Abstract: PARADIGMA (PARticipative Approach to DIsease
Global Management) is a pilot project which aims to develop and
demonstrate an Internet based reference framework to share scientific
resources and findings in the treatment of major diseases.
PARADIGMA defines and disseminates a common methodology and
optimised protocols (Clinical Pathways) to support service functions
directed to patients and individuals on matters like prevention, posthospitalisation
support and awareness. PARADIGMA will provide a
platform of information services - user oriented and optimised
against social, cultural and technological constraints - supporting the
Health Care Global System of the Euro-Mediterranean Community
in a continuous improvement process.
Abstract: The objective of this study was to improve our
understanding of vulnerability and environmental change; it's causes
basically show the intensity, its distribution and human-environment
effect on the ecosystem in the Apodi Valley Region, This paper is
identify, assess and classify vulnerability and environmental change
in the Apodi valley region using a combined approach of landscape
pattern and ecosystem sensitivity. Models were developed using the
following five thematic layers: Geology, geomorphology, soil,
vegetation and land use/cover, by means of a Geographical
Information Systems (GIS)-based on hydro-geophysical parameters.
In spite of the data problems and shortcomings, using ESRI-s ArcGIS
9.3 program, the vulnerability score, to classify, weight and combine
a number of 15 separate land cover classes to create a single indicator
provides a reliable measure of differences (6 classes) among regions
and communities that are exposed to similar ranges of hazards.
Indeed, the ongoing and active development of vulnerability
concepts and methods have already produced some tools to help
overcome common issues, such as acting in a context of high
uncertainties, taking into account the dynamics and spatial scale of
asocial-ecological system, or gathering viewpoints from different
sciences to combine human and impact-based approaches. Based on
this assessment, this paper proposes concrete perspectives and
possibilities to benefit from existing commonalities in the
construction and application of assessment tools.
Abstract: Chronic conditions carry with them strong emotions
and often lead to charged relationships between patients and their
health providers and, by extension, patients and health researchers.
Persons are both autonomous and relational and a purely cognitive
model of autonomy neglects the social and relational basis of chronic
illness. Ensuring genuine informed consent in research requires a
thorough understanding of how participants perceive a study and
their reasons for participation. Surveys may not capture the
complexities of reasoning that underlies study participation.
Contradictory reasons for participation, for instance an initial claim
of altruism as rationale and a subsequent claim of personal benefit
(therapeutic misconception), affect the quality of informed consent.
Individuals apply principles through the filter of personal values and
lived experience. Authentic autonomy, and hence authentic consent
to research, occurs within the context of patients- unique life
narratives and illness experiences.
Abstract: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a pervasive developmental disorder which affects individuals with varying degrees of impairment. Currently, there has been ample research done in serious game for autism children. Although serious games are traditionally associated with software developments, developing them in the autism field involves studying the associated technology and paying attention to aspects related to interaction with the game. Serious Games for autism cover matters related to education, therapy for communication, psychomotor treatment and social behavior enhancement. In this paper, a systematic review sets out the lines of development and research currently being conducted into serious games which pursue some form of benefit in the field of autism. This paper includes a literature review of relevant serious game developments since in year 2007 and examines new trends.
Abstract: While many studies have conducted the achievement
gap between groups of students in school districts, few studies have
utilized resilience research to investigate achievement gaps within
classrooms. This paper aims to summarize and discuss some recent
studies Waxman, Padr├│n, and their colleagues conducted, in which
they examined learning environment differences between resilient
and nonresilient students in reading and mathematics classrooms.
The classes consist of predominantly Hispanic elementary school
students from low-income families. These studies all incorporated
learning environment questionnaires and systematic observation
methods. Significant differences were found between resilient and
nonresilient students on their classroom learning environments and
classroom behaviors. The observation results indicate that the amount
and quality of teacher and student academic interaction are two of the
most influential variables that promote student outcomes. This paper
concludes by suggesting the following teacher practices to promote
resiliency in schools: (a) using feedback from classroom observation
and learning environment measures, (b) employing explicit teaching
practices; and (c) understanding students on a social and personal
level.
Abstract: In general architecture means the art of creating the
space. Comprehensive and complete body which is created by a
creative and purposeful thought to respond the human needs.
Professionally, architecture is the are of designing and
comprehensive planning of physical spaces that is created for
human-s productivity. The purpose of architectural design is to
respond the human needs which is appeared in physical frame.
Human in response to his needs is always looking to achieve comfort.
Throughout history of human civilization this relative comfort has
been inspired by nature and assimilating the facility and natural
achievement in the format of artifact patterns base on the nature, so
that it is achieved in this comfort level and invention of these factors.
All physical factors like regional, social and economical factors are
made available to human in order to achieve a specific goal and are
made to gain an ideal architecture to respond the functional needs and
consider the aesthetics and elemental principles and pay attention to
residents- comfort. In this study the Persian architecture with
exploiting and transforming the energies into the requisite energies of
architecture spaces and importing fuel products, utilities, etc, in order
to achieve a relative comfort level will be investigated. In this paper
the study of structural and physical specialties of traditional houses in
desert regions and Central Plateau of Iran gave us this opportunity to
being more familiar with important specialties of energy productivity
in architecture body of traditional houses in these regions specially
traditional houses of Kashan and in order to use these principles to
create modern architectures in these regions.
Abstract: Physical education (PE) is still neglected in schools
despite its academic, social, psychological, and health benefits.
Based on the assumption that Information and Communication
Technologies (ICTs) can contribute to the development of PE in
schools, this study aims to design a model of the factors affecting the
adoption of ICTs for PE in schools. The proposed model is based on
a sound theoretical framework. It was designed following a literature
review of technology adoption theories and of ICT adoption factors
for physical education. The technology adoption model that fitted to
the best all ICT adoption factors was then chosen as the basis for the
proposed model. It was found that the Unified Theory of Acceptance
and Use of Technology (UTAUT) is the most adequate theoretical
framework for the modeling of ICT adoption factors for physical
education.
Abstract: Long term rainfall analysis and prediction is a
challenging task especially in the modern world where the impact of
global warming is creating complications in environmental issues.
These factors which are data intensive require high performance
computational modeling for accurate prediction. This research paper
describes a prototype which is designed and developed on grid
environment using a number of coupled software infrastructural
building blocks. This grid enabled system provides the demanding
computational power, efficiency, resources, user-friendly interface,
secured job submission and high throughput. The results obtained
using sequential execution and grid enabled execution shows that
computational performance has enhanced among 36% to 75%, for
decade of climate parameters. Large variation in performance can be
attributed to varying degree of computational resources available for
job execution.
Grid Computing enables the dynamic runtime selection, sharing
and aggregation of distributed and autonomous resources which plays
an important role not only in business, but also in scientific
implications and social surroundings. This research paper attempts to
explore the grid enabled computing capabilities on weather indices
from HOAPS data for climate impact modeling and change
detection.
Abstract: This questionnaire-based study, aimed to measure and
compare the awareness of English reading strategies among EFL
learners at Bangkok University (BU) classified by their gender, field
of study, and English learning experience. Proportional stratified
random sampling was employed to formulate a sample of 380 BU
students. The data were statistically analyzed in terms of the mean
and standard deviation. t-Test analysis was used to find differences in
awareness of reading strategies between two groups (-male and
female- /-science and social-science students). In addition, one-way
analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to compare reading strategy
awareness among BU students with different lengths of English
learning experience. The results of this study indicated that the
overall awareness of reading strategies of EFL learners at BU was at
a high level (ðÑ = 3.60) and that there was no statistically significant
difference between males and females, and among students who have
different lengths of English learning experience at the significance
level of 0.05. However, significant differences among students
coming from different fields of study were found at the same level of
significance.
Abstract: “Web of Trust" is one of the recognized goals for
Web 2.0. It aims to make it possible for the people to take
responsibility for what they publish on the web, including
organizations, businesses and individual users. These objectives,
among others, drive most of the technologies and protocols recently
standardized by the governing bodies. One of the great advantages of
Web infrastructure is decentralization of publication. The primary
motivation behind Web 2.0 is to assist the people to add contents for
Collective Intelligence (CI) while providing mechanisms to link
content with people for evaluations and accountability of
information. Such structure of contents will interconnect users and
contents so that users can use contents to find participants and vice
versa. This paper proposes conceptual information storage and
linking model, based on decentralized information structure, that
links contents and people together. The model uses FOAF, Atom,
RDF and RDFS and can be used as a blueprint to develop Web 2.0
applications for any e-domain. However, primary target for this
paper is online trust evaluation domain. The proposed model targets
to assist the individuals to establish “Web of Trust" in online trust
domain.
Abstract: Sickness absence represents a major economic and
social issue. Analysis of sick leave data is a recurrent challenge to analysts because of the complexity of the data structure which is
often time dependent, highly skewed and clumped at zero. Ignoring these features to make statistical inference is likely to be inefficient
and misguided. Traditional approaches do not address these problems. In this study, we discuss model methodologies in terms of statistical techniques for addressing the difficulties with sick leave data. We also introduce and demonstrate a new method by performing a longitudinal assessment of long-term absenteeism using
a large registration dataset as a working example available from the Helsinki Health Study for municipal employees from Finland during the period of 1990-1999. We present a comparative study on model
selection and a critical analysis of the temporal trends, the occurrence
and degree of long-term sickness absences among municipal employees. The strengths of this working example include the large
sample size over a long follow-up period providing strong evidence in supporting of the new model. Our main goal is to propose a way to
select an appropriate model and to introduce a new methodology for analysing sickness absence data as well as to demonstrate model
applicability to complicated longitudinal data.
Abstract: The traditional Failure Mode and Effects Analysis
(FMEA) uses Risk Priority Number (RPN) to evaluate the risk level
of a component or process. The RPN index is determined by
calculating the product of severity, occurrence and detection indexes.
The most critically debated disadvantage of this approach is that
various sets of these three indexes may produce an identical value of
RPN. This research paper seeks to address the drawbacks in
traditional FMEA and to propose a new approach to overcome these
shortcomings. The Risk Priority Code (RPC) is used to prioritize
failure modes, when two or more failure modes have the same RPN.
A new method is proposed to prioritize failure modes, when there is a
disagreement in ranking scale for severity, occurrence and detection.
An Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is used to compare means of
RPN values. SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences)
statistical analysis package is used to analyze the data. The results
presented are based on two case studies. It is found that the proposed
new methodology/approach resolves the limitations of traditional
FMEA approach.
Abstract: Traditionally, terror groups have been formed by ideologically aligned actors who perceive a lack of options for achieving political or social change. However, terrorist attacks have been increasingly carried out by small groups of actors or lone individuals who may be only ideologically affiliated with larger, formal terrorist organizations. The formation of these groups represents the inverse of traditional organizational growth, whereby structural de-evolution within issue-based organizations leads to the formation of small, independent terror cells. Ideological franchising – the bypassing of formal affiliation to the “parent" organization – represents the de-evolution of traditional concepts of organizational structure in favor of an organic, independent, and focused unit. Traditional definitions of dark networks that are issue-based include focus on an identified goal, commitment to achieving this goal through unrestrained actions, and selection of symbolic targets. The next step in the de-evolution of small dark networks is the miniorganization, consisting of only a handful of actors working toward a common, violent goal. Information-sharing through social media platforms, coupled with civil liberties of democratic nations, provide the communication systems, access to information, and freedom of movement necessary for small dark networks to flourish without the aid of a parent organization. As attacks such as the 7/7 bombings demonstrate the effectiveness of small dark networks, terrorist actors will feel increasingly comfortable aligning with an ideology only, without formally organizing. The natural result of this de-evolving organization is the single actor event, where an individual seems to subscribe to a larger organization-s violent ideology with little or no formal ties.
Abstract: According to the statistics, the prevalence of congenital hearing loss in Taiwan is approximately six thousandths; furthermore, one thousandths of infants have severe hearing impairment. Hearing ability during infancy has significant impact in the development of children-s oral expressions, language maturity, cognitive performance, education ability and social behaviors in the future. Although most children born with hearing impairment have sensorineural hearing loss, almost every child more or less still retains some residual hearing. If provided with a hearing aid or cochlear implant (a bionic ear) timely in addition to hearing speech training, even severely hearing-impaired children can still learn to talk. On the other hand, those who failed to be diagnosed and thus unable to begin hearing and speech rehabilitations on a timely manner might lose an important opportunity to live a complete and healthy life. Eventually, the lack of hearing and speaking ability will affect the development of both mental and physical functions, intelligence, and social adaptability. Not only will this problem result in an irreparable regret to the hearing-impaired child for the life time, but also create a heavy burden for the family and society. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a set of computer-assisted predictive model that can accurately detect and help diagnose newborn hearing loss so that early interventions can be provided timely to eliminate waste of medical resources. This study uses information from the neonatal database of the case hospital as the subjects, adopting two different analysis methods of using support vector machine (SVM) for model predictions and using logistic regression to conduct factor screening prior to model predictions in SVM to examine the results. The results indicate that prediction accuracy is as high as 96.43% when the factors are screened and selected through logistic regression. Hence, the model constructed in this study will have real help in clinical diagnosis for the physicians and actually beneficial to the early interventions of newborn hearing impairment.
Abstract: It is quite essential to form dialogue mechanisms and
dialogue channels to solve intercultural communication issues.
Therefore, every country should develop a intercultural education
project which aims to resolve international communication issues.
For proper mediation training, the first step is to reach an agreement
on the actors to run the project. The strongest mediation mechanisms
in the world should be analyzed and initiated within the educational
policies. A communication-based mediation model should be
developed for international mediation training. Mediators can use
their convincing communication skills as a part of this model. At the
first, fundamental stages of the mediation training should be specified
within the scope of the model. Another important topic at this point is
common sence and peace leaders to act as an ombudsman in this
process. Especially for solving some social issues and conflicts,
common sense leaders acting as an ombudsman would lead to
effective communication. In mediation training that is run by
universities and non-governmental organizations, another phase is to
focus on conducting the meetings. In intercultural mediation training,
one of the most critical topics is to conduct the meeting traffic and
performing a shuttle diplomacy. Meeting traffic is where the mediator
organizes meetings with the parties with initiative powers, in order to
contribute to the solution of the issue, and schedule these meetings.
In this notice titled “ Intercultural mediation training and the training
process of common sense leaders by the leadership of universities
communication and artistic campaigns" , communication models and
strategies about this topic will be constructed and an intercultural art
activities and perspectives will be presented.
Abstract: Distance education program is a dimension of contemporary and new education technologies. Concepts and applications in this field are the results of a series of educational demands and developments in various communication and education technologies. Distance education applications have some conceptual bases. These are creating new education opportunities, realizing work-education unity, getting democratic in education, lifelong education, tendency to individual matters, effective use of institutions, integration of technology and education, tendency to individual and social needs, taking three dimensional integration as the main principle (publishing, printed materials and face to face education), reaching maximum mass, individual and mass education integrity and education demand and financial matters balance. Economics, Business Administration and Open Education faculties, which have been giving education within Anadolu University since 1982 in Turkey, are carrying on education with nearly 1.000.000 students. The aim of this study is to determine organizational commitment levels of students who have been studying at Anadolu University Economics, Business Administration and Open Education faculties in the scope of affective, continuance and nominative commitment in Allen&Meyer model. In the study, organizational commitment of the Economics, Business Administration and Open Education faculty students, who are receiving education by means of distance education, to their faculties is dealt after introducing Anadolu University Distance Education system which gives higher education via distance education method in Turkey. In order to increase the success level of faculties it is required for students to have high level of organizational commitment to their faculties. A questionnaire has been applied by using “Organizational Commitment Scale", developed by Meyer&Allen to determine organizational commitments of Economics, Business Administration and Open Education students. Organizational commitment is dealt with as affective, continuance and nominative commitment. The questionnaire was applied face to face to randomly chosen 500 students living in Eskişehir and the data was downloaded to the computer by using SPSS program and the results were analyzed in terms of demographic features (gender, age, marital status, years of study, work and income level) of students by using frequency test, ttest and ANOVA test. As a result of these analyses, when the comments of Open Education Faculty students on levels of affective, continuance and nominative commitment to their faculties were examined, it has been revealed that continuance commitment level has the highest rate. Among the female participants; continuance commitment is high in the age range of 30-40, for normative commitment it is 17-22. However no dominant age range was defined for affective commitment. Regarding the marital status; continuance commitment average is higher among married participants; but nominative affective commitment average is higher among single participants. As to the years of study, affective and continuance commitment is higher among senior students while normative commitment is higher among junior students. Moreover; in terms of continuance, affective and normative commitment, those who do not work and have low income have higher level of all there commitment types than those who work and have relatively high income.
Abstract: The use of wind energy for electricity generation is
growing rapidly across the world and in Portugal. However, the
geographical characteristics of the country along with the average
wind regime and with the environmental restrictions imposed to these
projects create limitations to the exploit of the onshore wind
resource. The best onshore wind spots are already committed and the
possibility of offshore wind farms in the Portuguese cost is now
being considered. This paper aims to make a contribution to the
evaluation of offshore wind power projects in Portugal. The technical
restrictions are addressed and the strategic, environmental and
financial interest of the project is analysed from the private company
and public points of view. The results suggest that additional support
schemes are required to ensure private investors interest for these
projects. Assuming an approach of direct substitution of energy
sources for electricity generation, the avoided CO2 equivalent
emissions for an offshore wind power project were quantified. Based
on the conclusions, future research is proposed to address the
environmental and social impacts of these projects.
Abstract: This study aims to assess the vulnerability and risk of
the coastal areas of Taijiang to abnormal oceanographic phenomena.
In addition, this study aims to investigate and collect data regarding
the disaster losses, land utilization, and other social, economic, and
environmental issues in these coastal areas to construct a coastal
vulnerability and risk map based on the obtained climate-change risk
assessment results. Considering the indexes of the three coastal
vulnerability dimensions, namely, man-made facilities, environmental
geography, and social economy, this study adopted the equal
weighting process and Analytic Hierarchy Process to analyze the
vulnerability of these coastal areas to disasters caused by climatic
changes. Among the areas with high coastal vulnerability to climatic
changes, three towns had the highest coastal vulnerability and four had
the highest relative vulnerability. Areas with lower disaster risks were
found to be increasingly vulnerable to disasters caused by climatic
changes as time progresses.
Abstract: Business and IT alignment has continued as a
top concern for business and IT executives for almost three
decades. Many researchers have conducted empirical studies on
the relationship between business-IT alignment and performance.
Yet, these approaches, lacking a social perspective, have had little
impact on sustaining performance and competitive advantage. In
addition to the limited alignment literature that explores
organisational learning that is represented in shared understanding,
communication, cognitive maps and experiences.
Hence, this paper proposes an integrated process that enables
social and intellectual dimensions through the concept of
organisational learning. In particular, the feedback and feedforward
process which provide a value creation across dynamic
multilevel of learning. This mechanism enables on-going
effectiveness through development of individuals, groups and
organisations, which improves the quality of business and IT
strategies and drives to performance.
Abstract: M. Kemal Ataturk was a great leader who was fond of art and he had displayed his being fond of art many times. In his speeches and writings you can see that he had showed his approval to art and the importance of artists and art for the society. During the foundation of republic, he also wanted renovation in art as in other fields and ordered many novelties both in art and society. One of the greatest steps in realizing this was to prepare a national Turkish opera. In this study, it was studied how a Turkish opera, Özsoy was prepared in the context of social and political conditions of that time and what kind of processes it passed. As a result, it is seen that there was two main aims for Ataturk with this opera. First, Ataturk wanted to abolish the sectarian conflict between Iran and Turkey going on for centuries. The second and maybe the most important is that he wanted to make a revolution in the field of art and aimed to reach the level of civilized countries.