A misleading answer generation system for exam questions

University professors are responsible for teaching and grading their students in each semester. Normally, in order to evaluate the students progress, professors create exams that are composed of questions regarding the subjects taught in the teaching period. Each year, professors need to develop new questions for their exams since students are free to discuss and register the correct answers to the various questions on prior exams. Professors want to be able to grade students based on their knowledge and not on their memorization skills. Each year, as discovered by our research, professors spend over roughtly 2:30 hours each year for a single course only on multiple answer questions sections. This solution will have at its core a misleading answer generator that would reduce the time and effort when creating a Fill Gap Type Questions through the merger of highly biased lexical model towards a specific subject with a generalist model. To help the most amount of professors with this task a web-server was implemented that served as an access to a exam creator interface with the misleading answer generator feature. To implement the misleading answer generator feature, several accessory programs had to be created as well as manually edditing textbooks pertaining to the question base topic. To evaluate the effectiveness of our implementation, several evaluation methods were proposed composed of objective measurements of the misleading answers generator, as well as subjective methods of evaluation by expert input. The development of the misleading answer suggestion function required us to build a lexical model composed from a highly biased corpus in a specific curricular subject. A highly biased model is probable to give good in-context misleading answers but their variance would most likely be limited. To counteract this the model was merged with a generalist model, in hopes of improving its overall performance. With the development of the custom lexical model and the server the professor can receive misleading answers suggestions to a newly formed question reducing the time spent on creating new exams questions each year to assess students’ knowledge

How to adapt a one-week presential workshop in a European education project: the “PETRHA +” COVID-19 experience

PETRHA+ (Physiotherapy E-Training ReHabilitation) is a European Erasmus+ project (2018- 1-BE01-KA203-038581) focused on the development of three intellectual outputs for physiotherapy students: (1) Clinical simulation video game (i.e. based in real patients with specific pathological content and context); (2) Clinical reasoning massive online open course (MOOC); (3) Clinical reasoning evaluation tool. The main aim of PETRHA+ is to strengthen the training of clinical reasoning skills for all the European physiotherapy students. The project started in September 2018 and will end in August 2021. In PETRHA+ participate five universities and one informatic enterprise from five European countries (Belgium, Finland, France, Portugal, Spain). We have planned five days “Summer-class” exchange with students and teachers in Bordeaux (France) in May 2020. However, the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Advance directives in Portugal: a qualitative survey

(1) Background: Advance directives (ADs) in Portugal have been legalized since 2012. What has been observed over time, from the few studies carried out, is that despite the positive attitudes in the population, there is a low level of adherence to ADs. To try to understand the reasons for these data, the current study aimed to explore and describe the experiences of the Portuguese population regarding AD. (2) Methods: For this exploratory and descriptive qualitative study, the researchers conducted open (unstructured) interviews with a convenience sample aged over 18 years until data saturation was achieved. (3) Results: A total of fifteen interviews were conducted—eight with women and seven with men. The following four categories emerged from the content analysis of the interviews: (1) AD literacy, (2) AD relevance, (3) AD attitudes, and (4) conditionalities for compiling the ADs. (4) Conclusions: The study pointed out the good receptivity of the participants to the ADs; however, literacy on this subject was low, and identifying the conditionalities in the development of ADs could contribute to improvements in implementation in the population. The data from this study suggest the need to implement measures to increase the literacy of the Portuguese population on ADs and review the legal framework for improving the accessibility of the citizen population. There is also a need to continue researching and obtain more evidence about the ways in which the Portuguese population perceives ADs; thus, in this way, a society can better respond to its citizens’ right to freely exercise their prospective autonomy at the end of their lives.(undefined

WebAssembly versus JavaScript: Energy and runtime performance

The worldwide Web has dramatically evolved in recent years. Web pages are dynamic, expressed by programs written in common programming languages given rise to sophisticated Web applications. Thus, Web browsers are almost operating systems, having to interpret/compile such programs and execute them. Although JavaScript is widely used to express dynamic Web pages, it has several shortcomings and performance inefficiencies. To overcome such limitations, major IT powerhouses are developing a new portable and size/load efficient language: WebAssembly.In this paper, we conduct the first systematic study on the energy and run-time performance of WebAssembly and JavaScript on the Web. We used micro-benchmarks and also real applications in order to have more realistic results. Preliminary results show that WebAssembly, while still in its infancy, is starting to already outperform JavaScript, with much more room to grow. A statistical analysis indicates that WebAssembly produces significant performance differences compared to JavaScript. However, these differences differ between micro-benchmarks and real-world benchmarks. Our results also show that WebAssembly improved energy efficiency by 30%, on average, and showed how different WebAssembly behaviour is among three popular Web Browsers: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. Our findings indicate that WebAssembly is faster than JavaScript and even more energy-efficient. Additionally, our benchmarking framework is also available to allow further research and replication.This work is financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT -Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia within project UIDB/50014/2020. Additionally, this paper acknowledges the support of the Erasmus+ Key Action 2 project No. 2020-1-PT01-KA203-078646: "SusTrainable -Promoting Sustainability as a Fundamental Driver in Software Development Training and Education"

Effect of the contraction of medial rotators of the tibia on the electromyographic activity of vastus medialis and vastus lateralis

This study attempted to assess if the resisted contraction of medial rotators of the tibia increases the ratio between the activity of vastus medialis (VM) and vastus lateralis (VL) during maximal isometric contractions (MIC) of the quadriceps femoral (QF) muscle at 90° of knee flexion. About 24 female subjects participated in this study, performing four series MIC of the QF. In the first series subjects performed only MIC of the QF muscle, whereas in the other three there was MIC of the QF with resisted contraction of medial rotators of the tibia, with the tibia positioned in medial, neutral and lateral rotation. During each contraction, VM and VL electromyographic signal (EMGs) and QF force were collected, being the EMGs root mean square (RMS) used to access the activity level of these muscles. The use of the General Linear Model (GLM) test showed that for α = 0.05 there was a significant increase in the VM:VL ratio when the resisted contraction of medial rotators of the tibia was performed with the tibia in medial (p = <0.0001), neutral (p = <0.0001) and lateral rotation (p = 0.001). The same test showed that during MIC of the QF associated to resisted contraction of medial rotators of the tibia there were no significant differences in the VM:VL ratio between the three tibial rotation positions adopted (p = 0.866 [medial–neutral]; p = 0.106 [medial–lateral]; p = 0.068 [neutral–lateral]). The resisted contraction of medial rotators of the tibia increases the VM:VL ratio during MIC of the QF and the tibial rotation position does not influence the VM:VL ratio during MIC associated to resisted contraction of medial rotators of the tibia.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Determinantes em saúde mental (contributos para a promoção da saúde mental das pessoas da região de Braga)

Introdução: Os determinantes em saúde mental são uma preocupação da Organização Mundial da Saúde tendo em conta que as doenças mentais estão a aumentar significativamente no mundo e concretamente em Portugal. Também o Plano Nacional de Saúde Mental 2007-2016 assume a redução do impacte das perturbações mentais e a contribuição para a promoção da saúde mental das populações como um dos seus objetivos. Este facto justifica a necessidade de se aprofundar o conhecimento das relações entre os fatores sociais, biológicos e psicológicos, e a saúde mental nas comunidades específicas. Objetivo: Este estudo pretende identificar as perspetivas das pessoas da região de Braga relativamente a determinantes em saúde mental. Metodologia: Tipo de estudo: estudo exploratório e descritivo de natureza qualitativa. Participantes: N= 60; amostra de conveniência. Instrumentos: questionário estruturado com base em variáveis de natureza biográfica e social e duas questões abertas relativas às perspetivas em saúde mental. Análise e tratamento dos dados: Os dados resultantes das narrativas foram tratados através de análise de conteúdo. Resultados: Das narrativas dos participantes emergiram sete categorias principais; três relativamente aos fatores que influenciam positivamente a saúde mental: i) fatores sociais e económicos; ii) fatores individuais e; iii) fatores relacionais e quatro categorias relativamente aos fatores que a influenciam negativamente: i) fatores sociais, económicos e ambientais; ii) fatores individuais, iii) fatores relacionais e; iv) eventos stressantes e transacionais. Conclusões: Os resultados corroboram os já apresentados pela Organização Mundial da Saúde e outros estudos, apontando, contudo, uma influência mais predominante dos fatores negativos. Esta constatação reflete a necessidade de uma maior atenção na compreensão das relações entre todos os fatores intervenientes na saúde mental, obtendo, assim, ganhos em saúde e, consequentemente, indicadores de comunidades mentalmente saudáveis em que o pensamento e as ações sejam mais dirigidos para a forma como se promove a saúde