Dentre, os mecanismos voltados ao planejamento ambiental na atualidade e possíveis de serem implantados na gestão territorial, o Zoneamento-Antrópico- Ambiental tem se mostrado como um instrumento estratégico nas tomadas de decisões, o qual busca compatibilizar o desenvolvimento socioeconômico e manter ou preservar a qualidade ambiental de um determinado território. Nesse contexto, a presente pesquisa teve como objetivo elaborar uma proposta de Zoneamento- Antrópico-Ambiental para o Município de Iporã do Oeste-SC, a partir da caracterização e análise dos fatores socioeconômicos e ambientais juntamente com as perspectivas da população local. O embasamento teórico foi fundamentado na abordagem sistêmica. Metodologicamente a pesquisa centrou-se na proposta de Libault (1971), o qual aborda os quatro níveis da pesquisa geográfica. Para a elaboração do Zoneamento-Antrópico-Ambiental do Município de Iporã do Oeste-SC, foram delimitadas duas microbacias hidrográficas com base no Projeto Microbacias II, a microbacia hidrográfica do Lajeado Pirapó (MHLP) e a microbacia Hidrográfica do Lajeado Esperança, (MHLE), as quais apresentaram particularidades (relevo, uso da terra e localização) e relevância socioeconômica para o contexto local. Os resultados compreenderam a elaboração de diferentes produtos cartográficos (uso da terra, declividade, hipsometria, legislação e conflitos ambientais), confeccionados a partir do software Spring 4.2.1. Tais produtos foram sobrepostos gerando três zonas de uso e ocupação para ambas as microbacias. As zonas definidas foram: Zona de Uso e Ocupação Moderada (ZUOM); Zona de Uso e Ocupação Restrita (ZUOR) e Zona de Uso e Ocupação Controlada (ZUOC). A ZUOR predomina nas duas microbacias com um total de 54,66% de 2.176,09 ha da MHLP e, 41,96% de 2.823,85 da MHLE. A partir daí, cada zona foi caracterizada, destacando as potencialidades e limitações existentes, gerando um cenário atual e a incentivar, a partir das perspectivas ou projetos elencados pela população residente em cada microbacia. A proposta pretende contribuir para a discussão e a reflexão sobre as formas atuais e potenciais de uso e ocupação do espaço, orientando as tomadas de decisões por parte dos planejadores e pesquisadores, juntamente com a comunidade local, visando assim, o desenvolvimento socioeconômico e o equilíbrio do sistema socioambiental como um todo. / Among, the mechanisms returned to the environmental planning at the present time and possible of they be implanted in the territorial administration, the zoning-entropicenvironmental has shown as a strategic instrument in the decisions-making, which it looks for compatibiling the socioeconomic development and to maintain or to preserve the environmental quality of a certain territory. In that context, to present research it had as objective elaborates a proposal of Zoning-Entropic-environmental for the Municipal district of Iporã of West-SC, starting from the characterization and analysis of the socioeconomic and environmental factors together with the perspectives of the local population. The theoretical basement was based in the systemic approach. Methodologically the research was centered in the Libault proposal (1971), which approaches the four levels of the geographical research. For the elaboration of the Zoning-Entropic-environmental of the Municipal district of Iporã of West-SC, two micro basin hydrographic were delimited with base in the Micro basins Project II, the micro basin hydrographic of Lajeado Pirapó (MHLP) and the micro basin Hydrographic of the Lajeado Esperança, (MHLE), which presented particularities (relieve, earth using and location) and socioeconomic relevance for the local context. The results understood the elaboration of different cartographic products (earth using, steepness, hypsometry, legislation and environmental conflicts), made starting from the software Spring 4.2.1. Such products were put upon generating three use areas and occupation for both micro basins. The defined areas were: Use Area and Moderate Occupation (ZUOM); Use Area and Restricted Occupation (ZUOR) and Use Area and Controlled Occupation (ZUOC). ZUOR prevails in the two micro basins with a total of 54, 66% of 2.176,09 of the MHLP and, 41, and 96% of 2.823,85 of MHLE. Since then, each area was characterized, detaching the potentialities and existent limitations, generating a current scenery and to motivate, starting from the perspectives or developed projects for the resident population in each micro basin. The proposal intends to contribute for the discussion and the reflection about the current forms and use potentials and occupation of the space, guiding the decisions-making on the part of the planners and researchers, together with the local community, seeking like this, the socioeconomic development and the balance of the system socio-environmental as a completely.

À notre époque, la problématique de la prise en charge des personnes en situation de handicap est d'une importance majeure. Nombreuses sont les études qui prouvent qu'économiquement et socialement le handicap impacte fortement la société moderne. La dépendance, résultat des situations de handicap, est l'incapacité de réaliser seul les tâches de la vie courante. Une aide spécialisée, voire l'hospitalisation dans les cas les plus avancés, peut devenir nécessaire. Les politiques ne se sont pas trompés en faisant de cet enjeu une priorité, notamment en France où le gouvernement a débloqué d'importantes sommes d'argent. L'Organisation Mondiale de la Santé, dans sa dernière définition du handicap, explique que le handicap est situationnel et qu'un environnement adapté peut compenser l'incapacité et supprimer la dépendance. Nous pouvons nous demander dans quelle mesure la technologie peut apporter, dans la vie de tous les jours, un certain degré de confort et une autonomie aux personnes dépendantes. La technologie apporte, aujourd'hui par l'intermédiaire des habitats intelligents, des systèmes pervasifs et de la domotique, les moyens nécessaires aux personnes pour gagner en autonomie et vivre plus longtemps à domicile. Ces solutions s'appuient sur des services d'assistance spécialisés, adaptés à la singularité de la pathologie du patient. Ainsi, un patient en situation de handicap physique se verra proposer une solution de contrôle d’environnement tandis qu’un patient souffrant de trouble cognitif pourra compenser son handicap grâce aux solutions d’analyse du comportement. Nous proposons une solution d’assistance unifiant les deux champs d’action, pour compenser les situations de polyhandicaps. Pour assurer autonomie, confort de vie, sécurité, surveillance et assistance à domicile des personnes dépendantes, les algorithmes d’assistance requièrent beaucoup de ressources de traitement et le manque de ces dernières peut ralentir voire bloquer le déploiement des différentes tâches et remettre en question considérablement l'expérience utilisateur et par conséquent l'acceptation de la solution. Négliger l'impact des ressources sur le déploiement peut mener à des situations de fonctionnement gênantes, voire dangereuses, dans le cas d'une urgence vitale. Peut-on vraiment proposer le meilleur service d'assistance possible si notre infrastructure ne permet pas sa réalisation ? Pour répondre à cette problématique, les concepteurs surdimensionnent la solution. Autrement dit, des équipements supplémentaires, spécialisés et couteux, sont installés. Toutefois, cette attitude très répandue dans l'industrie ne respecte pas les recommandations de l'aide au handicap, qui cherchent à réduire les critères de couts et d'intrusivité, notamment. Les habitudes de vie moderne impliquent que la maison d'aujourd'hui, sans modifications particulières, regorge déjà d'équipements domotiques et électroniques aux capacités inexploitées. Nous proposons une approche de modélisation des ressources pour mettre en évidence leurs capacités. Cependant, avoir conscience de ces capacités ne suffit pas, il faut aussi les connaître et savoir les gérer pour faciliter le déploiement des services d’assistance. En effet, si l’exploitation des capacités au niveau d’une ressource est correctement maitrisée, l’optimisation conjointe des capacités de plusieurs ressources est quant à elle moins développée. Nous avons mis en place un flot de déploiement contextuel qui grâce à la connaissance de son environnement et des ressources qui le composent peut déployer un service sur n'importe quel équipement capable de le réaliser. Une répartition de la charge de traitement de manière uniforme permet de garantir une sureté de fonctionnement en évitant un engorgement des ressources et une surcharge globale du système. / Nowadays, the problem of care for people with disabilities is a major concern. Many studies prove that handicaps strongly impact modern society, economically and socially. Dependence, resulting in disability situations, is the inability to perform alone the tasks of daily living. A specialized assistance or even hospitalization, in the most advanced cases, may become necessary. Politicians were not deceived by making this issue a priority, particularly in France where the government has provided large sums of money. The World Health Organization, in its latest definition of disability says that disability is situational and that a suitable environment can compensate for the inability and correct the dependency. We can wonder, to what degree, can technology bring in the life of every day, a certain degree of comfort and independence for disabled people? Today, technology brings through intelligent houses, pervasive systems and home automation, the necessary resources for people to gain autonomy and stay longer at home. These solutions are based on specialized support services adapted to the uniqueness of the patient's pathology. Thus, a patient with physical disabilities could have an environment control solution while a patient with cognitive impairment may compensate for his disability through behavior analysis solutions. We offer a healthcare solution combining the two fields of action, to compensate for situations of multiple handicaps. To ensure independence, living comfort, security, health surveillance and home care for disabled people, algorithms require a lot of processing resources. The lack of processing devices can slow or even block the deployment of different assistive tasks and question considerably the user experience and therefore the acceptance of the solution. Neglecting the impact of resources for deploying can lead to inconvenient situations, even dangerous in the case of vital emergency. Can we really offer the best possible assistance service if our infrastructure does not allow its achievement? To address this problem, designers oversize the solution. In other words, extra dedicated and expensive equipments are installed in the person's environment. This attitude, although widely used in the industry, does not respect the recommendations of ambient assisted living, which aim to reduce the cost criteria and intrusiveness. Modern lifestyles imply that today's home, without any particular modifications, is already full of home-automation and electronic devices with unused capacities. We offer a resource modeling approach to highlight their abilities. However, be aware of these capabilities is not enough, the system also need to know how to manage them to facilitate the deployment of assistive services. Indeed, if the system can properly manage the utilization of the capabilities of one resource, the joint optimization of several resources, at the same, time is not enough controlled. We have set up a contextual deployment flow which, thanks to the knowledge of the environment and resources, can deploy a service on any devices capable of carrying out the operation. A distribution of the processing load, uniformly, helps to ensure dependability of our solution, by avoiding resource bottlenecks and overall system overload.

There is a growing societal need to address the increasing prevalence of behavioral health issues, such as obesity, alcohol or drug use, and general lack of treatment adherence for a variety of health problems. The statistics, worldwide and in the USA, are daunting. Excessive alcohol use is the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States (with 79,000 deaths annually), and is responsible for a wide range of health and social problems. On the positive side though, these behavioral health issues (and associated possible diseases) can often be prevented with relatively simple lifestyle changes, such as losing weight with a diet and/or physical exercise, or learning how to reduce alcohol consumption. Medicine has therefore started to move toward finding ways of preventively promoting wellness, rather than solely treating already established illness. Evidence-based patient-centered Brief Motivational Interviewing (BMI) interven- tions have been found particularly effective in helping people find intrinsic motivation to change problem behaviors after short counseling sessions, and to maintain healthy lifestyles over the long-term. Lack of locally available personnel well-trained in BMI, however, often limits access to successful interventions for people in need. To fill this accessibility gap, Computer-Based Interventions (CBIs) have started to emerge. Success of the CBIs, however, critically relies on insuring engagement and retention of CBI users so that they remain motivated to use these systems and come back to use them over the long term as necessary. Because of their text-only interfaces, current CBIs can therefore only express limited empathy and rapport, which are the most important factors of health interventions. Fortunately, in the last decade, computer science research has progressed in the design of simulated human characters with anthropomorphic communicative abilities. Virtual characters interact using humans’ innate communication modalities, such as facial expressions, body language, speech, and natural language understanding. By advancing research in Artificial Intelligence (AI), we can improve the ability of artificial agents to help us solve CBI problems. To facilitate successful communication and social interaction between artificial agents and human partners, it is essential that aspects of human social behavior, especially empathy and rapport, be considered when designing human-computer interfaces. Hence, the goal of the present dissertation is to provide a computational model of rapport to enhance an artificial agent’s social behavior, and to provide an experimental tool for the psychological theories shaping the model. Parts of this thesis were already published in [LYL+12, AYL12, AL13, ALYR13, LAYR13, YALR13, ALY14].

Scientific evidence points to a changing global climate. The most vital and visible impacts of this phenomenon for sea-level communities are sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and more frequent severe coastal storms. However, limited research has been conducted to date to project the damage from rising maximum water levels and corresponding storm surges, and their impacts on the sustainability of coastal communities. This research focuses on the urban coastal community of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.), Canada as part of the C-Change International Community University research Alliance (ICURA), “Managing Adaptation to Environmental Change in Coastal Communities: Canada and the Caribbean.” The stochastic process that underlies, maximum observed water levels in Charlottetown, is modeled using historical data. Maximum observed water levels and storm surges are represented by fitted conditional and marginal univariate probability density functions. The statistical package “Easy-Fit” is used as a tool for analyzing goodness of fit to the historical data for maximum observed water levels in Charlottetown. A System Dynamics (SD) model, using STELLA, is developed to simulate the projected impacts of maximum observed water levels on the City of Charlottetown. The SD model captures the dynamics of the four pillars of community sustainability, namely Environmental, Economic, Social-Cultural and Human sectors identified for the City of Charlottetown. The model defines and evaluates the robustness of alternative adaptation strategies for various model scenarios to projected storms over a long-term planning period. The results quantify the vulnerability of Charlottetown. The analysis of the results from implementing 3 main adaptation strategies for protection, accommodation, and retreat scenarios as well as the ones from the most common current response of “doing nothing”, provide information on the dynamic and pillar-related impacts of storms on Charlottetown. Analysis of these strategy options clearly indicates that doing nothing in the face of more frequent severe storms is an inefficient strategy. Model results show that the protect strategy is unlikely to deliver complete protection, and the retreat option is costly and not well received. The accommodation strategy including a combination of protection options and controlled retreat will provide the most robust option for the coastal City of Charlottetown. The SD model and analysis provides a framework for the evaluation of adaptation strategies for alternative coastal communities.

Social commerce is a growing field due to the popularity of social media. Research on social commerce stresses the benefits of utilizing social media or Web 2.0 technologies for business because user contribution, participation and collaboration, which are characteristics of Web 2.0, fuel business vitalization. Nevertheless, there is a lack of academic research on social commerce, and in what little research there is, the coverage is circumscribed. One of the challenges is conceptualization of social commerce due to various definitions made from researchers’ different perspectives and different positions on social commerce. This also led to the limitation of scope of research. In addition, there is still a need for identifying technological features and business goals for social commerce. Therefore, this research primarily encompasses establishing the concept of social commerce and identifying its implementation methods. To amount to those two primary goals, the research objectives are to understand the factors that affect social commerce implementation; to identify and investigate applicable Web 2.0 technologies that enable social commerce activities; and to investigate the business goals that can be achieved by social commerce implementation. Ultimately, the research aims to address methods of implementation. Consequently, the achievement of this research is that first, the concept of social commerce has been established by refining several definitions from the literature. Second, social commerce activities and business goals were identified and categorized based on the marketing funnel concept and the new customer life cycle model. Third, applicable Web 2.0 technologies were identified from the literature and other functionalities were also seized from real cases. Finally, the concept of social commerce has been demonstrated by implementing selected various commerce applications

Structural health monitoring (SHM) systems generally install low cost excitation component and/or sensors to the machines or buildings permanently to monitor the health of it. Non Destructive Evaluation (NDE) systems use high cost sensors to perform the inspection of structures. It would be advantageous to inspect the some aerospace structures and parts in vacuum environment by using the remotely monitoring systems such as laser vibrometer. In this study, a scanning laser vibrometer is used to detect the location of the problem at the structure. For data collection and analysis recently, developed surface response to excitation (SuRE) method was used. First the software of the scanning laser vibrometer was used to evaluate the capabilities of the system. The vibration of simple structures such as the cone of a speaker and a beam was tested when they were excited below 200 Hz and the mode shapes were studied. Later, the scanning laser vibrometer was used for implementation of the SuRE method. The surface vibration of beams and plates were monitored while their surfaces were excited at high frequencies with a piezoelectric exciter. External force was applied to one point of the surface of the considered structures. The scanning laser vibrometer evaluated the vibration of different points on the structure according to given program and obtained the frequency response before and after the external load was applied. The sum of the squares of the differences of the frequency responses were obtained for each point on the surface and presented with a contour plot. Use of the scanning laser vibrometer was convenient at the test conditions. The calculated mode shapes were very similar to the expected ones when the simple structures were tested. The locations of the external forces were identified correctly when the beams and plates were tested. The study indicated that the scanning laser vibrometer and SuRE method may be used for identification of defects and/or loose fasteners.

No description available.

This diploma work discusses the chemical and physical characteristics of phytic acid, its positive and negative influence on people’s health, on the substances usability in the human organism and also its possible use in the food industry. Methods for analyzing phytic acid in the feed and food industry are also discussed. This diploma work also states the characteristics of analyzed raw materials and, for the analyzed raw material malt, it also covers the technological procedure for its production. For direct determination of phytic acid in barley caryopses and in malt, the isotachophoresis (ITP) method was used. This diploma work contains results of phytic acid determination in treated and untreated barley and malt variants by 6 different varieties in 4 test stations - specifically for harvests during the years 2006 and 2007. The final work contains comparisons of phytic acid content in different varieties of treated/untreated barley and malt variants. Comparisons are always within a single test station. Comparison are also included of phytic acid content for single varieties (across all examined test stations). This work furthermore, presents decreases in phytic acid content after malting. The ITP method was evaluated as quick and relatively simple. A method by using tests (from a commercial company) for obtaining phytic acid content was also used. This diploma work lists results of phytic acid content determination in untreated barley and malt variants at two test stations, for the year of harvest 2007. Further, this work contains a comparison of phytic acid content in different varieties for the given test station. The method by using tests was evaluated as a orientation method. This work states comparisons of phytic acid content obtained by measurements during the years 2006 and 2007. The diploma work also compares ITP with the method realized by using tests in two test stations for 5 untreated varieties of barley and malt for 2007 harvest.

This diploma thesis is about designing vacuum pressing device for plastics as an important method of manufacturing semi-finished plastic products. In introduction part of this thesis there is described a process of this method, the application field among the another plastics processing technologies, basic information about using semi-finished products and moulding forms. There are three versions of solution. After the estimation of this versions there is a decision about a final form vacuum pressing device. One’s own design work contains a project of a device like this with the help of Autodesk Inventor CAD system. In the end of the work, there is financial balance-sheet too.

Theme of this thesis is utilizing of liquide biofuels for energy supply in the complex Technicka 2. This work is divided into three parts. The first part dealt with the issue of liquid biofuels, both globally and within the Czech Republic. In the next part are noted technologies for heating, power and cooling of of liquid biofuels. In the third part is noted evaluation of using cogeneration unit from Seva, a.g. for komplex Technicka 2 in different types of traffic.