Validation of the Portuguese version of the Evidence-Based Practice Questionnaire

OBJECTIVES: To describe the process of translation and linguistic and cultural validation of the Evidence Based Practice Questionnaire for the Portuguese context: Questionário de Eficácia Clínica e Prática Baseada em Evidências (QECPBE). METHOD: A methodological and cross-sectional study was developed. The translation and back translation was performed according to traditional standards. Principal Components Analysis with orthogonal rotation according to the Varimax method was used to verify the QECPBE's psychometric characteristics, followed by confirmatory factor analysis. Internal consistency was determined by Cronbach's alpha. Data were collected between December 2013 and February 2014. RESULTS: 358 nurses delivering care in a hospital facility in North of Portugal participated in the study. QECPBE contains 20 items and three subscales: Practice (α=0.74); Attitudes (α=0.75); Knowledge/Skills and Competencies (α=0.95), presenting an overall internal consistency of α=0.74. The tested model explained 55.86% of the variance and presented good fit: χ2(167)=520.009; p = 0.0001; χ2df=3.114; CFI=0.908; GFI=0.865; PCFI=0.798; PGFI=0.678; RMSEA=0.077 (CI90%=0.07-0.08). CONCLUSION: confirmatory factor analysis revealed the questionnaire is valid and appropriate to be used in the studied context.

Avaliação do funcionamento de um motor diesel com biodiesel

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia Mecânica

Ireland's biodegradable municipal waste

This project focuses on the EU Landfill Directive targets for Biodegradable Municipal Waste (BMW) specifically focusing on how the targets will affect Ireland and its waste management infrastructure. Research will consist of reviewing relevant literature, legislation and policies that will provide a comparable between Ireland and other nations. Planning processes which govern both the building structure and running capacities of treatment facilities is also necessary in order to predict amounts of waste diverted from landfill. The efficiency of these treatment plants also requires investigation. Another objective is to research further information on Irelands organic ‘brown’ bin service, this will involve discovering the roll out of bins in the future over a defined time scale as well as the potential amounts of waste that will be collected. Figures received from waste management and waste treatment companies will be combined with figures from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) annual reports. This will give an indication to past trends and shed light on possible future trends. With this information annul waste volumes consigned to landfill can be calculated and used to determine whether or not Ireland can achieve the EU Landfill Directive targets. Without significant investment in Irelands waste management infrastructure it is unlikely that the targets will be met. Existing waste treatment facilities need to be managed as efficiently as possible. Waste streams must also be managed so waste is shared appropriately between companies and not create a monopolising waste treatment facility. The driving forces behind an efficient waste management infrastructure are government policy and legislation. An overall and efficient waste management strategy must be in place, along with disincentives for landfilling of waste such as the landfill levy. Encouragement and education of the population is the fundamental and first step to achieving the landfill directive targets.

Implementation of the I.S. EN 16001:2009 energy management standard into GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Ltd, Cork

As manufacturers face an increasingly competitive environment, they seek out opportunities to reduce production costs without negatively affecting the yield or the quality of their finished products. The challenge of maintaining high product quality while simultaneously reducing production costs can often be met through investments in energy efficient technologies and energy efficiency practices. Energy management systems can offer both technological and best practice efficiencies in order to achieve substantial savings. A strong energy management system provides a solid foundation for an organisation to reduce production costs and improve site efficiency. The I.S EN16001 energy management standard specifies the requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining and improving an energy management system and represents the latest best practice for energy management in Ireland. The objective of the energy management system is to establish a systematic approach for improving energy performance continuously. The I.S EN16001 standard specifies the requirements for continuous improvement through using energy more efficiently. The author analysed how GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Cork implemented the I.S. EN16001 energy management system model, and defined how energy saving opportunities where identified and introduced to improve efficiency performance. The author performed an extensive literature research in order to determine the current status of the pharmaceutical industry in Ireland, the processes involved in pharmaceutical manufacturing, the energy users required for pharmaceutical manufacturing and the efficiency measures that can be applied to these energy users in order to reduce energy consumption. The author then analysed how energy management standards are introduced to industry and critically analysed the driving factors for energy management performance in Ireland through case studies. Following an investigation as to how the I.S. EN16001 energy management standard is operated in GSK, a critical analysis of the performance achieved by the GSK energy management system is undertaken in order to determine if implementing the I.S EN16001 standard accelerates achieving energy savings. Since its introduction, the I.S. EN16001 model for energy management has enabled GSK to monitor, target and identify energy efficiency opportunities throughout the site. The model has put in place an energy management system that is continuously reviewed for improvement and to date has reduced GSK’s site operations cost by over 30% through technical improvements and generating energy awareness for smarter energy consumption within the GSK Cork site. Investment in I.S. EN16001 has proved to be a sound business strategy for GSK especially in today's manufacturing environment.

Computer integrated testing for the transport refrigeration systems industry.

This is a study of a state of the art implementation of a new computer integrated testing (CIT) facility within a company that designs and manufactures transport refrigeration systems. The aim was to use state of the art hardware, software and planning procedures in the design and implementation of three CIT systems. Typical CIT system components include data acquisition (DAQ) equipment, application and analysis software, communication devices, computer-based instrumentation and computer technology. It is shown that the introduction of computer technology into the area of testing can have a major effect on such issues as efficiency, flexibility, data accuracy, test quality, data integrity and much more. Findings reaffirm how the overall area of computer integration continues to benefit any organisation, but with more recent advances in computer technology, communication methods and software capabilities, less expensive more sophisticated test solutions are now possible. This allows more organisations to benefit from the many advantages associated with CIT. Examples of computer integration test set-ups and the benefits associated with computer integration have been discussed.

Design of a bifurcated stent graft, with its accompanying delivery system.

Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms (AAA) haemorhaging is a life-threatening disease. An aneurysm is a permanent swelling of an artery due to a weakness in its wall. Current surgical repair involves opening the chest or abdomen, gaining temporary vascular control of the aorta and suturing a prosthetic graft to the healthy aorta within the aneurysm itself The outcome of this surgical approach is not perfect, and the quality of life after this repair is impaired by postoperative pain, sexual dysfunction, and a lengthy hospital stay resulting in high health costs. All these negative effects are related to the large incision and extensive tissue dissection. Endovascular grafting is an alternative to the standard surgical method. This treatment is a less invasive method of treating aortic aneurysms. It involves a surgical exposure of the common femoral arteries where the stent graft can be inserted through by an over-the-wire technique. All manipulations are controlled from a remote place by the use of a catheter and this technique avoids the need to directly expose the diseased artery through a large incision or an extensive dissection. The proposed design method outlined in this project is to develop the endovascular approach. The main aim is to design an unitary bifurcated stent graft (1 e- bifurcated graft as a single component) to treat these Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms. This includes the delivery system and deployment mechanism necessary to first accurately position the stent graft across the aneurysm sac and also across the iliac bifurcation, and secondly fix the stent graft in position by using expandable metal stents. Thus, excluding the aneurysm from the circulation and therefore preventing rupture. Miniaturisation is a critical aspect of this design, as the smaller the crimped stent graft the easier to guide through the vascular system to the desired location. Biocompatibility is an important aspect. The preferred materials for this prosthesis are to use Shape Memory Alloys for the stent and a multifilament fabric for the graft. A taper design is applied for the geometry as this gives a favourable flow characteristic and reduced wave reflections. Adequate testing of the stent graft to prove its durability and the ease of the method of deployment is a prerequisite. A bench test facility has being designed and build to replicate the cardiovascular system and the disease in question aortic aneurysms at the iliac bifurcation. The testing here shows the feasibility of the proposed delivery system and the durability of the stent graft across the aneurysm sac. Finally, these endovascular treatments offer the economic advantage of short hospital stays or even treatment as an outpatient, as well as elimination of the need for postoperative intensive care The risk of developing an aneurysm increases with age, that is one of the mam reasons to look for less invasive ways of treating aneurysms. Consequently, there is enormous pressure to develop and use these devices rapidly.

Envelhecimento das aguardentes

1 - Colour, by itself, does not constitute a solid ground for judging of the age of a brandy because the more or less pronounced colour it acquires through aging can also be obtained by the addition of oack essence to newly distilled brandy. 2 - Urder the same conditions, colour intensity of a brandy wiU depend upon the nature of the wood and the condition of the storage. 3 - In accordance with the experimental results obtained by the present writers it rests no doubt that fermentation facility ferment resistence, produce and quality of the brendy all are factors depending upon the variety of the sugar cane. In addition, the authors presume that the variety of sugar cane has also influence upon the alteration of composition of the brandy submitted to aging. 4 - All aging phenomena of the brandy are accompanied by volume decreasing, what happens in a slow and continuous manner depending upon storage and environment conditions 5 - During brandy aging the alcoholic degree is greatly af- fected by evaporation, increasing or decreasing in accordance to the hygrometric state of the air and the teriperature in the place where the tuns are stored. 6 - The specific weight of the brandy is inversely proportio- nal to its alcoholic degree, but directly proportional to the extracts since the latter indicates the amount of dissolved residues. 7 - Brandy which shows high specific weight together with high alcoholic degree cannot be considered as aged. It may, however, be takens for brandy artificially coloved in order to conceal its actual age. 8 - The amount of extracts increases with aging, since it is the result of the solvent action of the brandy upon the soluble extractive substances of the wood. Notwithstanding that the extract, considered alone, has no value in determining the age of a brandy, since nothing easier is ohan to nake it change artificially. 9 -During aging the brandy get acidity in physiological as well as in physical way, but never by the action of microorganisms. 10 - The estturs produced during aging by the action of acids upon alcohols are the mean factors of the savour (bouquet) of a brandy and therefore every thing shall be done tor fhr estherification of a preserved brandy being not limited. 11 - Aeration increases esther formation, reduces the aging- time and turn better the taste qualities of the brandy. 12 - Due to the great proportion of high alcohols ordinarily found in the brandy, their analytical discrimination will be greatly important. 13 - The high alcohols are not responsable for the disastrous consequences of the alcoholism, but the high percentage of uthyl alcohol present in the brandy. 14 - The aldehydes appear always in high rate in the brazilian brandys in consequence of some intermediary products of the oxydation of the alcohols being left in the brandys during aging. 15 - The age has little or no influence on the quantity of phurphurol present in a brandy whose amount varies greatly the manner in which the wines to be distilled are treated. Wines centrifugalized or filtered before distillation always give rise to brandys poorer in phurphurol as compared with those distilled without these treatments. 16 - Though greatly variable, brandys of good qualities generally show a high residues coefficient, never under 200 mmg 17 - Lusson - Rocques oxydation coefficient cannot be indis- criminately applied to any brandy class, being, on the contrary, specifically destined to cognacs.

Anreize für FM-gerechtes Nutzerverhalten

Der Inhalt dieser Arbeit zeigt und gibt Beispiele, ob und wie sich das Verhalten von Personen beeinflussen lässt. So sollen Kosten und Aufwendugungen, die im Bereich des Facility Management entstehen, optimiert und minimiert werden. Es wird auf das Thema "Verhalten" eingegangen und wie sich dieses im Allgemeinen beeinflussen lässt. Dies wird auf das Facility Management übertragen und somit Anreize geschaffen, wie man Menschen dazu motiviert, ihr Verhalten zu überdenken.

A Grid Supercomputing Enviroment for High Demand Computational Applications

Despite the huge increase in processor and interprocessor network performace, many computational problems remain unsolved due to lack of some critical resources such as floating point sustained performance, memory bandwidth, etc... Examples of these problems are found in areas of climate research, biology, astrophysics, high energy physics (montecarlo simulations) and artificial intelligence, among others. For some of these problems, computing resources of a single supercomputing facility can be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude apart from the resources needed to solve some them. Supercomputer centers have to face an increasing demand on processing performance, with the direct consequence of an increasing number of processors and systems, resulting in a more difficult administration of HPC resources and the need for more physical space, higher electrical power consumption and improved air conditioning, among other problems. Some of the previous problems can´t be easily solved, so grid computing, intended as a technology enabling the addition and consolidation of computing power, can help in solving large scale supercomputing problems. In this document, we describe how 2 supercomputing facilities in Spain joined their resources to solve a problem of this kind. The objectives of this experience were, among others, to demonstrate that such a cooperation can enable the solution of bigger dimension problems and to measure the efficiency that could be achieved. In this document we show some preliminary results of this experience and to what extend these objectives were achieved.

Distribution center consolidation games

We study the location-inventory model as introduced by Teo et al. (2001) to analyze the impact of consolidation of distribution centers on facility and inventory costs. We extend their result on profitability of consolidation. We associate a cooperative game with each location-inventory situation and prove that this game has a non-empty core for identical and independent demand processes. This illustrates that consolidation does not only lower joint costs (which was shown by Teo et al. (2001)), but it allows for a stable division of the minimal costs as well.

Un estudi sobre l'emmagatzematge col·laboratiu dels recursos bibliotecaris

L'emmagatzematge cooperatiu consisteix bàsicament en compartir l'espai dins d'un servei, mentre que l'emmagatzematge col·laboratiu ("collaborative storage") implica una aproximació compartida a la col·lecció en termes de creixement, forma, gestió i accés. L'emmagatzematge col·laboratiu proporciona un ús més eficient dels recursos. Aquest estudi és una investigació sobre les opcions físiques, més que sobre l'emmagatzematge digital. Tanmateix, l'estudi reflexiona sobre la relació prospectiva que s'estableix entre aquests dos factors. La tensió entre ells és una qüestió emergent, la qual encara no ha trobat un lloc en el context de la política bibliotecària des d’una perspectiva local, regional o nacional.

The Rise and Fall of the ABS Market

The nancial crisis has raised some concern about the quality of information available on some traded assets on the securities markets to market participants and regulators. Asset-backed securitization in general got partial blame for the paucity of liquidity on bank balance sheets and the consequent credit crunch. After the Asset-Backed Security (ABS) market fell to near inactivity in 2009, the US federal government's Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) provided backing and a boost to the issuance of asset-backed securitization. In this market condition, given the nature of ABS, it is di¢ cult for them not to be relatively illiquid, and this has resulted in unacceptable levels of market risk for most investors. Their liquidity before the crisis was driven by a market in continuous expansion, fed by Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), Conduits, and other low capitalized term-transformation vehicles. Nowadays, the industry is concerned with the ongoing ABS reforms and how these will be implemented. This article reviews the ABS market in the last decade and the possible consequences of the recent regulatory proposals. It proposes a retention policy and the institution of a new nancial body to supervise the quality of the security in an ABS pool, its liquidity, and the model risk implied by the issuer's valuation model.

Free Mobility and Taste-Homogeneity of Jurisdiction Structures

We consider a population of agents distributed on the unit interval. Agents form jurisdictions in order to provide a public facility and share its costs equally. This creates an incentive to form large entities. Individuals also incur a transportation cost depending on their location and that of the facility which makes small jurisdictions advantageous. We consider a fairly general class of distributions of agents and generalize previous versions of this model by allowing for non-linear transportation costs. We show that, in general, jurisdictions are not necessarily homogeneous. However, they are if facilities are always intraterritory and transportation costs are superadditive. Superadditivity can be weakened to strictly increasing and strictly concave when agents are uniformly distributed. Keywords: Consecutiveness, stratification, local public goods, coalition formation, country formation. JEL Classification: C71 (Cooperative Games), D71 (Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations), H73 (Interjurisdictional Differentials and Their Effects).

Desarrollo y aplicación de estrategias de control avanzado en procesos biológicos de tratamiento de efluentes contaminados

En este proyecto se ha desarrollado estrategias de control avanzadas para plantas de depuración de aguas residuales urbanas que eliminan conjuntamente materia orgánica, nitrógeno y fósforo. Las estrategias se han basado en el estudio multivariable del comportamiento del sistema, que ha producido subsidios para la utilización de lazos de control feedforward, de control predictivo y de un control de costes que automáticamente enviaba las consignas más adecuadas para los controladores de proceso. Para el desarrollo de las estrategias, se ha creado un sistema virtual de simulación (simulador) de plantas de depuradoras, basado en datos de literatura. Para el caso de una planta real, se ha desarrollado un simulador de la planta de Manresa (Catalunya). Sin embargo, el sistema de Manresa se ha utilizado exclusivamente para auxiliar los ingenieros de la planta en la tomada de decisiones de cambio de configuración para que la eliminación de fósforo se dé por la ruta biológica y no por la ruta química. La implementación de los simuladores ha permitido hacer muchas pruebas que en una planta real demandarían mucho tiempo y consumirían muchos recursos energéticos y financieros. Las estrategias de control más elaboradas han podido ahorrar hasta 150.000,00 Euros por año en relación a la operación de la planta sin el control automático. Cuanto a los estudios del modelo de la planta real, se concluyó que la eliminación biológica de fósforo puede sustituir el actual proceso químico de eliminación de fósforo, bajando los costes operacionales (costes del agente precipitante).

La natura és sàvia: procés d'incubació i cria de la gallina Nana de Flor d'Atmeller

Treball de recerca realitzat per una alumna d'ensenyament secundari i guardonat amb un Premi CIRIT per fomentar l'esperit científic del Jovent l'any 2009. L’autora del treball ha tingut la possibilitat d’estudiar de prop una comunitat de gallines d’una raça concreta: Gallina nana flor d’ametller. La seva curiositat l’ha conduït a portar a l'Escola uns ous fecundats deixant la resta de la posta amb la gallina. Així comença l’estudi que té com objectiu establir similituds i diferències entre la cria natural i l’artificial en una incubadora. Posteriorment, aquest treball s’ha completat amb la comparació d’uns exemplars concrets de pollets de la raça estudiada. S’arriba clarament al final del treball a unes conclusions molt concretes: resulta molt difícil igualar de forma artificial allò que a la natura sembla que es realitza amb tanta facilitat. Per això es conclou taxativament que 'la natura és sàvia’.