O que Persiste na Imagem-Escombro?

When a building is demolished, its cohesive and planned structure fractures into countless fragments. These heterogeneous and disorganised fragments blur the boundaries between what was once private — the domestic space — and what is now public — the formerly occupied land. In 2019, I stumbled upon a family photograph amidst the rubble left by the demolition of the last towers of the Bairro do Aleixo in Porto. Constructed in the 1970s, this was a public housing estate designed to accommodate families from Ribeira-Barredo who had been displaced due to urban redevelopment. Throughout the years, the five towers have hosted a sizable and fluctuating population that has adapted and made use of this previously unconventional housing model. From 2011 to 2019, Aleixo underwent three demolition operations, politically supported by arguments citing its structural and social deterioration as justification. The first two were striking implosions broadcasted on television, whereas the final demolition, which I witnessed, unfolded as a slow deconstruction spanning several months. In the photograph, the woman dressed in white poses on a balcony of Tower 1 within the old Bairro do Aleixo. In the background stands the phallic skeleton of Tower 4, which would be imploded decades later. Upon its unearthing, the photograph, weathered by time and circumstance, hinted at a conceptual connection with the debris surrounding it. In this article, my focus centres on this found photograph, aiming to unveil the processes and tensions encapsulated within this fragment. I draw on the ontological connections between photography and death, as well as between photography and ruin, to analyse the spectral image of this obliterated site. I delve into what the encounter with this image might reveal about the memory of the neighbourhood, its public image, and the extensive and violent process of displacing its residents. I reach the concept of a "rubble-image" as pivotal in interpreting this nearly vanished imprint that stubbornly affirms the persistence of a dissenting and complex place, supposedly erased from public space and suppressed from urban memory by dominant sensibilities.Quando uma edificação é demolida, a sua estrutura, unitária e planeada, é desintegrada em incontáveis fragmentos. Heterogéneos e desordenados, estes fragmentos borram os limites entre o que era privado — o espaço doméstico — e o que é público — o terreno antes ocupado. Em 2019, encontrei uma fotografia familiar entre os escombros da demolição das últimas torres do Bairro do Aleixo, no Porto. Este foi um conjunto de habitação pública construído na década de 1970 para realojar famílias da Ribeira-Barredo, deslocadas por uma reabilitação urbana. Ao longo do tempo, as cinco torres abrigaram uma população numerosa e mutável que se apropriou desse modelo de habitação até então incomum. Entre 2011 e 2019, o Aleixo foi alvo de três operações de demolição, politicamente justificadas por sua degradação estrutural e social. As duas primeiras foram implosões espetaculares e televisionadas, enquanto a última, que presenciei, foi uma lenta desconstrução que durou meses. Na fotografia, uma mulher vestida de branco posa numa varanda da Torre 1 do antigo Bairro do Aleixo. Ao fundo, paira o esqueleto fálico da Torre 4, implodida décadas depois. Quando encontrada, a fotografia, arruinada pelo tempo e pelas circunstâncias, sugeria uma afinidade conceptual com os escombros que a cercavam. Neste artigo, detenho-me sobre essa fotografia encontrada, objetivando desvelar os processos e as tensões armazenadas nesse fragmento. Recorro às relações ontológicas entre fotografia e morte, também entre fotografia e ruína, para analisar a imagem espectral desse sítio obliterado. Desenvolvo o que o encontro com ela pode indicar sobre a memória do bairro, a sua imagem pública, assim como o longo e violento processo de remoção dos seus moradores. Chego à noção de “imagem-escombro” como chave de leitura para esse vestígio quase desaparecido que afirma teimosamente a persistência de um lugar dissidente e complexo, pretensamente apagado do espaço público e suprimido da memória urbana pelas sensibilidades dominantes

Physical activity promotion to older adults attending out-patient rehabilitation

Background: Physical inactivity is identified as a leading risk factor for global mortality. Physical activity benefits have been extensively demonstrated. Being physically active is essential for healthy ageing; with regular physical activity reported as the most effective strategy to prevent and reduce disability and maintain functional independence among older adults. Nonetheless, an overwhelming majority of people aged 65 years and above do not meet physical activity recommendations. Physiotherapists in out-patient rehabilitation settings are well placed to assist older adults to achieve an active lifestyle by incorporating physical activity into care plans and transitioning patients from a therapeutic to a healthier lifestyle focus. However, it is not known whether physiotherapists actively plan for this transition and incorporate this aspect of care into out-patient rehabilitation programs for older adults. The overall aim of this research program was to investigate current physiotherapy practice of physical activity promotion to older adults attending an out-patient rehabilitation program. Method: Pragmatism is the theoretical perspective that underpins this program of research. A multimethod approach was taken to answer the research questions for this research program. Two studies, a quantitative and a qualitative study, were undertaken to gain valuable insights in the promotion of physical activity to older adults attending out-patient rehabilitation. Study 1 comprised an audit of physiotherapists’ documentation in medical records of older adults who attended an out-patient rehabilitation program at a tertiary hospital. Study 2, a qualitative study, comprised three focus groups with a total of 16 physiotherapists involved in the delivery of rehabilitation to older adults. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results: In Study 1, 56 medical records were reviewed. Mean age (SD) of participants was 79 (7) years. No documentation was found on the use of validated tools to assess physical activity levels of older adults. Prescription of physical activity was documented in 55/56 (98%) medical records. Seven (12.5%) medical records included documentation on goal setting regarding physical activity participation. Advice on regular physical activity post-discharge from the rehabilitation program was documented in 28/56 (50%) medical records. Formal referral to community-based physical activity programs was documented in 4/56 (7%) medical records. In Study 2, four themes were identified: 1. Patient-centred approach; 2. Support required; 3. Exercise program targeting impairments versus physical activity for health, and 4. Inadequate community follow-up systems. Participants described a patient-centred approach when promoting physical activity to older adults attending out-patient rehabilitation. Participants identified the importance of getting patients engaged and willing to participate in physical activity by setting patient-centred goals and finding activities that are enjoyable, meaningful and relevant. Physiotherapist support was identified as a crucial factor to facilitate engagement in physical activity. Education, therapeutic rapport, encouragement and motivation were topics often discussed by participants. Physical activity assessment was rarely reported by participants in this study. Participants acknowledged focusing on the primary goal of restoring older adults’ functional capacity by treating physical impairments, and concomitantly promoting an active lifestyle for health benefits. Participants perceived that inadequate community follow-up was a major barrier to transition older adults to an active lifestyle post discharge from rehabilitation. Conclusion: The findings from this research program suggest that physiotherapists are not widely applying evidence-based practice to the promotion of physical activity to older adults attending out-patient rehabilitation. Increasing physical activity is a global priority, with the World Health Organisation Global Action Plan on Physical Activity (GAPPA) 2018-2030, ‘More active people for a healthier world’, calling for a systems-wide approach to patient assessment and counselling on physical activity across all primary health care settings. Physiotherapists are ideally placed to be actioning this strategy, though there is scope for improvement in physical activity promotion to older adults attending out-patient rehabilitation. Furthermore, the establishment of tailored physical activity programmes and services to support older adults starting and maintaining regular physical activity is recommended. Implementation research providing a guiding pathway to support physiotherapists promoting physical activity to older adults is warranted. Physiotherapists working in out-patient rehabilitation settings can and should drive older adults’ transition from a restorative and therapeutic context to a self-managed active lifestyle in the community, by integrating physical activity promotion into routine practice

Transformation, partitioning and flow–deposit interactions during the run-out of megaflows

Funded by BG Brasil E&P LtdaPeer reviewedPostprin

Approximate and timing-speculative hardware design for high-performance and energy-efficient video processing

Since the end of transistor scaling in 2-D appeared on the horizon, innovative circuit design paradigms have been on the rise to go beyond the well-established and ultraconservative exact computing. Many compute-intensive applications – such as video processing – exhibit an intrinsic error resilience and do not necessarily require perfect accuracy in their numerical operations. Approximate computing (AxC) is emerging as a design alternative to improve the performance and energy-efficiency requirements for many applications by trading its intrinsic error tolerance with algorithm and circuit efficiency. Exact computing also imposes a worst-case timing to the conventional design of hardware accelerators to ensure reliability, leading to an efficiency loss. Conversely, the timing-speculative (TS) hardware design paradigm allows increasing the frequency or decreasing the voltage beyond the limits determined by static timing analysis (STA), thereby narrowing pessimistic safety margins that conventional design methods implement to prevent hardware timing errors. Timing errors should be evaluated by an accurate gate-level simulation, but a significant gap remains: How these timing errors propagate from the underlying hardware all the way up to the entire algorithm behavior, where they just may degrade the performance and quality of service of the application at stake? This thesis tackles this issue by developing and demonstrating a cross-layer framework capable of performing investigations of both AxC (i.e., from approximate arithmetic operators, approximate synthesis, gate-level pruning) and TS hardware design (i.e., from voltage over-scaling, frequency over-clocking, temperature rising, and device aging). The cross-layer framework can simulate both timing errors and logic errors at the gate-level by crossing them dynamically, linking the hardware result with the algorithm-level, and vice versa during the evolution of the application’s runtime. Existing frameworks perform investigations of AxC and TS techniques at circuit-level (i.e., at the output of the accelerator) agnostic to the ultimate impact at the application level (i.e., where the impact is truly manifested), leading to less optimization. Unlike state of the art, the framework proposed offers a holistic approach to assessing the tradeoff of AxC and TS techniques at the application-level. This framework maximizes energy efficiency and performance by identifying the maximum approximation levels at the application level to fulfill the required good enough quality. This thesis evaluates the framework with an 8-way SAD (Sum of Absolute Differences) hardware accelerator operating into an HEVC encoder as a case study. Application-level results showed that the SAD based on the approximate adders achieve savings of up to 45% of energy/operation with an increase of only 1.9% in BD-BR. On the other hand, VOS (Voltage Over-Scaling) applied to the SAD generates savings of up to 16.5% in energy/operation with around 6% of increase in BD-BR. The framework also reveals that the boost of about 6.96% (at 50°) to 17.41% (at 75° with 10- Y aging) in the maximum clock frequency achieved with TS hardware design is totally lost by the processing overhead from 8.06% to 46.96% when choosing an unreliable algorithm to the blocking match algorithm (BMA). We also show that the overhead can be avoided by adopting a reliable BMA. This thesis also shows approximate DTT (Discrete Tchebichef Transform) hardware proposals by exploring a transform matrix approximation, truncation and pruning. The results show that the approximate DTT hardware proposal increases the maximum frequency up to 64%, minimizes the circuit area in up to 43.6%, and saves up to 65.4% in power dissipation. The DTT proposal mapped for FPGA shows an increase of up to 58.9% on the maximum frequency and savings of about 28.7% and 32.2% on slices and dynamic power, respectively compared with stat

Intensive animal farming conditions are a major threat to global health

Wiebers & Feigin accurately propose that reducing the risks posed by infectious disease outbreaks and other global health challenges will depend critically on transitioning away from intensive animal farming practices. Creating the right incentive structure for this transition to happen is one of the great challenges in the years to come, but a much-needed step to ensure the health and well-being of current and future generations

Proposição do grupo Ictericus em Euschistus (Euschistus) : revisão de espécies neárticas, com duas sinonímias

Pentatomidae são encontrados em todas as regiões zoogeográficas. É a quarta maior família da subordem Heteroptera, sendo distribuída em dez subfamílias, representadas por aproximadamente 4700 espécies e 800 gêneros, tendo sua maior diversidade nas regiões tropicais e subtropicais. Pentatominae é a subfamília mais diversa entre os pentatomídeos, e sua maior tribo, Carpocorini, reúne diversas espécies prejudiciais à agricultura. Euschistus Dallas, 1851 é o maior gênero desta tribo, e sua distribuição é restrita às Américas. Algumas espécies deste gênero possuem importância econômica tanto na América do Norte quanto na do Sul. No Brasil, a principal praga agrícola do gênero é E. heros (Fabricius, 1798), enquanto nos Estados Unidos são E. servus (Say, 1832), E. tristigmus (Say, 1832) e E. variolarius (Palisot de Beauvois, 1817). Com 67 espécies, Euschistus é dividido em três subgêneros: o nominal, Lycipta e Euschistomorphus. O subgênero nominal agrupa 54 espécies e é o maior do gênero. Poucas hipóteses filogenéticas foram propostas para o relacionamento destas espécies. Na ausência de análises filogenéticas em nível específico, alguns agrupamentos utilizando características morfológicas externas, mas principalmente de genitália masculina são tidas como hipóteses válidas de relações entre espécies. A redescrição e revisão taxonômica de espécies é crucial para um melhor entendimento nas proposições das unidades taxonômicas válidas. Descrições simplistas dificultam o reconhecimento preciso das espécies, e trabalhos revisivos são úteis para elucidação taxonômica, isto se torna mais importante no caso de insetos com importância econômica. Um dos agrupamentos sistemáticos dentro de Euschistus foi proposto por Stål, e relaciona cinco táxons baseados em similaridades morfológicas e localidade geográfica: E. ictericus (Linnaeus, 1763), E. variolarius (Palisot de Beauvois, 1817) E. servus servus (Say, 1832), E. servus euschistoides (Vollenhoven, 1868), E. tristigmus tristigmus (Say, 1832). Adicionalmente, nós incluímos a subespécie válida E. tristigmus luridus (Dallas, 1851), E. inflatus Van Duzee, 1903, e E. latimarginatus Zimmer, 1910. Neste trabalho estas espécies são redescritas, com inclusão de caracteres de genitália feminina interna e externa. No que se refere às subespécies, as variações de populações e regiões de simpatria levou-nos a propor as sinonímias das subespécies E. servus euschistoides com E. servus servus e de E. tristigmus luridus com E. tristigmus tristigmus. Euschistus tristigmus não seguiu o padrão morfológico das demais espécies do grupo, tendo acentuadas distinções em caracteres de pigóforo, parâmeros, phallus, genitália interna feminina. Neste trabalho é proposto uma descrição formal do grupo ictericus, com cinco espécies, e são fornecidas fotografias e ilustrações das espécies do grupo, bem como novos caracteres de genitália interna feminina, que podem agregar conhecimento em futuros trabalhos filogenéticos.Pentatomidae are found in all zoogeographic regions. It is the fourth largest family of the suborder Heteroptera, distributed within ten subfamilies, represented by approximately 4700 species and 800 genera, being more diverse in tropical and subtropical regions. Pentatominae is the most speciose subfamily among the pentatomids, and its largest tribe, Carpocorini groups several species harmful to agriculture. Euschistus Dallas, 1851 is the largest genus of this tribe, and is restricted to the Americas. Some species of the genus are important to the economy both in North and South America. In Brazil, the primary agricultural pest of the genus is E. heros (Fabricius, 1798), while in the United States, E. servus (Say, 1832), E. tristigmus (Say, 1832) and E. variolarius (Palisot de Beauvois, 1817). With 67 species, Euschistus is divided into three subgenera: the nominal, Lycipta and Euschistomorphus. The nominal subgenus groups 54 species and is the largest of the genera. Few phylogenetic hypotheses have been proposed for the relationship of these species. In the absence of phylogenetic analysis at species level, some groupings using external morphological characteristics, mainly male genitalia, are considered valid hypotheses of relationships between species. The redescription and taxonomic revision of species is crucial for a better understanding of the propositions of valid taxonomic units. Simplistic descriptions hinder the precise recognition of species, and revision papers are useful for taxonomic enlightenment. It becomes more important for insects with economic importance. One of the systematic groupings within Euschistus was proposed by Stål, and groups five taxa based on morphological similarities and geographical location: E. ictericus (Linnaeus, 1763), E. variolarius (Palisot de Beauvois, 1817) E. servus servus (Say, 1832), E. servus euschistoides (Vollenhoven, 1868), E. tristigmus tristigmus (Say, 1832). Additionally, we include the valid subspecies E. tristigmus luridus (Dallas, 1851), E. inflatus Van Duzee, 1903, and E. latimarginatus Zimmer, 1910. In this work, these species are redescribed, including the description of internal and external female genitalia. Regarding the subspecies, variations in populations, and regions of sympatry led us to propose the synonymies of the subspecies E. servus euschistoides as a junior synonym of E. servus servus and E. tristigmus luridus of E. tristigmus tristigmus. Euschistus tristigmus did not follow the morphological pattern of the other species of the group, presenting distinctions in characters of pygophore, parameres, phallus, and female internal genitalia. This work is proposed a formal description of ictericus group, including five species, and furnishes photographs and illustrations of the species of the group, as well as new characters of female internal genitalia, which can add knowledge in future phylogenetic works

Gender differences in financial well-being among college students

Financial satisfaction and its impact on the quality of life have received considerable attention in recent decades. A large number of studies have attempted to identify the dimensions of financial well-being and financial behavior among various groups in relation to the development of personal financial well-being. The majority of studies on personal financial satisfaction and financial behavior among adolescents reveal notable sex differences. There is evidence that men and women's perceptions differ and that they are not necessarily only influenced by economic factors, but also by social and psychological issues. To identify gender differences in financial well-being, this study focuses on the perceived financial well-being of Malaysian college students. This study was carried out under (IRPA) funding. Data were collected from students in public and private Malaysian universities. The multi stage stratified random sampling technique was used. A total of 11 universities were randomly selected for the study and 350 questionnaires were distributed to students through the student affairs section of the respective university. Data were collected using self-administered questionnaires. Financial well-being was measured by a six-item scale. The students were asked to rate those six items on a scale of one (not satisfied at all) to nine (very satisfied). The items statements include the amount of saving, financial situation, ability to purchase, saving for emergency expenses, skill to manage money, and ability to spend. The results revealed that there were significant gender differences among Malaysian college students concerning financial matters. The results indicate that Malaysian female students have a significantly higher level of financial satisfaction compared to male students. Female students have a lower level of financial knowledge and late age financial socialization compared to male students. The results showed that primary socialization agents were the strongest predictor of financial well-being among male students while financial problems were the strongest predictor among female students. Mediation analysis confirmed the mediation effect of financial problems in the association between predictors and financial well-being

Corak Perbelanjaan Pekerja-Pekerja Kilang Di Paroi, Seremban dan Sungai Way, Selangor

Satu kajian mengenai corak perbelanjaan 52 orang pekerja-pekerja kilang di asrama Perantau Paroi, Seremban dan Blok 8, Flat Perbadanan Kemajuan Negeri Selangor telah dijalankan dalam bulan OktoberNovember 1980. Hasil kajian menunjukkan bahawa 80.7 peratus responden mempunyai pendapatan kurang daripada $200 sebulan. Kumpulan ini berbelanja lebih kurang 21 peratus untuk makanan, 26 peratus untuk pakaian, 12 peratus untuk pengangkutan, 8 peratus untuk simpanan dan 14 peratus untuk membantu keluarga. Analisis statistik menunjukkan bahawa perbelanjaan ke atas makanan, simpanan dan keluarga bertambah mengikut pertambahan pendapatan. Amalim pengurusan kewangan responden dipengaruhi oleh kawasan tempat tinggal, pendapatan, taraf pelajaran dan pendapatan keluarga

A comparative study in money attitude among university students: a gendered view

The paper aims to examine gender differences in money attitude among college students. Using the stratified sampling method, 2,340 college students from six public and five private colleges were studied. The findings indicate gender differences for different dimensions of money attitude, in which males were attached to money as a power/prestige tool while experiencing anxiety and having a retentive attitude toward money. Meanwhile female students were conservatively minded about money, as well as being attached to money for self-gratification purposes

A theoretical study of family resource management

Family resource management has a fundamental role in helping meet and alter the increasing complexities faced by the families. In this way, this article attempts to describe the theories of family economic management. To solve the economic problems we need to improve the economic status of families who fail to manage their budget, which results in high debt levels and a lack of personal savings. The implication of this study arises from the fact that there has been little research carried out on the family economic status. Theoretically, the findings of this study enrich the knowledge concerning family economic and management functions