Accessing networked services : a user interface design problem

This research investigates the general user interface problems in using networked services. Some of the problems are: users have to recall machine names and procedures to. invoke networked services; interactions with some of the services are by means of menu-based interfaces which are quite cumbersome to use; inconsistencies exist between the interfaces for different services because they were developed independently. These problems have to be removed so that users can use the services effectively. A prototype system has been developed to help users interact with networked services. This consists of software which gives the user an easy and consistent interface with the various services. The prototype is based on a graphical user interface and it includes the following appJications: Bath Information & Data Services; electronic mail; file editor. The prototype incorporates an online help facility to assist users using the system. The prototype can be divided into two parts: the user interface part that manages interactlon with the user; the communicatIon part that enables the communication with networked services to take place. The implementation is carried out using an object-oriented approach where both the user interface part and communication part are objects. The essential characteristics of object-orientation, - abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism - can all contribute to the better design and implementation of the prototype. The Smalltalk Model-View-Controller (MVC) methodology has been the framework for the construction of the prototype user interface. The purpose of the development was to study the effectiveness of users interaction to networked services. Having completed the prototype, tests users were requested to use the system to evaluate its effectiveness. The evaluation of the prototype is based on observation, i.e. observing the way users use the system and the opinion rating given by the users. Recommendations to improve further the prototype are given based on the results of the evaluation. based on the results of the evah:1ation. . .'. " "', ':::' ,n,<~;'.'

Environmental quality in residential areas : a social survey approach to improvement priorities

The research is concerned with the measurement of residents' evaluations of the environmental quality of residential areas. The research reflects the increased attention being given to residents' values in planning decisions affecting the residential environment. The work was undertaken in co-operation with a local authority which was in the process of revising its housing strategy, and in particular the priorities for improvement action. The study critically examines the existing evidence on environmental values and their relationship to the environment and points to a number of methodological and conceptual deficiencies. The research strategy developed on the basis of the research review was constrained by the need to keep any survey methods simple so that they could easily be repeated, when necessary, by the sponsoring authority. A basic perception model was assumed, and a social survey carried out to measure residents' responses to different environmental conditions. The data was only assumed to have ordinal properties, necessitating the extensive use of non-parametric statistics. Residents' expressions of satisfaction with the component elements of the environment (ranging from convenience to upkeep and privacy) were successfully related to 'objective' measures of the environment. However the survey evidence did not justify the use of the 'objective' variables as environmental standards. A method of using the social survey data directly as an aid to decision-making is discussed. Alternative models of the derivation of overall satisfaction with the environment are tested, and the values implied by the additive model compared with residents' preferences as measured directly in the survey. Residents' overall satisfactions with the residential environment were most closely related to their satisfactions with the "Appearance" and the "Reputation" of their areas. By contrast the most important directly measured preference was "Friendliness of area". The differences point to the need to define concepts used in social research clearly in operational terms, and to take care in the use of values 'measured' by different methods.

Where are UK manufacturers along the journey to Lean?

Lean manufacturing is now widely accepted amongst UK based manufacturers as a valuable aid to achieving competitiveness. The associated principles, tools and techniques have been well documented since the 1980s and there are many competent practitioners, consultants and academics promoting Lean manufacturing. Therefore, it is useful to ask how well UK manufacturers are progressing along the Lean journey? This paper therefore provides an insight into this question by presenting the results, based on indepth case studies of five representative companies, that reflect progress being made within the UK manufacturing sector.

Are democratising countries ‘rewarded’ with higher levels of foreign aid?

The paper examines how flows of foreign aid have reacted to events of democratisation in developing countries. Using a panel dataset of 136 aid-receiving countries between 1980 and 2009, aid allocation regressions reveal that Western donors in general have tended to react to visible, major democratic transitions by increasing aid to the partner country, but no significant increases can be identified in the case of countries introducing smaller democratic reforms. The increases in aid flows are not sustained over time, implying that donors do not provide long-term support to nascent democracies. Also, democratisations in Sub-Saharan Africa do not seem to have been rewarded with higher levels of aid.

How does the tobacco industry attempt to influence marketing regulations? A systematic review

BACKGROUND: The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control makes a number of recommendations aimed at restricting the marketing of tobacco products. Tobacco industry political activity has been identified as an obstacle to Parties' development and implementation of these provisions. This study systematically reviews the existing literature on tobacco industry efforts to influence marketing regulations and develops taxonomies of 1) industry strategies and tactics and 2) industry frames and arguments. METHODS: Searches were conducted between April-July 2011, and updated in March 2013. Articles were included if they made reference to tobacco industry efforts to influence marketing regulations; supported claims with verifiable evidence; were written in English; and concerned the period 1990-2013. 48 articles met the review criteria. Narrative synthesis was used to combine the evidence. RESULTS: 56% of articles focused on activity in North America, Europe or Australasia, the rest focusing on Asia (17%), South America, Africa or transnational activity. Six main political strategies and four main frames were identified. The tobacco industry frequently claims that the proposed policy will have negative unintended consequences, that there are legal barriers to regulation, and that the regulation is unnecessary because, for example, industry does not market to youth or adheres to a voluntary code. The industry primarily conveys these arguments through direct and indirect lobbying, the promotion of voluntary codes and alternative policies, and the formation of alliances with other industrial sectors. The majority of tactics and arguments were used in multiple jurisdictions. CONCLUSIONS: Tobacco industry political activity is far more diverse than suggested by existing taxonomies of corporate political activity. Tactics and arguments are repeated across jurisdictions, suggesting that the taxonomies of industry tactics and arguments developed in this paper are generalisable to multiple jurisdictions and can be used to predict industry activity.

Learning to live with Parkinson’s disease in the family unit:an interpretative phenomenological analysis of well-being

We investigated family members’ lived experience of Parkinson’s disease (PD) aiming to investigate opportunities for well-being. A lifeworld-led approach to healthcare was adopted. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to explore in-depth interviews with people living with PD and their partners. The analysis generated four themes: It’s more than just an illness revealed the existential challenge of diagnosis; Like a bird with a broken wing emphasizing the need to adapt to increasing immobility through embodied agency; Being together with PD exploring the kinship within couples and belonging experienced through support groups; and Carpe diem! illuminated the significance of time and fractured future orientation created by diagnosis. Findings were interpreted using an existential-phenomenological theory of well-being. We highlighted how partners shared the impact of PD in their own ontological challenges. Further research with different types of families and in different situations is required to identify services required to facilitate the process of learning to live with PD. Care and support for the family unit needs to provide emotional support to manage threats to identity and agency alongside problem-solving for bodily changes. Adopting a lifeworld-led healthcare approach would increase opportunities for well-being within the PD illness journey.

First impressions and perceived roles: Palestinian perceptions on foreign aid

This paper summarizes some results of a wider research on foreign aid that was conducted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2010. It seeks to describe the impressions and feelings of Palestinian aid beneficiaries as well as the roles and functions they attached to foreign aid. To capture and measure local perceptions on Western assistance a series of individual in depth interviews and few focus group interviews were conducted in the Palestinian territories. The interview transcripts were processed by content analysis. As research results show — from the perspective of aid beneficiaries — foreign aid is more related to human dignity than to any economic development. All this implies that frustration with the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict inevitably embraces the donor policies and practices too.

Are Democratizing Countries ‘Rewarded’ with Higher Levels of Foreign Aid?

The paper examines how flows of foreign aid have reacted to events of democratization in developing countries. Using a panel dataset of 136 aid receiving countries between 1980 and 2009, aid allocation regressions reveal that donors in general have tended to react to visible, major democratic transitions by increasing aid to the partner country, but no significant increases can be identified in case of countries introducing smaller democratic reforms. The increases in aid flows are not sustained over time, implying that donors do not provide long term support to nascent democracies. Also, democratizations in Sub-Saharan Africa do not seem to have been rewarded with higher levels of aid.

Foreign aid and the national interest : the cases of the United States and Japan

Developed countries give foreign assistance for many reasons, one of which is the protection of national interests. Foreign aid gives a donor country leverage in international relations and is used as a tool of foreign policy. The United States and Japan are the two largest aid donors in the world. Each of these countries exert influence over specific regions through foreign assistance. Although the national interests of each country are different, both use foreign aid to protect these interests. This thesis discusses the means by which the United States and Japan use foreign aid in foreign policy. It looks specifically at U.S. food aid to Central America and Japanese aid to Asia.

Computação em nuvem no governo: caminhos para a formação de uma agenda governamental

This work aims to understand how cloud computing contextualizes the IT government and decision agenda, in the light of the multiple streams model, considering the current status of public IT policies, the dynamics of the agenda setting for the area, the interface between the various institutions, and existing initiatives on the use of cloud computing in government. Therefore, a qualitative study was conducted through interviews with a group of policy makers and the other group consists of IT managers. As analysis technique, this work made use of content analysis and analysis of documents, with some results by word cloud. As regards the main results to overregulation to the area, usually scattered in various agencies of the federal government, which hinders the performance of the managers. Identified a lack of knowledge of standards, government programs, regulations and guidelines. Among these he highlighted a lack of understanding of the TI Maior Program, the lack of effectiveness of the National Broadband Plan in view of the respondents, as well as the influence of Internet Landmark as an element that can jam the advances in the use of computing cloud in the Brazilian government. Also noteworthy is the bureaucratization of the acquisition of goods to IT services, limited, in many cases, technological advances. Regarding the influence of the actors, it was not possible to identify the presence of a political entrepreneur, and it was noticed a lack of political force. Political flow was affected only by changes within the government. Fragmentation was a major factor for the theme of weakening the agenda formation. Information security was questioned by the respondents pointed out that the main limitation coupled with the lack of training of public servants. In terms of benefits, resource economy is highlighted, followed by improving efficiency. Finally, the discussion about cloud computing needs to advance within the public sphere, whereas the international experience is already far advanced, framing cloud computing as a responsible element for the improvement of processes, services and economy of public resources

Acolhimento prescrito x real: uma análise sobre as relações entre trabalhadores e usuários na estratégia saúde da família

User embracement has been proposed as a tool that contributes to humanize the nursing, to increase the users’ access to the services, to ensure the resolvability of claims, to organize the services and promote the strengthening of the links between them and the health professionals. In the city of Recife, this practice has been fomented by the municipal government and its implementation is guided by normative acts, with evaluation matrices and proposition of goals, based on a model created by the public administration. This study intended to analyze the relation between the prescribed user embracement and the real one and their interferences with the relations of reciprocity between workers and users in the health units of basic attention in Recife. Four units of the Family Health Strategy at the Sanitary District IV of the city of Recife – PE were taken as an investigation field. The investigation had a qualitative character, so, Interviews were performed involving professionals and users whose speeches were recorded by the voice digital mode and literally transcript. The obtained speeches were analyzed mostly through the Discourse of the Collective Subject methodological approach, being also used, but on a smaller scale, the technique of thematic analysis, in the dialogic way, with theoretical contributions and official documents related to the theme. The results pointed that in most of the health units the professionals execute the proposed protocols and consider that these have a positive influence for the working process in user embracement, however, factors such as the excessive demand, the physical structure of the units, little resolvability of the reference network, singularities of the units, among others, have appeared, hampering the accomplishment of the prescribed, creating, thus, a negative influence on the working process of the user embracement. The reciprocal relations have also suffered the influences of these factors, which made difficult, therefore, the circulation of gift. Meanwhile, other factors such as access, resolvability, sheltering attitude and responsabilization, potentiated the reciprocal exchange between professionals and users. The findings demand the prescriptive acts and the reciprocal relations of the user embracement to be directly influenced by the singularities present in each community, by the human variabilities and by factors connected to the structure and working process, so it shall be operated with caution in order to provide a real user embracement with quality

Cloud Stratus: uma plataforma de middleware para desenvolvimento de aplicações em nuvem

Cloud Computing is a paradigm that enables the access, in a simple and pervasive way, through the network, to shared and configurable computing resources. Such resources can be offered on demand to users in a pay-per-use model. With the advance of this paradigm, a single service offered by a cloud platform might not be enough to meet all the requirements of clients. Ergo, it is needed to compose services provided by different cloud platforms. However, current cloud platforms are not implemented using common standards, each one has its own APIs and development tools, which is a barrier for composing different services. In this context, the Cloud Integrator, a service-oriented middleware platform, provides an environment to facilitate the development and execution of multi-cloud applications. The applications are compositions of services, from different cloud platforms and, represented by abstract workflows. However, Cloud Integrator has some limitations, such as: (i) applications are locally executed; (ii) users cannot specify the application in terms of its inputs and outputs, and; (iii) experienced users cannot directly determine the concrete Web services that will perform the workflow. In order to deal with such limitations, this work proposes Cloud Stratus, a middleware platform that extends Cloud Integrator and offers different ways to specify an application: as an abstract workflow or a complete/partial execution flow. The platform enables the application deployment in cloud virtual machines, so that several users can access it through the Internet. It also supports the access and management of virtual machines in different cloud platforms and provides services monitoring mechanisms and assessment of QoS parameters. Cloud Stratus was validated through a case study that consists of an application that uses different services provided by different cloud platforms. Cloud Stratus was also evaluated through computing experiments that analyze the performance of its processes.

Acompanhamento do crescimento e desenvolvimento da criança: a participação das mães da área rural

The accompaniment of growth and development is the central thrust of child care in primary health care in order to contribute to the reduction of infant morbidity and mortality and promote healthy development. Despite its importance, the family health unit located in rural Parazinhocounty experiences the problem of frequent absences of children to follow-up consultations. Thus, this study aims to analyze the participation of mothers in the accompaniment of growth and development of children in the Family Health Strategy. This is an exploratory, descriptive study with a qualitative approach with the method action research, developed with mothers who are part of the monitoring of the growth and development of children in the rural area of the municipality of Parazinho/RN from May to October 2014. Data collection was performed using the focus group techniques, participant observation and individual interviews. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis of categorization. The study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee, under the opinion embodied 617,559 and CAAE 28598014.7.0000.5537. In step situation analysis, were conducted two focus groups, attended by a total of 14 mothers of different rural locations. From the speeches, one realizes that they have a satisfactory understanding of the monitoring of the growth and development of the childwas a learning moment. The nurse was mentioned as key professional that actionof accompaniment. The main reason that mothers to abandon consultations is access to health services, due to the distance from their homes to the basic unit, the shortage of public transport for the movement of users and delay between the service and the back home. As a strategy to try to tackle these problems, at the suggestion of their mothers was created Monitoring of Growth and Development Itinerant, where the FHS team moved to rural locations, performing activities related to children's health. Mothers who participated in the action approved the initiative as improving access and care of health needs, despite indicate dissatisfaction as the poor infrastructure and little privacy in consultations. Therefore, it is concluded that, despite the difficulties encountered often for lack of management support and involvement of some professionals, the monitoring of growth and development itinerant proved to be an important tool in solving the problem of access to services oriented to the health of child, in addition to functioning as a space for the realization of health education, becoming, since then, an activity inherent in family health team schedule.

Promoção da alimentação saudável na atenção primária à saúde: contribuição para construção coletiva do saber-fazer

The recognition of the food as determinant and health-disease process etching requires new explanations and interventions of the food and nutrition policy action and demand health care model based on the completeness of the actions and focused on health promotion. This study, characterized as research-action of interventionist character, sought to develop strategies to support the transverse insertion of healthy eating promotion in professionals practices a core of support for the health of the family and a family health strategy Unit in the city of Natal, capital of Rio Grande do Norte, from the analysis of perceptions and work processes of these teams. Several methodological strategies were adopted: Dialectical Hermeneutical Circle, direct observation, reflective and Thematic Meetings Workshop "Rethinking the educational practices for promoting healthy eating". For data logging, search diaries - SD were used and moments. The analysis of procedural form occurred in conjunction with research participants, in constant movement of reflection-action-reflection, based on hermeneutics-dialectic. About the results, in relation to the promotion of health, showed the following insights: health promotion and disease prevention-related harms; health promotion related to quality of life and well-being, in its various dimensions; health promotion as a responsibility of the State; health promotion related to the actions of health education; health promotion as an expression of efficaciousness and accessibility to health services. Regarding healthy nutrition, predominated the perceptions relating to nutritional aspects. With regard to food and nutritional education - FNE, it was observed a predominance of perception of FNE as information, guidance and knowledge transfer for changes of dietary practices. As regards the working process, it was observed that among the actions for health promotion, educational activities predominate, such as lectures, conversations, groups that mostly occur in fragmentary form, without joint planning teams, varying according to the professionals and the moment of work in which they are carried out. The results pointed to the need for reorganization of the work processes, in the context of intra-and intersectoral coordination and the construction of new technologies, such as: Health project of the territory – HPT, Unique Therapeutic Project- UPT, Expanded Clinic and educational practices, Shared with active teaching and learning methodologies. From the results we believe that it is necessary to "thought reform", from changes in vocational training and strengthening of the permanent education spaces, whereas the complexity that involves feeding, food and nutrition education and health promotion. The reformation of thought must be articulate and closely tied to the production of knowledge and practices that encourage intersectoral approach, the transversality, dialogue and democratic and supportive attitude, based on the collective construction of know-how. We hope that this study can contribute with reflections and initiatives that encourage building practices that promote healthy eating in primary health care, in terms of completeness of the care and the attainment of food security and nutrition.

Representações arquitetônicas na concepção projetual: um estudo com arquitetos e urbanistas do Rio Grande do Norte

The architect materializes his ideas using architectural representations that acts differently during the design process, as instrument that expresses his creatives ideas, as communication between the designer and the client, or as project documentation for its execution (DURAND, 2003). In this paper, it’s been discussed the connexion between the architectural representations and the design process, in a professional context, focusing on representation as an aid to conception. The general aim is to understand the role of architectural representations in the design process by identifying ways of appropriation of their types and resources. The investigation was developed through the theoretical and conceptual studies about the mentioned themes, and the empirical and qualitative research, with architects from the state of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, which was developed in two stages: the first one, by filling an electronic form, and the second one, by case studies through execution of design exercises. The results of indirect research showed that the majority of architects and urbanists believes that the way it use the types and representation resources may interfere in design concept. And, after the completion of the case studies, was showed that, motivated by different design conditions, most designers has used the representations differently, which is reflected in different design conceptions.