80 research outputs found
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.
ELSA: Partial Weight Freezing for Overhead-Free Sparse Network Deployment
We present ELSA, a practical solution for creating deep networks that can
easily be deployed at different levels of sparsity. The core idea is to embed
one or more sparse networks within a single dense network as a proper subset of
the weights. At prediction time, any sparse model can be extracted effortlessly
simply be zeroing out weights according to a predefined mask. ELSA is simple,
powerful and highly flexible. It can use essentially any existing technique for
network sparsification and network training. In particular, it does not
restrict the loss function, architecture or the optimization technique. Our
experiments show that ELSA's advantages of flexible deployment comes with no or
just a negligible reduction in prediction quality compared to the standard way
of using multiple sparse networks that are trained and stored independently.Comment: updated to reflect PackNet prior wor
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
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