Knowledge and practices related to dengue and its vector: a community-based study from Southeast Brazil

Abstract INTRODUCTION: This study investigated the knowledge of users of primary healthcare services living in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, about dengue and its vector. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey of 605 people was conducted following a major dengue outbreak in 2013. RESULTS: Participants with higher levels of education were more likely to identify correctly the vector of the disease. CONCLUSIONS: The results emphasize the relevance of health education programs, the continuous promotion of educational campaigns in the media, the role of the television as a source of information, and the importance of motivating the population to control the vector.

The World Health Organization Multi-Professional Patient Safety Curriculum : implementation of key modules and its impact on patient safety knowledge, skills, and attitudes of medical students at the University of Algarve

ABSTRACT - Objectives: We attempted to show how the implementation of the key elements of the World Health Organization Patient Safety Curriculum Guide Multi-professional Edition in an undergraduate curriculum affected the knowledge, skills, and attitudes towards patient safety in a graduate entry Portuguese Medical School. Methods: After receiving formal recognition by the WHO as a Complementary Test Site and approval of the organizational ethics committee , the validated pre-course questionnaires measuring the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to patient safety were administered to the 2nd and3rd year students pursuing a four-year course (N = 46). The key modules of the curriculum were implemented over the academic year by employing a variety of learning strategies including expert lecturers, small group problem-based teaching sessions, and Simulation Laboratory sessions. The identical questionnaires were then administered and the impact was measured. The Curriculum Guide was evaluated as a health education tool in this context. Results: A significant number of the respondents, 47 % (n = 22), reported having received some form of prior patient safety training. The effect on Patient Safety Knowledge was assessed by using the percentage of correct pre- and post-course answers to construct 2 × 2 contingency tables and by applying Fishers’ test (two-tailed). No significant differences were detected (p < 0.05). To assess the effect of the intervention on Patient Safety skills and attitudes, the mean and standard deviation were calculated for the pre and post-course responses, and independent samples were subjected to Mann-Whitney’s test. The attitudinal survey indicated a very high baseline incidence of desirable attitudes and skills toward patient safety. Significant changes were detected (p < 0.05) regarding what should happen if an error is made (p = 0.016), the role of healthcare organizations in error reporting (p = 0.006), and the extent of medical error (p = 0.005). Conclusions: The implementation of selected modules of the WHO Patient Safety Curriculum was associated with a number of positive changes regarding patient safety skills and attitudes, with a baseline incidence of highly desirable patient safety attitudes, but no measureable change on the patient safety knowledge, at the University of Algarve Medical School. The significance of these results is discussed along with implications and suggestions for future research.

An agent based architecture to support monitoring in plug and produce manufacturing systems using knowledge extraction

In recent years a set of production paradigms were proposed in order to capacitate manufacturers to meet the new market requirements, such as the shift in demand for highly customized products resulting in a shorter product life cycle, rather than the traditional mass production standardized consumables. These new paradigms advocate solutions capable of facing these requirements, empowering manufacturing systems with a high capacity to adapt along with elevated flexibility and robustness in order to deal with disturbances, like unexpected orders or malfunctions. Evolvable Production Systems propose a solution based on the usage of modularity and self-organization with a fine granularity level, supporting pluggability and in this way allowing companies to add and/or remove components during execution without any extra re-programming effort. However, current monitoring software was not designed to fully support these characteristics, being commonly based on centralized SCADA systems, incapable of re-adapting during execution to the unexpected plugging/unplugging of devices nor changes in the entire system’s topology. Considering these aspects, the work developed for this thesis encompasses a fully distributed agent-based architecture, capable of performing knowledge extraction at different levels of abstraction without sacrificing the capacity to add and/or remove monitoring entities, responsible for data extraction and analysis, during runtime.

The price of honour: The corporate governance of Banco Espirito Santo

The Price of Honour is a case study, supported with teaching notes, which describes the events and circumstances surrounding the implosion of one of Portugal’s most systemically important banks - Banco Espírito Santo (BES). The case focuses on BES’s corporate governance and how the Espírito Santo family’s tight control of the bank led to its exploitation. Although the situation caught the attention of the bank’s supervisors, their untimely actions could not prevent BES’s financial health from crumbling only two months after a rights issue. With little leeway, the supervisors put forward a resolution which dramatically ended the bank’s centennial legacy.

Corporate governance failure at PT

The following case study depicts the bitter transfiguration of Portugal Telecom, SGPS (PT), a multinational telecommunications company that was once an honourable flag of innovation, corporate governance standards in Portugal and overseas. It scrutinises the controversial episodes that paved the way for the pitiful condition in which PT is nowadays: a company that carries the weight of a ruinous €897 million investment in a defaulted company and no more than a 25.6% stake in a heavily indebted Brazilian carrier. The free-fall is made, ironically, of a complete disregard for best corporate governance practices, allowing for PT’s major shareholders to take over the helm of the company, using it selfishly as a cash cow.

Towards a knowledge society

Economies are moving towards competitive stadiums based on knowledge and innovation. The changing environment and the level of globalization demand important efforts in order to sustain competitive advantages. Portugal has experienced a remarkable evolution since its adhesion to the European Union in several fields: economic development, Research & Development (R&D) consolidation, health parameters and social cohesion. As other developed economies, Portugal started its journey towards a knowledge-based economy and has been consolidating an innovation system during the last 35 years. The following report aims to analyze the evolution of a system since its creation to its last transformation within a globalized context. Challenges such as the lack of maturity of the system, the economic crisis, the European paradox, and closing the gap with other European countries are addressed in the next chapters. Likewise, recommendations on these points are provided by the end of the report as potential solutions.

Does the existing Corporate Governance structure and strict Legal Framework, affect the strategic decisionmaking of CEOs?

This thesis is a case study on Corporate Governance and Business Ethics, using the Portuguese Corporate Law as a general setting. The thesis was conducted in Portugal with illustrations on past cases under the Business Judgment Rule of the State of Delaware, U.SA along with illustrations on current cases in Portugal under the Portuguese Judicial setting, along with a comparative analysis between both. A debate is being considered among scholars and executives; a debate on best practices within corporate governance and corporate law, associated with recent discoveries of unlawful investments that lead to the bankruptcy of leading institutions and an aggravation of the crisis in Portugal. The study aimed at learning possible reasons and causes for the current situation of the country’s corporations along with attempts to discover the best way to move forward. From the interviews and analysis conducted, this paper concluded that the corporate governance structure and legal frameworks in Portugal were not the sole influencers behind the actions and decisions of Corporate Executives, nor were they the main triggers for the recent corporate mishaps. But it is rather a combination of different factors that played a significant role, such as cultural and ethical aspects, individual personalities, and others all of which created gray areas beyond the legal structure, which in turn accelerated and aggravated the corporate governance crisis in the country.

Interdisciplinary knowledge transfer and technological applications for assessment, strengthening and monitoring of timber structures in Europe

COST (European Co-operation in the field of scientific and technical research) is the longest running framework for research co-operation iri Europe, having been established in 1971 by a Ministerial Conference attended by Ministers for Science and Technology from 19 countries. Today COST is used by the scientific communities of 35 European countries to cooperate in exchanging knowledge and technology developed within research projects supported by national or European funds. The main objective of COST is to contribute to the realization of the European Research Área (ERA) anticipating and complementing the activities of the' Framework Programmes, constituting a "bridge" towards the scientific communities of emerging countries, increasing the mobility of researchers across Europe and fostering the establishment of "Networks of Excelience". Another essential objective is the knowledge transfer between the scientific soc'iety and industry. It is widely acknowledged that European scientific performance in relation to investment in science is excellent but technological and commercial performance has steadily worsened. The present paper discusses how the COST Action's instruments, from training schools to short scientific missions and workshops have been used within The COST ACTION FP11O1 Assessment, Reinforcement and Monitoring of Timber Structures to achieve such objectives.

[An editorial to] Recent Advances on Knowledge Discovery and Business Intelligence

Special issue guest editorial, June, 2015.

Child abuse monitor system model: a health care critical knowledge monitor system

The Childhood protection is a subject with high value for the society, but, the Child Abuse cases are difficult to identify. The process from suspicious to accusation is very difficult to achieve. It must configure very strong evidences. Typically, Health Care services deal with these cases from the beginning where there are evidences based on the diagnosis, but they aren’t enough to promote the accusation. Besides that, this subject it’s highly sensitive because there are legal aspects to deal with such as: the patient privacy, paternity issues, medical confidentiality, among others. We propose a Child Abuses critical knowledge monitor system model that addresses this problem. This decision support system is implemented with a multiple scientific domains: to capture of tokens from clinical documents from multiple sources; a topic model approach to identify the topics of the documents; knowledge management through the use of ontologies to support the critical knowledge sensibility concepts and relations such as: symptoms, behaviors, among other evidences in order to match with the topics inferred from the clinical documents and then alert and log when clinical evidences are present. Based on these alerts clinical personnel could analyze the situation and take the appropriate procedures.

Changes in institutional governance and management of higher education in Laos: National University of Laos

PhD thesis in Educational Sciences (specialization in Politics of Education).

Alcohol sponsored events: the impact on attitudes and intentions, and the mitigating impact of persuasion knowledge

Doctor of Philosophy in Marketing and Strategy

School governance and academic excellence: the representations of distinguished students in an annual award of excellence

Within a research project on «academic excellence in the state school», this paper is a contribution to the sociological reflection on the cultural and organisational characteristics of the school and its relationship with the academic success of students. The data we present stem from a case study underway at a secondary school in the north of Portugal, referring to the universe of students that since 2003 have distinguished themselves for achieving grades equal to or greater than 18 (on a scale of 0 to 20) and have thus been included in the school’s Framework of Excellence. From a contextual approach to this educational practice, we focused on the cultural characteristics of the school/subject as analytical support for the study of school and non-school dimensions in their mutual connections. To this end, we used the information from document analysis and data collected from a questionnaire survey administered to more than two-thirds of the students included in the above-mentioned Framework of Excellence. Subsequently, we will use the data from this survey to understand the extent to which academic excellence is perceived as an indivisible social construction of the school’s political and organisational matrix, particularly in terms of the educational and teaching guidelines adopted by the management body. We will conclude by questioning the meaning of the school’s management policies regarding the emphasis on educational outcomes, with particular focus on the representations of excellent students in the processes of school leadership, teaching organisation, school merit and justice.

Ethnoveterinary knowledge of the inhabitants of Marajó Island, Eastern Amazonia, Brazil

There have been ethnoveterinary reports from around the world investigating plant usage in therapeutic protocols; however, there is no information regarding the ethnoveterinary practices in Brazilian Amazonia. The objective of this work was to register and document the ethnoveterinary knowledge of the inhabitants of the Island of Marajó, eastern Amazonia, Brazil. In the study, interviews were conducted with 50 individuals, with the application of semi-structured questionnaires that were quantitatively analyzed using descriptive statistic methods of frequency distribution. Use-value was calculated to determine the most important species. Samples of plants that were reported to have medicinal value were collected and identified by botanical classification. Fifty plants, distributed among 48 genera and 34 families, were indicated for 21 different medicinal uses. The family Asteraceae had the largest number of reported species; Carapa guianensis Aubl., Copaifera martii Hayne, Crescentia cujete L., Caesalpinia ferrea Mart., Chenopodium ambrosioides L., Jatropha curcas L. and Momordica charantia L. were species with highest use- value. The plant parts that were more commonly utilized for the preparation of ethnoveterinary medicines were the leaves (56%), bark (18%), roots (14%), seeds (14%) and fruit (8%). With regard to usage, tea was reported as a usage method by 56% of the informants; most preparations (90.9%) utilized only a single plant. In addition to medicinal plants, informants reported using products of animal and mineral origin. The present study contributed to the construction of an inventory of Marajó Island's ethnoveterinary plants, which might be the basis for future scientific validation studies.

Postcolonial co-ordinary literature and the Web 2.0/3.0: "Thinking Back" within transmediatic knowledge

Pedro Andrade destaca o papel que as literacias híbridas preenchem numa redefinição pós-colonial da Europa. Em sua opinião, as literacias híbridas constituem uma condição necessária para a desconstrução do discurso colonial e a posterior reconstrução de literacias e literaturas pós-coloniais. Como parte deste processo, o autor argumenta a necessidade de vários tipos de competências que enfatizem a leitura e escrita não apenas dentro de sua própria cultura, mas também nas culturas dos outros. A literacia digital desempenha um papel particularmente importante neste processo, o que nos permite enfatizar as multivocalidades desta alteridade, igualmente na interação entre diferentes tradições de literacia: Ocidental e Oriental, nacional e transnacional, verbal e mediática. Andrade exemplifica o conceito de literatura transmediática com uma série de projetos em que esteve envolvido, por exemplo a Web 3.0 Novel enquanto modalidade daquilo que ele nomeia "GeoNeoLogic Novel". Este género de novel experimental mistura a narrativa com a teoria e a recolha de dados no campo empírico, promovendo uma abordagem que se apresenta simultaneamente regional e global. Em suma, o autor sugere diversos conceitos em primeira mão que classifica de ‘origem Lusófona’, e que representam diversas estratégias pós-coloniais globais também visíveis na área social, política e cultural da Lusofonia: o ‘pensamento-réplica’ (thinking back); o 'conhecimento transmediático' (transmediatic knowledge); a ‘sociedade da escrita comum’ (common writing society); as ‘redes comuns de conflito/significado’ (common webs of conflict and meaning); a literatura co-ordinária (co-ordinary literature).