Accessibility and Development in Peripheral Regions. The Case for Beira Interior

Beira Interior is a Portuguese region located at the centre of Portugal, close to the Spanish border, and traditionally seen as a strongly peripheral region. In the last years the decrease in population and weaknesses of the industrial park have been justified on basis of shortness and/or lack of quality in transport infrastructure. In order to evaluate whether there is in fact a case in favour of infrastructure shortage we have developed a methodology that would allow us to identify the accessibility gains in the recent past, the ones foreseeable in the usually adopted planning periods and the ones possible in a asymptotic scenario of strong generalised accessibility, enabling this way to make explicit identification of the gains already achieved and the ones still possible. The evolution of values of the studied region was compared with the corresponding values in the region Litoral Centro – the region that was also used as benchmark in a previous consultation process to industrial key informants operating in Beira Interior. This thematic is extremely important for the region and for the country since the conclusions obtained will enable a better supported discussion on additional investment in transport infrastructure.

Particle deposition onto a flat plate with various slopes

In this work, a numerical simulation of the deposition of small suspended particles onto a flat plate with various degrees of inclination is performed. The particle deposition rates are obtained for various Reynolds and Rayleigh number groups

A Community-Driven Validation Service for Standard Medical Imaging Objects

Digital medical imaging laboratories contain many distinct types of equipment provided by different manufacturers. Interoperability is a critical issue and the DICOM protocol is a de facto standard in those environments. However, manufacturers' implementation of the standard may have non-conformities at several levels, which will hinder systems' integration. Moreover, medical staff may be responsible for data inconsistencies when entering data. Those situations severely affect the quality of healthcare services since they can disrupt system operations. The existence of software able to confirm data quality and compliance with the DICOM standard is important for programmers, IT staff and healthcare technicians. Although there are a few solutions that try to accomplish this goal, they are unable to deal with certain situations that require user input. Furthermore, these cases usually require the setup of a working environment, which makes the sharing of validation information more difficult. This article proposes and describes the development of a Web DICOM validation service for the community. This solution requires no configuration by the user, promotes validation results share-ability in the community and preserves patient data privacy since files are de-identified on the client side.Comment: Computer Standards & Interfaces, 201

Impact of Geo-distribution and Mining Pools on Blockchains: A Study of Ethereum

Given the large adoption and economical impact of permissionless blockchains, the complexity of the underlying systems and the adversarial environment in which they operate, it is fundamental to properly study and understand the emergent behavior and properties of these systems. We describe our experience on a detailed, one-month study of the Ethereum network from several geographically dispersed observation points. We leverage multiple geographic vantage points to assess the key pillars of Ethereum, namely geographical dispersion, network efficiency, blockchain efficiency and security, and the impact of mining pools. Among other new findings, we identify previously undocumented forms of selfish behavior and show that the prevalence of powerful mining pools exacerbates the geographical impact on block propagation delays. Furthermore, we provide a set of open measurement and processing tools, as well as the data set of the collected measurements, in order to promote further research on understanding permissionless blockchains.Comment: To appear in 50th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 202

Supersymmetric U(N)U(N) Chern-Simons-matter theory and phase transitions

We study ${\mathcal{N}}=2$ supersymmetric $U(N)$ Chern-Simons with $N_{f}$ fundamental and $N_{f}$ antifundamental chiral multiplets of mass $m$ in the complete parameter space spanned by $(g,\,m,\,N,\,N_{f})$, where $g$ denotes the coupling constant. In particular, we analyze the matrix model description of its partition function, both at finite $N$ using the method of orthogonal polynomials together with Mordell integrals and, at large $N$ with fixed $g$, using the theory of Toeplitz determinants. We show for the massless case that there is an explicit realization of the Giveon-Kutasov duality. For finite $N$, with $N>N_{f}$, three regimes that exactly correspond to the known three large $N$ phases of theory are identified and characterized.Comment: 28 pages, v3: Minor modification to match published versio

Model Based Development of Quality-Aware Software Services

Modelling languages and development frameworks give support for functional and structural description of software architectures. But quality-aware applications require languages which allow expressing QoS as a first-class concept during architecture design and service composition, and to extend existing tools and infrastructures adding support for modelling, evaluating, managing and monitoring QoS aspects. In addition to its functional behaviour and internal structure, the developer of each service must consider the fulfilment of its quality requirements. If the service is flexible, the output quality depends both on input quality and available resources (e.g., amounts of CPU execution time and memory). From the software engineering point of view, modelling of quality-aware requirements and architectures require modelling support for the description of quality concepts, support for the analysis of quality properties (e.g. model checking and consistencies of quality constraints, assembly of quality), tool support for the transition from quality requirements to quality-aware architectures, and from quality-aware architecture to service run-time infrastructures. Quality management in run-time service infrastructures must give support for handling quality concepts dynamically. QoS-aware modeling frameworks and QoS-aware runtime management infrastructures require a common evolution to get their integration

The Impacts of Structural Changes in the Labor Market: a Comparative Statics Analysis Using Heterogeneous-agent Framework

In this paper we aim at analyzing the impacts on welfare and wealth and consumption distribution across different labor market structural features. In particular, we pursue a steady-state analysis to assess the impacts of unit vacancy costs, unemployment replacement ratio or the job destruction rate, when they are changed in order to promote a given reduction in the unemployment rate. We combine a labor market search and matching framework with unions, based on Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) with a heterogeneous-agent framework close to Imrohoroglu (1989) in a closed economy model. Such approach enables the joint assessment of macroeconomic welfare and inequality together with implications derived from institutional changes in labor market. Moreover, the transition matrix between worker's states is endogenous, fully derived from labor market conditions. Using feasible calibration to the Euro Area, we conclude that different institutional changes to promote unemployment reduction have non-neutral and differentiated effects on welfare and inequality. While changing unit vacancy costs and job destruction can be ranked, changes in the unemployment benefit replacement ration involve a trade-off between gains in welfare and in consumption/income distribution.Labor market institutions, search and matching models, heterogeneous-agent models, welfare and inequality.

Evaluación del bienestar animal en vacas lecheras de la región Sureste del estado de Hidalgo aplicando el protocolo Welfare Quality

Como resultado de la vinculación con el Cuerpo Académico en Producción Animal de la Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo que cultiva la LGAC de Bienestar Animal en Animales de Producción, se trabajó en el proyecto “Evaluación del Bienestar en Vacas de Hatos Lecheros en los Estados de Hidalgo y México” propuesto por la Dra. María Guadalupe Torres Cardona. Este proyecto obtuvo el primer lugar en el concurso Promotores de Bienestar Animal otorgado por World Animal Protection. De esta colaboración conjunta, se formó a un estudiante de Maestría bajo mi dirección y se publico un artículo científico.El objetivo de esta investigación fue evaluar el grado de bienestar de vacas lecheras aplicando el protocolo propuesto por Welfare Quality® (WQ®) en unidades de producción, de los municipios de Tulancingo, Metepec, Acatlán y Cuautepec en la región sureste del estado de Hidalgo, México. Las unidades se enmarcan en un sistema de producción familiar. El trabajo de campo se realizó en los meses de enero a mayo del 2014. El protocolo utilizado evalúa indicadores fiables, validados y medibles que convergen en un sistema ordenado de aplicación y análisis para evitar interpretaciones antropomorfistas, y son aplicables a cualquier sistema de producción, cuyos resultados permiten priorizar las acciones correctivas a fin de mejorar el grado de bienestar y por ende la producción. La aplicación del protocolo consistió en la evaluación de 29 medidas, 12 criterios y 4 principios para obtener una clasificación final en términos de Excelente, Buena, Aceptable y No clasificada; estos resultados se corroboraron con el simulador de WQ®. El protocolo fue aplicado a 1,187 vacas distribuidas en 52 unidades de producción (UP) con un promedio de 23 animales de tipo Holstein, de las cuales 48 realizaban ordeño manual y 4 mecánico, con un promedio de producción de 16 L/día. En 22 UP se estimó que las vacas pastorean por más de 6 horas por día y en 30, menos de 6 horas. Los resultados mostraron que el total de las UP obtuvieron la clasificación final de Aceptable, lo que indica un grado mínimo de bienestar y muestra la urgencia de mejorar las condiciones de vida de las vacas lecheras; la calificación obtenida para cada principio (en escala de 0 a 100) fue: para el P 1 (alimentación adecuada) 32 puntos; para el P 2 (alojamiento adecuado) 42 puntos; para el P 3 (salud adecuada) 23 puntos y para el P 4 (comportamiento adecuado) 28 puntos. Ninguno de estos valores rebasa la media de la escala. En la evaluación de WQ®, las medidas son las que aportan la información que puntualiza los aspectos que deterioran el bienestar y resalta aquellos positivos, tal es el caso de cojeras graves donde sólo se encontró 0.16% de vacas afectadas siendo este un valor bajo; en cuanto a suciedad de patas, ubres y flancos mostraron valores superiores al 70% en todos ellos, valores inadecuados e inherentes al sistema de producción. Dos medidas que sobresalen por su gravedad son mortalidad (4.70%) y distocias (14.9%), en ambos casos marcados en el protocolo como situaciones graves. La aplicabilidad al 100% del protocolo en este tipo de unidades de producción no es posible, obedeciendo sin duda a su origen dadas las necesidades de la realidad europea; sin embargo, puede ser utilizado como una herramienta útil para valorar el bienestar animal de las vacas lecheras en el sistema de producción a baja escala en el altiplano mexicano.Proyecto financiado por Fundación Hidalgo Produce A. C