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Information Systems (IS’s) have provided organisations with huge efficiency gains and benefits over the years; however an outstanding problem that is yet to be successfully tackled is that of the troublesome maintenance phase. Consuming vast resources and thwarting business progression in a competitive global market place, system maintenance has been recognised as one of the key areas where IS is failing organisations. Organisations are too often faced with the dilemma of either replacement or the continual upkeep of an unwieldy system. The ability for IS’s to be able to adapt to exogenous influences is even more acute today than at any time in the past. This is due to IS’s namely, Web Information Systems (WIS’s) increasingly and continually having to accommodate the needs of organisations to interconnect with a plethora of additional systems as well as supporting evolving business models. The richness of the interconnectivity, functionalities and services WIS’s now offer are shaping social, cultural and economic behaviour on a truly global scale, making the maintenance of such systems and evermore pertinent issue. The growth and proliferation of WIS’s shows no sign of abating which leads to the conclusion that what some have termed as the ‘maintenance iceberg’ should not be ignored. The quandary that commercial organisations face is typically driven by two key aspects; firstly, systems are built on the cultural premise of using fixed requirements, with not enough thought or attention being paid to systems abilities to deviate from these requirements. Secondly, systems do not generally cope well with adapting to unpredictable change arising from outside of the organisations environment. Over the recent past, different paradigms, approaches and methods have attempted to make software development more predictable, controllable and adaptable, however, the benefits of such measures in relation to the maintenance dilemma have been limited. The concept of flexible systems that are able to cope with such change in an efficient manner is currently an objective that few can claim to have realised successfully. The primary focus of the thesis was to examine WIS post-development change in order to empirically substantiate and understand the nature of the maintenance phase. This was done with the intention to determine exactly ‘where’ and ‘how’ flexibility could be targeted to address these changes. This study uses an emergent analytical approach to identify and catalogue the nature of change occurring within WIS maintenance. However, the research framework design underwent a significant revision as the initial results indicated that a greater emphasis and refocus was required to achieve the research objective. To study WIS’s in an appropriate and detailed context, a single case study was conducted in a web development software house. In total the case study approach was used to collect empirical evidence from four projects that investigated post-development change requests in order to identify areas of the system susceptible to change. The maintenance phases of three WIS projects were considered in-depth, resulting in the collection of over four hundred change requests. The fourth project served as a validation case. The results are presented and the findings are used to identify key trends and characteristics that depict WIS maintenance change. The analytical information derived from the change requests is consolidated and shown diagrammatically for the key areas of change using profile models developed in this thesis. Based on the results, the thesis concludes and contributes to the ongoing debate that there is a discernable difference when considering WIS maintenance change compared to that of traditional IS maintenance. The detailed characteristics displayed in the profile models are then used to map specific flexibility criteria that ultimately are required to facilitate change. This is achieved using the Flexibility Matrix of Change (FMoC) tool which was developed within the remit of this research. This tool is a qualitative measurement scheme that aligns WIS maintenance changes to a reciprocal flexibility attribute. Thus, the wider aim of this thesis is to also expand the awareness of flexibility and its importance as a key component of the WIS lifecycle.

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Esta pesquisa tem como tema as relações entre a restrição espacial e de acesso a recursos naturais historicamente vivenciadas pelos moradores de uma Comunidade composta por índios Macuxi e Wapichana, localizada em paisagem de savana em Roraima, suas estratégias de subsistência e seu perfil antropométrico. Consistiu de um estudo de caso em Ecologia Humana sobre o tema da adaptabilidade humana, desenvolvido a partir de pesquisa documental e de campo. A pesquisa está teoricamente fundamentada em diferentes contribuições que tratam dos estudos sobre interações humano-ambiente, além daquelas destinadas a discutir adaptabilidade humana no contexto amazônico. Como resultados, identificou-se que a população pesquisada desenvolveu estratégias de adaptabilidade necessárias à sobrevivência em condições socioambientais hostis, marcadas por fatores limitantes que operam em escalas micro e macroestruturantes. O impacto biocultural destas restrições desencadeou respostas adaptativas nesta Comunidade, em dimensão coletiva, doméstica e individual. Na dimensão coletiva, a maior parte das respostas adaptativas decorreu da incorporação de indivíduo externo ao grupo por meio de união conjugal com mulher do Anzol, o que trouxe diversas melhorias para todos e reverteu o processo de restrição espacial progressiva. Na dimensão doméstica, ocorreu o aumento do ingresso de recursos monetários oriundos de programas sociais e, consequentemente, o maior consumo de ailmentos industrializados, o que caracteriza um dos aspectos da transição nutricional. Na dimensão individual, contam o aumento do consumo de alimentos cultivados localmente e a pressão sobre instituições de direitos coletivos e defesa de direitos indígenas para a obtenção de melhores condições de saúde e para a demarcação de maiores extensões de terras, para que haja melhores condições nutricionais para cada um dos atuai e futuros moradores do Anzol. A despeito das estratégias de adaptabilidade desenvolvidas para fazer frente às restrições socioambientais macro e microestruturantes, foram identificados riscos para o desenvolvimento e a saúde destes índios / This research discuss the relations between the spatial restraint and of access to natural resources historically experienced by the inhabitants of a community composed of Macuxi and Wapichana indians, located in a savanna landscape in Roraima, their subsistence strategies and their anthropometric profile. It consisted of a case study in Human Ecology on the subject of human adaptability, developed from documentary and field research. The research is theoretically based on different contributions that deal with studies on human-environment interactions, besides those aimed at discussing human adaptability in the amazonian context. As results, it was identified that the researched population developed strategies of adaptability necessary for survival under hostile socioenvironmental conditions, marked by limiting factors that operate at micro and macrostructuring scales. The biocultural impact of these restrictions has triggered adaptive responses in this community, in collective, domestic and individual dimension. In the collective dimension, the majority of the adaptive responses resulted from the incorporation of an individual external to the group through a conjugal union with an Anzol woman, which brought several improvements for all and reversed the process of progressive spatial restriction. In the domestic dimension, there was an increase in the inflow of monetary resources from social programs and, consequently, the higher consumption of industrial food, which characterizes one of the aspects of the nutritional transition. In the individual dimension, they count on the increase of the consumption of locally grown food and the pressure on institutions of collective rights and defense of indigenous rights to obtain better health conditions and for the demarcation of greater extensions of land, so that can reach better nutritional conditions for each of the current and future residents of Anzol. Despite the adaptability strategies developed to deal with socio-environmental constraints, risks to the development and health of these Indians were identified

Theory and research on emotion regulation have shifted from an emphasis on adaptiveness of specific regulatory strategies to regulatory flexibility according situational demands. Using the process model of flexible regulation (Bonanno & Burton, 2013), this dissertation reports two studies designed to investigate questions related to regulatory repertoire and responsiveness to feedback (two central components underpinning regulatory flexibility), respectively. In Study 1, participants undertook the Expressive Flexibility Task (EF Task), in which they were instructed to up- and down-regulate their emotional facial expressions, and the Affective Flexibility Task (AF Task), in which they were instructed to up- and down-regulate their subjective feelings. The results showed that the ability to enhance emotional expression, as rated by untrained observers, and the ability to enhance subjective feeling, as measured by facial electromyography (EMG), were moderately correlated, so were the abilities to suppress emotional expression and subjective feeling, suggesting regulation in distinct response systems are separable but also reflect a broader, unified capacity. In Study 2, extra trials (2nd phase) were added to examine the effect of practice and feedback instruction on expressive and affective regulatory abilities. Half of the participants were given predetermined negative feedback about their performance of the EF and AF Tasks and asked to try harder in the 2nd phase of the tasks (feedback group), and the other half were instructed to wait before proceeding to the 2nd task phases (control group). The two groups demonstrated comparable improvement in the ability to further enhance subjective feeling in the 2nd phase of the tasks, as measured by facial EMG. The feedback group also reported more or less emotion in accordance to the regulatory instructions in the 2nd task phases. Furthermore, both the abilities to further enhance and suppress subjective feeling as measured by facial EMG were negatively correlated with depressive symptoms and general distress, regardless of group status. The findings were discussed within the regulatory flexibility framework. Methodological limitations of the study and direction for future research were also discussed.

The current study investigates whether the ability to enhance and suppress emotional facial expressions display cross-sectional associations with feelings of loneliness among spousal bereaved individuals 1.5 to 3 years after a loss. We compare bereaved individuals to a demographically similar married control group to examine whether the relationship between loneliness and emotional expression regulation is moderated by grief after controlling for the effects of relationship satisfaction and symptoms of PTSD/depression. We evaluate three dimensions of loneliness: emotional loneliness, social loneliness, and collective loneliness.

The primary aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between psychological flexibility, self-concealment, and eating disorder severity. This study also sought to explore the relationship between these variables in a clinical sample. Existing literature has demonstrated that diminished psychological flexibility is likely to play a key role in eating pathology. Additionally, self-concealment has been found to be a common and treatment-interfering aspect of the clinical presentation of eating-disordered individuals. Preliminary evidence has been found linking these variables to severity of eating-disorder pathology. However, this relationship needs further clarification to understand fully the implications for treatment and relapse prevention, for these often treatment-resistant disorders. Participants were 182 respondents to an online survey including demographic information, the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q), the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (AAQ-16), and the Self-Concealment Scale (SCS). Data were collected via Qualtrics software and analyzed in SPSS using Hayes PROCESS models. Findings included the following. Among a sample of eating-disordered individuals, the less (more diminished) psychological flexibility they reported, the more severe the reported eating-disorder symptoms; in other words, an inverse relationship was found. Additionally, the greater self-concealment participants reported, the more severe were their reported eating-disorder symptoms. These findings held up for overall severity of reported symptoms and also for subscale severity for eating restraint, eating concern, weight concern, and shape concern. Additionally, a moderated mediation model found that greater self-concealment, diminished psychological flexibility, and no treatment were all significantly related to increases in eating-disorder severity. This model also found a significant interaction between psychological flexibility and eating-disorder severity moderated by treatment condition. That is, the extent to which someone self-conceals helps to explain the relationship between psychological flexibility and severity. Furthermore, whether a patient has been in treatment significantly relates to the relationship between psychological flexibility and severity. Implications of these findings are discussed, including a focus on emotion-regulation models of eating disorders and the rationale for adopting a transdiagnostic understanding of eating pathology. Recommendations are proposed for clinical practice, including expanding the utilization of therapies such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) for eating disorders, which specifically target psychological flexibility and self-concealment in the hope of preventing future relapse.

O objetivo deste estudo foi avaliar a tolerância ao calor de ovinos de corte das raças Santa Inês, Dorper e Merino Branco através do teste de capacidade termolítica (exposição ao sol). Foram utilizadas um total de 97 fêmeas vazias, com idade média de 3 anos. O estudo decorreu no verão, onde foram registradas as variáveis fisiológicas temperatura retal (TR), temperatura superficial (TS), frequência respiratória (FR), mensuradas depois de duas horas sob a sombra (1), uma hora sob o sol (2), quinze (3) e trinta (4) minutos após a exposição ao sol, e a taxa de sudação (Sud), no tempo 2. Posteriormente foram realizadas observações de comportamento a pasto durante três dias, no período das 11 às 14 horas, para as variáveis: tempo ao sol; tempo em pé; pastejo/alimentação, ruminação e ócio. As médias de TR1 foram semelhantes para as ovelhas Santa Inês e Dorper e superior para as ovelhas Merino Branco (P<0,05). Para TR2, TR3 e TR4 as ovelhas da raça Merino Branco tiveram os maiores valores, seguidos das ovelhas da raça Santa Inês e com os menores aumentos de temperatura retal nas ovelhas da raça Dorper (P<0,05). Estes resultados refletiram na capacidade termolítica individual, sendo menor para a raça Santa Inês (P<0,05). Após exposição ao sol observaram-se diferenças entre as TS, sendo as da raça Merino Branco mais elevadas, seguidas pelas da raça Dorper e da Santa Inês (P<0,05). A raça Merino Branco apresentou as maiores FR, seguida das raças Dorper e Santa Inês, todas diferentes entre si (P<0,05). Todos os animais expostos por uma hora ao sol apresentaram aumento nas TR, TS e FR (P<0,05), e se aproximaram dos níveis encontrados antes da exposição ao sol após trinta minutos de descanso sob a sombra (Santa Inês e Dorper P<0,05; Merino Branco P>0,05). A taxa média de sudação para as ovelhas da raça Santa Inês foi superior a encontrada para as ovelhas da raça Dorper (P<0,05). Houve diferença entre os animais dentro de cada raça (P<0,05), confirmando a hipótese de grande variabilidade entre os indivíduos e diferenças entre as raças. Com relação ao comportamento, as ovelhas da raça Santa Inês continuaram em pastejo mesmo nas horas mais quentes do dia, tendo sido encontrada uma correlação positiva de 0,64 entre a capacidade termolítica individual e o pastejo ao sol, enquanto as ovelhas da raça Dorper preferencialmente permaneceram à sombra devido ao manejo semiconfinado. No presente trabalho o tipo de manejo alimentar influenciou no tempo de uso da sombra. Sob as condições climáticas encontradas no experimento os animais estudados tiveram seus parâmetros fisiológicos alterados devido à exposição ao sol, e os animais das raças Dorper e Merino Branco mostraram maior capacidade termolítica do que os animais da raça Santa Inês, sendo este um fator que pode influenciar na tolerância ao calor individual. / The aim of this study was to evaluate the heat tolerance of three meat sheep breeds, Santa Ines, Dorper and White Merino using Thermolysis capacity test. 97 non pregnant females (3 years old) were used in the study that took place in the summer. Physiological variables as rectal temperature (RT), surface temperature (ST), respiratory rate (RR) were measured after two hours under the shade (1), after one hour under the sun (2), fifteen (3) and thirty (4) minutes after sun exposure, and sweating rate (SR) on time 2. Were also collected behavioral data during three days in the period from 11:00 to 14:00 hours: say in the sun, standing posture, eating, ruminating and idling. RT1 means were equal Santa Ines and Dorper, and greater for White Merino (P<0.05). White Merino also had greater values for RT2, RT3 e RT4, followed by Santa Ines and Dorper (P<0.05). These results reflected the thermolysis capacity, being lower for Santa Ines breed (P<0.05). After sun exposure differences between ST were observed, and greater values were found for White Merino, followed by Dorper and Santa Ines breeds (P<0.05). In the same way, White Merino had the highest RR, followed by Dorper, which had higher RR compared to Santa Ines (P<0.05). All animals exposed to the sun for an hour showed increased RT, ST, RR values (P<0.05), and approached the levels found before exposure to the sun after thirty minutes of rest in the shade (Santa Ines and Dorper P<0.05; White Merino P>0.05). Sweating rate for Santa Ines breed was higher than those found for Dorper breed (P<0.05). There were differences among animals within each race (P<0.05), confirming the hypothesis of great variability among individuals and differences between the breeds. With respect to behavior, Santa Ines ewe grazed even during the hottest hours of the day, and a positive correlation of 0.64 between the individual thermolysis capacity and grazing in the sun was found, while the Dorper ewes remained preferentially under the shade due to the semi-confined management. In the present study, feedin management influenced the time under the shade. Under experimental climatic conditions, the studied ewes had theirs physiological parameters increased due to sun exposure, and Dorper and White Merino breeds showed a greater thermolisys capacity than the animals of the Santa Ines breed, which is a factor that can influence individual heat tolerance.

This study investigated the relationship between the Vineland Social Maturity Scale (VSMS) and the Adaptive Behavior Scale (ABS) in their assessment of adaptive behavior. Both scales, the VSMS and the ABS, were administered to a randomized sample of male and female residents of varying degrees of mental retardation. The ABS and the VSMS were administered by those hospital staff who were most familiar with the members in the sample. The scores from the ABS and the scores from the VSMS were then correlated. Additional correlations were carried by matching the sub-categories of the VSMS with the domains of the ABS.The results of this study indicate that there exists a significant relationship between the Adaptive Behavior Scale and the Vineland Social Maturity Scale. In the assessment of adaptive behavior one scale may be substituted for the other in those situations where an overall index of adaptive behavior is required.One of the major differences between the two scales is that the Adaptive Behavior Scale provides an extensive survey of personality and behavior disorders which identify areas that prevent progress in adaptive growth. As the assessment of maladaptive behavior is a major concern in the management of the mentally retarded, the Adaptive Behavior Scale has been found to be the preferred scale in this investigation.

<p>A substantial amount of time and efforts in the initial stages of creating a software system is spent capturing requirements, deciding what software to use and creating technical prototypes to gain confidence in the decisions that have been made are correct. This thesis targets the domain of Mobile Learning with the aim of optimizing these initial stages of a new project by identifying commonalities and architectural patterns found in six existing software systems related to research projects in the domain.</p><p>The results present a set of requirements, guidelines and/or an initial conceptual architecture that can be extended or adapted to a broad range of software systems.</p>