Learning roadmaps for Higher Education

An integrated platform for the support of teaching activities as been developed and deployed at the Aveiro Norte Polytechnic School of the University of Aveiro. In this paper we present an approach to Learning Roadmaps for Higher Education based on this platform. The aprend.e platform – Electronic Integrated System for Learning and Training - has at its core a Learning Management System with a number of plugins. It represents a new challenge for the University of Aveiro for higher education and is already being at its core is the concept of learning roadmaps that act upon two fundamental axes: education and learning. For the teachers, it aims at becoming a self-supporting tool that stimulates the organization and management of the course materials (lectures, presentations, multimedia content, and evaluation materials, amongst others). For the students, the learning roadmap aims at promoting self-study and supervised study, endowing the pupil with the capabilities to find the relevant information and to capture the concepts in the study materials. The outcome will be a stimulating learning process together with an organized management of those materials

Inseto galhador em mudas de bacurizeiro (Platonia insignis).

O bacurizeiro (Platonia insignis Mart.) é uma frutífera nativa da região Amazônica. Mudas de bacurizeiro em condição de viveiro em área experimental da Embrapa Amazônia Oriental, em Belém-PA, apresentaram folhas com galhas. O objetivo do presente trabalho foi relatar a ocorrência de inseto galhador em mudas de clones de bacurizeiro. Coleta de folhas foram realizadas em dez clones. Em laboratório as galhas foram quantificadas sob estereomicroscópio, com a coleta de formas imaturas e obtenção de adultos do inseto galhador. Foram quantificadas até 245 galhas por folha. Algumas folhas dos clones Aliança, Abaeté, Açu, Osake, 207-3, 116-4 e 105-5 apresentaram coalescência de pontos necróticos o que provavelmente concorreu para a queda das folhas. Maior número de galhas foi observado nos clones 116-4 e Osake com médias, respectivamente, de 78,3 e 72,3 galhas por folha. Foram obtidos espécimes pertencentes à ordem Diptera (em fase de identificação) que pode se constituir em inseto-praga em mudas de bacurizeiro em condição de viveiro

Gravitational non-commutativity and G\"odel-like spacetimes

We derive general conditions under which geodesics of stationary spacetimes resemble trajectories of charged particles in an electromagnetic field. For large curvatures (analogous to strong magnetic fields), the quantum mechanicical states of these particles are confined to gravitational analogs of {\it lowest Landau levels}. Furthermore, there is an effective non-commutativity between their spatial coordinates. We point out that the Som-Raychaudhuri and G\"odel spacetime and its generalisations are precisely of the above type and compute the effective non-commutativities that they induce. We show that the non-commutativity for G\"odel spacetime is identical to that on the fuzzy sphere. Finally, we show how the star product naturally emerges in Som-Raychaudhuri spacetimes.Comment: Two sections added (Relation to the fuzzy sphere, Emergence of the star product). 10 pages, Revtex. To appear in General Relativity and Gravitatio

Levantamento preliminar de coleobrocas em mandioca.

Este trabalho teve por objetivo realizar um levantamento preliminar visando conhecer as famílias/espécies de coleobrocas presentes em plantas de mandioca no banco de germoplasma na Embrapa Amazônia Oriental. Avaliações mensais, iniciadas em janeiro/2013, foram realizadas em 372 acessos, com a identificação e coleta das plantas com aspecto de murcha. Em laboratório as plantas foram observadas quanto à presença de galerias, larvas e insetos adultos nas hastes. Dezoito acessos apresentaram plantas com aspecto de murcha. Foram coletadas larvas dos tipos carabiforme, curculioniforme e limaciforme, além de adultos pertencentes à ordem Coleoptera e às famílias Curculionidae e Cerambycidae. Espécimes pertencentes à família Curculionidae foram mais abundantes

Vertex classification for non-uniform geometry reduction.

Complex models created from isosurface extraction or CAD and highly accurate 3D models produced from high-resolution scanners are useful, for example, for medical simulation, Virtual Reality and entertainment. Often models in general require some sort of manual editing before they can be incorporated in a walkthrough, simulation, computer game or movie. The visualization challenges of a 3D editing tool may be regarded as similar to that of those of other applications that include an element of visualization such as Virtual Reality. However the rendering interaction requirements of each of these applications varies according to their purpose. For rendering photo-realistic images in movies computer farms can render uninterrupted for weeks, a 3D editing tool requires fast access to a model's fine data. In Virtual Reality rendering acceleration techniques such as level of detail can temporarily render parts of a scene with alternative lower complexity versions in order to meet a frame rate tolerable for the user. These alternative versions can be dynamic increments of complexity or static models that were uniformly simplified across the model by minimizing some cost function. Scanners typically have a fixed sampling rate for the entire model being scanned, and therefore may generate large amounts of data in areas not of much interest or that contribute little to the application at hand. It is therefore desirable to simplify such models non-uniformly. Features such as very high curvature areas or borders can be detected automatically and simplified differently to other areas without any interaction or visualization. However a problem arises when one wishes to manually select features of interest in the original model to preserve and create stand alone, non-uniformly reduced versions of large models, for example for medical simulation. To inspect and view such models the memory requirements of LoD representations can be prohibitive and prevent storage of a model in main memory. Furthermore, although asynchronous rendering of a base simplified model ensures a frame rate tolerable to the user whilst detail is paged, no guarantees can be made that what the user is selecting is at the original resolution of the model or of an appropriate LoD owing to disk lag or the complexity of a particular view selected by the user. This thesis presents an interactive method in the con text of a 3D editing application for feature selection from any model that fits in main memory. We present a new compression/decompression of triangle normals and colour technique which does not require dedicated hardware that allows for 87.4% memory reduction and allows larger models to fit in main memory with at most 1.3/2.5 degrees of error on triangle normals and to be viewed interactively. To address scale and available hardware resources, we reference a hierarchy of volumes of different sizes. The distances of the volumes at each level of the hierarchy to the intersection point of the line of sight with the model are calculated and these distances sorted. At startup an appropriate level of the tree is automatically chosen by separating the time required for rendering from that required for sorting and constraining the latter according to the resources available. A clustered navigation skin and depth buffer strategy allows for the interactive visualisation of models of any size, ensuring that triangles from the closest volumes are rendered over the navigation skin even when the clustered skin may be closer to the viewer than the original model. We show results with scanned models, CAD, textured models and an isosurface. This thesis addresses numerical issues arising from the optimisation of cost functions in LoD algorithms and presents a semi-automatic solution for selection of the threshold on the condition number of the matrix to be inverted for optimal placement of the new vertex created by an edge collapse. We show that the units in which a model is expressed may inadvertently affect the condition of these matrices, hence affecting the evaluation of different LoD methods with different solvers. We use the same solver with an automatically calibrated threshold to evaluate different uniform geometry reduction techniques. We then present a framework for non-uniform reduction of regular scanned models that can be used in conjunction with a variety of LoD algorithms. The benefits of non-uniform reduction are presented in the context of an animation system. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)