Corporate effective tax rate: brief literature review

Given the model of partial dependence between accounting and taxation, the nominal tax rate tells nothing about the tax burden borne by companies`. Therefore, the effective tax rate is, an indicator to be considered by stakeholders when making decisions once it represents the tax burden that the company bears during the period. This paper aims to present a brief literature review on the effective corporate tax rate, emphasizing its determinants, namely the size, the leverage, the capital intensity, the stock intensity, and the return on assets. With this paper, there was detected evidence of a significant relationship between the effective tax rate and the determinants analysed.publishe

Unveiling Sympathetic Activation and Genetic Therapeutic Perspectives

Introduction: Hypertension, a leading cause of death, was investigated in this study to understand the role of specific brain regions in regulating blood pressure. The lateral parabrachial nucleus (LPBN), Kolliker-fuse nucleus (KF), and periductal grey matter (PAG) were examined for their involvement in hypertension. Methods: Lentiviral vectors were used to alter the activity of these brain regions in hypertensive rats. Over a 75-day period, blood pressure, heart rate, reflex responses, and heart rate variability were measured. Results: Decreasing the activity in the LPBN resulted in a reduced sympathetic outflow, lowering the blood pressure and heart rate. In the KF, the sympathetic activity decreased and chemoreflex variation was attenuated, without affecting the blood pressure. Silencing the PAG had no significant impact on blood pressure or sympathetic tone, but decreased cardiac baroreflex gain. Discussion: These findings highlight the significant role of the LPBN in hypertension-related sympathetic activation. Additionally, LPBN and KF neurons appear to activate mechanisms that control respiration and sympathetic outflow during chemoreceptor activation. Conclusions: The study provided insights into the contribution of the midbrain and pontine regions to neurogenic hypertension and offers potential avenues for future genetic interventions and developing novel treatment approaches.publishersversionpublishe

Knowledge extraction from medium voltage load diagrams to support the definition of electrical tariffs

With the electricity market liberalization, distribution and retail companies are looking for better market strategies based on adequate information upon the consumption patterns of its electricity customers. In this environment all consumers are free to choose their electricity supplier. A fair insight on the customer´s behaviour will permit the definition of specific contract aspects based on the different consumption patterns. In this paper Data Mining (DM) techniques are applied to electricity consumption data from a utility client’s database. To form the different customer´s classes, and find a set of representative consumption patterns, we have used the Two-Step algorithm which is a hierarchical clustering algorithm. Each consumer class will be represented by its load profile resulting from the clustering operation. Next, to characterize each consumer class a classification model will be constructed with the C5.0 classification algorithm

DOSSIÊ “INTERNET E POLÍTICA”

Apresentação:uma amostra das novas possibilidades de pesquisasobre as relações entre as NTICS e a polític

A influência da avaliação peer na dinâmica de trabalho de equipas em projetos PBL

Since the school year 2004/2005 has been applied in the course of Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM), University of Minho, a learning methodology based on Interdisciplinary Projects (PBL - Project-Based Learning). Among other skills, such projects emphasizes teamwork and in this process different goals and visions among team members origins conflicts to resolve. In this context, each team also faced with the evaluation process performed between its own elements, peer assessment. This paper aims to analyze how this evaluation may affect the performance and motivation of each member and the team as a whole, and will be a source of internal conflicts, or rather, a way to resolve these same conflicts in PBL processes. In this article is presented a brief testimony of the authors about their experience with peer assessment in interdisciplinary projects and a qualitative nature study about the peer evaluation that encompassed all years of the Industrial Management and Engineering course. After the analysis of the results it is presented a critical reflection of the experience of a group, in which the first tree authors were part, that used peer assessment and of the study that was made.Desde o ano letivo de 2004/2005 tem vindo a aplicar-se no Mestrado Integrado em Engenharia e Gestão Industrial (MIEGI) da Universidade do Minho uma metodologia de aprendizagem baseada em Projetos Interdisciplinares (PBL – Project-Based Learning). Entre outras competências, este tipo de projetos enfatiza o trabalho em equipa e neste processo, diferentes objetivos e visões entre os elementos da equipa, geram conflitos de difícil resolução. Neste contexto, cada equipa depara-se também com o processo de avaliação efetuada entre os seus próprios elementos, Avaliação Peer ou Avaliação por Pares. Neste trabalho pretende-se analisar de que forma esta avaliação pode afetar a performance e motivação de cada elemento e da equipa como um todo, e se será uma fonte geradora de conflitos internos, ou pelo contrário, uma forma de resolver esses mesmos conflitos, no contexto de processos PBL. No presente artigo apresenta-se um breve testemunho dos autores acerca da sua experiência com a avaliação peer em projetos interdisciplinares e um estudo de natureza qualitativa acerca deste tipo de avaliação que englobou todos os anos do curso do MIEGI. Após a análise de resultados apresenta-se uma reflexão crítica sobre a experiência de um grupo, do qual os três primeiros autores fizeram parte, que utilizou a avaliação peer e sobre o estudo realizado

Inoculated cell density as a determinant factor of the growth dynamics and metastatic efficiency of a breast cancer murine model

Copyright: © 2016 Gregório et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.4T1 metastatic breast cancer model have been widely used to study stage IV human breast cancer. However, the frequent inoculation of a large number of cells, gives rise to fast growing tumors, as well as to a surprisingly low metastatic take rate. The present work aimed at establishing the conditions enabling high metastatic take rate of the triple-negative murine 4T1 syngeneic breast cancer model. An 87% 4T1 tumor incidence was observed when as few as 500 cancer cells were implanted. 4T1 cancer cells colonized primarily the lungs with 100% efficiency, and distant lesions were also commonly identified in the mesentery and pancreas. The drastic reduction of the number of inoculated cells resulted in increased tumor doubling times and decreased specific growth rates, following a Gompertzian tumor expansion. The established conditions for the 4T1 mouse model were further validated in a therapeutic study with peguilated liposomal doxorubicin, in clinical used in the setting of metastatic breast cancer. Inoculated cell density was proven to be a key methodological aspect towards the reproducible development of macrometastases in the 4T1 mouse model and a more reliable pre-clinical assessment of antimetastatic therapies.Ana Cristina Gregório is a student of the international PhD program in Experimental Biology and Biomedicine (PDBEB) from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, University of Coimbra and recipient of the fellowship SFRH/BD/51190/2010 from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). The work was supported by the grants PTDC/SAU-BMA/121028/2010 (FCT) and UID/NEU/04539/2013 (FEDER/COMPETE 2020/FCT).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Taxation and corporate social responsability: literature review

Com o passar dos anos, cada vez mais as instituições internacionais manifestam a sua preocupação relativamente à qualidade dos relatórios divulgados pelas empresas, surgindo iniciativas que visam aumentar a transparência e a responsabilidade nas comunicações relativas ao desempenho económico, ambiental e social das empresas. Esta comunicação tem como objetivo apresentar uma breve revisão de literatura acerca da responsabilidade social e empresarial e o índice de divulgação voluntária de informação, enfatizando os métodos utilizados para a determinação deste índice, relacionando este conceito com a temática do planeamento fiscal e com a teoria da legitimidade.Over the years, more and more international institutions have expressed their concern about the quality of the reports published by companies. This concern results in the emergence of initiatives that aim to increase transparency and accountability in communications concerning the economic, environmental, and social companies' performance. This investigation's purpose is to present a brief literature review about social and corporate responsibility, and the voluntary disclosure of information index, highlighting the methods used to determine this index, linking this concept to tax planning and the legitimacy theory.publishe

Implementação de um Ensaio Piloto para Identificação e Quantificação de Fitoplâncton no âmbito da Avaliação Externa da Qualidade

O Programa Nacional de Avaliação Externa da Qualidade, implementou em 2015 um ensaio piloto no âmbito da dentificação e quantificação de fitoplâncton. O fitoplâncton é um importante indicador de qualidade biológica utilizado na classificação do estado ecológico de rios e lagos, e do potencial ecológico e risco toxicológico de massas de água doce fortemente modificadas como as albufeiras. O objetivo consistiu na implementação de um ensaio para identificação e quantificação de fitoplâncton, requisito para a acreditação dos laboratórios

Prosodic Classification of Discourse Markers

The first contribution of this study is the description of the prosodic behavior of discourse markers present in two speech corpora of European Portuguese (EP) in different domains (university lectures, and map-task dialogues). The second contribution is a multiclass classification to verify, given their prosodic features, which words in both corpora are classified as discourse markers, which are disfluencies, and which correspond to words that are neither markers nor disfluencies (chunks). Our goal is to automatically predict discourse markers and include them in rich transcripts, along with other structural metadata events (e.g., disfluencies and punctuation marks) that are already encompassed in the language models of our in-house speech recognizer. Results show that the automatic classification of discourse markers is better for the lectures corpus (87%) than for the dialogue corpus (84%). Nonetheless, in both corpora, discourse markers are more easily confused with chunks than with disfluencies.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Um estudo sobre a permanência e a evasão na Educação a Distância

O artigo descreve a pesquisa feita em cursos na modalidade adistância, em que foi abordada a evasão na Educação a Distância, e as interações foram analisadas através de categorias que permitiam identificar a ocorrência de diálogo numa perspectiva freireana e piagetiana, mostrando a necessidade de diálogo entre os atores, para que permaneçam num curso desta modalidade