Behavioural and morphological observations of the Collared Crescentchest (Melanopareia torquata) in a Cerrado area of south-eastern Brazil

The Collared Crescentchest (Melanopareia torquata) is endemic to the Cerrado Biome, and distributed mainly in Brazil, but extending to Bolivia and Paraguay. Although considered of least concern globally, it is threatened in the state of Sao Paulo in south-eastern Brazil. In this study we examined the morphology and some aspects of behaviour of the Collared Crescentchest. Birds were captured with mist-nets using playback in September-December 2006 and October-November 2007. For each captured bird, we took a range of morphological measurements, looked for brood-patches and moult, and took a blood sample for genetic determination of sex. Of the 35 individuals captured, only five were female, probably as a result of behavioural differences between sexes, with males apparently responding more readily to the playback. Furthermore, birds with white dorsal patches exhibited more aggression or risk taking behaviour than birds without patches. However, there was no sexual dimorphism in any of the morphological or colour traits measured ( although the female sample was small). Brood-patches were present mainly in October and November, but we did not detect any cloacal protuberance. Among the four species that comprise the family Melanopareiidae, this is the first record of brood-patches in males.

A novel approach for distributed application scheduling based on prediction of communication events

The evolution of commodity computing lead to the possibility of efficient usage of interconnected machines to solve computationally-intensive tasks, which were previously solvable only by using expensive supercomputers. This, however, required new methods for process scheduling and distribution, considering the network latency, communication cost, heterogeneous environments and distributed computing constraints. An efficient distribution of processes over such environments requires an adequate scheduling strategy, as the cost of inefficient process allocation is unacceptably high. Therefore, a knowledge and prediction of application behavior is essential to perform effective scheduling. In this paper, we overview the evolution of scheduling approaches, focusing on distributed environments. We also evaluate the current approaches for process behavior extraction and prediction, aiming at selecting an adequate technique for online prediction of application execution. Based on this evaluation, we propose a novel model for application behavior prediction, considering chaotic properties of such behavior and the automatic detection of critical execution points. The proposed model is applied and evaluated for process scheduling in cluster and grid computing environments. The obtained results demonstrate that prediction of the process behavior is essential for efficient scheduling in large-scale and heterogeneous distributed environments, outperforming conventional scheduling policies by a factor of 10, and even more in some cases. Furthermore, the proposed approach proves to be efficient for online predictions due to its low computational cost and good precision. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Application execution management on the InteGrade opportunistic grid middleware

The InteGrade project is a multi-university effort to build a novel grid computing middleware based on the opportunistic use of resources belonging to user workstations. The InteGrade middleware currently enables the execution of sequential, bag-of-tasks, and parallel applications that follow the BSP or the MPI programming models. This article presents the lessons learned over the last five years of the InteGrade development and describes the solutions achieved concerning the support for robust application execution. The contributions cover the related fields of application scheduling, execution management, and fault tolerance. We present our solutions, describing their implementation principles and evaluation through the analysis of several experimental results. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Is the unfolding of the group discussion off-pattern? Improving coordination support in educational forums using mobile devices

A forum is a valuable tool to foster reflection in an in-depth discussion; however, it forces the course mediator to continually pay close attention in order to coordinate learners` activities. Moreover, monitoring a forum is time consuming given that it is impossible to know in advance when new messages are going to be posted. Additionally, a forum may be inactive for a long period and suddenly receive a burst of messages forcing forum mediators to frequently log on in order to know how the discussion is unfolding to intervene whenever it is necessary. Mediators also need to deal with a large amount of messages to identify off-pattern situations. This work presents a piece of action research that investigates how to improve coordination support in a forum using mobile devices for mitigating mediator`s difficulties in following the status of a forum. Based on summarized information extracted from message meta-data, mediators consult visual information summaries on PDAs and receive textual notifications in their mobile phone. This investigation revealed that mediators used the mobile-based coordination support to keep informed on what is taking place within the forum without the need to log on their desktop computer. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Patient participation : what it is and what it is not

In general, patient participation is regarded as being informed and partaking in decision making regarding one’s care and treatment. This interpretation is common in legislation throughout the Western world and corresponding documents guiding health care professionals, as well as in scientific studies. Even though this understanding of the word participation can be traced to a growing emphasis on individuals’ autonomy in society and to certain dictionary defi nitions, there are other ways of understanding participation from a semantic point of view, and no trace of patients’ descriptions of what it is to participate can be found in these definitions. Hence, the aim of this dissertation was to understand patients’ experience of the phenomenon of patient participation. An additional aim was to understand patients’ experience of non-participation and to describe the conditions for patient participation and non-participation, in order to understand the prerequisites for patient participation. The dissertation comprises four papers. The philosophical ideas of Ricoeur provided a basis for the studies: how communication can present ways to understand and explain experiences of phenomena through phenomenological hermeneutics. The first and second studies involved a group of patients living with chronic heart failure. For the fi rst study, 10 patients were interviewed, with a narrative approach, about their experience of participation and non-participation, as defi ned by the participants. For the second study, 11 visits by three patients at a nurse-led outpatient clinic were observed, and consecutive interviews were performed with the patients and the nurses, investigating what they experience as patient participation and non-participation. A triangulation of data was performed to analyse the occurrence of the phenomena in the observed visits. For paper 3 and 4, a questionnaire was developed and distributed among a diverse group of people who had recent experience of being patients. The questionnaire comprised respondent’s description of what patient participation is, using items based on findings in Study 1, along with open-ended questions for additional aspects and general issues regarding situations in which the respondent had experienced patient participation and/or non-participation. The findings show additional aspects to patient participation: patient participation is being provided with information and knowledge in order for one to comprehend one’s body, disease, and treatment and to be able to take self-care actions based on the context and one’s values. Participation was also found to include providing the information and knowledge one has about the experience of illness and symptoms and of one’s situation. Participation occurs when being listened to and being recognised as an individual and a partner in the health care team. Non-participation, on the other hand, occurs when one is regarded as a symptom, a problem to be solved. To avoid non-participation, the information provided needs to be based on the individual’s need and with recognition of the patient’s knowledge and context. In conclusion, patient participation needs to be reconsidered in health care regulations and in clinical settings: patients’ defi nitions of participation, found to be close to the dictionaries’ description of sharing, should be recognised and opportunities provided for sharing knowledge and experience in two-way-communication.

On the Use of Agents in a Bioinformatics Grid

MyGrid is an e-Science Grid project that aims to help biologists and bioinformaticians to perform workflow-based in silico experiments, and help them to automate the management of such workflows through personalisation, notification of change and publication of experiments. In this paper, we describe the architecture of myGrid and how it will be used by the scientist. We then show how myGrid can benefit from agents technologies. We have identified three key uses of agent technologies in myGrid: user agents, able to customize and personalise data, agent communication languages offering a generic and portable communication medium, and negotiation allowing multiple distributed entities to reach service level agreements.

Sociological Agents for Effective Social Action

This paper is concerned with the problem of how effective social interaction arises from individual social action and mind. The need to study the individual social mind, suggests a move towards the notion of sociological agents who can model their social environment as opposed to acting socially within it. This does not constrain such social behaviour; on the contrary, we argue that it provides the requisite information and understanding for such behaviour to be effective. We argue that effective social agents must be sociological in modelling agents and agent relationships. In this paper, we show how an existing agent framework leads naturally to the enumeration of a map of inter-agent relationships that can be modelled and exploited by sociological agents to enable more effective operation.