A framework for demonstrating the value of human services

Tanto profesionales como quienes tienen a su cargo diferentes servicios están de acuerdo en que la evaluación es importante. Sin embargo, los orientadores rara vez evalúan su trabajo de manera de hallar una relación causal entre los servicios que los usuarios reciben y los cambios a los que acceden. Se ha desarrollado un marco teórico para evaluar los cambios en los conocimientos, habilidades, actitudes y creencias del usuario y examinar el impacto que dichos cambios han hecho en su vida y en la sociedad en la que se desenvuelve. El marco incluye también un sistema de seguimiento de las intervenciones realizadas y de los recursos necesarios para poder implementar exitosamente estas acciones. Ha sido empleado en diversas situaciones orientadoras, establecimientos educativos y acciones de orientación vocacional, con el objeto de proporcionar evidencia de que el servicio brindado realmente produce un impacto sobre la vida del usuario.

A framework for demonstrating the value of human services

Tanto profesionales como quienes tienen a su cargo diferentes servicios están de acuerdo en que la evaluación es importante. Sin embargo, los orientadores rara vez evalúan su trabajo de manera de hallar una relación causal entre los servicios que los usuarios reciben y los cambios a los que acceden. Se ha desarrollado un marco teórico para evaluar los cambios en los conocimientos, habilidades, actitudes y creencias del usuario y examinar el impacto que dichos cambios han hecho en su vida y en la sociedad en la que se desenvuelve. El marco incluye también un sistema de seguimiento de las intervenciones realizadas y de los recursos necesarios para poder implementar exitosamente estas acciones. Ha sido empleado en diversas situaciones orientadoras, establecimientos educativos y acciones de orientación vocacional, con el objeto de proporcionar evidencia de que el servicio brindado realmente produce un impacto sobre la vida del usuario.

The observatory of intelligence and territorial development, tool for innovation in processes of territorial planning in municipalities of the province of Jujuy

El municipio es considerado como un espacio donde sus habitantes comparten no sólo el territorio sino también los problemas y los recursos existentes. La institución municipal -como gobierno local- es el ámbito en el cual se toman decisiones sobre el territorio, que implican a sus habitantes. En cuanto a los actores, estos pueden ser funcionarios, empleados y la comunidad (individual y organizada en ongs), todos aportan sus conocimientos y valores, pero tienen diferentes intereses y diferentes tiempos. Vinculada a las decisiones, encontramos que la forma en que se gestiona la información territorial, es determinante si se pretende apuntar hacia acciones con impacto positivo, y sustentables en lo ambiental y en el tiempo. Este trabajo toma tres municipios: San Salvador de Jujuy, capital de la provincia localizada en los Valles Templados; San Pedro de Jujuy, principal municipio de la región de las Yungas y Tilcara en la Quebrada de Humahuaca. El aporte de la Inteligencia Territorial, a través del observatorio OIDTe, permite analizar los modos de gestión de la información, especialmente mediante el uso de las tecnologías de la información y comunicación (pagina web municipal, equipamiento informático en las oficinas, estrategias de comunicación y vinculación con la población) y mediante la organización de las estructuras administrativas (organigrama) por las cuales circula la información municipal. Además, con la participación enriquecedora de equipos multidisciplinarios en las diferentes etapas. Se busca, a partir de un diagnóstico, generar estrategias para la introducción de innovaciones con los propios actores municipales, a partir de las situaciones y modos culturales propios de cada lugar, incorporando los marcos conceptuales de la Inteligencia Territorial. En este sentido el OIDTe al promover el entendimiento entre los actores, institucionales y la sociedad, facilita la coordinación de diferentes intereses propiciando la toma de decisiones por acuerdos. Asimismo, el método Portulano, puede orientar la introducción de innovaciones en la coordinación de la información cartográfica, para que las diferentes oficinas puedan complementar sus aportes y la comunicación hacia fuera de la institución. En la fase de diagnóstico, se aplicaron entrevistas a informantes claves, se realizó un workshop con técnicos de planta permanente y funcionarios de áreas que manejan información territorial, y de planificación. También por la importancia de la capacidad instalada de recursos humanos, se analizó el nivel de instrucción y la capacitación con que cuenta el personal de planta permanente de cada área

The observatory of intelligence and territorial development, tool for innovation in processes of territorial planning in municipalities of the province of Jujuy

El municipio es considerado como un espacio donde sus habitantes comparten no sólo el territorio sino también los problemas y los recursos existentes. La institución municipal -como gobierno local- es el ámbito en el cual se toman decisiones sobre el territorio, que implican a sus habitantes. En cuanto a los actores, estos pueden ser funcionarios, empleados y la comunidad (individual y organizada en ongs), todos aportan sus conocimientos y valores, pero tienen diferentes intereses y diferentes tiempos. Vinculada a las decisiones, encontramos que la forma en que se gestiona la información territorial, es determinante si se pretende apuntar hacia acciones con impacto positivo, y sustentables en lo ambiental y en el tiempo. Este trabajo toma tres municipios: San Salvador de Jujuy, capital de la provincia localizada en los Valles Templados; San Pedro de Jujuy, principal municipio de la región de las Yungas y Tilcara en la Quebrada de Humahuaca. El aporte de la Inteligencia Territorial, a través del observatorio OIDTe, permite analizar los modos de gestión de la información, especialmente mediante el uso de las tecnologías de la información y comunicación (pagina web municipal, equipamiento informático en las oficinas, estrategias de comunicación y vinculación con la población) y mediante la organización de las estructuras administrativas (organigrama) por las cuales circula la información municipal. Además, con la participación enriquecedora de equipos multidisciplinarios en las diferentes etapas. Se busca, a partir de un diagnóstico, generar estrategias para la introducción de innovaciones con los propios actores municipales, a partir de las situaciones y modos culturales propios de cada lugar, incorporando los marcos conceptuales de la Inteligencia Territorial. En este sentido el OIDTe al promover el entendimiento entre los actores, institucionales y la sociedad, facilita la coordinación de diferentes intereses propiciando la toma de decisiones por acuerdos. Asimismo, el método Portulano, puede orientar la introducción de innovaciones en la coordinación de la información cartográfica, para que las diferentes oficinas puedan complementar sus aportes y la comunicación hacia fuera de la institución. En la fase de diagnóstico, se aplicaron entrevistas a informantes claves, se realizó un workshop con técnicos de planta permanente y funcionarios de áreas que manejan información territorial, y de planificación. También por la importancia de la capacidad instalada de recursos humanos, se analizó el nivel de instrucción y la capacitación con que cuenta el personal de planta permanente de cada área

A framework for demonstrating the value of human services

Tanto profesionales como quienes tienen a su cargo diferentes servicios están de acuerdo en que la evaluación es importante. Sin embargo, los orientadores rara vez evalúan su trabajo de manera de hallar una relación causal entre los servicios que los usuarios reciben y los cambios a los que acceden. Se ha desarrollado un marco teórico para evaluar los cambios en los conocimientos, habilidades, actitudes y creencias del usuario y examinar el impacto que dichos cambios han hecho en su vida y en la sociedad en la que se desenvuelve. El marco incluye también un sistema de seguimiento de las intervenciones realizadas y de los recursos necesarios para poder implementar exitosamente estas acciones. Ha sido empleado en diversas situaciones orientadoras, establecimientos educativos y acciones de orientación vocacional, con el objeto de proporcionar evidencia de que el servicio brindado realmente produce un impacto sobre la vida del usuario.

An example of integration between en economic and an hydrologic model in the framework of water resource management problems

Growing scarcity, increasing demand and bad management of water resources are causing weighty competition for water and consequently managers are facing more and more pressure in an attempt to satisfy users? requirement. In many regions agriculture is one of the most important users at river basin scale since it concentrates high volumes of water consumption during relatively short periods (irrigation season), with a significant economic, social and environmental impact. The interdisciplinary characteristics of related water resources problems require, as established in the Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC, an integrated and participative approach to water management and assigns an essential role to economic analysis as a decision support tool. For this reason, a methodology is developed to analyse the economic and environmental implications of water resource management under different scenarios, with a focus on the agricultural sector. This research integrates both economic and hydrologic components in modelling, defining scenarios of water resource management with the goal of preventing critical situations, such as droughts. The model follows the Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) approach, an innovative methodology successfully used for agricultural policy analysis in the last decade and also applied in several analyses regarding water use in agriculture. This approach has, among others, the very important capability of perfectly calibrating the baseline scenario using a very limited database. However one important disadvantage is its limited capacity to simulate activities non-observed during the reference period but which could be adopted if the scenario changed. To overcome this problem the classical methodology is extended in order to simulate a more realistic farmers? response to new agricultural policies or modified water availability. In this way an economic model has been developed to reproduce the farmers? behaviour within two irrigation districts in the Tiber High Valley. This economic model is then integrated with SIMBAT, an hydrologic model developed for the Tiber basin which allows to simulate the balance between the water volumes available at the Montedoglio dam and the water volumes required by the various irrigation users.

A New Multidisciplinary Home Care Telemedicine System to Monitor Stable Chronic Human Immunodeficiency Virus-Infected Patients: A Randomized Study

BACKGROUND: Antiretroviral therapy has changed the natural history of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in developed countries, where it has become a chronic disease. This clinical scenario requires a new approach to simplify follow-up appointments and facilitate access to healthcare professionals. METHODOLOGY: We developed a new internet-based home care model covering the entire management of chronic HIV-infected patients. This was called Virtual Hospital. We report the results of a prospective randomised study performed over two years, comparing standard care received by HIV-infected patients with Virtual Hospital care. HIV-infected patients with access to a computer and broadband were randomised to be monitored either through Virtual Hospital (Arm I) or through standard care at the day hospital (Arm II). After one year of follow up, patients switched their care to the other arm. Virtual Hospital offered four main services: Virtual Consultations, Telepharmacy, Virtual Library and Virtual Community. A technical and clinical evaluation of Virtual Hospital was carried out. FINDINGS: Of the 83 randomised patients, 42 were monitored during the first year through Virtual Hospital (Arm I) and 41 through standard care (Arm II). Baseline characteristics of patients were similar in the two arms. The level of technical satisfaction with the virtual system was high: 85% of patients considered that Virtual Hospital improved their access to clinical data and they felt comfortable with the videoconference system. Neither clinical parameters [level of CD4+ T lymphocytes, proportion of patients with an undetectable level of viral load (p = 0.21) and compliance levels >90% (p = 0.58)] nor the evaluation of quality of life or psychological questionnaires changed significantly between the two types of care. CONCLUSIONS: Virtual Hospital is a feasible and safe tool for the multidisciplinary home care of chronic HIV patients. Telemedicine should be considered as an appropriate support service for the management of chronic HIV infection. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Clinical-Trials.gov: NCT01117675.

Secure access control by means of human stress detection

This paper proposes a stress detection system based on fuzzy logic and the physiological signals heart rate and galvanic skin response. The main contribution of this method relies on the creation of a stress template, collecting the behaviour of previous signals under situations with a different level of stress in each individual. The creation of this template provides an accuracy of 99.5% in stress detection, improving the results obtained by current pattern recognition techniques like GMM, k-NN, SVM or Fisher Linear Discriminant. In addition, this system can be embedded in security systems to detect critical situations in accesses as cross-border control. Furthermore, its applications can be extended to other fields as vehicle driver state-of-mind management, medicine or sport training.

Improving the capacity of software acquisition management: An Alternative methodology

The acquisition of the information system technologies using the services of an external supplier could be the the best options to reduce the implementation and maintenance cost of software solutions, and allows a company to improve the efficient use of its resources. The focus of this paper is to outline a methodology structure for the software acquisition management. The methodology proposed in this paper is the result of the study and the convergence of the weakness and strengths of some models (CMMI, SA-CMM, ISO/IEC TR 15504, COBIT, and ITIL) that include the software acquisition process.

Irrigated agriculture: Water resources management for a sustainable environment

In the last decade, research on irrigation has mainly been aimed at reducing crop water consumption. In arid and semi-arid environments, in relation to the limited water resources, the use of low quality water in agriculture has also been investigated in order to detect their effects on soil physical properties and on crop production. More recently, even the reduction of energy consumption in agriculture, as well as the effects of external factors, climate change and agricultural policies, have been major research interests. All these objectives have been considered in the papers included in this special issue. However, in the last years, approaches aimed at reducing crop water requirements have significantly changed. Remote sensing with satellites or unmanned vehicles, and vegetation spectral measurements, among others, represent in fact the newest frontier of existing technologies. Knowledge of soil hydraulic properties, often forgotten because of the difficulty of their estimation, can also be considered as a new way to reduce water consumption.

Patterns of prehistoric human mobility in Polynesia indicated by mtDNA from the Pacific rat

Human settlement of Polynesia was a major event in world prehistory. Despite the vastness of the distances covered, research suggests that prehistoric Polynesian populations maintained spheres of continuing interaction for at least some period of time in some regions. A low level of genetic variation in ancestral Polynesian populations, genetic admixture (both prehistoric and post-European contact), and severe population crashes resulting from introduction of European diseases make it difficult to trace prehistoric human mobility in the region by using only human genetic and morphological markers. We focus instead on an animal that accompanied the ancestral Polynesians on their voyages. DNA phylogenies derived from mitochondrial control-region sequences of Pacific rats (Rattus exulans) from east Polynesia are presented. A range of specific hypotheses regarding the degree of interaction within Polynesia are tested. These include the issues of multiple contacts between central east Polynesia and the geographically distinct archipelagos of New Zealand and Hawaii. Results are inconsistent with models of Pacific settlement involving substantial isolation after colonization and confirm the value of genetic studies on commensal species for elucidating the history of human settlement.

In vivo estimates of division and death rates of human T lymphocytes.

We present data on the decay, after radiotherapy, of naive and memory human T lymphocytes with stable chromosome damage. These data are analyzed in conjunction with existing data on the decay of naive and memory T lymphocytes with unstable chromosome damage and older data on unsorted lymphocytes. The analyses yield in vivo estimates for some life-history parameters of human T lymphocytes. Best estimates of proliferation rates have naive lymphocytes dividing once every 3.5 years and memory lymphocytes dividing once every 22 weeks. It appears that memory lymphocytes can revert to the naive phenotype, but only, on average, after 3.5 years in the memory class. The lymphocytes with stable chromosome damage decay very slowly, yielding surprisingly low estimates of their death rate. The estimated parameters are used in a simple mathematical model of the population dynamics of undamaged naive and memory lymphocytes. We use this model to illustrate that it is possible for the unprimed subset of a constantly stimulated clone to stay small, even when there is a large population of specific primed cells reverting to the unprimed state.

Stability and sensitivity analysis of Be-CoDiS, an epidemiological model to predict the spread of human diseases between countries. Validation with data from the 2014-16 West African Ebola Virus Disease epidemic.

Ebola virus disease is a lethal human and primate disease that requires a particular attention from the international health authorities due to important recent outbreaks in some Western African countries and isolated cases in European and North-America continents. Regarding the emergency of this situation, various decision tools, such as mathematical models, were developed to assist the authorities to focus their efforts in important factors to eradicate Ebola. In a previous work, we have proposed an original deterministic spatial-temporal model, called Be-CoDiS (Between-Countries Disease Spread), to study the evolution of human diseases within and between countries by taking into consideration the movement of people between geographical areas. This model was validated by considering numerical experiments regarding the 2014-16 West African Ebola Virus Disease epidemic. In this article, we propose to perform a stability analysis of Be-CoDiS. Our first objective is to study the equilibrium states of simplified versions of this model, limited to the cases of one an two countries, and to determine their basic reproduction ratios. Then, in order to give some recommendations for the allocation of resources used to control the disease, we perform a sensitivity analysis of those basic reproduction ratios regarding the model parameters. Finally, we validate the obtained results by considering numerical experiments based on data from the 2014-16 West African Ebola Virus Disease epidemic.

The International Human Rights Policies of New Democracies: Brazil and Chile in Comparative Perspective

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the majority of Latin American states have attempted to incorporate in some way or another human rights concern into their respective foreign policies, highlighting a history of human rights abuses and the return of democratic political rule as a trigger for galvanizing a commitment to assist in preventing such violations in other countries. Yet, while human rights have come to play a non-trivial role in the contemporary foreign policy of many Latin American states, there is great diversity in the ways and the extent to which they go about incorporating human rights concerns into their foreign policies. Explaining the diversity of human rights foreign policies of new Latin American democracies is at the heat of this project. The main research questions are the following: Why do new democracies incorporate human rights into their foreign policies? And what explains the different international human rights policies of new democracies? To answer these questions, this research compares the human rights foreign policies of Chile and Brazil for over two decades starting from their respective transitions to democracy. The study argues that states commitment to international human rights is the result of the intersection of domestic and international influences. At the international level, the search for international legitimacy and the desire for recognition and credibility affected the adoption of international human rights in both cases but with different degrees of impact. International values and pressures by themselves, while necessary, are an insufficient condition for human rights initiatives perceived to have not insubstantial political, economic or strategic costs. New democracies will be more or less likely to actively include human rights in their international policies depending on the following four domestic conditions: political leadership legitimizing the inclusion of human rights into a state's policies, civil society groups connected to international human rights advocacy networks with a capacity to influencing the foreign policy decisions of their government, and the Foreign Ministry's attitudes towards international human rights and the degree of influence it exercises over the outcome of the foreign policy process.

Development of a Cleanup Management Plan for the San Benito River in San Benito County, California

Trash and car/truck bodies in the San Benito River and along its banks continue to present a challenge as state mandated basin plans often fail to address these pollutants. To measure the extent of the problem, an assessment of trash and car/truck bodies was completed along four locations of the river. The survey results indicated a need for a Cleanup Management Plan that should include a streamlining process for the removal of car/truck bodies, as well as guidelines for river cleanups. Existing cleanup plans and internet resources were analyzed for creation of the Cleanup Management Plan for the San Benito River.