Obstruction and infiltration: a proposal of a quality indicator.

Background The quest for continuous improvement of the quality of provided care is the objective of nursing care. However, the insertion and permanence of a peripheral venous catheter has been associated to complications, thus making a systematic evaluation of the performance of professionals and the management of health services important. Objective: Analyse complications that caused removal of intravenous catheters. Methods A prospective study with 64 patients of a health service of Portugal, from July to September/2015. Included patients with age 18 years, with a peripheral venous catheter. Descriptive analysis using SPSS. Ethical requirements were met. Results Two hundred three (203) intravenous catheters, in 64 patients, most elderly (section 95.3 %), with mean age of 80 years were evaluated. The catheters remained inserted between one and 12 days (mean 2 days), 66 % of the devices were removed because of complications, such as: removal by the patient (17.7 %), obstruction (17.2 %), infiltration (14.8 %), phlebitis (9.4 %) and fluid exiting the insertion site (6.4 %). The prevalence of obstruction and infiltration per patient was respectively 36 % and 39 %. Conclusions Obstruction and infiltration were the complications of higher prevalence that led to the removal and reinsertion of a new peripheral venous catheter with the possibility of increased pain, infection and hospital costs. Faced with the risk of compromising patient safety and being able to contribute to the improvement of health care, we suggest the inclusion of obstruction and infiltration in the indicators of quality of care, in order to have systematic evaluation of results, (re)plan and implement preventive measures.

Performance analysis in soccer: applications of player tracking technology

The aim of this thesis was threefold, firstly, to compare current player tracking technology in a single game of soccer. Secondly, to investigate the running requirements of elite women’s soccer, in particular the use and application of athlete tracking devices. Finally, how can game style be quantified and defined. Study One compared four different match analysis systems commonly used in both research and applied settings: video-based time-motion analysis, a semi-automated multiple camera based system, and two commercially available Global Positioning System (GPS) based player tracking systems at 1 Hertz (Hz) and 5 Hz respectively. A comparison was made between each of the systems when recording the same game. Total distance covered during the match for the four systems ranged from 10 830 ± 770 m (semi-automated multiple camera based system) to 9 510 ± 740m (video-based time-motion analysis). At running speeds categorised as high-intensity running (>15 km⋅h-1), the semi-automated multiple camera based system reported the highest distance of 2 650 ± 530 m with video-based time-motion analysis reporting the least amount of distance covered with 1 610 ± 370 m. At speeds considered to be sprinting (>20 km⋅h-1), the video-based time-motion analysis reported the highest value (420 ± 170 m) and 1 Hz GPS units the lowest value (230 ± 160 m). These results demonstrate there are differences in the determination of the absolute distances, and that comparison of results between match analysis systems should be made with caution. Currently, there is no criterion measure for these match analysis methods and as such it was not possible to determine if one system was more accurate than another. Study Two provided an opportunity to apply player-tracking technology (GPS) to measure activity profiles and determine the physical demands of Australian international level women soccer players. In four international women’s soccer games, data was collected on a total of 15 Australian women soccer players using a 5 Hz GPS based athlete tracking device. Results indicated that Australian women soccer players covered 9 140 ± 1 030 m during 90 min of play. The total distance covered by Australian women was less than the 10 300 m reportedly covered by female soccer players in the Danish First Division. However, there was no apparent difference in the estimated "#$%&', as measured by multi-stage shuttle tests, between these studies. This study suggests that contextual information, including the “game style” of both the team and opposition may influence physical performance in games. Study Three examined the effect the level of the opposition had on the physical output of Australian women soccer players. In total, 58 game files from 5 Hz athlete-tracking devices from 13 international matches were collected. These files were analysed to examine relationships between physical demands, represented by total distance covered, high intensity running (HIR) and distances covered sprinting, and the level of the opposition, as represented by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) ranking at the time of the match. Higher-ranking opponents elicited less high-speed running and greater low-speed activity compared to playing teams of similar or lower ranking. The results are important to coaches and practitioners in the preparation of players for international competition, and showed that the differing physical demands required were dependent on the level of the opponents. The results also highlighted the need for continued research in the area of integrating contextual information in team sports and demonstrated that soccer can be described as having dynamic and interactive systems. The influence of playing strategy, tactics and subsequently the overall game style was highlighted as playing a significant part in the physical demands of the players. Study Four explored the concept of game style in field sports such as soccer. The aim of this study was to provide an applied framework with suggested metrics for use by coaches, media, practitioners and sports scientists. Based on the findings of Studies 1- 3 and a systematic review of the relevant literature, a theoretical framework was developed to better understand how a team’s game style could be quantified. Soccer games can be broken into key moments of play, and for each of these moments we categorised metrics that provide insight to success or otherwise, to help quantify and measure different methods of playing styles. This study highlights that to date, there had been no clear definition of game style in team sports and as such a novel definition of game style is proposed that can be used by coaches, sport scientists, performance analysts, media and general public. Studies 1-3 outline four common methods of measuring the physical demands in soccer: video based time motion analysis, GPS at 1 Hz and at 5 Hz and semiautomated multiple camera based systems. As there are no semi-automated multiple camera based systems available in Australia, primarily due to cost and logistical reasons, GPS is widely accepted for use in team sports in tracking player movements in training and competition environments. This research identified that, although there are some limitations, GPS player-tracking technology may be a valuable tool in assessing running demands in soccer players and subsequently contribute to our understanding of game style. The results of the research undertaken also reinforce the differences between methods used to analyse player movement patterns in field sports such as soccer and demonstrate that the results from different systems such as GPS based athlete tracking devices and semi-automated multiple camera based systems cannot be used interchangeably. Indeed, the magnitude of measurement differences between methods suggests that significant measurement error is evident. This was apparent even when the same technologies are used which measure at different sampling rates, such as GPS systems using either 1 Hz or 5 Hz frequencies of measurement. It was also recognised that other factors influence how team sport athletes behave within an interactive system. These factors included the strength of the opposition and their style of play. In turn, these can impact the physical demands of players that change from game to game, and even within games depending on these contextual features. Finally, the concept of what is game style and how it might be measured was examined. Game style was defined as "the characteristic playing pattern demonstrated by a team during games. It will be regularly repeated in specific situational contexts such that measurement of variables reflecting game style will be relatively stable. Variables of importance are player and ball movements, interaction of players, and will generally involve elements of speed, time and space (location)".

Balancing Energy and Performance in Dense Linear System Solvers for Hybrid ARM+GPU platforms

The high performance computing community has traditionally focused uniquely on the reduction of execution time, though in the last years, the optimization of energy consumption has become a main issue. A reduction of energy usage without a degradation of performance requires the adoption of energy-efficient hardware platforms accompanied by the development of energy-aware algorithms and computational kernels. The solution of linear systems is a key operation for many scientific and engineering problems. Its relevance has motivated an important amount of work, and consequently, it is possible to find high performance solvers for a wide variety of hardware platforms. In this work, we aim to develop a high performance and energy-efficient linear system solver. In particular, we develop two solvers for a low-power CPU-GPU platform, the NVIDIA Jetson TK1. These solvers implement the Gauss-Huard algorithm yielding an efficient usage of the target hardware as well as an efficient memory access. The experimental evaluation shows that the novel proposal reports important savings in both time and energy-consumption when compared with the state-of-the-art solvers of the platform.

Multijurisdictional fisheries performance reporting: How Australia’s nationally standardised approach to assessing stock status compares

Australian marine wild-capture fisheries are managed by eight separate jurisdictions. Traditionally, fishery status reports have been produced separately by most of these jurisdictions, assessing the fish stocks they manage, and reporting on the effectiveness of their fisheries management. However, the format, the type of stock status assessments, the thresholds and terminology used to describe stock status and the classification frameworks have varied over time and among jurisdictions. These differences complicate efforts to understand stock status on a national scale. They also create potential misunderstanding among the wider community about how to interpret information on the status of fish stocks, and the fisheries management and science processes more generally. This is especially true when considering stocks that are shared across two or more jurisdictional boundaries. A standardised approach was developed in 2011 leading to production of the first national Status of key Australian fish stocks reports in 2012, followed by a second edition in 2014 (www.fish.gov.au). Production of these reports was the first step towards a broader national approach to reporting on the performance of Australian fisheries for target species and for wider ecosystem and socioeconomic consequences. This paper outlines the challenges associated with moving towards national performance reporting for target fish stocks and Australia’s successes so far. It also outlines the challenges ahead, in particular those relating to reporting more broadly on the status of entire fisheries. Comparisons are drawn between Australia and New Zealand and more broadly between Australia and other countries.

Biofloc contribution to antioxidant defence status, lipid nutrition and reproductive performance of broodstock of the shrimp Litopenaeus stylirostris: Consequences for the quality of eggs and larvae

The aim of this study was to determine biofloc contributions to the antioxidant status and lipid nutrition of broodstock of Litopenaeus stylirostris in relationship with their reproductive performance and the health of larvae produced. Shrimp broodstock reared with Biofloc technology (BFT) compared to Clear water (CW) exhibited a higher health status with (i) a better final survival rate during the reproduction period (52.6% in CW against 79.8% in BFT); (ii) higher glutathione level (GSH) and total antioxidant status (TAS), reduced oxidized/reduced glutathione ratio and a higher spawning rate and frequency as well as higher gonado-somatic index and number of spawned eggs. Finally, larvae from broodstock from BFT exhibited higher survival rates at the Zoe 2 (+ 37%) and Post Larvae 1 (+ 51%) stages when compared with those from females from CW treatment. The improved reproductive performance of the broodstock and higher larvae survival rate resulting from BFT treatment may be linked to the dietary supplement obtained by the shrimp from natural productivity during BFT rearing. Indeed, our study confirms that biofloc particulates represent a potential source of dietary glutathione and a significant source of lipids, particularly essential phospholipids and n-3 highly unsaturated fatty acids (HUFA) for shrimps. Thus, broodstock from BFT treatment accumulated phospholipids, n-3 HUFA and arachidonic acid, which are necessary for vitellogenesis, embryogenesis and pre-feeding larval development. The predominant essential fatty acids, arachidonic acid (ARA), eicopentaeonic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), had levels in the eggs that were, respectively, 2.5, 2.8 and 3 fold higher for BFT compared to the CW treatment. Statement of Relevance Today, the influence of biofloc technology on shrimp broodstock is not enough described and no information was available on the larvae quality. Moreover, two key pieces of new information emerge from the present study. Firstly, biofloc is a source of further dietary lipids that can act as energetic substrates, but also as a source of phospholipids and essential fatty acids necessary to sustain reproduction, embryonic and larval development. Second, improving the reproduction of the broodstock also leads to an improvement in the quality of the larvae. We think that our research is new and important to increase knowledge on biofloc topic. We believe the paper will contribute to the development of more efficient and therefore more sustainable systems.

GPRM: a high performance programming framework for manycore processors

Processors with large numbers of cores are becoming commonplace. In order to utilise the available resources in such systems, the programming paradigm has to move towards increased parallelism. However, increased parallelism does not necessarily lead to better performance. Parallel programming models have to provide not only flexible ways of defining parallel tasks, but also efficient methods to manage the created tasks. Moreover, in a general-purpose system, applications residing in the system compete for the shared resources. Thread and task scheduling in such a multiprogrammed multithreaded environment is a significant challenge. In this thesis, we introduce a new task-based parallel reduction model, called the Glasgow Parallel Reduction Machine (GPRM). Our main objective is to provide high performance while maintaining ease of programming. GPRM supports native parallelism; it provides a modular way of expressing parallel tasks and the communication patterns between them. Compiling a GPRM program results in an Intermediate Representation (IR) containing useful information about tasks, their dependencies, as well as the initial mapping information. This compile-time information helps reduce the overhead of runtime task scheduling and is key to high performance. Generally speaking, the granularity and the number of tasks are major factors in achieving high performance. These factors are even more important in the case of GPRM, as it is highly dependent on tasks, rather than threads. We use three basic benchmarks to provide a detailed comparison of GPRM with Intel OpenMP, Cilk Plus, and Threading Building Blocks (TBB) on the Intel Xeon Phi, and with GNU OpenMP on the Tilera TILEPro64. GPRM shows superior performance in almost all cases, only by controlling the number of tasks. GPRM also provides a low-overhead mechanism, called “Global Sharing”, which improves performance in multiprogramming situations. We use OpenMP, as the most popular model for shared-memory parallel programming as the main GPRM competitor for solving three well-known problems on both platforms: LU factorisation of Sparse Matrices, Image Convolution, and Linked List Processing. We focus on proposing solutions that best fit into the GPRM’s model of execution. GPRM outperforms OpenMP in all cases on the TILEPro64. On the Xeon Phi, our solution for the LU Factorisation results in notable performance improvement for sparse matrices with large numbers of small blocks. We investigate the overhead of GPRM’s task creation and distribution for very short computations using the Image Convolution benchmark. We show that this overhead can be mitigated by combining smaller tasks into larger ones. As a result, GPRM can outperform OpenMP for convolving large 2D matrices on the Xeon Phi. Finally, we demonstrate that our parallel worksharing construct provides an efficient solution for Linked List processing and performs better than OpenMP implementations on the Xeon Phi. The results are very promising, as they verify that our parallel programming framework for manycore processors is flexible and scalable, and can provide high performance without sacrificing productivity.

Optimising plant bed performance through adaptive research with the Australian sweetpotato industry

A key driver of Australian sweetpotato productivity improvements and consumer demand has been industry adoption of disease-free planting material systems. On a farm isolated from main Australian sweetpotato areas, virus-free germplasm is annually multiplied, with subsequent 'pathogen-tested' (PT) sweetpotato roots shipped to commercial Australian sweetpotato growers. They in turn plant their PT roots into specially designated plant beds, commencing in late winter. From these beds, they cut sprouts as the basis for their commercial fields. Along with other intense agronomic practices, this system enables Australian producers to achieve worldRSQUOs highest commercial yields (per hectare) of premium sweetpotatoes. Their industry organisation, ASPG (Australian Sweetpotato Growers Inc.), has identified productivity of mother plant beds as a key driver of crop performance. Growers and scientists are currently collaborating to investigate issues such as catastrophic plant beds losses; optimisation of irrigation and nutrient addition; rapidity and uniformity of initial plant bed harvests; optimal plant bed harvest techniques; virus re-infection of plant beds; and practical longevity of plant beds. A survey of 50 sweetpotato growers in Queensland and New South Wales identified a substantial diversity in current plant bed systems, apparently influenced by growing district, scale of operation, time of planting, and machinery/labour availability. Growers identified key areas for plant bed research as: optimising the size and grading specifications of PT roots supplied for the plant beds; change in sprout density, vigour and performance through sequential cuttings of the plant bed; optimal height above ground level to cut sprouts to maximise commercial crop and plant bed performance; and use of structures and soil amendments in plant bed systems. Our ongoing multi-disciplinary research program integrates detailed agronomic experiments, grower adaptive learning sites, product quality and consumer research, to enhance industry capacity for inspired innovation and commercial, sustainable practice change.

Performance Analysis of IP based WSNs in real time systems

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the key enablers of the internet of things (IoT) paradigm. Traditionally, sensor network research has been to be unlike the internet, motivated by power and device constraints. The IETF 6LoWPAN draft standard changes this, defining how IPv6 packets can be efficiently transmitted over IEEE 802.15.4 radio links. Due to this 6LoWPAN technology, low power, low cost micro- controllers can be connected to the internet forming what is known as the wireless embedded internet. Another IETF recommendation, CoAP allows these devices to communicate interactively over the internet. The integration of such tiny, ubiquitous electronic devices to the internet enables interesting real-time applications. This thesis work attempts to evaluate the performance of a stack consisting of CoAP and 6LoWPAN over the IEEE 802.15.4 radio link using the Contiki OS and Cooja simulator, along with the CoAP framework Californium (Cf). Ultimately, the implementation of this stack on real hardware is carried out using a raspberry pi as a border router with T-mote sky sensors as slip radios and CoAP servers relaying temperature and humidity data. The reliability of the stack was also demonstrated during scalability analysis conducted on the physical deployment. The interoperability is ensured by connecting the WSN to the global internet using different hardware platforms supported by Contiki and without the use of specialized gateways commonly found in non IP based networks. This work therefore developed and demonstrated a heterogeneous wireless sensor network stack, which is IP based and conducted performance analysis of the stack, both in terms of simulations and real hardware.

An A Posteriori Error Indicator for Discontinuous Galerkin Approximations of Fourth Order Elliptic Problems

We introduce a residual-based a posteriori error indicator for discontinuous Galerkin discretizations of the biharmonic equation with essential boundary conditions. We show that the indicator is both reliable and efficient with respect to the approximation error measured in terms of a natural energy norm, under minimal regularity assumptions. We validate the performance of the indicator within an adaptive mesh refinement procedure and show its asymptotic exactness for a range of test problems.

Quantification of key biological processes determining the dynamics and the assessment of the anchovy population in the Bay of Biscay: growth, reproduction, demography and natural mortality.

333 p.

Boosting the performance of metaheuristics for the MinLA problem using a more discriminating evaluation function

International audience

Resiliência e performance: Um voo lado a lado?

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada ao Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada para obtenção de grau de Mestre na especialidade de Psicologia Social e das Organizações.

Marketing channel behaviour and performance

Thesis submitted to University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Business Administration.

Using niche modelling of indicator species to predict the distribution of xerophitic shrub dune communities in South-Western Portugal

Inland sand dune systems are amongst the most threatened habitat types of Europe. Affected by severe conditions, these habitats present distinct community compositions, which makes them excellent for studying possible interactions among their integrating species and the environment. We focus on understanding the distribution and cooccurrence of the species from dune plant assemblages as a key step for the adequate protection of these habitats. Using data from an extensive survey we identified the shrub species that could be considered indicators of the different xerophytic scrub dune communities in South West Portugal. Then, we modelled the responses of these species to the environmental conditions using Ecological Niche Factor Analysis. We present some preliminary results elucidating whether using species distribution models of indicator species at a regional scale is a valid approach to predict the distribution of the different types of communities inhabiting these endangered habitats.

Unraveling the performance of dispersion-corrected functionals for the accurate description of weakly bound natural polyphenols

Long-range non-covalent interactions play a key role in the chemistry of natural polyphenols. We have previously proposed a description of supramolecular polyphenol complexes by the B3P86 density functional coupled with some corrections for dispersion. We couple here the B3P86 functional with the D3 correction for dispersion, assessing systematically the accuracy of the new B3P86-D3 model using for that the well-known S66, HB23, NCCE31, and S12L datasets for non-covalent interactions. Furthermore, the association energies of these complexes were carefully compared to those obtained by other dispersion-corrected functionals, such as B(3)LYP-D3, BP86-D3 or B3P86-NL. Finally, this set of models were also applied to a database composed of seven non-covalent polyphenol complexes of the most interest.