Transaction support is crucial in mobile data management. Specific characteristics of mobile environments (e.g. variable bandwidth, disconnections, limited resources on mobile hosts) make traditional transaction management techniques no longer appropriate. Several models for mobile transactions have been proposed but it is difficult to have an overview of all of them. This paper analyzes and compares several contributions to mobile transactions. The analysis distinguishes two groups of models. The first group includes proposals where transactions are completely or partially executed on mobile hosts. In this group we focus on ACID properties support. The second group considers transactions requested by mobile hosts and executed on the wired network. In this case, ACID properties are not compromised and focus is on supporting mobile host movements during transaction execution. Discussions pointing out limitations, interesting solutions and research perspectives complete this paper.

Research on context management and activity recognition in smart environments is essential in the development of innovative well adapted services. This paper presents two main contributions. First, we present ContextAct@A4H, a new real-life dataset of daily living activities with rich context data 4. It is a high quality dataset collected in a smart apartment with a dense but non intrusive sensor infrastructure. Second, we present the experience of using temporal logic and model checking for activity recognition. Temporal logic allows specifying activities as complex events of object usage which can be described at different granularity. It also expresses temporal ordering between events thus palliating a limitation of ontology based activity recognition. The results on using the CADP toolbox for activity recognition in the real life collected data are very good.

Objective To describe fetal and neonatal mortality due to congenital anomalies in Colombia. Methods We analyzed all fetal and neonatal deaths due to a congenital anomaly registered with the Colombian vital statistics system during 1999–2008. Results The registry included 213,293 fetal deaths and 7,216,727 live births. Of the live births, 77,738 (1.08%) resulted in neonatal deaths. Congenital anomalies were responsible for 7321 fetal deaths (3.4% of all fetal deaths) and 15,040 neonatal deaths (19.3% of all neonatal deaths). The fetal mortality rate due to congenital anomalies was 9.9 per 10,000 live births and fetal deaths; the neonatal mortality rate due to congenital anomalies was 20.8 per 10,000 live births. Mortality rates due to congenital anomalies remained relatively stable during the study period. The most frequent fatal congenital anomalies were congenital heart defects (32.0%), central nervous system anomalies (15.8%), and chromosomal anomalies (8.0%). Risk factors for fetal and neonatal death included: male or undetermined sex, living in villages or rural areas, mother's age >35 years, low and very low birthweight, and <28 weeks gestation at birth. Conclusions Congenital anomalies are an important cause of fetal and neonatal deaths in Colombia, but many of the anomalies may be preventable or treatable.

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