Radical Israeli settlers: ultimate concerns, political goals and violence

The focus of this article is the radical and activist parts of the wider Israeli settler community on the West Bank. This Radical Israeli Settler Movement should not be confused with the general settler community in the West Bank, even if the more radical groups often recruit their members from the general settler community. The Radical Israeli Settler Movement today includes groups such as Kach, The Committee for Safety on the Roads and The Jewish Legion. The purpose of this article is to analyse some instances of violence in the radical Israeli settler movement and to identify recurring features and processes in this violence. It will be argued that these features and processes are important factors in understanding why certain movements use violence. It will also be argued that future comparative studies are needed, which include other contexts where similar radical movements have become violent, in order to develop a general theory of ethno-religious movements using political violence

Nova School of Business & Economics: Sustainability report

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and EconomicsThis work project consists of a sustainability report proposal for NovaSBE, consolidating its strategic goals of preparing students for sustainable development challenges of today’s organizations and communication towards stakeholders. This proposal arouses from the partnership with the Consultancy firm for Sustainable Development Sair da Casca. The first assignment given by the company consisted of building a sustainability observatorium that included the top 25 Portuguese companies’ sustainability practices. However, during the process, the company realized such a benchmarking tool already existed so that it did not make sense to develop it. It was then that from the alignment of interests between the company and the Field Lab purpose emerged the idea of a sustainability report for the school. To conduct a Sustainability Report Proposal for NovaSBE, the previous experience of collecting data on the top 25 companies’ sustainability practices allowed for a deeper knowledge on sustainability reporting.The Global Reporting Initiative sustainability reporting standards were chosen to carry this project out considering that its wider acceptance applies for NovaSBE’s internationalization ambitions. Nonetheless, the standard framework was adjusted to NovaSBE’s specificities in what sustainability is concerned. Overall, the results from this report’s proposal show that although NovaSBE has already taken several sustainability related measures they lack on strategic orientation and coordination, so that their full potential is not being achieved. Taking into consideration the conclusions, several recommendations for future sustainability reports are presented

Public-­‐Private Partnerships in the healthcare sector : a real options approach to Hospital de Cascais

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the Hospital de Cascais “Dr. José de Almeida”, built under a Public and Private Partnerships’ program, in order to understand if the private partner will be responsible for the hospital’s management until the end of the contract (in 2018) or if it will step out due to financial losses. Such analysis will be done using a Real Options approach, through the use of abandonment options. Two scenarios will be considered: in the first one the operational costs will follow the same evolution as expected in the Base Case (86,7% of the revenues). In the second scenario the operational costs will be assumed to be 95% of the revenues, to better reflect the past performance of the hospital. Moreover, for each of these scenarios two discount rates will be used to compute the Net Present Value: one is the discount rate used by the government to assess the value of the public sector comparator (PSC): 6,08%; the other is the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC), which changes every year to match with the changing debt ratio. The results show that in the first scenario the optimal decision is to continue in the project and not do the step out, since the Real Options analysis shows that the stepping out provides savings smaller than the profit they would obtain from continuing. However, in the second scenario the optimal decision is to abandon the project. It is also concluded that the DCF model underestimates the value of the project by ignoring the flexibility HPP has to step out

Knowledge Distillation Performs Partial Variance Reduction

Knowledge distillation is a popular approach for enhancing the performance of ``student'' models, with lower representational capacity, by taking advantage of more powerful ``teacher'' models. Despite its apparent simplicity and widespread use, the underlying mechanics behind knowledge distillation (KD) are still not fully understood. In this work, we shed new light on the inner workings of this method, by examining it from an optimization perspective. We show that, in the context of linear and deep linear models, KD can be interpreted as a novel type of stochastic variance reduction mechanism. We provide a detailed convergence analysis of the resulting dynamics, which hold under standard assumptions for both strongly-convex and non-convex losses, showing that KD acts as a form of \emph{partial variance reduction}, which can reduce the stochastic gradient noise, but may not eliminate it completely, depending on the properties of the ``teacher'' model. Our analysis puts further emphasis on the need for careful parametrization of KD, in particular w.r.t. the weighting of the distillation loss, and is validated empirically on both linear models and deep neural networks.Comment: 36 page

Destination Weddings: motivação e escolha por Portugal

O mercado do turismo de casamentos, onde se incluem os destination weddings, é um mercado que se encontra em contínuo crescimento. Nos últimos anos tem-se vindo a verificar um avolumar no número de casamentos realizados fora do local de residência dos noivos. Com o aumento da procura, este mercado está a tornar-se num importante setor do Turismo. O objetivo central deste estudo, além da caracterização do perfil do turista de destination wedding, é determinar quais os principais motivos da escolha de Portugal como destino de casamentos por parte de casais estrangeiros. Para atingir os objetivos propostos, esta investigação recorreu à metodologia baseada no inquérito por questionário dirigido à população de casais estrangeiros residentes fora de Portugal, mas que optaram por fazer cá o seu casamento, tendo-se estudado uma amostra de 114 inquiridos. Os resultados permitiram determinar que os principais motivos de escolha de Portugal para a realização deste evento tão importante são "bom tempo, praia e serviços", "custo" e "imagem atrativa do destino". Identificámos também os atributos que um casal considera mais importantes na escolha de um destino para a realização do seu casamento, os quais são: “qualidade”, “espaço”, "paisagem e beleza natural" e ““boa relação preço/qualidade”".The wedding tourism market, which include destination weddings, is a market that is continuously growing. In recent years we have seen an increasing in the number of marriages performed outside the place of residence of the bride and groom. With increasing demand, this market is becoming an important sector of tourism. The main objective of this study, in addition to the characterization of the destination tourist profile wedding, is to determine what the main reasons for choosing Portugal as destination wedding by foreign couples. To achieve the proposed objectives, this research turned to the methodology based on the survey questionnaire to the population of foreign couples residents out of Portugal, but who have chosen to make their marriage here, having studied a sample of 114 respondents. The results determine that the main reasons for choosing Portugal for the realization of this important event are "good weather, beach and services", "cost" and "attractive image of the destination." We also identified the attributes that a couple consider most important in choosing a destination for the realization of their marriage, which are "quality", "space", "landscape and natural beauty" and "good price/quality ratio.

A New Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry Method for Determination of Bisoprolol in Human Plasma Samples

Liquid chromatography (LC) coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) detection is one of the most powerful analytical tools for organic compound analysis. The advantages of using LC/MS methods over HPLC methods include: selectivity, chromatographic integrity, peak assignment, structural information, and rapid method development. In this paper, a new liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method has been developed and validated for the determination of bisoprolol in human plasma samples, using metoprolol as internal standard and liquid-liquid extraction procedure. The assay has proven to be sensitive, specific and reproducible, suitable to determine the bisoprolol concentration, following a single oral administration of a 10 mg bisoprolol tablet in 22 healthy volunteers, in the bioequivalence study of Bisoprolol 10 mg coated tablets, produced by Antibiotice S.A. versus Concor 10 mg, produced by Merck

Reabilitação do antigo matadouro municipal de Santarém

A reabilitação de construções antigas é uma tarefa difícil, devido à sua complexidade geométrica intrínseca, à variabilidade das propriedades dos materiais tradicionais, ao escasso conhecimento sobre técnicas construtivas originais, à difícil caracterização das acções e à quase inexistência de normas ou instruções específicas que salvaguardam os técnicos responsáveis. Um sistema de reabilitação sustentável do património edificado, originalmente construído sem o seu ciclo de vida planeado, permitirá aos seus utilizadores viver num ambiente flexível e ecológico, adaptável ás suas expectativas e simultaneamente contribuir para a preservação do património construído e ambiental. Nesta dissertação/projecto irão ser delineados parâmetros de sustentabilidade na reabilitação e manutenção de edifícios, utilizando-se procedimentos técnicos e materiais que contribuam para minimizar o impacto ambiental do meio construído sobre o sítio arquitectónico local, podendo auxiliar na sustentabilidade e reabilitação ecológica do meio ambiente citadino. A importância desta problemática está no facto de se poder aumentar o ciclo de vida dos edifícios de forma a possibilitar ao mesmo tempo a requalificação de áreas degradadas, assim como preservar aspectos históricos citadinos relevantes. No caso de estudo, desta dissertação, serão aplicados os parâmetros definidos para uma reabilitação sustentável. De outro modo, o estudo reforçará a premissa de que a sustentabilidade ecológica citadina pode ser entendida quando se utiliza procedimentos arquitectónicos adequados, o uso de tecnologias e materiais ambientalmente correctos.The rehabilitation of ancient constructions is a difficult task, due to his geometrical intrinsic complexity, the variability of the properties of the traditional materials, the scarce knowledge on constructive original techniques, to the difficult characterization of the actions and to almost non-existence of standards or specific educations that safeguard the responsible technicians. A system of sustainable rehabilitation of the built inheritance, originally built without his cycle of life planned, will allow to his users to live in a flexible and ecological, adaptable environment to his expectations and simultaneously to contribute to the preservation of the built and environmental inheritance. In this dissertation / project I will be going to try to outline parameters of susteinability in the rehabilitation and maintenance of buildings, when are used technical and material proceedings that contribute to minimize the environmental impact of the way built on the architectural local siege, being able to help in the susteinability and ecological rehabilitation of the town environment. The importance of this problematics is in the fact of being able to be increased the cycle of life of the buildings of form to make possible at the same time the requalification of degraded areas, as well as preserving historical town relevant aspects. In this case of study, of this dissertation, there will be applied the parameters defined for a sustainable rehabilitation. Otherwise, the study will reinforce the premise of which the ecological town susteinability can be understood when one uses architectural appropriate proceedings, the use of technologies and materials environmentally correct

Accurate Neural Network Pruning Requires Rethinking Sparse Optimization

Obtaining versions of deep neural networks that are both highly-accurate and highly-sparse is one of the main challenges in the area of model compression, and several high-performance pruning techniques have been investigated by the community. Yet, much less is known about the interaction between sparsity and the standard stochastic optimization techniques used for training sparse networks, and most existing work uses standard dense schedules and hyperparameters for training sparse networks. In this work, we examine the impact of high sparsity on model training using the standard computer vision and natural language processing sparsity benchmarks. We begin by showing that using standard dense training recipes for sparse training is suboptimal, and results in under-training. We provide new approaches for mitigating this issue for both sparse pre-training of vision models (e.g. ResNet50/ImageNet) and sparse fine-tuning of language models (e.g. BERT/GLUE), achieving state-of-the-art results in both settings in the high-sparsity regime, and providing detailed analyses for the difficulty of sparse training in both scenarios. Our work sets a new threshold in terms of the accuracies that can be achieved under high sparsity, and should inspire further research into improving sparse model training, to reach higher accuracies under high sparsity, but also to do so efficiently

Sparsity in deep learning: Pruning and growth for efficient inference and training in neural networks

The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, sometimes even better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity promises to reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field