Museological discourse and the question of memory

O Turismo tornou-se um dos mais importantes mecanismos de construção e reprodução e significados e atitudes sobre o passado. Os museus, em particular, tornaram-se ferramentas importantes na formatação da memória coletiva e de narrativas históricas dentro das práticas de produção/consumo culturais na sociedade contemporânea. Por um lado, os museus podem ser, e frequentemente são, instituições de educação pública que ajudam a fazer sentido do mundo. Por outro lado, por necessidade ligadas às suas práticas discursivas e escolhas expositivas, as exposições museológicas, bem como todos os outros produtos turísticos, têm sempre predisposições ideológicas. O que acontece, então, quando o passado em exposição carrega características dissonantes ou está relacionado com eventos traumáticos? Esta dissertação pretende analisar os aparatos ideológicos e discursivos presentes em dois museus memoriais que tratam esse tipo de passado: o Museu do Aljube – Resistência e Liberdade, em Lisboa, e a Casa do Terror em Budapeste. Aplicando a Análise Multimodal Crítica do Discurso às exposições permanentes e adotando uma abordagem textual, a dissertação pretende identificar práticas discursivas específicas, como papéis de agentes, omissões e evasões, entre outros, bem como as estratégias expositivas que os criam e/ou reproduzem. Com esta análise, a dissertação propõe-se contribuir para a discussão mais alargada sobre como os produtos turísticos se relacionam com as práticas estabelecidas de memória social, particularmente nas sociedades Portuguesa e Húngar

MICRO MILLING OF METALLIC MATERIALS - A BRIEF OVERVIEW

Micro milling is an important process of mechanical micromachining, with practical application in aerospace, automotive, mould and die, biomedical, military and microelectronics packaging industries. This article will give a brief overview of the effects and conditions of micro milling with an emphasis on minimum chip thickness, size effect, cutting forces, cutting temperature, tool wear and tool failure, burr formation and surface quality. The case study presented in the present paper refers to the micro milling of an aluminium alloy

Genetic Land - Modeling land use change using evolutionary algorithms

Future land use configurations provide valuable knowledge for policy makers and economic agents, especially under expected environmental changes such as decreasing rainfall or increasing temperatures, or scenarios of policy guidance such as carbon sequestration enforcement. In this paper, modelling land use change is designed as an optimization problem in which landscapes (land uses) are generated through the use of genetic algorithms (GA), according to an objective function (e.g. minimization of soil erosion, or maximization of carbon sequestration), and a set of local restrictions (e.g. soil depth, water availability, or landscape structure). GAs are search and optimization procedures based on the mechanics of natural selection and genetics. The GA starts with a population of random individuals, each corresponding to a particular candidate solution to the problem. The best solutions are propagated; they are mated with each other and originate “offspring solutions” which randomly combine the characteristics of each “parent”. The repeated application of these operations leads to a dynamic system that emulates the evolutionary mechanisms that occur in nature. The fittest individuals survive and propagate their traits to future generations, while unfit individuals have a tendency to die and become extinct (Goldberg, 1989). Applications of GA to land use planning have been experimented (Brookes, 2001, Ducheyne et al, 2001). However, long-term planning with a time-span component has not yet been addressed. GeneticLand, the GA for land use generation, works on a region represented by a bi-dimensional array of cells. For each cell, there is a number of possible land uses (U1, U2, ..., Un). The task of the GA is to search for an optimal assignment of these land uses to the cells, evolving the landscape patterns that are most suitable for satisfying the objective function, for a certain time period (e.g. 50 years in the future). GeneticLand develops under a multi-objective function: (i) Minimization of soil erosion – each solution is validated by applying the USLE, with the best solution being the one that minimizes the landscape soil erosion value; (ii) Maximization of carbon sequestration – each solution is validated by applying atmospheric CO2 carbon uptake estimates, with the best solution being the one that maximizes the landscape carbon uptake; and (iii) Maximization of the landscape economic value – each solution is validated by applying an economic value (derived from expert judgment), with the best solution being the one that maximizes the landscape economic value. As an optimization problem, not all possible land use assignments are feasible. GeneticLand considers two sets of restrictions that must be met: (i) physical constraints (soil type suitability, slope, rainfall-evapotranspiration ratio, and a soil wetness index) and (ii) landscape ecology restrictions at several levels (minimum patch area, land use adjacency index and landscape contagion index). The former assures physical feasibility and the latter the spatial coherence of the landscape. The physical and landscape restrictions were derived from the analysis of past events based on a time series of Landsat images (1985-2003), in order to identify the drivers of land use change and structure. Since the problem has multiple objectives, the GA integrates multi-objective extensions allowing it to evolve a set of non-dominated solutions. An evolutive type algorithm – Evolutive strategy (1+1) – is used, due to the need to accommodate the very large solution space. Current applications have about 1000 decision variables, while the problem analysed by GeneticLand has almost 111000, generated by a landscape with 333*333 discrete pixels. GeneticLand is developed and validated for a Mediterranean type landscape located in southern Portugal. Future climate triggers, such as the increase of intense rainfall episodes, is accommodated to simulate climate change . This paper presents: (1) the formulation of land use modelling as an optimization problem; (2) the formulation of the GA for the explicit spatial domain, (3) the land use constraints derived for a Mediterranean landscape, (4) the results illustrating conflicting objectives, and (5) limitations encountered.

Access networks for mobility: a techno-economic model for broadband access technologies

The two main challenges for the access networks are the increasing bandwidth demand and mobility trends. The "triple play" services required (Internet, telephone and TV services) lead to a great increase in bandwidth demand. However, the existing access networks are not able to support this increase, and the capacity to delivery broadband services remain as a challenge ("last mile problem"). The access network remains a bottleneck in terms of the bandwidth and service quality it affords the end user. Besides the bandwidth, other great challenge to access networks is the mobility and the user need to have internet access anywhere and anytime. Then, the increasing demand of "quad-play" (also known as quadruple-play) services, including video, voice, data and mobility, have created new challenges to the modern broadband wireless/wired access networks. This document proposes a techno-economic model to support the new requirements of fixed and nomadic users

Game theoretic modeling of NGANs: impact of retail and wholesale services price variation

The increasing demand for broadband access leads operators to upgrade the existing access infrastructures (or building new access network). Broadband access networks require higher investments (especially passive infrastructures such as trenches/ducts and base station towers/masts), and before making any decision it is important to analyze all solutions. The selection of the best solution requires understanding the technical possibilities and limitations of the different access technologies, as well as understanding the costs of building and operating the networks. This study analyzes the effect of asymmetric retail and wholesale prices on operators’ NPV, profit, consumer surplus, welfare, retail market, wholesale market, and so on. For that, we propose a tehno-economic model complemented by a theoretic-game model. This tool identifies all the essential costs of building (and operating) access networks, and performs a detailed analysis and comparison of the different solutions in various scenarios. Communities, operators/service providers, and regulators can use this tool to compare different technological solutions, forecast deployment costs, compare diferente scenarios, and so on, and help them in making deployment (or regulatory) decisions. The game-theory analyses give a better understanding of the competition and its effect on the business case scenarios’ economic results