Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the internal reliability, factorial validity, and measurement invariance of a Brazilian-Portuguese version of the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12) across clinical and nonclinical groups. The clinical sample consisted of 228 chronic hemodialysis patients (41.7% female), with a mean age of 48.23 (SD = 16.02) years, whereas the nonclinical sample comprised 350 university students (59.1% female), with a mean age of 21.15 (SD = 2.04) years. Initial model fit comparison of 16 factor structures reported in the literature, through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), provided mixed results. Additional revisions based on CFA modification indices demonstrated that a reduced (8-item) one-factor model with three error covariances provided the best fit to the data in both samples (comparative fit index > .98 and root mean square error of approximation < .05) and acceptable internal reliability estimates (>.70). Pearson's correlations between the original and the reduced scale was .96 for both samples. Multigroup analysis supported partial strong measurement equivalence across groups. Latent mean differences showed an expected higher factor mean for the clinical sample. Overall results demonstrated that the 8-item one-factor of the GHQ-12 showed good psychometric properties in both samples and provided preliminary support for meaningful comparisons of factor means across clinical and nonclinical groups.

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Abstract
The motivational orientation of an athlete aims to improve their skills (task) and getting a good result in a given competition (ego). Thus, the purpose of the present study was to compare players of one Portuguese team handball club. The independent variables were: competitive levels, years as competitors, time presence as player in the club and competitive position. The dependent variables were motivational orientations: task and ego. The sample consisted of 57 male athletes borne between 1977 and 1997. The Task and Ego Orientation Questionnaire in Sport (TEOSQp), validated by Fernandes and Vasconcelos-Raposo (2010) was used. Results revealed that the handball players in the club studied present high scores on both task and ego orientation with a higher score at the level of task orientation. The present results are not in accordance with previous studies. However they do not contradict consolidated theoretical proposal. Senior athletes presented higher scores in task orientation and lower on ego. Comparisons by years in competition, time presence in the club and competitive position in the do influence significantly the motivational orientation among this club team handball players.

Abstract
In communication systems, transient faults will eventually occur. Thus, some mechanism is necessary to handle them and achieve appropriate levels of reliability, particularly in safety-critical systems. One possibility is to rely on temporal redundancy, i.e., using message retransmissions. General requirements for such a mechanism would include a parsimonious use of extra bandwidth while guaranteeing the schedulability of the message set. In this paper we propose using on-line traffic scheduling together with scheduling servers to recover message errors in time-triggered systems on Controller Area Network (CAN), taking advantage of the Flexible Time-Triggered CAN protocol. This novel mechanism is shown to offer a desired error recovery latency using much less extra bandwidth than typical approaches used in time-triggered systems. In this paper we present this novel error recovery mechanism, including a thorough characterization as well as configuration guidelines, namely concerning how to choose the server parameters (type, period and capacity). The correctness of the proposed approach and its superior performance are validated with simulation using several communication benchmarks available in the literature.

Abstract
Distributed Embedded Systems are subject to transient communication faults that need being detected and mitigated in safety-critical scopes. This paper addresses error recovery in time-triggered systems based on the Controller Area Network (CAN). It extends a recent work that proposed using online traffic scheduling, combined with servers, to implement dynamic message retransmissions. In particular, we provide a schedulability analysis that considers the interference of the error-recovery server in the time-triggered traffic, as well as a methodology to compute the worst-case response time of messages affected by errors. We also present a comparison with related error-recovery methods that confirms the superiority of the proposed method. © 2013 IEEE.

Abstract