Place and action: The school building as an enhancer of the learning process

This paper aims to highlight the relevance of the built space towards society, and more specifically the influence that the school building bears for the learning process, that there takes place. It also intends to emphasize the relevance of studies on space use, assuming that they provide a comprehensive input on the actual occupancy of a particular space, and that conversely present guidelines as an operative design tool when intervening on that or other buildings with a similar brief. Ultimately, contributing for a more complete and effective spatial, social and pedagogical answer to the actual needs and wants of the users, at each particular time, throughout its lifecycle.Hence, it will regard first the relationship between architecture and society, focusing on the bond between providers and users of the places, thought and lived in. Itwill then concentrate on school buildings and their input towards education, considering space use research as a means to understand space as a social «setting» and also a social «influence». Finally, it will address psychosocial studies on spatiality, while dealing with means and techniques within architectural studies concerned with this relationship. Firstly in its generic assertion and secondly and more specifically applied to school buildings.Peer Reviewe

Ecclesiastical Support to the Master of Avis: An Analysis from the Aclamation Act of 1385

The death of king Fernando of Portugal in October 1383 without male heirs opened a succesion crisis. Despite the studies that have been made concerning the composition of the factions that supported the various pretenders to the throne, in special about the participation of town elites and nobility, there are still few contributions on the participation of the clergy in the conflict. This is a matter of great importance, given the religious character of the royal power in the legitimation of kings and dynasties, in particular in a period marked by the Schism of the Catholic Church. Therefore, starting from the list of signatories and witnesses of the acclamation act of João I, made in the cortes of Coimbra in 1385, our aim is to analyse the participation of the clergy in the fight for the throne, identifying the main protagonists of each party and the reasons for their positions, as well as the consequences for their later ecclesiastic and political careers

Self-defeating austerity in Portugal during the Troika’s economic and financial adjustment programme

In 2011, Portugal agreed with the Troika (European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) to implement an economic and financial assistance programme during the period 2011-2014. One of the objectives of the programme was to guarantee the sustainability of public accounts, by setting targets for reducing the weight of the budget balance on GDP. Between 2010 and 2013, the weight of the budget deficit on GDP decreased by six percentage points. However, in that period, there was a colossal destruction of jobs and the unemployment rate grew by five percentage points. In an Input-Output framework, we show the existence of a negative relationship between the unemployment rate and the budget deficit and we revisit the concept of neutral budget balance proposed by Lopes and Amaral (2017), and also we consider the use of alternative fiscal policies and a mix of fiscal policies. In an empirical application to the Portuguese case, in 2013, we concluded that: (i) the balance of public accounts in that year would imply a very high unemployment rate; (ii) the larger the budget balance in that year, the greater the negative impact on the budget balance in 2014; and (iii) the budget balance actually verified in 2013 had a detrimental effect on the reduction of the budget deficit in 2014.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A note on the convexity number for complementary prisms

In the geodetic convexity, a set of vertices $S$ of a graph $G$ is $\textit{convex}$ if all vertices belonging to any shortest path between two vertices of $S$ lie in $S$. The cardinality $con(G)$ of a maximum proper convex set $S$ of $G$ is the $\textit{convexity number}$ of $G$. The $\textit{complementary prism}$ $G\overline{G}$ of a graph $G$ arises from the disjoint union of the graph $G$ and $\overline{G}$ by adding the edges of a perfect matching between the corresponding vertices of $G$ and $\overline{G}$. In this work, we we prove that the decision problem related to the convexity number is NP-complete even restricted to complementary prisms, we determine $con(G\overline{G})$ when $G$ is disconnected or $G$ is a cograph, and we present a lower bound when $diam(G) \neq 3$.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure