Akivis Superalgebras and speciality

In this paper we define Akivis superalgebra and study enveloping superalgebras for this class of algebras, proving an analogous of the PBW Theorem. Lie and Malcev superalgebras are examples of Akivis superalgebras. For these particular superalgebras, we describe the connection between the classical enveloping superalgebras and the corresponding generalized concept defined in this work

The effect of temperature on generic stable periodic structures in the parameter space of dissipative relativistic standard map

In this work, we have characterized changes in the dynamics of a two-dimensional relativistic standard map in the presence of dissipation and specially when it is submitted to thermal effects modeled by a Gaussian noise reservoir. By the addition of thermal noise in the dissipative relativistic standard map (DRSM) it is possible to suppress typical stable periodic structures (SPSs) embedded in the chaotic domains of parameter space for large enough temperature strengths. Smaller SPSs are first affected by thermal effects, starting from their borders, as a function of temperature. To estimate the necessary temperature strength capable to destroy those SPSs we use the largest Lyapunov exponent to obtain the critical temperature ($T_C$) diagrams. For critical temperatures the chaotic behavior takes place with the suppression of periodic motion, although, the temperature strengths considered in this work are not so large to convert the deterministic features of the underlying system into a stochastic ones.Comment: 8 pages and 7 figures, accepted to publication in EPJ

Empowering Rural Citizen Journalism Via Web 2.0 Technologies

Once acquainted with the modern information and communication tools made available with the advent of the Internet, five Brazilian rural communities participating in a pilot project to develop a self-sustaining telecenter model, engaged in citizen journalism using inexpensive digital video cameras. Community members used Web 2.0 collaborative tools to post short videos on the telecenter portal. The 95 video blogs published between September 2006 and May 2008 recorded various aspects of community life,including religious celebrations,oral history arts and crafts traditions,folklore,and envirnmental concerns. This study evaluates the impact of video blogging in these communities

Active civic participation of immigrants in Portugal

Portugal’s historical past strongly influences the composition of the country’s immigrant population. The main third-country foreign nationals in Portugal originate traditionally from Portuguese-speaking African countries (namely Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea Bissau, and S. Tomé e Príncipe) and Brazil. In 2001, a newly created immigrant status entitled “permanence” authorization uncovered a quantitative and a qualitative change in the structure of immigrant population in Portugal. First, there was a quantitative jump from 223.602 foreigners in 2001 to 364.203 regularized foreigners in 2003. Secondly, there was a substantial qualitative shift in the composition of immigrants. The majority of the new immigrants began coming from Eastern European countries, such as Ukraine, Moldavia, Romania, and the Russian Federation. Thus, European countries outside the E.U. zone now rank second (after African countries) in their contribution of individuals to the stocks of immigrant population in Portugal. The differences between the new and traditional immigration flows are visible in the geographical distribution of immigrants and in their insertion into the labour market. While the traditional flows would congregate around the metropolitan area of Lisbon and in the Algarve, the new migratory flows tend to be more geographically dispersed and present in less urbanized areas of Portugal. In terms of insertion in the labour market, although the construction sector is still the most important industry for immigrant labour, Eastern European workers may also be found in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors. The institutional conditions that encourage immigrants’ civic participation are divided at three different levels: the state, the local, and the civil society levels. At the state level, the High Commissioner for Migrations and Ethnic Minorities is the main organizational structure along with a set of interrelated initiatives operating under specific regulatory frameworks, which act as mediators between state officials and the Portuguese civil society, and more specifically, immigrant communities. At the local level, some municipalities created consultative councils and municipal departments aiming at encouraging the participation and representation of interests from immigrant groups and association in local policies. In the civil society sphere, the main actors in Portugal spurring immigrants civic participation are immigrant associations, mainstream associations directed toward immigration topics, and unions. The legal conditions framing immigrants’ access to social housing, education, health, and social security in Portugal are also considered to be positive. Conditions restricting immigrants’ civic participation are mainly normative and include the Portuguese nationality law, the regulations shaping the political participation of immigrants, namely in what concerns their right to vote, and employment regulations restricting immigrants’ access to public administration positions. Part II of the report focuses on the active civic participation of third country immigrants. First, reasons for the lack of research on this issue in Portugal are explained. On the one hand, the recent immigration history and the more urgent needs regarding school and economic integration kept this issue out of the research spotlight. On the other hand, it was just in the beginning of the 1990s that immigrants took the very first steps toward collective mobilisation. Secondly, the literature review of Portuguese bibliography covers research on third country immigrants’ associative movement, research on local authorities’ policies and discussion about ethnic politics and political mobilisation of immigrants in Portugal. As political mobilisation of these groups has been made mainly through ethnic and/or migrant organisations, a brief history of immigrants' associative movement is given. Immigrant associations develop multiple roles, covering the social, the cultural, the economic and the political domains. Political claiming for the regularisation of illegal immigrants has been a permanent and important field of intervention since the mid-1990s. Research results reveal the com5 plex relations between ethnic mobilisation and the set of legal and institutional frameworks developed by local and national governmental authorities targeted to the incorporation of minority groups. Case studies on the Oeiras district and on the Amadora district are then presented. Conclusions underline that the most active immigrant groups are those from Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau, since these groups have constituted a higher number of ethnic associations, give priority to political claiming and present a more politicised discourse. Reflecting on the future of research on civic participation of third country immigrants in Portugal, the authors state that it would be interesting and relevant to compare the Portuguese situation with those of other European countries, with an older immigration history, and analyse how the Portuguese immigrants’ associative movement will be affected by a changing legal framework and the emergence of new opportunities within the set of structures regarding the political participation of minority groups.Country Report prepared for the European research project POLITIS, Oldenburg 2005, www.uni-oldenburg.de/politis-europ

Can ICT help overcome L1 interference in L2 writing? — implications and challenges for the EFL classroom

Learning English as a foreign language can posit a number of difficulties to students whose native language is Latin-based and therefore ethymologically different from a Germanic language such as English. Despite the abundance of Latin vocabulary in the English language, syntax and morphology may be difficult to master for a speaker of a Latin language, namely Portuguese students. A number of studies (Silva 1993, Picard 2002, Bhela 1999, for example) have already highlighted how L1 can deeply interfere with the learning of L2 and how some processes of transfer are regularly applied by speakers of a foreign language. The aim of this paper is to identify the most common processes of L1 interference and transfer based on a corpus of 1st year Portuguese university students who are taking English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at a B1/ B2 level. The processes of interference and transfer that constitute mistakes in the target language will be coded for syntax, morphology and/or lexicon and remedial procedures to overcome these difficulties will then be set up for two different control groups. One group of students will be subjected to the flipped approach (Huba & Freed 2000, Crouch & Mazur 2001), whereby they will be given full autonomy to work on the technology-based activities posted on the Moodle platform and which will be designed to help them overcome their specific linguistic short comings, be it syntax, morphology or vocabulary. The second group of students will be exposed to a traditional approach, mostly teacher-centered and will have to submit print handouts to their teacher based on the most common syntax and grammar mistakes they have made. This paper will thus examine the following: the most common mistakes in the target language that may result from L1 interference in the context of tertiary EFL teaching in Portugal; and whether the highly acclaimed flipped approach is an efficient remedial, pedagogic method to help students improve their learning experience and mastering of English as a foreign language. Namely, this paper aims at testing the "flipped" approach to hopefully derive meaningful conclusions as to which it is efficient in terms of empowering students, boosting learning autonomy and develop language awareness.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A client focused business intelligence & analytics solution for the hospitality sector

Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceOne of the greatest needs of today's business is to know the customer or the type of customer it wants to reach, which makes a customer database a strategic weapon and one of the most important investments a company can make. The business world is becoming more competitive every day, we are constantly overwhelmed with advertisements of products we may like, product promotions we usually buy or discounts on the next purchase if we subscribe to the company’s newsletter. All of this creates a client customization, and any company that is not able to do this cannot keep up with its competition. This report details the project developed at Pestana Hotel Group, which consisted of a Business Intelligence solution, more specifically the development of a customer database with the creation of two tabular models using SQL Server tools, one specific for loyal customers and another, more general, with information about all Pestana customers, and two Power BI reports that allow the visualization of the information obtained in an effective and simplified way. This report contains a literature review that situates the reader on the subject addressed in this project, a chapter dedicated to the data modeling used to create the tabular models, and another on the creation of the reports.Uma das maiores necessidades dos negócios atuais é conhecer o seu cliente ou o tipo de cliente que quer atingir, o que torna uma base de dados de cliente uma arma estratégica e um dos mais importantes investimentos. O mundo empresarial está cada dia mais competitivo, somos constantemente assoberbados com anúncios de produtos que podemos gostar, promoções de produtos que costumamos comprar ou descontos na próxima compra caso subscrevamos a newsletter. Tudo isto cria uma personalização para o cliente, e qualquer empresa que não o consiga fazer não conseguirá acompanhar a concorrência. Este relatório detalha o projeto feito no Pestana Hotel Group, que consistiu numa solução de Business Intelligence, mais especificamente na construção de uma base de dados do cliente com a criação de dois modelos tabulares através de ferramentas do SQL Server, um específico para clientes fidelizados e outro mais geral com informação sobre todos os clientes Pestana, e dois relatórios em Power BI que permitem a visualização da informação obtida de uma forma eficaz e simplificada. O relatório contém uma revisão de literatura que situa o leitor sobre os assuntos abordados neste projeto, um capítulo dedicado à modelação dos dados de forma a criar os modelos tabulares e outro sobre a criação dos relatórios

Action Recognition in Videos: from Motion Capture Labs to the Web

This paper presents a survey of human action recognition approaches based on visual data recorded from a single video camera. We propose an organizing framework which puts in evidence the evolution of the area, with techniques moving from heavily constrained motion capture scenarios towards more challenging, realistic, "in the wild" videos. The proposed organization is based on the representation used as input for the recognition task, emphasizing the hypothesis assumed and thus, the constraints imposed on the type of video that each technique is able to address. Expliciting the hypothesis and constraints makes the framework particularly useful to select a method, given an application. Another advantage of the proposed organization is that it allows categorizing newest approaches seamlessly with traditional ones, while providing an insightful perspective of the evolution of the action recognition task up to now. That perspective is the basis for the discussion in the end of the paper, where we also present the main open issues in the area.Comment: Preprint submitted to CVIU, survey paper, 46 pages, 2 figures, 4 table

Estilo de vida, percepção e estado de saúde em estudantes do instituto politécnico de Viseu: influência da área de formação

Recentemente, as ciências sociais e humanas têm dado um contributo importante para o estudo da saúde e do bem estar das populações. Neste contexto pensa-se que uma das principais funções dos profissionais de saúde é ajudar a promover nas pessoas comportamentos saudáveis. Porém, muitos destes profissionais, quando sugerem que, por exemplo, não se beba em excesso, que se faça exercício físico ou que não se fume, etc., em pouco tempo se apercebem e interiorizam que os seus bem intencionados programas de intervenção não têm um resultado satisfatório, não se verificando, muitas vezes, mudanças significativas nos comportamentos dos indivíduos. Assim, para que seja viável promover a aprendizagem de estilos de vida saudáveis não basta a boa vontade e o bom senso. É preciso muito mais. Há que compreender a dinâmica da saúde-doença nas pessoas. Há que conhecer quais os factores – biológicos, sociais e psicológicos – que acentuam a vulnerabilidade e como agir para reforçar a resilience individual

The concept of hybridization and its contribution to urban ethnobiology

Both ethnozoological and ethnobotanical studies carried out in cities mention the complexity of these cases and the need for shortcuts to aid understanding of the different social, cultural, economic and ecological processes which interact. In this work we propose and discuss a possible shortcut that could be useful in studies related to urban ethnobiology, the use of the concept of process of hybridization. Particularly, we show in the case of the study of medicinal plant use in cities that the hybridization process can be detected and described in a more complete way if we take into account some sub processes such as: fusion or juxtaposition, re-localization, recombination, restructuring, special segregation, new developments in production, circulation and consumption and simultaneous coexistence of different symbolic universes. We propose that these seven processes could be used as a quali-quantitative check list in future urban ethnobiological studies in order to visualize, contextualize and characterize hybridization more profoundly.Fil: Ladio, Ana Haydee. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Patagonia Norte. Instituto de Investigación En Biodiversidad y Medioambiente; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Comahue; ArgentinaFil: Albuquerque, Ulysses Paulino. Universidade Federal Rural Pernambuco. Departamento de Biologia. Laboratorio de Etnobotanica Aplicada; Brasi