Detecting outliers and asserting consistency in agriculture ground truth information by using temporal VI data from modis.

Collecting ground truth data is an important step to be accomplished before performing a supervised classification. However, its quality depends on human, financial and time ressources. It is then important to apply a validation process to assess the reliability of the acquired data. In this study, agricultural infomation was collected in the Brazilian Amazonian State of Mato Grosso in order to map crop expansion based on MODIS EVI temporal profiles. The field work was carried out through interviews for the years 2005-2006 and 2006-2007. This work presents a methodology to validate the training data quality and determine the optimal sample to be used according to the classifier employed. The technique is based on the detection of outlier pixels for each class and is carried out by computing Mahalanobis distances for each pixel. The higher the distance, the further the pixel is from the class centre. Preliminary observations through variation coefficent validate the efficiency of the technique to detect outliers. Then, various subsamples are defined by applying different thresholds to exclude outlier pixels from the classification process. The classification results prove the robustness of the Maximum Likelihood and Spectral Angle Mapper classifiers. Indeed, those classifiers were insensitive to outlier exclusion. On the contrary, the decision tree classifier showed better results when deleting 7.5% of pixels in the training data. The technique managed to detect outliers for all classes. In this study, few outliers were present in the training data, so that the classification quality was not deeply affected by the outliers.

Cross-National Analysis of the Associations between Traumatic Events and Suicidal Behavior: Findings from the WHO World Mental Health Surveys

Background: Community and clinical data have suggested there is an association between trauma exposure and suicidal behavior (i.e., suicide ideation, plans and attempts). However, few studies have assessed which traumas are uniquely predictive of: the first onset of suicidal behavior, the progression from suicide ideation to plans and attempts, or the persistence of each form of suicidal behavior over time. Moreover, few data are available on such associations in developing countries. The current study addresses each of these issues. Methodology/Principal Findings: Data on trauma exposure and subsequent first onset of suicidal behavior were collected via structured interviews conducted in the households of 102,245 (age 18+) respondents from 21 countries participating in the WHO World Mental Health Surveys. Bivariate and multivariate survival models tested the relationship between the type and number of traumatic events and subsequent suicidal behavior. A range of traumatic events are associated with suicidal behavior, with sexual and interpersonal violence consistently showing the strongest effects. There is a dose-response relationship between the number of traumatic events and suicide ideation/attempt; however, there is decay in the strength of the association with more events. Although a range of traumatic events are associated with the onset of suicide ideation, fewer events predict which people with suicide ideation progress to suicide plan and attempt, or the persistence of suicidal behavior over time. Associations generally are consistent across high-, middle-, and low-income countries. Conclusions/Significance: This study provides more detailed information than previously available on the relationship between traumatic events and suicidal behavior and indicates that this association is fairly consistent across developed and developing countries. These data reinforce the importance of psychological trauma as a major public health problem, and highlight the significance of screening for the presence and accumulation of traumatic exposures as a risk factor for suicide ideation and attempt.

The BRAzilian Seismographic Integrated Systems (BRASIS): infrastructure and data management

In geophysics and seismology, raw data need to be processed to generate useful information that can be turned into knowledge by researchers. The number of sensors that are acquiring raw data is increasing rapidly. Without good data management systems, more time can be spent in querying and preparing datasets for analyses than in acquiring raw data. Also, a lot of good quality data acquired at great effort can be lost forever if they are not correctly stored. Local and international cooperation will probably be reduced, and a lot of data will never become scientific knowledge. For this reason, the Seismological Laboratory of the Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Sao Paulo (IAG-USP) has concentrated fully on its data management system. This report describes the efforts of the IAG-USP to set up a seismology data management system to facilitate local and international cooperation.

Non-Cardiac Surgery in Developing Countries: Epidemiological Aspects and Economical Opportunities - The Case of Brazil

Background: Worldwide distribution of surgical interventions is unequal. Developed countries account for the majority of surgeries and information about non-cardiac operations in developing countries is scarce. The purpose of our study was to describe the epidemiological data of non-cardiac surgeries performed in Brazil in the last years. Methods and Findings: This is a retrospective cohort study that investigated the time window from 1995 to 2007. We collected information from DATASUS, a national public health system database. The following variables were studied: number of surgeries, in-hospital expenses, blood transfusion related costs, length of stay and case fatality rates. The results were presented as sum, average and percentage. The trend analysis was performed by linear regression model. There were 32,659,513 non-cardiac surgeries performed in Brazil in thirteen years. An increment of 20.42% was observed in the number of surgeries in this period and nowadays nearly 3 million operations are performed annually. The cost of these procedures has increased tremendously in the last years. The increment of surgical cost was almost 200%. The total expenses related to surgical hospitalizations were more than $10 billion in all these years. The yearly cost of surgical procedures to public health system was more than $1.27 billion for all surgical hospitalizations, and in average, U$445.24 per surgical procedure. The total cost of blood transfusion was near $98 million in all years and annually approximately $10 million were spent in perioperative transfusion. The surgical mortality had an increment of 31.11% in the period. Actually, in 2007, the surgical mortality in Brazil was 1.77%. All the variables had a significant increment along the studied period: r square (r(2)) = 0.447 for the number of surgeries (P = 0.012), r(2) = 0.439 for in-hospital expenses (P = 0.014) and r(2) = 0.907 for surgical mortality (P = 0.0055). Conclusion: The volume of surgical procedures has increased substantially in Brazil through the past years. The expenditure related to these procedures and its mortality has also increased as the number of operations. Better planning of public health resource and strategies of investment are needed to supply the crescent demand of surgery in Brazil.

E-contracting with price configuration for Web services and QoS

The large amount of information in electronic contracts hampers their establishment due to high complexity. An approach inspired in Software Product Line (PL) and based on feature modelling was proposed to make this process more systematic through information reuse and structuring. By assessing the feature-based approach in relation to a proposed set of requirements, it was showed that the approach does not allow the price of services and of Quality of Services (QoS) attributes to be considered in the negotiation and included in the electronic contract. Thus, this paper also presents an extension of such approach in which prices and price types associated to Web services and QoS levels are applied. An extended toolkit prototype is also presented as well as an experiment example of the proposed approach.

New perspectives on the processing and release of public information

This article discusses issues related to the organization and reception of information in the context of services and public information systems driven by technology. It stems from the assumption that in a ""technologized"" society, the distance between users and information is almost always of cognitive and socio-cultural nature, a product of our effort to design communication. In this context, we favor the approach of the information sign, seeking to answer how a documentary message turns into information, i.e. a structure recognized as socially useful. Observing the structural, cognitive and communicative aspects of the documentary message, based on Documentary Linguistics, Terminology, as well as on Textual Linguistics, the policy of knowledge management and innovation of the Government of the State of Sao Paulo is analyzed, which authorizes the use of Web 2.0, also questioning to what extent this initiative represents innovation in the environment of libraries.

The notion of structure and the information records of the documentary systems

Assuming as a starting point the acknowledge that the principles and methods used to build and manage the documentary systems are disperse and lack systematization, this study hypothesizes that the notion of structure, when assuming mutual relationships among its elements, promotes more organical systems and assures better quality and consistency in the retrieval of information concerning users` matters. Accordingly, it aims to explore the fundamentals about the records of information and documentary systems, starting from the notion of structure. In order to achieve that, it presents basic concepts and relative matters to documentary systems and information records. Next to this, it lists the theoretical subsides over the notion of structure, studied by Benveniste, Ferrater Mora, Levi-Strauss, Lopes, Penalver Simo, Saussure, apart from Ducrot, Favero and Koch. Appropriations that have already been done by Paul Otlet, Garcia Gutierrez and Moreiro Gonzalez. In Documentation come as a further topic. It concludes that the adopted notion of structure to make explicit a hypothesis of real systematization achieves more organical systems, as well as it grants pedagogical reference to the documentary tasks.

Theoretical and Experimental Study of Polarization Dependent Loss in a Optical Recirculating Loop

An experimental study of the Polarization Dependent Loss (PDL) is performed in an Optical Recirculating Loop (RCL). The RCL enables to simulate the transmission through various optical links using just one optical fiber spool, one in line amplifier, some optical filters and devices in a low cost manner. The total amount of PDL in a Recirculating loop, due to its statistical nature, is different of the simple sum of each element of the recirculating loop because of the alignment variation of the PDL elements with time, depending on the environmental conditions such as fiber stress and temperature. In this paper theoretical studies are also performed using formalism of Jones and Mueller matrices in order to represent the different optical elements in the recirculating loop. The PDL must be correctly characterized in order to evaluate properly the impact on the performance of next generation DWDM systems. Theoretical and experimental results comparison shows that a depolarization of 7% occurs in the experimental setup, probably by the optical amplifier due to the depolarized nature of the amplified spontaneous emission.

Human gait recognition using extraction and fusion of global motion features

This paper proposes a novel computer vision approach that processes video sequences of people walking and then recognises those people by their gait. Human motion carries different information that can be analysed in various ways. The skeleton carries motion information about human joints, and the silhouette carries information about boundary motion of the human body. Moreover, binary and gray-level images contain different information about human movements. This work proposes to recover these different kinds of information to interpret the global motion of the human body based on four different segmented image models, using a fusion model to improve classification. Our proposed method considers the set of the segmented frames of each individual as a distinct class and each frame as an object of this class. The methodology applies background extraction using the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), a scale reduction based on the Wavelet Transform (WT) and feature extraction by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We propose four new schemas for motion information capture: the Silhouette-Gray-Wavelet model (SGW) captures motion based on grey level variations; the Silhouette-Binary-Wavelet model (SBW) captures motion based on binary information; the Silhouette-Edge-Binary model (SEW) captures motion based on edge information and the Silhouette Skeleton Wavelet model (SSW) captures motion based on skeleton movement. The classification rates obtained separately from these four different models are then merged using a new proposed fusion technique. The results suggest excellent performance in terms of recognising people by their gait.

Performance analysis of an optical network employing waveband and traffic grooming

This paper analyses an optical network architecture composed by an arrangement of nodes equipped with multi-granular optical cross-connects (MG-OXCs) in addition to the usual optical cross-connects (OXCs). Then, selected network nodes can perform both waveband as well as traffic grooming operations and our goal is to assess the improvement on network performance brought by these additional capabilities. Specifically, the influence of the MG-OXC multi-granularity on the blocking probability is evaluated for 16 classes of service over a network based on the NSFNet topology. A mechanism of fairness in bandwidth capacity is also added to the connection admission control to manage the blocking probabilities of all kind of bandwidth requirements. Comprehensive computational simulation are carried out to compare eight distinct node architectures, showing that an adequate combination of waveband and single-wavelength ports of the MG-OXCs and OXCs allow a more efficient operation of a WDM optical network carrying multi-rate traffic.

Hybrid Algorithms for Routing and Assignment Wavelengths in Optical Networks

This paper presents a strategy for the solution of the WDM optical networks planning. Specifically, the problem of Routing and Wavelength Allocation (RWA) in order to minimize the amount of wavelengths used. In this case, the problem is known as the Min-RWA. Two meta-heuristics (Tabu Search and Simulated Annealing) are applied to take solutions of good quality and high performance. The key point is the degradation of the maximum load on the virtual links in favor of minimization of number of wavelengths used; the objective is to find a good compromise between the metrics of virtual topology (load in Gb/s) and of the physical topology (quantity of wavelengths). The simulations suggest good results when compared to some existing in the literature.

A flexible consensus scheme for multicriteria group decision making under linguistic assessments

The present paper proposes a flexible consensus scheme for group decision making, which allows one to obtain a consistent collective opinion, from information provided by each expert in terms of multigranular fuzzy estimates. It is based on a linguistic hierarchical model with multigranular sets of linguistic terms, and the choice of the most suitable set is a prerogative of each expert. From the human viewpoint, using such model is advantageous, since it permits each expert to utilize linguistic terms that reflect more adequately the level of uncertainty intrinsic to his evaluation. From the operational viewpoint, the advantage of using such model lies in the fact that it allows one to express the linguistic information in a unique domain, without losses of information, during the discussion process. The proposed consensus scheme supposes that the moderator can interfere in the discussion process in different ways. The intervention can be a request to any expert to update his opinion or can be the adjustment of the weight of each expert`s opinion. An optimal adjustment can be achieved through the execution of an optimization procedure that searches for the weights that maximize a corresponding soft consensus index. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of the presented consensus scheme, a technique for multicriteria analysis, based on fuzzy preference relation modeling, is utilized for solving a hypothetical enterprise strategy planning problem, generated with the use of the Balanced Scorecard methodology. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Collaborative e-learning and Learning Objects

The Learning Object (OA) is any digital resource that can be reused to support learning with specific functions and objectives. The OA specifications are commonly offered in SCORM model without considering activities in groups. This deficiency was overcome by the solution presented in this paper. This work specified OA for e-learning activities in groups based on SCORM model. This solution allows the creation of dynamic objects which include content and software resources for the collaborative learning processes. That results in a generalization of the OA definition, and in a contribution with e-learning specifications.

Evaluation of Adaptive Genetic Algorithm to Environmental Modeling of Peponapis and Cucurbita

This paper presents a free software tool that supports the next-generation Mobile Communications, through the automatic generation of models of components and electronic devices based on neural networks. This tool enables the creation, training, validation and simulation of the model directly from measurements made on devices of interest, using an interface totally oriented to non-experts in neural models. The resulting model can be exported automatically to a traditional circuit simulator to test different scenarios.

Title Model for Computer Networks Optimization

The TCP/IP architecture was consolidated as a standard to the distributed systems. However, there are several researches and discussions about alternatives to the evolution of this architecture and, in this study area, this work presents the Title Model to contribute with the application needs support by the cross layer ontology use and the horizontal addressing, in a next generation Internet. For a practical viewpoint, is showed the network cost reduction for the distributed programming example, in networks with layer 2 connectivity. To prove the title model enhancement, it is presented the network analysis performed for the message passing interface, sending a vector of integers and returning its sum. By this analysis, it is confirmed that the current proposal allows, in this environment, a reduction of 15,23% over the total network traffic, in bytes.