Dance performance in cyberspace - transfer and transformation

The aim of this research undertaking is to understand the potential development of dance performance in the context of cyberculture, by examining the way practitioners use new media to create artworks that include audience participation, and by endeavouring in their theorization. With specific reference to cyberspace as a concept of electronic, networked and navigable space, the enquiry traces the connections such practices have with conventions of the medium of dance, which operate in its widely known condition as a live performing art. But acknowledgement that new media and new contexts of production and reception inform the characteristics of these artworks and their discursive articulation, in terms of the way people and digital technologies interact in contemporary culture, is a major principle to their analysis and evaluation. This qualitative research is based on case-study design as a means of finding pragmatic evidence in particulars, to illustrate abstract concepts, technological processes and aesthetic values that are underway in a new area of knowledge. The field where this research operates within is located by a mapping of published literature that informs a theoretical interdisciplinary framework, which contextualizes the interpretation of artworks. The selected case studies have been subject to a process of systematic and detailed analysis, entailed with a model devised for the purpose of this enquiry. From this undertaking it can be claimed that while an extensive array of technologies, media and interactive models is available in this field, the artists pursue a commitment to demonstrate their worth for specifically developing (new media) dance performance, and for dance performance to articulate technological and critical issues for cyberculture studies. The results of this enquiry also contribute to conceptual understanding of what dance can be, today, in the light of technological changes

Tradition and change in the built space of Yemen: the description of a process as observed in the former Yemen Arab republic between 1970 and 1990

Built space In Yemen is observed through the forms taken from the earliest phases of the process of building and dwelling In an agricultural territory to the Increasingly complex expressions of settling and developing urban structures, before and after the Republican Revolution of 1962. The Revolution is seen as a turning point in building methods and attitudes; and the twenty years that followed the consolidation of the Republican regime in 1970 exuberantly illustrate the results of the country’s consequent exposure to an industrial culture hitherto unknown. The manifestations of pre-Revolution times and those taking shape in the subsequent twenty years are approached from parallel points of view. The later period, however, includes not only a study of built form but also the declared intentions for planning growth and conservation within the environment as a whole. Disruption appears as a consequence of cultural change and the mitigation of its effect as a government responsibility. Consolidated forms of domestic architecture are studied and a basic distribution pattern of regional variations is proposed. New approaches in the process of building may be creating original idioms and radicalising economic and stylistic differences between the urban and the rural contexts. An attempt is made to identify meaningful trends

The Techno-Soma-Aesthetics of a Dance for the iPhone

UID/PAM/00417/2019On the course of intensive research a corpus of artworks that instantiate dance performance in cyberspace have been inspected in order to understand how expert-practitioners used new technologies for production as well as the new means of public dissemination that they enabled. This paper is dedicated to Soi Moi, which was made for the IPhone in 2009 by n+n corsino using motion capture, synthesized environments and multi-sensorial human-computer interaction. I bare the commitment of an expert-spectator that demonstrates the value of this research-practice to understand and inform creative process, technological development, aesthetic experience and scholar debate. This enquiry pursued a constructivist analysis of components and attributes that revealed the ‘remediation’ of disciplinary traditions. But intersecting close examination with a contextualizing project and interpretative layers generated a productive dialogue with theoretical perspectives about the arts, media and cyberculture of the 21st century. It shall be evident why securing a place for this artwork in the history of new media art and performance is a relevant contribution to knowledge. Despite solid proof that performance experts have provided computer technology and information society with pioneering discourse, their practices have a marginal position in the new media art sector and market. Retrieving research results is paramount. Like ephemeral live dance and performance artworks have succumbed to time, the spectre of redundancy hovers Soi Moi because the state-of-the-art technology in use is already outdated.publishersversionpublishe

Tradition stereotypes and cultural resistance through building forms: the case of Yemen

Malha Urbana: Revista Lusófona de UrbanismoAté Maio de 1990 o que é hoje a República do Yemen dividia-se entre dois estados separados: a República Árabe do Yemen também conhecida como Yemen do Norte e a República Popular Democrática do Yemen, ou Yemen do Sul. A Reunificação implicou uma complexa e delicada distribuição de poderes em que o presidente do Yemen do Norte ficava o presidente do novo país e o presidente do Yemen do Sul o seu vice-presidente. Isto era um acordo difícil de se aguentar e em pouco tempo o vice presidente chefiou uma tentativa de secessão que levou a uma curta Guerra civil ganha pelo presidente estabelecido.A partir daí a intenção óbvia de criar um carácter nacional homogéneo manifestou-se em acções como a transfusão da população do sul para norte e vice-versa. Do ponto de vista específico de uma gramática arquitectónica, um dos aspectos mais evidentes para um visitante agora é a difusão de estereótipos característicos das cidades do norte e que parece estarem a ser muito bem aceites, por muito estranhos que apareçam no tecido consolidado pelas maneiras próprias de construir no sul. Percebe-se que se apresentam como uma versão deste tempo de um “Estilo Yemenita” que é suposto sobrepor-se à enorme variedade de tradições regionais de construção, tal como foram documentadas por este autor em publicações anteriores.Contudo isto não é uma regra geral; e um caso exemplar é o do Hadramaute onde uma sólida tradição de construção em terra ao serviço de uma linguagem arquitectónica com uma forte identidade não perdeu nenhum do seu vigor. Isto pode-se explicar por várias razões mas há uma que é abertamente expressa: o sentido de identidade dos Hadramitas e a resistência que parecem opor a quaisquer influências que ameacem a relativa independência que mantiveram ao longo da sua história.Este artigo tenta ilustrar o confronto entre os estereótipos do que deseja ser uma representação de “arquitectura nacional” e os sinais identitários de formas e técnicas, umas consolidadas outras em evolução, tal como se observaram numa área significativa do Hadramaute durante o trabalho de campo levado a cabo em 2006.Until May 1990 the present day Yemen Republic was divided into two separate states: the Yemen Arab Republic also known as North Yemen and the People‟s Democratic Republic of Yemen, or South Yemen. The Re-unification involved a fairly complex and delicate balance of power where the president of North Yemen became the president of the new country and the president of South Yemen its vice-president. This agreement was hard to maintain and, shortly after, an attempt at secession led by the vice-president ended with the victory of the established president of the country. From there on, the obvious intention of homogenising a national character took such forms as the transfusion of southern population to the north and vice versa. From the specific point of view of architectural idioms one of the aspects that strikes the visitor in the present is the diffusion of stereotypes that were characteristically northern and urban, to most of the southern half and which seem to have been gladly accepted however alien they might appear in the architectural fabrics consolidated by their own ways of building until then. They tend to be presented as the contemporary version of a “Yemeni Style” which is supposed to overlay the enormous variety of regional traditions of building, as they were documented by this author in previous published surveys. Yet this is not always the rule; and one case in point is that of the Hadhramawt where a solid tradition of earth construction at the service of an architectural language with a strong identity has not lost any of its vigour. This may be explained by a variety of reasons but one, at least, is openly expressed: the Hadhramis sense of identity and the resistance they seem to oppose to influences that may be a threat to the relative independence they have maintained throughout their history. This article attempts to illustrate the confrontation between the stereotypes of what appears to be intended as a representation of “national architecture” and the identity traits of forms and techniques, both consolidated and in evolution, as they were observed throughout a significant area of the Hadhramawt during a field survey undertaken in the year 2006

Fire safety self-protection measures of Regional Conservatory from Castelo Branco.

As medidas de autoproteção são disposições de organização e gestão da segurança, que têm como objetivo incrementar a segurança de pessoas e dos edifícios/recintos face ao risco de incêndio. Estas medidas incluem no seu conjunto procedimentos de prevenção, preparação e resposta face a um cenário de incêndio. Aplicam-se a todos os edifícios e recintos, incluindo os existentes, de acordo com o estipulado no artigo 22.º do Decreto-Lei n.º 220/2008, de 12 de novembro (regime jurídico da segurança contra incêndio em edifícios). Estas medidas são determinadas em função da utilização-tipo e da respetiva categoria de risco. As medidas de autoproteção são atualmente um instrumento preventivo e de gestão operacional que sistematizam um determinado conjunto de procedimentos estabelecidos com o objetivo de reduzir a probabilidade de ocorrência de incêndio, de limitar o desenvolvimento de eventuais incêndios, de facilitar a evacuação e salvamento dos ocupantes em risco e ainda de permitir a intervenção eficaz e segura dos meios de socorro. O presente trabalho consiste na verificação das medidas de autoproteção do Conservatório Regional de Castelo Branco localizado em zona histórica. A localização do edifício, os antecedentes históricos e os processos construtivos que o caracterizam, são fatores que constituem um risco acrescido na resposta a situações de emergência por parte dos utilizadores que usufruem das instalações e serviços. Para que as medidas de autoproteção possam ser implementadas é necessário o levantamento de várias condicionantes dos edifícios, tendo sempre em consideração a utilização-tipo dos edifícios/recintos, assim com a categoria de risco. O Conservatório Regional de Castelo Branco, estando dotado dos meios necessários de combate ao incêndio, nomeadamente o sistema automático de detecção de incêndios, deve também implementar as medidas de autoproteção.Abstract The self-protection mesures are organizational arrangements and safety management, which aim to increase the safety of people and buildings/grounds against to the fire risk. These rules include a whole procedure of prevention, preparedness and response against to fire scenario. They apply to all buildings and grounds, including the existing, according to the article 22º of Decree-Law n.º 220/2008 of 12 November (Legal Regime of Fire Safety in Buildings). These rules are determined according to the use-type and the respective risk category. The self-protection mesures are currently a preventive and operational management tool that systematize a set of procedures established in order to reduce the probability of fire, limit the development of certain fire, to facilitate the evacuation and rescue of occupants in risk and still allow effective and safe intervention of rescue resources. This study is the evaluation of the self-protection mesures of the Conservatório Regional de Castelo Branco located in historic area. The building location, the historical background and the construction processes that characterize it, are factors that constitute an increased risk in response to emergencies, by the users who enjoy the facilities and services. As self-protection mesures can be implement, it is necessary to do building conditions assessment, taking into account the use-type buildings/grounds, as well as the risk category. The Conservatório Regional de Castelo Branco, is being provided with adequate equipment of fire fighting, mainly the automatic fire detection system, must also implement the self-protection rules.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

New insights into the applications of viruses to biotechnology

Viruses are responsible for many devastating human and animal diseases, such as Ebola, rabies, HIV, smallpox, influenza, dengue, and SARS-CoV-2. The deleterious impact of viruses is also shown in agriculture, wherein plant virus diseases account for USD30 billion in annual losses globally, thereby threatening world food security. Viruses are obligate parasites, and are present in all habitats where there is life. They are the most abundant agents on Earth; the estimated number of viral particles on earth is close to 10^31. Needless to say, the vast majority of viruses are unknown; however, the breakthrough and development of new sequencing technologies such as next-generation sequencing are accelerating the discovery of new viruses. The world of technology is evolving at a rapid pace, and innovative technologies are continuously being discovered, allowing the genetic manipulation of these available simple viral systems and making them attractive tools for exploitation in different fields of science. We can go back to the 18th century to find the first application of viruses in biotechnology; when, cowpox pustules were used to combat smallpox. All subsequent scientific advances have enabled us today to use highly efficient vaccines containing genetically modified viruses to combat COVID-19. Viruses are being used in the prevention and treatment of many infectious diseases or cancer, not only through vaccines, but also as vectors to carry and deliver substances in situ, in which we can take advantage of their capacity to target specific cells. In agriculture, viruses have been studied to introduce desirable characteristics in plants, showing their potential in plant breeding and plant protection. Viruses have also been used in materials science and nanotechnology as a source of nanoparticles and as building blocks. Other industries such as pharmacology, cosmetics, electronics, are some areas that are also benefiting from the potential uses of viruses. We cannot ignore the harm viruses can cause to us, but we also cannot ignore the good they can do, and the potential they have alongside the cutting edge technologies we possess. It is clear that the more they are studied, the more possibilities they offer. In this Special Issue ‘The Application of Viruses to Biotechnology, 2022’, we have gath- ered up-to-date research on the use of viruses in biotechnology, reinforcing the contribution these extraordinary agents to significant advances in science that would not be possible without their existence.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A análise de redes sociais no mundo lusófono: contributos para o conhecimento de uma comunidade científica em desenvolvimento

Neste artigo visamos caraterizar um conjunto de investigadores da área das ciências sociais que se distinguem pela utilização da análise de redes sociais (ars) como perspetiva teórico-metodológica e que circunscrevemos à partilha da língua portuguesa. A partir da caraterização sociográfica e da medição do sistema de interdependências entre estes investigadores (colaboração, aconselhamento e coautoria) pretendemos contribuir para a compreensão do desenvolvimento da ars no mundo lusófono, esboçando hipóteses explicativas dos fatores inibidores e estimulantes do seu desenvolvimento neste contexto linguístico

ORÁCULO: Detection of Spatiotemporal Hot Spots of Conflict-Related Events Extracted from Online News Sources

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Geographic Information Systems and ScienceAchieving situational awareness in peace operations requires understanding where and when conflict-related activity is most intense. However, the irregular nature of most factions hinders the use of remote sensing, while winning the trust of the host populations to allow the collection of wide-ranging human intelligence is a slow process. Thus, our proposed solution, ORÁCULO, is an information system which detects spatiotemporal hot spots of conflict-related activity by analyzing the patterns of events extracted from online news sources, allowing immediate situational awareness. To do so, it combines a closed-domain supervised event extractor with emerging hot spots analysis of event space-time cubes. The prototype of ORÁCULO was tested on tweets scraped from the Twitter accounts of local and international news sources covering the Central African Republic Civil War, and its test results show that it achieved near state-of-theart event extraction performance, significant overlap with a reference event dataset, and strong correlation with the hot spots space-time cube generated from the reference event dataset, proving the viability of the proposed solution. Future work will focus on improving the event extraction performance and on testing ORÁCULO in cooperation with peacekeeping organizations. Keywords: event extraction, natural language understanding, spatiotemporal analysis, peace operations, open-source intelligence.Atingir e manter a consciência situacional em operações de paz requer o conhecimento de quando e onde é que a atividade relacionada com o conflito é mais intensa. Porém, a natureza irregular da maioria das fações dificulta o uso de deteção remota, e ganhar a confiança das populações para permitir a recolha de informações é um processo moroso. Assim, a nossa solução proposta, ORÁCULO, consiste num sistema de informações que deteta “hot spots” espácio-temporais de atividade relacionada com o conflito através da análise dos padrões de eventos extraídos de fontes noticiosas online, (incluindo redes sociais), permitindo consciência situacional imediata. Nesse sentido, a nossa solução combina um extrator de eventos de domínio limitado baseado em aprendizagem supervisionada com a análise de “hot spots” emergentes de cubos espaçotempo de eventos. O protótipo de ORÁCULO foi testado em tweets recolhidos de fontes noticiosas locais e internacionais que cobrem a Guerra Civil da República Centro- Africana. Os resultados dos seus testes demonstram que foram conseguidos um desempenho de extração de eventos próximo do estado da arte, uma sobreposição significativa com um conjunto de eventos de referência e uma correlação forte com o cubo espaço-tempo de “hot spots” gerado a partir desse conjunto de referência, comprovando a viabilidade da solução proposta. Face aos resultados atingidos, o trabalho futuro focar-se-á em melhorar o desempenho de extração de eventos e em testar o sistema ORÁCULO em cooperação com organizações que conduzam operações paz

Molecular characterization of Olea europaea L. necrovirus transmission by fungal vectors

Abstract OMMV is an olive infecting necrovirus, likely a recombinant between TNV-D, with which it shares a high identity in its coat protein (CP), and OLV-1. Design of specific primers to use in RT-PCR, allowed for the first time molecular discrimination of OMMV from TNV-D. RT-PCR application to an olive orchard survey revealed OMMV predominance. Its transmission by Olpidium brassicae was demonstrated here for the first time and further examined. OMMV wild-type, a natural non-transmissible OMMVL11 mutant containing two mutations, a construct OMMVWT/OMMVL11 and single mutants obtained by site-directed mutagenesis were found similarly infectious. Sequencing, homology modelling and transmissibility assays showed that the single mutation of Asn residue to Tyr in position 189 of the CP amino acid sequence was located internally in the particle and abolished virus-zoospore adsorption and transmissibility. This indicates that mutation altered CP conformation on zoospore recognition sites. These findings may have important epidemiological implications in the olive crop. Caracterização molecular da transmissão de Necrovirus (Tombusviridae) de Olea europaea L. por fungos vectores OMMV é um necrovirus que infecta a oliveira e que terá surgido a partir de recombinação entre TNV-D, com o qual compartilha uma elevada identidade na cápside proteica (CP), e OLV- 1. O desenho de ‘primers’ específicos para utilização em RT-PCR permitiu, pela primeira vez, a discriminação entre OMMV e TNV-D. A aplicação de RT-PCR a um olival revelou a predominância de OMMV. A transmissão por Olpidium brassicae foi aqui pela primeira vez demonstrada e examinada. OMMV ‘wild type’, um mutante natural OMMVL11 não transmissível contendo duas mutações e mutantes obtidos por mutagénese dirigida revelaram-se igualmente infecciosos. Sequenciação, modelagem por homologia e e

Leadership and diffusion of information for policy implementation: a new methodological approach

This research is part of a larger project (PRAXIS/P/SOC/11214/1998) which was financially supported by Fundação para a Ciência e TecnologiaThe aim of this research is to explore more effective strategies to build leadership groups for the implementation of policies whose success depends on the massive mobilisation of targets. The underlying motivation for this work stems from the observation of a weak participation by traders in modernising a city's centre commerce in spite of high financial incentives. The analysis of the leadership - the board in charge of the trade association- whose main task was to lead this initiative, showed a poor performance in diffusing information. Using combinatorial optimisation techniques, two new leadership groups are built. The three leadership groups' performance in the diffusion of information is evaluated and compared. This reveals that, with the tools of social network analysis and combinatorial optimisation, the choice of leaders for policy processes can be improved