Road to sustainability in the short-let industry: the guest ready case: how can the short-let industry become more sustainable? Specifically, what is the environmental (CO2) and financial impact of replacing small plastic amenities, cleaning products and conventional energy with greener alternatives?

Small hospitality companies’ transition to sustainability has been little studied. This qualitative and quantitative analysis of a short-let start-up explores the question: How can the short-let industry become more sustainable? What is the environmental (CO2) and financial impact of replacing small plastic amenities, cleaning products and conventional energy with greener alternatives? It concludes that if it overcomes barriers typical of smaller companies’ focus on profitability and finds a business model that monetises the impact of embarking on the sustainability trend, cost reductions due to adopting environment-friendly products can lead to an enhanced financial performance and to clear environmental benefits

Modelling biodiversity trends in the montado (wood pasture) landscapes of the Alentejo, Portugal

Abstract Context Montados are dynamic agroforestry systems of southern Portugal, with high economic and ecological values. Changes in land use and cover have important implications for landscape-level biodiversity and its conservation. Objectives Our objectives were to evaluate the biodiversity values and trends in a montado system in the Alentejo, Portugal so as to inform landscape level conservation approaches. In doing so, we aimed to develop a replicable and robust approach drawing together field observation, expert opinion, and remote sensing to produce predictions relevant to land management planning. Methods Field sampling and subsequent analysis of data on the birds, butterflies and plants in eight distinct land covers allowed the identification of two principal habitat groupings of importance: ‘montado mosaic’ and ‘shrubland’. Morphological spatial pattern analysis was performed on Landsat-derived GIS habitat layers for 1984 and 2009, generating maps and statistics for change in the different landscape functional classes. In addition, we demonstrated how the modelling of ecotones between open and closed biomes can identify the preferred hunting grounds of the threatened Iberian lynx and black vulture, flagship species whose conservation provides benefits to the area’s wider biodiversity values. Results Total and core area of montado mosaics and shrubland increased over the 25 year period, whilst the amount of habitat connectivity declined in the case of shrubland. Considerable local variation in these trends highlighted targetable areas for conservation action (e.g. through agri-environment spending). Conclusions A rapid and robust approach was demonstrated, with potentially wider utility for biodiversity assessment and planning

Forum participation plugin for Moodle: development and discussion

At present, a large amount of software has been created to analyze social networks, such as libraries to access online social networking APIs, software to draw graphs and tools to use and analyze networks. In fact, and because of the use of Moodle as standard Learning Management System at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in 2009 was born the idea of creating a plugin for Moodle capable of analyzing forums in which students participate and of identifying the major players within the student network. This work is about the present state of such plugin, which provides useful information to teachers so that, through the use of social network analysis, allows them to make decisions to improve and promote participatory education. Here, we show the application of the plugin to three case studies, in two different universities, which allowed to evaluate its usefulness and to compare the information according to the variables that influenced each case study

Peripheral Artery Disease Patients May Benefit More from Aggressive Secondary Prevention than Aneurysm Patients to Improve Survival

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Although it has become clear that aneurysmal and occlusive arterial disease represent two distinct etiologic entities, it is still unknown whether the two vascular pathologies are prognostically different. We aim to assess the long-term vital prognosis of patients with abdominal aortic aneurysmal disease (AAA) or peripheral artery disease (PAD), focusing on possible differences in survival, prognostic risk profiles and causes of death. METHODS: Patients undergoing elective surgery for isolated AAA or PAD between 2003 and 2011 were retrospectively included. Differences in postoperative survival were determined using Kaplan-Meier and Cox regression analysis. Prognostic risk profiles were also established with Cox regression analysis. RESULTS: 429 and 338 patients were included in the AAA and PAD groups, respectively. AAA patients were older (71.7 vs. 63.3 years, p < 0.001), yet overall survival following surgery did not differ (HR: 1.16, 95% CI: 0.87-1.54). Neither was type of vascular disease associated with postoperative cardiovascular nor cancer-related death. However, in comparison with age- and gender-matched general populations, cardiovascular mortality was higher in PAD than AAA patients (48.3% vs. 17.3%). Survival of AAA and PAD patients was negatively affected by age, history of cancer and renal insufficiency. Additional determinants in the PAD group were diabetes and ischemic heart disease. CONCLUSIONS: Long-term survival after surgery for PAD and AAA is similar. However, overall life expectancy is significantly worse among PAD patients. The contribution of cardiovascular disease towards mortality in PAD patients warrants more aggressive secondary prevention to reduce cardiovascular mortality and improve longevity

Endodontia de dentes decíduos com MTA: solução em odontopediatria

Dissertação para obtenção do grau de Mestre no Instituto Superior de Ciências da Saúde Egas MonizO Mineral Trioxide Aggregate (MTA) é um material relativamente recente, que surgiu em 1993 para tratamento de perfurações laterais em dentes definitivos. Nos últimos anos tem-se preconizado a sua utilização como material obturador e restaurador/conservador em dentes decíduos. O MTA tem sido aplicado para protecções pulpares directas, pulpotomias, apexificação e apexogénese, obturação endodôntica, reparação de reabsorções radiculares e perfurações. Os objectivos são avaliar a utilização e aplicação do MTA como material obturador/ restaurador de dentes decíduos. Comparando-o com outros materiais frequentemente utilizados, nomeadamente o hidróxido de cálcio, o MTA tem mostrado igualmente bons resultados uma vez que possui propriedades que o tornam particular, revelando-se a sua utilização vantajosa tanto em dentes decíduos como em dentes definitivos. O MTA tem-se revelado um material de difícil aplicação e sendo um material recente, bastante dispendioso e de difícil armazenamento, raramente tem sido utilizado em dentes decíduos, estando desta forma ainda pouco estudado. No entanto, graças às distintas e vantajosas propriedades, que lhe conferem uma enorme versatilidade, tem-se evidenciado como uma mais-valia, uma vez que se verifica um aumento da taxa de sucesso em casos com prognóstico reservado, devendo-se incentivar a sua utilização numa perspetiva de desenvolvimento futuro

SDRS: a new lossless dimensionality reduction for text corpora

In recent years, most content-based spam filters have been implemented using Machine Learning (ML) approaches by means of token-based representations of textual contents. After introducing multiple performance enhancements, the impact has been virtually irrelevant. Recent studies have introduced synset-based content representations as a reliable way to improve classification, as well as different forms to take advantage of semantic information to address problems, such as dimensionality reduction. These preliminary solutions present some limitations and enforce simplifications that must be gradually redefined in order to obtain significant improvements in spam content filtering. This study addresses the problem of feature reduction by introducing a new semantic-based proposal (SDRS) that avoids losing knowledge (lossless). Synset-features can be semantically grouped by taking advantage of taxonomic relations (mainly hypernyms) provided by BabelNet ontological dictionary (e.g. “Viagra” and “Cialis” can be summarized into the single features “anti-impotence drug”, “drug” or “chemical substance” depending on the generalization of 1, 2 or 3 levels). In order to decide how many levels should be used to generalize each synset of a dataset, our proposal takes advantage of Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEA) and particularly, of the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II). We have compared the performance achieved by a Naïve Bayes classifier, using both token-based and synset-based dataset representations, with and without executing dimensional reductions. As a result, our lossless semantic reduction strategy was able to find optimal semantic-based feature grouping strategies for the input texts, leading to a better performance of Naïve Bayes classifiers.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Perfil socioeconómico del municipio de Capitanejo

Imágenes, Mapas, CuadrosEn el presente trabajo se hace una investigación técnica sobre la situación socioeconómica del municipio de Capitanejo, que a groso modo permite conocer las dificultades por las que atraviesa, las causas que la ocasionan, y conocer las necesidades que afronta, a fin de proponer alternativas de solución que conlleven al mejoramiento de la calidad de vida de los Capitanejanos.No Abstrac

Multi-objective evolutionary optimization for dimensionality reduction of texts represented by synsets

Despite new developments in machine learning classification techniques, improving the accuracy of spam filtering is a difficult task due to linguistic phenomena that limit its effectiveness. In particular, we highlight polysemy, synonymy, the usage of hypernyms/hyponyms, and the presence of irrelevant/confusing words. These problems should be solved at the pre-processing stage to avoid using inconsistent information in the building of classification models. Previous studies have suggested that the use of synset-based representation strategies could be successfully used to solve synonymy and polysemy problems. Complementarily, it is possible to take advantage of hyponymy/hypernymy-based to implement dimensionality reduction strategies. These strategies could unify textual terms to model the intentions of the document without losing any information (e.g., bringing together the synsets “viagra”, “ciallis”, “levitra” and other representing similar drugs by using “virility drug” which is a hyponym for all of them). These feature reduction schemes are known as lossless strategies as the information is not removed but only generalised. However, in some types of text classification problems (such as spam filtering) it may not be worthwhile to keep all the information and let dimensionality reduction algorithms discard information that may be irrelevant or confusing. In this work, we are introducing the feature reduction as a multi-objective optimisation problem to be solved using a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA). Our algorithm allows, with minor modifications, to implement lossless (using only semantic-based synset grouping), low-loss (discarding irrelevant information and using semantic-based synset grouping) or lossy (discarding only irrelevant information) strategies. The contribution of this study is two-fold: (i) to introduce different dimensionality reduction methods (lossless, low-loss and lossy) as an optimization problem that can be solved using MOEA and (ii) to provide an experimental comparison of lossless and low-loss schemes for text representation. The results obtained support the usefulness of the low-loss method to improve the efficiency of classifiers.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A avaliação da dor em doentes dependentes não comunicantes : as perspetivas dos cuidadores informais em contexto domiciliário

Tese de mestrado, Cuidados Paliativos, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Medicina, 2021Enquadramento teórico: a avaliação da dor do doente dependente e não comunicante é um processo complexo, dificultado pela alteração das suas capacidades cognitivas e deterioração do estado funcional. Em contexto domiciliário o cuidador informal (CI) está envolvido no processo de avaliação da dor, sendo necessária investigação da sua perceção sobre as manifestações comportamentais de dor do doente a seu cuidado. Objetivos: averiguar as perspetivas dos cuidadores informais sobre a avaliação da dor em doentes dependentes e não comunicantes, em contexto domiciliário. Descrever a observação e sinais percecionados pelos CI; os sinais não-verbais que mais valorizam; as dificuldades sentidas e a sua opinião sobre estratégias de melhoria da avaliação e registo da dor. Métodos: estudo qualitativo; exploratório; transversal; observacional. Amostra não probabilística e de conveniência, constituída por cuidadores informais de doentes adultos, dependentes, não comunicantes verbalmente, a receber apoio de saúde em contexto domiciliário. A recolha de dados foi realizada através de uma entrevista semiestruturada a cada cuidador informal, o conteúdo das entrevistas foi submetido à metodologia de análise de conteúdo. Resultados: participaram 17 cuidadores informais. O processo de análise de conteúdo deu origem a quatro categorias importantes: identificação de sinais não verbais; valorização de sinais não verbais; dificuldades na avaliação da dor e perceções sobre a avaliação profissional da dor. A totalidade da amostra referiu reconhecer a dor do doente. Foram referidos aspetos de natureza relacional, emocional e empírica essenciais à sua perceção da dor. Os sinais não verbais mais valorizados no reconhecimento da dor foram a linguagem corporal e a vocalização negativa. As principais dificuldades estão associadas à deterioração do estado físico e psíquico do doente, bem como à sobrecarga física, psicológica e social sentida. Foram referidos a falta de apoio formal e o não reconhecimento da função da equipa de saúde na avaliação da dor, como fatores prejudiciais a uma gestão da dor eficaz. Conclusões: o estudo identificou quatro necessidades: 1) uma investigação mais aprofundada sobre os fatores sensoriais e afetivos envolvidos no processo de avaliação da dor; 2) uma triagem objetiva e interventiva das preocupações, desafios e barreiras vividos pelo CI no processo de gestão da dor; 3) a adoção de estratégias de comunicação alternativas com o doente dependente e não-comunicante e 4) a implementação de programas de educação para a saúde personalizadosBackground: pain assessment in nonverbal dependent patients is a complex process hampered by deterioration of cognitive abilities and functional status. As the informal caregiver (IC) is involved in the pain assessment process, investigation of the caregiver’s perception of the patient's pain behavioral sings is decisive. Objectives: to ascertain the IC ́s perceptions on pain assessment in nonverbal and dependent patients in home care; to describe the pain signs and behaviors perceived by the IC, identifying the most relevant; to describe the IC’s difficulties in pain assessment; to describe the IC’s views on strategies for improving pain record and assessment. Materials and methods: qualitative, exploratory, transversal, observational study; non- probabilistic and convenience sample of 17 IC of adult, dependent, nonverbal patients in homecare. Data collection tools: sociodemographic questionnaire; semi structed interview; content analysis. Results: A framework of four major themes with subordinate subthemes was developed: identification of non-verbal pain sings; valorization of non-verbal pain signs; barriers in pain assessment and perceptions about professional pain assessment. 100% of the IC sample recognized pain in their relatives dependent, non-verbal patients; relational, emotional and empirical aspects were referred by IC as essential to their perception of pain; body language and negative vocalization were the most valued pain signs; Deterioration of the patient’s physical and psychological state, as well as the overload felt by IC, were the main mentioned barriers. Lack of formal support and lack of recognition of the health professional’s role in pain assessment were mentioned as unfavorable factors to effective pain management. Conclusions: The study identifies the need for: 1) further investigation into the sensory and affective factors involved in pain assessment; 2) an objective and interventional screening of the concerns, challenges and barriers experienced by IC in pain management; 3) search for innovative communication strategies with the dependent, nonverbal patient and 4) implementation of personalized health education program