Professional development and a discussion of the professional preparation provided by information and library science degree programs in public universities in Madrid, 2000-2005

A study was designed to determine how the degree programs in Information and library science available in 2000-2005 at the public universities of Madrid fit the tabour market needs of their students. The methodology used was the development of a questionnaire addressed to graduates. Although the number of surveys completed is not high (118), the authors believe that the results obtained permit a series of conclusions that may be extrapolated to the entire cohort.

The game inside the school: a representation of 5(th) graders physical education classes

Since the beginning of Physical Education entrance in the brazilin public schools, the game has been frequently used as content, and in the course of time that practice seems to be intensified. In spite of many approaches of different purposes to justify its pedagogic usefulness, the game has been used as an indiscriminate way due to the fascination that it provides to the students. The present study searches for a description and analysis of children`s (10-12 years old) attitudes behaviors in games, on Physical Education classes, inside a public school. The study was accomplished with the researcher also attending as a teacher (action research). For the accomplishment of the study 55 children were filmed in four different games, of different kinds (exposed, transformed, and spontaneous). The classes` description and analysis were focused in the attitude axis and it was defined four topics for the discussion: Conflicts, Respect of rules, Expressiveness, and Competitiveness. The relationship between the individual with the game and its culture were pointed as the main characteristics in the configuration of the ludicrous activity atmosphere. It was also possible to observe specific situations of this relationship, once the games were limited to the social games (Piaget category), in a school atmosphere where children have students roles. Due to the obtained results, the study proposes a reflexive practice in which the students notice their own attitudes and try to adapt the game to their needs and not he other way around. In this perspective, the teacher has an important mediator roll, once he will be responsible to point out the students` difficulties and promote discussions in favor to provide teamwork.

EOPAS, the EthnoER online representation of interlinear text

One of the goals of the ARC funded Eresearch project called Sharing access and analytical tools for ethnographic digital media using high speed networks, or simply EthnoER is to take outputs of normal linguistic analytical processes and present them online in a system we have called the EthnoER online presentation and annotation system, or EOPAS.

Providing evidence-based answers to clinical questions - A pilot information service for general practitioners

Objective: To pilot a clinical information service for general practitioners. Methods: A representative sample of 31 GPs was invited to submit clinical questions to a local academic department of general practice. Their views on the service and the usefulness of the information were obtained by telephone interview. Results: Over one month, nine GPs (29% of the sample, 45% of those stating an interest), submitted 20 enquiries comprising 45 discrete clinical questions. The median time to search for evidence, appraise it and write answers to each enquiry was 2.5 hours (range, 1.0-7.4 hours). The median interval between receipt of questions and dispatch of answers was 3 clays (range, 1-12 days). Conclusions: The GPs found the answers useful in clinical decision making; in four out of 20 cases patient management was altered.

Self-reported needs for care among persons who have suicidal ideation or who have attempted suicide

This study examined the self-reported needs of suicidal users of mental health services and the extent to which needs were met. Data on 10,641 adults were available from the Australian National Survey of Mental Health and Well-being. In the year before the survey, 245 persons with suicidal ideation used services, 37 of whom had attempted suicide. Suicidal persons reported a range of needs, especially for counseling, medication, and information. More than half of those with suicidal ideation and those who had attempted suicide who reported any needs felt that their needs had not been fully met. Suicidal persons were significantly more likely to perceive that they had needs.

A Graphical Representation Model for Telemedicine and Telehealth Center Sustainability

This study shows the creation of a graphical representation after the application of a questionnaire to evaluate the indicative factors of a sustainable telemedicine and telehealth center in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We categorized the factors into seven domain areas: institutional, functional, economic-financial, renewal, academic-scientific, partnerships, and social welfare, which were plotted into a graphical representation. The developed graph was shown to be useful when used in the same institution over a long period and complemented with secondary information from publications, archives, and administrative documents to support the numerical indicators. Its use may contribute toward monitoring the factors that define telemedicine and telehealth center sustainability. When systematically applied, it may also be useful for identifying the specific characteristics of the telemedicine and telehealth center, to support its organizational development.

The effects of information request ambiguity and construct incongruence on query development

This paper examines the effects of information request ambiguity and construct incongruence on end user's ability to develop SQL queries with an interactive relational database query language. In this experiment, ambiguity in information requests adversely affected accuracy and efficiency. Incongruities among the information request, the query syntax, and the data representation adversely affected accuracy, efficiency, and confidence. The results for ambiguity suggest that organizations might elicit better query development if end users were sensitized to the nature of ambiguities that could arise in their business contexts. End users could translate natural language queries into pseudo-SQL that could be examined for precision before the queries were developed. The results for incongruence suggest that better query development might ensue if semantic distances could be reduced by giving users data representations and database views that maximize construct congruence for the kinds of queries in typical domains. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Mental evolution and development: Evidence for secondary representation in children, great apes, and other animals

Recent interest in the development and evolution of theory of mind has provided a wealth of information about representational skills in both children and animals, According to J, Perrier (1991), children begin to entertain secondary representations in the 2nd year of life. This advance manifests in their passing hidden displacement tasks, engaging in pretense and means-ends reasoning, interpreting external representations, displaying mirror self-recognition and empathic behavior, and showing an early understanding of mind and imitation. New data show a cluster of mental accomplishments in great apes that is very similar to that observed in 2-year-old humans. It is suggested that it is most parsimonious to assume that this cognitive profile is of homologous origin and that great apes possess secondary representational capacity. Evidence from animals other than apes is scant. This analysis leads to a number of predictions for future research.

Incremental parsing in language-based editors: user needs and how to meet them

Incremental parsing has long been recognized as a technique of great utility in the construction of language-based editors, and correspondingly, the area currently enjoys a mature theory. Unfortunately, many practical considerations have been largely overlooked in previously published algorithms. Many user requirements for an editing system necessarily impact on the design of its incremental parser, but most approaches focus only on one: response time. This paper details an incremental parser based on LR parsing techniques and designed for use in a modeless syntax recognition editor. The nature of this editor places significant demands on the structure and quality of the document representation it uses, and hence, on the parser. The strategy presented here is novel in that both the parser and the representation it constructs are tolerant of the inevitable and frequent syntax errors that arise during editing. This is achieved by a method that differs from conventional error repair techniques, and that is more appropriate for use in an interactive context. Furthermore, the parser aims to minimize disturbance to this representation, not only to ensure other system components can operate incrementally, but also to avoid unfortunate consequences for certain user-oriented services. The algorithm is augmented with a limited form of predictive tree-building, and a technique is presented for the determination of valid symbols for menu-based insertion. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Research commentary: Information systems and conceptual modeling - A research agenda

Within the information systems field, the task of conceptual modeling involves building a representation of selected phenomena in some domain. High-quality conceptual-modeling work is important because it facilitates early detection and correction of system development errors. It also plays an increasingly important role in activities like business process reengineering and documentation of best-practice data and process models in enterprise resource planning systems. Yet little research has been undertaken on many aspects of conceptual modeling. In this paper, we propose a framework to motivate research that addresses the following fundamental question: How can we model the world to better facilitate our developing, implementing, using, and maintaining more valuable information systems? The framework comprises four elements: conceptual-modeling grammars, conceptual-modeling methods, conceptual-modeling scripts, and conceptual-modeling contexts. We provide examples of the types of research that have already been undertaken on each element and illustrate research opportunities that exist.

Wavelet-based image segment representation

An efficient representation method for arbitrarily shaped image segments is proposed. This method includes a smart way to select wavelet basis to approximate the given image segment, with improved image quality and reduced computational load.

Information technology supporting healthcare and social care services

The authors are developing a pilot project for a Municipality in the North of Portugal, envisaging the definition and implementation of an e-marketplace for healthcare and social services, in order to facilitate the interaction between healthcare and social services professionals and people with special needs (or their relatives). Based on the results of a survey on user needs analysis and expectations conducted in 2011, the paper discusses the relevance and interest of such platforms and the main drivers and motivations of the population for using such services, as well as which services would motivate citizens to use the platform. The results of the study will be used to select the products and services perceived to be the most desired by the potential users. The paper thus makes three main contributions: (1) the results of the study confirm the interest and the perceived potential of such a service, from the end-users perspective; (2) the findings support the advantage of expanding this pilot project to a full scale implementation; and (3) the performed analysis improves our understanding of the relations between the characteristics of the inquired population and the perceived interest in such platforms.

Grid structure impact in sparse point representation of derivatives

In the Sparse Point Representation (SPR) method the principle is to retain the function data indicated by significant interpolatory wavelet coefficients, which are defined as interpolation errors by means of an interpolating subdivision scheme. Typically, a SPR grid is coarse in smooth regions, and refined close to irregularities. Furthermore, the computation of partial derivatives of a function from the information of its SPR content is performed in two steps. The first one is a refinement procedure to extend the SPR by the inclusion of new interpolated point values in a security zone. Then, for points in the refined grid, such derivatives are approximated by uniform finite differences, using a step size proportional to each point local scale. If required neighboring stencils are not present in the grid, the corresponding missing point values are approximated from coarser scales using the interpolating subdivision scheme. Using the cubic interpolation subdivision scheme, we demonstrate that such adaptive finite differences can be formulated in terms of a collocation scheme based on the wavelet expansion associated to the SPR. For this purpose, we prove some results concerning the local behavior of such wavelet reconstruction operators, which stand for SPR grids having appropriate structures. This statement implies that the adaptive finite difference scheme and the one using the step size of the finest level produce the same result at SPR grid points. Consequently, in addition to the refinement strategy, our analysis indicates that some care must be taken concerning the grid structure, in order to keep the truncation error under a certain accuracy limit. Illustrating results are presented for 2D Maxwell's equation numerical solutions.

Advanced side information creation techniques and framework for Wyner-Ziv video coding

Recently, several distributed video coding (DVC) solutions based on the distributed source coding (DSC) paradigm have appeared in the literature. Wyner-Ziv (WZ) video coding, a particular case of DVC where side information is made available at the decoder, enable to achieve a flexible distribution of the computational complexity between the encoder and decoder, promising to fulfill novel requirements from applications such as video surveillance, sensor networks and mobile camera phones. The quality of the side information at the decoder has a critical role in determining the WZ video coding rate-distortion (RD) performance, notably to raise it to a level as close as possible to the RD performance of standard predictive video coding schemes. Towards this target, efficient motion search algorithms for powerful frame interpolation are much needed at the decoder. In this paper, the RD performance of a Wyner-Ziv video codec is improved by using novel, advanced motion compensated frame interpolation techniques to generate the side information. The development of these type of side information estimators is a difficult problem in WZ video coding, especially because the decoder only has available some reference, decoded frames. Based on the regularization of the motion field, novel side information creation techniques are proposed in this paper along with a new frame interpolation framework able to generate higher quality side information at the decoder. To illustrate the RD performance improvements, this novel side information creation framework has been integrated in a transform domain turbo coding based Wyner-Ziv video codec. Experimental results show that the novel side information creation solution leads to better RD performance than available state-of-the-art side information estimators, with improvements up to 2 dB: moreover, it allows outperforming H.264/AVC Intra by up to 3 dB with a lower encoding complexity.

Eastwards / westwards: which direction for gender studies in the 21st century?

Eastwards / Westwards: Which Direction for Gender Studies in the XXIst Century? is a collection of essays which focus on themes and methods that characterize current research into gender in Asian countries in general. In this collection, ideas derived from Gender Studies elsewhere in the world have been subjected to scrutiny for their utility in helping to describe and understand regional phenomena. But the concepts of Local and Global – with their discoursive productions – have not functioned as a binary opposition: localism and globalism are mutually constitutive and researchers have interrogated those spaces of interaction between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, bearing in mind their own embeddedness in social and cultural structures and their own historical memory. Contributors to this collection provided a critical transnational perspective on some of the complex effects of the dynamics of cultural globalization, by exploring the relation between gender and development, language, historiography, education and culture. We have also given attention to the ideological and rhetorical processes through which gender identity is constructed, by comparing textual grids and patterns of expectation. Likewise, we have discussed the role of ethnography, anthropology, historiography, sociology, fiction, popular culture and colonial and post-colonial sources in (re)inventing old/new male/female identities, their conversion into concepts and circulation through time and space. This multicultural and trans-disciplinary selection of essays is totally written in English, fully edited and revised, therefore, it has a good potential for an immediate international circulation. This project may trace new paths and issues for discussion on what concerns the life, practices and narratives by and about women in Asia, as well as elsewhere in the present day global experience. Academic readership: Researchers, scholars, educators, graduate and post-graduate students, doctoral students and general non-fiction readers, with a special interest in Gender Studies, Asia, Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, History, Historiography, Politics, Race, Feminism, Language, Linguistics, Power, Political and Feminist Agendas, Popular Culture, Education, Women’s Writing, Religion, Multiculturalism, Globalisation, Migration. Chapter summary: 1. “Social Gender Stereotypes and their Implication in Hindi”, Anjali Pande, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. This essay looks at the subtle ways in which gender identities are constructed and reinforced in India through social norms of language use. Language itself becomes a medium for perpetuating gender stereotypes, forcing its speakers to confirm to socially defined gender roles. Using examples from a classroom discussion about a film, this essay will highlight the underlying rigid male-female stereotypes in Indian society with their more obvious expressions in language. For the urban woman in India globalisation meant increased economic equality and exposure to changed lifestyles. On an individual level it also meant redefining gender relations and changing the hierarchy in man-­woman relationships. With the economic independence there is a heightened sense of liberation in all spheres of social life, a confidence to fuzz the rigid boundaries of gender roles. With the new films and media celebrating this liberated woman, who is ready to assert her sexual needs, who is ready to explode those long held notions of morality, one would expect that the changes are not just superficial. But as it soon became obvious in the course of a classroom discussion about relationships and stereotypes related to age, the surface changes can not become part of the common vocabulary, for the obvious reason that there is still a vast gap between the screen image of this new woman and the ground reality. Social considerations define the limits of this assertiveness of women, whereas men are happy to be liberal within the larger frame of social sanctions. The educated urban woman in India speaks in favour of change and the educated urban male supports her, but one just needs to scratch the surface to see the time tested formulae of gender roles firmly in place. The way the urban woman happily balances this emerging promise of independence with her gendered social identity, makes it necessary to rethink some aspects of looking at gender in a gradually changing, traditional society like India. 2. “The Linguistic Dimension of Gender Equality”, Alissa Tolstokorova, Kiev Centre for Gender Information and Education, Ukraine. The subject-matter of this essay is gender justice in language which, as I argue, may be achieved through the development of a gender-related approach to linguistic human rights. The last decades of the 20th century, globally marked by a “gender shift” in attitudes to language policy, gave impetus to the social movement for promoting linguistic gender equality. It was initiated in Western Europe and nowadays is moving eastwards, as ideas of gender democracy progress into developing countries. But, while in western societies gender discrimination through language, or linguistic sexism, was an issue of concern for over three decades, in developing countries efforts to promote gender justice in language are only in their infancy. My argument is that to promote gender justice in language internationally it is necessary to acknowledge the rights of women and men to equal representation of their gender in language and speech and, therefore, raise a question of linguistic rights of the sexes. My understanding is that the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights in 1996 provided this opportunity to address the problem of gender justice in language as a human rights issue, specifically as a gender dimension of linguistic human rights. 3. “The Rebirth of an Old Language: Issues of Gender Equality in Kazakhstan”, Maria Helena Guimarães, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Portugal. The existing language situation in Kazakhstan, while peaceful, is not without some tension. We propose to analyze here some questions we consider relevant in the frame of cultural globalization and gender equality, such as: free from Russian imperialism, could Kazakhstan become an easy prey of Turkey’s “imperialist dream”? Could these traditionally Muslim people be soon facing the end of religious tolerance and gender equality, becoming this new old language an easy instrument for the infiltration in the country of fundamentalism (it has already crossed the boarders of Uzbekistan), leading to a gradual deterioration of its rich multicultural relations? The present structure of the language is still very fragile: there are three main dialects and many academics defend the re-introduction of the Latin alphabet, thus enlarging the possibility of cultural “contamination” by making the transmission of fundamentalist ideas still easier through neighbour countries like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan (their languages belong to the same sub-group of Common Turkic), where the Latin alphabet is already in use, and where the ground for such ideas shown itself very fruitful. 4. “Construction of Womanhood in the Bengali Language of Bangladesh”, Raasheed Mahmood; University of New South Wales, Sydney. The present essay attempts to explore the role of gender-based language differences and of certain markers that reveal the status accorded to women in Bangladesh. Discrimination against women, in its various forms, is endemic in communities and countries around the world, cutting across class, race, age, and religious and national boundaries. One cannot understand the problems of gender discrimination solely by referring to the relationship of power or authority between men and women. Rather one needs to consider the problem by relating it to the specific social formation in which the image of masculinity and femininity is constructed and reconstructed. Following such line of reasoning this essay will examine the nature of gender bias in the Bengali language of Bangladesh, holding the conviction that as a product of social reality language reflects the socio-cultural behaviour of the community who speaks it. This essay will also attempt to shed some light on the processes through which gender based language differences produce actual consequences for women, who become exposed to low self-esteem, depression and systematic exclusion from public discourse. 5. “Marriage in China as an expression of a changing society”, Elisabetta Rosado David, University of Porto, Portugal, and Università Ca’Foscari, Venezia, Italy. In 29 April 2001, the new Marriage Law was promulgated in China. The first law on marriage was proclaimed in 1950 with the objective of freeing women from the feudal matrimonial system. With the second law, in 1981, values and conditions that had been distorted by the Cultural Revolution were recovered. Twenty years later, a new reform was started, intending to update marriage in the view of the social and cultural changes that occurred with Deng Xiaoping’s “open policy”. But the legal reform is only the starting point for this case-study. The rituals that are followed in the wedding ceremony are often hard to understand and very difficult to standardize, especially because China is a vast country, densely populated and characterized by several ethnic minorities. Two key words emerge from this issue: syncretism and continuity. On this basis, we can understand tradition in a better way, and analyse whether or not marriage, as every social manifestation, has evolved in harmony with Chinese culture. 6. “The Other Woman in the Portuguese Colonial Empire: The Case of Portuguese India”, Maria de Deus Manso, University of Évora, Portugal. This essay researches the social, cultural and symbolic history of local women in the Portuguese Indian colonial enclaves. The normative Portuguese overseas history has not paid any attention to the “indigenous” female populations in colonial Portuguese territories, albeit the large social importance of these social segments largely used in matrimonial and even catholic missionary strategies. The first attempt to open fresh windows in the history of this new field was the publication of Charles Boxer’s referential study about Women in lberian Overseas Expansion, edited in Portugal only after the Revolution of 1975. After this research we can only quote some other fragmentary efforts. In fact, research about the social, cultural, religious, political and symbolic situation of women in the Portuguese colonial territories, from the XVI to the XX century, is still a minor historiographic field. In this essay we discuss this problem and we study colonial representations of women in the Portuguese Indian enclaves, mainly in the territory of Goa, using case studies methodologies. 7. “Heading East this Time: Critical Readings on Gender in Southeast Asia”, Clara Sarmento, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Portugal. This essay intends to discuss some critical readings of fictional and theoretical texts on gender condition in Southeast Asian countries. Nowadays, many texts about women in Southeast Asia apply concepts of power in unusual areas. Traditional forms of gender hegemony have been replaced by other powerful, if somewhat more covert, forms. We will discuss some universal values concerning conventional female roles as well as the strategies used to recognize women in political fields traditionally characterized by male dominance. Female empowerment will mean different things at different times in history, as a result of culture, local geography and individual circumstances. Empowerment needs to be perceived as an individual attitude, but it also has to be facilitated at the macro­level by society and the State. Gender is very much at the heart of all these dynamics, strongly related to specificities of historical, cultural, ethnic and class situatedness, requiring an interdisciplinary transnational approach.