The Flanagan Quality of Life Scale: Evidence of Construct Validity

BACKGROUND: The Quality of Life Scale (QOLS), developed originally by John Flanagan in the 1970's, has been adapted for use in chronic illness groups. Evidence for reliability and validity has been published over the years for both English and translations. This paper presents further evidence of construct validity for persons with chronic conditions as well as across two languages, and gender. METHODS: A sample of 1241 chronically ill and healthy adults from American and Swedish databases was used to generate factor analyses for both the 15-item original QOLS and the 16-item chronic illness adaptation. RESULTS: Analysis of the data suggested that the QOLS has three factors in the healthy sample and across chronic conditions, two languages and gender. Factors that could be labeled (1) Relationships and Material Well-Being, (2) Health and Functioning, and (3) Personal, Social and Community Commitment were identified. CONCLUSIONS: The QOLS is a valid instrument for measuring domains of quality of life across diverse patient groups

Linguistic terrioriality under stress:European perspectives

This article revisits a well-known dichotomy (the ‘territorial’ and ‘personal’ principles) and develops a four-element classification of state approaches(from the most generous to the most menacing, from the perspective of speakers of minority languages). The article examines the implications for language policy of geographically dispersed or spatially concentrated patterns of distribution of speakers of particular languages. We begin by exploring the general literature on language policy, focusing in particular on the territorial and personal principles, the use of ‘threshold rules’ at municipal and other subnational levels, and the hybrid language regimes that are often a consequence of sociolinguistic complexity. We consider the extent to which responses to linguistic diversity across Europe may be understood by reference to these principles and categories. We explain why we have selected particular case studies (the Baltic republics, Transylvania, Switzerland, Belgium and Ireland) for further exploration. We conclude that, notwithstanding the value of the typologies we consider, real-life cases are almost invariably more complex, with states implementing policies that defy categorisation, that may change over time, and that may treat different language minorities by reference to different principles

Psilídeos do Brasil (Hemiptera, Psylloidea): surpreendente diversidade de um grupo de insetos fitófagos.

Resumo

Robustness against Power is PSPACE-complete

Power is a RISC architecture developed by IBM, Freescale, and several other companies and implemented in a series of POWER processors. The architecture features a relaxed memory model providing very weak guarantees with respect to the ordering and atomicity of memory accesses. Due to these weaknesses, some programs that are correct under sequential consistency (SC) show undesirable effects when run under Power. We call these programs not robust against the Power memory model. Formally, a program is robust if every computation under Power has the same data and control dependencies as some SC computation. Our contribution is a decision procedure for robustness of concurrent programs against the Power memory model. It is based on three ideas. First, we reformulate robustness in terms of the acyclicity of a happens-before relation. Second, we prove that among the computations with cyclic happens-before relation there is one in a certain normal form. Finally, we reduce the existence of such a normal-form computation to a language emptiness problem. Altogether, this yields a PSPACE algorithm for checking robustness against Power. We complement it by a matching lower bound to show PSPACE-completeness

First record of the Australian genus Platyobria Taylor, 1987 from Europe and P. biemani sp. nov. as a potential pest of Eucalyptus (Myrtaceae) (Hemiptera: Psylloidea)

Platyobria biemani sp. nov. (Aphalaridae, Spondyliaspidinae) is described from the island of Lesbos (Greece) based on a series of adult specimens which were collected on a long-leaved Eucalyptus species. This is a likely host as immatures of three of the nine previously known species of Platyobria Taylor, 1987 develop on young succulent terminal branchlets or leaves of eucalypts. This is the first time that Platyobria is recorded from outside Australia from where the new species probably originates. Whereas Platyobria species do not seem to affect their hosts significantly in Australia, there is a potential that in a new environment lacking specific parasitoids, P. biemani sp. nov. may become a pest of eucalypts

On the Behaviour of General-Purpose Applications on Cloud Storages

Managing data over cloud infrastructures raises novel challenges with respect to existing and well studied approaches such as ACID and long running transactions. One of the main requirements is to provide availability and partition tolerance in a scenario with replicas and distributed control. This comes at the price of a weaker consistency, usually called eventual consistency. These weak memory models have proved to be suitable in a number of scenarios, such as the analysis of large data with Map-Reduce. However, due to the widespread availability of cloud infrastructures, weak storages are used not only by specialised applications but also by general purpose applications. We provide a formal approach, based on process calculi, to reason about the behaviour of programs that rely on cloud stores. For instance, one can check that the composition of a process with a cloud store ensures `strong' properties through a wise usage of asynchronous message-passing

Reasoning algebraically about refinement on TSO architectures

The Total Store Order memory model is widely implemented by modern multicore architectures such as x86, where local buffers are used for optimisation, allowing limited forms of instruction reordering. The presence of buffers and hardware-controlled buffer flushes increases the level of non-determinism from the level specified by a program, complicating the already difficult task of concurrent programming. This paper presents a new notion of refinement for weak memory models, based on the observation that pending writes to a process' local variables may be treated as if the effect of the update has already occurred in shared memory. We develop an interval-based model with algebraic rules for various programming constructs. In this framework, several decomposition rules for our new notion of refinement are developed. We apply our approach to verify the spinlock algorithm from the literature

Psilídeos no Brasil: 8 - Mastigimas anjosi (Hemiptera, Psylloidea), nova praga da Toona ciliata no Brasil.

bitstream/item/82815/1/CT-313-Dalva-final.pd