Political Elites in Federalized Countries: The Case of Spain (1980-2005). CES Working Paper, no. 146, 2008

This paper explores the social profile of the regional elite that has emerged in Spain since the de-mocratization and federalization of the country. For the first time, researchers present data about crucial variables like gender, place of birth, age, education, and profession. They make inter-regional comparisons, put their data on an international perspective, and try to explain some un-expected findings, such as the behavior of political elites in Catalonia and Castile-La Mancha. The authors compare also the social profile of MPs of the two largest parties and show that the gap between society and political elite has been reduced over the years. The paper offers a research agenda

Aspecto do neoconstitucionalismo

Trata do estado atual que envolve o direito constitucional, analisando a atmosfera teórica, metodológica e ideológica do neoconstitucionalismo

The social rise of a housing intervention: Álvaro Siza project for Bouça neighbourhood

The creation, in 1974, of SAAL was intended to assist financially challenged populations to obtain a decent dwelling. It corresponded to a unique moment in the history of Portugal, following April 25th revolution, where participatory processes were tested in a close relationship between the designers (the brigades) and the population.The Bouça Housing Complex, a project of Álvaro Siza, was included in SAAL promotion and corresponded to an adaptation of a pre-revolution project, prepared for FFH. The construction process was interrupted in 1978 (following SAAL's extinction in October 1976) and only the first phase was completed - 58 houses out of a total of 131 - corresponding to intermediate areas of implantation and without definitive access. In a central area of Porto, Bouça remained as a revolutionary open scar for almost 25 years, until 1999, when Álvaro Siza was invited to conclude the intervention with the construction of the absent buildings and the rehabilitation of existing ones, work that was finished in 2006. Bouça Housing Complex corresponds to an exceptional operation in national context, not only due to the intrinsic characteristics of the project but also because of its process and constructive definition. Bouça was finished nearly three decades after its starting, incorporating new issues that buildings and architecture meanwhile had to face - such as the inescapable role of the car or new demands of comfort and energy consumption and rethinking the whole construction system balancing new requirements and respect for the initial idea. Even though new intervention should have been based on the same initial conditions, in terms of areas, building systems but also the social population for which it was intended - the former residents of 1974s degraded houses and who were eventually relocated to other urban areas - upon conclusion few were the initial residents who decided to return to their place of origin and a middle-upper class population (with an expected high incidence of architects) acquired the small houses.The objective of this paper is to present an analysis of the two constructive phases of Bouça Housing Complex, assessing design, constructive definition, occupancy and social transformations

Using data mining to predict automobile insurance fraud

This thesis presents a study on the issue of Automobile Insurance Fraud. The purpose of this study is to increase knowledge concerning fraudulent claims in the Portuguese market, while raising awareness to the use of Data Mining techniques towards this, and other similar problems. We conduct an application of data mining techniques to the problem of predicting automobile insurance fraud, shown to be of interest to insurance companies around the world. We present fraud definitions and conduct an overview of existing literature on the subject. Live policy and claim data from the Portuguese insurance market in 2005 is used to train a Logit Regression Model and a CHAID Classification and Regression Tree. The use of Data Mining tools and techniques enabled the identification of underlying fraud patterns, specific to the raw data used to build the models. The list of potential fraud indicators includes variables such as the policy’s tenure, the number of policy holders, not admitting fault in the accident or fractioning premium payments semiannually. Other variables such as the number of days between the accident and the patient filing the claim, the client’s age, and the geographical location of the accident were also found to be relevant in specific sub-populations of the used dataset. Model variables and coefficients are interpreted comparatively and key performance results are presented, including PCC, sensitivity, specificity and AUROC. Both the Logit Model and the CHAID C&R Tree achieve fair results in predicting automobile insurance fraud in the used dataset

Wealth management in Africa: the cape verde opportunity

This work project consists of a comprehensive study of the possibility of opening a Wealth Management (WM) firm located in Cape Verde (CV), and was made at the request of NovoBanco’s Research Sectorial team. WM is a growing industry that consists in the set of financial services provided to wealthy clients. After taking into account the expected industry growth of the Sub-Saharan region, the preferences of the African wealthy, the current industry structure, and the advantages and disadvantages of locating a WM business in CV, it is concluded that a business opportunity exists. The reasons for thus, along with relevant recommendations, including which services a new business should offer and whom to target specifically, are presented in the final section.UNL - NSB

A modular distributed transactional memory framework

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaThe traditional lock-based concurrency control is complex and error-prone due to its low-level nature and composability challenges. Software transactional memory (STM), inherited from the database world, has risen as an exciting alternative, sparing the programmer from dealing explicitly with such low-level mechanisms. In real world scenarios, software is often faced with requirements such as high availability and scalability, and the solution usually consists on building a distributed system. Given the benefits of STM over traditional concurrency controls, Distributed Software Transactional Memory (DSTM) is now being investigated as an attractive alternative for distributed concurrency control. Our long-term objective is to transparently enable multithreaded applications to execute over a DSTM setting. In this work we intend to pave the way by defining a modular DSTM framework for the Java programming language. We extend an existing, efficient, STM framework with a new software layer to create a DSTM framework. This new layer interacts with the local STM using well-defined interfaces, and allows the implementation of different distributed memory models while providing a non-intrusive, familiar,programming model to applications, unlike any other DSTM framework. Using the proposed DSTM framework we have successfully, and easily, implemented a replicated STM which uses a Certification protocol to commit transactions. An evaluation using common STM benchmarks showcases the efficiency of the replicated STM,and its modularity enables us to provide insight on the relevance of different implementations of the Group Communication System required by the Certification scheme, with respect to performance under different workloads.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - project (PTDC/EIA-EIA/113613/2009

Cenários urbanos na poesia de Walt Whitman

One of the most striking features in 19th century poetry is the scenes of astonishing industrial progress, the development of the cities, the people who rush around, either working or just living their lives. Such urban scenarios are constant images in poems of this period. American poet Walt Whitman is also one of the poets who conveys urban movement through his poetry. With these characteristics as a starting point, the purpose of this article is to focus on the urban images in Whitman’s poetry, analyzing the poetry of the cities. Closely linked to Baudelaire’s flâneur, Whitman also observes city life from a contemplative point of view. In poems like City of Ships, I Hear America Singing, Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry, among others, Whitman sings of city life, its constant movement, its people and its landscapes. Focusing on the poet’s observation of urban life in the nineteenth century, this article also intends to make a link between the 19th Century idea of modernity and Whitman’s poems. A small selection of poems from Leaves of Grass which highlights these characteristics was chosen to be the focus of this analysis.Uma das características mais marcantes na poesia do século XIX são as cenas do progresso industrial assustador, o desenvolvimento das cidades, as pessoas que passam apressadas, quer trabalhando ou apenas vivendo suas vidas.Tais cenários urbanos são imagens constantes nos poemas desse período. O poeta americano Walt Whitman também é um desses poetas, ele canta o movimento urbano através de sua poesia. Tendo tais elementos como ponto de partida, a proposta deste artigo é focalizar nas imagens urbanas da poesia de Whitman, analisando a poesia vista nas cidades, a partir de seu ponto de vista. Diretamente relacionado com o flaneur de Baudelair, Whitman também observa a vida na cidade de forma contemplativa. Em poemas como Cidade dos Navios, Eu Ouço a América Cantar, Atravessando a Balsa do Brooklin, entre outros, Whitman canta a vida da cidade, seu movimento constante, suas pessoas e suas paisagens. Tendo como foco o poeta que observa a vida urbana do século XIX, este artigo também pretende fazer um elo entre ideia de modernidade do século XIX e os poemas de Whitman, foram escolhidos alguns poemas da coletânea Folhas de Relva que destacam tais elementos para esta análise

Nominal disunification

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Departamento de Matemática, 2019.Propõe-se uma extensão para problemas de disunificação de primeira-ordem adicionando suporte a operadores de ligação de acordo com a abordagem nominal. Nesta abordagem, abstração é implementada usando átomos nominais ao invés de variáveis de ligação como na representação clássica de termos e renomeamento de átomos é implementado por permutações. Em lógica nominal problemas de unificação consistem de perguntas equacionais da forma s ≈α ? t (lê-se: s é α-equivalente a t?) consideradas sobre problemas de freshness da forma a# ? t (lê-se: a é fresco em t?) que restringem soluções proibindo ocorrências livres de átomos na instanciação de variáveis. Além dessas questões equacionais e freshness, problemas de disunificação nominal incluem restrições na forma de disequações s ̸≈α ? t (lê-se: s é αdiferente de t?) com soluções dadas por pares consistindo de uma substituição σ e um conjunto de restrições de freshness na forma a#X tal que sobre estas restrições a σ-instanciação de equações, disequações, e problemas de freshness são válidas. Mostra-se, reutilizando noções de unificação nominal, como decidir se dois termos nominais podem ser feitos diferentes módulo α-equivalência. Isso é feito extendendo resultados anteriores sobre disunificação de primeira ordem e definindo a noção de soluções com exceção na linguagem nominal. Uma discussão sobre a semântica de restrições em forma de disequações também é apresentada.Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq).An extension of first-order disunification problems is proposed by taking into account binding operators according to the nominal approach. In this approach, bindings are implemented through nominal atoms used instead of binding variables and renaming of atoms are implemented by atom permutations. In the nominal setting, unification problems consist of equational questions of the form s ≈α ? t (read: is s α-equivalent to t?) considered under freshness problems a# ? t (read: is a fresh for t?) that restrict solutions by forbidding free occurrences of atoms in the instantiations of variables. In addition to equational and freshness problems, nominal disunification problems also include nominal disunification constraints in the form of disequations s ̸≈α ? t (read: is s α-different to t?) and their solutions consist of pairs of a substitution σ and a finite set of freshness constraints in the form of a#X such that under these restrictions the σ-instantiation of the equations, disequations, and freshness problems holds. By re-using nominal unification techniques, it is shown how to decide whether two nominal terms can be made different modulo α-equivalence. This is done by extending previous results on first-order disunification and by defining the notion of solutions with exceptions in the nominal syntax. A discussion on the semantics of disunification constraints is also given