; Property Bridge – Representa uma relação semântica entre uma ou mais propriedades de origem e uma ou mais propriedades de destino; Service – São aplicados às Semantic Bridges (Property e Concept Bridges) definindo como as instâncias origem devem ser transformadas em instâncias de destino. Estes conceitos estão especificados na ontologia SBO (Semantic Bridge Ontology) [Silva, 2004]. No contexto deste trabalho, um documento de mapeamento é uma instanciação do SBO, contendo relações semânticas entre entidades da ontologia de origem e da ontologia de destino. Processo de evolução do mapeamento O processo de evolução de mapeamento é o processo onde as entidades do documento de mapeamento são adaptadas, reflectindo eventuais alterações nas ontologias mapeadas, tentando o quanto possível preservar a semântica das relações semântica especificadas. Se as ontologias origem e/ou destino sofrerem alterações, algumas relações semânticas podem tornar-se inválidas, ou novas relações serão necessárias, sendo por isso este processo composto por dois sub-processos: (i) correcção de relações semânticas e (ii) processamento de novas entidades das ontologias. O processamento de novas entidades das ontologias requer a descoberta e cálculo de semelhanças entre entidades e a especificação de relações de acordo com a ontologia/linguagem SBO. Estas fases (“similarity measure” e “semantic bridging”) são implementadas no MAFRA Toolkit, sendo o processo (semi-) automático de mapeamento de ontologias descrito em [Silva, 2004].O processo de correcção de entidades SBO inválidas requer um bom conhecimento da ontologia/linguagem SBO, das suas entidades e relações, e de todas as suas restrições, i.e. da sua estrutura e semântica. Este procedimento consiste em (i) identificar as entidades SBO inválidas, (ii) a causa da sua invalidez e (iii) corrigi-las da melhor forma possível. Nesta fase foi utilizada informação vinda do processo de evolução das ontologias com o objectivo de melhorar a qualidade de todo o processo. Conclusões Para além do processo de evolução do mapeamento desenvolvido, um dos pontos mais importantes deste trabalho foi a aquisição de um conhecimento mais profundo sobre ontologias, processo de evolução de ontologias, mapeamento etc., expansão dos horizontes de conhecimento, adquirindo ainda mais a consciência da complexidade do problema em questão, o que permite antever e perspectivar novos desafios para o futuro.

The Dark Side of Organizational Change: The Moderating Role of Political Behavior and Organizational Cynicism

Workplace aggression is a factor that shapes the interaction between individuals and their work environment and produces many undesirable outcomes, sometimes introducing heavy costs for organizations. Only through a comprehensive understanding of the genesis of workplace aggression is possible to develop strategies and interventions to minimize its nefarious effects. The existent body of knowledge has already identified several individual, situational and contextual antecedents of workplace aggression, although this is a research area where significant gaps occur and many issues were still not addressed Dupré and Barling (2006). According to Baron and Neuman (1998) one of these predictors is organizational change, since certain changes in the work environment (e.g., changes in management) can lead to increased aggression. This paper intends to contribute to workplace aggression research by studying its relationship with organizational change, considering a moderating role of political behaviors and organizational cynicism (Ammeter et al., 2002, Ferris et al., 2002). The literature review suggests that mediators and moderators that intervene in the relationships between workplace aggression and its antecedents are understudied topics. James (2005) sustains that organizational politics is related to cynicism and the empirical research of Miranda (2008) has identified leadership political behavior as an antecedent of cynicism but these two variables were not yet investigated regarding their relationship with workplace aggression. This investigation was operationalized using several scales including the Organizational Change Questionnaire-climate of change, processes, and readiness (Bouckenooghe, Devos and Broeck, 2009), a Workplace Aggression Scale (Vicente and D’Oliveira, 2008, 2009, 2010), an Organizational Cynicism Scale (Wanous, Reichers and Austin, 1994) and a Political Behavior Questionnaire (Yukl and Falbe, 1990). Participants representing a wide variety of jobs across many organizations were surveyed. The results of the study and its implications will be presented and discussed. This study contribution is also discussed in what concerns organizational change practices in organizations.

A semantic approach for learning objects repositories with knowledge reuse

In this paper we discuss how the inclusion of semantic functionalities in a Learning Objects Repository allows a better characterization of the learning materials enclosed and improves their retrieval through the adoption of some query expansion strategies. Thus, we started to regard the use of ontologies to automatically suggest additional concepts when users are filling some metadata fields and add new terms to the ones initially provided when users specify the keywords with interest in a query. Dealing with different domain areas and having considered impractical the development of many different ontologies, we adopted some strategies for reusing ontologies in order to have the knowledge necessary in our institutional repository. In this paper we make a review of the area of knowledge reuse and discuss our approach.

An analysis of teachers' environmental concerns: use of a conceptual change model

Tese de doutoramento em Ciências da Educação

Vulnerability of mediterranean watersheds to climate change

Desertification is a critical issue for Mediterranean drylands. Climate change is expected to aggravate its extension and severity by reinforcing the biophysical driving forces behind desertification processes: hydrology, vegetation cover and soil erosion. The main objective of this thesis is to assess the vulnerability of Mediterranean watersheds to climate change, by estimating impacts on desertification drivers and the watersheds’ resilience to them. To achieve this objective, a modeling framework capable of analyzing the processes linking climate and the main drivers is developed. The framework couples different models adapted to different spatial and temporal scales. A new model for the event scale is developed, the MEFIDIS model, with a focus on the particular processes governing Mediterranean watersheds. Model results are compared with desertification thresholds to estimate resilience. This methodology is applied to two contrasting study areas: the Guadiana and the Tejo, which currently present a semi-arid and humid climate. The main conclusions taken from this work can be summarized as follows: • hydrological processes show a high sensitivity to climate change, leading to a significant decrease in runoff and an increase in temporal variability; • vegetation processes appear to be less sensitive, with negative impacts for agricultural species and forests, and positive impacts for Mediterranean species; • changes to soil erosion processes appear to depend on the balance between changes to surface runoff and vegetation cover, itself governed by relationship between changes to temperature and rainfall; • as the magnitude of changes to climate increases, desertification thresholds are surpassed in a sequential way, starting with the watersheds’ ability to sustain current water demands and followed by the vegetation support capacity; • the most important thresholds appear to be a temperature increase of +3.5 to +4.5 ºC and a rainfall decrease of -10 to -20 %; • rainfall changes beyond this threshold could lead to severe water stress occurring even if current water uses are moderated, with droughts occurring in 1 out of 4 years; • temperature changes beyond this threshold could lead to a decrease in agricultural yield accompanied by an increase in soil erosion for croplands; • combined changes of temperature and rainfall beyond the thresholds could shift both systems towards a more arid state, leading to severe water stresses and significant changes to the support capacity for current agriculture and natural vegetation in both study areas.

Change Processes and Future Perspectives in the Knowledge Society. The Example of Clothing and Textile Industry

The paper examines change processes und future perspectives in the knowledge society. It presents the clothing and textile industry as an example for a transforming industry in a global economy. The paper reviews existing future studies, which have surveyed change processes and future developments in the clothing and textile industry. Main goals of the review are the identification of changes in work and the description of the restructuring of global value chains within the clothing and textile sector. The paper also highlights major current trends, drivers of change and future prospects in this sector.

Uniprocessor EDF scheduling with mode change

Consider the problem of scheduling sporadically-arriving tasks with implicit deadlines using Earliest-Deadline-First (EDF) on a single processor. The system may undergo changes in its operational modes and therefore the characteristics of the task set may change at run-time. We consider a well-established previously published mode-change protocol and we show that if every mode utilizes at most 50% of the processing capacity then all deadlines are met. We also show that there exists a task set that misses a deadline although the utilization exceeds 50% by just an arbitrarily small amount. Finally, we present, for a relevant special case, an exact schedulability test for EDF with mode change.

Climate change impacts on portuguese energy system in 2050

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas Ambientais

Assessment of climate change statistical downscaling methods: Application and comparison of two statistical methods to a single site in Lisbon

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente

Validation of psychosocial scales for physical activity in university students

OBJECTIVE Translate the Patient-centered Assessment and Counseling for Exercise questionnaire, adapt it cross-culturally and identify the psychometric properties of the psychosocial scales for physical activity in young university students.METHODS The Patient-centered Assessment and Counseling for Exercise questionnaire is made up of 39 items divided into constructs based on the social cognitive theory and the transtheoretical model. The analyzed constructs were, as follows: behavior change strategy (15 items), decision-making process (10), self-efficacy (6), support from family (4), and support from friends (4). The validation procedures were conceptual, semantic, operational, and functional equivalences, in addition to the equivalence of the items and of measurements. The conceptual, of items and semantic equivalences were performed by a specialized committee. During measurement equivalence, the instrument was applied to 717 university students. Exploratory factor analysis was used to verify the loading of each item, explained variance and internal consistency of the constructs. Reproducibility was measured by means of intraclass correlation coefficient.RESULTS The two translations were equivalent and back-translation was similar to the original version, with few adaptations. The layout, presentation order of the constructs and items from the original version were kept in the same form as the original instrument. The sample size was adequate and was evaluated by the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin test, with values between 0.72 and 0.91. The correlation matrix of the items presented r < 0.8 (p < 0.05). The factor loadings of the items from all the constructs were satisfactory (> 0.40), varying between 0.43 and 0.80, which explained between 45.4% and 59.0% of the variance. Internal consistency was satisfactory (α ≥ 0.70), with support from friends being 0.70 and 0.92 for self-efficacy. Most items (74.3%) presented values above 0.70 for the reproducibility test.CONCLUSIONS The validation process steps were considered satisfactory and adequate for applying to the population.

Hospitalization due to drug use did not change after a decade of the Psychiatric Reform

ABSTRACT OBJECTIVE To investigate whether the psychiatric hospitalization rates due to use of psychoactive substances and average time of hospitalization suffered any changes after the first decade of effective implementation of the psychiatric reform in Brazil. METHODS This article examines the evolution of hospitalizations due to disorders arising from the use of alcohol or other substances in the state of Santa Catarina, Southern Brazil, from 2000 to 2012. This is an ecological, time-series study, which uses data from admissions obtained by the Informatics Service of the Brazilian Unified Health System. Hospitalization rates by 100,000 inhabitants and average time of occupancy of beds were estimated. Coefficients of variation of these rates were estimated by Poisson Regression. RESULTS The total and male hospitalization rates did not vary (p = 0.056 and p = 0.244, respectively). We observed an increase of 3.0% for the female sex (p = 0.049). We did not observe any significant variation for occupancy time of beds. CONCLUSIONS The deployment of services triggered by the Brazilian psychiatric reform was not accompanied by a reduction of hospitalization rates or mean occupancy time of hospitalized patients during this first decade of implementation of the reform.