Introduction

UID/HIS/04666/2013Introduction to the volumeauthorsversionpublishe

Utopia III or an Ambiguous Humanist Utopia for the Second Millennium

UID/HIS/04666/2013Portuguese literature does not have many examples of successful and renowned utopias, though the considerable amount of published utopias written in foreign languages and translated to Portuguese language being quite relevant. However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, almost at the eve of the second millennium an important Portuguese utopia was published: Utopia III, written by Pina Martins (1998). This long novel is structured as being the sequel of More’s Utopia, presenting the history and actual status of the mother of all literary utopias. The question at the basis of the whole novel is, “What would More’s Utopia be like today?” The main goal of this text will be to presente a literary analysis of Utopia III, focusing on the humanist principles and their adaptation to contemporary society, the search for a harmonious relationship between city and nature, the defence of a Portuguese identity and the appeal to a humanist renewalpublishersversionpublishe

Comparative analysis of More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Miguel Real’s O Último Europeu 2284

UID/HIS/04666/2013Being a creation based on Christian Humanism, Utopia went through several changes, many of which are already present in More’s narrative. Bacon’s New Atlantis brought one of the first radical transformations about. The closed, agrarian, and immutable Utopian island opened itself to the world and promoted change through controlled scientific research. However much of what More conceived was maintained: New Atlantis is still an island lost somewhere in the middle of the ocean, protecting its privacy and secrecy, evolving through the inclusion of selected external information, but avoiding exchanged. In Miguel Real’s O Último Europeu 2284 [The Last European 2284] the narrative starts in part of the European continent, with diffused borders, but unquestionably defined as a perfect utopian society, technological and scientifically advanced, and actively engaged in providing its citizens with the necessary otium, in the sense of the Greek word skole, meaning intellectual activity. After the destruction of this utopian and pacifist Europe, there is the creation of a new one, in the almost desert island of Pico, in the Azores. Once again, this utopia is crashed, and what endures as hope for future generations is a handwritten manuscript describing the two shattered future Utopias. The thread to explore in the paper is that of how humanism evolved through the last 500 years, taking these three paradigmatic literary utopias as base stones.authorsversionpublishe

Emile Souvestre and Cordwainer Smith

UID/HIS/04666/2013Zaha Hadid’s statement that is used as an epigraph to this book is also the cornerstone of this essay: “Non puo esserci progresso senza affrontare l’ignoto”. This sentence has an ambiguous meaning and can be interpreted in at least two different ways: either as a natural challenge or as an aggressive defiance. This ambiguity encompasses the relationship between individuals, communities and progress, reminding the image of Janus, each facing a different side, both forming the same and a different entity. It is a natural and complementary ambivalence. Every endeavour undertook by promoters of progress has a degree of uncertainty, a pending threat of failure, and the outcome always produces positive and negative consequences frequently in uneven ways. Culturally, in a consistent way at least from the beginning of modernity, Western civilisation has regarded progress as a natural unstoppable endeavour. Sometimes even as a duty of every rational educated person – to pass (or trespass) the frontier of the known, to act, to evolve, to transform, to change, and to discover the “God given world”. This almost linear way to understand progress, to view reality from a dominant, sometimes exclusive point of view, tends to erase the notion and effects of negative consequences both on individuals and on communities, assumed by the dominant culture as acceptable collateral damages in the name/notion of rational evolution. In this essay, the main goal is to defy this dominant trend of evolution as based mainly on material, objective, rational progress, and defy the unique view of a future based on quantifiable and technological evolution. This challenge will be done with the comparative analysis of two literary texts: Emile Souvestre’s Le monde tel qu'il sera and Cordwainer Smith’s “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”.authorsversionpublishe

Chronic Inflammation in Obesity and the Metabolic Syndrome

The increasing incidence of obesity and the metabolic syndrome is disturbing. The activation of inflammatory pathways, used normally as host defence, reminds the seriousness of this condition. There is probably more than one cause for activation of inflammation. Apparently, metabolic overload evokes stress reactions, such as oxidative, inflammatory, organelle and cell hypertrophy, generating vicious cycles. Adipocyte hypertrophy, through physical reasons, facilitates cell rupture, what will evoke an inflammatory reaction. Inability of adipose tissue development to engulf incoming fat leads to deposition in other organs, mainly in the liver, with consequences on insulin resistance. The oxidative stress which accompanies feeding, particularly when there is excessive ingestion of fat and/or other macronutrients without concomitant ingestion of antioxidant-rich foods/beverages, may contribute to inflammation attributed to obesity. Moreover, data on the interaction of microbiota with food and obesity brought new hypothesis for the obesity/fat diet relationship with inflammation. Beyond these, other phenomena, for instance psychological and/or circadian rhythm disturbances, may likewise contribute to oxidative/inflammatory status. The difficulty in the management of obesity/metabolic syndrome is linked to their multifactorial nature where environmental, genetic and psychosocial factors interact through complex networks

Gibbs sampling detection for large MIMO and MTC uplinks with adaptive modulation

Wireless networks beyond 5G will mostly be serving myriads of sensors and other machine-type communications (MTC), with each device having different requirements in respect to latency, error rate, energy consumption, spectral efficiency or other specifications. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems remain a central technology towards 6G, and in cases where massive antenna arrays or cell-free networks are not possible to deploy and only moderately large antenna arrays are allowed, the detection problem at the base-station cannot rely on zero-forcing or matched filters and more complex detection schemes have to be used. The main challenge is to find low complexity, hardware feasible methods that are able to attain near optimal performance. Randomized algorithms based on Gibbs sampling (GS) were proven to perform very close to the optimal detection, even for moderately large antenna arrays, while yielding an acceptable number of operations. However, their performance is highly dependent on the chosen “temperature” parameter (TP). In this paper, we propose and study an optimized variant of the GS method, denoted by triple mixed GS, and where three distinct values for the TP are considered. The method exhibits faster convergence rates than the existing ones in the literature, hence requiring fewer iterations to achieve a target bit error rate. The proposed detector is suitable for symmetric large MIMO systems, however the proposed fixed complexity detector is highly suitable to spectrally efficient adaptively modulated MIMO (AM-MIMO) systems where different types of devices upload information at different bit rates or have different requirements regarding spectral efficiency. The proposed receiver is shown to attain quasi-optimal performance in both scenarios.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Massive MIMO Full-Duplex Relaying with Optimal Power Allocation for Independent Multipairs

With the help of an in-band full-duplex relay station, it is possible to simultaneously transmit and receive signals from multiple users. The performance of such system can be greatly increased when the relay station is equipped with a large number of antennas on both transmitter and receiver sides. In this paper, we exploit the use of massive arrays to effectively suppress the loopback interference (LI) of a decode-and-forward relay (DF) and evaluate the performance of the end-to-end (e2e) transmission. This paper assumes imperfect channel state information is available at the relay and designs a minimum mean-square error (MMSE) filter to mitigate the interference. Subsequently, we adopt zero-forcing (ZF) filters for both detection and beamforming. The performance of such system is evaluated in terms of bit error rate (BER) at both relay and destinations, and an optimal choice for the transmission power at the relay is shown. We then propose a complexity efficient optimal power allocation (OPA) algorithm that, using the channel statistics, computes the minimum power that satisfies the rate constraints of each pair. The results obtained via simulation show that when both MMSE filtering and OPA method are used, better values for the energy efficiency are attained.Comment: Accepted to the 16th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications - SPAWC, Stockholm, Sweden 201

Fast matrix inversion updates for massive MIMO detection and precoding

In this letter, methods and corresponding complexities for fast matrix inversion updates in the context of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) are studied. In particular, we propose an on-the-fly method to recompute the zero forcing (ZF) filter when a user is added or removed from the system. Additionally, we evaluate the recalculation of the inverse matrix after a new channel estimation is obtained for a given user. Results are evaluated numerically in terms of bit error rate (BER) using the Neumann series approximation as the initial inverse matrix. It is concluded that, with fewer operations, the performance after an update remains close to the initial one.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio