Os Bancos na Região Autónoma da Madeira.Tomada de decisão e Financiamento de Projectos de Investimento: Estudo de Caso

A tomada de decisão é um tema constantemente debatido no meio académico quer pelo facto de que da decisão tomada resultam práticas diferentes e, também, porque são múltiplos os critérios que os decisores recorrem, para decidir. Nesta investigação a proposta é estudar a tomada de decisão ao financiamento dos projetos de investimento por parte dos bancos às empresas, procurando estabelecer os critérios e informação mais relevantes na avaliação desses projetos. Para tal, analisou-se o processo de tomada de decisão em três instituições bancárias. Para o conhecimento científico desta realidade, recorreu-se à compreensão e discussão das teorias de racionalidade e tipologias de processos de decisão que se apresenta na parte teórica desta dissertação; o objetivo foi a compreensão dos processos de decisão e entendimento daquele que mais se adequa aos bancos em estudo. Desta forma, seria possível um conhecimento mais profundo da tomada de decisão ao financiamento dos projetos de investimento. Os resultados da investigação referem-se, apenas, aos três bancos que participaram no estudo, tratando-se de um estudo de caso múltiplo que se auxiliou, para a colheita de dados, de uma entrevista semidiretiva realizada a três atores que, nos respetivos bancos, participam na decisão ao financiamento de projetos de investimento na Região Autónoma da Madeira. As principais conclusões apontam para o facto de a tomada de decisão nestes bancos ser conduzida em conformidade com o modelo de processo de decisão de Mintzberg, et al. (1976), em que as decisões são as satisfatórias aos critérios de decisão do banco apresentando os decisores uma autonomia limitada de decisão para o que recorrem a um conjunto de indicadores económico-financeiros

UNIVERSIDADE “TOP10”: DESAFIO DA EDUCAÇÃO SUPERIOR PELA A ÓTICA DA INTERNACIONALIZAÇÃO

Este artigo tem o objetivo de avaliar a influência dos rankings da educação superior na visibilidade das universidades brasileiras, pela ótica da internacionalização. O método de amostragem utilizado foi não probabilístico, por julgamento. Foram escolhidas as universidades brasileiras que ocupam os dez primeiros lugares gerais no Ranking Universitário Folha (RUF) 2014. Foi realizado um levantamento bibliográfico e documental em publicações nacionais e internacionais, com o objetivo de: a) analisar as ações de fomento à internacionalização planejadas nos PDIs das universidades que compõem a amostra, b) analisar as ações executadas de fomento à internacionalização das universidades brasileiras que compõem a amostra; e, c) analisar o posicionamento das universidades brasileiras que compõem a amostra no The Times Higher Education World University Ranking 2014 e compará-las às universidades “TOP10” internacionais, de acordo com os indicadores de nota geral e internacionalização. Ao final deste artigo será possível identificar algumas ações necessárias para melhorar a visibilidade nacional e internacional das universidades brasileiras, no que diz respeito ao processo de internacionalização

Unidade de ensino estruturado para alunos com perturbações do espectro do Autismo no 2º Ciclo do E.B.: expectativas e realidades

A educação de crianças com necessidades educativas especiais (NEE) coloca nos nossos dias grandes desafios às escolas e famílias. A Inclusão apresenta-se neste contexto como a expressão chave, reveladora de um novo olhar e decidir, expressa na legislação, no discurso político e nas actuais disposições académicas e pedagógicas. Não obstante, nem todos os alunos com NEE dispõem de respostas integralmente inclusivas. Os alunos com espectro de Autismo, por exemplo, colocam às escolas e aos pais sérios problemas, os quais, devido à sua intensidade e variabilidade, questionam sem dúvida o sentido das respostas educativas adequadas a alunos portadores desta problemática. O objectivo geral deste estudo é, neste contexto, procurar aceder a um conhecimento mais actualizado sobre uma Unidade de Ensino Estruturado no atendimento a alunos com espectro de Autismo (UEEA). Pretende-se de modo mais específico aceder ao que pensam os professores sobre o atendimento educativo a alunos com espectro de Autismo e caracterizar uma unidade de ensino estruturado no que respeita aos recursos humanos, físicos e materiais, bem como as estratégias de trabalho privilegiadas no atendimento a este tipo de alunos e formas de colaboração entre técnicos e famílias. No sentido de melhor compreender e aprofundar esta problemática foram realizadas entrevistas semi-directivas a 3 professores do ensino especial com experiência em UEEA e a 3 professores do ensino regular. A escolha dos professores baseou-se em critérios relacionados com a sua experiência no atendimento a alunos com problemas de Autismo. A natureza do objecto de estudo induziu a um desenho de investigação de natureza interpretativa de carácter descritivo - Estudo de caso. O corpus do trabalho foi constituído pelas entrevistas semi-directivas, sujeitas a uma análise qualitativa de acordo com os procedimentos previsto para a análise de conteúdo. Com base na análise dos dados recolhidos, foi possível identificar e caracterizar aspectos relevantes sobre o que pensam os professores sobre a intervenção educativa de alunos com espectro de Autismo e sobre as respostas educativas existentes na UEEA

The impact of influencer marketing onto portuguese consumers´ value perceptions and purchase intentions towards premium beauty brands

The impact of influencer marketing onto Portuguese consumers’ value perceptions and purchase intentions towards premium beauty brandsMotivated by therising practice of influencer marketing in the beauty industry, this study aimsto understand the impact of Social Media Influencers (SMIs) onto Portugueseconsumers’ brand value perceptions, purchase intentions and willingness to pay.Through anexperimental approach and development ofan online survey, a sample of 117 individuals was obtained, whom were either exposed to an Instagram postfrom thechosenbrand or the SMI. The results were not significant,both groups having similar value perceptions,purchase intentionsand willingness to pay. Respondents’perceptionstowards the SMI and brand-imagery fitsignificantlyimpactedvalue perceptions and purchase intentions

The role of GRA8 antigen-derived synthetic peptides in serotyping of toxoplasma gondii

Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular parasite, capable of infecting humans and other warm-blooded animals. It is typically associated with the adequately named infection, toxoplasmosis. The aim of the present work was to develop serotyping by selecting different synthetic GRA8 C-terminal polymorphic peptides with 64 human serum samples (of known strain types) to determine the peptides’ ability to differentiate strain types of T. gondii (I, II, III and atypical). Serotyping is a typing method consisting of an immunoenzymatic assay (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay [ELISA]) using synthetic polymorphic peptides derived from Toxoplasma gondii antigens. Sera samples were processed through indirect ELISA and the colour product formed measured by absorbance at 415 nm. Data obtained was processed in a Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve to determine the sensibility and specificity of each peptide. Of the four GRA8II peptides used (217, 221, 246 and 258), only GRA8II 221 proved to have some ability to differentiate strains of type II from non-type II with an 85,8% probability of doing so. However, with such poor results for the remaining three peptides (all three with a probability of successfully distinguish between different strains types under 60%), GRA8 may not be an ideal peptide to be used for serotyping.Toxoplasma gondii é um parasita intracelular obrigatório, capaz de infetar humanos e outros animais de sangue quente. T. gondii é tipicamente associado à infeção pela qual é responsável, designada por toxoplasmose. O objetivo do presente trabalho foi testar novos péptidos polimórficos de GRA8 por serotipagem com 64 amostras de soro humano (com linhas clonais conhecidas) para determinar a capacidade dos péptidos de diferenciar linhas clonais de T.gondii. A serotipagem é um método constituído por um ensaio imunoenzimático (ELISA) que utiliza péptidos polimórficos sintéticos derivados de antigénios de T. gondii. As amostras de soro foram processadas através de ELISA indireta e o produto de cor formado foi avaliado medindo a sua absorbância a 415 nm. Os dados obtidos foram processados numa curva Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) para determinar a sensibilidade e especificidade de cada péptido. Dos quatro péptidos de GRA8II usados (217, 221, 246 e 258), apenas o péptido GRA8II 211 demonstrou ter alguma capacidade para ser usado na distinção entre estirpes tipo II de estirpes não-tipo II, com uma probabilidade de 85,8% de o fazer com sucesso. No entanto, os resultados menos satisfatórios verificados para os restantes três péptidos (todos com uma probabilidade de distinguir com sucesso entre tipos de estirpes abaixo de 60%) sugerem que GRA8 talvez não seja o péptido mais indicado para ser usado em serotipagem

Phenotypic and Transcriptomic Characterization of Rice SnRK1 Mutants Developed by CRISPR/Cas9 Mutagenesis

SnRK1 is a heterotrimeric protein kinase that is composed of a catalytic subunit (α) and two regulatory subunits (β and βγ), and it has a main role in regulating energy homeostasis in the plant by modulating anabolic and catabolic process. SnRK1 phosphorylates and alters the activities of enzymes involved in metabolism and regulates gene expression by altering the activity of chromatin-remodeling enzymes or the transcription factors. Rice contains three functional paralogs of SnRK1α: SnRK1αa (LOC_Os03g17980), SnRK1αb (LOC_Os08g37800), and SnRK1αc (LOC_Os05g45420). This study focused on the function of these SnRK1 paralogs by evaluating the phenotypic and transcriptomic characteristics and the disease response of the knockout mutants developed by CRISPR/Cas9 mediated targeted mutagenesis. These knockout lines consisted of the double-mutant snrk1αa+b lines and the single mutant snrk1αc lines. The phenotypic characterization of early-stage seedlings in ½ MS media showed that snrka+b mutants had lower seedling length compared with the WT but snrk1αc mutants were similar to the WT. The snrk1αc mutants showed phenotypic differences in the late developmental stages in the greenhouse, mainly in the yield parameters such as number of seeds per panicle and total weight of seeds per plant. This is in agreement with previous studies that showed that SnRK1αa and SnRK1αb are primarily expressed in the early seedling stages and SnRK1αc is significantly expressed in the later vegetative and reproductive phases. Transcriptomic analysis on 7 days old seedlings showed that the defense response and the secondary metabolic process were upregulated in WT Kitaake seedlings exposed to extended darkness mimicking starvation. In contrast, the dark-exposed snrk1αa+b mutant showed downregulation of these biological processes and upregulation of light-induced processes such as ribosome biogenesis, translation, and DNA replication. However, not many biological processes were found to be significantly up or down regulated in the snrk1αc mutant. Therefore, stress response during early stages of seedling growth is controlled by SnRK1αa and/or SnRK1αb, and SnRK1αc does not play a major role in the seedling growth or stress response during early phases of the development. Next, the study examined the response of snrk1 mutants against three different diseases: rice blast caused by Magnaporthe oryzae, sheath blight caused by Rhizoctonia solani, and bacterial panicle blight caused by Burkholderia glumae. Previous studies have shown that mutation in the SnRK1 gene increases susceptibility to pathogens. However, in our experiments we did not observe an increase of susceptibility in the snrk1αa+b or snrk1αc mutants to bacterial panicle blight and sheath blight diseases. However, regarding blast fungus caused by M. oryzae, we noted that snrk1 mutants were more susceptible, which is in accordance with the literature and our transcriptomic results that shows downregulation of defense response in snrk1 mutants

An Offering on the Altar of Queer History: Amalia Mesa-Bains and Sor Juana’s Library

This paper argues that home altars are archives. I consider the history of altars within Chicana community practices; political, and feminist critique of both patriarchal nationalism; and the role of the altar in challenging the public and private divide defined by nationalist discourses of the US and Aztlan. Furthermore, I use Amalia Mesa-Bains’s altar installation The Library of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz to consider how altars are spaces of feminist queer memory-making and resistance against colonial logics

Essays on bounded rationality: individual decision and strategic interaction

Economics is a social science which, therefore, focuses on people and on the decisions they make, be it in an individual context, or in group situations. It studies human choices, in face of needs to be fulfilled, and a limited amount of resources to fulfill them. For a long time, there was a convergence between the normative and positive views of human behavior, in that the ideal and predicted decisions of agents in economic models were entangled in one single concept. That is, it was assumed that the best that could be done in each situation was exactly the choice that would prevail. Or, at least, that the facts that economics needed to explain could be understood in the light of models in which individual agents act as if they are able to make ideal decisions. However, in the last decades, the complexity of the environment in which economic decisions are made and the limits on the ability of agents to deal with it have been recognized, and incorporated into models of decision making in what came to be known as the bounded rationality paradigm. This was triggered by the incapacity of the unboundedly rationality paradigm to explain observed phenomena and behavior. This thesis contributes to the literature in three different ways. Chapter 1 is a survey on bounded rationality, which gathers and organizes the contributions to the field since Simon (1955) first recognized the necessity to account for the limits on human rationality. The focus of the survey is on theoretical work rather than the experimental literature which presents evidence of actual behavior that differs from what classic rationality predicts. The general framework is as follows. Given a set of exogenous variables, the economic agent needs to choose an element from the choice set that is avail- able to him, in order to optimize the expected value of an objective function (assuming his preferences are representable by such a function). If this problem is too complex for the agent to deal with, one or more of its elements is simplified. Each bounded rationality theory is categorized according to the most relevant element it simplifes. Chapter 2 proposes a novel theory of bounded rationality. Much in the same fashion as Conlisk (1980) and Gabaix (2014), we assume that thinking is costly in the sense that agents have to pay a cost for performing mental operations. In our model, if they choose not to think, such cost is avoided, but they are left with a single alternative, labeled the default choice. We exemplify the idea with a very simple model of consumer choice and identify the concept of isofin curves, i.e., sets of default choices which generate the same utility net of thinking cost. Then, we apply the idea to a linear symmetric Cournot duopoly, in which the default choice can be interpreted as the most natural quantity to be produced in the market. We find that, as the thinking cost increases, the number of firms thinking in equilibrium decreases. More interestingly, for intermediate levels of thinking cost, an equilibrium in which one of the firms chooses the default quantity and the other best responds to it exists, generating asymmetric choices in a symmetric model. Our model is able to explain well-known regularities identified in the Cournot experimental literature, such as the adoption of different strategies by players (Huck et al. , 1999), the inter temporal rigidity of choices (Bosch-Dom enech & Vriend, 2003) and the dispersion of quantities in the context of di cult decision making (Bosch-Dom enech & Vriend, 2003). Chapter 3 applies a model of bounded rationality in a game-theoretic set- ting to the well-known turnout paradox in large elections, pivotal probabilities vanish very quickly and no one should vote, in sharp contrast with the ob- served high levels of turnout. Inspired by the concept of rhizomatic thinking, introduced by Bravo-Furtado & Côrte-Real (2009a), we assume that each per- son is self-delusional in the sense that, when making a decision, she believes that a fraction of the people who support the same party decides alike, even if no communication is established between them. This kind of belief simplifies the decision of the agent, as it reduces the number of players he believes to be playing against { it is thus a bounded rationality approach. Studying a two-party first-past-the-post election with a continuum of self-delusional agents, we show that the turnout rate is positive in all the possible equilibria, and that it can be as high as 100%. The game displays multiple equilibria, at least one of which entails a victory of the bigger party. The smaller one may also win, provided its relative size is not too small; more self-delusional voters in the minority party decreases this threshold size. Our model is able to explain some empirical facts, such as the possibility that a close election leads to low turnout (Geys, 2006), a lower margin of victory when turnout is higher (Geys, 2006) and high turnout rates favoring the minority (Bernhagen & Marsh, 1997)

Phenotypic and Transcriptomic Characterization of Rice SnRK1 Mutants Developed by CRISPR/Cas9 Mutagenesis

SnRK1 is a heterotrimeric protein kinase that is composed of a catalytic subunit (α) and two regulatory subunits (β and βγ), and it has a main role in regulating energy homeostasis in the plant by modulating anabolic and catabolic process. SnRK1 phosphorylates and alters the activities of enzymes involved in metabolism and regulates gene expression by altering the activity of chromatin-remodeling enzymes or the transcription factors. Rice contains three functional paralogs of SnRK1α: SnRK1αa (LOC_Os03g17980), SnRK1αb (LOC_Os08g37800), and SnRK1αc (LOC_Os05g45420). This study focused on the function of these SnRK1 paralogs by evaluating the phenotypic and transcriptomic characteristics and the disease response of the knockout mutants developed by CRISPR/Cas9 mediated targeted mutagenesis. These knockout lines consisted of the double-mutant snrk1αa+b lines and the single mutant snrk1αc lines. The phenotypic characterization of early-stage seedlings in ½ MS media showed that snrka+b mutants had lower seedling length compared with the WT but snrk1αc mutants were similar to the WT. The snrk1αc mutants showed phenotypic differences in the late developmental stages in the greenhouse, mainly in the yield parameters such as number of seeds per panicle and total weight of seeds per plant. This is in agreement with previous studies that showed that SnRK1αa and SnRK1αb are primarily expressed in the early seedling stages and SnRK1αc is significantly expressed in the later vegetative and reproductive phases. Transcriptomic analysis on 7 days old seedlings showed that the defense response and the secondary metabolic process were upregulated in WT Kitaake seedlings exposed to extended darkness mimicking starvation. In contrast, the dark-exposed snrk1αa+b mutant showed downregulation of these biological processes and upregulation of light-induced processes such as ribosome biogenesis, translation, and DNA replication. However, not many biological processes were found to be significantly up or down regulated in the snrk1αc mutant. Therefore, stress response during early stages of seedling growth is controlled by SnRK1αa and/or SnRK1αb, and SnRK1αc does not play a major role in the seedling growth or stress response during early phases of the development. Next, the study examined the response of snrk1 mutants against three different diseases: rice blast caused by Magnaporthe oryzae, sheath blight caused by Rhizoctonia solani, and bacterial panicle blight caused by Burkholderia glumae. Previous studies have shown that mutation in the SnRK1 gene increases susceptibility to pathogens. However, in our experiments we did not observe an increase of susceptibility in the snrk1αa+b or snrk1αc mutants to bacterial panicle blight and sheath blight diseases. However, regarding blast fungus caused by M. oryzae, we noted that snrk1 mutants were more susceptible, which is in accordance with the literature and our transcriptomic results that shows downregulation of defense response in snrk1 mutants