TrivPlat - A monitoring, management and evaluation tool for electronic public procurement

Bad decisions in public procurement processes have two negative effects: price increase of public goods and services with an impact on public expenditure, and adversely effects on competition, with the negative result of loss of efficiency and social welfare. Electronic public procurement (EPP) has been considered an important tool for promoting competition, simplifying and ensuring transparency in decision-making processes, thus ensuring significant time and money gains. In Portugal, EPP replaced paper-based pre-contractual procedures for communication and processing based on information technologies and systems. Interested in this phenomenon, the authors of this paper structured the TrivPlat project, a tool of free access for monitoring, managing and evaluating electronic public procurement. This paper aims to present the TrivPlat project and its contributions to the discussion about additional efforts needed to be implemented in order to efficiently promote a more transparent and accountable governance, in the defense of public interest.This work is funded by FEDER funds through the Operational Program for Competitiveness Factors -COMPETE and National Funds through FCT -Foundation for Science and Technology under the Project: FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-022674 and PEst-OE/CJP/UI0758/2013-1

Two Statistical Methods for Resolving Healthy Individuals and Those with Congestive Heart Failure Based on Extended Self-similarity and a Recursive Method

In this paper we introduce two methods for measuring irregularities in human heartbeat time series (HHTS). First we consider the multi-fractal structure of HHTS to distinguish healthy individuals and from those with congestive heart failure. In this way we modify the Extended Self-Similarity (ESS) method and apply it to HHTS. Our second approach is based on the recursive method, which we use to predict the duration of the next heartbeat by considering a few previous ones. We use standard physiological data and show that these approaches lead to very satisfactory methods to resolve the healthy and CHF individuals. These methods can be used potentially in portable electronic heart alarm systems