Love and desire: concepts, narratives and practices of sex amongst youths in Maputo city

This study analyses the perceptions and practices of sexuality among young people in post-colonial and post socialist Maputo city. Using a combination of various methods, it compares sexuality in two different generations and deeply describes two diverse kinds of relationships: occasional and steady relationships. Occasional relationships tend to show a new pattern of condom use that corroborates with the discourse advocated in prevention HIV/AIDS campaigns. The study shows that young women are redefining the gender roles of the wider society through their sexual practices and identities. Namoro (steady) relationships where sex takes the form of unprotected sex are reciprocated by the exchange of the gift of love and the proposition of commitment on the part of the young men. Here, there are major possibilities for HN/AIDS infection. In both kinds of relationships, sex, described by informants in terms of a model of heterosexual penetration, is perceived as a factor that permits transition from childhood to adulthood, bypassing parental and other senior kins peoples' control

Does journalism education make a difference?

Do journalism students read newspapers? Are they aware of what is happening around the world and in their own countries? Keeping track of current affairs and their developments is one of their concerns? Do they use the media to do it? If yes, how do they interpret and value the news? What’s their opinion about journalism? How do they value journalism as a profession? Is journalism students’ behavior different from other students, when it comes to using the media? If not, should it be? Should journalism education programs include these dimensions as part of their curricula? Do habits and uses of media differ along the way? Do journalism education programs make a difference? These are some of the concerns that we face as journalism teachers, having to create and develop programs, curricula and strategies for journalism education. Although we were convinced that the products of media and current affairs should be brought to class, also as an item for students’ evaluation, we felt the need to gather empirical data to test and improve our teaching methods. That’s how we first came up with the idea for a survey about students’ habits of media use, back in the year 2000. Since then, we have been developing a research in the form of a case study at University of Minho. So far, we have implemented the first part of the survey, an exploratory study, which enabled us to gather and analyze data about graduation students’ habits and representations, from 2001 to 2005, and to test the instrument we created (questionnaire)

A Similarity Measure for Material Appearance

We present a model to measure the similarity in appearance between different materials, which correlates with human similarity judgments. We first create a database of 9,000 rendered images depicting objects with varying materials, shape and illumination. We then gather data on perceived similarity from crowdsourced experiments; our analysis of over 114,840 answers suggests that indeed a shared perception of appearance similarity exists. We feed this data to a deep learning architecture with a novel loss function, which learns a feature space for materials that correlates with such perceived appearance similarity. Our evaluation shows that our model outperforms existing metrics. Last, we demonstrate several applications enabled by our metric, including appearance-based search for material suggestions, database visualization, clustering and summarization, and gamut mapping.Comment: 12 pages, 17 figure

A qualidade em jornalismo: problematização e operacionalização do conceito

Comunicação apresentada ao I Congresso Luso-Brasileiro de Estudos Jornalísticos e ao II Congresso Luso-Galego de Estudos Jornalísticos, realizados em simultâneo na Universidade Fernando Pessoa, Porto, em 10 e 11 de Abril de 2003.No âmbito do projecto Mediascópio, apoiado pela FCT e em curso na Universidade do Minho, os autores procedem a uma revisão da literatura sobre o conceito de qualidade em jornalismo. Propõem-se contribuir para a elaboração de um mapeamento que permita identificar variáveis e relações significativas do conceito e lançar as bases de um estudo empírico a realizar neste domínio.Estudo realizado no âmbito do Projecto Mediascópio – Estudo da Reconfiguração do Campo da Comunicação e dos Media em Portugal e financiado pela Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - POCTI/COM/41888/2001

Deciphering the suppressive soil microbiota from an avocado crop

Comunicación en pósterDifferent strategies based on ecological principles have been approached in sustainable agriculture causing positive effects, including the induction of soil suppressiveness against a wide range of soilborne pathogens. Suppressiveness against the phytopathogenic fungus Rosellinia necatrix was observed after the application of composted almond shells in avocado crops. Previous works have analyzed the use of this traditional strategy and applied new microbial community analysis techniques in order to help in the identification of targeted sustainable agricultural strategies. These studies have focused on the microbial profile from an induced-suppressive soil where the soil microbiome had a proven essential role. Microbial profiles based on the 16S rRNA gene and ITS regions sequencing were analysed and an increase in Gammaproteobacteria and Dothideomycetes groups, as well as a reduction in Xylariales (where R. necatrix is allocated) were observed. These results led to the bacterial isolation of different groups of Gammaproteobacteria from this suppressive soil in order to identify new strains with biological control properties. Different characterization tests were performed, and a final selection of representative strains belonging to the genus Pseudomonas and related groups showed, all of them, plant disease protection abilities. Moreover, using previously described biological control agents against R. necatrix, a bacterial synthetic community have been design in order to improve the knowledge of the multitrophic interactions that occur during biological control process.This work was supported by Plan Nacional I+D+I (MINECO, Spain) (AGL2014-52518-C2-IR) and co-financed by FEDER funds (EU). C.Vida was supported by a PhD fellowship from the FPI program of MINECO. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Isolation, characterization and selection of Pseudomonas spp. as biological control agents from a suppressive soil

Bacterial profile from a suppressive soil against Rosellinia necatrix, fungal pathogen of avocado roots, were obtained by 16S rRNA gene sequencing. The results revealed a significant increase in the bacterial class of Gammaproteobacteria, especially in some antagonistic representatives of Pseudomonas spp. For this reason, a collection of 246 bacterial isolates was obtained from this suppressive soil in order to identify new strains with antifungal activity against this fungal phytopathogen. First, we performed an isolation on a selective medium for Pseudomonas-like microorganisms. Then, we used different characterization tests in order to analyse the bacterial collection, including the identification of the general metabolic profile of glucose, the profiling of antifungals produced, both the putative production of antifungal compounds and lytic exoenzymes, as well as the evaluation of traits related with beneficial effects on plants. A final selection of representative strains resulted in antifungal isolates belonging to the genus Pseudomonas and related groups. These selected strains were tested for plant protection by an in vivo experiment using avocado and wheat plants challenged by the pathogen R. necatrix, showing all of them an antifungal ability and plant disease protection.This work was supported by Plan Nacional I+D+I from MINECO (Spain) (AGL2014-52518-C2-IR) and co-financed by FEDER funds (EU). C.Vida was supported by a PhD fellowship from the FPI program of MINECO.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Evidencias del pensamiento funcional en niños de segundo de educación básica primaria

A continuación se presenta un trabajo de grado en el marco de la Licenciatura en Matemáticas, el cual tiene el objetivo de analizar las estrategias utilizadas por los estudiantes de segundo de primaria para crear registros, encontrar patrones y relaciones de dependencia entre los datos obtenidos en una situación de variación, e identificar en dichas estrategias el desarrollo del pensamiento funcional

CONSUMPTION OF THE LICHEN ROCCELLA GRACILIS BY THE LARGE GROUND-FINCH GEOSPIZA MAGNIROSTRIS ON THE ISLAND OF DAPHNE MAJOR (GALÁPAGOS)

This note reports a trophic interaction of a passerine consuming lichens. On the islet of Daphne Major (Galápagos Archipelago), we made five observations of the Large Ground-Finch Geospiza magnirostris eating the fruticose lichen Roccella gracilis. This is an example of how island birds broaden their feeding niche in resource-poor environments