The use of geotechnologies for the identification of the urban flora in the city of Teresina,Brazil

Urban Ecosystems - Urban greenness is an element of vital importance for the population quality of life, and forest inventory is considered the most appropriate method for its assessment. Remote...     

Integration of the information systems in the production process: a case study

This paper evaluates the execution of an ERP – enterprise resource planning in a production process. The changes that were made to processes to make them compatible with ERP modules and adaptations that were required by the ERP implementation are presented. The presented study is different from the normal patterns of a vertical implementation, since its application is not direct. In order to use the standard modules of the ERP system, the internal processes were embellished and the data collection steps were integrated into the production process (production orders, inventory, production, daily consumption, daily output). The case study shows that the ERP implementation caused an improvement of the processes in the areas adjacent to production (purchasing, logistics, distribution, supply and sales). In conclusion, this paper presents the main advantages and disadvantages of the ERP system implementation, as well as some considerations and recommendations for the future ERP implementations.     

Die neue Rolle des Projektmanagements – mit dem richtigen Projektmanagement-Assessment zu Wettbewerbsvorteilen

Companies are facing new challenges. Project management can help to address these challenges. But this requires an extended interpretation of project management. This article presents such an extended interpretation in form of project management as a management approach. On this foundation a continuum of project management is being deducted and the new goals, tasks and methods of project management are outlined. In addition this extended interpretation of project management imposes the responsibility on management to ensure the existence of the required project management competences and the need to bring them alive in daily project business. This usually requires the establishment or further development of situational project management competences on corporate and on individual level. The execution of a project management assessment can identify which project management competences are required and to which extent they are already available in the company. But the extended interpretation of project management also imposes new requirements to the assessment model. Those requirements are being described in this article. Furthermore COACH PM, an exemplary realisation of this new type of assessment model, is being introduced to demonstrate how the application of such an assessment model can improve the company’s capability for self-reflection significantly.     

Health Status,Living Arrangements,and Service Use at 100: Findings From the Oporto Centenarian Study

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the sociodemographic characteristics, health status, and service use of centenarians living in the community and centenarians residing in an elder care facility/nursing home and examines their main differences. Participants were 140 centenarians from the population-based Oporto Centenarian Study (M_age = 101.2; SD = 1.6). Main findings revealed that the majority of the centenarians lived at home with their family members (57.9%). Increased health care needs, living alone, and family caregiving constraints were the most common reasons for entering a nursing home. Community-dwelling centenarians were cared for mostly by their children and were less dependent and in better cognitive health than those who resided in a nursing home. Differences were found in the pattern of health service use according to the centenarians’ residence, ability to pay medical expenses, and dependency level. Findings highlight the need for an accurate assessment of caregiving support systems, particularly family intergenerational duties, and of the factors constraining the access and use of health and social services. Policy makers may be guided by the insights gained from this research and work toward improvement of support options and removal of barriers to service access.     

Column generation approach for the point-feature cartographic label placement problem

This paper proposes a column generation approach for the Point-Feature Cartographic Label Placement problem (PFCLP). The column generation is based on a Lagrangean relaxation with clusters proposed for problems modeled by conflict graphs. The PFCLP can be represented by a conflict graph where vertices are positions for each label and edges are potential overlaps between labels (vertices). The conflict graph is decomposed into clusters forming a block diagonal matrix with coupling constraints that is known as a restricted master problem (RMP) in a Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition context. The clusters’ sub-problems are similar to the PFCLP and are used to generate new improved columns to RMP. This approach was tested on PFCLP instances presented in the literature providing in reasonable times better solutions than all those known and determining optimal solutions for some difficult large-scale instances.     

Oral,systemic and socioeconomic factors associated with preterm birth

Background

The rates of preterm births have been increasing worldwide. Complications related to preterm births are associated with increased costs of care, and have a direct impact on the health system of the countries. Therefore, it is important to address factors associated with preterm birth in order to provide prevention strategies.

Constraints and opportunities for civic and political participation: perceptions of young people from immigrant and non-immigrant background in Portugal

Youth civic and political participation (CPP) has been a central concern of research and public policy. This situation has been motivated by growing signs of the disaffection of younger generations, at least regarding conventional forms of participation. Recent theoretical debates stress how forms of CPP are evolving; nevertheless it is obviously important to integrate young people's views in the discussion, particularly taking into account groups at risk of exclusion, such as immigrants. This paper intends to contribute to this discussion by considering the meanings that young people attribute to their civic and political experiences, using data collected with focus groups (N = 94) that address the factors that facilitate and/or inhibit the participation of young people from immigrant (Brazilian and Angolan) and non-immigrant (Portuguese) backgrounds. Data will be analysed according to three main dimensions: (1) participants' sources of knowledge, information and influence; (2) participants' views on civic and political engagement: relevance, resources, personal experiences, trustworthiness and efficacy; and (3) participants' perceptions of excluded groups and proposals to promote inclusion. Results show that the experiences and levels of participation of young people of Brazilian and Angolan origin are influenced by their immigrant background. In addition, they indicate a strong tendency of young people to emphasise constraints over opportunities. They feel like incomplete or in-the-making citizens, and state their claim for rights and opportunities to be heard and to be civic and politically engaged.     

Detecting dependence between marks and locations of marked point processes

Summary.  We introduce two characteristics for stationary and isotropic marked point proces- ses, E ( h ) and V ( h ), and describe their use in investigating mark–point interactions. These quantities are functions of the interpoint distance h and denote the conditional expectation and the conditional variance of a mark respectively, given that there is a further point of the process a distance h away. We present tests based on E and V for the hypothesis that the values of the marks can be modelled by a random field which is independent of the unmarked point process. We apply the methods to two data sets in forestry.     

Ensuring the Quality of Occupational Safety Risk Assessment

In work environments, the main aim of occupational safety risk assessment (OSRA) is to improve the safety level of an installation or site by either preventing accidents and injuries or minimizing their consequences. To this end, it is of paramount importance to identify all sources of hazards and assess their potential to cause problems in the respective context. If the OSRA process is inadequate and/or not applied effectively, it results in an ineffective safety prevention program and inefficient use of resources. An appropriate OSRA is an essential component of the occupational safety risk management process in industries. In this article, we performed a survey to elicit the relative importance for identified OSRA tasks to enable an in‐depth evaluation of the quality of risk assessments related to occupational safety aspects on industrial sites. The survey involved defining a questionnaire with the most important elements (tasks) for OSRA quality assessment, which was then presented to safety experts in the mining, electrical power production, transportation, and petrochemical industries. With this work, we expect to contribute to the main question of OSRA in industries: “What constitutes a good occupational safety risk assessment?” The results obtained from the questionnaire showed that experts agree with the proposed OSRA process decomposition in steps and tasks (taxonomy) and also with the importance of assigning weights to obtain knowledge about OSRA task relevance. The knowledge gained will enable us, in the near future, to build a framework to evaluate OSRA quality for industrial sites.     

Fornicatie and Hoerendom or the Long Shadow of the Portuguese: Connected Histories,Languages and Gender in the Indian Ocean and Beyond

Abstract

Processes of creolisation, some of which went by the name of ‘miscegenation’ in older colonial studies, have a much broader area of distribution than the colonial and postcolonial spaces wherein they are traditionally studied. In fact, they originate in a very large area of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and are ultimately not colonial in origin. Moreover, these processes involved social technologies that were gendered and deeply affected knowledge networks and movement of people and goods in the Indian Ocean and beyond. Processes of creolisation in the Americas can also be traced back to these ancient Indian Ocean patterns. Those processes have been somewhat overlooked by traditional nation-centred historiographies. They have, however, noticeably inflected colonial and postcolonial imaginaries through a variety of local languages, such as, for instance, from west to east: Brazilian Portuguese, Afrikaans, Netherlands Indies Dutch or Malay-Indonesian. They also find expression in various kinds of narratives, including historiographical works. Only a connected history, linked to a translinguistic approach, will be able to retrieve more fully the complexities and nuances of those ancient networks of people and knowledge transfer.