Performance measurement and indicators for water supply management: review and international cases

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Management of Wolf-Livestock Conflicts in Minnesota

In 1975, the gray wolf (Canis lupus) population in Minnesota was protected by the federal Endangered Species Act (USA). At that time, there were 500-750 wolves. By 2004, the population had grown to an estimated 3,020 wolves. Over time, conflicts between wolves and livestock increased. Wolf depredation control programs have been conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (1975-1986) and by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services program (1986 to present). In 1978, Minnesota’s wolves were reclassified from endangered to threatened which allowed authorized federal agents to lethally remove wolves that had depredated on livestock or pets. A State funded wolf compensation program was also established in 1978. Wildlife Services’ wolf damage management approach utilizes both nonlethal and lethal methods of control. Currently, wolf depredations are verified at 60-85 farms annually and 125-175 wolves are taken each year. Wolf compensation payments to livestock producers have averaged $67,111 per year during the past five years. Most livestock losses occur during spring and summer. Selective removal of depredating wolves, coupled with improvements in animal husbandry practices, has potential for reducing wolf-livestock conflicts. Minnesota’s wolf population is currently considered to be fully recovered and federal delisting is expected to occur in the near future.

JOB SATISFACTION: A QUALITY INDICATOR IN NURSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

This descriptive study addresses the job satisfaction of nurse managers and clinical nurses working at the Hematology and Hemotherapy Services of a public hospital in Sao Paulo. The study objectives were to identify the factors that caused job satisfaction among nurse managers and clinical nurses, and support the results in the development of indicators to evaluate the quality of nursing human resource management. The components of the study were: autonomy, interaction, professional status, job requirements, organizational norms and remuneration. Participants were 44 nurses. Data were collected using a Job Satisfaction Index (JSI) questionnaire. In conclusion, this study permitted the identification of the clinical nurse group, which was the most satisfied, with a JSI of 10.5; the managerial group scored 10.0. Regarding the satisfaction levels in regards to the current activity, 88.9% of the nurse managers reported feeling satisfied, as did 90.9% of clinical nurses. For both groups, autonomy was the component with the highest level of professional satisfaction.

Outsourcing Operations in Project Management Offices: The Reality of Brazilian Companies

The purpose of this study is to explore the mechanisms that influence decisions regarding outsourcing competencies in the operation of project management offices (PMOs). The exploratory research described here involves the use of a web-based survey for enterprises in Brazil. In 78 of the survey's valid cases, the PMO is operated using the organization's internal resources. A possible conclusion is that the PMO is unlikely to positively relate to the culture of external services used by the organization and to use outsourcing to operate the PMO.

Land Use, Freshwater Flows and Ecosystem Services in an Era of Global Change

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse interactions between freshwater flows, terrestrial ecosystems and human well-being. Freshwater management and policy has mainly focused on the liquid water part (surface and ground water run off) of the hydrological cycle including aquatic ecosystems. Although of great significance, this thesis shows that such a focus will not be sufficient for coping with freshwater related social-ecological vulnerability. The thesis illustrates that the terrestrial component of the hydrological cycle, reflected in vapour flows (or evapotranspiration), serves multiple functions in the human life-support system. A broader understanding of the interactions between terrestrial systems and freshwater flows is particularly important in light of present widespread land cover change in terrestrial ecosystems. The water vapour flows from continental ecosystems were quantified at a global scale in Paper I of the thesis. It was estimated that in order to sustain the majority of global terrestrial ecosystem services on which humanity depends, an annual water vapour flow of 63 000 km3/yr is needed, including 6800 km3/yr for crop production. In comparison, the annual human withdrawal of liquid water amounts to roughly 4000 km3/yr. A potential conflict between freshwater for future food production and for terrestrial ecosystem services was identified. Human redistribution of water vapour flows as a consequence of long-term land cover change was addressed at both continental (Australia) (Paper II) and global scales (Paper III). It was estimated that the annual vapour flow had decreased by 10% in Australia during the last 200 years. This is due to a decrease in woody vegetation for agricultural production. The reduction in vapour flows has caused severe problems with salinity of soils and rivers. The human-induced alteration of vapour flows was estimated at more than 15 times the volume of human-induced change in liquid water (Paper II).

Support infrastructures for multimedia services with guaranteed continuity and QoS

Advances in wireless networking and content delivery systems are enabling new challenging provisioning scenarios where a growing number of users access multimedia services, e.g., audio/video streaming, while moving among different points of attachment to the Internet, possibly with different connectivity technologies, e.g., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular 3G. That calls for novel middlewares capable of dynamically personalizing service provisioning to the characteristics of client environments, in particular to discontinuities in wireless resource availability due to handoffs. This dissertation proposes a novel middleware solution, called MUM, that performs effective and context-aware handoff management to transparently avoid service interruptions during both horizontal and vertical handoffs. To achieve the goal, MUM exploits the full visibility of wireless connections available in client localities and their handoff implementations (handoff awareness), of service quality requirements and handoff-related quality degradations (QoS awareness), and of network topology and resources available in current/future localities (location awareness). The design and implementation of the all main MUM components along with extensive on the field trials of the realized middleware architecture confirmed the validity of the proposed full context-aware handoff management approach. In particular, the reported experimental results demonstrate that MUM can effectively maintain service continuity for a wide range of different multimedia services by exploiting handoff prediction mechanisms, adaptive buffering and pre-fetching techniques, and proactive re-addressing/re-binding.

Strategies and procedures for the development of intermodal freight transport in Europe: the role of motorways of the sea services and railway terminals

Since the birth of the European Union on 1957, the development of a single market through the integration of national freight transport networks has been one of the most important points in the European Union agenda. Increasingly congested motorways, rising oil prices and concerns about environment and climate change require the optimization of transport systems and transport processes. The best solution should be the intermodal transport, in which the most efficient transport options are used for the different legs of transport. This thesis examines the problem of defining innovative strategies and procedures for the sustainable development of intermodal freight transport in Europe. In particular, the role of maritime transport and railway transport in the intermodal chain are examined in depth, as these modes are recognized to be environmentally friendly and energy efficient. Maritime transport is the only mode that has kept pace with the fast growth in road transport, but it is necessary to promote the full exploitation of it by involving short sea shipping as an integrated service in the intermodal door-to-door supply chain and by improving port accessibility. The role of Motorways of the Sea services as part of the Trans-European Transport Network is is taken into account: a picture of the European policy and a state of the art of the Italian Motorways of the Sea system are reported. Afterwards, the focus shifts from line to node problems: the role of intermodal railway terminals in the transport chain is discussed. In particular, the last mile process is taken into account, as it is crucial in order to exploit the full capacity of an intermodal terminal. The difference between the present last mile planning models of Bologna Interporto and Verona Quadrante Europa is described and discussed. Finally, a new approach to railway intermodal terminal planning and management is introduced, by describing the case of "Terminal Gate" at Verona Quadrante Europa. Some proposals to favour the integrate management of "Terminal Gate" and the allocation of its capacity are drawn up.

Architectures for Context Aware Services in Smart Environments

This thesis deals with Context Aware Services, Smart Environments, Context Management and solutions for Devices and Service Interoperability. Multi-vendor devices offer an increasing number of services and end-user applications that base their value on the ability to exploit the information originating from the surrounding environment by means of an increasing number of embedded sensors, e.g. GPS, compass, RFID readers, cameras and so on. However, usually such devices are not able to exchange information because of the lack of a shared data storage and common information exchange methods. A large number of standards and domain specific building blocks are available and are heavily used in today's products. However, the use of these solutions based on ready-to-use modules is not without problems. The integration and cooperation of different kinds of modules can be daunting because of growing complexity and dependency. In this scenarios it might be interesting to have an infrastructure that makes the coexistence of multi-vendor devices easy, while enabling low cost development and smooth access to services. This sort of technologies glue should reduce both software and hardware integration costs by removing the trouble of interoperability. The result should also lead to faster and simplified design, development and, deployment of cross-domain applications. This thesis is mainly focused on SW architectures supporting context aware service providers especially on the following subjects: - user preferences service adaptation - context management - content management - information interoperability - multivendor device interoperability - communication and connectivity interoperability Experimental activities were carried out in several domains including Cultural Heritage, indoor and personal smart spaces – all of which are considered significant test-beds in Context Aware Computing. The work evolved within european and national projects: on the europen side, I carried out my research activity within EPOCH, the FP6 Network of Excellence on “Processing Open Cultural Heritage” and within SOFIA, a project of the ARTEMIS JU on embedded systems. I worked in cooperation with several international establishments, including the University of Kent, VTT (the Technical Reserarch Center of Finland) and Eurotech. On the national side I contributed to a one-to-one research contract between ARCES and Telecom Italia. The first part of the thesis is focused on problem statement and related work and addresses interoperability issues and related architecture components. The second part is focused on specific architectures and frameworks: - MobiComp: a context management framework that I used in cultural heritage applications - CAB: a context, preference and profile based application broker which I designed within EPOCH Network of Excellence - M3: "Semantic Web based" information sharing infrastructure for smart spaces designed by Nokia within the European project SOFIA - NoTa: a service and transport independent connectivity framework - OSGi: the well known Java based service support framework The final section is dedicated to the middleware, the tools and, the SW agents developed during my Doctorate time to support context-aware services in smart environments.

Spectrum Management and Cognitive Radios

The ever increasing demand for new services from users who want high-quality broadband services while on the move, is straining the efficiency of current spectrum allocation paradigms, leading to an overall feeling of spectrum scarcity. In order to circumvent this problem, two possible solutions are being investigated: (i) implementing new technologies capable of accessing the temporarily/locally unused bands, without interfering with the licensed services, like Cognitive Radios; (ii) release some spectrum bands thanks to new services providing higher spectral efficiency, e.g., DVB-T, and allocate them to new wireless systems. These two approaches are promising, but also pose novel coexistence and interference management challenges to deal with. In particular, the deployment of devices such as Cognitive Radio, characterized by the inherent unplanned, irregular and random locations of the network nodes, require advanced mathematical techniques in order to explicitly model their spatial distribution. In such context, the system performance and optimization are strongly dependent on this spatial configuration. On the other hand, allocating some released spectrum bands to other wireless services poses severe coexistence issues with all the pre-existing services on the same or adjacent spectrum bands. In this thesis, these methodologies for better spectrum usage are investigated. In particular, using Stochastic Geometry theory, a novel mathematical framework is introduced for cognitive networks, providing a closed-form expression for coverage probability and a single-integral form for average downlink rate and Average Symbol Error Probability. Then, focusing on more regulatory aspects, interference challenges between DVB-T and LTE systems are analysed proposing a versatile methodology for their proper coexistence. Moreover, the studies performed inside the CEPT SE43 working group on the amount of spectrum potentially available to Cognitive Radios and an analysis of the Hidden Node problem are provided. Finally, a study on the extension of cognitive technologies to Hybrid Satellite Terrestrial Systems is proposed.

Strategisches TV-Management: Erlösdiversifizierung privater deutscher Free-TV-Unternehmen

Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit der Erlösdiversifizierung privater deutscher Free-TV-Unternehmen. Im Zentrum stehen dabei die Entwicklung eines Nutzwerttheo-rie-basierten Modells zur Bestimmung attraktiver Diversifikationsfelder und dessen empirische Überprüfung. Zur Modellbildung werden sowohl der market-based als auch der resource-based View des strategischen Managements berücksichtigt und methodisch integriert. Zunächst werden anhand von Fallstudien der Mediengruppe RTL Deutsch-land und der ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG der strategische Optionsraum bestehend aus 15 Diversifizierungsmärkten identifiziert und die Kernressourcen deutscher Free-TV-Unternehmen untersucht. Aufbauend auf den gewonnenen Erkenntnissen wird das soge-nannte COAT-Diversifizierungsmodell als Rahmenmodell für die Planung und Bewer-tung von Diversifizierungsstrategien entworfen (COAT = Online Content Distribution, Offline Activities und Add-On Services/ Transaction TV). Durch eine ausführliche Be-fragung von 26 hochrangigen Managern, Senderchefs und Branchenbeobachtern der deutschen TV-Industrie wird das entworfene Modell überprüft und die Attraktivität der identifizierten Diversifizierungsmärkte ermittelt. Im Zentrum des Modells und der Ex-pertenbefragung steht die Durchführung einer Nutzwertanalyse, anhand derer zum einen die Marktattraktivität der verschiedenen Diversifizierungsmärkte ermittelt wird (market-based View), und zum anderen die Bedeutung der Kernressourcen eines Free-TV-Unternehmens in den verschiedenen Diversifizierungsmärkten untersucht wird (ressour-ce-based View). Hierzu werden für beide Dimensionen entsprechende Subkriterien de-finiert und eine Nutzwertbewertung für jedes Kriterium in jedem der 15 Märkte vorge-nommen. Aus den ermittelten Teilnutzwerten können für jeden untersuchten Markt ein übergreifender marktorientierter Nutzwert NM und ein ressourcenorienterter Nutzwert NR ermittelt werden. Im Resultat lässt sich ein Nutzwert-Portfolio aufspannen, in dem die 15 Diversifizierungsmärkte entsprechend ihrer ressourcen- und marktorientierten Nutzwertkombinationen in vier Gruppen kategorisiert werden: Diversifizierungsmärkte mit 1) sehr hoher Attraktivität, 2) hoher Marktchance, 3) hoher Opportunität oder rn4) geringer Attraktivität. Abschließend werden erste Normstrategien für die einzelnen Diversifizierungskategorien abgeleitet und die Eignung des COAT-Diversifizierungs-modells für die strategische Planung analysiert.rn

Data breach - services for threat detection, analysis and response

Nel mondo della sicurezza informatica, le tecnologie si evolvono per far fronte alle minacce. Non è possibile prescindere dalla prevenzione, ma occorre accettare il fatto che nessuna barriera risulterà impenetrabile e che la rilevazione, unitamente ad una pronta risposta, rappresenta una linea estremamente critica di difesa, ma l’unica veramente attuabile per poter guadagnare più tempo possibile o per limitare i danni. Introdurremo quindi un nuovo modello operativo composto da procedure capaci di affrontare le nuove sfide che il malware costantemente offre e allo stesso tempo di sollevare i comparti IT da attività onerose e sempre più complesse, ottimizzandone il processo di comunicazione e di risposta.

Riconoscimento automatico di attività attraverso i Google Play Services: una valutazione sperimentale

Tesi sperimentale per testare la nuova libreria di Activity Recognition per Android di Google inc.

Mobile phone technologies and advanced data analysis towards the enhancement of diabetes self-management

Advances in the area of mobile and wireless communication for healthcare (m-Health) along with the improvements in information science allow the design and development of new patient-centric models for the provision of personalised healthcare services, increase of patient independence and improvement of patient's self-control and self-management capabilities. This paper comprises a brief overview of the m-Health applications towards the self-management of individuals with diabetes mellitus and the enhancement of their quality of life. Furthermore, the design and development of a mobile phone application for Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) self-management is presented. The technical evaluation of the application, which permits the management of blood glucose measurements, blood pressure measurements, insulin dosage, food/drink intake and physical activity, has shown that the use of the mobile phone technologies along with data analysis methods might improve the self-management of T1DM.

Long-term effects of watershed management on surface runoff and sediment loss in the Ethiopian Highlands

Data on rainfall, runoff and sediment loss from different land use types have been collected by the Soil Conservation Research Programme in seven small catchments (73-673 hectares) throughout the Ethiopian Highlands since the early 1980s. Monitoring was carried out on a storm-to-storm basis for extended periods of 10-20 years, and the data are analysed here to assess long-term effects of changes. Soil and water conservation technologies were introduced in the early years in the catchments in view of their capacity to reduce runoff and sediment yield. Results indicate that rainfall did not substantially change over the observation periods. Land use changes and land degradation, however, altered runoff, as shown by the data from small test plots (30 m2), which were not altered by conservation measures during the monitoring periods. Sediment delivery from the catchments may have decreased due to soil and water conservation, while runoff rates did not change significantly. Extrapolation of the results in the highlands, however, showed that expansion of cultivated and grazing land induced by population growth may have increased the overall surface runoff. Watershed management in the catchments, finally, had beneficial effects on ecosystem services by reducing soil erosion, restoring soil fertility, enhancing agricultural production, and maintaining overall runoff to the benefit of lowland areas and neighbouring countries.

Experiences in Monitoring and Assessment of Sustainable Land Management

Although sustainable land management (SLM) is widely promoted to prevent and mitigate land degradation and desertification, its monitoring and assessment (M&A) has received much less attention. This paper compiles methodological approaches which to date have been little reported in the literature. It draws lessons from these experiences and identifies common elements and future pathways as a basis for a global approach. The paper starts with local level methods where the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) framework catalogues SLM case studies. This tool has been included in the local level assessment of Land Degradation Assessment in Drylands (LADA) and in the EU-DESIRE project. Complementary site-based approaches can enhance an ecological process-based understanding of SLM variation. At national and sub-national levels, a joint WOCAT/LADA/DESIRE spatial assessment based on land use systems identifies the status and trends of degradation and SLM, including causes, drivers and impacts on ecosystem services. Expert consultation is combined with scientific evidence and enhanced where necessary with secondary data and indicator databases. At the global level, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) knowledge from the land (KM:Land) initiative uses indicators to demonstrate impacts of SLM investments. Key lessons learnt include the need for a multi-scale approach, making use of common indicators and a variety of information sources, including scientific data and local knowledge through participatory methods. Methodological consistencies allow cross-scale analyses, and findings are analysed and documented for use by decision-makers at various levels. Effective M&A of SLM [e.g. for United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)] requires a comprehensive methodological framework agreed by the major players.