Ethics and science in brazilian legal discourse

The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 declares Brazil as a Democratic State of Law. This formally democratic legal status has been facing difficulties when it comes to its material implementation. Brazilian legal procedures are still greatly influenced by the catholic heritage from Portugal in the times of colonization, translated in the present times into a strong moral set of dogmas that still reflects upon the legal production and interpretation in the country. Recently in Brazil, a debate brought to the Supremo Tribunal Federal, the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court, has evidenced the struggle between Ethics and Morality in the country’s legal scenario. The focus of the discussion was the possibility of abortion of anencephalic fetuses (in Brazil, abortion in considered a crime against life). In order to properly ground its decision, the Court invited scientists, doctors, members of feminist movements and representatives of certain religions to a public dialogue, in which both scientific-technical and purely moral-religious arguments were presented. Although these procedures encouraged and promoted a democratic and pluralistic legal debate, it seems like the crucial point of the discussion were not taken into account: the scientific character of Law. This is the object of the present manuscript: in order to ensure an intersubjective construction and application of Law, this must be perceived as an Applied Social Science and judges, lawyers, legislators and all other legal actors must proceed in a scientific way. To illustrate the theme, the specific case of abortion of anencephalic fetuses will be mentioned through the text

The Robust Reading Competition Annotation and Evaluation Platform

The ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (RRC), initiated in 2003 and re-established in 2011, has become a de-facto evaluation standard for robust reading systems and algorithms. Concurrent with its second incarnation in 2011, a continuous effort started to develop an on-line framework to facilitate the hosting and management of competitions. This paper outlines the Robust Reading Competition Annotation and Evaluation Platform, the backbone of the competitions. The RRC Annotation and Evaluation Platform is a modular framework, fully accessible through on-line interfaces. It comprises a collection of tools and services for managing all processes involved with defining and evaluating a research task, from dataset definition to annotation management, evaluation specification and results analysis. Although the framework has been designed with robust reading research in mind, many of the provided tools are generic by design. All aspects of the RRC Annotation and Evaluation Framework are available for research use.Comment: 6 pages, accepted to DAS 201

Unsupervised Adaptation for Synthetic-to-Real Handwritten Word Recognition

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is still a challenging problem because it must deal with two important difficulties: the variability among writing styles, and the scarcity of labelled data. To alleviate such problems, synthetic data generation and data augmentation are typically used to train HTR systems. However, training with such data produces encouraging but still inaccurate transcriptions in real words. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised writer adaptation approach that is able to automatically adjust a generic handwritten word recognizer, fully trained with synthetic fonts, towards a new incoming writer. We have experimentally validated our proposal using five different datasets, covering several challenges (i) the document source: modern and historic samples, which may involve paper degradation problems; (ii) different handwriting styles: single and multiple writer collections; and (iii) language, which involves different character combinations. Across these challenging collections, we show that our system is able to maintain its performance, thus, it provides a practical and generic approach to deal with new document collections without requiring any expensive and tedious manual annotation step.Comment: Accepted to WACV 202

Testing the Hypothesis of Contagion using Multivariate Volatility Models

The aim of this paper is to test whether or not there was evidence of contagion across the various financial crises that assailed some countries in the 1990s. Data on sovereign debt bonds for Brazil, Mexico, Russia and Argentina were used to implement the test. The contagion hypothesis is tested using multivariate volatility models. If there is any evidence of structural break in volatility that can be linked to financial crises, the contagion hypothesis will be confirmed. Results suggest that there is evidence in favor of the contagion hypothesisContagion, Multivariate Volatility Models

Diffracting Histories of Performance

This article aims to explore the historicization and archiving of performance artworks created during the Portuguese dictatorship (1926–74), through diffraction - a conceptual framework grounded in new materialisms. Drawing on feminist frameworks, it proposes that the reconstruction of performance art’s historical milieu works on stages of appearance and disappearance in relation to ideas of absence and the performative archive. This is particularly relevant in the case of performance artworks created in Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s. Framed by their disappearance in periods leading to the 1990s, this art genre has been characterized as dormant, lacking inscription, or absent from art history. This paper investigates forms of historicization that question the official art historical narratives and that come to the fore through the gaps of the social fabric where these narratives emerge. In questioning how we can recover the performative potential of those works, the article analyses two artworks – Negative Music (1965), by E. M. de Melo e Castro, and Identificacíon (1975), by Manoel Barbosa. The gaps that emerge through the works’ multiple existences after the event are made apparent, reframing the process of their disappearance as a radical gesture of potentiality. Through the discussion of the re-enactment process of Identificacíon, led by the artist and choreographer Vânia Rovisco in the context of her project REACTING TO TIME: The Portuguese in Performance, this paper shows how the existent gaps reclaiming the transformative potential of those absences through participation. The article then proposes that the transformative potential of the gaps in that history comes to fore by diffracting centres of authority to Others. Otherness, in this sense, amplifies the dislocation of authority from the artist and radiates towards a multiplicity of perspectives and bodies, creating an abundancy of material and ethical intra-actions at each encounter

Comunicació i política: el cas de ‘News of the World’

En les democràcies liberals els mass media s’ocupen de fer de mitjancers, de mediar, entre la realitat i els seus lectors o la seva audiència. Per extensió, entre la realitat i la societat. Per tant, els mitjans constitueixen també un sistema fonamental d’interrelació entre ciutadans i grups socials. Gràcies als mitjans, els ciutadans saben què fan i què els ocorre a d’altres persones i poden prendre posició o actuar en conseqüència