ABSTRACT:
A micro slit has been designed between micro ridges, and deformation of a biological cell passing through the micro slit has been observed in vitro. The slit, of which the width is 0.87 mm and the height is 0.010 mm, has been made between the micro ridges on the transparent polydimethylsiloxane disk and on the glass disk by the photolithography technique. The slit is placed at the middle part of a flow channel. Four kinds of cells were used in the experiment: C2C12 (mouse myoblast cells), HUVEC (human umbilical vein endothelial cells), Hepa1-6 (mouse hepatoma cells), and Neuro-2a (mouse neural crest-derived cells). The suspension of each kind of cells was introduced to the slits. The deformation of cells passing through the micro slit was observed with an inverted phase-contrast microscope. The experimental results show that cells deform to the flat circular disk and pass through the micro slit of 0.010 mm height. The deformation ratio, the passing velocity, and the shape index of cells through the slit were evaluated: Hepa1-6 is deformed with the increase of the passing velocity, and HUVEC elongates along the flow. The designed slit between micro ridges has capability to evaluate the deformability of cells.

ABSTRACT:
Students’ attitudes towards Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) has been a topic of enduring interest in the field of STEM education over the past decade – but why? After all, there is no sense in which people are concerned about students’ attitudes towards the learning of English or history. So what drives the interest in these topics? Previous research has suggested a relationship between teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards a subject area. In order to increase student representation in STEM, we need teachers who have positive attitudes and can serve as role models to encourage their students to pursue STEM careers. In this paper we argue that in order to engage students’ interest in the technical career paths, we must start with inspiring and training teachers to instill such interest in their students at early age. We present our experiences and outcomes from a teacher training program. Through the training, we were able to help teachers explore ways to incorporate programming into their curriculum, gain STEM career awareness and develop an understanding of importance of soft skills in STEM. The results show that teachers were able to gain confidence in incorporating their subject matter into Scratch-based classroom activities and teaching this material in a classroom setting and gain a better understanding of careers in STEM.

ABSTRACT:
Hospital Pelopidas Silveira-IMIP/SES/SUS is a tertiary-unit, specialized in cardiology, neurology, neurosurgery and interventional radiology. It is the only hospital of Brazilian Public-Health-System (SUS) with this profile and a 24h-acute-cardio/neurovascular facility. Challenges of Continuing-Education include a) guaranteeing appropriate level of basic knowledge, b) empowering clinical staff to remain up to date in current knowledge. HPS Continuing-Education Program is based on three branches: a) Classroom-Tutorials (CT), b) Online-Tutorials at “Pelopidas Digital” Virtual-Teaching-Platform (PD-VTP) and c) Daily-Practice Evaluation (DPE). This paper presents logistic details of HPS Continuing-Education Program. Training team coordinates tutorial meetings and performs continuous statistical analysis. Evaluation team visit hospital departments daily, observing in practice the incorporation of information provided, and retraining individuals in their work scenarios. Both teams perform curriculum development, meeting planning and creation of digital-training-modules. Tutorial meetings have pre/post-tests, allowing monitoring of attendance, topic significance and short-term retention. Tutorial groups are formed by 6-12 employees sharing similarities in training needs. CT is offered to 4 groups-of-interest: a) nurses, b) nursing assistants, c) administrative staff, porters, drivers, d) cleaning, laundry and security staff. Problematization and active strategies have resulted into an attractive, structured educational program customized to produce short-term results. The strategy is of interest to institutions sharing similar challenges.

ABSTRACT:
This study shares the findings of a school-based Action Research project to explore how inquiry-based science practical lessons designed using the Flipped Science Inquiry@CGS classroom pedagogical model influence the way students learn scientific knowledge and also students’ development of 21^st century competencies, in particular, in the area of Knowledge Construction.

Taking on a broader definition of the flipped classroom pedagogical model, the Flipped Science Inquiry@CGS framework adopts a structure that inverted the traditional science learning experience. Scientific knowledge is constructed through discussions with their peers, making use of their prior knowledge and their experiences while engaging in hands-on activities.

Through the study, it is found that with the use of the Flipped Science Inquiry@CGS framework, learning experiences that are better aligned to the epistemology of science while developing 21^st century competencies in students are created.

ABSTRACT:
This paper addresses the possibilities of combining Spanish language learners and English language learners in high school and post-secondary institutions for mutual benefit to learn authentic language. Academic or “classroom” Spanish is insufficient to empower students for today’s workplace. The concept behind “Real Language” is illustrated by an example of an interdisciplinary activity to facilitate communicative interaction in genuine language and promote cultural understanding between intermediate Spanish students and ESOL/native speakers at the high school and post-secondary level. Students are asked to utilize their life skills in interactive, freestyle conversation without the intervention of an instructor. The learning space for language exchange is an out-of-class venue for a non-intimidating, more authentic setting. This simple qualitative study investigates the potential value of this sort of interdisciplinary activity. The intent is to evaluate attitudes of the participants in relation to confidence in their ability to use the target language, and their willingness to use it in social and professional environments and, in addition, to facilitate cultural understanding. The positive result of the project is validated by the voice of the student participants as they reflect on their experience in “Real Language”. Could this concept facilitate evolving strategies for interdisciplinary contemporary foreign language learning?

ABSTRACT:
Graph organizers are powerful tools for both structuring and transmitting knowledge. Because of their unique characteristics, these organizers are valuable for cultural institutions, which own large amounts of information assets and need to constantly make sense of them. On one hand, graph organizers are tools for connecting numerous chunks of data. On the other hand, because they are visual media, they offer a bird’s-eye view perspective on complexity, which is digestible to the human eye. They are effective tools for information synthesis, and are capable of providing valuable insights on data. Information synthesis is essential for Heritage Interpretation, since institutions depend on constant generation of new content to preserve relevance among their audiences. While Mind Maps are simpler to be structured and comprehended, Knowledge Maps offer challenges that require new methods to minimize the difficulties encountered during their assembly. This paper presents strategies based on manual and automatic tagging as an answer to this problem. In addition, we describe the results of a usability test and qualitative analysis performed to compare the workflows employed to construct both Mind Maps and Knowledge Maps. Furthermore, we also talk about how well concepts can be communicated through the visual representation of trees and networks. Depending on the employed method, different results can be achieved, because of their unique topological characteristics. Our findings suggest that automatic tagging supports and accelerates the construction of graphs.

ABSTRACT:
About the book written by Marcienne Martin, The Pariah in Contemporary Society: A Black Sheep or a Prodigal Child?, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, 145 p.

Be the ugly duckling in a family, the head of a Turk in a group, or the pariah in a society, amounts to living in marked and implicit difference, in indifference, even in cruelty.

The research which this book is dedicated to articulates the concept of the “pariah,” and it is through the various filters presented above that we will proceed to its analysis. Besides these, we will try to study the notion of the “pariah” using the different strata that make up human society, such as wonderful tales and literature. We will also present the perception of lexicologists and psychologists, because behind the word there is the object, which is apprehended differently by the human psyche because it is included in value systems varying from one sociocultural group to another. Even though the project is ambitious, it cannot cover this notion entirely because a large number of questions emerge from it. This amounts to opening a Pandora's Box dedicated to this status constructed by human beings, which is based on the diachronic stratum of the lexicology and the symbolic, but also the very nature of living.

ABSTRACT:
By taking advantage of niche sharing scheme,we propose a novel co-evolutionary particle swarm optimization algorithm (NCPSO) to solve permutation flow shop scheduling problem. As the core of this algorithm, niche sharing scheme maximizes the diversity of population and hence improves the quality of individuals. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, we have use eight Taillard instances with different sizes to extensive experiment and results clearly shown that the solutions found by NCPSO algorithm outperform those by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimization (CPSO).

ABSTRACT:
This article examines and evaluates the systems view of the concept of the collision avoidance early warning system (will be referred to as “the early warning system” in all further instances) which uses traffic accident data and data mining algorithms. Principles of the General Systems Theory are used in describing the system and elaborating upon its attributes.

Connections to other current telematic systems and its location in the hierarchy of state traffic safety units are discussed steadily and gradually in the article.

It also describes the principles of the collision avoidance early warning system, along with its inputs and outputs and the elements and connections it is formed out of.

With regard to the principles of the General Systems Theory isomorphism’s are searched for and the feedback and the goals of the system are discussed within.

ABSTRACT:
There are currently presented ”smart city” solutions from the biggest worldwide corporations through start-ups up to the universities. It is indisputable that some of them are for sure very interesting and beneficial for citizens and cities themselves. Nevertheless, there are too many provided solutions that make it very hard to evaluate which are really beneficial and which are not. A simple and understandable framework that would allow cities to evaluate a proposed smart city solution is currently missing. The aim of this paper is to provide an approach for evaluation of particular smart city solutions and to determine whether it is suitable and beneficial for the city. Cities are dynamic, non-linear, complex systems and the evaluation cannot be done by a static and deterministic program in most cases, but dynamics and non-linearity of cities must be considered. While modeling is widely used in transportation or energy management, in the field of smart cities, no modeling approach has been used. In this paper, SMACEF (SMArt City Evaluation Framework) is proposed and its contributions are shown on a case study.

ABSTRACT:
In the 1990s, NASA implemented a programme named "Faster, Better, Cheaper," (FBC) which involved essential changes to the way in which the organization used to be established. It was a huge organizational and transformational effort that required delivering dramatic advances in robustness, flexibility, and efficiency. Nevertheless in 1999, the failures of two consecutive Mars Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander missions brought to a stop of the FBC programme. We critically analyze and evaluate NASA’s reorganization across of two models of organization theory such as the Diamond and Star, which show that FBC style needed a super-high-tech, a high level of complexity and novelty, and a time-critical pace. In addition, the majority of the missions' failures were also because of the short schedule, limited budget, and a deficient coordination of the processes management particularly in learning.

ABSTRACT:
The fundamental challenge to a solution to improve software quality is in the people and processes that develop software products. Imparting real world experiences in software development best practices to undergraduate students is often a challenge due to the lack of effective learning tools. This pedagogical requirement is important because graduates are expected to develop software that meets rigorous quality standards. Certain best practices are difficult to comprehend by course lectures alone and are enhanced with supplemental learning tools. Realizing the necessity of such teaching tools, we designed and developed six (6) delivery hours of case study videos for use in courses that impart knowledge on Software Verification & Validation (SV&V) topics viz. requirements engineering, and software reviews. We see case study videos as an effective active learning tool in our flipped classroom approach. We present our design of the case study video in its generic components envisioning how it may be used in general. To evaluate our active learning tools we mapped the learning objectives of the case Study videos to the expected learning outcomes for ABET accreditation of an undergraduate engineering program. Our implementation has been disseminated to partner institutions. Results of delivery in a faculty workshop and in two different university courses are shared.

ABSTRACT:
The synthesis and application of new nanostructured organic materials, for the development of technology based on organic devices, have taken great interest from the scientific community. The greatest interest in studying organic semiconductor materials has been connected to its already known potential applications, such as: batteries, organic solar cells, flexible organic solar cells, organic light emitting diodes, organic sensors and others. Phototherapy makes use of different radiation sources, and the treatment of hyperbilirubinemia the most common therapeutic intervention occurs in the neonatal period. In this work we developed an organic optoelectronic sensor capable of detecting and determining the radiation dose rate emitted by the radiation source of neonatal phototherapy equipment. The sensors were developed using optically transparent substrate with Nanostructured thin film layers of Poly(9-Vinylcarbazole) covered by a layer of Poly(P-Phenylene Vinylene). The samples were characterized by UV-Vis Spectroscopy, Electrical Measurements and SEM. With the results obtained from this study can be developed dosimeters organics to the neonatal phototherapy equipment.

ABSTRACT:
Mobile phones not only increase our availability for communication anytime, anywhere, but also interrupt us anytime, anywhere. This paper empirically examines the role of local context (e.g. activity/location where one receives the call) vs. the relational context (e.g. what the phone call is about and from whom) in how people make decisions to answer or ignore phone call. Using both quantitative (N=101) and qualitative (N=10) methods, we gathered data on people’s cellphone handling practices. Analysis of the data reveals that 1) people are influenced by the availability or unavailability of relational context in making call handling decisions and are rarely influenced by their local context alone; 2) people predict the value of a call to be significantly different before engaging in the call than the value they perceive after the call. Our qualitative data confirmed that the low availability of relational context information not only led to misjudgment of call value but also suboptimal call handling decisions. Together our findings suggest that designing cell phone interfaces that display relational context information can support people in accurately gauging the value of incoming calls to appropriate response decisions in social and professional contexts.

ABSTRACT:
This work presents a computational implementation of an automatic conformity verification of building projects using a 3D modeling platform for BIM. This program was developed in C# language and based itself on the 9th Technical Instruction from Military Fire Brigade of the State of Minas Gerais which covers regulations of fire load in buildings and hazardous areas.