Metodologias participativas: os media e a educação

"Livros LabCom. Pesquisas em comunicação"(Excerto) Este livro representa o corolário de mais de dois anos de trabalho num projeto de investigação ação-participação no qual a rádio e a internet se uniram para fomentar novos horizontes de cidadania, de diálogo e de aprendizagem fora da escola. Trata-se de uma coleção de textos com experiências e reflexões que ajudam a compreender melhor o potencial cívico e educativo de projetos que se apoiam nestas plataformas, que partilham estes objetivos de empoderamento social e que aplicam este tipo de metodologias. Efetivamente, as metodologias participativas podem facilitar processos de aprendizagem e de identificação positiva dos indivíduos envolvidos com os projetos (Brites et al., 2014a; Brites et al., 2014b; Santos et al., 2015), muito em especial quando é estimulada uma praxis e uma reflexão (Brites et al, 2014b; Brites et al. 2014c). A mediatização do mundo atual, consubstanciada em diversos formatos e com presença ubíqua, coadjuva o uso de ferramentas de mediatização que facilitam processos de integração, de cidadania e de ligação do individual ao colectivo

Distributed video coding for wireless video sensor networks: a review of the state-of-the-art architectures

Distributed video coding (DVC) is a relatively new video coding architecture originated from two fundamental theorems namely, Slepian–Wolf and Wyner–Ziv. Recent research developments have made DVC attractive for applications in the emerging domain of wireless video sensor networks (WVSNs). This paper reviews the state-of-the-art DVC architectures with a focus on understanding their opportunities and gaps in addressing the operational requirements and application needs of WVSNs

Does counseling increase sustained benefit of HAART among prison inmates after release to the community?

The lack of sustained effectiveness of HAART after release to the community of HIV-infected inmates treated in prison was well demonstrated by Springer et al. in a recent article. This disappointing result occurred even though all of the patients scheduled for release were referred for transitional case management services to a community-based organization and were provided with a 2-week supply of medications, a medical appointment with an HIV care provider, emergency housing and food, and assistance with other identified unmet needs

Lanthanide grafted phenanthroline-polymer for physiological temperature range sensing

Accurate measurement of the temperature is crucial as it determines the dynamics of almost any system. Conventional contact thermometers are not well suited for small scale measurements. Temperature dependent luminescent materials, i.e. materials that emit light of different color at different temperature, are therefore of particular interest in the development of noncontact thermometers. Luminescent materials consisting of lanthanide ions feature high thermal sensitivity, high photostability and high quantum yields. These ions possess very interesting light emitting properties. By anchoring them onto different backbone materials, their light absorption is increased. The search for a backbone that allows the sensor to be active in a defined temperature range, with a high detection sensitivity is ongoing. This work reports the first insoluble phenanthroline-polymer (phen-polymer) backbone on which europium (Eu3+) and terbium (Tb3+) trifluoroacetylacetone (tfac) complexes are easily grafted in a 1 : 1 metal ratio in order to create a noncontact temperature sensor. Two clear, discriminable emission peaks were observed during the photoluminescence study at room temperature, demonstrating that this material can be used as a ratiometric thermometer. The characteristic emission peak correlated to Eu3+ transition is slightly stronger than the emission peak of Tb3+ transition, resulting in a yellow emission color. The maximum value of the relative temperature sensitivity was calculated to be 2.3404% K-1 (340 K), which indicated good thermometric behavior. The emission color of the designed phen-polymer@Eu,Tb_tfac changed from light green (260 K) to orange-red (460 K). The thermometer can therefore be used as a ratiometric noncontact temperature sensor in the broad physiological temperature range

The Credibility of Cabo Verde’s Currency Peg

This paper studies the credibility of the currency peg of Cape Verde (CV) by assessing the impact of economic fundamentals, our explanatory variables, on the stochastic properties of Exchange Market Pressure (EMP), the dependent variable, using EGARCH-M models. Our EMP descriptive analysis finds a substantial reduction in the number of crisis episodes and of (unconditional) volatility after the peg’s adoption. Moreover, our estimation results suggest that mean EMP is driven by fundamentals and that conditional variability is more sensitive to negative shocks. We also find evidence that the expected return from holding CV’s assets is lower under the currency peg for the same increase in monthly volatility. The reason is that the return’s composition is “more virtuous”, as it results from the strengthening of CV’s foreign reserve position and is not due to either a larger risk premium or favourable exchange rate movements. We take this to be a sign of the credibility of the peg, which apparently reflects the intertemporal credibility of CV’s economic policy and so has successfully withstood international markets’ scrutiny.

Maize open-pollinated populations physiological improvement: validating tools for drought response participatory selection

Participatory selection—exploiting specific adaptation traits to target environments—helps to guarantees yield stability in a changing climate, in particular under low-input or organic production. The purpose of the present study was to identify reliable, low-cost, fast and easy-to-use tools to complement traditional selection for an e ective participatory improvement of maize populations for drought resistance/tolerance. The morphological and eco-physiological responses to progressive water deprivation of four maize open-pollinated populations were assessed in both controlled and field conditions. Thermography and Chl a fluorescence, validated by gas exchange indicated that the best performing populations under water-deficit conditions were ‘Fandango’ and to a less extent ‘Pigarro’ (both from participatory breeding). These populations showed high yield potential under optimal and reduced watering. Under moderate water stress, ‘Bilhó’, originating from an altitude of 800 m, is one of the most resilient populations. The experiments under chamber conditions confirmed the existence of genetic variability within ‘Pigarro’ and ‘Fandango’ for drought response relevant for future populations breeding. Based on the easiness to score and population discriminatory power, the performance index (PIABS) emerges as an integrative phenotyping tool to use as a refinement of the common participatory maize selection especially under moderate water deprivationinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Intra-WZ quantization mismatch in distributed video coding

During the past decade, Distributed Video Coding (DVC) has emerged as a new video coding paradigm, shifting the complexity from the encoder-to the decoder-side. This paper addresses a problem of current DVC architectures that has not been studied in the literature so far, that is, the mismatch between the intra and Wyner-Ziv (WZ) quantization processes. Due to this mismatch, WZ rate is spent even for spatial regions that are accurately approximated by the side-information. As a solution, this paper proposes side-information generation using selective unidirectional motion compensation from temporally adjacent WZ frames. Experimental results show that the proposed approach yields promising WZ rate gains of up to 7% relative to the conventional method