ECONOMICAL VERSUS POLITICAL CYCLES IN AN IBERIAN MANUFACTURING SECTOR

The paper discusses several questions related to the economic cycles, from the scientific methodological approach to isolate the economic cycles, to an empirical application using data of the Portuguese industrial sector, passing by the identification of the real economic cycles that modulated the productive activity during almost the last 5 decades of the 20th century, and by its rationality. It ends trying to identify the explicative factors of the different phases of expansion, alert, depression, recession and recovering of the estimated economic cycles and puts them side-by-side with the political cycles dictated by the democratic elections.economic cycles, political cycles, manufactories industry, Portuguese economy, explicative cycle factors, industrial economics

INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION IN A WESTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRY – THE CASE OF PORTUGAL

The paper speaks of the technological evolution using a translog cost function for a western European country – Portugal. It begins by presenting the methodological framework, the estimation process based on the iterative Zellner method to estimate systems of seemingly unrelated regression equations (SURE), the empirical application to Portugal, and the interpretation of the results, namely in terms of the technological evolution.Technological evolution, Energy Economics, Translog Cost Function, SURE System.

A Challenging Conversation on Integral Futures: Embodied Foresight and Trialogues

Practitioner reflection is vital for knowledge frameworks such as Ken Wilber's Integral perspective. Richard Slaughter, Joseph Voros and others have combined Wilber's perspective and Futures Studies to create Integral Futures as a new stance. This paper develops Embodied Foresight as a new approach about the development of new Integral Futures methodologies (or meta-methodologies) and practitioners, with a heightened sensitivity to ethics and specific, local contexts. Three practitioners conduct a 'trialogue' - a three-way deep dialogue - to discuss issues of theory generation, practitioner development, meta-methodologies, institutional limits, knowledge systems, and archetypal pathologies. Personal experiences within the Futures Studies and Integral communities, and in other initiatory and wisdom traditions are explored

Quest of shape coexistence in Zr isotopes

Background: The mass region with A approximate to 100 and Z approximate to 40 is known to experience a sudden onset of deformation. The presence of the subshell closure Z = 40 makes it feasible to create particle-hole excitations at a moderate excitation energy and, therefore, likely intruder states could be present in the low-lying spectrum. In other words, shape coexistence is expected to be a key ingredient to understand this mass region. Purpose: The aim of this work is to describe excitation energies, transition rates, radii, and two-neutron separation energies for the even-even Zr94-110 nuclei and, moreover, to obtain information about wave functions and deformation. Method: The interacting boson model with configuration mixing will be the framework to study the even-even Zr nuclei, considering only two types of configurations: 0particle-0hole and 2particle-2hole excitations. On one hand, the parameters appearing in the Hamiltonian and in the E2 transition operator are fixed trough a least-squares fit to the whole available experimental information. On the other hand, once the parameters have been fixed, the calculations allow to obtain a complete set of observables for the whole even-even Zr chain of isotopes. Results: Spectra, transition rates, radii, rho(2)(E0), and two-neutron separation energies have been calculated and a good agreement with the experimental information has been obtained. Moreover, a detailed study of the wave function has been conducted and mean-field energy surfaces and deformation have been computed too. Conclusions: The importance of shape coexistence has been shown to correctly describe the A approximate to 100 mass area for even-even Zr nuclei. This work confirmed the rather spherical nature of the ground state of Zr94-98 and its deformed nature for Zr100-110 isotopes. The sudden onset of deformation in Zr-100 is owing to the rapid lowering of a deformed (intruder) configuration which is high-lying in lighter isotopes