Perceived Impact of the Alqueva Dam on Regional Tourism Development

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylot & Francis via the DOI in this recordThe paper studies the impact of the Alqueva Multi-Purpose Dam on the Alentejo region (Portugal), focusing on tourism development. In 2002, the Alqueva dam originated the largest artificial lake in Europe and was widely believed to bring a great number of benefits for the region by creating conditions for intensive irrigated farming and enhancing a new tourism destination in interior Portugal. The aim of this study is to assess to what degree the latter has been achieved. Interviews were held with 35 local and regional stakeholders of the tourism and cultural heritage sectors to understand their perception regarding the changes that occurred in the regional tourism industry since the dam's construction. Findings show that, against initial expectations, the tourism industry is still largely underdeveloped, partly due to a lack of investment and an inadequate tourism planning model. Furthermore, conflicts were observed concerning the balance between the value of the traditional montado landscape for tourism and irrigated farming development.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologi

The clustering conditions for managing creative tourism destinations: the Alqueva region case, Portugal

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordThe paper discusses conditions and format of a cluster model to support the management of a potential creative tourism destination in a setting where regional cross-sectoral collaboration is lacking. Creative tourism development requires a flexible framework and a healthy collaboration environment, more so when associated with resources shared by several stakeholders. This article focuses on the tourism potential of archaeological knowledge discovered during the environmental impact assessment of the Alqueva dam (Alentejo, Portugal). Interviews were conducted with 38 regional actors in the tourism and heritage sectors, as well as the dam developers and the companies responsible for archaeological interventions. Findings indicate that the lack of specific local policy addressing archaeological heritage hampers its potential use for tourism development, which is further aggravated by the absence of stakeholder communication and cooperation. A conceptual cluster model for the management of creative tourism destinations based on heritage resources and other local resources is proposed.Portuguese national funding agency for Science, Research and Technology (FCT

Guernsey voluntary and charitable sector research study

The study‘s focus was on social inclusion, and how voluntary and charitable organisations try to overcome the barriers and inequalities which prevent people participating on equal terms in society. Its aim was to identify gaps in provision and ways to fill them. Its methodology included a literature review, focus groups and a questionnaire.The report reviews literature and research, from the UK and Europe as well as Guernsey, on social exclusion, social inclusion, the voluntary sector and its changing relationship with the statutory sector. Some of the themes of this broader review are reflected in the findings of the study of the VCS in Guernsey.Most households in Guernsey are not at risk of becoming poor in the near future, but the 2007 Household Expenditure Survey indicated that 16.6% of respondents lived in households with an income below 60% of median income. Those most affected by poverty are lone parent households, single pensioner households and households with children. This means poorer diet, worse health and housing, greater vulnerability to crime and less social support

Descrição de uma abordagem participada com vista ao redesenvolvimento da mina de São Domingos, Alentejo, Portugal

A recuperação de áreas industriais abandonadas tem crescido de importância na Europa. Por um lado, são áreas com problemas ambientais, agravados ou não por problemas económicos e sociais nas comunidades adjacentes. Por outro lado, estas áreas surgem como uma oportunidade para o (re)desenvolvimento local. Este artigo descreve e analisa sucintamente o processo de participação pública implementado no projeto rehmine que, entre outros aspetos, pretendeu contribuir para o planeamento estratégico do redesenvolvimento da Mina de São Domingos. O planeamento espacial estratégico é aqui entendido como uma experiência de aprendizagem social, ambos conceitos úteis na análise crítica das escolhas metodológicas aplicadas.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Abdominal obesity in adolescents: Development of age-specific waist circumference cut-offs linked to adult IDF criteria

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to develop age- and sex-specific waist cir-cumference (WC) cut-off points, linked to older adolescent and adult criteria forabdominal obesity, to be applied to children in the clinical setting.Methods: A total of 16,788 adolescents aged 10 to 16 years were assessed for WC.Smoothed age and sex-specific WC curves were obtained using Cole’s LMS method.Results: Percentiles that corresponded to the International Diabetes Federation (IDF)recommendations used for older adolescents and adults (161 years old) were the97thpercentile for boys and the 87thpercentile for girls. Using these cutoffs, a total of368 boys and 1138 girls were categorized as abdominally obese, in contrast to 1654boys and 987 girls that were identified using the current IDF pediatric criteria (90thpercentile).Conclusions: We provide age- and sex-specific cut-off points that can be used toidentify abdominal obesity in adolescents. The present findings provide a tool thatcan be used in the clinical setting for the early detection and prevention of adult obe-sity. Population-specific cutoffs may be required for pediatric ages to diagnosechildren at risk

What Has Changed During the COVID-19 Pandemic? - The Effect on an Academic Breast Department in Portugal

Introduction: One year ago, Portugal entered its first lockdown because of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The impact of this on delays in cancer diagnosis and treatment is a major concern, which may negatively affect the outcomes of these patients. Materials and methods: This retrospective, single-center analysis compared the clinical and pathological characteristics of breast cancer (BC) patients referred to a medical oncology first appointment between March 2020 and 2021, with the same period in the previous year. Results: Strikingly, there was a 40% reduction in the number of BC patients during lockdown. However, there was a statistically significant increase in the proportion of metastatic BC patients admitted for the first time for systemic therapy (13.6% vs. 28.9%, p = 0.003). Additionally, a statistically significant increase in the number of patients with bilateral early BC at diagnosis after March 2020 was found (7.2% vs. 1.9%, p = 0.043). Conclusion: These findings support international recommendations for an accelerated restoration of BC screening, to reduce incidence of advanced breast cancer at diagnosis and mitigate the expected impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on patients with cancer. Further work is needed to examine in detail the impact of measures to manage the COVID-19 pandemic on breast cancer outcomes.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

L2F/INESC-ID at SemEval-2019 Task 2: unsupervised lexical semantic frame induction using contextualized word representations

Building large datasets annotated with semantic information, such as FrameNet, is an expensive process. Consequently, such resources are unavailable for many languages and specific domains. This problem can be alleviated by using unsupervised approaches to induce the frames evoked by a collection of documents. That is the objective of the second task of SemEval 2019, which comprises three subtasks: clustering of verbs that evoke the same frame and clustering of arguments into both frame-specific slots and semantic roles. We approach all the subtasks by applying a graph clustering algorithm on contextualized embedding representations of the verbs and arguments. Using such representations is appropriate in the context of this task, since they provide cues for word-sense disambiguation. Thus, they can be used to identify different frames evoked by the same words. Using this approach we were able to outperform all of the baselines reported for the task on the test set in terms of Purity F1, as well as in terms of BCubed F1 in most cases.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Utilidade do estudo da flora espontânea nos reconhecimentos agrológicos

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Psychological advocacy towards healing (PATH): A randomized controlled trial of a psychological intervention in a domestic violence service setting

Background Experience of domestic violence and abuse (DVA) is associated with mental illness. Advocacy has little effect on mental health outcomes of female DVA survivors and there is uncertainty about the effectiveness of psychological interventions for this population. Objective To test effectiveness of a psychological intervention delivered by advocates to DVA survivors. Design, masking, setting, participants Pragmatic parallel group individually randomized controlled trial of normal DVA advocacy vs. advocacy + psychological intervention. Statistician and researchers blinded to group assignment. Setting: specialist DVA agencies; two UK cities. Participants: Women aged 16 years and older accessing DVA services. Intervention Eight specialist psychological advocacy (SPA) sessions with two follow up sessions. Measurements Primary outcomes at 12 months: depression symptoms (PHQ-9) and psychological distress (CORE-OM). Primary analysis: intention to treat linear (logistic) regression model for continuous (binary) outcomes. Results 263 women recruited (78 in shelter/refuge, 185 in community), 2 withdrew (1 community, control group; 1 intervention, refuge group), 1 was excluded from the study for protocol violation (community, control group), 130 in intervention and 130 in control groups. Recruitment ended June 2013. 12-month follow up: 64%. At 12-month follow up greater improvement in mental health of women in the intervention group. Difference in average CORE-OM score between intervention and control groups: -3.3 points (95% CI -5.5 to -1.2). Difference in average PHQ-9 score between intervention and control group: -2.2 (95% CI -4.1 to -0.3). At 12 months, 35% of the intervention group and 55% of the control group were above the CORE-OM -2clinical threshold (OR 0.32, 95% CI 0.16 to 0.64); 29% of the intervention group and 46% of the control group were above the PHQ-9 clinical threshold (OR 0.41, 95% CI 0.21 to 0.81). Limitations 64% retention at 12 months Conclusions An eight-session psychological intervention delivered by DVA advocates produced clinically relevant improvement in mental health outcomes compared with normal advocacy care. Trial registration ISRCTN registry ISRCTN58561170 Original Research 3675/375

The Liver Plays a Major Role in Clearance and Destruction of Blood Trypomastigotes in Trypanosoma cruzi Chronically Infected Mice

This deposit is composed by a publication in which the IGC's authors have had the role of collaboration (it's a collaboration publication). This type of deposit in ARCA is in restrictedAccess (it can't be in open access to the public), and can only be accessed by two ways: either by requesting a legal copy from the author (the email contact present in this deposit) or by visiting the following link: http://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0000578Intravenous challenge with Trypanosoma cruzi can be used to investigate the process and consequences of blood parasite clearance in experimental Chagas disease. One hour after intravenous challenge of chronically infected mice with 5x10(6) trypomastigotes, the liver constituted a major site of parasite accumulation, as revealed by PCR. Intact parasites and/or parasite remnants were visualized at this time point scattered in the liver parenchyma. Moreover, at this time, many of liver-cleared parasites were viable, as estimated by the frequency of positive cultures, which considerably diminished after 48 h. Following clearance, the number of infiltrating cells in the hepatic tissue notably increased: initially (at 24 h) as diffuse infiltrates affecting the whole parenchyma, and at 48 h, in the form of large focal infiltrates in both the parenchyma and perivascular spaces. Phenotypic characterization of liver-infiltrating cells 24 h after challenge revealed an increase in Mac1(+), CD8(+) and CD4(+) cells, followed by natural killer (NK) cells. As evidence that liver-infiltrating CD4(+) and CD8(+) cells were activated, increased frequencies of CD69(+)CD8(+), CD69(+)CD4(+) and CD25(+)CD122(+)CD4(+) cells were observed at 24 and 48 h after challenge, and of CD25(-)CD122(+)CD4(+) cells at 48 h. The major role of CD4(+) cells in liver protection was suggested by data showing a very high frequency of interferon (IFN)-gamma-producing CD4(+) cells 24 h after challenge. In contrast, liver CD8(+) cells produced little IFN-gamma, even though they showed an enhanced potential for secreting this cytokine, as revealed by in vitro T cell receptor (TCR) stimulation. Confirming the effectiveness of the liver immune response in blood parasite control during the chronic phase of infection, no live parasites were detected in this organ 7 days after challenge