Apresentamos um modelo estocástico para evolução de espécies utilizando processos de Poisson. Eventos de surgimento de novas espécies e eventos de extinção são dados por dois processos de Poisson independentes. A cada evento de surgimento, uma nova espécie é adicionada ao sistema e uma aptidão aleatória é associada a ela. À cada evento de extinção, é associado um limiar também aleatório e todas as espécies com aptidão inferior ao limiar são retiradas do sistema. Apresentamos critérios necessários e suficientes para recorrência/transitoriedade da configuração vazia. Mostramos a existência da distribuição limite e apresentamos critérios necessários e suficientes para um número in/finito de espécies em tal distribuição. / We present a stochastic model for species evolution based on Poisson Processes. Birth of new species and extinction events are given by two independent Poisson processes. At each birth, a new species enters the system and is given a random fitness mark. To each extinction event is associated a random threshold mark and all species with fitness lower than the threshold are removed from the system. We present necessary and suficient criteria for the recurrence/transience of the empty configuration. We show the existence of the limit distribution and present necessary and suficient criteria for an in/finite number os species in such distribution.

The music industry in 1962 reflected the political turmoil of the times. Dinner and dancing was a popular pastime. The music Americans heard and enjoyed over the airways was limited, however, by payola. Program directors adhered to criteria that supported the corporate fiscal model of their radio stations. Songs needed to attract listeners and major advertisers. Payola typically involved direct payments from major record labels to disc jockeys and the rewards were lucrative. Record labels fed them songs to play and disc jockeys became loyal to the payments. Thus, payola became a bottleneck to broader distribution of other artists, which hurt musicians, small record labels, and the public, and increased the price of music. Entertainment managers were ambitious band managers who took on additional roles due to the high costs of producing and promoting songs. The case of Robby and the Troubadours is shared through a historical simulated marketing plan. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The use, reuse and manipulation of information has become a key factor in the success of any organisation in an increasingly competitive and global business environment. Ensuring that employees are able to access (or are provided with) the right information in a timely manner is one of the key challenges facing organisations. Amongst the dominant communication methods email fills an important role in facilitating distributed communication and it is seen as a key target for improvement. Email is being used extensively and increasingly as a significant (and often dominant) method for communication within engineering organisations and projects and there exists significant opportunity and requirement to improve the use and reuse of email. This thesis contributes a rich understanding of the practise and perception of email use and reuse developed through a comprehensive review of the literature and three investigative studies: a study of the content of emails exchanged during an engineering project, a survey of practising engineers describing the role of email in supporting communication in projects and engineers perception of email, and a investigation of the information about the relationships between engineers participating in a project as represented by their exchanges of email. The second main contribution is a set of scenarios that were developed to summarise the understanding developed in the investigative studies, and form a core set of contextualised problems that can be used to communicate the research to industry and around which an holistic proposal is described to improve engineers use and reuse of email. The final contribution is an approach for supporting engineers in interpreting emails by the provision of additional contextual information, mitigating a core problem identified during the course of the research for which a well established information management solution does not already exist.

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Thesis. 1975. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. / Includes bibliographical references. / M.S.

This dissertation aims to examine the collection and use of digital patient-generated health data (PGHD) in real-world settings, including existing barriers from the perspectives of patients and healthcare providers, and possible approaches to optimizing the process. In Chapter One, the potential of PGHD to improve health and wellness, particularly for individuals with chronic conditions, as well as known barriers to PGHD collection and use, are described. One chronic condition in particular, atrial fibrillation (AF), is then introduced as a use case for PGHD. Chapter Two contains an integrative review synthesizing findings from eleven studies reporting patients’ and providers’ needs when collecting and using PGHD, and identifying convergence and divergence between needs. Chapter Three contains a quantitative evaluation of sustained engagement, currently a major barrier to collection of PGHD, in a group of adults self-monitoring AF, as well as predictors and moderators of engagement that come from an adapted version of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). These individuals were previously enrolled in the randomized, controlled trial, the iPhone® Helping Evaluate Atrial Fibrillation Rhythm through Technology (iHEART). In Chapter Four, the adapted UTAUT model is explored in more detail through a qualitative investigation of sustained engagement with patients, healthcare providers, and research coordinators involved in the iHEART trial. Chapter Five summarizes the findings of this dissertation, including strengths and limitations, and elicits implications for the intersection of health policy and clinical practice, design, nursing, and future research from the findings.

Patient medical records are a valuable resource that can be used for many purposes including managing and planning for future health needs as well as clinical research. Health databases such as the clinical practice research datalink (CPRD) and many other similar initiatives can provide researchers with a useful data source on which they can test their medical hypotheses. However, this can only be the case when researchers have a good set of hypotheses to test on the data. Conversely, the data may have other equally important areas that remain unexplored. There is a chance that some important signals in the data could be missed. Therefore, further analysis is required to make such hidden areas become more obvious and attainable for future exploration and investigation. Data mining techniques can be effective tools in discovering patterns and signals in large-scale patient data sets. These techniques have been widely applied to different areas in medical domain. Therefore, analysing patient data using such techniques has the potential to explore the data and to provide a better understanding of the information in patient records. However, the heterogeneity and complexity of medical data can be an obstacle in applying data mining techniques. Much of the potential value of this data therefore goes untapped. This thesis describes a novel methodology that reduces the dimensionality of primary care data, to make it more amenable to visualisation, mining and clustering. The methodology involves employing a combination of ontology-based semantic similarity and principal component analysis (PCA) to map the data into an appropriate and informative low dimensional space. The aim of this thesis is to develop a novel methodology that provides a visualisation of patient records. This visualisation provides a systematic method that allows the formulation of new and testable hypotheses which can be fed to researchers to carry out the subsequent phases of research. In a small-scale study based on Salford Integrated Record (SIR) data, I have demonstrated that this mapping provides informative views of patient phenotypes across a population and allows the construction of clusters of patients sharing common diagnosis and treatments. The next phase of the research was to develop this methodology and explore its application using larger patient cohorts. This data contains more precise relationships between features than small-scale data. It also leads to the understanding of distinct population patterns and extracting common features. For such reasons, I applied the mapping methodology to patient records from the CPRD database. The study data set consisted of anonymised patient records for a population of 2.7 million patients. The work done in this analysis shows that methodology scales as O(n) in ways that did not require large computing resources. The low dimensional visualisation of high dimensional patient data allowed the identification of different subpopulations of patients across the study data set, where each subpopulation consisted of patients sharing similar characteristics such as age, gender and certain types of diseases. A key finding of this research is the wealth of data that can be produced. In the first use case of looking at the stratification of patients with falls, the methodology gave important hypotheses; however, this work has barely scratched the surface of how this mapping could be used. It opens up the possibility of applying a wide range of data mining strategies that have not yet been explored. What the thesis has shown is one strategy that works, but there could be many more. Furthermore, there is no aspect of the implementation of this methodology that restricts it to medical data. The same methodology could equally be applied to the analysis and visualisation of many other sources of data that are described using terms from taxonomies or ontologies.

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Apresentamos um modelo estocástico para evolução de espécies utilizando processos de Poisson. Eventos de surgimento de novas espécies e eventos de extinção são dados por dois processos de Poisson independentes. A cada evento de surgimento, uma nova espécie é adicionada ao sistema e uma aptidão aleatória é associada a ela. À cada evento de extinção, é associado um limiar também aleatório e todas as espécies com aptidão inferior ao limiar são retiradas do sistema. Apresentamos critérios necessários e suficientes para recorrência/transitoriedade da configuração vazia. Mostramos a existência da distribuição limite e apresentamos critérios necessários e suficientes para um número in/finito de espécies em tal distribuição. / We present a stochastic model for species evolution based on Poisson Processes. Birth of new species and extinction events are given by two independent Poisson processes. At each birth, a new species enters the system and is given a random fitness mark. To each extinction event is associated a random threshold mark and all species with fitness lower than the threshold are removed from the system. We present necessary and suficient criteria for the recurrence/transience of the empty configuration. We show the existence of the limit distribution and present necessary and suficient criteria for an in/finite number os species in such distribution.

nÃo hà / A farmacovigilÃncia à a ciÃncia relativa à detecÃÃo, avaliaÃÃo, compreensÃo e prevenÃÃo de reaÃÃes adversas ou quaisquer outros possÃveis problemas relacionados a medicamentos. No Brasil, a farmacovigilÃncia encontra-se em desenvolvimento. Ainda nÃo està completamente disseminada a cultura da notificaÃÃo espontÃnea, principalmente na oncologia, onde a ocorrÃncia de reaÃÃo adversa passa muitas vezes despercebida por ser considerada como um evento esperado, e, portanto, sem importÃncia significativa. Este estudo avaliou as aÃÃes de farmacovigilÃncia desenvolvidas numa instituiÃÃo hospitalar da cidade de Teresina-PI, atravÃs da monitorizaÃÃo de pacientes portadores de cÃncer de mama submetidos à terapia antineoplÃsica com o regime de combinaÃÃo FEC. Para isso, foi realizada uma investigaÃÃo baseada em uma revisÃo dos prontuÃrios desses pacientes para detectar o registro: de reaÃÃes adversas decorrentes da quimioterapia antineoplÃsica vigente e da distinÃÃo das mesmas, segundo os graus de severidade estabelecidos pelo National Cancer Institute (NCI); de intercorrÃncias clÃnicas devido à RAM ocorridas durante a terapia e de possÃveis alteraÃÃes no plano do tratamento protocolado (atrasos na realizaÃÃo dos ciclos de quimioterapia ou suspensÃo temporÃria da terapia, reduÃÃes das doses preconizadas) relacionadas com reaÃÃes adversas. De todas as reaÃÃes adversas observadas durante a investigaÃÃo, 2,07% foram registradas em nÃo conformidade com a terminologia qualitativa adotada pelo NCI e 15,06% nÃo foram graduadas quanto à severidade; alÃm disso, 100% das RAMs nÃo foram notificadas à autoridade sanitÃria competente (ANVISA) e nÃo existe um banco de dados institucional com essas reaÃÃes adversas. Foram ainda identificadas 17 (70,83%) intervenÃÃes clÃnicas devido à RAM realizadas em nÃvel ambulatorial e 7 (29,17%) intervenÃÃes clÃnicas devido à RAM que exigiram a hospitalizaÃÃo do paciente; atrasos ou suspensÃo temporÃria da realizaÃÃo dos ciclos de quimioterapia, com 8,70% decorrentes de causas clÃnicas, entre estas reaÃÃes adversas; e 8 (5,84%) casos de reduÃÃo das doses protocoladas devido à presenÃa e severidade de reaÃÃes adversas. Conclui-se que as aÃÃes de farmacovigilÃncia da instituiÃÃo hospitalar ainda sÃo incipientes, com falhas organizacionais que diminuem a confiabilidade das informaÃÃes registradas; alÃm disso, houve a comprovaÃÃo da importÃncia da farmacovigilÃncia em oncologia, onde a toxicidade dos fÃrmacos utilizados pode ser considerada fator limitante primÃrio para uma prÃtica terapÃutica ideal. / Pharmacovigilance is the science concerning the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse reactions or any other possible drug-related problems. In Brazil, pharmacovigilance is in the developmental stage. The culture of spontaneous reporting not yet fully spread, especially in oncology, where the occurrence of adverse reaction is often unnoticed because it is considered as an expected event, and therefore immaterial. This study evaluated the pharmacovigilance actions carried out at a hospital in the city of Teresina, PI, through the monitoring of patients with breast cancer undergoing anticancer therapy with the FEC protocol. An investigation was undertaken based on a review of the medical records of these patients to detect the registry: of adverse reactions resulting from cancer chemotherapy and the distinction of them according to the degrees of severity established by the National Cancer Institute (NCI); of clinical interventions due to ADR that occurred during therapy and possible changes in the plan of treatment protocol (delays in the achievement of cycles of chemotherapy or temporary suspension of therapy, reductions in the recommended doses) related with adverse reactions. Of all the adverse reactions observed during the investigation, 2,07% were not registered in accordance with the terminology adopted by NCI qualitative and 15,06% were not graded as to severity. In addition, 100% of ADRs were not reported to the recognized health authority (ANVISA) and there is not an institutional database with these adverse reactions. There were also 17 identified (70,83%) clinical interventions due to ADR performed on an outpatient basid and 7 (29,17%) clinical interventions due to ADR that required hospitalization of the patient; delays or temporary suspension of achievement of cycles of chemotherapy with 8,70% due to clinical causes among these adverse reactions; and 8 (5,84%) cases of dose reduction due to the presence and severity of adverse reactions. It is concluded that the pharmacovigilance actions of the hospital are still preliminary, with organizational flaws that reduce the reliability of the information recorded. In addition, there was evidence of the importance of pharmacovigilance in oncology, where the toxicity of drugs used may be considered a limiting factor necessary for an ideal therapeutic practice.