Teachers managing the curriculum in the context of the mathematics’ subject group

This study addresses the teacher daily practice. The goal is to understand, from the teachers’ perspective, the challenges and difficulties that they face when attempting to involve the pupils in mathematics learning. We are particularly interested in the issues that arise when teachers assume curriculum management decisions in the con-text of the school mathematics department. The methodology is qualitative and inter-pretive, with case studies. The results indicate that curriculum management sup-ported by the collaborative context creates tensions when a teacher makes decisions that diverge from those assumed collectively and also between the collaborative group with an innovative approach to teaching and teacher professional identity

Popular music and the public sphere: the case of Portuguese music journalism

Music journalism has been acknowledged as an important space of mediation between artists and consumers. Journalists and critics have played an historical role in the creation of discourse on popular music and are acknowledged by the music industry as an important referent in promotion strategies. Research on the subject has been mostly focused either on the relationship between music journalism and the wider music industry in which it operates or on its status as a field of cultural production. Little consideration has been given to the role played by music journalists in articulating popular music with wider political, social and cultural concerns. This thesis will examine the case-study of Portuguese popular music journalism. It will address its historical evolution and current status by taking into consideration some dimensions, namely, the wider institutional contexts that frame the status of music journalism and how they work upon it, the ideologies and values realised in journalistic discourse, the journalists’ relationship to the music industry (as represented by record labels/companies and concert promotion companies) and issues of interactivity with readers. The thesis will draw on theories of the public sphere and, to a lesser extent, on Bourdieu’s notions of field, capital and habitus to assess the possibilities for music journalism to create reasoned discourse on popular music and, therefore, contribute to wider debates on the public sphere of culture

The Choral Va, Pensiero as a Nationalist Badge in the Lyrical World of XIX Century

PEst-OE/EAT/UI0693/2014publishersversionpublishe

Geometric quantization, complex structures and the coherent state transform

It is shown that the heat operator in the Hall coherent state transform for a compact Lie group $K$ is related with a Hermitian connection associated to a natural one-parameter family of complex structures on $T^*K$. The unitary parallel transport of this connection establishes the equivalence of (geometric) quantizations of $T^*K$ for different choices of complex structures within the given family. In particular, these results establish a link between coherent state transforms for Lie groups and results of Hitchin and Axelrod, Della Pietra and Witten.Comment: to appear in Journal of Functional Analysi

On the BKS pairing for Kahler quantizations of the cotangent bundle of a Lie group

A natural one-parameter family of K\"ahler quantizations of the cotangent bundle $T^*K$ of a compact Lie group $K$, taking into account the half-form correction, was studied in \cite{FMMN}. In the present paper, it is shown that the associated Blattner-Kostant-Sternberg (BKS) pairing map is unitary and coincides with the parallel transport of the quantum connection introduced in our previous work, from the point of view of \cite{AdPW}. The BKS pairing map is a composition of (unitary) coherent state transforms of $K$, introduced in \cite{Ha1}. Continuity of the Hermitian structure on the quantum bundle, in the limit when one of the K\"ahler polarizations degenerates to the vertical real polarization, leads to the unitarity of the corresponding BKS pairing map. This is in agreement with the unitarity up to scaling (with respect to a rescaled inner product) of this pairing map, established by Hall.Comment: final version, to appear in Journ. Funct. Ana

Genetic Land - Modeling land use change using evolutionary algorithms

Future land use configurations provide valuable knowledge for policy makers and economic agents, especially under expected environmental changes such as decreasing rainfall or increasing temperatures, or scenarios of policy guidance such as carbon sequestration enforcement. In this paper, modelling land use change is designed as an optimization problem in which landscapes (land uses) are generated through the use of genetic algorithms (GA), according to an objective function (e.g. minimization of soil erosion, or maximization of carbon sequestration), and a set of local restrictions (e.g. soil depth, water availability, or landscape structure). GAs are search and optimization procedures based on the mechanics of natural selection and genetics. The GA starts with a population of random individuals, each corresponding to a particular candidate solution to the problem. The best solutions are propagated; they are mated with each other and originate “offspring solutions” which randomly combine the characteristics of each “parent”. The repeated application of these operations leads to a dynamic system that emulates the evolutionary mechanisms that occur in nature. The fittest individuals survive and propagate their traits to future generations, while unfit individuals have a tendency to die and become extinct (Goldberg, 1989). Applications of GA to land use planning have been experimented (Brookes, 2001, Ducheyne et al, 2001). However, long-term planning with a time-span component has not yet been addressed. GeneticLand, the GA for land use generation, works on a region represented by a bi-dimensional array of cells. For each cell, there is a number of possible land uses (U1, U2, ..., Un). The task of the GA is to search for an optimal assignment of these land uses to the cells, evolving the landscape patterns that are most suitable for satisfying the objective function, for a certain time period (e.g. 50 years in the future). GeneticLand develops under a multi-objective function: (i) Minimization of soil erosion – each solution is validated by applying the USLE, with the best solution being the one that minimizes the landscape soil erosion value; (ii) Maximization of carbon sequestration – each solution is validated by applying atmospheric CO2 carbon uptake estimates, with the best solution being the one that maximizes the landscape carbon uptake; and (iii) Maximization of the landscape economic value – each solution is validated by applying an economic value (derived from expert judgment), with the best solution being the one that maximizes the landscape economic value. As an optimization problem, not all possible land use assignments are feasible. GeneticLand considers two sets of restrictions that must be met: (i) physical constraints (soil type suitability, slope, rainfall-evapotranspiration ratio, and a soil wetness index) and (ii) landscape ecology restrictions at several levels (minimum patch area, land use adjacency index and landscape contagion index). The former assures physical feasibility and the latter the spatial coherence of the landscape. The physical and landscape restrictions were derived from the analysis of past events based on a time series of Landsat images (1985-2003), in order to identify the drivers of land use change and structure. Since the problem has multiple objectives, the GA integrates multi-objective extensions allowing it to evolve a set of non-dominated solutions. An evolutive type algorithm – Evolutive strategy (1+1) – is used, due to the need to accommodate the very large solution space. Current applications have about 1000 decision variables, while the problem analysed by GeneticLand has almost 111000, generated by a landscape with 333*333 discrete pixels. GeneticLand is developed and validated for a Mediterranean type landscape located in southern Portugal. Future climate triggers, such as the increase of intense rainfall episodes, is accommodated to simulate climate change . This paper presents: (1) the formulation of land use modelling as an optimization problem; (2) the formulation of the GA for the explicit spatial domain, (3) the land use constraints derived for a Mediterranean landscape, (4) the results illustrating conflicting objectives, and (5) limitations encountered.

Mission Planning Application Software for Solar Powered UAVs

The growing demand for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for dedicated civilian use over the last decade has attracted the attention of investigators and engineers all over the world. It is important to note that the non-necessity of manual piloting is ideally suited to the operation of dirty, dangerous, dull (long autonomy) or large scale missions (use of swarms of UAVs) [1], however it demands a greater level of attention to the development of technologies that allow and ease the planning, operation and management of such vehicles. A lot of improvement has been made in the development of solar-powered UAVs, which promise a low-energy cost, silent and clean operation. However, despite solar energy being free and abundant, among many the present cost, complexity, solar energy capture systems’ efficiency, electric storage and traction efficiency, as well as the consequent requirement for large-size vehicles, greatly restricts the extensive use of these UAVs [2], besides the added difficulties from the absence of a human pilot. Nevertheless, the present work covers the development of a graphical user interface (GUI) associated to the improvement of a mission planning software created by past work, allying flexibility and quickness to the planning efficiency of solar UAV operations. Beyond facilitating the input of necessary data to the optimization of a pre-set route, this interface allows to export the optimized route to the open-source ground control station (GCS) program “MissionPlanner” (MP) [3]. In addition, as part of an exhaustive testing process, the final ensembled software was run several times, proving its capabilities and limitations in a real operational situation.A crescente procura por veículos aéreos não tripulados (UAV) para uso civil na última década tem atraído a atenção de investigadores e engenheiros um pouco por todo o mundo. É importante realçar que a sua desnecessidade de pilotagem manual é idealmente adequada à realização de missões “sujas”, perigosas, monótonas (longa autonomia) ou de grande escala (uso de “enxames” de UAVs) [1], contudo exige uma maior atenção ao desenvolvimento de tecnologias que permitam e facilitem o planeamento, operação e gestão destes veículos. Bastantes avanços têm sido feitos em UAVs movidos a energia solar, que prometem uma operação de baixo custo energético, silenciosa e limpa. Contudo, por mais que a energia solar seja livre e abundante, o presente custo, complexidade, eficiência dos sistemas de captação solar, do armazenamento e da tração usando energia elétrica, bem como a consequente necessidade de veículos de grande tamanho, restringe muito a aplicação extensiva destes veículos [2], para além das dificuldades acrescidas pela ausência de um piloto humano. Não obstante, esta dissertação abrange o desenvolvimento de um interface gráfico de utilizador (GUI) associado ao aperfeiçoamento de um software de planeamento de missões criado a partir de projetos passados, aliando a flexibilidade e rapidez à eficiência de planeamento da operação de UAVs solares. Para além de facilitar a introdução de dados necessários à otimização de uma rota predefinida, este interface permite exportar a rota otimizada para o programa open-source de estação de controlo de solo (GCS) “MissionPlanner” (MP) [3]. Para além disso, o software conjunto final foi também executado como parte de um teste exaustivo, provando as suas capacidades e limitações numa situação real de operação