Where does inter-firm trust come from?

This research aims at understanding the manifestation of inter-firm trust in a given activity sector

The first shall be last: selection-driven minority becomes majority

Street demonstrations occur across the world. In Rio de Janeiro, June/July 2013, they reach beyond one million people. A wrathful reader of \textit{O Globo}, leading newspaper in the same city, published a letter \cite{OGlobo} where many social questions are stated and answered Yes or No. These million people of street demonstrations share opinion consensus about a similar set of social issues. But they did not reach this consensus within such a huge numbered meetings. Earlier, they have met in diverse small groups where some of them could be convinced to change mind by other few fellows. Suddenly, a macroscopic consensus emerges. Many other big manifestations are widespread all over the world in recent times, and are supposed to remain in the future. The interesting questions are: 1) How a binary-option opinion distributed among some population evolves in time, through local changes occurred within small-group meetings? and 2) Is there some natural selection rule acting upon? Here, we address these questions through an agent-based model.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Physica

Arqueologia e Nation Building: Importância do Conhecimento Arqueológico Para a Identidade Nacional de Timor-Leste

The island of Timor has always attracted the interest of archaeological research. The part that currently corresponds to Timor-Leste saw the first archaeological excavations take place in the 1930s. However, the first scientific investigations systematically carried out, only took place in the late 1960s and especially since the end of Indonesian occupation, in 2000. In the past, Timor-Leste was the target of mainly Portuguese researchers, whose colonial period lasted until 1975. Former 'Portuguese Timor', as it was then known, had been a colony since the mid-sixteenth century. However, only during the last ca. 100 years of colonial rule and especially during the Estado Novo, the Portuguese administration strengthened its presence and invested resources more systematically in what was its most distant colony. Nowadays, more than 40,000 years of history of human occupation in Timor are documented, represented through a significant diversity of archaeological sites, including shell middens, open air sites and caves with prehistoric occupation, caves and cliffs with rock art, ancient, pre-colonial fortified settlements, in addition to evidence of the Portuguese and Dutch colonial periods and evidence of the Japanese and Indonesian occupations. Such archaeological information is fundamental so that the new country grows knowing about its history, which in turn is essential in the process of creating a sense of national identity for all East Timorese

Landau Gauge Fixing on GPUs and String Tension

We explore the performance of CUDA in performing Landau gauge fixing in Lattice QCD, using the steepest descent method with Fourier acceleration. The code performance was tested in a Tesla C2070, Fermi architecture. We also present a study of the string tension at finite temperature in the confined phase. The string tension is extracted from the color averaged free energy and from the color singlet using Landau gauge fixing.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Contribution to the International Meeting "Excited QCD", Peniche, Portugal, 06 - 12 May 201

Landau gauge fixing on the lattice using GPU's

In this work, we consider the GPU implementation of the steepest descent method with Fourier acceleration for Laudau gauge fixing, using CUDA. The performance of the code in a Tesla C2070 GPU is compared with a parallel CPU implementation.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the Xth Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, 8-12 October 2012, TUM Campus Garching, Munich, German