Organizational Probes:Exploring Playful Interactions in Work Environment

Playfulness, with non-intrusive elements, can be considered a useful resource for enhancing social awareness and community building within work organizations. Taking inspirations from the cultural probes approach, we developed organizational probes as a set of investigation tools that could provide useful information about employees’ everyday playful experiences within their work organizations. In an academic work environment, we applied our organizational probes over a period of three weeks. Based on the collected data we developed two design concepts for playful technologies in work environments

Subsidence Hazard in Limestone Cavities: The Case of “Grutas da Moeda”

“Grutas da Moeda” are natural touristic caves, located in the plateau of São Mamede, 5 minutes away from the Sanctuary of Fátima. They have been opened to the public since 1974, and receives about 75,000 visitors per year, from 76 nationalities. They are inserted in the “Maciço Calcário Estremenho”, composed by limestone deposits of the Middle Jurassic (Bathonian), corresponding to the Serra de Aire formation and Upper Jurassic limestone deposits corresponding to the Cabaços and Montejunto formations. The geological risk assessment is fundamental to guarantee the safety of its visitors and workers, therefore it is intended to develop methodologies of geotechnical monitoring in order to collect data to understand the risks that may be associated with this natural cavity and to identify critical areas of collapse. In the caves there are four main alignments (faults / joints), N35ºW, N150ºE, N75ºE and N100ºE, which assume a parallelism with the development of the caves. The trend of the layers in the cave are approximately N30ºE pending 17ºSE. In the year 2015, a geophysical study was carried out in the caves, using the 3D electrical resistivity method and, for one of the areas in particular, the georadar method. The georadar method allowed to map the anomalies corresponding to empty spaces that have been identified with the 3D electrical resistivity technique. This paper presents the results obtained, as well as proposals for geotechnical measures to mitigate the risk of collapse subsidence.GeoBioTe

Growth, age estimation and corroboration of northeast Atlantic chub mackerel (Scomber colias) in northern Iberian waters: a first attempt.

Updated information on growth of Atlantic chub mackerel in several areas of its distribution is required for the first stock assessment. Its growth pattern in Northern Iberian waters (2011-2017) is here analyzed with different approaches: those based on otoliths analyses (direct age estimation-DAE, back-calculation-BC and otolith marginal analyses) and those based on length frequency analyses (Bhattacharya, SLCA and PROJMAT methods). Two main different growth patterns are obtained, a "slow" one based on DAE, BC and LFDA from surveys; and a "fast" one based on Bhattacharya and LFDA from commercial landings. The divergence between both patterns begins to be evident at age 3 and older. Otolith marginal analyses that show an annual periodicity in the formation of the hyaline and opaque edge, the unimodal distribution of the annuli radius and the similarity of the back-calculated mean lengths to those obtained by DAE, support the age estimation criteria used in our analysis. The VBGF growth parameters (L∞=45.34, k=0.28, t0=1.18) obtained by otolith age estimation are available for the upcoming stock assessment process

Advances in the study on sexual maturity of Atlantic chub mackerel (Scomber colias) in Cantabrian Sea.

Atlantic chub mackerel (Scomber colias) is a middle size pelagic species distributed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Landings of this species have increased recently in the Iberian Peninsula, likely associated to the increase of its abundance and expansion northwards, probably related to an increment of the sea temperature. The aim of this study is to improve the knowledge of the reproductive biology of the Atlantic chub mackerel and to present updated information on spawning period and maturity ogives that can be used for analytical stock assessment in ICES and its management

Demand Response Approach for the Coordination Between Aggregators and Providers

Nowadays electricity system is looking for innovation in its role. New approaches are being able to discuss because of several issues as environmental, costs, quality and reliability of the electric energy production. In this paper one more aggregation’s scheme for demand response will be proposed. Based on National Grid’s programs that already exist in the market which will be shown on the current paper. This paper will be a support for a master thesis in electrical engineering based on the same topic.The present work was done and funded in the scope of the following project: H2020 DREAM - GO Project (Marie Sklodowska Curie grant agreement No. 641794)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Supercritical CO2 extraction of V. vinifera leaves: influence of cosolvents and particle size on removal kinetics and selectivity to target compounds

Leaves from Vitis vinifera L. contain potential bioactive compounds, namely: long chain aliphatic alcohols (e.g., 1-hexacosanol, 1-octacosanol and 1-triacontanol), α-tocopherol, β-sitosterol, and the triterpenes β-amyrin and lupeol. Supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) runs were measured at lab scale using: crushed and ground biomass; pure CO2 at 300 bar and 40−80 °C; and CO2 modified with 5 and 10 wt.% of ethanol or ethyl acetate. Total SFE yields ranged from 1.86 to 7.52 wt.%. The broken plus intact cells model (BICM), provided a good fitting of the SFE curves with 4.06 % error for total yield and 1.98–5.49 % for the individual yields of the said compounds. The BICM results revealed that the SFE is limited by intraparticle diffusion. Remarkable experimental and calculated selectivities were obtained for triterpenes (lupeol and β-amyrin), starting with a score of 1.7 and increasing along time to 10−100.publishe

The origin and genetic diversity of the causal agent of Asian soybean rust, Phakopsora pachyrhizi, in South America

A sequence‐based approach was used to investigate molecular genetic variations in Phakopsora pachyrhizi, an obligate biotrophic pathogen that causes Asian soybean rust. In Argentina, the samples came from uredinium‐bearing leaves taken from 11 soybean fields; in Brazil, the samples comprised urediniospores from leaves of 10 soybean genotypes that had been grown in three experimental stations during two growing seasons. PCR‐based cloning techniques were used to generate DNA sequences for two gene regions and alignments were supplemented with data from GenBank. A total of 575 sequences for the internal transcribed spacer region (18 ribotypes) and 160 partial sequences for a housekeeping gene encoding ADP‐ribosylation factor (10 haplotypes) were obtained. Ribotype accumulation curves predicted that about 20 bacterial clones would recover 5–6 ribotypes (c. 70–80% of the total molecular variation) per locality. The samples from the three experimental stations in Brazil displayed most (14 out of 16) ribotypes found worldwide; the lack of genetic structure and differentiation at a diverse geographic scale suggests that both local and distant sources provide airborne inoculum during disease establishment. Soybean genotypes with resistance genes for the Asian soybean rust did not decrease the molecular genetic variation of fungal populations.Instituto de GenéticaFil: Jorge, V.R. Universidade Federal de Viçosa. Departamento de Bioquímica e Biologia Molecular; BrasilFil: Silva, M.R. Universidade Federal de Viçosa. Departamento de Bioquímica e Biologia Molecular; BrasilFil: Guillin, Eduardo Alejandro. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). Instituto de Genética; ArgentinaFil: Freire, M.C.M. Universidade Federal de Viçosa. Departamento de Bioquímica e Biologia Molecular; BrasilFil: Schuster, I. Cooperativa Central de Pesquisa Agrícola; BrasilFil: Almeida, A.M.R. Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, Embrapa‐Soja; BrasilFil: Oliveira, Luiz O. Universidade Federal de Viçosa. Departamento de Bioquímica e Biologia Molecular; Brasi

Preliminary observation on sexual maturity of chub mackerel (Scomber colias) in the Northern Iberian Atlantic waters (ICES Divisions 27.8.c and 27.9.a.N)

A study of the reproductive biology of the Atlantic chub mackerel (Scomber colias) has been performed in Northern Iberian Atlantic waters (ICES Divisions 27.8.c and 27.9.a.N) based on samples of 14538 specimens (11-50 cm total length) from commercial landings and scientific surveys from 2011-2019. The spawning period was defined based on the monthly prevalence of active females (maturity stages 3, 4 and 5 according to Walsh maturity scale) and temporal variability of females gonado- and hepatosomatic indices (GSI/HSI). Length and age maturity ogives were also estimated for males and females pooling all sampled years together. The spawning period occurred from March to July, with a peak in June. In the 27.8.c area, the GSI, HSI and prevalence of active females increased from March to June and then GSI and prevalence decreased abruptly. In the 27.9.a.N, the peak of spawning was observed earlier (April-May) and with lower intensity than in 27.8.c, but sampling in 27.9.a area was limited to the northern zone (Spanish waters) and are not conclusive. L50 and A50 values estimated with annual data were 22.9 cm and 1.6 years old respectively for both sexes combined, similar to the values estimated with data only from the spawning period: 22.7 cm and 1.5 years old respectively for both sexes combined. Our results were compared with those from previous studies in the NE Atlantic