uncovering the phonographic industry and the ‘NGOMA national label’ in socialist Mozambique (1978–1990)

UIDB/00472/2020 UIDP/00472/2020This article outlines the structure and editorial practices of the phonographic industry in postcolonial Mozambique during the so-called ‘socialist period’. It details the production phases, the associated companies and delves into the material conditions and aesthetic values that guided the phonograms published by NGOMA—dubbed as ‘the Mozambican national label’—and their relationship with state-defined cultural policy between 1978 (when production on this series commenced) and 1990 (when vinyl production officially ceased in the country). Several themes are explored, such as predominant topics of song lyrics, repertoires and artists, copyright, women artists, and the restrictions on music production during the civil war. After analysing the main musical trends and acknowledging noteworthy absences, I reflect on NGOMA’s efficiency in the nation-building process.publishersversionpublishe

First record of the Bicoloured-spined Porcupine Coendou bicolor (Tschudi, 1844) for Brazil

While travelling as part of the protected area management activities undertaken by the Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio) in the state of Acre, four records of porcupines (Coendou spp.) were gathered: two for Coendou bicolor and two for Coendou prehensilis. The records for Coendou bicolor are the first for Brazil while the records for Coendou prehensilis present the state of Acre as a potential region of sympatry between C. bicolor and C. prehensilis

Microservices applied to Web and mobile applications internship

Microservices is a software architecture that has seen an increase in popularity and use in recent years. Due to its simplicity and ease of implementation it is nowadays the standard reference for web services. This report focuses on the general concepts of microservices and their real-world application. The report was divided into three main points: (a) general concepts of microservices, (b) facial and emotion recognition applied to an adaptive user interface using microservices and (c) restructure an existing web application following a microservices architecture. The first point, (a) general concepts of microservices, introduces the definition of a microservice and what are the main traits that a microservice should have. The second point, (b) describes the implementation of a mobile application with an adaptive user interface that uses microservices for facial and emotional recognition. In this point it is possible to understand how to consume microservices developed by third parties. The third point, (c) describes the restructuring of an existing web application, through a microservices architecture, exemplifying the concepts mentioned in point (a) and small excerpts of code from an open-source project to demonstrate its real-world code usage.Micro serviços é uma arquitetura de software que cresceu em popularidade e utilização nos anos mais recentes. Devido à sua simplicidade e facilidade de implementação é hoje em dia o padrão referência para serviços web. Este relatório foca os conceitos gerais de micro serviços e a sua aplicação num âmbito profissional. O relatório foi dividido em 3 pontos principais: (a) conceitos gerais de micro serviços, (b) reconhecimento facial e de emoções aplicado a uma interface adaptativa de utilizador utilizando micro serviços e (c) reestruturar uma aplicação web existente seguindo uma arquitetura de micro serviços. O primeiro ponto, o (a) conceitos gerais de micro serviços, introduz a definição de um micro serviço e quais as principais características que um micro serviço deve obedecer. No segundo ponto, (b) descreve-se a implementação de uma aplicação mobile com uma interface adaptativa de utilizador recorrendo a micro serviços para reconhecimento facial e de emoções. Neste ponto é possível compreender como consumir micro serviços desenvolvidos por terceiros. No terceiro ponto, (c) descreve-se a reestruturação de uma aplicação web existente, através de uma arquitetura de micro serviços, exemplificando os conceitos mencionados no ponto (a) e pequenos excertos de código de um projecto open-source para demonstrar a sua utilização

THE ROLE OF NRF2 SIGNALLING IN CELL PROLIFERATION AND TUMORIGENESIS OF CHROMIUM TRANSFORMED HUMAN BRONCHIAL EPITHELIAL CELLS

Hexavalent Chromium (Cr(VI) induces malignant cell transformation in normal bronchial epithelial (BEAS-2B) cells. Cr(VI)-transformed cells exhibit increased level of antioxidants, are resistant to apoptosis, and are tumorigenic. RNAseq analysis in Cr(VI)-transformed cells showed that expression of transcripts associated with mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation is reduced, and the expression of transcripts associated with pentose phosphate pathway, glycolysis, and glutaminolysis are increased. Sirtuin-3 (SIRT3) regulates mitochondrial adaptive response to stress, such as metabolic reprogramming and antioxidant defense mechanisms. SIRT3 was upregulated and it positively regulated mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation in Cr(VI)-transformed cells. Our results suggests that SIRT3 plays an important role in mitophagy deficiency of Cr(VI)-transformed cells. Furthermore, SIRT3 knockdown suppressed cell proliferation and tumorigenesis of Cr(VI)-transformed cells. Nrf2 is a transcription factor that regulates oxidative stress response. This study investigated the role of Nrf2 in regulating metabolic reprogramming in Cr(VI)-transformed cells. We observed that in Cr(VI)-transformed cells p-AMPKthr172 was increased, when compared to normal BEAS-2B cells. Additionally, Nrf2 knockdown reduced p-AMPKthr172. Our results suggest that Nrf2 regulated glycolytic shift via AMPK regulation of PFK1/PFK2 pathway. Furthermore, our results showed that Nrf2 constitutive activation in Cr(VI-transformed cells increased cell proliferation and tumorigenesis. Overall this dissertation demonstrated that Cr(VI)-transformed cells undergo metabolic reprogramming. We demonstrated that Nrf2 constitutive activation plays decisive role on metabolic reprogramming induction, and SIRT3 activation contributing to increased cancer cell proliferation and tumorigenesis

Squamate Reptiles of the central Chapada Diamantina, with a focus on the municipality of Mucugê, state of Bahia, Brazil

We present the first species list of squamate reptiles for the central region of the Chapada Diamantina, with a focus on the municipality of Mucugê, state of Bahia Brazil. The data provided were mostly collected in the Caraíbas estate, during vegetation clearing operations for agriculture. The remnant records were collected from roadkills encountered in Mucugê and neighboring municipalities. We found 64 species of squamate reptiles including 35 species of snakes, 25 of lizards and four of amphisbaenians. These records have already yielded three species descriptions with others likely to follow. This is evidence of the poorly documented herpetological diversity of the Chapada Diamantina. The present work highlights the need for further research and the potential of less traditional data sources such as roadkills to improve the knowledge of the herpetofauna of extensive and megadiverse countries like Brazil

Generating Mathematical Derivations with Large Language Models

The derivation of mathematical results in specialised fields using Large Language Models (LLMs) is an emerging research direction that can help identify models' limitations, and potentially support mathematical discovery. In this paper, we leverage a symbolic engine to generate derivations of equations at scale, and investigate the capabilities of LLMs when deriving goal equations from premises. Specifically, we employ in-context learning for GPT and fine-tune a range of T5 models to compare the robustness and generalisation of pre-training strategies to specialised models. Empirical results show that fine-tuned FLAN-T5-large (MathT5) outperforms GPT models on all static and out-of-distribution test sets in terms of absolute performance. However, an in-depth analysis reveals that the fine-tuned models are more sensitive to perturbations involving unseen symbols and (to a lesser extent) changes to equation structure. In addition, we analyse 1.7K equations and over 200 derivations to highlight common reasoning errors such as the inclusion of incorrect, irrelevant, and redundant equations, along with the tendency to skip derivation steps. Finally, we explore the suitability of existing metrics for evaluating mathematical derivations finding evidence that, while they capture general properties such as sensitivity to perturbations, they fail to highlight fine-grained reasoning errors and essential differences between models. Overall, this work demonstrates that training models on synthetic data can improve their mathematical capabilities beyond larger architectures.Comment: 13 page

First record of Cercosaura eigenmanni (Griffin, 1917) (Squamata: Gymnophthalmidae) for the state of Acre, Brazil

A female specimen of Cercosaura eigenmanni (Griffin, 1917) was found during fieldwork in the Extractive Reserve Chico Mendes, municipality of Brasiléia, state of Acre, Brazil. This is the first record of the species for this state, extending the known distribution of the species by 465 km

Unification-based Reconstruction of Multi-hop Explanations for Science Questions

This paper presents a novel framework for reconstructing multi-hop explanations in science Question Answering (QA). While existing approaches for multi-hop reasoning build explanations considering each question in isolation, we propose a method to leverage explanatory patterns emerging in a corpus of scientific explanations. Specifically, the framework ranks a set of atomic facts by integrating lexical relevance with the notion of unification power, estimated analysing explanations for similar questions in the corpus. An extensive evaluation is performed on the Worldtree corpus, integrating k-NN clustering and Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. We present the following conclusions: (1) The proposed method achieves results competitive with Transformers, yet being orders of magnitude faster, a feature that makes it scalable to large explanatory corpora (2) The unification-based mechanism has a key role in reducing semantic drift, contributing to the reconstruction of many hops explanations (6 or more facts) and the ranking of complex inference facts (+12.0 Mean Average Precision) (3) Crucially, the constructed explanations can support downstream QA models, improving the accuracy of BERT by up to 10% overall.Comment: Accepted at EACL 202