Programa de gestió per la Pastisseria Mas

En els últims anys, el món de la informàtica ha evolucionat d'una manera inimaginable, tan a nivell de Hardware com de Software. Aquesta evolució ha donat lloc a la creació de moltes empreses dedicades a la programació, on una de les seves principals feines ha estat la realització de programes de gestió d'empreses. Moltes vegades, però, els programes estàndards no poden satisfer el total de les necessitats dels clients, sinó algunes d’aquestes i realitzar un programa personalitzat té un cost elevat. En el cas de la Pastisseria Mas de Navàs, una empresa familiar, per poder realitzar les tasques administratives utilitzen fulls de càlcul, concretament el Microsoft Excel, que permet portar els comptes d'una manera més o menys senzilla, ja que només són necessàries unes nocions bàsiques d'informàtica. El mateix passa amb les dades dels proveïdors, que les guarden en una Base de Dades del tipus Microsoft Access. Una altra de les mancances és el tema dels encàrrecs que es fa de manera manual. Per tant, l’objectiu d’aquest projecte, és realitzar un programa que els hi faciliti la seva activitat. Aquest programa els permetrà gestionar les dades que utilitzen, com la informació sobre els clients, personal, comandes... També s’ha desenvolupat una web que permet obtenir informació sobre les comandes que s’han realitzat. Aquesta aplicació està dissenyada per funcionar en l’entorn Windows XP i s’ha desenvolupat amb el compilador de CodeGear Rad Studio, concretament el C++ Builder 2009. A nivell de base de dades, he utilitzat MySQL i en el cas de la pàgina web, PHP i lamateixa base de dades. L’anàlisi i el disseny ha estat fet en UML.

Adaptación del Índice de Bienestar Personal para adolescentes en lengua española y portuguesa

The psychometric properties of the Personal Wellbeing Index are analyzed on a Spanish and Portuguese adolescent sample. We test the reliability of the scale using Cronbach’s alpha. And complementarily we analyze the item-total correlations in the different wellbeing domains included. We execute an exploratory factor analysis (principal components) and a multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). The results show that Cronbach’s alpha is 0.79 for the Chilean version and in the Brazilian version is 0.78 confirming adequate levels of reliability found in previous studies. Correlations between fields of well-being shows values ranging between 0.224 and 0.496 for Chile and from 0.24 to 0.46 for Brazil. The results are similar to those obtained in other countries. The monofactorial structure of the scale is cinfirmed, also the adjustment to the scale structure to the data of the two samples and the comparability of means of global indices. The results suggest the existence of other well-being domains that had not been considered in the original proposal of the scale

Psychometric Properties of the Personal Wellbeing Index in Brazilian and Chilean Adolescents Including Spirituality and Religion = Propriedades Psicométricas do Personal Wellbeing Index em Adolescentes Brasileiros e Chilenos Incluindo Espiritualidade e Religião

This study compared the 7-item Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI) with two other versions which include the domains “Spirituality” and “Religion”, separately, in a sample of Brazilian (n = 1.047) and Chilean (n = 1.053) adolescents. A comparison of psychometric properties between the PWI versions was carried out through multigroup confi rmatory factor analysis showing adequate adjustments (CFI > .95, RMSEA < .08), whereas the item spirituality presented better performance. For the analysis of the differential contribution of each domain to the notion of global satisfaction, a regression on the item Overall Life Satisfaction (OLS) was applied using structural equations. It isrecommended the inclusion of the item spirituality in the original scale, considering the importance of such domain in both cultures

Características de la conducta de fumar en función de la fase de abandono en una muestra de personal de la Universidad de Girona

Objetivos: Determinar la prevalencia y las características de la conductade fumar y la distribución por estadios de abandono del tabaquismoentre el personal de la Universidad de Girona.Pacientes y método: Se diseñó un estudio descriptivo transversal.Para ello se realizó una entrevista sobre la conducta de fumar a una muestrarepresentativa de los 941 miembros del personal de la Universidadde Girona en el segundo semestre de 1999.Resultados: De los 281 participantes en el estudio, 77 (27,4%) eranfumadores, 67 (23,9%) exfumadores y 137 (48,7%) no fumadores. PorFacultades, la mayor prevalencia de fumadores se encontró en: Letras:38,9%; Ciencias de la Educación: 31% y Enfermería: 28,3%. La distribuciónde los sujetos por etapas de abandono fue la siguiente: precontemplación:36,8%; contemplación: 13,2%; preparación: 3,5%; acción:3,5% y mantenimiento: 43%. El consumo de tabaco light fue del49,1% en precontemplación, 47,1% en contemplación y 33,3% en preparación.Respondieron haber recibido consejo médico para dejar de fumar:precontemplación: 35,8%; contemplación: 52,6%, preparación:60%, acción: 20% y mantenimiento: 24,2%.Conclusiones: 1. Las Facultades relacionadas con el ámbito de lasalud, Ciencias de la Educación y Enfermería son, junto con las de Letraslas que presentan mayor consumo de tabaco. 2. Los fumadores en precontemplación,en comparación con los sujetos en contemplación y preparación,informan con mayor frecuencia de consumir tabaco bajo ennicotina y de no haber recibido consejo médico

A myriad of small histories and personal experiences

Kirjallisuusarvostelu

Salesperson's customer orientation in the personal selling process and in the use of personal selling techniques in the business-to-business setting

Selling is much maligned, often under-valued subject whose inadequate showing in business schools is in inverse proportion to the many job opportunities it offers and the importance of salespeople bringing incomes to companies. The purpose of this research is to increase the understanding of customer-oriented selling and examine the influence of customer-oriented philosophy on selling process, the applicability of selling techniques to this philosophy and the importance of them to salespeople. The empirical section of the study is two-fold. Firstly, the data of qualitative part was collected by conducting five thematic interviews among sales consultants and case company representatives. The findings of the study indicate that customer-oriented selling requires the activity of salespeople. In the customer-oriented personal selling process, salespeople invest time in the preplanning, the need analysis and the benefit demonstration stages. However, the findings propose that salespeople today must also have the basic capabilities for executing the traditional sales process, and the balance between traditional and consultative selling process will change as the duration of the relationship between the salesperson and customer increases. The study also proposes that selling techniques still belong to the customer-oriented selling process, although their roles might be modest. This thesis mapped 75 selling techniques and the quantitative part of the study explored what selling techniques are considered to be important by salespeople in direct selling industry when they make sales with new and existing customers. Response rate of the survey was 69.5%.

Supermatrix-hankkeen vahvuudet, heikkoudet, mahdollisuudet ja uhat

Supermatrix on Finnet-liitto ry:n jäsenyritysten hanke, joka tuo nopeiden valokuituyhteyksien avulla erilaisia sähköisiä palveluita kuluttajien koteihin ja yritysten toimipisteisiin. Näitä palveluita ovat mm. virtualisoidut henkilö-kohtaiset tietokoneet, tiedon tallennuspalvelut ja multimediasisältö, kuten teräväpiirtotelevisio. Tässä diplomityössä arvioidaan Supermatrixin palveluiden toteutumis-mahdollisuuksia sekä teknologian, että markkinoiden kannalta. Työn tarkoituksena oli myös laskea virtualisoitujen tietokoneiden avulla tuotetun työpöytäpalvelun tuotantokustannus. Kustannuslaskentaa varten testattiin useiden valmistajien teknologioita, ja parhaimmista vaihtoehdoista laskettiin tuotantokustannukset. Tulevia Supermatrix-operaattoreita varten kehitettiin työkalu, jolla työpöytäpalvelun vaatimien investointien kannattavuus saadaan nopeasti selville. Tuotantohintojen laskelmat osoittavat, että työpöytäpalvelua on taloudelli-sesti mahdollista tuottaa luomaan lisäarvoa nopeille laajakaistayhteyksille. Yrityksissä työpöytien virtualisointi on jo tämän päivän teknologiaa, mutta kuluttaja-asiakkaiden innostuminen palvelusta vaatii uuden markkinan luomisen. Uhkana on, että kuluttajien ostokäyttäytymisen muuttaminen ei onnistu, koska Supermatrix ei tuota fyysisen tuotteen ostamisen tarjoamaa mielihyvää.

High-Throughput Screening for Novel Prostate Cancer Drug Targets –Getting Personal

Prostate cancers form a heterogeneous group of diseases and there is a need for novel biomarkers, and for more efficient and targeted methods of treatment. In this thesis, the potential of microarray data, RNA interference (RNAi) and compound screens were utilized in order to identify novel biomarkers, drug targets and drugs for future personalized prostate cancer therapeutics. First, a bioinformatic mRNA expression analysis covering 9873 human tissue and cell samples, including 349 prostate cancer and 147 normal prostate samples, was used to distinguish in silico prevalidated putative prostate cancer biomarkers and drug targets. Second, RNAi based high-throughput (HT) functional profiling of 295 prostate and prostate cancer tissue specific genes was performed in cultured prostate cancer cells. Third, a HT compound screen approach using a library of 4910 drugs and drug-like molecules was exploited to identify potential drugs inhibiting prostate cancer cell growth. Nine candidate drug targets, with biomarker potential, and one cancer selective compound were validated in vitro and in vivo. In addition to androgen receptor (AR) signaling, endoplasmic reticulum (ER) function, arachidonic acid (AA) pathway, redox homeostasis and mitosis were identified as vital processes in prostate cancer cells. ERG oncogene positive cancer cells exhibited sensitivity to induction of oxidative and ER stress, whereas advanced and castrate-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) could be potentially targeted through AR signaling and mitosis. In conclusion, this thesis illustrates the power of systems biological data analysis in the discovery of potential vulnerabilities present in prostate cancer cells, as well as novel options for personalized cancer management.

Usable Privacy Preservation in Mobile Electronic Personality

Personalised ubiquitous services have rapidly proliferated due technological advancements in sensing, ubiquitous and mobile computing. Evolving societal trends, business and the economic potential of Personal Information (PI) have overlapped the service niches. At the same time, the societal thirst for more personalised services has increased and are met by soliciting deeper and more privacy invasive PI from customers. Consequentially, reinforcing traditional privacy challenges and unearthed new risks that render classical safeguards ine ective. The absence of solutions to criticise personalised ubiquitous services from privacy perspectives, aggravates the situation. This thesis presents a solution permitting users' PI, stored in their mobile terminals to be disclosed to services in privacy preserving manner for personalisation needs. The approach termed, Mobile Electronic Personality Version 2 (ME2.0), is compared to alternative mechanisms. Within ME2.0, PI handling vulnerabilities of ubiquitous services are identi ed and sensitised on their practices and privacy implications. Vulnerability where PI may leak through covert solicits, excessive acquisitions and legitimate data re-purposing to erode users privacy are also considered. In this thesis, the design, components, internal structures, architectures, scenarios and evaluations of ME2.0 are detailed. The design addresses implications and challenges leveraged by mobile terminals. ME2.0 components and internal structures discusses the functions related to how PI pieces are stored and handled by terminals and services. The architecture focusses on di erent components and their exchanges with services. Scenarios where ME2.0 is used are presented from di erent environment views, before evaluating for performance, privacy and usability.

Memristive Computing

Memristive computing refers to the utilization of the memristor, the fourth fundamental passive circuit element, in computational tasks. The existence of the memristor was theoretically predicted in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, but experimentally validated only in 2008 by HP Labs. A memristor is essentially a nonvolatile nanoscale programmable resistor — indeed, memory resistor — whose resistance, or memristance to be precise, is changed by applying a voltage across, or current through, the device. Memristive computing is a new area of research, and many of its fundamental questions still remain open. For example, it is yet unclear which applications would benefit the most from the inherent nonlinear dynamics of memristors. In any case, these dynamics should be exploited to allow memristors to perform computation in a natural way instead of attempting to emulate existing technologies such as CMOS logic. Examples of such methods of computation presented in this thesis are memristive stateful logic operations, memristive multiplication based on the translinear principle, and the exploitation of nonlinear dynamics to construct chaotic memristive circuits. This thesis considers memristive computing at various levels of abstraction. The first part of the thesis analyses the physical properties and the current-voltage behaviour of a single device. The middle part presents memristor programming methods, and describes microcircuits for logic and analog operations. The final chapters discuss memristive computing in largescale applications. In particular, cellular neural networks, and associative memory architectures are proposed as applications that significantly benefit from memristive implementation. The work presents several new results on memristor modeling and programming, memristive logic, analog arithmetic operations on memristors, and applications of memristors. The main conclusion of this thesis is that memristive computing will be advantageous in large-scale, highly parallel mixed-mode processing architectures. This can be justified by the following two arguments. First, since processing can be performed directly within memristive memory architectures, the required circuitry, processing time, and possibly also power consumption can be reduced compared to a conventional CMOS implementation. Second, intrachip communication can be naturally implemented by a memristive crossbar structure.

Trustworthy context dependency in ubiquitous systems

The modern society is getting increasingly dependent on software applications. These run on processors, use memory and account for controlling functionalities that are often taken for granted. Typically, applications adjust the functionality in response to a certain context that is provided or derived from the informal environment with various qualities. To rigorously model the dependence of an application on a context, the details of the context are abstracted and the environment is assumed stable and fixed. However, in a context-aware ubiquitous computing environment populated by autonomous agents, a context and its quality parameters may change at any time. This raises the need to derive the current context and its qualities at runtime. It also implies that a context is never certain and may be subjective, issues captured by the context’s quality parameter of experience-based trustworthiness. Given this, the research question of this thesis is: In what logical topology and by what means may context provided by autonomous agents be derived and formally modelled to serve the context-awareness requirements of an application? This research question also stipulates that the context derivation needs to incorporate the quality of the context. In this thesis, we focus on the quality of context parameter of trustworthiness based on experiences having a level of certainty and referral experiences, thus making trustworthiness reputation based. Hence, in this thesis we seek a basis on which to reason and analyse the inherently inaccurate context derived by autonomous agents populating a ubiquitous computing environment in order to formally model context-awareness. More specifically, the contribution of this thesis is threefold: (i) we propose a logical topology of context derivation and a method of calculating its trustworthiness, (ii) we provide a general model for storing experiences and (iii) we formalise the dependence between the logical topology of context derivation and its experience-based trustworthiness. These contributions enable abstraction of a context and its quality parameters to a Boolean decision at runtime that may be formally reasoned with. We employ the Action Systems framework for modelling this. The thesis is a compendium of the author’s scientific papers, which are republished in Part II. Part I introduces the field of research by providing the mending elements for the thesis to be a coherent introduction for addressing the research question. In Part I we also review a significant body of related literature in order to better illustrate our contributions to the research field.

Developing customer need based services in personal security service industry

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how services can be developed and how the voice of the customer can be incorporated to the strategic planning of services. Furthermore, the objective is to investigate the methods of customer need analysis and service bundling. The data is collected from secondary and primary sources by reviewing the existing academic literature and by conducting in-depth interviews and surveys. The main findings of this research indicate that the service development in personal security service industry should be conducted through a formalized process and the process should begin with setting the strategic objectives. Moreover, the voice of the customer should be incorporated into all stages of the development process, especially into the front-end of the process. Furthermore, the information on customer needs should be gathered in a manner tailored for the purposes of service development.

Adaptação sociocultural do short personal experiences questionnaire (SPEQ) no Brasil

OBJETIVO: traduzir e adaptar culturalmente o Short Personal Experiences Questionnaire (SPEQ) para a língua portuguesa, no Brasil, em mulheres climatéricas. MÉTODOS: a versão original do questionário, em inglês, proveniente da Universidade de Melbourne (Austrália), inicialmente foi traduzida para a língua portuguesa e retraduzida ao inglês. Procedeu-se, então, à adaptação sociocultural do vocabulário e da construção linguística para melhor compreensão. O questionário foi então aplicado para pré-teste em 50 mulheres, em etapas sucessivas, até que não houvesse mais dúvidas. A versão final do instrumento adaptado foi utilizada em estudo de base populacional, autorrespondido anonimamente por 378 mulheres pesquisadas, entre 40 e 65 anos e com 11 anos ou mais de escolaridade, nascidas no Brasil. Foi aplicada uma análise de confiabilidade (consistência interna, pelo alfa de Cronbach), uma análise de validade do construto (correlação de pares de itens que compõem o SPEQ e cada um destes com os quatro fatores obtidos e com o escore total), e uma análise de validade de critério (correlação entre os quatro fatores obtidos com o escore de classificação geral da vida sexual). RESULTADOS: cento e oitenta mulheres responderam a todas as perguntas do SPEQ e foram incluídas na análise. A consistência interna (alfa de Cronbach) para os nove itens do SPEQ situou-se entre 0,55 e 0,77 e o alfa geral foi 0,68. Na análise de validade do construto, a maioria dos coeficientes de correlação se mostrou significativo (valores p<0,005). A análise de validade de critério mostrou coeficientes de correlação significativos em sua maior parte. CONCLUSÕES: a versão em português do instrumento SPEQ, após processo de adaptação, mostrou-se útil e adequada para levantar informações relativas à função sexual e dispareunia em mulheres brasileiras entre 40 e 65 anos e com 11 anos ou mais de escolaridade.

Towards combining interactive mobile TV and smart spaces : architectures, tools and application development

Technological developments in microprocessors and ICT landscape have made a shift to a new era where computing power is embedded in numerous small distributed objects and devices in our everyday lives. These small computing devices are ne-tuned to perform a particular task and are increasingly reaching our society at every level. For example, home appliances such as programmable washing machines, microwave ovens etc., employ several sensors to improve performance and convenience. Similarly, cars have on-board computers that use information from many di erent sensors to control things such as fuel injectors, spark plug etc., to perform their tasks e ciently. These individual devices make life easy by helping in taking decisions and removing the burden from their users. All these objects and devices obtain some piece of information about the physical environment. Each of these devices is an island with no proper connectivity and information sharing between each other. Sharing of information between these heterogeneous devices could enable a whole new universe of innovative and intelligent applications. The information sharing between the devices is a diffcult task due to the heterogeneity and interoperability of devices. Smart Space vision is to overcome these issues of heterogeneity and interoperability so that the devices can understand each other and utilize services of each other by information sharing. This enables innovative local mashup applications based on shared data between heterogeneous devices. Smart homes are one such example of Smart Spaces which facilitate to bring the health care system to the patient, by intelligent interconnection of resources and their collective behavior, as opposed to bringing the patient into the health system. In addition, the use of mobile handheld devices has risen at a tremendous rate during the last few years and they have become an essential part of everyday life. Mobile phones o er a wide range of different services to their users including text and multimedia messages, Internet, audio, video, email applications and most recently TV services. The interactive TV provides a variety of applications for the viewers. The combination of interactive TV and the Smart Spaces could give innovative applications that are personalized, context-aware, ubiquitous and intelligent by enabling heterogeneous systems to collaborate each other by sharing information between them. There are many challenges in designing the frameworks and application development tools for rapid and easy development of these applications. The research work presented in this thesis addresses these issues. The original publications presented in the second part of this thesis propose architectures and methodologies for interactive and context-aware applications, and tools for the development of these applications. We demonstrated the suitability of our ontology-driven application development tools and rule basedapproach for the development of dynamic, context-aware ubiquitous iTV applications.