Portuguese cultural standards from the French perspective

The goal of current master thesis is to identify the Portuguese cultural standards from the perspective of French culture. The methodology that best suits this type of study is the Cultural Standards Method. It allows to determine cultural standards between two specific cultures through narrative interviews with representatives of one of the cultures. The data was gathered during interviews made with French people who have a significant experience of living and working in Portugal. The thesis is divided into two major parts: the first one concerns the theoretical framework of the investigation. Different researches of important authors with basis on crosscultural management were explained. The theoretical part is pursued by comparing Portugal and France according to Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions which give an initial overview. The chapter introducing the Cultural Standards Method concludes this section. The second part of the thesis presents the research sample and the subsequent Portuguese cultural standards that were obtained, which are then compared to the Hofstede’s dimensions. This part is completed with case studies based on real experiences, a Portuguese business guide for French people, and the conclusion. The research is valuable for any French person who plans on moving to Portugal and has to be prepared for the encounter with the Portuguese culture.O objetivo desta tese de mestrado é identificar os padrões culturais portugueses desde uma perspetiva cultural francesa. A metodologia que melhor se adequa a este tipo de estudo é o método dos standards culturais. Este método permite determinar padrões culturais entre duas culturas específicas através de entrevistas narrativas com representantes de uma das culturas. Os dados foram colhidos durante entrevistas feitas com franceses que tiveram uma experiência significativa de vida e de trabalho em Portugal. A tese é repartida em duas partes principais: a primeira refere-se ao quadro teórico da investigação abordando conceitos relacionados à cultura e a diferentes pesquisas de autores importantes com base na gestão intercultural. A parte teórica é seguida pela comparação entre Portugal e França de acordo com as dimensões culturais de Geert Hosftede. O capítulo que introduz o método dos standards culturais conclui essa parte. A segunda parte da tese apresenta a amostra da pesquisa e os subsequentes padrões culturais portugueses obtidos, os quais foram comparados com as dimensões de Hofstede. Para finalizar são apresentados casos de estudo baseados em experiências reais, um guia de negócios português para franceses, que finalmente levam à conclusão. Este estudo é útil para qualquer francês que intente mudar-se para Portugal e que terá de estar preparado para o encontro com a cultura Portuguesa

Histopathological evaluation of two Blennius fishes exposed to microplastics via feeding

The microplastic particles have dramatically increased in marine environments, emerging the concern of their potential adverse effects on marine biota, among others. These biological adverse effects of microplastics may result not only in physical harm such as internal abrasions and blockages, but also in an entrance vector of contaminants into marine organism. Therefore, the overall aim of this study was to assess the health status of two gobies (Blennius pholis and Blennius galerita) exposed to microplastics, both coated and uncoated with antifouling paints (i.e. common source of metals), via feeding for a month. For that purpose, multi-organ histopathological assessment (i.e. gills, liver, kidney and digestive tract) was carried out qualitatively and semi-quantitatively in gobies, as well as histochemical evaluation. The results showed no sign of microplastics ingestion, suggesting that these gobies were not able to ingest used microplastic spheres. Accordingly, no gross histological alterations were recorded in both fish species exposed to microplastics. Similarly, regardless the pathway of contaminants exposure (i.e. by ingestion or waterborne), animals exposed to contaminated microplastics presented similar histopathological levels than those treated with uncontaminated microplastics, or even than control. The affection degree of each target organ revealed gills and liver as the most affected organs following by kidney, digestive tract and spleen. Lamellar lifting, fat vacuolation of hepatocytes and melanomacrophage centers were the most prevalent alterations noticed in gills, liver and whole-body of fish, respectively. These findings may suggest that other factors, even natural occurrence, could be the cause of these mild histopathological alterations. Moreover, the use of Blennius gobies in multi-organ histopathology showed to be a suitable organism and tool for assessing the potential adverse effects caused by microplastics and their potential role as contaminants entrance. Therefore, smaller microplastic particles, both contaminated and uncontaminated, should be tested in gobies in order to clarify and evaluate their potential adverse effects via feeding

Towards European Portuguese Conversational Assistants for Smart Homes

Nowadays, smart environments, such as Smart Homes, are becoming a reality, due to the access to a wide variety of smart devices at a low cost. These devices are connected to the home network and inhabitants can interact with them using smartphones, tablets and smart assistants, a feature with rising popularity. The diversity of devices, the user\u27s expectations regarding Smart Homes, and assistants\u27 requirements pose several challenges. In this context, a Smart Home Assistant capable of conversation and device integration can be a valuable help to the inhabitants, not only for smart device control, but also to obtain valuable information and have a broader picture of how the house and its devices behave. This paper presents the current stage of development of one such assistant, targeting European Portuguese, not only supporting the control of home devices, but also providing a potentially more natural way to access a variety of information regarding the home and its devices. The development has been made in the scope of Smart Green Homes (SGH) project

Faster and Accurate Compressed Video Action Recognition Straight from the Frequency Domain

Human action recognition has become one of the most active field of research in computer vision due to its wide range of applications, like surveillance, medical, industrial environments, smart homes, among others. Recently, deep learning has been successfully used to learn powerful and interpretable features for recognizing human actions in videos. Most of the existing deep learning approaches have been designed for processing video information as RGB image sequences. For this reason, a preliminary decoding process is required, since video data are often stored in a compressed format. However, a high computational load and memory usage is demanded for decoding a video. To overcome this problem, we propose a deep neural network capable of learning straight from compressed video. Our approach was evaluated on two public benchmarks, the UCF-101 and HMDB-51 datasets, demonstrating comparable recognition performance to the state-of-the-art methods, with the advantage of running up to 2 times faster in terms of inference speed

Biomass equations for tropical forest tree species in Mozambique

Chanfuta (Afzelia quanzensis Welw.), Jambire (Millettia stuhlmannii Taub.) and Umbila (Pterocarpus angolensis D.C.) are, among others, three of the main tropical tree species producing commercial timber in Mozambique. The present study employed destructive biomass estimation methods at three localities in Mozambique (Inhaminga, Mavume, and Tome) to acquire data on the mean diameter at breast height (DBH), and height of trees sampled in 21 stands each of Chanfuta and Jambire, and 15 stands of Umbila. Mean diameter at breast height (DBH) (ob) for Chanfuta, Jambire, and Umbila was: 33.8 ± 12.6 (range 13.5–61.1), 33.4 ± 7.4 (range 21.0–52.2), and 27.0 ± 9.5 (range 14.0–46.5) cm. The mean total values for biomass (kg) of trees of Chanfuta, Jambire, and Umbila trees were 864, 1016, and 321 respectively. The mean percentages of total tree biomass as stem, branch and leaf respectively were 54, 43, and 3 for Chanfuta; 77, 22, and 1 for Jambire; and 46, 51, and 3 for Umbila. The best fit species-specific equation for estimating total above ground biomass (AGB) was the power equation with only DBH considered as independent variable yielding coefficient of determination (R2) ranging from 0.89 to 0.97. At stand level, a total mean of 27.3 tons ha−1 biomass was determined of which studied species represented 94.6%. At plot level, total mean biomass for Jambire was 11.8 tons ha−1, Chanfuta and Umbila 9.9 and 4.1 tons ha−1 respectively. The developed power equation fitted total and stem biomass data well and could be used for biomass prediction of the studied species in Mozambique

Empirical study of user behavior on home page layouts: SAPO portal case study

The use of eye tracking in usability research has increased in the past years. The work presented in this paper reports on an empirical study that took place at the University of Aveiro. 58 participants were asked to read news on the SAPO homepage while their eye movements and mouse interaction were recorded. An analysis of their visual and interactive behavior on the news areas of interest was made as well as other areas of the homepage. Acquired results were considered, and reinforced interaction design criteria used in the reconceptualization of the actual SAPO homepage.SAPO/UA R&D Lab

Evaluation of sound pressure levels of infrassons and low frequency noise in Coentral Grande

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

How Far Can We Get with Neural Networks Straight from JPEG?

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved astonishing advances over the past decade, defining state-of-the-art in several computer vision tasks. CNNs are capable of learning robust representations of the data directly from the RGB pixels. However, most image data are usually available in compressed format, from which the JPEG is the most widely used due to transmission and storage purposes demanding a preliminary decoding process that have a high computational load and memory usage. For this reason, deep learning methods capable of leaning directly from the compressed domain have been gaining attention in recent years. These methods adapt typical CNNs to work on the compressed domain, but the common architectural modifications lead to an increase in computational complexity and the number of parameters. In this paper, we investigate the usage of CNNs that are designed to work directly with the DCT coefficients available in JPEG compressed images, proposing a handcrafted and data-driven techniques for reducing the computational complexity and the number of parameters for these models in order to keep their computational cost similar to their RGB baselines. We make initial ablation studies on a subset of ImageNet in order to analyse the impact of different frequency ranges, image resolution, JPEG quality and classification task difficulty on the performance of the models. Then, we evaluate the models on the complete ImageNet dataset. Our results indicate that DCT models are capable of obtaining good performance, and that it is possible to reduce the computational complexity and the number of parameters from these models while retaining a similar classification accuracy through the use of our proposed techniques.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2012.1372

Reptilia, Colubridae, Helicops angulatus: distribution extension and rediscovery in the state of Ceará

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