Parasitic Infection and Immunity—A Special Biomedicines Issue

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“Hurt right down the middle, but alive and well”: African American Gothic Elements in Toni Morrison’s Home

Toni Morrison’s Home presents the story of two siblings who return to their hometown of Lotus, Georgia, after facing several traumatic episodes throughout their lives. This article aims to observe and analyze the gothic elements presented in the novel—particularly those related to Ycidra’s tale. Those elements are discussed especially in their relation to the Gothic subgenre that Maisha Wester calls African American Gothic. Methodological procedures include a brief overview of the African American Gothic and an analysis and discussion of gothic themes in Home. The results show that Morrison employs and subverts some Anglo American gothic tropes in order to contest and critique the identities imposed upon black people by white gothic writers, thus offering an important revision of the genre

Estudo do perfil dos pacientes em tratamento com análogos de GnRH para puberdade precoce na Farmácia Escola - UFSC

TCC(graduação) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Centro de Ciências da Saúde. Farmácia.A puberdade precoce (PP) é uma patologia com um significativo impacto psicossocial, dada á aceleração da velocidade de crescimento e maturação esquelética. Um estudo populacional na Dinamarca verificou a incidência de 20 casos para cada 10.000 meninas e 5 casos para cada 10.000 meninos. A escassez de dados nacionais justifica a realização deste estudo, o qual tem o objetivo de analisar o perfil dos pacientes com o diagnóstico de PP central (PPC) em Florianópolis. Trata-se de um estudo descritivo retrospectivo dos dados demográficos e clínicos dos pacientes cadastrados na Farmácia Escola da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Foram analisados os dados dos prontuários das crianças em tratamento para PPC como: causas, exames de diagnóstico, idade cronológica, sexo, idade óssea e medicamento em uso. Foram incluídos 102 prontuários. Observou-se que a dentre os casos estudados, a grande maioria teve origem idiopática, havendo baixa incidência de co-morbidades orgânicas, assim como a maior incidência em crianças do sexo feminino. A maioria trata com análogos do GnRH de ação prolongada. Estudos sobre esta temática permitem, entre outros, conhecer o perfil das crianças diagnosticadas, possibilitando o desenvolvimento de ações específicas para ampliar a qualidade dos tratamentos e a disseminação de informações que contribuam para o diagnóstico precoce de crianças com PP

Conceptualization of project management offices structures

Project management is becoming an asset to a considerable amount of organizations in their everyday routine. When the importance of PM grows, the challenges that an organization has to face also raise, and the need of an effective answer becomes essential. The Project Management Office (PMO) is an entity which aims to facilitate project management, to solve its main challenges and to optimize its best practices within the organization. However, to decide which specific functions and in what context should an organization implement a PMO remains a major challenge for most organizations. Therefore, this paper suggests different PMOs typologies, designed to perceive PMOs like an evolutional structure. The PMOs are conceptualized as models through the roles they play, taking into account the level of integration within the organization

Improving project management practices in architecture & design offices

"World Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (WorldCIST 2017)"This paper describes a study on improving project management (PM) practices in architecture & design offices, conducted through semi-structured interviews and focus group with professionals from seven different offices. Taking into account the best PM practices described in literature and the most used practices and problems identified in this particular organizational context, a set of key PM practices are proposed. The results show that there are common practices already used by the architecture & design offices, such as: project charter, kickoff meeting, budgeting document and progress meetings. The problems found are mainly related to communication, collecting requirements, schedule control and portfolio management. The set of key PM practices proposed is composed by well-known practices: kick-off meeting, budgeting document, project charter, milestone planning, work packages and deadlines document, communication plan, change request, progress meeting, progress report, meeting minutes, client acceptance form and project closure documentation.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Benefits Management in University-Industry R&D collaborative projects: a review on benefits and success factors

"Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems / International Conference on Project MANagement / Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and Technologies, CENTERIS / ProjMAN / HCist 2016"Benefits Management is a field of growing interest in the universe of University-Industry collaborative partnerships. Therefore, this paper aims to present and discuss a review on benefits and success factors that were previously identified in the literature through two distinct methods of categorization in order to qualify and better understand how each benefit and success factor act and what are their intrinsic properties. Throughout these methods, the next goal is to perform a cause-effect analysis to understand which factors generate which benefits and make some theoretical assumptions based on these correlations. This study will display that there are important underlying conceptual issues in benefits categorization and will suggest, accordingly, an approach to surpass it in order to contribute to further research in benefits management.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Project management system implementation in SMEs: a case study

This paper aims to describe the implementation of a Project Management System (PMS), supported by a Project Management Information System (PMIS) in a SME. The implemented PMS was designed to be flexible in order to support the different organization’s business areas that have different types of projects requiring different project management (PM) approaches. Therefore, a hybrid model was implemented, merging traditional with agile PM practices, and thus achieving the flexibility demanded by the organization, without unsettle projects planning. After implementing the PMIS, several difficulties were experienced with the embedding process. It was felt the system implemented was too complex for the organization’s PM maturity, and that it would be necessary to re-evaluate the scope of this implementation. So, difficulties, failures and successes experienced are presented, as well as improvement actions that may facilitate the embedment of the PMS in the organization. The conclusion was that the main problems were related to the complexity of some PMIS requirements, associated with more formal PM practices, and with the range of the initial dissemination of the system. Therefore, it was suggested a revision of the PMS to become less complex, and a new embedding approach, more realistic and measurable

Risks, issues and critical success factors in shared service center projects

ICOPEV2018 – 4th International Conference on Production Economics and Project Evaluation | 20 Set. - 21 Set. 2018This paper is based on a case study performed in a Shared Service Center from SEG Automotive group, a former automotive division from Bosch. Due to the Bosch decision of selling the business unit of Starter Motors and Generators, it was required to create a Shared Service Center which performed the processes, until then executed by central departments to all Bosch divisions. This paper will focus on the project of processes transfer from the Bosch departments to the Shared Service Center. Through semi-structured interviews to the leadership team, it was intended to identify the major risks and issues of those projects and its critical success factors, in order to allow the management to work on measures that can avoid the risks and issues and potentiate the project success. The results show the importance of the alignment and cooperation of all stakeholders during the whole project life. It turns also clear the need of a project manager that leads the project, guides the team and has authority for decisions making. Moreover, the influence of the project team within the project is clear, being crucial to have experience, flexibility and multilanguage knowledge.This research was supported by the SEG Automotive Portugal. I appreciate the support from all the colleagues which accepted to be part of the interviews phase. Without their support this work would not have been possible

Allelic Imbalance Studies Of Chromosome 9 Suggest Major Differences In Chromosomal Instability Among Nonmelanoma Skin Carcinomas.

Loss of heterozygosity in the 9p21-p22 region, has been frequently described in a wide range of human malignancies, including familial melanomas. Also, losses and gains in other regions of chromosome 9 have frequently been observed and may indicate additional mechanisms for basal cell tumorigenesis. To investigate allelic imbalance in the 9p21-p22 region, among basal cell carcinomas. Microsatellite analysis. Two dermatology services of public universities in São Paulo and the Laboratory of Cancer Molecular Genetics of Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp). 13 patients with benign skin lesions consecutively referred to the outpatient dermatology clinics of Unicamp and Universidade Estadual de São Paulo (Unesp) and 58 with malignant skin tumours. MEAN MEASUREMENTS: We examined 13 benign cases including four of solar keratosis, three keratoachanthomas, three melanocytic nevi, two of Bowen's disease and one of neurofibroma, and 58 malignant skin tumors: 14 of squamous cell, 40 basal cell carcinomas and four melanomas. Participating patients had the main tumor and a normal portion of non-adjacent skin surgically removed. DNA was extracted from the tumor and matching normal tissue. We used four sets of primers to amplify polymorphic microsatellite repeats on chromosome 9, two of them targeting the 9p21-p22 region. We identified eight cases (20%) of allelic imbalance among basal cell carcinomas, two cases of loss of heterozygosity and six cases of microsatellite instability in the 9p21-p22 region. Additional markers were also involved in three of these tumors. No events were detected among the benign or the other malignant cases. This phenotype dependency suggests that there is a major distinction between the two most important forms of nonmelanoma skin cancers in their tendency to present microsatellite instability in chromosome 9. Since the CDKN2a/p16INK4a, p19ARF and p15INK4b tumor suppressor genes do not appear to be responsible for the observed abnormalities, other genes at 9p21-p22 may be involved in the pathogenesis and progression pathway of basal cell carcinomas.12218-2

Linking information systems team resilience to project management success

Team resilience is a critically essential contributor to team effectiveness. However, the impact of team resilience on project management success has been little studied. This article aims to investigate the influence of team resilience on project management success in the context of information system projects. Using a quantitative study, we show that there is a significant positive relationship between project team resilience and project management success. As a result of this finding, we stress the importance of developing actions to promote team resilience to increase the likelihood of project management success, particularly in unstable environments.This work was been supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope (UIDB/00319/2020)