Embodied carbon and economic cost analysis of a contemporary house design using local and reused materials

This paper presents a house design that uses adobe in the walls and wood in the roof, a mixed building system that vernacular houses in the region where it is located already use, however it presents a contemporary strategy based on less, more natural, reused, and local materials, implying also less transport. The environmental impact analysis of the Case Study was made considering the Embodied Carbon of the construction materials used and compared with conventional building systems. In spite of presenting a much lower embodied carbon than all the conventional solutions in comparison, it turns to be more expensive.FCT -Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia(undefined

On portuguese cinema

UID/ELT/00657/2013From the beginning, our chief aim in bringing together this special dossier been to provide, through a combination of different contributions, a response to the very concept of "Portuguese cinema." With their own varied critical standpoints, the essays brought together here point to a possible cartography of Portuguese film based not on a previous delimitation of the implications of the adjective "Portuguese" in historical, geographical, or even national terms, but instead determined precisely by indeterminacy.publishersversionpublishe

Motivation, interaction and perceived learning: assessing the impact of an urban game with 7th grade geography students

The increasing development of mobile technology devices is revolutionizing education. In this context emerge the mobile location-based games. This research was carried out in an effort to understand the importance of mobile location-based games in informal learning and involved the design of an urban game - “MobiGeo”. MobiGeo was implemented for an outdoor pedagogical activity and enrolled a group of 173 seventh grade geography students. In order to collect data, a questionnaire was developed and validated measuring three dimensions related to educational games: motivation, interaction and perceived learning. Results show that this urban game was an adequate activity to use in informal learning environments because it engaged students in gaming with high degrees of motivation and interaction. In fact, while solving the tasks proposed by MobiGeo, students´ developed their perceptions of learning, consolidating and acquiring new knowledge about the European Union.CIEC – Research Centre on Child Studies, IE, UMinho (FCT R&D unit 317), PortugalNational Funds through the FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) and co-financed by European Regional Development Funds (FEDER) through the Competitiveness and Internationalization Operational Program (POCI) through CIEC (Research Centre on Child Studies, of the University of Minho) with the reference POCI-01-0145-FEDER-00756

If beam search is the answer, what was the question?

Quite surprisingly, exact maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding of neural language generators frequently leads to low-quality results. Rather, most state-of-the-art results on language generation tasks are attained using beam search despite its overwhelmingly high search error rate. This implies that the MAP objective alone does not express the properties we desire in text, which merits the question: if beam search is the answer, what was the question? We frame beam search as the exact solution to a different decoding objective in order to gain insights into why high probability under a model alone may not indicate adequacy. We find that beam search enforces uniform information density in text, a property motivated by cognitive science. We suggest a set of decoding objectives that explicitly enforce this property and find that exact decoding with these objectives alleviates the problems encountered when decoding poorly calibrated language generation models. Additionally, we analyze the text produced using various decoding strategies and see that, in our neural machine translation experiments, the extent to which this property is adhered to strongly correlates with BLEU.Comment: EMNLP 202

Signalling with dividends? : The signalling effects of dividend change announcements: new evidence from Europe

The dividend policy is one of the most debated topics in the finance literature. One of the different lines of research on this issue is based on the information content of dividends, which has motivated a significant amount of theoretical and empirical research. According to the dividend signalling hypothesis, dividend change announcements trigger share returns because they convey information about management’s assessment on firms’ future prospects. We start by analysing the classical assumptions of dividend signalling hypothesis. The evidence gives no support for a positive relation between dividend change announcements and the market reaction for French firms, and only a weak support for the Portuguese and the UK firms. After accounting for non-linearity in the mean reversion process, the global results do not give support to the assumption that dividend change announcements are positively related with future earnings changes. Afterwards, we formulate two hypotheses in order to explore the window dressing phenomenon and the maturity hypothesis, finding some evidence, especially in the UK market, for both of the phenomenon.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Urban games: conceito e potencialidades educativas

proporcionar uma aprendizagem em contexto real, sendo que a literatura revela vários exemplos de sucesso em termos de motivação, interação e colaboração entre os alunos que os realizaram. Contudo, é fundamental que os professores que os vão idealizar se conscientizem da necessidade de seguir um conjunto de linhas orientadoras que lhes permitem moldar a atividade aos seus objetivos e público-alvo, mas também poder antecipar possíveis constrangimentos físicos e humanos. Não menos importante é estabelecer a sua fundamentação teórica uma vez que, dada a insuficiência de modelos teóricos direcionados para estudar o Mobile Learning em ambientes informais de aprendizagem, um dos objetivos centrais do presente artigo é dar um contributo nesse sentido através da proposta que fazemos de um modelo que acrescenta à tríade aluno-dispositivoaprendizagem, o contexto como elemento crucial que possibilita o estabelecer e compreender as dinâmicas entre os elementos do modelo “clássico”. De seguida apresentamos o MobiGeo, um urban game que foi idealizado no âmbito de uma investigação académica e implementado numa escola do ensino básico portuguesa com 174 alunos do 7º ano de escolaridade. Terminamos com as considerações finais que incluem alguma recomendações que pretendam implementar um Urban Game com os seus alunos.Centro de Investigação em Estudos da Criança (CIEC

Signalling with dividends? new evidence from Europe

According to the dividend signalling hypothesis, dividend change announcements trigger share returns because they convey information about management’s assessment on firms’ future prospects. We analyse the classical assumptions of the dividend signalling hypothesis, using data from three European countries. The evidence gives no support to a positive relation between dividend change announcements and the market reaction for French firms, and only weak support for the Portuguese and UK firms. After accounting for non-linearity in the mean reversion process, the global results do not give support to the assumption that dividend change announcements are positively related with future earnings changes. We also formulate two hypotheses in order to explore the window dressing phenomenon and the maturity hypothesis, finding some evidence in favour of both, especially in the UK market

Mobile learning: perspetivando o potencial dos códigos QR na educação

A evolução da sociedade deu ao telemóvel uma importância que vai para além da comunicação típica entre as pessoas. Como seria de esperar este disseminou-se e também chegou à escola. Daí que se torna imperioso usar este meio de comunicação para fomentar/incrementar novas atividades que sejam motivantes e desafiadoras para os alunos. Este artigo pretende contextualizar e demonstrar com casos práticos como os professores poderão tornar esta ferramenta um excelente recurso pedagógico, ou seja, como se pode potencializar o telemóvel no processo de ensino-aprendizagem. Nesse sentido, será apresentado o conceito e potencial educativo dos códigos Qr. Os códigos Qr aplicados à educação enquadram-se nos princípios do Mobile Learning. A este estão associados a tríade: “independência de localização”, “independência de tempo” e “conteúdo significativo”. Agregando estas características, os códigos Qr podem promover a qualidade do processo de ensino-aprendizagem, seja democratizando os espaços de aprendizagem, alargando os limites tradicionais da sala de aula ou mesmo promovendo a interacção dentro da própria sala de aula. Esta revisão de literatura visa pois consolidar a pertinência do Mobile Learning, nomeadamente com o uso dos códigos Qr, para ser usado nas atividades pedagógicas, sendo o professor o seu principal difusor mas sendo os alunos os principais beneficiários desta nova ferramenta pedagógica.The evolution of society gave the mobile phone an importance that goes beyond typical communication between people. As expected this has spread and also reached the school. It becomes imperative to use this media to promote/increase new activities that are motivating and challenging for students. This article aims to contextualize and demonstrate with practical examples how teachers can make this tool an excellent teaching resource, in other words, how can we potentiate the mobile phone in the teaching-learning process. In this sense, the concept and the educational potential of QR codes will be presented. QR codes applied to education fall within the principles of Mobile Learning. This is associated feature, QR codes can promote the quality of the teaching-learning process, for example democratizing learning spaces, extending the traditional boundaries of the classroom or even encouraging interaction in the classroom. This study aims to consolidate the relevance of Mobile Learning, especially with the use of QR codes, to be used in educational activities, being the teacher its main diffuser but the students the main beneficiaries of this new educational tool

Lower propensity to pay dividends? new evidence from Europe

Recently, some empirical studies reported the phenomenon of the low propensity of firms to dividend payment, concluding that companies have become less likely to pay dividends. In addition, the major parts of these studies sustain the investors’ expectations regarding dividend payments also decreased. We analyse the propensity to pay dividends in three European markets: Portugal, France and the UK. Although they are all European markets, they are different from each other for several reasons. Firstly, the UK is one of the most important European capital markets, whereas the French and Portuguese markets are smaller, specially Portugal, that is a very small market compared to other Western European markets. Additionally, these two markets are less intensively researched. Secondly, we have differences in these countries associated with the ownership of equity. In Portugal and France ownership tends to be more concentrated than in the UK. Thirdly, Portugal and France are bank-based system, whereas the UK is a market-based system. Finally, the legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders is different in the three countries. While the UK is a country of Anglo-Saxon influence, the other two countries are characterised by a continental influence. We find evidence of the decline of firms paying dividends, except for the French market. Moreover, we find evidence suggesting that the Portuguese market does not have such a smoothing dividend policy like the US or the UK markets, but it has a more volatile dividend policy, such as the case of the German market

The phenomenon of the adverse market reaction to dividend change announcements: new Eeidence from Europe

The dividend policy is one of the most debated topics in the finance literature. According to the dividend signalling hypothesis, which has motivated a significant amount of theoretical and empirical research, dividend change announcements trigger share returns because they convey information about management’s assessment on firms’ future prospects. Consequently, a dividend increase (decrease) should be followed by an improvement (reduction) in a firm’s value. Although there are empirical evidence supporting the positive relationship between dividend change announcements and the subsequent share price reactions, some studies have not supported this idea. Furthermore, several studies found evidence of a significant percentage of cases where share prices reactions are opposite to the dividend changes direction, like the works of Asquith and Mullins (1983), Benesh, Keown and Pinkerton (1984), Born, Mozer and Officer (1988), Dhillon and Johnson (1994) Healy, Hathorn and Kirch (1997), and, more recently, Vieira (2005). We introduce a new approach to investigate the relationship between the market reaction to dividend changes and future earnings changes with the purpose of understanding why the market sometimes reacts negatively (positively) to dividend increases (decreases). We find only weak evidence for the dividend information content hypothesis. The Portuguese results suggest that the adverse market reaction to dividendchange announcements is basically due to the fact that the market does not understand the signal given by firms though dividend change announcements. Moreover, we find no evidence of the inverse signalling effect, except for the UK market. The results suggest that the UK market investors have more capability to predict future earnings than the investors of the Portuguese and the French markets