How socio-cultural factors affect cervical cancer screening adherence and treatment in disadvantaged communities in the greater Cape Town, South Africa.

Approximately 85% of the global cervical cancer deaths occur in women living in developing countries. In South Africa, cervical cancer is the second most common cancer amongst women, with Black South African women having the highest risk of developing cervical cancer. Previous research with the same population group found that there are structural (time, health education, age) and psychosocial (fear of screening and stigmatization) influences to cervical screening. The purpose of this research was to identify socio-cultural factors affecting cervical cancer screening adherence within a disadvantaged community in South Africa, a developing country. To identify the social-cultural factors four focus groups consisting of men and women between the ages of 18 and 60 were conducted. A combination of the Health Belief Model (HBM) and Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) provided a theoretical framework for this study. Thematic analysis was used to identify themes that emerged from the focus groups and participant observation. Through conducting these focus groups, themes emerged which strongly highlighted the role of cultural norms, gender roles, the western medical model and traditional medicine in a woman’s decision to adhere to cervical screening. It was found that factors such as knowledge and stigma, found previously in research, were also shared amongst this sample group. However, spiritual and religious beliefs (traditional healers, religion, and balancing paradigms), gender beliefs, social construction and acceptance of disease were factors which also emerged as exerting influence in a woman’s decision to adhere to cervical screening

The Costs of Urban Sprawl on Portuguese Municipalities in 2011

Urban sprawl is a type of urban growth which is generally considered as mainly negative that entails a series of negative impacts. One specific negative impact is the higher municipal direct monetary costs associated with it, when compared with other types of urban growth, e.g. compact city (1). Municipal monetary costs are related with the construction, management, operation and maintenance of infrastructures, such as roads, sewerage, water supply, communications and energy; and services such as garbage collection, recycling, postal service and transportation (including school transport). Usually, these costs are, directly and indirectly, supported by the municipal government (2). The association between sprawl and higher municipal costs is related with the over extension of infra-structures and services to serve a fragmented low density urban space. Nevertheless there is a paradox at work here, since sprawled urban development could act as a source of revenues to a municipality (e.g. urbanization and construction licenses and tax revenues), but in the long term the costs to maintain such paradigm will be higher than the revenues obtained (2). The objective of this work is to assess and associate the aforementioned costs to higher levels of and to different manifestations of sprawl. For that we collected data on a sample of 60 municipalities, which are classified as medium cities in Portugal. For this assessment, a dataset composed by each municipality?s census subsections of 2011, containing demographic information, and developed on ARCGIS ®, will be developed. Sprawl indicators will be built focusing on the following dimensions: population density, building densities and type of urban space, to account for fragmentation and dispersions patterns; and the irregularity of urban forms; Correlation analysis and regression models will be built between the sprawl indicators and the monetary costs of the municipalities, to assess if sprawl is correlated or not with higher costs, while controlling for other aspect like municipality size, region administrative and political structure. These costs are to be extracted from municipal annual budgets, and it will include the budget lines related with the development and maintenance of municipalities infrastructures and services, namely: roads; sewerages; water supply; garbage and recycle recollection; transportation; green spaces; and cultural and sports facilities. The obtained results are discussed both in terms of its accordance with previous findings in the literature as well as its policy implications. 1 Carruthers, J.I. & Ulfarsson, G.F., 2003. Urban Sprawl and the Cost of Public Services. Environment and Planning B-Planning & Design, 30, pp.503?522. 2 Carter, N. & Silva, F.N. da, 2001. Recent Changes in Territorial Planning and the System for Controling Urban Development in Portugal. Transportation Research Part a-Policy and Practice, 3, pp.341?370

The Portuguese High Speed Rail Network; Relating Financing to Strategic and Operating Issues

This paper describes the implementation of the Portuguese High Speed Rail (HSR) Network. The business model developed by RAVE for the PPP’s related with the HSR infrastructure is described and discussed. Following a recently awarded research project (EXPRESS) aimed at studying the strategic aspects related with the implementation of HSR is presented and its aspects more directly related with HSR operation which could be relevant in a PPP context are discussed

An investigation into the influence of land-use, social networks and information and communication technologies on destination choice for social activities

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) enable individuals to travel more flexibly. The choice of location for social activities has become very flexible. In addition to this, land-use characteristics also play a vital role in the location of social activities. This work aims to analyse the influence of land-use characteristics, ICT use, and social networks in the destination choices for face-to-face social activities of university students during both weekdays and weekends. Students from the two different campuses of the Instituto Superior Técnico were presented with an online questionnaire, which was intended to collect information about their use of ICT and social networks, in addition to their travel characteristics and socio-demographics. Emphasis was made upon capturing the characteristics of social networks and ICT usage. Information on land-use characteristics was obtained from secondary sources. Factor analysis was initially carried out to extract factors related to the use of ICT and social networks; these were later used to model the destination choice for social activities. The alternatives considered for destination choice included: home or the vicinity thereof, university or the vicinity thereof, other locations (further away from home and university), and evenly spread locations – having no specific priority for any of the other three locations considered. The analysis was performed separately for travel during weekdays and weekends so that an understanding of the differences and similarities in behaviour during these different time periods could be garnered. A multinomial logit model was estimated to model this choice. The results point to the relevance of land-use characteristics, the location of close friends, and modes of interaction. Individuals residing in more accessible central, and denser areas, were more likely to have activities distributed evenly across the city. These results stress the relevance of accessibility in allowing larger and more diverse spaces to be used for social activities

A “Deficiência” como problema filosófico

The renowned “History of Philosophy” is characterized as a set of reflections of a philosophical nature. It is carried out in different periods and territories. In each of these periods and territories, there is a profusion of concepts and categories whose fundamental premise is to address a specific theme or problem. This functions as the starting point of every act of philosophizing, an admiring astonishment thaumadizem (θαυμαδιζέμ) in the face of everything that is how it is. Is “disability”, the person with a disability, and their existence intended as a philosophical theme or problem? Would it be capable of awakening an admiring astonishment? thaumadizem. Would it be capable of initiating an act of philosophizing? Within the history of philosophy, very few pages are dedicated to dealing with “disabilities” and often intend to explain that disability constitutes a disarticulation of the standards of nature and culture. This article proposes to think about disability as a philosophical object, turning to the control machinery that constitutes the bodies of people with disabilities in a restrictive way. Determining what a person's body can or cannot do and where that body may or may not be. Thus, these machines build a preconceived, ableist understanding of what “disability” is.O que comumente se denomina de “História da Filosofia” caracteriza-se como um conjunto de reflexões de cunho filosófico, levadas a cabo em períodos e territorialidades distintas. Em cada um desses períodos e territorialidades há uma profusão das construções de conceitos e categorias que têm como premissa fundamental tencionar um tema/problema específico, que funciona como ponto inicial de todo ato de filosofar, um espanto admirativo – thaumadizem (θαυμαδιζέμ) – diante de tudo o que é como é. A “deficiência”... a pessoa com deficiência e sua existencialidade pode ser compreendida enquanto um tema/problema filosófico no interior da “História da Filosofia”? A “deficiência” é capaz de despertar um espanto admirativo iniciador um ato de filosofar? São escassas as páginas de escritos filosóficos que tratam da “deficiência” e, quando tencionada, é com o intuito de explicitar que a “deficiência” se constitui em uma desarticulação dos padrões da natureza e da cultura. Minha proposta no presente artigo é pensar o lócus da deficiência enquanto tema/problema filosófico, tendo como fio condutor algumas reflexões de Platão, Aristóteles e Lucrécio. Posteriormente, tencionarei as maquinarias de controle enquanto constituidoras restritivas dos corpos das pessoas com deficiência, as quais determinam o que um o corpo de uma pessoa com deficiência pode ou não fazer, onde esse corpo pode ou não estar. Assim, essas maquinarias edificam uma compreensão preconcebida, capacitista, sobre o que é “deficiência”

Bounds on the Q-spread of a graph

The spread s(M) of an n × n complex matrix M is s(M) = maxij |_i − _j |, where the maximum is taken over all pairs of eigenvalues of M, _i, 1 ≤ i ≤ n, [9] and [11]. Based on this concept, Gregory et al. [7] determined some bounds for the spread of the adjacency matrix A(G) of a simple graph G and made a conjecture regarding the graph on n vertices yielding the maximum value of the spread of the corresponding adjacency matrix. The signless Laplacian matrix of a graph G, Q(G) = D(G)+A(G), where D(G) is the diagonal matrix of degrees of G and A(G) is its adjacency matrix, has been recently studied, [4], [5]. The main goal of this paper is to determine some bounds on s(Q(G)). We prove that, for any graph on n ≥ 5 vertices, 2 ≤ s(Q(G)) ≤ 2n − 4, and we characterize the equality cases in both bounds. Further, we prove that for any connected graph G with n ≥ 5 vertices, s(Q(G)) < 2n − 4. We conjecture that, for n ≥ 5, sQ(G) ≤ √4n2 − 20n + 33 and that, in this case, the upper bound is attained if, and only if, G is a certain path- complete graph

Accessibility Indicators for Regional Economic Development: An Application to the Regional Distributive Effects of High-Speed Rail in Spain

The inauguration of a HSR line increases the accessibility to people, resources, goods, and markets, which brings locational advantages, thus attracting new households, economic activities, allowing greater agglomerations. Intuitively, the locations where the accessibility increases higher than average may gain more economic opportunities and more growth. Accessibility indicators measure the relative location importance, affecting the attractiveness and economic development potentials of regions. They are also able to measure the disparities among regions to define how transport and development impacts are distributed across geographical areas or population. In order to evaluate the impacts of accessibility on the regional economic growth, choosing the most suitable accessibility indicator is rather crucial. To analyze how well different types of accessibility indicators are able to capture the spatial distributions of the regional economic variables, this paper is set to study the ex-post impacts of accessibility due to the HSR network expansion in the 2000s at provincial level in Spain and its relation to the evolution of several economic performance indicators (GDP, population, employment and number of firms) during the same time period. Four accessibility indicators corresponding to different conceptualizations are introduced: one location indicator, two economic potential indicators and one daily accessibility indicator. The study area and the zoning level for the analysis is comprised of 47 provinces in continental Spain. The visualization procedure for accessibility indicators and the economic variables is supported by ArcGIS® software. To calculate the accessibility values, travel times between all the municipalities by railway are computed for the year 2000 and 2010 using a GIS-based network with network analysis tool box in ArcGIS®. The relative changes of accessibility and economic variables for all the provinces of Spain are presented and analyzed. The distribution patterns of the accessibility indicators and economic variables are compared. The obtained results are expected to help better understanding the concept of accessibility and its explanatory power in the economic impact analysi