Selectivity of memories of WWII in portugal: the role of leisure, education, the arts and the media

Even though more than seventy-five years have passed since the end of WWII, its prominence in entertainment media productions along with the global emergence of memorial markers have contributed to its omnipresence in people’s minds. Nevertheless, the perception of this historical event is still far from reaching consensus as nations tend to interpret and remember episodes in accordance with their perspective, thus adding up to the complexity of WWII and of Holocaust memories. With this in mind, this article describes the idiosyncrasies of Portugal’s recent tribute and remembrance strategies for the victims of WWII. The country’s neutral status, along with a set of cultural and historical specifics, has led to the dissemination of tropes leading to the idea of Portugal as an inherently tolerant and mild-mannered nation. A perception that is often fostered by resorting to monuments, museums, tourism and leisure activities. Despite evidence provided, mostly, by recent academic studies and documentary films, these tropes continue to fuel Portuguese popular imagination and are still prevalent in some recently established WWII memory places.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Spartan Daily, November 6, 1998

Volume 111, Issue 49https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9337/thumbnail.jp

Coordinating the Competition, Pre-electoral Coalitions in the Indian General Elections

The number and variety of pre-electoral coalitions in the Indian general elections make India a prime case to examine why parties chose to join forces with their rivals during elections. Yet, existing theories, which emphasise narrow definitions of party size and shared ideology, are unable to explain the tangled alliances that emerge between Indian political parties. In order to examine why parties pursue certain pre-electoral coalitions, I employ a mixed-methods strategy that combines statistical network analysis (exponential random graph models) with case study analysis, using a new dataset of pre-electoral coalitions 1999-2014. The network analysis suggests that pre-electoral coalitions in India are driven by the parties’ wish to increase their odds of winning in particular constituencies and, to a smaller degree, their wish to combine their parliamentary strength afterwards. The analysis also suggests that the network structure of the party system has a significant impact on pre- electoral coalition formation in that parties are attracted to ‘high-connector parties’ that allow them to form indirect alliances with a number of parties, and that parties build denser, regional coalitions that allow smaller parties to buy leverage against bigger allies. Finally, even though pre-electoral coalitions in India appear highly changeable, parties are more likely to renew an existing pre-electoral coalition than to build a new one. I explore the implications of the network analysis in three case studies, namely a pre- electoral coalition that took place as the model predicted (a true positive case), one that did not take pace despite being predicted (a false positive case), and one that took place despite not being predicted (a false negative case). The case studies corroborate the statistical findings but also demonstrate that network structures can both encourage and hinder pre-electoral coalitions

Functional Organization of the Human Brain: How We See, Feel, and Decide.

The human brain is responsible for constructing how we perceive, think, and act in the world around us. The organization of these functions is intricately distributed throughout the brain. Here, I discuss how functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was employed to understand three broad questions: how do we see, feel, and decide? First, high-resolution fMRI was used to measure the polar angle representation of saccadic eye movements in the superior colliculus. We found that eye movements along the superior-inferior visual field are mapped across the medial-lateral anatomy of a subcortical midbrain structure, the superior colliculus (SC). This result is consistent with the topography in monkey SC. Second, we measured the empathic responses of the brain as people watched a hand get painfully stabbed with a needle. We found that if the hand was labeled as belonging to the same religion as the observer, the empathic neural response was heightened, creating a strong ingroup bias that could not be readily manipulated. Third, we measured brain activity in individuals as they made free decisions (i.e., choosing randomly which of two buttons to press) and found the activity within fronto-thalamic networks to be significantly decreased compared to being instructed (forced) to press a particular button. I also summarize findings from several other projects ranging from addiction therapies to decoding visual imagination to how corporations are represented as people. Together, these approaches illustrate how functional neuroimaging can be used to understand the organization of the human brain

Dynamic theme-based narrative systems

The advent of videogames, and the new forms of expressions they offered, sprouted the possibility of presenting narratives in ways that could capitalize on unique qualities of the media, most notably the agency found in their interactive nature. In spite of many people in the game studies’ field interested in how far said novelty could bring narrative experiences, most approached the creation of narrative systems from a structural approach (especially the classical Aristotelian one), and concurrently, with a bottom-up (characters defining a world) or top-down (world defining characters) perspective. While those more mainstream takes have been greatly progressing what interactive digital narrative can be, this research intended to take a bit of a detour, proposing a functionally similar system that emphasized thematic coherence and responsiveness above all else. Once the theoretical formulation was done, taking into consideration previously similar or tangential systems, a prototype would be developed to make a first step towards validating the proposal, and contribute to building a better understanding of the field’s possibilities

High Frequency Generation from Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistors Used as Passive Mixers

The high mobilities, low capacitances (due to small sizes), and high current densities of carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNT FETs) make them valid candidates for high frequency applications. The high cost of high frequency measurement equipment has been the largest hurdle to observing CNT transistor behavior at frequencies above 50 GHz. One economic solution to this barrier is to use an external harmonic mixer to convert high frequency signals to lower frequencies where they can be detected by a standard spectrum analyzer. By using this detection method, a new regime of high frequency CNT FET behavior is available for study. In this dissertation, we describe the design and fabrication of CNT FETs on quartz substrates using aligned arrays of CNTs as the device channel. The nonlinear input voltage to output drain current behavior of the devices is explained and approximated to the first order by using a Taylor expansion. For the high frequency mixing experiments, two input voltages of different frequencies are sourced on the gate of the devices without any device biasing. The input frequencies are limited to 100 kHz to 40 GHz by the signal generators used. The nonlinearities of the fabricated CNT FETs cause the input frequencies to be mixed together, even in the absence of a source-drain bias (passive mixing). The device output is the drain current, which contains sum and difference products of the input frequencies. By using an external harmonic mixer in combination with a spectrum analyzer to measure the drain current, output frequencies from 75 to 110 GHz can be observed. Up to 11th order mixing products are detected, due to the low noise floor of the spectrum analyzer. Control devices are also measured in the same experimental setup to ensure that the measured output signals are generated by the CNTs. The cutoff frequencies from previous passive mixing experiments predict that our devices should stop operating near 13 GHz, however our measurement setup extends and overcomes these cutoffs, and the generation of high frequency output signals is directly observed up to 110 GHz. This is the highest output frequency observed in CNT devices to date