Friendship, Gender and Sexual Experience: Retrospective Narratives About the Formation of a Sexual Self During Youth

In this article, I explore the ways in which friendship contributes to shaping the boundaries of men's and women's sexual experiences. Using inputs from the sociology of experience and the sociology of friendship, I explore qualitative data from a research about sexuality in Portugal, in which I collected sexual biographies of 35 men and women, aged 30-55. In the in-depth interviews, these adult participants, possessing secondary and tertiary education, and living in urban areas, reflected retrospectively about their sexual biography, including their childhood and youth. The main thesis is that the practices of friendship (which structure those relationships as social facts) also help to structure sexual practices and representations and, through them, to construct the contemporary sexual self. Those practices may be discursive ('talking' and 'chatting'), or rather oriented to action ('doing things together'). In this article, I focus on discursive friendship practices, and how they contribute to shaping contemporary sexual experience. Drawing on F. Dubet's sociology of experience, I argue that this relationship is defined in the tension along three dimensions: integration, strategy and subjectivation. This process is cross-cut by gender, as discursive friendship practices interact differently with the dimensions of sexual experience, in that strategy mainly reinforces definitions and enactment of hegemonic forms of masculinity, while subjectivation helps to challenge them and to build plural gender experiences (both feminine and masculine).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

“The real deal”: managing intimacy within friendship at a distance

How is intimacy constructed between friends who live apart, at a long distance? Family studies have paid considerable attention to the (re)negotiation processes of personal and intimate bonds within transnational families. However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which these structural constraints affect intimate relationships between friends. As significant members of the personal networks of individuals, friends have a supportive role that, in the continuum of other personal relationships (family, co-workers, neighbors, acquaintances), is challenged by the increasing mobility that characterizes contemporary global post-industrial societies. While a significant amount of literature has underlined the negative impact of geographical distance in friendships, other studies have suggested otherwise, stressing the renewed importance of friendship ties between geographically long-distant young adults. This paper explores long distance friendships (LDFs) focusing mainly on two dimensions: the meanings given to intimacy and the practices of friendship at a distance. The main hypothesis is that transformations of intimacy between long-distant friends are likely to be associated with reconfiguration of the meanings given to friendship, as well as to the norms that regulate them. On the one hand, the erosion of friendship is associated with the impossibility of keeping a face-to-face, co-present, accompanying contact, which is part of the expected normative role of friendship. On the other hand, its reconfiguration is mostly associated with those routines and rituals that keep friendship alive by permanently reenacting a sense of self identity and "ontological security" through the "work of memory." The role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in fostering intimacy within an LDF is also explored, as these have considerably changed the ways we relate to geographical distance and, therefore, the norms that shape intimate relationships.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Daphne the Cat: Reimagining human–animal boundaries on Facebook

How are companion animals, and cats in particular, built as Otherness, on social media? And how are human–animal boundaries reconfigured along the flow of online digital interactions? This article tries to answer these questions drawing on the story of female cat Daphne, as reported on the official Facebook page of a Portuguese animal shelter. Based on both narrative analysis and categorical content analysis of the posts and comments around the story, the article discusses the social construction of nonhuman animals, bringing together concepts from human–animal studies, science and technology studies, and media studies. It argues that, through digital practices on social media, animals are done and undone. Two emergent and conflicting versions of the same animal, Daphne, are constructed throughout the unstable and contingent flow of digital exchanges: the-animal-victim and the-animal-maladjusted. As such, digital practices become also animal practices, contributing to normative definitions of what an animal ‘is’. As a result, human–animal boundaries are reinstalled and reinforced, and the animals themselves become, once more and paradoxically, invisible.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Crítica a la cultura fósil. La estructura económica como unidad de análisis del cambio cultural paleolítico

Nowadays, technological and processual interpretation of the lithic record has been generalized, partly displacing theclassical typological approach. Thereby the lithic variability and technological change have started to be contextualizedin the economical and environmental processes surrounding the lithic tool production. However, typology is still the onlyargument when discussing about cultural evolution, since the traditional sequence divided into “fossil cultures”, eachcharacterized by distinct and recurrent “guide fossil” assemblages, is widely applied. Thus, in this paper we argue thatit is necessary to create a new palaeo-cultural model that more properly suits the Palaeolithic record, getting rid of thesacredness of the object, challenging the direct relationship between morpho-types and cultural traditions and suppressingthe lithic record privilege as the only marker of cultural shift. In conclusion, we propose the economic structure asthe analytical unit to approach the Palaeolithic cultural change.Actualmente se ha generalizado una interpretación del registro lítico en clave tecnológica y procesual que ha desplazadoen parte al enfoque tipológico. Esto ha significado que la variabilidad y el cambio industrial sean contextualizadosdentro de los procesos económicos y ambientales en el que se activan las estrategias de talla. Sin embargo, la tipologíasigue siendo el único argumento vigente cuando se habla de evolución cultural, pues se continúa empleando la tradicionalsecuencia evolutiva dividida en “culturas fósiles” definidas a su vez por la agrupación recurrente de “fósilesdirectores”. Así las cosas, nos parece necesario la creación de un modelo paleocultural que se ajuste a la realidad delregistro paleolítico, se libere de la sacralidad del objeto, cuestione la inapelable relación establecida entre morfo-tipoy tradición cultural y suprima el privilegio concedido al registro lítico como marcador absoluto del cambio cultural.Para ello partimos de la asunción de que la evolución cultural va más allá de la variabilidad diacrónica industrial yproponemos la estructura económica como la unidad de análisis del cambio cultural

Creation of general traffic indicators for the city of Lisbon through the crossing of diversified information

Tese de mestrado, Engenharia Informática , 2022, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasWith the increase in the amount of vehicles and the population in big cities, problems related to traffic jams, traffic congestion and pollution arise with it. A lot of investigation has been done to try and solve or, at least, mitigate this problem. Governments are trying to mitigate traffic congestion and traffic jams by better understanding traffic, its characteristics and its patterns and getting insights about traffic. The purpose of this research is to create general traffic indicators for the city of Lisbon and, to do so, we will apply state of the art methods to a dataset of traffic from the city of Lisbon, provided by Camara Municipal de Lisboa ˆ that contain traffic data from the years of 2019 and 2020. We discuss the several types of data used in this type of problem, the pre-processing techniques used to transform the data, the several state of the art methods used for both prediction of traffic flow, and classification of different traffic situations, and also the performance metrics used to evaluate results. We make an exploratory and a more complex analysis to the provided data and also a discussion about the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on the data and the problems that this could bring. We explain all the pre-processing and data cleaning techniques we used to handle the data, all the prediction models used, as in LSTM and ARIMA, and all the classification models used, as in Decision Tree Classifier and SVM. For the prediction task, LSTM obtained a mean RMSE of 10.493, while ARIMA got a mean RMSE of 38.722. For the classification task, DTC got a mean accuracy of 96.7%, while SVM got a mean accuracy of 88.6%

Humanos, demasiado humanos

En evolución humana los grandes debates oscilan entre un punto de vista gradualista o puntualista, aunque todos ellos tienen un único fin: trazar la frontera entre el hombre y el mono. Sin saberlo, ambas posturas construyen la misma deontología del ser humano, pues ambas se centran en el "comportamiento moderno" como paradigma de la humanidad. En este artículo, por un lado, pretendemos deconstruir la carga trascendental que se ha depositado sobre esta cuestión; y, por el otro, a través de un breve repaso del proceso de humanización, proponer una serie de atributos bio-comportamentales cuya concurrencia, fuera de todo sesgo filosófico, dotan de entidad al ser humano.The main debates about human evolution fluctuate between the gradualism and the puntualism point of view, although all of them have one only aim: draw the boundary between the human being and the monkey. Without knowing it, both views build the same deonthology about the human being, since they understand the "modern behaviour" as a paradigm of humankind. In this paper, on the one hand, we are going to deconstruct the transcendental charge places in this question; on the other hand, by means of a short revision of the humanization process, we suggest several bio-behaviour attributes whose convergence provides entity to the human being, regardless of all philosophical slant

Arqueología de la modernidad

Presentamos un enfoque procesual de los pensamientos sobre los que se ha construido la Modernidad, a la luz del contexto histórico-cultural que los crea y crean. Este proyecto, levantado sobre dos fuerzas de empuje en conflicto, tras siglos de desarrollo se ha colapsado. Se hace necesario, pues, que la modernidad despliegue su heroicidad y se auto-regenere. Para ello, debe partir de sus mejores cualidades: el discernimiento crítico, la reflexión y el dialogo racional.A processualistic approach is offered in the study of that thinking giving rise to modernism from the historical cultural context in which the phenomenon has arisen and evolves. Built upon two opposing forces, it has collapsed after various centuries of development. Modernism is thus called to heroism and must regenerate, availing itself of its best of qualities: critical thinking, reflection and rational dialogue

Variation-aware high-level DSP circuit design optimisation framework for FPGAs

The constant technology shrinking and the increasing demand for systems that operate under different power profiles with the maximum performance, have motivated the work in this thesis. Modern design tools that target FPGA devices take a conservative approach in the estimation of the maximum performance that can be achieved by a design when it is placed on a device, accounting for any variability in the fabrication process of the device. The work presented here takes a new view on the performance improvement of DSP designs by pushing them into the error-prone regime, as defined by the synthesis tools, and by investigating methodologies that reduce the impact of timing errors at the output of the system. In this work two novel error reduction techniques are proposed to address this problem. One is based on reduced-precision redundancy and the other on an error optimisation framework that uses information from a prior characterisation of the device. The first one is a generic architecture that is appended to existing arithmetic operators. The second defines the high-level parameters of the algorithm without using extra resources. Both of these methods allow to achieve graceful degradation whilst variation increases. A comparison of the new methods is laid against the existing methodologies, and conclusions drawn on the tradeoffs between their cost, in terms of resources and errors, and their benefits in terms of throughput. In some cases it is possible to double the performance of the design while still producing valid results.Open Acces