INSA scientific activities in the space astronomy area

Support to Astronomy operations is an important and long-lived activity within INSA. Probably the best known (and traditional) INSA activities are those related with real-time spacecraft operations: Ground station maintenance and operation (Ground station engineers and operators); spacecraft and payload real-time operation (spacecraft and instruments controllers); computing infrastructure maintenance (operators, analysts) and general site services.In this paper, we'll show a different perspective, probably not so well-known, presenting some INSA recent activities at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) and NASA Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex (MDSCC) directly related to scientific operations. Basic lines of activity involved include: Operations support for science operations; system and software support for real time systems; technical administration and IT support; R \& D activities, radioastronomy (at MDSCC and ESAC) and scientific research projects. This paper is structured as follows: first, INSA activities in two ESA cornerstone astrophysics missions, XMM-Newton and Herschel, will be outlined. Then, our activities related to Science infrastructure services, represented by the Virtual Observatory (VO) framework and the Science Archives development facilities are briefly shown. Radio Astronomy activities will be described afterwards, and finally, a few research topics in which INSA scientists are involved will be also described.Comment: 6 pages. Highlights of Spanish Astrophysics V Proceedings of the VIII Scientific Meeting of the Spanish AstronomicalSociety (SEA) held in Santander, 7-11 July, 200

Perspectives on institutional change - water management in Europe

CONTENTS: Mapping institutional change... 3, Insa Theesfeld, Frauke Pirscher; Affordability as an institutional obstacle to water-related price reforms... 9, Erik Gawel, Wolfgang Bretschneider; Analysing the shortcomings of the Ukrainian urban waste water sector - Institutional options for modernisation ... 35, Herwig Unnerstall, Nina Hagemann; Gemeinschaftsgüter und Gemeinwohl - Theoretischer Erkenntnisgehalt und praktische Relevanz für die Regionalentwicklung am Beispiel von Wasserinfrastrukturen und Kulturlandschaften ... 55, Andreas Röhring, Timothy Moss, Ludger Gailing, Rita Gudermann; Explaining top-down institutional design: The introduction of River Basin Management in Portugal... 85, Andreas Thiel, Catrin Egerton; Decentralization failures in post-socialist fishery management ... 107, Insa Theesfeld, Oscar Schmidt --

Análise de dados microbiológicos de géneros alimentícios prontos a comer servidos no ano de 2013 em unidades de restauração coletiva

Objetivo: Apresentar uma análise dos dados obtidos na interpretação dos ensaios microbiológicas aos géneros alimentícios prontos a comer, efetuados no âmbito dos protocolos de vigilância estabelecidos com o INSA, em 2013, de acordo com os “Valores Guia, INSA”. Não sendo critérios obrigatórios, os “Valores Guia, INSA” constituem linhas de orientação relevantes na evidência do cumprimento dos procedimentos de boas práticas em unidades de restauração coletiva

Free-space laser optical link simulation software

GDAF (Displays and Photonics Applications Group) in Electronics Technology Department at University Carlos III de Madrid develops a hardware-software application for a communications free-space optical link, in a Project with INSA corp. It aims to substitute the usual radio frequencies link, because of the increasing of bandwidth and the guarantee of privacity. Optics and electronics collaboration is searched

Glaucoma and cigarette smoking: a review of narrative reviews

Background: Glaucoma is an optic neuropathy associated with visual field changes for which high intra-ocular pressure is a major risk factor. Emerging research indicates that modifiable factors, among which the cigarette smoke, besides IOP may be associated with the presence of glaucoma. Objective: The objective of the study was to perform a review of narrative reviews to examine on the relationship between cigarette smoking and glaucoma. Methods: The results of all narrative reviews in the scientific literature about glaucoma and tobacco smoking were analyzed. A quality assessment was performed according to an easy and convenient tool for the quality assessment of narrative reviews for systematic reviews (International Narrative Systematic assessment) the INSA tool. Literature searches were performed using PubMed. Results: 20 studies about relation between glaucoma and smoke were collected, no restriction language was applied. 15 of these studies have been excluded. We selected among them 5 reviews. With the INSA tool we measured the quality of the 5 selected narrative reviews. Studies that had a highest score with the INSA tool were two: A. Coleman et al. “Risk Factors for Glaucoma Needing More Attention” and R. Salowe et al. “Primary Open-Angle Glaucoma in Individuals of African Descent: A Review of Risk Factors”. Conclusion: The narrative reviews analyzed underline that there is no definitive association between cigarette smoking

Latin American Agricultural Trade: The Role of the WTO in Sustainable Virtual Water Flows

International agricultural trade has been growing significantly during the last decade. Many countries rely on imports to ensure adequate food supplies to the people. A few are becoming food baskets of the world. This process raises issues about the food security in depending countries and potentially unsustainable land and water use in exporting countries. In this paper, we analyse the impacts of amplified farm trade on natural resources, especially water. Farm exports and imports of five Latin America countries (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru and Chile) are examined carefully. A preliminary analysis indicates that virtual water imports can save valuable water resources in water-short countries, such as Mexico and Chile. Major exporting countries, including Brazil and Argentina, have become big exporters due to abundant natural resource endowments. The opportunity costs of agricultural production in those countries are identified as being low, because of the predominant green water use. It is concluded that virtual water trade can be a powerful tool to alleviate water stress in semi-arid countries. However, for exporting nations a sustainable water use can only be guaranteed if environmental production costs are fully reflected in the commodity prices. There is no basis for erecting environmental trade tariffs on exporters though. Setting up legal foundations for them in full compliance with WTOs processes would be a daunting task.farm trade, water, blue water, green water, global sustainability, food production, global food demand, water pricing, WTO, International Relations/Trade, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Possible contaminants of frying oils

Artigo publicado também em inglês.Tânia Gonçalves Albuquerque agradece a Bolsa de Investigação Científica Ricardo Jorge (BRJ/DAN-2012) financiada pelo INSA, I.P. Este trabalho foi financiado pelo INSA no âmbito do projeto “PTranSALT - Avaliação de ácidos gordos trans,gordura saturada e sal em alimentos processados: estudo do panorama português (2012DAN828)”

Human case of West Nile neuroinvasive disease in Portugal, summer 2015

A case of West Nile virus (WNV) infection was reported in the Algarve region, Portugal, in the first week of September 2015. WNV is known to circulate in Portugal, with occasional reports in horses and birds (2004 to 2011) and very sporadically human cases (in 2004 and in 2010). Here we present the clinical and laboratory aspects related to the first human case of West Nile neuroinvasive disease reported in Portugal

Multiple perspectives HMM-based feature engineering for credit card fraud detection

Machine learning and data mining techniques have been used extensively in order to detect credit card frauds. However, most studies consider credit card transactions as isolated events and not as a sequence of transactions. In this article, we model a sequence of credit card transactions from three different perspectives, namely (i) does the sequence contain a Fraud? (ii) Is the sequence obtained by fixing the card-holder or the payment terminal? (iii) Is it a sequence of spent amount or of elapsed time between the current and previous transactions? Combinations of the three binary perspectives give eight sets of sequences from the (training) set of transactions. Each one of these sets is modelled with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Each HMM associates a likelihood to a transaction given its sequence of previous transactions. These likelihoods are used as additional features in a Random Forest classifier for fraud detection. This multiple perspectives HMM-based approach enables an automatic feature engineering in order to model the sequential properties of the dataset with respect to the classification task. This strategy allows for a 15% increase in the precision-recall AUC compared to the state of the art feature engineering strategy for credit card fraud detection.Comment: Presented as a poster in the conference SAC 2019: 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing in April 201