INTRODUCTION:Dermatological disorders are common in medical practice. In medical school, however, the time devoted to teaching dermatology is usually very limited. Therefore, online educational systems have increasingly been used in medical education settings to enhance exposure to dermatology.OBJECTIVE:The present study was designed to develop an e-learning program for medical students in dermatology and evaluate the impact of this program on learning.METHODS:This prospective study included second year medical students at the University of Technology and Science, Salvador, Brazil. All students attended discussion seminars and practical activities, and half of the students had adjunct online seminars (blended learning). Tests were given to all students before and after the courses, and test scores were evaluated.RESULTS:Students who participated in online discussions associated with face-to-face activities (blended learning) had significantly higher posttest scores (9.0±0.8) than those who only participated in classes (7.75±1.8, p <0.01).CONCLUSIONS:The results indicate that an associated online course might improve the learning of medical students in dermatology.

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In our research, we have been concerned with the question of how to make relevant features of security situations visible to users in order to allow them to make informed decisions regarding potential privacy and security problems, as well as regarding potential implications of their actions. To this end, we have designed technical infrastructures that make visible the configurations, activities, and implications of available security mechanisms. This thus allows users to make informed choices and take coordinated and appropriate actions when necessary. This work differs from the more traditional security usability work in that our focus is not only on the usability of security mechanism (e.g., the ease-of-use of an access control interface), but how security can manifest itself as part of people's interactions with and through information systems (i.e., how people experience and interpret privacy and security situations, and are enabled or constrained by existing technological mechanisms to act appropriately). In this paper, we report our experiences designing, developing, and testing two technical infrastructures for supporting this approach for usable security.

Publish/subscribe infrastructures, specifically notification servers, are used in a large spectrum of distributed applications as their basic communication and integration infrastructure. With their recent popularization, notification servers are being developed to support specific application domains. At the same time, generalpurpose notification servers provide a large set of functionality for a broad set of applications. With so many options, developers face the dilemma of choosing between application-specific or generalpurpose notification servers. In both cases, however, the set of features provided by the servers are usually neither extensible nor configurable, making their customization to specific application domains a difficult task. In this work, a more flexible approach is proposed -a customizable, extensible and dynamic architecture for notification services -which allows the customization of the notification service to different application domains. The extensibility model is presented according to the design framework proposed by Rosemblum and Wolf. A preliminary implementation of the prototype is also discussed, as well as configuration examples.

Publish/subscribe infrastructures, specifically notification servers, are used in a large spectrum of distributed applications as their basic communication and integration infrastructure. With their recent popularization, notification servers are being developed to support specific application domains. At the same time, generalpurpose notification servers provide a large set of functionality for a broad set of applications. With so many options, developers face the dilemma of choosing between application-specific or generalpurpose notification servers. In both cases, however, the set of features provided by the servers are usually neither extensible nor configurable, making their customization to specific application domains a difficult task. In this work, a more flexible approach is proposed -a customizable, extensible and dynamic architecture for notification services -which allows the customization of the notification service to different application domains. The extensibility model is presented according to the design framework proposed by Rosemblum and Wolf. A preliminary implementation of the prototype is also discussed, as well as configuration examples.

Publish/subscribe infrastructures are used as the basic communication and integration framework in many application domains. The majority of those infrastructures, however, fall short of mechanisms that allow their customization and configuration to comply with the requirements of those application domains. In other words, they are not versatile enough to support new and evolving requirements demanded by different applications. The YANCEES (Yet ANother Configurable Extensible Event Service) addresses these versatility issues by relying on a combination of plug-in oriented architecture and extensible languages decomposed over different design dimensions of a publish/subscribe infrastructure. We demonstrate our approach, showing how the YANCEES platform can be useful in reducing the customization, extension and implementation effort of different publish/subscribe infrastructures to attend the demands of many application domains.

The focus of our approach to the usability considerations of privacy and security has been on providing people with information they can use to understand the implications of their interactions with a system, as well as, to assess whether or not a system is secure enough for their immediate needs. To this end, we have been exploring two design principles for secure interaction: visualizing system activity and integrating configuration and action. Here we discuss the results of a user study designed as a broad formative examination of the successes and failures of an initial prototype based around these principles. Our response to the results of this study has been twofold. First, we have fixed a number of implementation and usability problems. Second, we have extended our visualizations to incorporate new considerations regarding the temporal and structural organization of interactions.

Software systems are increasingly being built as compositions of reusable artifacts (components, frameworks, toolkits, plug-ins, APIs, etc) that have non-trivial usage constraints in the form of interface contracts, underlying assumptions and design composition rules. Satisfying these constraints is challenging: they are often not well documented; or they are difficult to integrate into the software development process in ways that allow their identification by developers; or they may not be enforced by existing tools and development environments. Aspect-Oriented Programming has been advocated as an approach to represent and enforce software constraints in code artifacts. Aspects can be used to detect constraint violations, or more pro-actively, to ensure that the constraints are satisfied without requiring the developer's attention. This paper discusses our experience using aspects to document and enforce software constraints in an industrial application, specifically TDE/UML, a model-driven software testing tool developed at SIEMENS. We present an analysis of common constraints found in our case study, a set of primitive aspects developed to help the enforcement of software constraints, and show how AOP has been incorporated into existing software development and governance approaches in the TDE/UML project. We conclude with a discussion of strengths and limitations of AspectJ in supporting these constraints.