Isabel Pavão Martins

A New Mixed-Integer Programming Model for Harvest Scheduling Subject to Maximum Area Restrictions

Forest ecosystem management often requires spatially explicit planning because the spatial arrangement of harvests has become a critical economic and environmental concern. Recent research on exact methods has addressed both the design and the solution of forest management problems with constraints on the clearcut size, but where simultaneously harvesting two adjacent stands in the same period does not necessarily exceed the maximum opening size. Two main integer programming approaches have been proposed for this area restriction model. However, both encompass an exponential number of variables or constraints. In this work, we present a new integer programming model with a polynomial number of variables and constraints. Branch and bound is used to solve it. The model was tested with both real and hypothetical forests ranging from 45 to 1,363 polygons. Results show that the proposed models solutions were within or slightly above 1% of the optimal solution and were obtained in a short computation time.

Extratrigeminal ice-pick status

We describe six patients with an identical type of headache, consisting of short episodes (lasting around 1 week) of daily attacks of ice‐pick‐like pain, recurring every minute in the same points of the scalp. In all of them, the pain was felt outside the cutaneous area of the trigeminal nerve (retroauricular, parietal, and occipital regions). All patients were examined in the emergency department of a general hospital over a period of 7 years because of these acute headaches. None of them had a history of migraine.

A column generation approach for solving a non-temporal forest harvest model with spatial structure constraints

Abstract We present an integer programming model for a non-temporal forest harvest problem with constraints on the clearcut size and on the total area of old growth patches with a minimum size requirement. The model has a very large number of variables for operationally sized problems which precludes the use of exact solution methods. We propose column generation to solve the linear relaxation of the model and a linear programming rounding heuristic to obtain a solution to the model. Column generation may not solve exactly the linear relaxation because the optimization problems associated with the pricing subproblems are NP -hard. We present heuristics for these subproblems. Computational results for test instances and for a real life instance that corresponds to a large Portuguese forest are reported.

Acquired Conduction Aphasia in a Child

An 11‐year‐old girl is described who acquired conduction aphasia after head trauma. Detailed study of her repetition defect showed that it was because of impaired short‐term verbal memory. CT scan showed two hypodense areas in the left hemisphere, which included the supramarginal gyrus and Wernickés area. This case is similar to adults with conduction aphasia, indicating the early intrahemispheric specialisation for verbal functions, in this case auditory verbal short‐term memory.

A longitudinal study of neurological soft signs from late childhood into early adulthood.

Neurological examination of children includes the screening for soft neurological signs (NSS). There is little knowledge about their evolution during adolescence, except that their lasting presence has been associated with developmental, psychological, and cognitive disorders.

AGE AND SEX DIFFERENCES IN NEUROBEHAVIORAL PERFORMANCE: A STUDY OF PORTUGUESE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN

In this study normative data were obtained on measures of IQ, visual/motor, motor and memory functions among Portuguese elementary school children. Subjects were 228 females and 275 males, 8.0 to 11.9 years of age, in grades 2 through 4, who participated in a dental study. Performance on all tests improved with increasing age. Females performed better in rote verbal learning, psychomotor speed, and speed of information processing. Males had higher scores on tests of visual learning, visual memory, and fine motor speed and coordination. Nonverbal IQ had a significant impact on all tests except motor speed and coordination. Results represent an initial attempt to evaluate Portuguese children in educational and medical settings.

Headaches associated with refractive errors: myth or reality?

Introduction.—Headache and refractive errors are very common conditions in the general population, and those with headache often attribute their pain to a visual problem. The International Headache Society (IHS) criteria for the classification of headache includes an entity of headache associated with refractive errors (HARE), but indicates that its importance is widely overestimated.

Recovery of acquired aphasia in children

Abstract We report a longitudinal study of 32 children (younger than 15 years) with acquired aphasia secondary to unilateral focal brain lesions, and study the factors responsible for the prognosis of aphasia. Poor outcome was associated with infectious aetiology, lesion onset after age 7 years, fluent speech, poor auditory comprehension and damage to Wernickes area. Conversely, vascular and traumatic aetiology and the presence of mutism or hemiparesis were associated with a better recovery. However, as some of these factors tended to cluster, we performed a multivariable regression analysis. This analysis showed that only three of the variables could predict the prognosis: infectious aetiology, poor verbal comprehension, and involvement of Wernickes area were all associated with a poor outcome. Age at lesion onset, in contrast, did not account for aphasia recovery. These data suggest therefore that recovery from aphasia depends much more upon the integrity of certain brain areas (left posterior languag...

Cut‐off scores in MMSE: a moving target?

Background:  Cognitive tests are known to be influenced by language, culture and education. In addition, there may be an impact of ‘epoch’ in cognition, because there is secular increase in scores of IQ tests in children. If we assume this is a long lasting process, then it should persist later in life.

Speech rate and fluency in children and adolescents.

Reduced speech fluency is frequent in clinical paediatric populations, an unexplained finding. To investigate age related effects on speech fluency variables, we analysed samples of narrative speech (picture description) of 308 healthy children, aged 5 to 17 years, and studied its relation with verbal fluency tasks. All studied measures showed significant developmental effects. Speech rate and verbal fluency scores increased, while pauses, repetitions and locution time declined with age. Speech rate correlated with semantic fluency tasks suggesting that it also depends upon the efficacy of lexical retrieval. These results indicate that the interpretation of disorders of speech fluency in childhood must incorporate age appropriate norms.