A Travel Optimization System for Academic Environments

Carpooling initiated in America in the 1970s due to the oil crisis. However, over the past years, carpooling has increased significantly across the world. Some countries have created a High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane to encourage commuters not to travel alone. In additional, carpool websites has been developed to facilitate the connection between the commuters, making it possible to create a compatible match in a faster and efficient manner. This project focuses on carpooling, especially in an academic environment since younger people are more likely to choose carpool. Initially, an intense research was made to examine carpool studies that occurred all over the world, following with a research of higher education institutes that use carpooling as a transportation mode. Most websites created carpools by targeting people from a specific country. These commuters have different origins and destinations making it more complicated to create compatible matches. The objective of this project is to develop a system helping teachers and students from an academic environment to create carpool matches. This objective makes it easier to create carpools because these students and teachers have the same destination. During the research, it was essential to explore, as many as possible, existing carpool websites that are available across the world. After this analysis, several sketches were made to develop the layout and structure of the web application that’s being implemented throughout the project. Once the layout was established, the development of the web application was initiated. This project had its ups and downs but it accomplished all the necessary requirements. This project can be accessed on the link: http://ipcacarpool.somee.com. Once the website was up and running, a web-based survey was developed to study the reasons that motivate people to consider carpooling as an alternative to driving alone. To develop this survey was used a tool called Survey Planet. This survey contained 408 respondents, which 391 are students and 17 are teachers. This study concludes that a majority of the respondents don’t carpool, however they will consider carpooling if there was a dedicated parking space. A majority of the respondents that carpool initiated less than a year ago, indicating that this mean of transportation is recent.

Academic dishonesty: understanding how undergraduate students think and act

The purpose of this investigation is to explore and understand the justifications given by students to the existence of dishonest behavior and understanding the extent to which the justifications given might influence denouncing and cheating behavior. 1277 undergraduate students of two Portuguese Public Universities were surveyed about their own cheating behavior, their propensity to denounce and the ―neutralizing attitudes‖. As predicted, ―neutralizing attitudes‖ was negatively correlated with self cheating behavior and positively correlated with reporting. The likelihood of copying is greater when the purpose is ―helping a friend‖, ―when the courses are more difficult‖, ―to get higher marks/grades‖, and because ―peers accept and tend to see copying practices as normal‖. Results support the notion that context emerges as a very important influence in the decision to cheating. The environment-peer pressure and the normalized attitudes towards academic dishonesty are the main influences on the propensity to cheating.

Book citations: influence of epidemiologic thought in the academic community

Whilst their 'death' has often been certified, books remain highly important to most professions and academic disciplines. Analyses of citations received by epidemiologic texts may complement other views on epidemiology. The objective was to assess the number of citations received by some books of epidemiology and public health, as a first step towards studying the influence of epidemiological thought and thinking in academia. For this purpose, Institute for Scientific Information/ Thomson Scientific - Web of Science/ Web of Knowledgedatabase was consulted, in May 2006. The book by Rothman & Greenland appeared to have received the highest number of citations overall (over 8,000) and per year. The books by Kleinbaum et al, and by Breslow & Day received around 5,000 citations. In terms of citations per year the book by Sackett et al ranks 3rd, and the one by Rose, 4th of those included in this preliminary study. Other books which were influential in the classrooms collected comparatively less citations. Results offer a rich picture of the academic influences and trends of epidemiologic methods and reasoning on public health, clinical medicine and the other health, life and social sciences. They may contribute to assess epidemiologists' efforts to demarcate epidemiology and to assert epistemic authority, and to analyze some historical influences of economic, social and political forces on epidemiological research.

Considerações prévias: distinctions between academic and intellectual goals for young children

Lilian Katz refere-se à crescente tendência nos Estados Unidos de introduzir objetivos de caráter “académico” nos programas destinados a crianças pequenas, em alternativa a programas centrados simplesmente no jogo espontâneo. Katz propõe uma terceira alternativa que desenvolva as competências de caráter intelectual nas crianças, de modo a estimular o desenvolvimento das suas mentes e as suas sensibilidades morais e estéticas. Katz propõe a introdução do trabalho de projeto com crianças desde os primeiros anos.

Towards an Academic Social Network for Bologna Process

The Bologna Process aimed to build a European Higher Education Area promoting student's mobility. The adoption of Bologna Declaration directives requires a self management distributed approach to deal with student's mobility, allowing frequent updates in institutions rules or legislation. This paper suggests a computational system architecture, which follows a social network design. A set of structured annotations is proposed in order to organize the user's information. For instance, when the user is a student its annotations are organized into an academic record. The academic record data is used to discover interests, namely mobility interests, among students that belongs the academic network. These ideas have been applied into a demonstrator that includes a mobility simulator to compare and show the student's academic evolution.

Academic social network in EHES

This paper presents the foundations of an Academic Social Network (ASN) focusing the Bologna Declaration and the Bologna Process (BP) mobility issues using ontological support. An ASN will permit students to share commons academic interests, preferences and mobility paths in the European Higher Education Space (EHES). The description of the conceptual support is ontology based allowing knowledge sharing and reuse. An approach is presented by merging Academic Ontology to Support the Bologna Mobility Process with Friend of a Friend ontology. The resulting ontology supports the student mobility profile in the ASN. The strategies to make available, in the network, knowledge about mobility issues, are presented including knowledge discovery and simulation approaches to cover student's mobility scenarios for BP.

Accomodating students with disabilities in academic and institucional contexts

Sunflower Conference 2009 11-12 November, Ostrava Third annual internacional conference

Accomodating students with disabilities in academic and institucional contexts

The developemnt of educational techonologies has been increasing the opportunities for students with disabilities to integrate Higher Education Institutions...

Impact of academic exposure on health status of university students

OBJECTIVE: To assess the impact of academic life on health status of university students. METHODS: Longitudinal study including 154 undergraduate students from the Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal, with at least two years of follow-up observations. Sociodemographic and behavioral characteristics were collected using questionnaires. Students' weight, height, blood pressure, serum glucose, serum lipids and serum homocysteine levels were measured. Regression analysis was performed using linear mixed-effect models, allowing for random effects at the participant level. RESULTS: A higher rate of dyslipidemia (44.0% vs. 28.6%), overweight (16.3% vs. 12.5%) and smoking (19.3% vs. 0.0%) was found among students exposed to the academic life when compared to freshmen. Physical inactivity was about 80%. Total cholesterol, high density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C), triglycerides, systolic blood pressure, and physical activity levels were significantly associated with gender (p<0.001). Academic exposure was associated with increased low density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C) levels (about 1.12 times), and marginally with total cholesterol levels (p=0.041). CONCLUSIONS: High education level does not seem to have a protective effect favoring a healthier lifestyle and being enrolled in health-related areas does not seem either to positively affect students' behaviors. Increased risk factors for non-transmissible diseases in university students raise concerns about their well-being. These results should support the implementation of health promotion and prevention programs at universities.

Carbon footprint of the academic community of Lisbon School of Health Technology, Portugal

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the average temperature of the Earth's surface has risen about 1º C in the last 100 years and will increase, depending on the scenario emissions of Greenhouse Gases. The rising temperatures could trigger environmental effects like rising sea levels, floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes. With growing concerns about different environmental issues and the need to address climate change, institutions of higher education should create knowledge and integrate sustainability into teaching programs and research programs, as well as promoting environmental issues for society. The aim of this study is to determine the carbon footprint of the academic community of Lisbon School of Health Technology (ESTeSL) in 2013, identifying possible links between the Carbon Footprint and the different socio-demographic variables.

Challenges and perspectives of academic evaluation

Academic evaluation has been an essential component of modern science since its inception, as science has moved away from personalized patronage toward its contemporary role as an essential enterprise of contemporary, democratic societies. In recent years, Brazil has experienced sustained growth in its scientific output, which is nowadays fully compatible with its status as a high middle-income country striving to become a fully developed, more equitable country in the years to come. Growth usually takes place amidst challenges and dilemmas and, in Brazil as elsewhere, academic evaluation is not exempt from such difficulties. In a large, profoundly heterogeneous country with a national evaluation system and nationwide on-line platforms disseminating information on the most disparate fields of knowledge, the main challenges refer to how to pay attention to detail without losing sight of comprehensiveness and how to handle social and regional diversity while preserving academic excellence as the fundamental benchmark.

Using the TRAILER tool for managing informal learning in academic and professional contexts: the learner perspective

Informal Learning plays an important role in everyone's life and yet we often are unaware of it. The need to keep track of the knowledge acquired through informal learning is increasing as its sources become increasingly diverse. This paper presents a study on a tool developed to help keeping track of learners' informal learning, both within academic and professional contexts, This tool, developed within the European Commission funded TRAILER project, will further integrate the improvements suggested by users during the piloting phase. The two studied contexts were similar regarding the importance and perception of Informal Learning, but differed concerning tool usage. The overall idea of managing one's informal learning was well accepted and welcomed, which validated the emerging need for a tool with this purpose.

Implementação da filosofia Lean na gestão dos serviços de saúde: o caso português

Dissertação apresentada ao Instituto Politécnico do Porto para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Gestão das Organizações, Ramo de Gestão de Empresas. Orientada por Prof. Dra. Maria Rosário Moreira e Prof. Dr. Paulo Sousa

Academic plagiarism : yielding to temptation

Scope: Everybody lies. Plagiarism is pervasive because people are used to lying to succeed. While bringing up someone else’s ideas may be an inadvertent case of cryptomnesia, or unintentional plagiarism, academic plagiarism is hardly ever that case. Building on the existing literature, the aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it contributes to the creation of a new framework for the definition of academic plagiarism within the larger scope of academic dishonesty, or academic misconduct; on the other hand, it identifies forms to recognize and discourage it. Aim: Our aim is to provide the basis for a subsequent empirical study on the phenomenon of plagiarism at LABS-ISCAL hoping to help diminish this practice that is deeply rooted in students in general.

Stress in university students and cardiovascular response to academic stressors

Introduction: University students are frequently exposed to events that can cause stress and anxiety, producing elevated cardiovascular responses. Repeated exposure to academic stress has implications to students’ success and well-being and may contribute to the development of long-term health problems. Objective: To identify stress levels and coping strategies in university students and assess the impact of stress experience in heart rate variability (HRV). Methods: 17 university students, 19-23 years, completed the University Students Stress Inventory, the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales and the Ways of Coping Questionnaire. Two 24h-Holter recordings were performed, on academic activity days, including one of them an exam situation. Results: Students tend to present moderate stress levels, and prefer problem-focused coping strategies in order to manage stress. Exam situations are perceived as significant stressors. Although we found no significant differences in HRV (SDNN), between days with and without an exam, we registered a lower SDNN score and a variation in heart rate (HR) related to exam situation (maximum HR peak at 10 minutes before the exam, and total HR recovery 20 minutes after the exam), reflecting sympathetic activation due to stress. Conclusions: These results suggest that academic events, especially those related to exam situations, are the cause of stress in university students, with implications at cardiovascular level, underlying the importance of interventions that help these students improve their coping skills and optimize stress management, in order to improve academic achievement and promote well-being and quality of life.