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Summary This study aims to detect voice disorders related to vocal fold nodule, Reinke’s edema and neurological pathologies through multiband cepstral features of the sustained vowel /a/. Detection is performed between pairs of study groups and multiband analysis is accomplished using the wavelet transform. For each pair of groups, a parameters selection is carried out. Time series of the selected parameters are used as input for four classifiers with leave-one-out cross validation. Classification accuracies of 100% are achieved for all pairs including the control group, surpassing the state-of-art methods based on cepstral features, while accuracies higher than 88.50% are obtained for the pathological pairs. The results indicated that the method may be adequate to assist in the diagnosis of the voice disorders addressed. The results must be updated in the future with a larger population to ensure generalization.

A strawberry spreadable cream was developed, valorizing regional raw materials, contributing to food waste reduction and agri-food ecosystem sustainability. Spreadable creams are water-in-oil emulsions whose lipid phase normally contains a blend of vegetable oils, natural colourants, stabilizers, emulsifiers, flavourings, antioxidants, lecithin, and fat-soluble vitamins. The aqueous phase normally contains skim milk proteins and small quantities of other ingredients, such as salt, preservatives, thickeners, and water-soluble vitamins. The methodology involved the experimental technological development articulated with microbiological, proximal, physicochemical, and sensorial analysis. This new product revealed nutritional advantages over similar products already on the market. The final prototype was subjected to food pairing and food design with incremental acceptance according to gastronomic use, in addition to its direct use as a spreadable cream. This work was part of the project Agrio et Emulsio—new products development (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-023583), whose main objective was the formulation and design of innovative food emulsions based on processed raw materials, with potential application in certain markets such as gourmet, diet, and vegan.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases and it is strongly associated with age. There are four AD stages: mild cognitive impairment (MCI), mild, moderate (ADM) and advanced (ADA). This work aims at developing a new tool capable of distinguishing the different stages of AD at scalp level. Features such as the conventional frequencies relative power of the power spectrum wavelet packet transform have been extracted from the electroencephalogram signals in order to feed four classifiers: random forest decision trees, linear and quadratic support-vector-machines and linear discriminant analysis. The obtained results were analyzed through topographic maps and enabled the distinguish between binary groups with the following overall accuracies: 85.5% (C-MCI); 88.2% (C-ADM); 91.4% (C-ADA); 89.7% (MCI-ADM); 82.4% (MCI-ADA) and 81.3% (ADM-ADA). The applied method was able to detect major differences in scalp areas above the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain as AD progresses.

The use of doxorubicin (DOX) in clinical practice continues to be challenged by its severe toxicity. DOX cytotoxic activity is not only directed against malignant tumours, given that the treatment will damage healthy tissues as well leading to irreversible injuries. This study aimed to address the in vivo effects of DOX and its co-administration with a new analog of thioamide; thiocyanoacetamide (TA) on the germinal epithelium. Thus, male rats received either intravenous injection (iv) of 0.03 mg/kg of body weight/week, 0.9% NaCl and were regarded as the control group (CTR), treated with DOX (3.7 mg/kg/week iv), TA [10 mg/kg/day intragastrically (ig)] or a co-supplementation of DOX and TA. After 50 days, the left testes were dissected and used for toluidine blue, periodic acid-Schiff (PAS) staining (to evaluate the change in polysaccharides/glycoproteins content), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) (to assess the morphological damages). To estimate the impact of the test compounds on mitochondrial biogenesis, the expression of NAD-dependent deacetylase sirtuin-3 (SIRT-3) and proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator 1-alpha (PGC-1α) were evaluated by immunofluorescence. Apoptotic cells were observed using Hoechst 33324 fluorescent staining. Data showed testicular injuries in the DOX-treated group, manifested by a significant decrease in total germ cell (GC) number, alteration of Sertoli cell (SC) nucleolus, anchoring junction, along with modifications of the basement membrane (BM) regularity and increase in apoptotic cell count. Mitochondrial aspect and SIRT-3 and PGC-1α expression in the testis were unaffected by the DOX. Co-therapy increased GC number, decreased apoptotic cell count, and restored the BM and anchoring junction regular aspects. This study provides novel insights into understanding DOX-mediated impairment in rats' testis and might offer some basis for the emerging new alternative therapeutic schemes in male patients undergoing chemotherapy.

This study evaluates the simulation of water balance components at half-hourly time steps from the Canadian Land Surface Scheme (CLASS) when driven by a 500-year stochastic meteorological data set produced by the Advanced WEather GENerator (AWE-GEN) at two boreal sites with contrasting water availability. The CLASS was driven by ERA5 reanalysis data (CLASS-CTL) over 39 years and its output was used as a surrogate for land surface observations. At both sites, the mean monthly and annual values of all meteorological variables used to drive CLASS, including precipitation, are well captured by AWE-GEN, but their variability is, sometimes, biased. In general, CLASS driven by stochastic data (CLASS-WG) tends to produce higher evapotranspiration compared to values simulated by CLASS-CTL, especially during spring and summer at the wet site. The interannual evapotranspiration-precipitation and runoff-precipitation relationships derived from CLASS-WG and those derived from CLASS-CTL were very similar to each other at the dry site; they both indicate that evapotranspiration and runoff are limited by water availability. At the wet site, however, CLASS-WG only captured well the interannual runoff-precipitation relationship. The sensitivity analysis shows that CLASS water fluxes are particularly affected by the replacement of physically consistent input time series of incoming short-wave radiation, precipitation, temperature, and specific humidity. In conclusion, the results show that even though a weather generator can produce coherent climate time series, the use of this synthetic data as meteorological forcing in a physically based land surface model does not necessarily reproduce the complex surface processes, such as the surface water fluxes. More studies are encouraged to further analyze the constraints of this framework.

The Canadian Land Surface Scheme (CLASS) has been applied over the years in coupled and uncoupled (offline) modes at local, regional, and global scales using various forcing datasets. In this study, CLASS is applied at a local scale in the offline configuration to evaluate its performance when driven by the ERA5 reanalysis. Simulated surface energy fluxes, as well as several other water balance components, are investigated at four sites across the Canadian boreal biome. The results from CLASS driven by ERA5 (CLASS-RNL) are compared with available in situ measurements, as well as with results from CLASS driven by observations (CLASS-CTL). Additional simulations are conducted to evaluate the effects of biases in the ERA5 precipitation, where CLASS is forced by ERA5 data, but with ERA5 precipitation being replaced by observed precipitation (CLASS-RNL-ObsP). The results show that simulated surface variables in CLASS-RNL are in good agreement with observations as well as with those simulated in CLASS-CTL. The CLASS-RNL captures well the observed annual cycles of the surface energy and water fluxes, as well as the year-to-year variation of snow depth, soil temperature, and soil moisture. A strong correlation is found between the observed and CLASS-RNL simulated snow depth and soil temperature. Biases in the ERA5 precipitation did not affect the simulation of soil state variables, whereas the simulated surface heat and water fluxes, as well as the snow depth, were significantly affected. For instance, the simulated runoff in CLASS-RNL is much higher than in CLASS-RNL-ObsP and CLASS-CTL at the most humid sites due to significant positive bias in ERA5 precipitation.

O custo do processamento de uma consulta em sistemas de banco de dados distribuídos liga-se diretamente ao custo da transferência de dados na rede. A Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) e uma tecnologia que permite (re)programar dispositivos de rede via software. Sua programabilidade proporciona novas possibilidades para gerenciar topologias de forma dinâmica, possibilitando ainda o processamento de dados nesses dispositivos. Este artigo avalia o processamento distribuído da operação hash join em switches de rede, a partir de um modelo de custo. Os resultados mostram que o processamento dessas operações em switches de rede alcança desempenho comparável ao processamento tradicional em servidores com um trafego de dados similar.

Despite the popularity of microservice architectures using container based virtualization, there are not many studies that describe how logging practices are being employed in this scenario. In this empirical study, we cloned 10,918 of the most stargazed GitHub Python repositories with a Docker/Kubernetes associated file. We were able to find 1,166 Python projects that used containers. A custom parser identified and saved log statements from Python source code. We discovered that certain licenses tend to have a higher log density; over 99% of projects use the built-in Python logging library; the repository age does not affect its log statements/LLOC ratio; logging verbosity levels debug and info are used almost twice as much as warning and error. We hope our study provides the community with useful data about this topic, possibly contributing to the improvement of techniques that stimulate its applications.

Este trabalho apresenta os resultados preliminares de um algoritmo em desenvolvimento para detecção em tempo real de estados emocionais através da análise de imagens do rosto. Para avaliar o estado emocional, o algoritmo de Viola-Jones é aplicado para segmentar o rosto e uma rede neural convolucional (CNN) é utilizada para classificar as imagens analisadas. Os resultados demonstram uma acurácia de 96,18% na classificação do grupo de teste. Ainda assim, o algoritmo será otimizado para uma melhor detecção e a base de dados utilizada deverá ser ampliada de forma a generalizar os resultados., This paper presents the preliminary results of an under development algorithm for emotional states real-time detection through an analysis of face images. In order to evaluate the emotional state, the Viola-Jones algorithm is applied to segment the face and a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to classify the analyzed images. The results show an accuracy of 96.18% for the classification of the test group. The algorithm still need to be optimized for better face detection and the used database must be extended in order to generalize the results.

Este trabalho tem como objetivo diferenciar distúrbios vocais relacionados com nódulo vocal e edema de Reinke através de parâmetros não-lineares. Os parâmetros são obtidos da banda completa e, por meio da transformada wavelet, de sub-bandas de vogal sustentada. A wavelet que maximiza a capacidade discriminante individual dos parâmetros é buscada. Duas seleções dos parâmetros em sub-bandas são realizadas. Os parâmetros em banda completa e em sub-bandas, e os conjuntos selecionados são aplicados a vários classificadores com validação cruzada leave-one-out. Acurácias de classificação de até 86,2% são obtidas sem seleção de parâmetros enquanto acurácias até 100% são alcançadas com parâmetros selecionados., This work aims to detect vocal disorders related to vocal nodule and Reinke’s edema through non-linear features. The features are computed from the fullband and, by means of the wavelet transform, from sub-bands of sustained vowel. The wavelet that maximizes the individual discriminating capacity of the features is sought. Two sub-band parameter selections are performed. The fullband and sub-band parameters, and the selected sets are applied to several classifiers with leave-one-out cross-validation. Classification accuracies of up to 86.2% are obtained without parameter selection while accuracies of up to 100% are achieved with selected parameters.

Orientador: Luiz Valdrighi Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Odontologia de Piracica Resumo: O propósito desta pesquisa foi avaliar "in vitro" os diferentes métodos de colocação de pasta curativa de hidróxido de cálcio em canais radiculares. Foram confeccionados 120 blocos de resina acrilica transparente simulando canais radiculares com diâmetros de matriz apical de 0,30 mm (curvos) 0,50 mm, 0,80 mm, 1,20 mm e 1,40 mm. Os métodos testados foram: Limas K girando em sentido anti-horário, Espiral de Lentulo girando em sentido horário, Compactadores de McSpadden girando em sentido horário, Canal Finder, Ultra-Som e Seringas, em 4 canais de cada diâmetro. A eficácia foi avaliada, mediante exame radiográfico nos terços cervical, médio e apical, verificando o grau de compactação dos. canais preenchidos. A Espiral de Lentulo foi o método mais eficiente, seguido em ordem pelas Limas e Compactadores de McSpadden, principalmente no terço apical. A injeção pelas Seringas, Canal Finder e Ultra-Som mostraram-se pouco eficientes. O tempo gasto para a colocação da pasta curativa de hidróxido de cálcio foi pequeno, independente do método, sendo considerado um fator irrelevante Abstract: The purpose of this research was evaluate "in vitro" the different insertion methods of calcium hydroxide paste into root canais. One hundred and twenty blocks were made with c1ear plastic blocks simulating root canais with apicaI matrix diameters with 0,30 mm (with curves), 0,50 mm, 0,80 mm, 1,20 mm and 1,40 mm. The tested methods were: counterclock wise rotation of K Files, c1ockwise rotation of Lentulo Spiral, c1ockwise rotation of McSpadden Compactors, Canal Finder, Ultrasound and Syringes at 4 canais of each diameter. This efficiency was evaluated through radiograph examination in the thirds cervical, haIf and apicaI checking the completed canais compactation level. The most efficient method was the Lentulo Spiral, followed by the Files and McSpaddtm Compactors, main1y at the apical one third. The Syringe injection, CanaI Finder and Ultrasound were little efficient. The used time was minimum, and it was considered as an irrelevant factor Mestrado Farmacologia Mestre em Ciências

O sistema de nuvem, como importante fornecedor de serviços escaláveis online, trouxe consigo um novo campo de pesquisa. Este trabalho propõe uma ferramenta que efetue o monitoramento, a caracterização e a reprodução das atividades e consumo de CPU, memória RAM e tráfego de rede de um ambiente de nuvem Infrastructure as a Service, apresentando uma solução que apoia a pesquisa e o caráter reprodutível do método científico.

Cold content (CC) is an internal energy state within a snowpack and is defined by the energy deficit required to attain isothermal snowmelt temperature (0 °C). For any snowpack, fulfilling the cold content deficit is a pre-requisite before the onset of the snowmelt. Cold content for a given snowpack thus plays a critical role because it affects both the timing and the rate of snowmelt. Estimating the cold content is a labour-intensive task as it requires extracting in-situ snow temperature and density. Hence, few studies have focused on characterizing this snowpack variable. This study describes the multilayer cold content of a snowpack and its variability across four sites with contrasting canopy structures within a coniferous boreal forest in southern Québec, Canada, throughout winter 2017–18. The analysis was divided into two steps. In the first step, the observed CC data from weekly snowpits for 60 % of the snow cover period were examined. During the second step, a reconstructed time series of CC was produced and analyzed to highlight the high-resolution temporal variability of CC for the full snow cover period. To accomplish this, the Canadian Land Surface Scheme (CLASS; featuring a single-layer snow model) was first implemented to obtain simulations of the average snow density at each of the four sites. Next, an empirical procedure was used to produce realistic density profiles, which, when combined with in situ continuous snow temperature measurements from an automatic profiling station, provides a time series of CC estimates at half-hour intervals for the entire winter. At the four sites, snow persisted on the ground for 218 days, with melt events occurring on 42 of those days. Based on snowpit observations, the largest mean CC (−2.62 MJ m−2) was observed at the site with the thickest snow cover. The maximum difference in mean CC between the four study sites was −0.47 MJ m−2, representing a site-to-site variability of 20 %. Before analyzing the reconstructed CC time series, a comparison with snowpit data confirmed that CLASS yielded reasonable estimates of the snow water equivalent (SWE) (R2 = 0.64 and percent bias (Pbias) = −17.1 %), bulk snow density (R2 = 0.71 and Pbias = 1.6 %), and bulk cold content (R2 = 0.90 and Pbias = −2.0 %). A snow density profile derived by utilizing an empirical formulation also provided reasonable estimates of cold content (R2 = 0.42 and Pbias = 5.17 %). Thanks to these encouraging results, the reconstructed and continuous CC series could be analyzed at the four sites, revealing the impact of rain-on-snow and cold air pooling episodes on the variation of CC. The continuous multilayer cold content time series also provided us with information about the effect of stand structure, local topography, and meteorological conditions on cold content variability. Additionally, a weak relationship between canopy structure and CC was identified.

Meteorological measurements were performed on the non-glaciated coastal area of the Ferraz Station, the Brazilian Antarctic Station, at King George Island. Near the Station there are different topographic attributes, such as sea, glacier and hill, in addition to the intermittent presence of snow. The local atmospheric characteristics depend on wind direction, which is related in small scale to the local features and in large scale to the synoptic systems acting over the region. Westerly winds were the most frequent, with relatively lower speed and higher temperature and humidity values compared to the also frequent easterly winds, related to the coolest and driest winds. The average monthly barometric pressure and wind speed were higher during winter, associated with the presence of high-pressure systems. The radiation balance, measured for the first time in Ferraz Station, evidenced the presence of clouds throughout the year, especially during summer months, associated with the frequent synoptic systems of the region. During nighttimes (daytimes) and in winter (summer) months, the surface lost (gained) energy mainly by net longwave (shortwave) radiation. Reflected shortwave radiation was higher during spring months because of the its relatively higher albedo values combined with the already increased magnitude of the incident shortwave radiation.

Millionen Menschen leiden weltweit, weil ihnen der Zugang zu ausreichender Gesundheitsversorgung verwehrt wird oder weil die Impfstoffe, Diagnostika und Medikamente, die sie benotigen, nicht entwickelt werden. Dieser Beitrag erklart anhand konkreter Beispiel aus den Projekten von Arzte ohne Grenzen/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), wie herkommliche, zumeist marktbasierte Mechanismen der Forschung und Entwicklung von Diagnostika und Medikamenten die Bedurfnisse der armsten Patient*innen vernachlassigen. Basierend auf den Erfahrungen von Arzte ohne Grenzen in den Einsatzlandern und der Arbeit der MSF-Medikamentenkampagne pladiert der Artikel dafur, dass sich die Bundesregierung und deutsche humanitare Akteure aktiv mit den politischen und wirtschaftlichen Grunden fur die Vernachlassigung der gesundheitlichen Bedurfnisse der vulnerabelsten Menschen befassen.

Achieving a balanced healthcare workforce requires health planners to adjust the supply of health human resources (HHR). Mathematical programming models have been widely used to assist such planning, but the way uncertainty is usually considered in these models entails methodological and practical issues and often disregards radical yet plausible changes to the future. This study proposes a new socio-technical methodology to factor in uncertainty over the future within mathematical programming modelling. The methodological approach makes use of foresight and scenario planning concepts to build tailor-made scenarios and scenario fit input parameters, which are then used within mathematical programming models. Health stakeholders and experts are engaged in the scenario building process. Causal map modelling and morphological analysis are adopted to digest stakeholders and experts’ information about the future and give origin to contrasting and meaningful scenarios describing plausible future. These scenarios are then adjusted and validated by stakeholders and experts, who then elicit their best quantitative estimates for coherent combinations of input parameters for the mathematical programming model under each scenario. These sets of parameters for each scenario are then fed to the mathematical programming model to obtain optimal solutions that can be interpreted in light of the meaning of the scenario. The proposed methodology has been applied to a case study involving HHR planning in Portugal, but its scope far extends HHR planning, being especially suited for addressing strategic and policy planning problems that are sensitive to input parameters. info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

Este trabalho tem como objetivo detectar distúrbios vocais relacionados com nódulo vocal, edema de Reinke e patologias neurológicas através de parâmetros cepstrais multibandada vogal sustentada /a/. A detecção é realizada entre pares de grupos de estudo e a análise multibanda é efetuada usando a transformada Wavelet. Para cada par de grupos, uma seleção de parâmetros é realizada. Estatísticas dos parâmetros selecionados são utilizadas como entrada para quatro classificadores com validação cruza da leave-one-out. Acurácias de classificação iguais ou superiores a 96,70% são obtidas para 6 pares de grupos de estudo enquanto apenas 74,20% é alcançado para o par Edema/Nódulo., This work aims to detect vocal disorders related to vocal nodule, Reinke’s edema and neurological pathologies through multiband cepstral measures of the sustained vowel/a/. Detection is performed between pairs of study groups and multiband analysis is accomplished using the Wavelet transform. For each pair of groups, a parameters selection is performed. Statistics of the selected parameters are used as input for four classifiers with leave-one-out cross validation. Classification accuracies equal or greater than 96.70% are obtained for 6pairs of study groups while only 74.20% is achieved for the Edema/Nodule pair

Output-only methods are widely used to characterize the dynamic behavior of very diverse structures. However, their application to floating structures may be limited due to their strong nonlinear behavior. Therefore, since there is very little experience on the application of these experimental tools to these very peculiar structures, it is very important to develop studies, either based on numerical simulations or on real experimental data, to better understand their potential and limitations. In an initial phase, the use of numerical simulations permits a better control of all the involved variables. In this work, the Covariance-driven Stochastic Subspace Identification (SSI-COV) algorithm is applied to numerically simulated data of two different solutions to Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWT) and for its capability of tracking the rigid body motion modal properties and susceptibility to different modeling restrictions and environmental conditions tested. The feasibility of applying the methods in an automated fashion in the processing of a large number of datasets is also evaluated. While the structure natural frequencies were consistently obtained from all the simulations, some difficulties were observed in the estimation of the mode shape components in the most changeling scenarios. The estimated modal damping coefficients were in good agreement with the expected results. From all the results, it can be concluded that output-only methods are capable of characterizing the dynamic behavior of a floating structure, even in the context of continuous dynamic monitoring using automated tracking of the modal properties, and should now be tested under uncontrolled environmental loads.

Quando falamos em esporte de alto rendimento, estamos falando diretamente em vencer os limites, e na natação milésimos de segundo, fazem a diferença. Os aspectos técnicos como a saída, o nado e a virada são os principais responsáveis pelo resultado final em provas de 50 e 100 metros e nestas provas, à saída tem papel importante no resultado final podendo corresponder a 10% (50 m) e 5% (100 m) do tempo total de prova. Desta forma esta pesquisa buscou desenvolver um método de análise da fase inicial das provas de natação, a saída de cima do bloco até o início do nado, de forma individual, com o intuito de aprimorar seus tempos finais de prova, otimizando a terceira fase da saída (fase submersa), por meio de uma análise biomecânica das fases que compõem a saída do nado livre. Foram utilizados nove (9) atletas da categoria máster que participam de competições nacionais em provas de 50 metros e 100 metros e que possuam uma carga mínima de cinco (5) treinos por semana. Para a análise do movimento as imagens foram captadas por quatro (4) câmeras sendo três (3) posicionadas perpendicularmente à raia do teste (2 externas e 1 submersa) e uma (1) posicionada posteriormente ao atleta. Todas as imagens foram editadas e analisadas através do software Kinovea 0.8.24. e os dados de velocidade e aceleração obtidos foram analisados e plotados através do software Microsoft Excel®. Após os testes e as análises dos vídeos e dos dados de cada atleta foi possível verificar a eficácia do método para encontrar possíveis erros de execução na técnica de saída e criando possibilidades de correção para técnicos e atletas de provas de velocidade (50 e 100 metros), demonstrando ser um método de baixo custo e de fácil manuseio. When we talk about high performance sport, we're talking directly to overcome the limits, and in swimming, milliseconds make difference. Technical aspects such as start, swimming and turn, are the main responsible for the final result in tests of 50 and 100 meters and in these swim, the output as so important in the final result, may correspond to 10% (50 m) and 5% (100 m) of the total test time. Thus this research has developed a method of analysis of the initial phase of the swimming competitions, the start from the block to the start of the swim, individually, in order to improve their end times swim, optimizing the third stage of the (submerged phase) by means of a biomechanical analysis of the stages that comprise the start of the freestyle. Nine (9) athletes of master category participating in national competitions in 50 meters and 100 meters and have a minimum charge of five (5) workouts per week were used. For the analysis of motion images were captured by four (4) cameras, three (3) positioned perpendicularly to the test ray (2 external and 1 submerged) and one (1) positioned behind the athlete. All images were edited and analyzed by Kinovea 0.8.24 software and the velocity and acceleration data obtained were analyzed and plotted using software Microsoft Excel®. After testing and analysis of video data of each athletes was able to verify the effectiveness of the method for finding possible implementation errors in the start technic and creating correction possibilities for technical and speed events athletes (50 and 100 meters), proving to be a method of low cost and easy to handle. Dissertação (Mestrado)