Carmen Santos

For many poor women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the early 20th century, the only work available was in factory sweatshops or big city department stores. A young Portuguese immigrant, Maria do Carmo managed to escape this fate when she responded to an advertisement in a magazine and was cast as the lead actress in a film produced and directed by American William Jansen titled Urutau (1919). She would become the motion picture star Carmen Santos. In a fascinating interview in 1929 with the fan magazine Cinearte, Santos admitted that Urutau, the very film in which she starred, was the first film that she had ever seen in the theatr

Representational organization of novel task sets during proactive encoding

Recent multivariate analyses of brain data have boosted our understanding of the organizational principles that shape neural coding. However, most of this progress has focused on perceptual visual regions (Connolly et al., 2012), whereas far less is known about the organization of more abstract, action-oriented representations. In this study, we focused on humans{\textquoteright} remarkable ability to turn novel instructions into actions. While previous research shows that instruction encoding is tightly linked to proactive activations in fronto-parietal brain regions, little is known about the structure that orchestrates such anticipatory representation. We collected fMRI data while participants (both males and females) followed novel complex verbal rules that varied across control-related variables (integrating within/across stimuli dimensions, response complexity, target category) and reward expectations. Using Representational Similarity Analysis (Kriegeskorte et al., 2008) we explored where in the brain these variables explained the organization of novel task encoding, and whether motivation modulated these representational spaces. Instruction representations in the lateral prefrontal cortex were structured by the three control-related variables, while intraparietal sulcus encoded response complexity and the fusiform gyrus and precuneus organized its activity according to the relevant stimulus category. Reward exerted a general effect, increasing the representational similarity among different instructions, which was robustly correlated with behavioral improvements. Overall, our results highlight the flexibility of proactive task encoding, governed by distinct representational organizations in specific brain regions. They also stress the variability of motivation-control interactions, which appear to be highly dependent on task attributes such as complexity or novelty.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTIn comparison with other primates, humans display a remarkable success in novel task contexts thanks to our ability to transform instructions into effective actions. This skill is associated with proactive task-set reconfigurations in fronto-parietal cortices. It remains yet unknown, however, how the brain encodes in anticipation the flexible, rich repertoire of novel tasks that we can achieve. Here we explored cognitive control and motivation-related variables that might orchestrate the representational space for novel instructions. Our results showed that different dimensions become relevant for task prospective encoding depending on the brain region, and that the lateral prefrontal cortex simultaneously organized task representations following different control-related variables. Motivation exerted a general modulation upon this process, diminishing rather than increasing distances among instruction representations

Políticas de apoio a micro e pequenas empresas no Brasil: avanços no período recente e perspectivas futuras

Incluye bibliografíaEste estudo tem como objetivo fornecer uma visão ampla das micro e pequenas empresas no Brasil e a experiência recente na formulação e implementação de políticas para seu fomento, especialmente considerando o acesso a fontes de financiamento e iniciativas de fomento a produção e a inovação. Busca-se dar centralidade a questões cruciais na discussão acerca da política industrial e de inovação, tais como a adequação das iniciativas e instrumentos, os construtos institucionais e as condições de aplicação e de coordenação e o ambiente macroeconômico, legal e regulatório

Adopting the Euro: a synthetic control approach

We investigate whether joining the European Monetary Union and losing the ability to set monetary policy affected the economic growth of Eurozone countries. We use the synthetic control approach to create a counterfactual scenario for how each Eurozone country would have evolved without adopting the Euro. We let this matching algorithm determine which combination of other developed economies best resembles the pre-Euro path of twelve Eurozone economies. Our estimates suggest that there were some mild losers (France, Germany, Italy, and Portugal) and a clear winner (Ireland). Nevertheless, a gross domestic product decomposition suggests that the drivers of the economic gains and losses are heterogeneous. In particular, our results show that for the majority of Eurozone countries, Euro spurred government consumption and deterred investment and private consumption. The common currency also stimulated trade for most cases but only Germany and Ireland bear positive net trade benefits

Adopting the Euro: a synthetic control approach

We investigate whether joining the European Monetary Union and losing the ability to set monetary policy affected the economic growth of 12 Eurozone countries. We use the synthetic control approach to create a counterfactual scenario for how each Eurozone country would have evolved without adopting the Euro. We let this matching algorithm determine which combination of other developed economies best resembles the pre-Euro path of twelve Eurozone economies. Our estimates suggest that there were some mild losers (France, Germany, Italy, and Portugal) and a clear winner (Ireland). Nevertheless, a GDP decomposition analysis suggests that the drivers of the economic gains and losses are heterogeneous

Adopting the Euro: a synthetic control approach

We investigate whether joining the European Monetary Union and losing the ability to set monetary policy affected the economic growth of 12 Eurozone countries. We use the synthetic control approach to create a counterfactual scenario for how each Eurozone country would have evolved without adopting the Euro. We let this matching algorithm determine which combination of other developed economies best resembles the pre-Euro path of twelve Eurozone economies. Our estimates suggest that there were some mild losers (France, Germany, Italy, and Portugal) and a clear winner (Ireland). Nevertheless, a GDP decomposition analysis suggests that the drivers of the economic gains and losses are heterogeneous

Transforming pedagogy in higher education

In this article we present some reflections of the ongoing research, developed within the scope of the EEP project — Empowering ePortfolio Process. We discuss some central ideas that emerged from the study focused on the students’ experiences and perspectives of ePortfolios, developed at the School of Education of the Polytechnic Institute of Setubal. We discuss its preliminary results broadening the focus to its implications to Higher Education pedagogy and to the development of students’ transformative capabilities — autonomy, reflexivity, critical thought, creativity and cooperation, amongst others. We highlight the ePortfolio contribution, as an epistemic framework, to the HE pedagogical transformation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio