Mid-point for open-ended income category and the effect of equivalence scales on the income-health relationship

To estimate the mid-point of an open-ended income category and to assess the impact of two equivalence scales on income-health associations. Data were obtained from the 2010 Brazilian Oral Health Survey ( Pesquisa Nacional de Saúde Bucal – SBBrasil 2010). Income was converted from categorical to two continuous variables ( per capita and equivalized) for each mid-point. The median mid-point was R$ 14,523.50 and the mean, R$ 24,507.10. When per capita income was applied, 53% of the population were below the poverty line, compared with 15% with equivalized income. The magnitude of income-health associations was similar for continuous income, but categorized equivalized income tended to decrease the strength of association.

Cut-off point for WHOQOL-bref as a measure of quality of life of older adults

OBJECTIVE To propose a cut-off for the World Health Organization Quality of Life-Bref (WHOQOL-bref) as a predictor of quality of life in older adults. METHODS Cross-sectional study with 391 older adults registered in the Northwest Health District in Belo Horizonte, MG, Southeastern Brazil, between October 8, 2010 and May 23, 2011. The older adults’ quality of life was measured using the WHOQOL-bref. The analysis was rationalized by outlining two extreme and simultaneous groups according to perceived quality of life and satisfaction with health (quality of life good/satisfactory – good or very good self-reported quality of life and being satisfied or very satisfied with health – G5; and poor/very poor quality of life – poor or very poor self-reported quality of life and feeling dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with health – G6). A Receiver-Operating Characteristic curve (ROC) was created to assess the diagnostic ability of different cut-off points of the WHOQOL-bref. RESULTS ROC curve analysis indicated a critical value 60 as the optimal cut-off point for assessing perceived quality of life and satisfaction with health. The area under the curve was 0.758, with a sensitivity of 76.8% and specificity of 63.8% for a cut-off of ≥ 60 for overall quality of life (G5) and sensitivity 95.0% and specificity of 54.4% for a cut-off of < 60 for overall quality of life (G6). CONCLUSIONS Diagnostic interpretation of the ROC curve revealed that cut-off < 60 for overall quality of life obtained excellent sensitivity and negative predictive value for tracking older adults with probable worse quality of life and dissatisfied with health.

ECG Biometrics: A Template Selection Approach

Electrocardiography (ECG) biometrics is emerging as a viable biometric trait. Recent developments at the sensor level have shown the feasibility of performing signal acquisition at the fingers and hand palms, using one-lead sensor technology and dry electrodes. These new locations lead to ECG signals with lower signal to noise ratio and more prone to noise artifacts; the heart rate variability is another of the major challenges of this biometric trait. In this paper we propose a novel approach to ECG biometrics, with the purpose of reducing the computational complexity and increasing the robustness of the recognition process enabling the fusion of information across sessions. Our approach is based on clustering, grouping individual heartbeats based on their morphology. We study several methods to perform automatic template selection and account for variations observed in a person's biometric data. This approach allows the identification of different template groupings, taking into account the heart rate variability, and the removal of outliers due to noise artifacts. Experimental evaluation on real world data demonstrates the advantages of our approach.

Efficient Implementation Of A Single-Precision Floating-Point Arithmetic Unit on FPGA

This paper presents a single precision floating point arithmetic unit with support for multiplication, addition, fused multiply-add, reciprocal, square-root and inverse squareroot with high-performance and low resource usage. The design uses a piecewise 2nd order polynomial approximation to implement reciprocal, square-root and inverse square-root. The unit can be configured with any number of operations and is capable to calculate any function with a throughput of one operation per cycle. The floatingpoint multiplier of the unit is also used to implement the polynomial approximation and the fused multiply-add operation. We have compared our implementation with other state-of-the-art proposals, including the Xilinx Core-Gen operators, and conclude that the approach has a high relative performance/area efficiency. © 2014 Technical University of Munich (TUM).

Supplier's selection model based on an empirical study

The problem of selecting suppliers/partners is a crucial and important part in the process of decision making for companies that intend to perform competitively in their area of activity. The selection of supplier/partner is a time and resource-consuming task that involves data collection and a careful analysis of the factors that can positively or negatively influence the choice. Nevertheless it is a critical process that affects significantly the operational performance of each company. In this work, there were identified five broad selection criteria: Quality, Financial, Synergies, Cost, and Production System. Within these criteria, it was also included five sub-criteria. After the identification criteria, a survey was elaborated and companies were contacted in order to understand which factors have more weight in their decisions to choose the partners. Interpreted the results and processed the data, it was adopted a model of linear weighting to reflect the importance of each factor. The model has a hierarchical structure and can be applied with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method or Value Analysis. The goal of the paper it's to supply a selection reference model that can represent an orientation/pattern for a decision making on the suppliers/partners selection process

Enhancing Multimodal Silent Speech Interfaces With Feature Selection

In research on Silent Speech Interfaces (SSI), different sources of information (modalities) have been combined, aiming at obtaining better performance than the individual modalities. However, when combining these modalities, the dimensionality of the feature space rapidly increases, yielding the well-known "curse of dimensionality". As a consequence, in order to extract useful information from this data, one has to resort to feature selection (FS) techniques to lower the dimensionality of the learning space. In this paper, we assess the impact of FS techniques for silent speech data, in a dataset with 4 non-invasive and promising modalities, namely: video, depth, ultrasonic Doppler sensing, and surface electromyography. We consider two supervised (mutual information and Fisher's ratio) and two unsupervised (meanmedian and arithmetic mean geometric mean) FS filters. The evaluation was made by assessing the classification accuracy (word recognition error) of three well-known classifiers (knearest neighbors, support vector machines, and dynamic time warping). The key results of this study show that both unsupervised and supervised FS techniques improve on the classification accuracy on both individual and combined modalities. For instance, on the video component, we attain relative performance gains of 36.2% in error rates. FS is also useful as pre-processing for feature fusion. Copyright © 2014 ISCA.

Matching CO2 large point sources and potential geological storage sites in mainland Portugal

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, Perfil Gestão e Sistemas Ambientais

A simulation of integrated photovoltaic conversion into electric grid

This paper presents a systemic modeling for a PV system integrated into an electric grid. The modeling includes models for a DC-DC boost converter and a DC-AC two-level inverter. Classical or fuzzy PI controllers with pulse width modulation by space vector modulation associated with sliding mode control is used for controlling the PV system and power factor control is introduced at the output of the system. Comprehensive performance simulation studies are carried out with the modeling of the DC-DC boost converter followed by a two-level power inverter in order to compare the performance with the experimental results obtained during in situ operation with three commercial inverters. Also, studies are carried out to assess the quality of the energy injected into the electric grid in terms of harmonic distortion. Finally, conclusions regarding the integration of the PV system into the electric grid are presented. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Fifth harmonic and sag impact on PMSG wind turbines with a balancing new strategy for capacitor voltages

This paper deals with the computing simulation of the impact on permanent magnet synchronous generator wind turbines due to fifth harmonic content and grid voltage decrease. Power converter topologies considered in the simulations are the two-level and the three-level ones. The three-level converters are limited by unbalance voltages in the DC-link capacitors. In order to lessen this limitation, a new control strategy for the selection of the output voltage vectors is proposed. Controller strategies considered in the simulation are respectively based on proportional integral and fractional-order controllers. Finally, a comparison between the results of the simulations with the two controller strategies is presented in order to show the main advantage of the proposed strategy. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Water treatments in semi-closed cooling circuits and their impact on the quality of effluents discharged by CERN

Dissertação apresentada à Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, Gestão de Sistemas Ambientais

Fuzzy clustering applied to a demand response model in a smatr grid contingency scenario

This paper focus on a demand response model analysis in a smart grid context considering a contingency scenario. A fuzzy clustering technique is applied on the developed demand response model and an analysis is performed for the contingency scenario. Model considerations and architecture are described. The demand response developed model aims to support consumers decisions regarding their consumption needs and possible economic benefits.

Layered smart grid architecture approach and field tests by ZigBee technology

This paper presents a layered Smart Grid architecture enhancing security and reliability, having the ability to act in order to maintain and correct infrastructure components without affecting the client service. The architecture presented is based in the core of well design software engineering, standing upon standards developed over the years. The layered Smart Grid offers a base tool to ease new standards and energy policies implementation. The ZigBee technology implementation test methodology for the Smart Grid is presented, and provides field tests using ZigBee technology to control the new Smart Grid architecture approach. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Analysis of the domain of applicability of an algorithm for a resources system selection problem for Distributed/Agile/Virtual Enterprises integration

The process of resources systems selection takes an important part in Distributed/Agile/Virtual Enterprises (D/A/V Es) integration. However, the resources systems selection is still a difficult matter to solve in a D/A/VE, as it is pointed out in this paper. Globally, we can say that the selection problem has been equated from different aspects, originating different kinds of models/algorithms to solve it. In order to assist the development of a web prototype tool (broker tool), intelligent and flexible, that integrates all the selection model activities and tools, and with the capacity to adequate to each D/A/V E project or instance (this is the major goal of our final project), we intend in this paper to show: a formulation of a kind of resources selection problem and the limitations of the algorithms proposed to solve it. We formulate a particular case of the problem as an integer programming, which is solved using simplex and branch and bound algorithms, and identify their performance limitations (in terms of processing time) based on simulation results. These limitations depend on the number of processing tasks and on the number of pre-selected resources per processing tasks, defining the domain of applicability of the algorithms for the problem studied. The limitations detected open the necessity of the application of other kind of algorithms (approximate solution algorithms) outside the domain of applicability founded for the algorithms simulated. However, for a broker tool it is very important the knowledge of algorithms limitations, in order to, based on problem features, develop and select the most suitable algorithm that guarantees a good performance.

Logarithmically proportional objective function for planar surfaces recognition in 3D point cloud

3D laser scanning is becoming a standard technology to generate building models of a facility's as-is condition. Since most constructions are constructed upon planar surfaces, recognition of them paves the way for automation of generating building models. This paper introduces a new logarithmically proportional objective function that can be used in both heuristic and metaheuristic (MH) algorithms to discover planar surfaces in a point cloud without exploiting any prior knowledge about those surfaces. It can also adopt itself to the structural density of a scanned construction. In this paper, a metaheuristic method, genetic algorithm (GA), is used to test this introduced objective function on a synthetic point cloud. The results obtained show the proposed method is capable to find all plane configurations of planar surfaces (with a wide variety of sizes) in the point cloud with a minor distance to the actual configurations. © 2014 IEEE.

A contribuição da informática para o desenvolvimento sustentável: o exemplo do conceito de grid computing

Este trabalho foi realizado sob orientação do Prof. António Brandão Moniz para a disciplina “Factores Sociais da Inovação” do Mestrado Engenharia Informática realizado na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal)