How social media and DIY culture contribute to democracy, communities and the creative economy

UID/SOC/04647/2013authorsversionpublishe

the cases of protest rap and graffiti in Portugal

UID/SOC/04647/2013 EXPL/IVC-COM/2191/2013Over the last decade, we have witnessed the emergence of an academic debate surrounding the relationship between youth and the new media', with a particular emphasis on the social uses of different digital technologies within the sphere of youth activity. A specific area of research has been dedicated to studying the use of digital media in the context of the so-called youth subcultures. With this article we expect to contribute to this ongoing debate, by examining the problem through an analysis of two interconnected case studies: protest rap and illegal graffiti. Both cases may be defined as subcultures, insofar as they are characterized as alternative, subterranean, and to a certain extent, subversive movements. The empirical ground for this discussion is based on several investigations, with a qualitative basis, carried out by the authors in the course of over a decade in Portugal. This extended time frame allowed ample access to a diversified and matured analytical material and enabled a better perspective of the developments and the mutations involving the appropriation of the digital media. Our researches have shown that digital media and technologies have been gradually integrated in these urban youth subcultures, accomplishing several strategic roles.authorsversionpublishe

Online Circuits of Rap Music by Portuguese Afro-Descendant Youth

UID/SOC/04647/2013In this article we examine how the internet and other digital technologies are used by Portuguese Afro-descendant youth living in contexts of socio-economic deprivation. More specifically, based on a set of interviews held with rappers, we pursue a discussion on the significance of the concepts of digital inclusion and participation, arguing that young people's online practices reflect not only distinct ways of digital participation but also cultural engagement. By studying black amateur rap, our main goal is to examine how disadvantaged young people use the internet and other digital technologies and how these apparatuses may be employed for cultural expression and identity construction. Our research shows, on the one hand, how crucial a strategic use of these devices can be for amateur cultural production, on the other hand, how these platforms contribute to build an enlarged circuit of ethicized cultural expression. Therefore, we argue that digital participation contributes to reverse the cultural devaluation experienced by these black communities, working as a mechanism of individual and cultural empowerment.publishe

Combinatory Examples Extraction for Machine Translation

One of the bottlenecks of example-based machine translation (EBMT) is to be able to amass automatically quantities of good examples. In our work in EBMT, we are investigating how far one can go by performing example extraction from parallel corpora using Probabilistic Translation Dictionaries to obtain example segmentation points. In fact, the success of EBMT highly depends on examples quality and quantity, but also in their length. Thus, we give special importance on methods to extract different size examples from the same translation unit. With this article we show that it is possible to extract quantities for examples from parallel corpora just using probabilistic translation dictionaries extracted from the same corpor

Qualidade na administração pública: estudo comparativo entre o modelo da European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) e a Common Assessment Framework (CAF)

Mestrado em Gestão e Estratégia IndustrialA Qualidade é um dos pilares fundamentais da vida das Organizações e das Sociedades actuais, e mais do que um conceito é uma filosofia de gestão. Características como a proactividade, o envolvimento dos colaboradores, o foco no cliente, a flexibilidade e a disponibilidade para a mudança são requisitos comuns aos sistemas de gestão de qualidade em qualquer organização. A adopção desta filosofia nos serviços públicos pressupõe um esforço significativo de mudança nos padrões culturais vigentes na Administração Pública. O modelo da Common Assessment Framework (CAF) foi criado com o objectivo de introduzir na Administração Pública os princípios da Gestão da Qualidade Total. Em comparação com o modelo da European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), e embora derivado deste, é um modelo mais simples e mais fácil de aplicar à Administração Pública. Com base no enquadramento teórico elaborado na revisão de literatura, o principal objectivo deste estudo é verificar, numa perspectiva teórica, se o modelo CAF é um modelo de análise de simples utilização e bem adaptado às características de uma organização pública relativamente ao EFQM. Constatou-se que a CAF preconiza um modelo especificamente para aplicação aos organismos da Administração Pública, para que estes apliquem as técnicas de Gestão pela Qualidade Total.Quality is one of the fundamental pillars of life of Organizations and current Societies, more than one concept is a management philosophy. Features like proactive, employee involvement, customer focus, flexibility and openness to change are common requirements for quality management systems in any organization. The adoption of this philosophy in public services requires a significant effort to change the cultural patterns prevailing in Public Administration. The model of the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) was created with the aim of introducing the principles of Total Quality Management in Public Administration. Compared with the model of European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), and although this derivative is more simple and easier to implement to Public Administration. Based on the theoretical framework developed in the literature review, the main objective of this study is to verify a theoretical perspective that the CAF is an analytical model simple to use and well suited to the characteristics of a public organization for the EFQM. We found that CAF advocates a model specifically for application to public administration services, so that they apply the techniques of Total Quality Management

Grabbing parallel corpora from the web

Multilingual resources are useful for linguistic studies, translation, and many other tasks. Unfortunately, these resources are difficult to obtain and organize. In this document we describe a set of tools designed to help in the task of mining bilingual resources from the web, from a specific site, from a file system, from a list of URLs, or from a translation memory. As a design goal we intend to build tools that can be used both cooperatively (in pipeline) and also in a independent way