Multinationals and Foreign Direct Investment: The Portuguese Experience (1900-2010)

A long-term perspective on the evolution of inward and outward foreign investment in Portugal over the twentieth century has been absent from the existing literature. In a few cases the analysis has a larger chronological depth, namely in the studies by Salgado de Matos (1973). However, even in this case the author zooms in a specific period of time: the 1960s and early 1970s. Other studies provide a long-term synthesis on foreign direct investment (see for all, Leite et al, 2001; Moreira and Dias, 2008), but they rely on a descriptive and very superficial approach. The chapters dedicated by the recent and in-depth História Económica de Portugal (Lains and Silva, 2005, vol. 3) to the internationalization of the Portuguese economy or to capital as a factor of production never address FDI, which constitutes one important weakness of this work

Passivation of carbon steel using intelligent epoxy paint

This paper presents the production of an epoxy paint associated with a determined concentration of PAni emeraldine base binder, in order to increase dispersion of PAni polymer chains in the paint allow physical contact between PAni chains, the electrolytic medium, and the metal of interest. The coating called Intelligent Epoxy Paint (IEP) seeks to potentialize the electrolytic capacity of PAni to produce passivation, differentiated research which uses PAni in oxidized and conductive form as paint pigment that needs high PAni concentrations. The physicochemical characterization and morphological presented results that indicate the preservation of the desirable properties of PAni in order to make the passivation process possible. The electrochemical tests showed the passivation and/or maintenance of the passivation of the metal of interest, without the need to apply an external current

Ultrasound Muscle Assessment and Nutritional Status in Institutionalized Older Adults: A Pilot Study

Muscle thickness, measured by ultrasonography, has been investigated for nutritional assessment in older adults, however the associations between muscle ultrasound parameters in the lower limb and nutritional status have not been studied. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between muscle thickness echo intensity (EI), and nutritional status in home care residents. A cross sectional study was conducted involving 19 older adults from a home care in Malaga (Spain). We evaluated lower leg muscles by ultrasound, anthropometric data, physical function (measured by gait speed and the Short Physical Performance Battery), strength (handgrip and knee extensors strength) and nutritional status across the Mini-Nutritional Assessment Short-Form (MNA-SF). We found that muscle thickness assessed by ultrasonography independently predicts nutritional status by MNA-SF and after adjusting for handgrip strength or age and sex. As secondary findings, we found relations between strength, functional capacity and the MNA-SF test. These results suggest that lower leg muscle ultrasound parameters could be used as a low-cost objective method for muscle evaluation in nutritional assessment in older adults

Aspectos imunológicos do diabetes melito tipo 1

Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) Escola Paulista de MedicinaUNIFESP, EPMSciEL

A Fully Attention-Based Information Retriever

Recurrent neural networks are now the state-of-the-art in natural language processing because they can build rich contextual representations and process texts of arbitrary length. However, recent developments on attention mechanisms have equipped feedforward networks with similar capabilities, hence enabling faster computations due to the increase in the number of operations that can be parallelized. We explore this new type of architecture in the domain of question-answering and propose a novel approach that we call Fully Attention Based Information Retriever (FABIR). We show that FABIR achieves competitive results in the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) while having fewer parameters and being faster at both learning and inference than rival methods.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 201

Um algoritimo simplificado, desenvolvido em Excel®, para estimativa do intervalo hídrico ótimo dos solos

ABSTRACT: The least limiting water range (LLWR) of soils has been employed as a methodological approach for evaluation of soil physical quality in different agricultural systems, including forestry, grasslands and major crops. However, the absence of a simplified methodology for the quantification of LLWR has hampered the popularization of its use among researchers and soil managers. Taking this into account this work has the objective of proposing and describing a simplified algorithm developed in Excel® software for quantification of the LLWR, including the calculation of the critical bulk density, at which the LLWR becomes zero. Despite the simplicity of the procedures and numerical techniques of optimization used, the nonlinear regression produced reliable results when compared to those found in the literature. __________________________________________________________________________________________ RESUMOO intervalo hídrico ótimo (IHO) dos solos tem sido empregado como uma metodologia para a avaliação da qualidade física do solo em diferentes sistemas agrícolas, incluindo áreas florestais, pastagens e grandes culturas. Entretanto, a inexistência de uma metodologia simplificada para a quantificação do IHO tem dificultado a popularização do uso desta técnica entre pesquisadores e técnicos. Levando isto em consideração, este trabalho tem como objetivo propor e descrever um algoritmo simplificado, desenvolvido em planilha eletrônica Excel®, para quantificação do IHO, incluindo o cálculo da densidade do solo crítica, na qual o IHO é nulo. Apesar da simplicidade dos procedimentos e técnicas numéricas de otimização utilizados, a regressão não-linear produziu resultados confiáveis quando comparados com aqueles encontrados em literatura