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Since the 1990¿s, public-private partnerships agreements (PPPs) have been used as a main tool for investments in public infrastructures. The movement began in the United Kingdom and fortunately became a great success, which later was adopted by many other countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas. As international experiences have shown, the combination of private capital in public services and facilities can be very thriving, particularly under the best value for money principle. In an overall approach, this study compares the UK (original) PPPs with the newly Brazilian PPPs, focusing on the financial contractual risks under both systems. The analysis shall emphasise the mandatory financial contractual guarantees given by the public sector to the private sector, within the Brazilian PPP legal framework (Federal Law nº 11.079/2004, article 8). Therefore, this book should help clear some basic definitions and understandings on both systems and should be especially useful to professionals on public and private initiatives, either supplying, financing or contracting under PPP agreements.

Despite early diagnosis, early fitting of more advanced sensory aids, early intervention, and intensive educational management, many children with severe to profound hearing loss are delayed in their acquisition of spoken language compared with their peers with normal hearing. Some of the greatest challenges facing educators of deaf children include determining where to focus intervention in order to maximise benefit, and establishing the most effective strategies for the development of age-appropriate language. The experimental research in this book examined the relationship between hearing, speech production, and vocabulary knowledge, and investigated the contributions of these factors to the overall speech perception performance of deaf children. This research also investigated the areas in which intervention would be most beneficial, and examined the effects of different types of intervention on the development of spoken language and speech perception skills in deaf children. The evaluation, analysis and intervention methods reported in this book provide an experimentally validated program for improving speech perception, speech production and spoken language skills of deaf children.

The ability to develop high muscular strength and power has been identified as an essential component for success in many individual and team sports, thus numerous coaches have implemented training methods to enhance power and ultimately improve performance quality. In addition to these training methods, individuals have also turned to ergogenic aids, for example: creatine, and in extreme cases Illegal substances, for example: anabolic steroids. Although influential on performance, a new phenomenon has emerged, Post Activation Potentiation. Post Activation Potentiation has been seen as being influential on acutely improving power output, thus being highly beneficial for Individual sports which require jumping or bounding movements. Consequently, this could enable faster running times and jumping distances, which is sought after by most athletes competing in events. Although beneficial, results have varied significantly. This text tries to provides answers on how influential Post Activation Potentiation can be on power output, by taking a keen interest on the optimal recoveries used between pre conditioned exercise and power exercise.

Neural networks are processing devices which are either algorithms or actual hard wares. Their designs are motivated by the design and functioning of human brains and components thereof. Neural networks provide improved performance over conventional technologies in the areas of machine vision, robust pattern detection, signal filtering, virtual reality, data segmentation, data compression, data mining, text mining, artificial life, adaptive control, optimization and scheduling, complex mapping and many more. In this book the fundamental simulation methodologies of the neural networks - McCulloch Pitts neuron model, Hebb''s network, perceptron network, ADALINE neuron model, MADALINE neurons model, hetero associative memory network, auto associative memory network, bidirectional associative memory network, discrete Hopfield network, back propagation network, self organizing map network, learning vector quantization network, max net, mexican hat network, hamming net and counter propagation network are described and illustrated with the help of algorithms, MATLAB source codes and outputs.