Collaborative language learning in Teletandem: a resource for pre-service teacher education

This article presents some of the results of a qualitative research project about the influences of the pedagogic strategies used by a mediator (graduate student in applied linguistics) in the supervision process of a Teletandem partner (undergraduate student in languages) on her pedagogical practice. It was done within the project Teletandem Brazil: foreign language for all. Based on the reflective teaching paradigm and collaborative language learning, with special emphasis on tandem learning, we analyzed the contributions of the collaborative relationship established between the graduate student and the student-teacher in her first teaching experience. The results bring about implications for the field of language teacher education in a perspective of education within practice, evidencing the experience of collaborative learning in teletandem as an opportunity for reflective teacher education of pre-service teachers.

Incorporating priorities for waiting customers in the hypercube queuing model with application to an emergency medical service system in Brazil

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

The Vaquita: Can It Survive?

The vaquita (Spanish for "little cow"), or Gulf of California harbor porpoise (Phocoena sinus), has the most limited range of any marine cetacean and is probably the rarest. It has been caught incidentally in gill nets set commercially for totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi), large fish that were over-exploited in the upper Gulf of California until they, too, were endangered. In 1975. the Mexican Government announced a total indefinite closure on fishing for totoaba, Between the time this porpoise was described as new to science (1958) and its listing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as Endangered (early 1985), the vaquita was known from only 26 confirmed records (partial remains found on beaches) and a few sightings of live animals. (Note: the vernacular name "cochito" was cited when this animal was listed, but biologists have since learned that "vaquita" is the term used by most local fishermen.) The Endangered Species Technical Bulletin story about its listing (see BULLETIN Vol. X No. 2) said the species was on the brink of extinction "if it still exists."

A load-balancing spare capacity reallocation approach in service-rich SONET metro mesh networks

The next-generation SONET metro network is evolving into a service-rich infrastructure. At the edge of such a network, multi-service provisioning platforms (MSPPs) provide efficient data mapping enabled by Generic Framing Procedure (GFP) and Virtual Concatenation (VC). The core of the network tends to be a meshed architecture equipped with Multi-Service Switches (MSSs). In the context of these emerging technologies, we propose a load-balancing spare capacity reallocation approach to improve network utilization in the next-generation SONET metro networks. Using our approach, carriers can postpone network upgrades, resulting in increased revenue with reduced capital expenditures (CAPEX). For the first time, we consider the spare capacity reallocation problem from a capacity upgrade and network planning perspective. Our approach can operate in the context of shared-path protection (with backup multiplexing) because it reallocates spare capacity without disrupting working services. Unlike previous spare capacity reallocation approaches which aim at minimizing total spare capacity, our load-balancing approach minimizes the network load vector (NLV), which is a novel metric that reflects the network load distribution. Because NLV takes into consideration both uniform and non-uniform link capacity distribution, our approach can benefit both uniform and non-uniform networks. We develop a greedy loadbalancing spare capacity reallocation (GLB-SCR) heuristic algorithm to implement this approach. Our experimental results show that GLB-SCR outperforms a previously proposed algorithm (SSR) in terms of established connection capacity and total network capacity in both uniform and non-uniform networks.

2003 IANR Team Award and Exemplary Service Award Presentations

What a treat it is to be here today to celebrate the outstanding work of members of our IANR community. It seems so much of our administrative time these days is spent dealing with difficult and joyless issues surrounding slashed budgets, lost programs, and the very real pain those engender. Perhaps it is that pain that doubles our joy when we have opportunities such as today to celebrate excellence. This afternoon we celebrate accomplishment in two ways with the IANR Team Award, and with the Exemplary Service Award. We'll begin today with the IANR Team Award, which recognizes the importance of interdisciplinary team efforts in achieving the Institute's goals. Criteria include: 1) problem identification, team strategy, grant success; 2) productivity and impact and the output of the team in relation to inputs; 3) the team effort, and 4) the quality of the nomination.

RP96-11 The Farm Corporation: What It Is, How It Works, How It Is Taxed

A corporation is an artificial person that is created and operated according to state corporation statutes. It is a separate taxpayer subject to specific and detailed federal, state, and local tax laws. The advice and service of your lawyer are indispensable in organizing and operating a farm corporation. There are three basic forms of farm business organization, the sole proprietorship, the partnership, and the corporation. Variations of these forms have resulted in the limited partnership and the "tax option" corporation. These three basic forms are discussed in this research publication.

Assessment of referrals to an OT consultation-liaison service: a retrospective and comparative study

The objective was to conduct a retrospective and comparative study of the requests for consultation-liaison (RCLs), during a period of six years, sent to the Occupational Therapy (OT) team that acts as the Consultation-liaison Service in Mental Health. During the studied period 709 RCLs were made and 633 patients received OT consultations. The comparison group was extended to 1 129 consecutive referrals to the psychiatric CL service, within the same period and that were also retrospectively reviewed. Regarding to RCLs to the OT team, most of the subjects were women with incomplete elementary schooling, with a mean age of 39.2 years, and were self-employed or retired. Internal Medicine was responsible for most of the RCLs. The mean length of hospitalization was 51 days and the mean rate of referral was 0.5%, with the most frequent reason for the request being related to the emotional aspects and the most frequent psychiatric diagnosis was mood disorder. It is concluded that there is a clear demand for the development of consultation-liaison in OT, particularly with regard to the promotion of mental health in general hospitals.

HEDONIC ANALYSIS OF CELL PHONES SOLD WITH POST-PAID SERVICE PLANS IN BRAZIL

The aim of this paper is to analyze the determining factors for the pricing of handsets sold with service plans, using the hedonic price method. This was undertaken by building a database comprising 48 handset models, under nine different service plans, over a period of 53 weeks in 2008, and resulted in 27 different attributes and a total number of nearly 300,000 data registers. The results suggest that the value of monthly subscriptions and calling minutes are important to explain the prices of handsets. Furthermore, both the physical volume and number of megapixels of a camera had an effect on the prices. The bigger the handset, the cheaper it becomes, and the more megapixels a camera phone has, the more expensive it becomes. Additionally, it was found that in 2008 Brazilian phone companies were subsidizing enabled data connection handsets.

HOLISTIC WOMEN: "GREEN BLOUSE" NURSES TO THE SERVICE OF THE NATION

This study aims to investigate the role assigned to the holistic nurse and the education she receives to perform her role with maximum efficiency within the Brazilian Holistic Action (Acao Integralista Brasileira), a right-wing political party that emerged in Brazil in the 1930s. It uses holistic newspapers, the "Holistic Encyclopedia" collection, and records about the Holistic School of Nursing which compose the criminal collection by the Political Police, organized by the Special Police of Political and Social Safety as source material. As a result, the study presents a significant investment of holistic thinking in formally educating nurses, women who took the opportunity of the moment to expand their social arenas. It concludes that, although holistic thinking strengthened social roles described as female, the women's relationship with the movement was innovative because it enabled new practices and representations that they also started to develop in the public sphere, for example, working as nurses.

The 193 call center, a meaningful public service!

This article is the first part of an on-going ergonomic work analysis with the emergency services call center set up by the Fire Department of the Military Police of Sao Paulo. The final objective of the research is to identify the prescribed task, the real work executed and strategies used by workers to meet the demands of the job. Starting by identifying the tasks and activities developed, this article analyzes the work of the emergency services call center which is of vital importance to the organizational structure, since it is the start point for the process that results in fulfilling the corporation's mission.

Hedonic analysis of cell phones sold with post-paid service plans in Brazil

The aim of this paper is to analyze the determining factors for the pricing of handsets sold with service plans, using the hedonic price method. This was undertaken by building a database comprising 48 handset models, under nine different service plans, over a period of 53 weeks in 2008, and resulted in 27 different attributes and a total number of nearly 300,000 data registers. The results suggest that the value of monthly subscriptions and calling minutes are important to explain the prices of handsets. Furthermore, both the physical volume and number of megapixels of a camera had an effect on the prices. The bigger the handset, the cheaper it becomes, and the more megapixels a camera phone has, the more expensive it becomes. Additionally, it was found that in 2008 Brazilian phone companies were subsidizing enabled data connection handsets.

Multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for single and multiple fault service restoration in large-scale distribution systems

Network reconfiguration for service restoration (SR) in distribution systems is a complex optimization problem. For large-scale distribution systems, it is computationally hard to find adequate SR plans in real time since the problem is combinatorial and non-linear, involving several constraints and objectives. Two Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms that use Node-Depth Encoding (NDE) have proved able to efficiently generate adequate SR plans for large distribution systems: (i) one of them is the hybridization of the Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) with NDE, named NSGA-N; (ii) the other is a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm based on subpopulation tables that uses NDE, named MEAN. Further challenges are faced now, i.e. the design of SR plans for larger systems as good as those for relatively smaller ones and for multiple faults as good as those for one fault (single fault). In order to tackle both challenges, this paper proposes a method that results from the combination of NSGA-N, MEAN and a new heuristic. Such a heuristic focuses on the application of NDE operators to alarming network zones according to technical constraints. The method generates similar quality SR plans in distribution systems of significantly different sizes (from 3860 to 30,880 buses). Moreover, the number of switching operations required to implement the SR plans generated by the proposed method increases in a moderate way with the number of faults.

Formalizing languages for service oriented computing

Service Oriented Computing is a new programming paradigm for addressing distributed system design issues. Services are autonomous computational entities which can be dynamically discovered and composed in order to form more complex systems able to achieve different kinds of task. E-government, e-business and e-science are some examples of the IT areas where Service Oriented Computing will be exploited in the next years. At present, the most credited Service Oriented Computing technology is that of Web Services, whose specifications are enriched day by day by industrial consortia without following a precise and rigorous approach. This PhD thesis aims, on the one hand, at modelling Service Oriented Computing in a formal way in order to precisely define the main concepts it is based upon and, on the other hand, at defining a new approach, called bipolar approach, for addressing system design issues by synergically exploiting choreography and orchestration languages related by means of a mathematical relation called conformance. Choreography allows us to describe systems of services from a global view point whereas orchestration supplies a means for addressing such an issue from a local perspective. In this work we present SOCK, a process algebra based language inspired by the Web Service orchestration language WS-BPEL which catches the essentials of Service Oriented Computing. From the definition of SOCK we will able to define a general model for dealing with Service Oriented Computing where services and systems of services are related to the design of finite state automata and process algebra concurrent systems, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a formal language for dealing with choreography. Such a language is equipped with a formal semantics and it forms, together with a subset of the SOCK calculus, the bipolar framework. Finally, we present JOLIE which is a Java implentation of a subset of the SOCK calculus and it is part of the bipolar framework we intend to promote.

Semantic-based middleware solutions to support context-aware service provisioning in pervasive environments

The dynamicity and heterogeneity that characterize pervasive environments raise new challenges in the design of mobile middleware. Pervasive environments are characterized by a significant degree of heterogeneity, variability, and dynamicity that conventional middleware solutions are not able to adequately manage. Originally designed for use in a relatively static context, such middleware systems tend to hide low-level details to provide applications with a transparent view on the underlying execution platform. In mobile environments, however, the context is extremely dynamic and cannot be managed by a priori assumptions. Novel middleware should therefore support mobile computing applications in the task of adapting their behavior to frequent changes in the execution context, that is, it should become context-aware. In particular, this thesis has identified the following key requirements for novel context-aware middleware that existing solutions do not fulfil yet. (i) Middleware solutions should support interoperability between possibly unknown entities by providing expressive representation models that allow to describe interacting entities, their operating conditions and the surrounding world, i.e., their context, according to an unambiguous semantics. (ii) Middleware solutions should support distributed applications in the task of reconfiguring and adapting their behavior/results to ongoing context changes. (iii) Context-aware middleware support should be deployed on heterogeneous devices under variable operating conditions, such as different user needs, application requirements, available connectivity and device computational capabilities, as well as changing environmental conditions. Our main claim is that the adoption of semantic metadata to represent context information and context-dependent adaptation strategies allows to build context-aware middleware suitable for all dynamically available portable devices. Semantic metadata provide powerful knowledge representation means to model even complex context information, and allow to perform automated reasoning to infer additional and/or more complex knowledge from available context data. In addition, we suggest that, by adopting proper configuration and deployment strategies, semantic support features can be provided to differentiated users and devices according to their specific needs and current context. This thesis has investigated novel design guidelines and implementation options for semantic-based context-aware middleware solutions targeted to pervasive environments. These guidelines have been applied to different application areas within pervasive computing that would particularly benefit from the exploitation of context. Common to all applications is the key role of context in enabling mobile users to personalize applications based on their needs and current situation. The main contributions of this thesis are (i) the definition of a metadata model to represent and reason about context, (ii) the definition of a model for the design and development of context-aware middleware based on semantic metadata, (iii) the design of three novel middleware architectures and the development of a prototypal implementation for each of these architectures, and (iv) the proposal of a viable approach to portability issues raised by the adoption of semantic support services in pervasive applications.

Creep and damage models for the service behaviour of structural members

Deformability is often a crucial to the conception of many civil-engineering structural elements. Also, design is all the more burdensome if both long- and short-term deformability has to be considered. In this thesis, long- and short-term deformability has been studied from the material and the structural modelling point of view. Moreover, two materials have been handled: pultruded composites and concrete. A new finite element model for thin-walled beams has been introduced. As a main assumption, cross-sections rigid are considered rigid in their plane; this hypothesis replaces that of the classical beam theory of plane cross-sections in the deformed state. That also allows reducing the total number of degrees of freedom, and therefore making analysis faster compared with twodimensional finite elements. Longitudinal direction warping is left free, allowing describing phenomena such as the shear lag. The new finite-element model has been first applied to concrete thin-walled beams (such as roof high span girders or bridge girders) subject to instantaneous service loadings. Concrete in his cracked state has been considered through a smeared crack model for beams under bending. At a second stage, the FE-model has been extended to the viscoelastic field and applied to pultruded composite beams under sustained loadings. The generalized Maxwell model has been adopted. As far as materials are concerned, long-term creep tests have been carried out on pultruded specimens. Both tension and shear tests have been executed. Some specimen has been strengthened with carbon fibre plies to reduce short- and long- term deformability. Tests have been done in a climate room and specimens kept 2 years under constant load in time. As for concrete, a model for tertiary creep has been proposed. The basic idea is to couple the UMLV linear creep model with a damage model in order to describe nonlinearity. An effective strain tensor, weighting the total and the elasto-damaged strain tensors, controls damage evolution through the damage loading function. Creep strains are related to the effective stresses (defined by damage models) and so associated to the intact material.