Abstract
Distributed Computing is becoming more and more led by technological and application advances. Many works consider new computing models compared to the classical closed model with a fixed number of participants and strong hypothesis on communication and structuration. Indeed, it is hard to imagine some application or computational activity and process that falls outside Distributed Computing. Internet and the web (e.g. social networks, clouds) are becoming the main application field for distributed computing. In addition to the classical challenges that developers have to face (asynchrony and failures) they have to deal with load balancing, malicious and selfish behaviors, mobility, heterogeneity and the dynamic nature of participating processes. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

Abstract
Causality plays a central role as a building block in solving important problems in distributed systems, such as replication, debugging, group communication and global snapshots. To be useful, causality must be realised by actual mechanisms that can track it and encode it. Existing causality tracking mechanisms, such as vector clocks and version vectors, rely on mappings from globally unique identifiers to integer counters. In a system with a well known set of entities these identifiers can be pre-configured and given distinct positions in a vector or distinct names in a mapping. Identity management is more problematic in dynamic systems, with a large and highly variable number of entities, being worsened when network partitions occur. Present solutions for causality tracking are not appropriate to these increasingly common scenarios. This work introduces novel causality tracking mechanisms that can be used in scenarios with a dynamic number of entities. These allow completely decentralised creation of entities (processes or replicas) with no need for global identifiers or global coordination. These mechanisms have a variable size representation that adapts automatically to the number of entities, growing or shrinking appropriately. This book is the published version of the second half of my PhD thesis, and focus its discourse on causality tracking for disconnected and semi-connected distributed systems.

Abstract
Molinate is a thiocarbamate herbicide used worldwide in rice crop protection. As with other pesticides, molinate is a recognized environmental pollutant, detected in soils, irrigation water, or rivers and bio-accumulated by some wildlife forms. For this reason, and in spite of its low toxicity to humans, environmental protection measures, which include reduction of use and/or remediation processes, are recommended. Due to its physic-chemical properties, molinate can easily disperse and react in the environment, originating diverse transformation products, some with increased toxicity. In spite of being a xenobiotic compound, molinate can also suffer microbial transformation by bacteria or fungi, sometimes serving as nutrient and energy source. In an attempt to isolate microorganisms to be used in the bioremediation of molinate-contaminated sites, a mixed culture, dominated by the actinobacterium Gulosibacter molinativorax ON4(T), was recovered from the runoff of a molinate-producing plant. Beyond a promising tool to decontaminate molinate-polluted sites, this culture also brought interesting insights into the biology of the degradation of this herbicide. In this review, an overview of the distribution and properties of molinate as environmental contaminant, the capability of microorganisms to transform this herbicide, and some reflections about possible bioremediation approaches are made.

Abstract
The growing demand for virtual urban models in emerging areas of interest has promoted a variety of techniques for automating the creation of virtual scenes with a high level of realism. However, visualization is not always the only aim in many applications. Increasingly, urban systems are also required for management, analysis, or interaction with very different types of information. Three-dimensional (3D) urban entities should maintain neighbor relations, and being inserted in a geospatial database in order to enable associative queries, one of the most important features associated with 3D urban geographic information system (GIS). Additional challenges are found when these three-dimensional models are implemented in web-based systems. This paper proposes a method for automatic modeling of buildings and street surfaces of entire real cities by combining computer graphics, computational geometry, and GIS techniques. The sources of information employed are two-dimensional (2D) GIS and its associated digital elevation models (DEMs) in order to provide real terrain features. The virtual environment supports web-based navigation and data interaction. The case study was performed in Jaen, Spain, a hilly city with more than 1,000 blocks of buildings. The 3D city model was generated using the public data provided by the general cadastral office of Jaen and the DEM information of this area. The topological relations between the geometric urban entities were inserted in the spatial database and the graphics and thematic information could be accessed through the Internet. All these features are highly desirable for decision making in urban planning. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)UP.1943-5444.0000131. (C) 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Abstract
The operating theater is the biggest hospital budget expenditure. The usage of surgery related resources and its intrinsic planning must be carefully devised in order to achieve better operational performance. However, from long to short term planning, the decision processes inherent to the operating theater are often the subject of empiricism. Moreover, the current hospital information systems available in Portuguese public hospitals lack a decision support system component, which could assist in achieving better planning solutions. This work reports the development of a centralized system for the operating theater planning to support decision-making tasks of surgeons, chief specialty managers, and hospital administration. Its main components concern surgery scheduling, operating theater's resource allocation and performance measurement. The enhancement of the planning processes, the increase of policy compliance, and the overall performance of the operating theater compared to the former methodologies are also discussed. © 2013, IGI Global.

Abstract
In this paper we present a quality model based on the software engineering paradigms, which is applied to evaluate digital learning content, specifically, games for mobile platforms. The model is called Quantitative Evaluation Framework (QEF), and measures system quality throughout its development life cycle. QEF evaluates the educational software quality, particularly the digital learning content (ISO 9126 is the standard of reference) in a three-dimensional space. Every dimension aggregates a set of factors. A factor is a component that represents the system performance from a particular point of view. The quality of a given system is defined and evaluated in our tri-dimensional Cartesian quality space in relation to a hypothetical ideal system represented in our quality space by the coordinates (1, 1, 1). Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.