The 'S' Word: The Spectre of Syphilis within Middle-Class Marriage in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain

The years between 1870 and 1914 witnessed profound shifts in the medical understanding of, social responses to, and cultural representations of syphilis and its sufferers. Prostitutes had traditionally been recognised as the primary carriers of disease and men their ‘unsuspecting victims.’ However, responsibility for the spread of syphilis into middle-class homes had been redistributed across the gender divide by the end of the century. This thesis charts the changing medical and social attitudes towards the conjugal and congenital transmission of syphilis during the fin-de-siècle and the effects of these changes upon the construction of middle-class male identity and gender relations

Explainable machine learning for malware detection on Android applications

The presence of malicious software (malware), for example, in Android applications (apps), has harmful or irreparable consequences to the user and/or the device. Despite the protections app stores provide to avoid malware, it keeps growing in sophistication and diffusion. In this paper, we explore the use of machine learning (ML) techniques to detect malware in Android apps. The focus is on the study of different data pre-processing, dimensionality reduction, and classification techniques, assessing the generalization ability of the learned models using public domain datasets and specifically developed apps. We find that the classifiers that achieve better performance for this task are support vector machines (SVM) and random forests (RF). We emphasize the use of feature selection (FS) techniques to reduce the data dimensionality and to identify the most relevant features in Android malware classification, leading to explainability on this task. Our approach can identify the most relevant features to classify an app as malware. Namely, we conclude that permissions play a prominent role in Android malware detection. The proposed approach reduces the data dimensionality while achieving high accuracy in identifying malware in Android apps.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Estudo da sinistralidade laboral em meio hospitalar - Aspeto fundamental para a integração da segurança no trabalho na gestão de unidades de saúde

O tipo de atividade profissional e as condições em que é desempenhada constituem fatores determinantes do risco para a saúde dos trabalhadores. Os últimos estudos realizados sobre acidentes de trabalho nas instituições de saúde revelam um aumento da incidência dos acidentes de trabalho com o consequente aumento do absentismo laboral e dos encargos financeiros inerentes.Realizamos um estudo descritivo-correlacional, retrospetivo, compreendendo um período de análise de quatro anos, utilizando os dados do serviço de saúde ocupacional, relatórios anuais e balanços sociais de cada ano em estudo. Os resultados revelaram um aumento progressivo do índice de frequência e do índice de gravidade dos acidentes de trabalho. O maior número de acidentes ocorreu nos enfermeiros, a trabalhar por turnos. A lesão mais declarada é a picada e as mãos o local mais atingido, no entanto são os esforços excessivos e a cervicalgia/lombalgia que produzem uma maior incapacidade para o trabalho com o consequente aumento dos dias de absentismo. Constatamos que o tempo em dias perdido vai gradualmente aumentando ao longo dos 4 anos, assim como as implicações financeiras. Os gestores de topo devem tomar medidas no sentido de garantir uma melhor qualidade de vida dos profissionais, contribuindo para uma melhoria da qualidade da prestação de serviços nas unidades de saúde, preservando os recursos humanos e proporcionando dotações seguras de técnicos de saúde/utente

Energetic Particle Tracing in Optimized Quasisymmetric Stellarator Equilibria

Recent developments in the design of magnetic confinement fusion devices have allowed the construction of exceptionally optimized stellarator configurations. The near-axis expansion in particular has proven to enable the construction of magnetic configurations with good confinement properties while taking only a fraction of the usual computation time to generate optimized magnetic equilibria. However, not much is known about the overall features of fast-particle orbits computed in such analytical, yet simplified, equilibria when compared to those originating from accurate equilibrium solutions. This work aims to assess and demonstrate the potential of the near-axis expansion to provide accurate information on particle orbits and to compute loss fractions in moderate to high aspect ratios. The configurations used here are all scaled to fusion-relevant parameters and approximate quasisymmetry in various degrees. This allows us to understand how deviations from quasisymmetry affect particle orbits and what are their effects on the estimation of the loss fraction. Guiding-center trajectories of fusion-born alpha particles are traced using gyronimo and SIMPLE codes under the NEAT framework, showing good numerical agreement. Discrepancies between near-axis and MHD fields have minor effects on passing particles but significant effects on trapped particles, especially in quasihelically symmetric magnetic fields. Effective expressions were found for estimating orbit widths and passing-trapped separatrix in quasisymmetric near-axis fields. Loss fractions agree in the prompt losses regime but diverge afterward.Comment: 24 pages, 15 figure

SMART sensor network: with Bluetooth low energy and CAN-BUS

This paper proposes a system to monitor, through the internet, the data of a logistics distribution truck. For this, it was implemented a reliable and flexible wireless sensor network with low energy consumption. The technology used for the radio system was Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Each node in the network contains one type of sensor. The sensors information together with GPS and On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) data collected by the central unit, and later transmitted to the cloud by GSM or Wi-Fi.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Impact of surface sizing on inkjet printing quality

Printing quality is strongly influenced by the structural and chemical properties of paper surface, and is one of the most important factors concerning costumer’s evaluation. Thus, all studies regarding the evaluation of paper surface characteristics, the effects of surface treatments, paper-ink interactions as well as the influence of all these parameters on printing quality, are of utmost importance. The aim of this study is to analyze the influence on printing quality of different chemical surface treatments used in printing and writing papers and also identify the most relevant parameters for inkjet printing quality evaluation. For that, four paper samples were studied. Differences in the performance of the distinct samples were detected, and interpreted in terms of the different treatments. The results also revealed that contact angles measurements are a valuable tool to predict paper’s inkjet printing behavior

A Rare Case of Pleural Empyema Caused by Campylobacter Rectus

Campylobacter rectus is considered to be a primary periodontal pathogen that is rarely identified in extraoral specimens. We report a case of pleural empyema caused by Campylobacter rectus: the pathogen was isolated in the drained pleural fluid sample. Since the patient had previously undergone multiple antibiotic treatments, oral cultures were highly unlikely to be positive, although poor dental hygiene appears to be the leading risk factor for C. rectus systemic infections. The present case illustrates that C. rectus can be a cause of not only periodontal disease but also pulmonary infection.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Smart home power management system for electric vehicle battery charger and electrical appliance control

This paper presents a power management system (PMS) designed for smart homes aiming to deal with the new challenges imposed by the proliferation of plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) and their coexistence with other residential electrical appliances. The PMS is based on a hybrid wireless network architecture composed by a local hub/gateway and several Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Wi-Fi sensor/actuator devices. These wireless devices are used to transfer information inside the smart home using the MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) protocol. Based on the proposed solution, the current consumption of the EV battery charger and other residential electrical appliances are dynamically monitored and controlled by using a configurable algorithm, ensuring that the total current consumption does not cause the tripping of the home circuit breaker. An Android client application allows the user to monitor and configure the system operation in real-time, a developed Wi Fi smart plug permits to measure the RMS values of current of the connected electrical appliance and change its state of operation remotely, and an EV battery charger may be controlled in terms of operating power according to set-points received from the Android client application. Experimental tests are used to evaluate the quality of service provided by the developed smart home platform in terms of communication delay and reliability. An experimental validation for different conditions of operation of the proposed smart home PMS concerning the power operation of the EV battery charger with the proposed control algorithm is also presented.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The application of furniture manufacturing residues in wood pellets: Assessment of the combustion efficiency

The European Union aims to fulfill 20% of the primary energy consumption with renewable energy sources, by 2020. Biomass has a great potential for domestic and industrial heating applications and these are amongst the most promising uses for biomass as they combine high efficiency and ease of use. Pellets are a good method for biomass distribution due to its quality standards and energy density which make them attractive to distribution and handling. In addition to the traditional use of sawdust as a raw material, there has been a growing interest in the incorporation of residues from industry processing such as the furniture sector. This paper reports the application of pellets made of residues from the furniture industry as a fuel source in domestic heating applications. Pellets were characterized according to their chemical and physical composition. They were subsequently burned in an automatic boiler rated at 15 kW. A probe in the exhaust chimney was used to continuously analyze the flue gases. In addition, the ashes chemical composition was also analyzed. The results show that these pellets have a good thermal efficiency in domestic boilers, releasing however large emissions of NOx, originated from the high concentration of nitrogen in its chemical composition. The ash analysis confirms the slagging and fouling prediction, and these problems were verified in the grate, chamber combustion and heat exchanger. In conclusion, these pellets can be explored for industrial applications, with better control of its chemical composition. For domestic boilers however, these can cause serious ash problems.One of authors (P. T. Ferreira) acknowledges the scholarship (SFRH/BD/73101/2010) sponsored by FCT