Uma avaliacão fenomenográfica dos cursos suecos baseados na web

O propósito deste texto é discutir a avaliação de um curso superior oferecido por uma universidade sueca. Para tanto, parti de uma análise das avaliações feitas pelos estudantes, no ano de 2011-2012, quanto ao conteúdo, as aulas ministrada e a relação estabelecida entre o professor e os estudantes. O curso analisado foi o de Brasil Contemporâneo, da Universidade de Dalarna. O curso é oferecido na forma EBW e faz parte da graduação em Português.       As conclusões alcançadas e fundamentadas na análise do questionários  apontam para uma necessidade de uma sistematização do conteúdo e de uma melhor exposição do mesmo. Os estudantes, na sua maoria estrangeiros, têm uma percepção sobre a realidade brasileira que ao se contrapor à literatura do curso leva-os a reverem e a redefinirem a imagem que os mesmos tinham sobre o Brasil. Entrentanto, as avaliações apontam para a necessidade de desenvolvimento e formento de trabalhos em grupos que auxiliam na aprendizagem dos estudantes. Esta é um importante desáfio dos cursos baseados na Web, na rede de ensino superior sueca.

A web application for follow-up of results from a mobile device test battery for parkinson’s disease patients

Background: A test battery consisting of self-assessments and motor tests (tapping and spiral drawing) was developed for a hand computer with touch screen in a telemedicine setting. Objectives: To develop and evaluate a web-based system that delivers decision support information to the treating clinical staff for assessing PD symptoms in their patients based on the test battery data. Methods: The test battery is currently being used in a clinical trial (DAPHNE, EudraCT No. 2005-002654-21) by sixty five patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease (PD) on 9991 test occasions (four tests per day during in all 362 week-long test periods) at nine clinics around Sweden. Test results are sent continuously from the hand unit over a mobile net to a central computer and processed with statistical methods. They are summarized into scores for different dimensions of the symptom state and an ‘overall test score’ reflecting the overall condition of the patient during a test period. The information in the web application is organized and presented graphically in a way that the general overview of the patient performance per test period is emphasized. Focus is on the overall test score, symptom dimensions and daily summaries. In a recent preliminary user evaluation, the web application was demonstrated to the fifteen study nurses who had used the test battery in the clinical trial. At least one patient per clinic was shown. Results: In general, the responses from nurses were positive. They claimed that the test results shown in the system were consistent with their own clinical observations. They could follow complications, changes and trends within their patients. Discussion: In conclusion, the system is able to summarise the various time series of motor test results and self-assessments during test periods and present them in a useful manner. Its main contribution is a novel and reliable way to capture and easily access symptom information from patients’ home environment. The convenient access to current symptom profile as well as symptom history provides a basis for individualized evaluation and adjustment of treatments.

Visualization of spirography-based objective measures in Parkinson's disease

Objective: To investigate whether advanced visualizations of spirography-based objective measures are useful in differentiating drug-related motor dysfunctions between Off and dyskinesia in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Background: During the course of a 3 year longitudinal clinical study, in total 65 patients (43 males and 22 females with mean age of 65) with advanced PD and 10 healthy elderly (HE) subjects (5 males and 5 females with mean age of 61) were assessed. Both patients and HE subjects performed repeated and time-stamped assessments of their objective health indicators using a test battery implemented on a telemetry touch screen handheld computer, in their home environment settings. Among other tasks, the subjects were asked to trace a pre-drawn Archimedes spiral using the dominant hand and repeat the test three times per test occasion. Methods: A web-based framework was developed to enable a visual exploration of relevant spirography-based kinematic features by clinicians so they can in turn evaluate the motor states of the patients i.e. Off and dyskinesia. The system uses different visualization techniques such as time series plots, animation, and interaction and organizes them into different views to aid clinicians in measuring spatial and time-dependent irregularities that could be associated with the motor states. Along with the animation view, the system displays two time series plots for representing drawing speed (blue line) and displacement from ideal trajectory (orange line). The views are coordinated and linked i.e. user interactions in one of the views will be reflected in other views. For instance, when the user points in one of the pixels in the spiral view, the circle size of the underlying pixel increases and a vertical line appears in the time series views to depict the corresponding position. In addition, in order to enable clinicians to observe erratic movements more clearly and thus improve the detection of irregularities, the system displays a color-map which gives an idea of the longevity of the spirography task. Figure 2 shows single randomly selected spirals drawn by a: A) patient who experienced dyskinesias, B) HE subject, and C) patient in Off state. Results: According to a domain expert (DN), the spirals drawn in the Off and dyskinesia motor states are characterized by different spatial and time features. For instance, the spiral shown in Fig. 2A was drawn by a patient who showed symptoms of dyskinesia; the drawing speed was relatively high (cf. blue-colored time series plot and the short timestamp scale in the x axis) and the spatial displacement was high (cf. orange-colored time series plot) associated with smooth deviations as a result of uncontrollable movements. The patient also exhibited low amount of hesitation which could be reflected both in the animation of the spiral as well as time series plots. In contrast, the patient who was in the Off state exhibited different kinematic features, as shown in Fig. 2C. In the case of spirals drawn by a HE subject, there was a great precision during the drawing process as well as unchanging levels of time-dependent features over the test trial, as seen in Fig. 2B. Conclusions: Visualizing spirography-based objective measures enables identification of trends and patterns of drug-related motor dysfunctions at the patient’s individual level. Dynamic access of visualized motor tests may be useful during the evaluation of drug-related complications such as under- and over-medications, providing decision support to clinicians during evaluation of treatment effects as well as improve the quality of life of patients and their caregivers. In future, we plan to evaluate the proposed approach by assessing within- and between-clinician variability in ratings in order to determine its actual usefulness and then use these ratings as target outcomes in supervised machine learning, similarly as it was previously done in the study performed by Memedi et al. (2013).

AvalWeb : sistema interativo para gerência de questões e aplicação de avaliações na web

Neste trabalho, é realizado um estudo dos processos de avaliação de alunos em ambiente WBT (Web Based Training). Para tanto, foram analisadas várias ferramentas de avaliação disponíveis no mercado. Com base nestas análises, foi proposto um sistema de gerência de questões e aplicação de avaliações, onde o termo “gerência” é utilizado com o objetivo de (i) atender requisições dos professores para elaboração de avaliações, (ii) escolher o nível de dificuldade das questões que comporão a avaliação e (iii) usar estratégias interativas para aplicação de provas, como por exemplo, a utilização de níveis de dificuldade progressivos das questões submetidas aos alunos, dependendo de suas respostas anteriores. Integrando o sistema de gerência de questões foi proposto um módulo de auto-avaliações, com retorno imediato para o aluno sobre qual é a resposta correta juntamente com uma explicação do professor, auxiliando no entendimento do estudante sobre a matéria ao invés de simplesmente atribuir determinada nota. Enfim, foi implementado um protótipo demonstrando a viabilidade das idéias presentes no modelo de avaliação aqui proposto. A proposta conceitual estabelecida para o modelo é bem mais ampla e flexível do que a atual versão da implementação realizada.

The effectiveness of community-based interventions to improve maternal and infant health in the Northeast of Brazil

EMOND, Alan et al. The effectiveness of community-based interventions to improve maternal and infant health in the Northeast of Brazil. Revista Panamericana de Salud Pública/ Pan American Journal of Public Health , v.12, n.2, p.101-110, 2002

Utilizing cross-domain SOAP Web services using client-side languages in an enterprise mashup platform

Service oriented architectures (SOA) based on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Web services have attracted the attention of enterprises mainly for business-to-business integration and to create composite applications that execute business processes. An existing problem is the lack of preoccupation with non technical users due to the fact that to create a composite application to fulfill users needs, it is necessary to be in contact with IT staff. To overcome this issue, enterprises can take advantage of web 2.0, 'introducing in the development stage some technologies like mashups and some concepts like user empowerment, collaborative work and collective intelligence. Some results [3] [13] have shown how web 2.0 concepts can help non technical users to produce relative complex business processes. However, traditional enterprise requirements goes beyond typical web 2.0 solutions in several aspects: (1) traditional enterprise systems are based on heterogeneous stack of technologies that are not directly exploitable from a web-based client (where SOAP web services play an important role); (2) web browsers set some cross-domain security constraints making difficult to integrate services from diverse domains. In this paper, a contribution to two web 2.0 research projects [14] [15] partially solves the problems described: provide a way to invoke cross-domain backend services (based on SOAP technologies) directly only using clientside languages, without a need for any adaptation layer. © 2010 ACM.

Web system to aid project management

This work describes a new web system to aid project management that was created to correct the principal deficiencies identified in systems having a common purpose which are at present available, as well as to follow the guidelines that are proposed in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) and the quality characteristics described in the ISO/IEC 9126 norm. As from the adopted methodology, the system was structured to attend the real necessities of project managers and also to contribute towards obtaining quality results from the projects. The validation of the proposed solution was done with the collaboration of professionals that used the functions available in it for a period of 15 days. Results attested to the quality and adequacy of the developed system.

Interventions to promote the wearing of hearing protection

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Four year multitrophic food web: source food web description, methodology accuracy and species diversity

Food webs have been used in order to understand the trophic relationship among organisms within an ecosystem, however the extension by which sampling efficiency could affect food web responses remain poorly understood. Still, there is a lack of long-term sampling data for many insect groups, mainly related to the interactions between herbivores and their host plants. In the first chapter, I describe a source food web based on the Senegalia tenuifolia plant by identifying the associated insect species and the interactions among them and with this host plant. Furthermore, I check for the data robustness from each trophic level and propose a cost-efficiently methodology. The results from this chapter show that the collected dataset and the methodology presented are a good tool for sample most insect richness of a source food web. In total the food web comprises 27 species belonging to four trophic levels. In the second chapter, I demonstrate the temporal variation in the species richness and abundance from each trophic level, as well as the relationship among distinct trophic levels. Moreover, I investigate the diversity patterns of the second and third trophic level by assessing the contribution of alfa and beta-diversity components along the years. This chapter shows that in our system the parasitoid abundance is regulated by the herbivore abundances. Besides, the species richness and abundances of the trophic levels vary temporally. It also shows that alfa-diversity was the diversity component that most contribute to the herbivore species diversity (2nd trophic level), while the contribution of alfa- and beta-diversity changed along the years for parasitoid diversity (3rd level). Overall, this dissertation describes a source food web and bring insights into some food web challenges related to the sampling effort to gather enough species from all trophic levels. It also discuss the relation among communities associated with distinct trophic levels and their temporal variation and diversity patterns. Finally, this dissertation contributes for the world food web database and in understanding the interactions among its trophic levels and each trophic level pattern along time and space

Uma arquitetura multiagentes para sistema educacional baseado na web semântica

Pós-graduação em Ciência da Computação - IBILCE

Sistema multiagente web semântico para gestão de conteúdos educacionais

Pós-graduação em Ciência da Computação - IBILCE

Websislapam: sistema de avaliações de pessoas baseado em tecnologias WEB

This work, entitled Websislapam: People Rating System Based on Web Technologies, allows the creation of questionnaires, and the organization of entities and people who participate in evaluations. Entities collect data from people with the help of resources that reduce typing mistakes. The Websislapam maintains a database and provides graphical reporting, which enable the analysis of those tested. Developed using Web technologies such as PHP, Javascript, CSS, and others. Developed with the paradigm of object-oriented programming and the MySQL DBMS. For the theoretical basis, research in the areas of System Database, Web Technologies and Web Engineering were performed. It was determined the evaluation process, systems and Web-based applications, Web and System Engineering Database. Technologies applied in the implementation of Websislapam been described. In a separate chapter presented the main features and artifacts used in the development of Websislapam. A case study demonstrates the practical use of the system

Improvements of nutrition behavior fitness and body fatness with a short-term after school intervention program

The prevalence of childhood obesity has been increasing worldwide and lifestyle changes are the most important strategies in managing this prevalence. This study aimed to describe the intervention effects of nutrition and physical activities offered as an after school short-term on outcomes of healthy nutrition practices, fitness and lowering fatness. This quasi-experimental study was conducted with a convenience sample of 59 caucasian children, aged 7.7 ± 1.4 years old (52.5% girls) registered on a private school of a middle-size town located in Sao Paulo State, Brazil. The school-based 12-week intervention consisted of 2 weekly 60 minutes section, during 3 months, including a nutritional education and a physical activity curriculum. Anthropometric data was measured for all children at baseline and after 12 weeks. All parents were contacted and requested to complete questionnaire about child’s eating behavior at baseline and after the 12-week program. After the intervention, children showed an increasing in the intake of fruits (64.3%), vegetables (61.9%), and water (52.0%). Overall, 83.3% of the children changed eating behavior according to the questionnaire responded by the parents. Waist circumference was significantly lower and abdominal strength improved after participating in the intervention program. Mean height and weight were significantly higher in boys and girls after a 12-week intervention. Although mean values of BMI remained the same after the intervention it was observed a decreasing in the prevalence of obesity among the children. Thus our study showed that a school-based intervention program focused on nutritional education and physical activity program promoted waist circumference reduction and decreased obesity without affecting the height growth along with improved fitness and healthy eating behavior. This intervention program would be feasible and replicable in others schools around the country.

Acetylcysteine for Prevention of Renal Outcomes in Patients Undergoing Coronary and Peripheral Vascular Angiography Main Results From the Randomized Acetylcysteine for Contrast-Induced Nephropathy Trial (ACT)

Background-It remains uncertain whether acetylcysteine prevents contrast-induced acute kidney injury. Methods and Results-We randomly assigned 2308 patients undergoing an intravascular angiographic procedure with at least 1 risk factor for contrast-induced acute kidney injury (age >70 years, renal failure, diabetes mellitus, heart failure, or hypotension) to acetylcysteine 1200 mg or placebo. The study drugs were administered orally twice daily for 2 doses before and 2 doses after the procedure. The allocation was concealed (central Web-based randomization). All analysis followed the intention-to-treat principle. The incidence of contrast-induced acute kidney injury (primary end point) was 12.7% in the acetylcysteine group and 12.7% in the control group (relative risk, 1.00; 95% confidence interval, 0.81 to 1.25; P = 0.97). A combined end point of mortality or need for dialysis at 30 days was also similar in both groups (2.2% and 2.3%, respectively; hazard ratio, 0.97; 95% confidence interval, 0.56 to 1.69; P = 0.92). Consistent effects were observed in all subgroups analyzed, including those with renal impairment. Conclusions-In this large randomized trial, we found that acetylcysteine does not reduce the risk of contrast-induced acute kidney injury or other clinically relevant outcomes in at-risk patients undergoing coronary and peripheral vascular angiography.

Aplicación web para la gestión de tareas siguiendo la metodología GTD

[ES] El Trabajo Final de Grado tiene por finalidad ofrecer una solución que ayude a las personas a gestionar sus tareas tanto personales como empresariales de una manera más productiva. Actualmente este tipo de aplicaciones tienen mucho éxito. Se decidió que el desarrollo de esta aplicación fuera con la metodología Getting Things Done (GTD) ya que es una metodología que aumenta la productividad y reduce el estrés laboral. A día de hoy, no hay muchas aplicaciones que utilice esta metodología y las que la utilizan lo hace de una forma muy básica. Junto a esta metodología y guiándonos de la experiencia del tutor se intentó combinar esta metodología con controles de tiempo para mejorar aún más la productividad de las personas que utiliza dicho software. El resultado obtenido de este trabajo final de grado fue la base de una aplicación web para la gestión de tareas. El software creado es totalmente funcional, muy fácil de usar, muy intuitivo, y usa la filosofía Getting Things Done . Básicamente los objetivos principales conseguidos en este proyecto fueron: la gestión de usuarios. La gestión de tareas y proyectos. Aplicación de la metodología GTD. Control del tiempo productivo, e improductivo, interrupciones, temporizadores. La aplicación ha sido realizada como Trabajo Final de Grado en Ingeniería Informática, cumpliendo con todas las fases del desarrollo del software, para obtener un producto funcional que fuera aprobado por el tutor que haría el rol de potencial cliente. En el presente proyecto se ha seguido la metodología RUP, dirigida por casos de uso, iterativa e incremental. Para completar el proceso se ha realizado la elaboración de una lista de características, la especificación de los casos de uso, una fase de análisis, una de diseño, implementación y prueba. Las tecnologías utilizadas han sido, principalmente, Ruby On Rails, HTML5, CSS , AJAX y JAVASCRIPT. El objetivo a largo plazo es que esta solución pueda ser tomada como base de implementación, donde haciendo las mejoras necesarias se pueda poner en el mercado un gran software de gestión de tareas siguiendo la metodología GTD.