Resources for Media Literacy: Mediating the Research on Children and Media

Mucho se ha investigado sobre la educación en medios, su importancia y objetivos. Más allá de las directivas, resoluciones o recomendaciones, la investigación en esta área ha permitido profundizar y solidificar sus fundamentos, al tiempo que ha facilitado el reconocimiento de sus puntos más débiles u omisiones. Uno de los puntos críticos destacados por la formación y por el trabajo de investigación que se ha desarrollado en la Universidad de Miño (Portugal) durante los últimos 20 años, es la inexistencia de recursos y materiales que puedan utilizarse para la promoción de la educación en los medios de comunicación en diferentes contextos. De esta forma, independientemente de los recursos y materiales, se genera la importancia de la transferencia de conocimientos a la práctica, la trascendencia de la mediación del conocimiento producido a su público. Esta preocupación fue la base principal del proyecto titulado «Recursos para la alfabetización mediática» llevado a cabo en el Centro de Estudios de Comunicación y Sociedad y financiado por Evens Foundation (Bélgica). Este trabajo presenta sucintamente los procesos de creación y los resultados generados por estos recursos, centrados en tres medios: televisión, videojuegos e Internet y redes sociales.Much has been said and written about media education, its relevance and goals. Beyond directives, resolutions or recommendations, research in this area has deepened the foundations of media education but has also emphasized its weak points or faults. One of these critical points noted in the training and research work developed at the University of Minho, Portugal, in the last 20 years is the non-existence of resources and materials that could be used to promote media education in different contexts. But this is not just about the availability of materials, it concerns the importance of putting knowledge into practice and of mediating the knowledge produced with the appropriate audience. This concern was the basis of the ‘Media Education in Booklets’ project carried out by the Society and Communication Research Centre and funded by the Evens Foundation, Belgium. This paper presents the resources produced by this project in the form of three booklets: the first deals with the mediation of TV at school and at home; the second describes videogames, ways of playing, benefits, dangers, creativity and interculturality; the third is about the Internet and social networks, and the new forms of relationships and communication that these allow

Analogy, Mind, and Life

I'll show that the kind of analogy between life and information [argue for by authors such as Davies (2000), Walker and Davies (2013), Dyson (1979), Gleick (2011), Kurzweil (2012), Ward (2009)] – that seems to be central to the effect that artificial mind may represents an expected advance in the life evolution in Universe – is like the design argument and that if the design argument is unfounded and invalid, the argument to the effect that artificial mind may represents an expected advance in the life evolution in Universe is also unfounded and invalid. However, if we are prepared to admit (though we should not do) this method of reasoning as valid, I'll show that the analogy between life and information to the effect that artificial mind may represents an expected advance in the life evolution in Universe seems suggest some type of reductionism of life to information, but biology respectively chemistry or physics are not reductionist, contrary to what seems to be suggested by the analogy between life and information

Empirical Evidence on the Behavior and Stabilizing Role of Fiscal and Monetary Policies in the US

In this paper, standard SVAR tools and counterfactual simulation techniques are applied to study the behavior and countercyclical role of monetary and fiscal policies in the US. In order to set up the model properly, different issues raised by joint identification of monetary and fiscal policy shocks are addressed, in particular, the contemporaneous response of taxes to the federal funds rate. I conclude that the federal funds rate and taxes net of transfers have moved mostly for endogenous reasons and, in the latter case, this reflects automatic rather than discretionary policy. In contrast, government expenditure has been basically driven by exogenous forces. Further, I reach evidence that (automatic) fiscal policy has been the most important stabilizing force in the course of postwar recessions, surpassing the role of monetary policy, while both policies have contributed similarly to narrowing the output gap at early stages of the recovery.

Impact of the Recent Reform of the Portuguese Public Employees’ Pension System

This paper analyses the effects of the recent reform of the Estatuto da Aposentação, applicable to the contributors of the Caixa Geral de Aposentações (CGA). Using the "2005 Public Administration Human Resources Database", a simulation exercise is undertaken in order to evaluate the impact of the reform on the time-profile of retirements, initial pensions and CGA pension-related expenditure. The results show that the reform has heterogeneous effects, but, for most public employees, it results in an extension of the contributory career and a decrease in initial pensions, generating a reduction in the CGA pension-related expenditure.

Occipital and left temporal instantaneous amplitude and frequency oscillations correlated with access and phenomenal consciousness

Given the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995) there are no brain electrophysiological correlates of the subjective experience (the felt quality of redness or the redness of red, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field, the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothball, bodily sensations from pains to orgasms, mental images that are conjured up internally, the felt quality of emotion, the experience of a stream of conscious thought or the phenomenology of thought). However, there are brain occipital and left temporal electrophysiological correlates of the subjective experience (Pereira, 2015). Notwithstanding, as evoked signal, the change in event-related brain potentials phase (frequency is the change in phase over time) is instantaneous, that is, the frequency will transiently be infinite: a transient peak in frequency (positive or negative), if any, is instantaneous in electroencephalogram averaging or filtering that the event-related brain potentials required and the underlying structure of the event-related brain potentials in the frequency domain cannot be accounted, for example, by the Wavelet Transform (WT) or the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analysis, because they require that frequency is derived by convolution rather than by differentiation. However, as I show in the current original research report, one suitable method for analyse the instantaneous change in event-related brain potentials phase and accounted for a transient peak in frequency (positive or negative), if any, in the underlying structure of the event-related brain potentials is the Empirical Mode Decomposition with post processing (Xie et al., 2014) Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (postEEMD) and Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT)

A Stochastic Frontier Analysis of Secondary Education Output in Portugal

This paper contributes to the discussion about the performance and efficiency of Portuguese secondary schools, using the stochastic production frontier analysis. We discuss the impact of school variables and the environment on output (measured by the average national examination scores), as determinants of the shape of technology and degree of efficiency. We find, in particular, that teacher seniority, school size and private management have a positive impact on output. The area where the school is located also plays an important role. Further, results show that schools differ considerably in their efficiency levels, and we also address the use of the stochastic frontier methodology in order to improve the computation of school rankings.

Time varying fiscal policy in the U.S.

To investigate the time heterogeneity effects of fiscal policy in the U.S., we use a non-recursive, Blanchard and Perotti-like structural VAR with time-varying parameters, estimated through Bayesian simulation over the 1965:2-2009:2 period. Our evidence suggests that fiscal policy has lost some capacity to stimulate output but that this trend is more pronounced for taxes net of transfers than for government expenditure, whose effectiveness declines only slightly. Fiscal multipliers keep conventional signs throughout. An investigation of changes in fiscal policy conduct indicates an increase in the countercyclical activism of net taxes over time, which appears to have reached a maximum during the 2008-09 recession.Fiscal policy, Bayesian estimation, Structural change, Macroeconomic stabilization