Do down ao up… : contributos do envolvimento familiar na estimulação precoce de uma criança com Trissomia 21

Do Down ao UP… Percurso de sentimentos, emoções, procuras e certezas, por vezes, incertas mas alegre e esperançosamente desafiantes… O itinerário de investigação, e consequente formação, que foi encetado procurou, com o envolvimento familiar, as estratégias e dinâmicas mais eficazes para a promoção de aquisições relevantes e significativas para uma criança, filha do próprio investigador, com necessidades educativas especiais decorrentes do quadro de Trissomia 21. Através da procura objectiva de dados contextualizadores, foi delineado um programa de estimulação precoce aplicado nas rotinas familiares, as quais se constituíram como reais oportunidades/meios de um envolvimento familiar participante e corresponsável, facilitador e promotor de desenvolvimento das potencialidades e capacidades da própria criança. Com esta investigação pretendeu-se destacar a importância da intervenção/estimulação nas rotinas familiares constituídas ou a potencializar, como forma de obtenção de prometedores resultados em todas as áreas de desenvolvimento, veiculando os princípios da normalização, da funcionalidade, da contextualização e do envolvimento convergente de todo o agregado familiar.

Convergência brasileira aos padrões internacionais de contabilidade pública vis-à-vis as estratégias top-down e bottom-up

O Brasil está em processo de convergência de sua contabilidade pública em relação aos padrões internacionais desenvolvidos pela Federação Internacional dos Contadores (Ifac). A implementação de sistemas de informação contábil é geralmente realizada por meio das abordagens top-down ou bottom-up. Assim, este estudo tem por objetivos: 1) identificar a abordagem adotada pelo governo federal brasileiro; 2) descrever o modelo de implementação do sistema de informação contábil público no Brasil; e 3) mapear o fluxo de informações e atores envolvidos no processo de convergência. A abordagem qualitativa foi adotada utilizando a pesquisa documental e análise de conteúdo de documentos disponíveis para operacionalizar a pesquisa. Foi identificado que o Brasil utiliza a abordagem middle-up-down, que favorece a interação entre múltiplos atores no processo, diferentemente da abordagem top-down, que segue o modelo internacional divulgado.

Happiness, hope and affection as predictors of quality of life and functionality of individuals with heart failure at 3 month follow up

Introduction: Meeting the actual role of positive psychology, begins to be recognized the contribution of positive variables in health outcomes. Objective: To know the contribution of happiness, hope and affection individually and as a whole in the quality of life and functionality of individuals with heart failure. Population and Methodology: 128 individuals with heart failure, 98 men and 30 women, 61.9±12,1 years of age, 6,6±3,9 years of school and 74,2% retired because of this disease. 56,3% were in Class III of New York Heart Association, with poor left ventricular ejection fraction (25,3±6,2%). The clinical history was of 9,4±8,5 years for this heart disease and had at least one hospitalization due to heart failure with 51,6% having ischemic heart disease.

Two-year follow-up study of elderly residents in S. Paulo, Brazil: methodology and preliminary results

INTRODUCTION: Previous cross-sectional studies have shown a high prevalence of chronic disease and disability among the elderly. Given Brazil’s rapid aging process and the obvious consequences of the growing number of old people with chronic diseases and associated disabilities for the provision of health services, a need was felt for a study that would overcome the limitations of cross-sectional data and shed some light on the main factors determining whether a person will live longer and free of disabling diseases, the so-called successful aging. The methodology of the first follow-up study of elderly residents in Brazil is presented. METHOD: The profile of the initial cohort is compared with previous cross-sectional data and an in-depth analysis of nonresponse is carried out in order to assess the validity of future longitudinal analysis. The EPIDOSO (‘Epidemiologia do Idoso’) Study conducted a two-year follow-up of 1,667 elderly people (65+), living in S. Paulo. The study consisted of two waves, each consisting of household, clinical, and biochemical surveys. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: In general, the initial cohort showed a similar profile to previous cross-sectional samples in S. Paulo. There was a majority of women, mostly widows, living in multigenerational households, and a high prevalence of chronic illnesses, psychiatric disturbances, and physical disabilities. Despite all the difficulties inherent in follow-up studies, there was a fairly low rate of nonresponse to the household survey after two years, which did not actually affect the representation of the cohort at the final household assessment, making unbiased longitudinal analysis possible. Concerning the clinical and blood sampling surveys, the respondents tended to be younger and less disabled than the nonrespondents, limiting the use of the clinical and laboratory data to longitudinal analysis aimed at a healthier cohort. It is worth mentioning that gender, education, family support, and socioeconomic status were not important determinants of nonresponse, as is often the case.

Optical properties and transport in PLD-GaN

We present structural, optical and transport data on GaN samples grown by hybrid, two-step low temperature pulsed laser deposition. The band gap of samples with good crystallinity has been deduced from optical spectra. Large below gap band tails were observed. In samples with the lowest crystalline quality the PL spectra are quite dependent on spot laser incidence. The most intense PL lines can be attributed to excitons bounded to stacking faults. When the crystalline quality of the samples is increased the ubiquitous yellow emission band can be detected following a quenching process described by a similar activation energy to that one found in MOCVD grown samples. The samples with the highest quality present, besides the yellow band, show a large near band edge emission which peaked at 3.47 eV and could be observed up to room temperature. The large width of the NBE is attributed to effect of a wide distribution of band tail states on the excitons. Photoconductivity data supports this interpretation.

O Impacto contabilistico da concentração de empresas: um estudo de caso

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Contabilidade e Finanças Orientadores: Doutor José Manuel Veiga Pereira Professor Adjunto da área científica de Contabilidade, Grupo de disciplinas de Contabilidade Financeira Doutora Deolinda Maria Moreira Aparício Meira Professora Adjunta da área científica de Direito, Grupo de disciplinas de Direito Comercial

Spatio-temporal alignment of pedobarographic image sequences

O documento em anexo encontra-se na versão post-print (versão corrigida pelo editor).

IOPT Petri Net State Space Generation Algorithm with Maximal-Step Execution Semantics

This paper presents an algorithm to efficiently generate the state-space of systems specified using the IOPT Petri-net modeling formalism. IOPT nets are a non-autonomous Petri-net class, based on Place-Transition nets with an extended set of features designed to allow the rapid prototyping and synthesis of system controllers through an existing hardware-software co-design framework. To obtain coherent and deterministic operation, IOPT nets use a maximal-step execution semantics where, in a single execution step, all enabled transitions will fire simultaneously. This fact increases the resulting state-space complexity and can cause an arc "explosion" effect. Real-world applications, with several million states, will reach a higher order of magnitude number of arcs, leading to the need for high performance state-space generator algorithms. The proposed algorithm applies a compilation approach to read a PNML file containing one IOPT model and automatically generate an optimized C program to calculate the corresponding state-space.

Patching up dipoles: can dipolar particles be viewed as patchy colloids?

We investigate whether the liquid-vapour phase transition of strongly dipolar fluids can be understood using a model of patchy colloids. These consist of hard spherical particles with three short-ranged attractive sites (patches) on their surfaces. Two of the patches are of type A and one is of type B. Patches A on a particle may bond either to a patch A or to a patch B on another particle. Formation of an AA (AB) bond lowers the energy by epsilon AA (epsilon AB). In the limit [image omitted], this patchy model exhibits condensation driven by AB-bonds (Y-junctions). Y-junctions are also present in low-density, strongly dipolar fluids, and have been conjectured to play a key role in determining their critical behaviour. We map the dipolar Yukawa hard-sphere (DYHS) fluid onto this 2A + 1B patchy model by requiring that the latter reproduce the correct DYHS critical point as a function of the isotropic interaction strength epsilon Y. This is achieved for sensible values of epsilon AB and the bond volumes. Results for the internal energy and the particle coordination number are in qualitative agreement with simulations of DYHSs. Finally, by taking the limit [image omitted], we arrive at a new estimate for the critical point of the dipolar hard-sphere fluid, which agrees with extrapolations from simulation.

Drug therapy complexity: the importance of pharmacotherapeutic follow-up

Nowadays, the phenomenon of population ageing represents an worldwide problem, which assumes particular significance in Portugal. As they get older, individuals present more comorbidities and consequently consume an increasing number of drugs, which contributes to a growing drug therapy complexity. The institutionalized elders are particularly affected by this occurrence. Drug therapy complexity is defined as the conciliator of several characteristics of the pharmacotherapy and can affect patient’s safety and medication adherence. It can be measured with Medication Regimen Complexity Index (MRCI). This study aims to determine the drug therapy complexity of institutionalized elders in order to assess the need of pharmacotherapeutic follow-up.

Arrow Plot: a new graphical tool for selecting up and down regulated genes and genes differentially expressed on samples subgroups

Background: A common task in analyzing microarray data is to determine which genes are differentially expressed across two (or more) kind of tissue samples or samples submitted under experimental conditions. Several statistical methods have been proposed to accomplish this goal, generally based on measures of distance between classes. It is well known that biological samples are heterogeneous because of factors such as molecular subtypes or genetic background that are often unknown to the experimenter. For instance, in experiments which involve molecular classification of tumors it is important to identify significant subtypes of cancer. Bimodal or multimodal distributions often reflect the presence of subsamples mixtures. Consequently, there can be genes differentially expressed on sample subgroups which are missed if usual statistical approaches are used. In this paper we propose a new graphical tool which not only identifies genes with up and down regulations, but also genes with differential expression in different subclasses, that are usually missed if current statistical methods are used. This tool is based on two measures of distance between samples, namely the overlapping coefficient (OVL) between two densities and the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The methodology proposed here was implemented in the open-source R software. Results: This method was applied to a publicly available dataset, as well as to a simulated dataset. We compared our results with the ones obtained using some of the standard methods for detecting differentially expressed genes, namely Welch t-statistic, fold change (FC), rank products (RP), average difference (AD), weighted average difference (WAD), moderated t-statistic (modT), intensity-based moderated t-statistic (ibmT), significance analysis of microarrays (samT) and area under the ROC curve (AUC). On both datasets all differentially expressed genes with bimodal or multimodal distributions were not selected by all standard selection procedures. We also compared our results with (i) area between ROC curve and rising area (ABCR) and (ii) the test for not proper ROC curves (TNRC). We found our methodology more comprehensive, because it detects both bimodal and multimodal distributions and different variances can be considered on both samples. Another advantage of our method is that we can analyze graphically the behavior of different kinds of differentially expressed genes. Conclusion: Our results indicate that the arrow plot represents a new flexible and useful tool for the analysis of gene expression profiles from microarrays.

A Novel Short-Step Synthesis of New Xanthenedione Derivatives from the Cyclization of 3-Cinnamoyl-2-styrylchromones

Novel (E)-3-aryl-4-benzylidene-8-hydroxy-3,4-dihydro-1 H-xanthene-1,9(2H)-diones are prepared by the cyclization of (E,E)-3-cinnamoyl-5-hydroxy-2-styrylchromones efficiently catalyzed with boron tribromide. The (E,E)-3-cinnamoyl-5-hydroxy-2-styrylchromones are obtained from the Baker–Venkataraman rearrangement of (E,E)-2-acetyl-1,3-phenylene bis(3-phenylacrylate), which is greatly improved under microwave irradiation.

Cork industry wastewater characterization assessment of the biodegradability, reuse and of the relationship between BOD, COD and tannins with TOC

Cork processing involves a boiling step to make the cork softer, which consumes a high volume of water and generates a wastewater with a high organic content, rich in tannins. An assessment of the final wastewater characteristics and of the boiling water composition along the boiling process was performed. The parameters studied were pH, color, total organic carbon (TOC), chemical and biochemical oxygen demands (COD, BOD5, BOD20), total suspended solids (TSS), total phenols and tannins (TP, TT). It was observed that the water solutes extraction power is significantly reduced for higher quantities of cork processed. Valid relationships between parameters were established not only envisaging wastewater characterization but also to provide an important tool for wastewater monitoring and for process control/optimization. Boiling water biodegradability presented decreasing values with the increase of cork processed and for the final wastewater its value is always lower than 0.5, indicating that these wastewaters are very difficult to treat by biological processes. The biodegradability was associated with the increase of tannin content that can rise up to 0.7 g/L. These compounds can be used by other industries when concentrated and the clarified wastewater can be reused, which is a potential asset in this wastewater treatment.

Astaxanthin production using Photobioreactors, investigation and scale up and an integrated solution for eutrophic lakes

TRANSCREA, Convertir la investigación y el conocimiento en innovación, propiedad intelectual e industrial. Terceira, 16 e 17 Fevereiro, 2011.