An Investigation of People with Persistent Low Back Pain and High Pain-Related Fear

Pain that is interpreted as threatening can lead to fear, avoidance and disengagement from valued activities. Low back pain (LBP) associated with high pain-related fear is disabling. The body of work presented in this doctoral thesis aims to better understand the relationship between pain, fear and disability; and how the process of change unfolds for individuals with persistent LBP and high pain-related fear over the course of an exposure-based behavioural intervention

Comparison Of Statistical Failure Models To Support Sewer System Operation

Currently, achieving appropriate operative performance of water infrastructure has become a high priority in urbanized areas. Particularly, providing reliable sewerage service is central for human well-being and its development (Kleidorfer, et al. 2013). Having that wastewater system management is an increasingly complex task due to a number of hardly predictable factors (e.g. deterioration of system components and climate variability), recent research efforts have been focusing on developing methods to identify optimum proactive rehabilitation and maintenance strategies, some of which are based on the identification of the sewerage structures in most need of attention. To meet such a goal, different forecast failure models for urban water infrastructure have been recently developed. These models are able to assess the future behavior of water supply and sewer system structures. This study presents the comparison of two different failure statistical packages for urban water systems: (a) The FAIL software that calculates failure predictions based on two alternative stochastic processes, the single-variate Poisson process and the Linear Extended Yule process (LEYP) (see Martins et al., 2013) and (b) The SIMA software that, trough out a series of statistical tests, selects a failure model that is based either on an homogeneous Poisson process (HPP), a renewal process or a non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP), which allows changes of trend in the failure intensity (see Rodríguez, et al. 2012). Those different statistical models are applied to two contrasting urban wastewater systems: Bogotá (Colombia, 7.5 million inhabitants) and Oeiras e Amadora (Portugal, 10.000 inhabitants). Customer complaints and failure databases were gathered in order to analyze two different types of sewer failures named sediment-related blockages and structural failures. Multiple analyses are carried out in order to assess the impact of sewer system characteristics, system complexity, spatial resolution and data availability onto models forecasting efficiency

Diabetes Tracker and Volunteer+ Software Engineering for Sustainability

In a world where sustainability is increasingly important, we must look for ways to promote it; the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) fulfill this function. In software engineering, one of the main challenges for the success of a software solution is to achieve sustainability. This chapter introduces the development of two mobile applications on Android: Diabetes Tracker and Volunteer+ that are inspired by the SDGs, incorporating the principles and dimensions of the Karlskrona Manifesto in relation to the software development phases. In this investigation, a customized adaptation of the Scrum agile methodology was used, with a concern to promote software engineering for sustainability. To achieve this end, an iterative approach is used, allowing the principles of the manifesto to be crossed to emphasize the various dimensions of sustainability. The main results can be seen in the applications developed, specifically to facilitate the control of the diabetes disease and promote quality health, as well as enhance the participation of citizens by promoting volunteering

Propuesta de simplificación administrativa utilizando gobierno electrónico en la Autoridad Nacional del Servicio Civil

Publicación a texto completo no autorizada por el autorBusca mejorar el servicio que brindan las entidades públicas como, por ejemplo, la excesiva cantidad de trámites y la burocratización de éstas, entre otros. En el Perú han elaborado estrategias que aplican el gobierno electrónico para la reforma administrativa. En los últimos años, la modernización de la administración pública se ha apoyado de manera importante en la incorporación de tecnologías de la información y comunicación (TIC’s) a los procesos y servicios gubernamentales. Las investigaciones realizadas en América Latina. El presente trabajo es la formulación práctica del Gobierno electrónico como herramienta de apoyo a la Simplificación Administrativa aplicada en la Autoridad Nacional del Servicio Civil - SERVIR, entidad administradora de los recursos humanos del estado. En los capítulos siguientes se detallará como se plantea o solucionar los problemas generados por la burocratización de los trámites

Libro para colorear sobre la simbología del color según la percepción visual de los estudiantes en el Callao - 2019

El presente proyecto de investigación lleva por nombre “Libro para colorear sobre la simbología del color según la percepción visual de los estudiantes en el Callao – 2019”, cuyo objetivo es: comprobar la simbología del color mediante el libro para colorear según la percepción visual de los estudiantes de la I.E. Señor de la Misericordia, Callao – 2019. El tipo de investigación según su finalidad es aplicada, con un diseño cuasi-experimental y un enfoque cuantitativo; acerca de la muestra, esta fue censal, tomándose a los 300 estudiantes de la I.E. Señor de la Misericordia, separándolos en dos grupos: Control y Experimento, cada uno conformado por 150 estudiantes, a los cuales se les aplicó una lista de cotejo de 14 ítems. La confiabilidad se obtuvo con el método del KR 20 a través del programa Excel 2010, y los datos se obtuvieron con el programa SPSS, versión 22. Los resultados indican que se acepta la hipótesis general de la investigación, debido a que hay una significancia de 0,000, por lo tanto, se determina que los niños perciben visualmente de manera positiva la simbología del color. En conclusión, los estudiantes de la I.E. Señor de la Misericordia del Callao, tanto del grupo Control como Experimento, perciben visualmente de manera positiva la simbología del color según Goethe, esto se afirma a través de la significancia menor de 0,05; también, mediante la identificación de los personajes o elementos de las ilustraciones, la comprensión de las instrucciones, y la asociación de los colores con las distintas emociones que se les relacionan

Swarm-based Descriptor Combination and its Application for Image Classification

In this paper, we deal with the descriptor combination problem in image classification tasks. This problem refers to the definition of an appropriate combination of image content descriptors that characterize different visual properties, such as color, shape and texture. In this paper, we propose to model the descriptor combination as a swarm-based optimization problem, which finds out the set of parameters that maximizes the classification accuracy of the Optimum-Path Forest (OPF) classifier. In our model,  a descriptor is seen as a pair composed of a feature extraction algorithm and a suitable distance function. Our strategy here is to combine distance scores defined by different descriptors, as well as to employ them to weight OPF edges, which connect samples in the feature space. An extensive evaluation of several swarm-based optimization techniques was performed. Experimental results have demonstrated the robustness of the proposed combination approach