Creating Peace: The Education for Global Peace Sustainability Project

Peace concepts, aspirations, propositions and tactics have changed throughout history. Historic age, culture, politics and science affected the thoughts about the ideal of an everlasting peace -the eternal dream –but peace has been mostly considered a nobel aim, and the capacity for peace was predominantly contemplated as an individual and social virtue, and a learning asset. Therefore, throughout the years, peace education programs emerged. The current state of the world keeps reminding us that more efforts to create peace are not redundant, and that there is an urgency to keep developing and spreading more initiatives on education for peace, in particular scientifically based, rigorously assessed, flexible, and straightforward programs that can be deliver to the simplest and the most complex world arenas. This article addresses a framework for a humble, but also distinguished and valuable input to understanding and promoting peace, that refers to the contribution that surfaced from the emergent positive psychology movement, namely its studies on collective wellbeing and public happiness. Positive psychology is the scientific study of what enablesindividuals and communities to thrive, and peace is clearly one crucial aspect towards human flourishing.Both –positive peace building education and positive psychology -are strengths-oriented and aim for the optimization of the best in people, focusing attention and strategies in developing the peak functioning of individuals, groups, communities and nations. The study and promotion of virtuousness, goodness, social cohesion, justice and wellbeing is therefore inherent to the framework of the Education for Global Peace Sustainability Project -E=GPS. The contextualization and specifics of the program,and its consubstantiation and aims, are therefore detailed.Os conceitos de paz, e as aspirações, proposições e tácticas pela pacificação, mudaram ao longo da história. O momento histórico, a cultura, a politica e a ciência afectaram os pensamentos sobre o ideal de uma paz duradoura -o sonho eterno -mas a paz tem sido considerada, genericamente, um objectivo nobre, tendo a capacitação para a paz sido predominantemente contemplada como uma virtude individual e social e um recurso de aprendizagem relevante. Em consequência, ao longo dos anos foram surgindo programas de educação para a paz. O estado atual do mundo continua a lembrar-nos que não é redundante realizar mais esforços para gerar a paz, e que há mesmo uma urgência para continuar a desenvolver e difundir mais iniciativas sobre educação para a paz, em especial que tenham base científica, avaliação rigorosa, sejam flexíveis e possam ser aplicados nas arenas mundiais mais simples e nas mais complexas. Este artigo aborda uma proposta para uma contribuição humilde, mas também distinta e considerada valiosa, para entender e promover a paz, e refere-se à contribuição que emergiu do recente movimento de psicologia positiva, ou seja, dos estudos sobre bem-estar coletivo e felicidade pública. A psicologia positiva é o estudo científico do que permite que os indivíduos e as comunidades prosperem, e a paz é claramente um aspecto crucial para o florescimento humano. Ambos -educação positiva para a construção da paz e psicologia positiva -são orientados para a optimização do melhor das pessoas, concentrando atenção e estratégias no desenvolvimento do funcionamento óptimo dos indivíduos, grupos, comunidades e nações. O estudo e a promoção da virtuosidade, do bem, da coesão social, da justiça e do bem-estar é, portanto, inerente ao quadro do Projecto de Educação para a Paz Global Sustentável (E=GPS). A contextualização e as especificidades do programa, e a sua consubstanciação e objectivos, são detalhados neste texto

Supervised Topical Key Phrase Extraction of News Stories using Crowdsourcing, Light Filtering and Co-reference Normalization

Fast and effective automated indexing is critical for search and personalized services. Key phrases that consist of one or more words and represent the main concepts of the document are often used for the purpose of indexing. In this paper, we investigate the use of additional semantic features and pre-processing steps to improve automatic key phrase extraction. These features include the use of signal words and freebase categories. Some of these features lead to significant improvements in the accuracy of the results. We also experimented with 2 forms of document pre-processing that we call light filtering and co-reference normalization. Light filtering removes sentences from the document, which are judged peripheral to its main content. Co-reference normalization unifies several written forms of the same named entity into a unique form. We also needed a "Gold Standard" - a set of labeled documents for training and evaluation. While the subjective nature of key phrase selection precludes a true "Gold Standard", we used Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to obtain a useful approximation. Our data indicates that the biggest improvements in performance were due to shallow semantic features, news categories, and rhetorical signals (nDCG 78.47% vs. 68.93%). The inclusion of deeper semantic features such as Freebase sub-categories was not beneficial by itself, but in combination with pre-processing, did cause slight improvements in the nDCG scores.Comment: In 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012

Key Phrase Extraction of Lightly Filtered Broadcast News

This paper explores the impact of light filtering on automatic key phrase extraction (AKE) applied to Broadcast News (BN). Key phrases are words and expressions that best characterize the content of a document. Key phrases are often used to index the document or as features in further processing. This makes improvements in AKE accuracy particularly important. We hypothesized that filtering out marginally relevant sentences from a document would improve AKE accuracy. Our experiments confirmed this hypothesis. Elimination of as little as 10% of the document sentences lead to a 2% improvement in AKE precision and recall. AKE is built over MAUI toolkit that follows a supervised learning approach. We trained and tested our AKE method on a gold standard made of 8 BN programs containing 110 manually annotated news stories. The experiments were conducted within a Multimedia Monitoring Solution (MMS) system for TV and radio news/programs, running daily, and monitoring 12 TV and 4 radio channels.Comment: In 15th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD 2012

Savoring Para Docentes: experiências, processos e estratégias formativas

A profissão docente revela indicadores de  mal-estar e neste contexto a auto-regulação das emoções negativas tem merecido estudo teórico e empírico, faltando no âmbito da psicologia positiva emergente estudar-se modelos de regulação das emoções positivas, como por exemplo o modelo de Savoring proposto Bryant e Veroff (2007). Este trabalho teve como principais objetivos: explicar o conceito de savoring no âmbito do Modelo de Savoring de Bryant e Veroff (2007), caracterizar, no contexto da docência, as principais estratégias de savoring desenvolvidos a partir do Ways of Savoring Checklist (WOSC) e discutir a aplicação do savoring ao âmbito da formação de professores. Considerando o material levantado afirma-se a importância da regulação emocional promovida pelo modelo de savoring e a sua aplicação ao contexto docente, parecendo fundamental que a formação de professores promova a construção de estratégias de savoring que tenham efeitos na qualidade de vida dos docentes. Seria, igualmente importante, testar em contexto real a eficácia de um programa de desenvolvimento de estratégias de savoring e o seu impacto no bem-estar dos docentes. Palavras-chave: savoring; estratégias de savoring; modelo de savoring; formação de professores

Voltage security in AC microgrids: A power flow-based approach considering droopcontrolled inverters

This study deals with the problem of voltage security in microgrids. In general, voltage security is an issue for power systems, where the lack of reactive power is a concern. For microgrids a complexity is imposed, since frequency and voltage level deviations may take place by the operation of droop-controlled inverters. This study incorporates the load margin calculation into a microgrid structure. For this purpose, a special power flow program is developed in order to consider the effects of the droop-controlled inverters. Simulation results are obtained with the help of an islanded distribution system with only generators coupled by droop-controlled inverters, so the proposed methodology may be tested and discussed.Postprint (author's final draft