Social and environmental determinants, household food insecurity

Food security is defined as a situation that exists when “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life. It is a multilevel concept, which includes four main dimensions: availability related to food supply; accessibility in order to ensure the physical and economic access to food; adequacy to meet nutritional needs in quantity and quality while respecting individual food preferences and cultural issues (utilization); and, lastly, stability of the guarantee of food security over time. According to the food security definition, it is abroad concept where all these dimensions are largely affected by a considerable number of factors related to: public policies of different sectors, food production/industry/distribution food systems, marketing and advertising of food, social support networks and individual determinants related to food choice behaviour.

Between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean : the late bronze age around the Tagus estuary (Portugal) : economic, social and cultural aspects

This paper deals with the importance, quantity and diversity of Late Bronze Age sites known around the Tagus estuary. The material culture points out to the existence of cultural stimuli from very different origins: from the Iberian Peninsula inner, the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean basin, related to the social organization and the economy of the populations that inhabited this region between the XIII century BC and the IX century BC, according to the available radiocarbon data. These populations interacted with the first Phoenicians that arrived to the region at the end of this period, after episodic relations of trading with their antecedents, from Central Mediterranean region.

An AAL Collaborative System: The AAL4ALL and a Mobile Assistant Case Study

Part 20: Health and Care Networks

Towards Automated Business Process Deduction through a Social and Collaborative Platform

Part 12: Collaboration Platforms

MIGRATION PATTERNS AMONG YOUNG ADULTS IN THE UNITED STATES: ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, AND ECONOMIC EXPLANATIONS

Young adult migration is a key factor in community development. The goal of this paper is to study what kinds of places attract young adults and what kinds are losing them. Linear regression is conducted to analyze what place-specific factors explain migration patterns among young adults. These factors include economic, social, and environmental variables. This study finds that social and environmental factors are just as important as economic ones. Specifically, employment in the arts increases young adult net migration. Environmental variables, for example, natural amenities and protected federal lands are particularly important in rural settings in attracting young adults. These findings suggest that policy makers interested in attracting and retaining young adults should pay closer attention to social and environmental factors and consider creating more opportunities for arts employment in general. For rural areas, improving the attractiveness of natural amenities and better protection of federal lands is also recommended.

Urban Agriculture Oriented towards Self-Supply, Social and Commercial Purpose: A Typology

Urban agriculture, a dynamic multifunctional phenomenon, affects the spatial diversification of urban land use, its valorization and its governance. Literature acknowledges its contribution to the development of sustainable cities. The dimension and extent of this contribution depends significantly on the particular form and function of urban agriculture. However, the complexity of interests and dimensions is insufficiently covered by theory. This paper proposes a typology for urban agriculture, supporting both theory building and practical decision processes. We reviewed and mapped the diversity of the types of agriculture found along three beneficial dimensions (self-supply, socio-cultural, commercial) for product distribution scale and actors. We distinguish between ideal types, subtypes and mixed types. Our intention is to include a dynamic perspective in the typology of urban agricultural land use because transition processes between types are observable due to the existence of complex motivations and influences. In a pilot study of 52 urban agriculture initiatives in Germany, we tested the validity of the typology and discussed it with stakeholders, proving novelty and relevance for profiling discussions.

An Overview of IoT and Healthcare

This paper is an overview of some of the implications of IoT on the healthcare field. Due to the increasing of IoT solutions, healthcare cannot be outside of this paradigm. The contribution of this paper is to introduce directions to achieve a global connectivity between the Internet of Things (IoT) and the medical environments. The need to integrate all in a global environment is a huge challenge to all (from electrical engineers to data engineers).This revolution is redesigning the way we see healthcare, from the smallest sensor to the big data collected.

Summary and Conclusion

This monograph outlines the process and results of development of a common educational programme at masters level in health and social care management, which was supported by the Erasmus Life Long Education project CareMan (Cul- ture and Care Management). The CareMan project brought together university partners actively involved in educating social and health care professionals in leadership and management at master’s level in Europe. The five partners of the consortium were Lahti University of Applied Sciences – Lahti UAS (administra- tive and academic coordinator, Finland), Charles University – CU (the Czech Republic), Edinburgh Napier University – ENU (Scotland), Hammeline University of Applied Sciences – HAMK (Finland), and University of Évora – UoE (Portugal). The objectives of the project were to achieve lower -level educational goals that included the development through education cultural and value -driven leadership, quality of care and quality management to effectively manage an integrated health and social care service. Through mapping the situation in the field and comparing curricula of all participating universities the overall aim was to develop a joint masters programme in social and healthcare management. After the detailed understanding of national and institutional specifics of each of the individual academic entities it was recognised that, due to a number of regulation issues, the original aim was not achievable. Following subsequent analytical work, it was decided to develop a set of three master’s level modules. At the end of the project it was intended that all created modules would be available virtually to the participating programmes and would contribute some added value to existing curricula. In the future these ready -to -use modules are intended to be taught in cooperation with the participating universities or as a separate module in each university. The chosen theoretical framework of the project that underpinned the devel- opment, management and evaluation of the inter -cultural educational provision relied on the combination of two learning theories – ‘cooperative collaborative and social learning’ and ’transformational’ (Mezirow, 2009). This theoretical framework helped to align with European collaborative policy and its application on all levels of implementation of the project.

Evaluating social and environmental impacts at Embrapa.

A strategic planning process has been implemented at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Agency (Embrapa) to introduce sustainable development objectives in all steps of agricultural Research and Development. An essential component of the institutional mission statement hence devised has called for the systematic assessment of social and environmental impacts (in addition to the traditionally studied economic ones) of all technology innovations resulting from R&D. The proposed approach emphasizes the interest of promoting close interaction between R&D teams and technology-adopting producers, under actual field contexts, in order to improve both the technology development and the demand probing processes. Given the multiplicity of technological applications ensuing from Embrapa?s very broad research encompassment, and the variety of environmental and productive contexts involved, a customized impact assessment system has been proposed. Directed at the appraisal of agricultural technology development research projects (ex-ante) as well as their ensuing innovations (ex-post), the Ambitec-Agro System comprises a set of integrated socio-environmental indicators, constructed in modules suited to Agricultural, Animal husbandry, and Agro-industrial activities, besides a specific module for Social Impact Assessment. The system has been routinely applied in technology appraisal in all of Embrapa?s Units, as a basis for their institutional performance evaluations, and toward the formulation of the annual Social Balance Report. Following the inception of this institutional technology appraisal initiative, several methodological innovations have been proposed within Embrapa, including technical improvements and applicability adaptations of the Ambitec-Agro system, and approaches to further-reaching objectives, such as the sustainable development of rural communities, and the environmental management of agricultural activities.

Populism as a battlefield Populist actors and their representation on social and legacy media during the european parliament elections 2019 in Finland, Italy and the Netherlands

The objective of the present research is to describe and explain populist actors and populism as a concept and their representation on social and legacy media during the 2019 EU elections in Finland, Italy and The Netherlands. This research tackles the topic of European populism in the context of political communication and its relation to both the legacy and digital media within the hybrid media system. Departing from the consideration that populism and populist rhetoric are challenging concepts to define, I suggest that they should be addressed and analyzed through the usage of a combination of methods and theoretical perspectives, namely Communication Studies, Corpus Linguistics, Political theory, Rhetoric and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies. This thesis considers data of different provenance. On the one hand, for the Legacy media part, newspapers articles were collected in the three countries under study from the 1st until the 31st of May 2019. Each country’s legacy system is represented by three different quality papers and the articles were collected according to a selection of keywords (European Union Elections and Populism in each of the three languages). On the other hand, the Digital media data takes into consideration Twitter tweets collected during the same timeframe based on particular country-specific hashtags and tweets by identified populist actors. In order to meet the objective of this study, three research questions are posed and the analysis leading to the results are exhaustively presented and further discussed. The results of this research provide valuable and novel insights on how populism as a theme and a concept is being portrayed in the context of the European elections both in legacy and digital media and political communication in general.

Serverless middlewares to integrate heterogeneous and distributed services in cloud continuum environments

The application of modern ICT technologies is radically changing many fields pushing toward more open and dynamic value chains fostering the cooperation and integration of many connected partners, sensors, and devices. As a valuable example, the emerging Smart Tourism field derived from the application of ICT to Tourism so to create richer and more integrated experiences, making them more accessible and sustainable. From a technological viewpoint, a recurring challenge in these decentralized environments is the integration of heterogeneous services and data spanning multiple administrative domains, each possibly applying different security/privacy policies, device and process control mechanisms, service access, and provisioning schemes, etc. The distribution and heterogeneity of those sources exacerbate the complexity in the development of integrating solutions with consequent high effort and costs for partners seeking them. Taking a step towards addressing these issues, we propose APERTO, a decentralized and distributed architecture that aims at facilitating the blending of data and services. At its core, APERTO relies on APERTO FaaS, a Serverless platform allowing fast prototyping of the business logic, lowering the barrier of entry and development costs to newcomers, (zero) fine-grained scaling of resources servicing end-users, and reduced management overhead. APERTO FaaS infrastructure is based on asynchronous and transparent communications between the components of the architecture, allowing the development of optimized solutions that exploit the peculiarities of distributed and heterogeneous environments. In particular, APERTO addresses the provisioning of scalable and cost-efficient mechanisms targeting: i) function composition allowing the definition of complex workloads from simple, ready-to-use functions, enabling smarter management of complex tasks and improved multiplexing capabilities; ii) the creation of end-to-end differentiated QoS slices minimizing interfaces among application/service running on a shared infrastructure; i) an abstraction providing uniform and optimized access to heterogeneous data sources, iv) a decentralized approach for the verification of access rights to resources.

Uma reforma gerencial da administra????o p??blica no Brasil

O texto aborda as principais caracter??sticas da reforma administrativa em andamento no Brasil. A proposta ?? de mudan??a da administra????o p??blica burocr??tica e clientelista para uma administra????o p??blica gerencial, baseada no enfoque da ???nova administra????o p??blica???. A reforma brasileira distingue as atividades exclusivas do Estado, detentoras do poder de Estado, dos servi??os sociais e cient??ficos e das empresas estatais. O primeiro setor permanecer?? dentro do aparato estatal e as empresas estatais est??o sendo privatizadas. Com rela????o aos servi??os sociais e cient??ficos, que recebem um suporte substancial do Estado, a proposta ?? de transform??-los em organiza????es sociais n??o lucrativas, seguindo as linhas dos ???quangos??? (quasi non governamental organizations) ingleses.

Assessment of primary health care: health professionals’ perspective

Objective To assess primary health care attributes of access to a first contact, comprehensiveness, coordination, continuity, family guidance and community orientation. Method An evaluative, quantitative and cross-sectional study with 35 professional teams in the Family Health Program of the Alfenas region, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Data collection was done with the Primary Care Assessment Tool - Brazil, professional version. Results Results revealed a low percentage of medical experts among the participants who evaluated the attributes with high scores, with the exception of access to a first contact. Data analysis revealed needs for improvement: hours of service; forms of communication between clients and healthcare services and between clients and professionals; the mechanism of counter-referral. Conclusion It was concluded that there is a mismatch between the provision of services and the needs of the population, which compromises the quality of primary health care.