Pediculus capitis infestation according to sex and social factors in Argentina

OBJECTIVE: To determine the intensity of Pediculus capitis infestation (abundance) among Argentinean schoolchildren. Children's sex and social stratum were analyzed as modifiers of the general prevalence and degree of parasitism. METHODS: The study included 1,370 schoolchildren (692 girls, 678 boys) from 26 schools of the province of La Rioja (21 public schools, five private schools). Classic prevalence was obtained as the percentage of children with nits and/or lice. Moreover, five degrees of parasitism were classified: 0) children with no signs of pediculosis; 0+) children with evidence of past infestation; 1) children with a recent infestation and low probability of active parasitism; 2) children with a recent infestation and high probability of active parasitism; 3) children with mobile lice (active pediculosis). RESULTS: The general prevalence was 61.4% (girls: 79%; boys: 44%, p<0.001). Private schools showed lower prevalence than public schools (p=0.02), especially due to the low prevalence in boys. Fifty percent of children were classified in classes 0 and 0+, 22% in class 1; and 28% in grades 2 and 3. The proportion of children in grade 3 was higher in public schools than in private schools. There were significant sexual differences in the intensity of parasitism for grades 2 and 3, where girls' rates exceeded twice those of boys'. CONCLUSIONS: Sex and social stratum are important modifiers of P. capitis general prevalence and degree of infestation. The classification of children by intensity of infestation allowed a more precise delimitation of this condition, which is especially important for disease surveillance and application of control measures.

Nintendo Wii: uso terapêutico no controlo postural em indivíduos que sofreram um acidente vascular cerebral

Mestrado em Fisioterapia.

Distributed Model Predictive Control for Housing with Hourly Auction of Available Energy

This paper presents a distributed model predictive control (DMPC) for indoor thermal comfort that simultaneously optimizes the consumption of a limited shared energy resource. The control objective of each subsystem is to minimize the heating/cooling energy cost while maintaining the indoor temperature and used power inside bounds. In a distributed coordinated environment, the control uses multiple dynamically decoupled agents (one for each subsystem/house) aiming to achieve satisfaction of coupling constraints. According to the hourly power demand profile, each house assigns a priority level that indicates how much is willing to bid in auction for consume the limited clean resource. This procedure allows the bidding value vary hourly and consequently, the agents order to access to the clean energy also varies. Despite of power constraints, all houses have also thermal comfort constraints that must be fulfilled. The system is simulated with several houses in a distributed environment.

Cork industry wastewater characterization assessment of the biodegradability, reuse and of the relationship between BOD, COD and tannins with TOC

Cork processing involves a boiling step to make the cork softer, which consumes a high volume of water and generates a wastewater with a high organic content, rich in tannins. An assessment of the final wastewater characteristics and of the boiling water composition along the boiling process was performed. The parameters studied were pH, color, total organic carbon (TOC), chemical and biochemical oxygen demands (COD, BOD5, BOD20), total suspended solids (TSS), total phenols and tannins (TP, TT). It was observed that the water solutes extraction power is significantly reduced for higher quantities of cork processed. Valid relationships between parameters were established not only envisaging wastewater characterization but also to provide an important tool for wastewater monitoring and for process control/optimization. Boiling water biodegradability presented decreasing values with the increase of cork processed and for the final wastewater its value is always lower than 0.5, indicating that these wastewaters are very difficult to treat by biological processes. The biodegradability was associated with the increase of tannin content that can rise up to 0.7 g/L. These compounds can be used by other industries when concentrated and the clarified wastewater can be reused, which is a potential asset in this wastewater treatment.

Adam Smith on power and maritime trade

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

Controlo clássico vs. preditivo na regulação de frequência em sistemas de potência

Dissertação para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica Ramo Automação e Electrónica Industrial

Engineering real-time applications with WorldFIP: tools and analysis

WorldFIP is standardised as European Norm EN 50170 - General Purpose Field Communication System. Field communication systems (fieldbuses) started to be widely used as the communication support for distributed computer-controlled systems (DCCS), and are being used in all sorts of process control and manufacturing applications within different types of industries. There are several advantages in using fieldbuses as a replacement of for the traditional point-to-point links between sensors/actuators and computer-based control systems. Indeed they concern economical ones (cable savings) but, importantly, fieldbuses allow an increased decentralisation and distribution of the processing power over the field. Typically DCCS have real-time requirements that must be fulfilled. By this, we mean that process data must be transferred between network computing nodes within a maximum admissible time span. WorldFIP has very interesting mechanisms to schedule data transfers. It explicit distinguishes to types of traffic: periodic and aperiodic. In this paper we describe how WorldFIP handles these two types of traffic, and more importantly, we provide a comprehensive analysis for guaranteeing the real-time requirements of both types of traffic. A major contribution is made in the analysis of worst-case response time of aperiodic transfer requests.

Simulation model for driving dynamics, energy use and power supply

Dissertação para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica Ramo de Energia

RadiaLE: A framework for designing and assessing link quality estimators in wireless sensor networks

Stringent cost and energy constraints impose the use of low-cost and low-power radio transceivers in large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This fact, together with the harsh characteristics of the physical environment, requires a rigorous WSN design. Mechanisms for WSN deployment and topology control, MAC and routing, resource and mobility management, greatly depend on reliable link quality estimators (LQEs). This paper describes the RadiaLE framework, which enables the experimental assessment, design and optimization of LQEs. RadiaLE comprises (i) the hardware components of the WSN testbed and (ii) a software tool for setting-up and controlling the experiments, automating link measurements gathering through packets-statistics collection, and analyzing the collected data, allowing for LQEs evaluation. We also propose a methodology that allows (i) to properly set different types of links and different types of traffic, (ii) to collect rich link measurements, and (iii) to validate LQEs using a holistic and unified approach. To demonstrate the validity and usefulness of RadiaLE, we present two case studies: the characterization of low-power links and a comparison between six representative LQEs. We also extend the second study for evaluating the accuracy of the TOSSIM 2 channel model.

Scalable and efficient data processing in networked control systems

Network control systems (NCSs) are spatially distributed systems in which the communication between sensors, actuators and controllers occurs through a shared band-limited digital communication network. However, the use of a shared communication network, in contrast to using several dedicated independent connections, introduces new challenges which are even more acute in large scale and dense networked control systems. In this paper we investigate a recently introduced technique of gathering information from a dense sensor network to be used in networked control applications. Obtaining efficiently an approximate interpolation of the sensed data is exploited as offering a good tradeoff between accuracy in the measurement of the input signals and the delay to the actuation. These are important aspects to take into account for the quality of control. We introduce a variation to the state-of-the-art algorithms which we prove to perform relatively better because it takes into account the changes over time of the input signal within the process of obtaining an approximate interpolation.

Structural and mechanistic studies of iron containing proteins

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Bioquímica, ramo de Bioquímica-Física, pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia

Control of baker’s yeast fermentation: PID and fuzzy algorithms

A MATLAB/SIMULINK-based simulator was employed for studies concerning the control of baker’s yeast fed-batch fermentation. Four control algorithms were implemented and compared: the classical PID control, two discrete versions- modified velocity and position algorithms, and a fuzzy law. The simulation package was seen to be an efficient tool for the simulation and tests of control strategies of the nonlinear process.

Self-reported diabetes in older people: comparison of prevalences and control measures

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to analyze the prevalence of diabetes in older people and the adopted control measures.METHODS Data regarding older diabetic individuals who participated in the Health Surveys conducted in the Municipality of Sao Paulo, SP, ISA-Capital, in 2003 and 2008, which were cross-sectional studies, were analyzed. Prevalences and confidence intervals were compared between 2003 and 2008, according to sociodemographic variables. The combination of the databases was performed when the confidence intervals overlapped. The Chi-square (level of significance of 5%) and the Pearson’s Chi-square (Rao-Scott) tests were performed. The variables without overlap between the confidence intervals were not tested.RESULTS The age of the older adults was 60-69 years. The majority were women, Caucasian, with an income of between > 0.5 and 2.5 times the minimum salary and low levels of schooling. The prevalence of diabetes was 17.6% (95%CI 14.9;20.6) in 2003 and 20.1% (95%CI 17.3;23.1) in 2008, which indicates a growth over this period (p at the limit of significance). The most prevalent measure adopted by the older adults to control diabetes was hypoglycemic agents, followed by diet. Physical activity was not frequent, despite the significant differences observed between 2003 and 2008 results. The use of public health services to control diabetes was significantly higher in older individuals with lower income and lower levels of education.CONCLUSIONS Diabetes is a complex and challenging disease for patients and the health systems. Measures that encourage health promotion practices are necessary because they presented a smaller proportion than the use of hypoglycemic agents. Public health policies should be implemented, and aimed mainly at older individuals with low income and schooling levels. These changes are essential to improve the health condition of older diabetic patients.

Fractional calculus: application in modelling and control

This contribution introduces the fractional calculus (FC) fundamental mathematical aspects and discuses some of their consequences. Based on the FC concepts, the chapter reviews the main approaches for implementing fractional operators and discusses the adoption of FC in control systems. Finally are presented some applications in the areas of modeling and control, namely fractional PID, heat diffusion systems, electromagnetism, fractional electrical impedances, evolutionary algorithms, robotics, and nonlinear system control.

Optimal offering strategies for wind power producers considering uncertainty and risk

This paper provides a two-stage stochastic programming approach for the development of optimal offering strategies for wind power producers. Uncertainty is related to electricity market prices and wind power production. A hybrid intelligent approach, combining wavelet transform, particle swarm optimization and adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system, is used in this paper to generate plausible scenarios. Also, risk aversion is explicitly modeled using the conditional value-at-risk methodology. Results from a realistic case study, based on a wind farm in Portugal, are provided and analyzed. Finally, conclusions are duly drawn.