Organizational Culture and Quality Management Practices in the Hospital Sector

Research in the healthcare sector is a particular relevant topic as a contribution to the development of patient care service improvement. This research focuses the identification and understanding of the organizational culture dimensions and its relation with the quality management practices in the hospital sector. A case-based research was implemented in two major public hospitals, with quantitative and qualitative methods, through multivariate and thematic analysis. Our findings allows us to postulate that the existence and intensity of a particular set of organizational culture dimensions was a catalyst factor of different realities in the implementation and development of the quality management systems in those hospitals. We believe that we were able to reach valid advice for practitioners, and also ensuring a contribution to knowledge, reinforcing the value of the contingency approach to quality management and taking relevant steps towards theory building about the links between organizational culture and quality management in the healthcare services, particularly in the hospital sector

Volatiles and refratories in solar analogs: no terrestial planet connection

We have analysed very high-quality HARPS and UVES spectra of 95 solar analogs, 24 hosting planets and 71 without detected planets, to search for any possible signature of terrestial planets in the chemical abundances of volatile and refractory elements with respect to the solar abundances. We demonstrate that stars with and without planets in this sample show similar mean abundance ratios, in particular, a sub-sample of 14 planet-host and 14 "single" solar analogs in the metallicity range 0.14<[Fe/H]<0.36. In addition, two of the planetary systems in this sub-sample, containing each of them a super-Earth-like planet with masses in the range ~ 7-11 Earth masses, have different volatile-to-refratory abundance ratios to what would be expected from the presence of a terrestial planets. Finally, we check that after removing the Galactic chemical evolution effects any possible difference in mean abundances, with respect to solar values, of refratory and volatile elements practically dissappears.Comment: 2 pages, 2 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 276th IAU Symposium "The Astrophysics of Planetary Systems

Physical measures for mostly sectional expanding flows

We prove that a partially hyperbolic attracting set for a $C^2$ vector field supports an ergodic physical/SRB measure if, and only if, the trapping region admits non-uniform sectional expansion on a positive Lebesgue measure subset. Moreover, in this case, the attracting set supports at most finitely many ergodic physical/SRB measures, which are also Gibbs states along the central-unstable direction. This extends to continuous time systems a similar well-known result obtained for diffeomorphisms, encompassing the presence of equilibria accumulated by regular orbits within the attracting set, since it is shown that slow recurrence to hyperbolic saddle-type equilibria is automatic for Lebesgue almost every point. We present several examples of application, including the existence of physical measures for asymptotically sectional hyperbolic attracting sets.Comment: 50 pages, 9 figures; improved presentation, shortened title, included (counter-)examples, improved results showing that slow recurrence to saddle-type hyperbolic equilibria is automatic thus dropping a crucial sufficient condition from the main theorem

The LSTS open-source communication and autonomy software: enabling networked vehicle systems to find track, and sample dynamic features of the ocean

Peer Reviewe

IXGAMES – Implementing Internet exchange point, exclusively for games

An ever-growing number of games is available on the market and more and more features are incorporated each day. The increase in the player base and game enhancements demand that games work on a network with reliable speed and efficient time response. This article proposes a high speed network infra-structure exclusive for games,. This network, called IXGAMES originated from experiments with shared routing through Internet Exchange Point (IXP). IXGAMES opens new business opportunities for operators/ Providers and game companies that, not only will provide financial return, but will also allow them to offer better quality service to their customersWorkshop de Arquitecturas, Redes y Sistemas Operativos (WARSO)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

USE: a concept-based recommendation system to support creative search

Semiotics is a field on which research in Computer Science methodologies has focused, mainly concerning Syntax and Semantics. These methodologies, however, are lacking some flexibility for the continuously evolving web community, in which the knowledge is classified with tags rather than with ontologies. In this paper we propose a system for the recommendation of tagged pictures obtained from the Web. The system, driven by user feedback, executes an abductive reasoning (based on WordNet synset semantic relations) that is able to iteratively lead to new concepts which progressively represent the cognitive creative user state.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Antimicrobial Susceptibility of Persister Biofilm Cells of Bacillus cereus and Pseudomonas fluorescens

The present study evaluates the antimicrobial susceptibility of persister cells of Bacillus cereus and Pseudomonas fluorescens after their regrowth in suspension and as biofilms. Two conventional (benzalkonium chloride-BAC and peracetic acid-PAA) and two emerging biocides (glycolic acid-GA and glyoxal-GO) were selected for this study. Persister cells resulted from biofilms subjected to a critical treatment using the selected biocides. All biocide treatments developed B. cereus persister cells, except PAA that effectively reduced the levels of vegetative cells and endospores. P. fluorescens persister cells comprise viable and viable but non-culturable cells. Afterwards, persister cells were regrown in suspension and in biofilms and were subjected to a second biocide treatment. In general, planktonic cultures of regrown persister cells in suspension lost their antimicrobial tolerance, for both bacteria. Regrown biofilms of persister cells had antimicrobial susceptibility close to those regrown biofilms of biocide-untreated cells, except for regrown biofilms of persister P. fluorescens after BAC treatment, which demonstrated increased antimicrobial tolerance. The most active biocide against persister cells was PAA, which did not promote changes in susceptibility after their regrowth. In conclusion, persister cells are ubiquitous within biofilms and survive after critical biocide treatment. The descendant planktonic and biofilms populations showed similar properties as the original ones

Word sense ranking based on semantic similarity and graph entropy

In this paper we propose a system for the recommendation of tagged pictures obtained from the Web. The system, driven by user feedback, executes an abductive reasoning (based on WordNet synset semantic relations) that is able to iteratively lead to new concepts which progressively represent the cognitive creative user state. Furthermore we design a selection mechanism to pick the most relevant abductive inferences by mixing a topological graph analysis together with a semantic similitude measure.Preprin