Quantifying the legacy of the Chinese Neolithic on the maternal genetic heritage of Taiwan and Island Southeast Asia

There has been a long-standing debate concerning the extent to which the spread of Neolithic ceramics and Malay-Polynesian languages in Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) were coupled to an agriculturally driven demic dispersal out of Taiwan 4000 years ago (4 ka). We previously addressed this question using founder analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control-region sequences to identify major lineage clusters most likely to have dispersed from Taiwan into ISEA, proposing that the dispersal had a relatively minor impact on the extant genetic structure of ISEA, and that the role of agriculture in the expansion of the Austronesian languages was therefore likely to have been correspondingly minor. Here we test these conclusions by sequencing whole mtDNAs from across Taiwan and ISEA, using their higher chronological precision to resolve the overall proportion that participated in the "out-of-Taiwan" mid-Holocene dispersal as opposed to earlier, postglacial expansions in the Early Holocene. We show that, in total, about 20 % of mtDNA lineages in the modern ISEA pool result from the "out-of-Taiwan" dispersal, with most of the remainder signifying earlier processes, mainly due to sea-level rises after the Last Glacial Maximum. Notably, we show that every one of these founder clusters previously entered Taiwan from China, 6-7 ka, where rice-farming originated, and remained distinct from the indigenous Taiwanese population until after the subsequent dispersal into ISEA.

Aprender a debater: o debate como atividade de interação e de participação democrática

Relatório de estágio de mestrado em Ensino de Inglês e de Espanhol no 3º Ciclo do Ensino Básico e no Ensino Secundário

Process simulation support in BPM tools: The case of BPMN

Due to the increasing acceptance of BPM, nowadays BPM tools are extensively used in organizations. Core to BPM are the process modeling languages, of which BPMN is the one that has been receiving most attention these days. Once a business process is described using BPMN, one can use a process simulation approach in order to find its optimized form. In this context, the simulation of business processes, such as those defined in BPMN, appears as an obvious way of improving processes. This paper analyzes the business process modeling and simulation areas, identifying the elements that must be present in the BPMN language in order to allow processes described in BPMN to be simulated. During this analysis a set of existing BPM tools, which support BPMN, are compared regarding their limitations in terms of simulation support.

Using relational algebra on the specification of real world ETL processes

Modeling Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes of a Data Warehousing System has always been a challenge. The heterogeneity of the sources, the quality of the data obtained and the conciliation process are some of the issues that must be addressed in the design phase of this critical component. Commercial ETL tools often provide proprietary diagrammatic components and modeling languages that are not standard, thus not providing the ideal separation between a modeling platform and an execution platform. This separation in conjunction with the use of standard notations and languages is critical in a system that tends to evolve through time and which cannot be undermined by a normally expensive tool that becomes an unsatisfactory component. In this paper we demonstrate the application of Relational Algebra as a modeling language of an ETL system as an effort to standardize operations and provide a basis for uncommon ETL execution platforms.

The greener grass: da autorrepresentação em Alanis Morissette

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências da Literatura - Especialidade em Teoria da Literatura

On the verification of architectural reconfigurations

In a reconfigurable system, the response to contextual or internal change may trigger reconfiguration events which, on their turn, activate scripts that change the system׳s architecture at runtime. To be safe, however, such reconfigurations are expected to obey the fundamental principles originally specified by its architect. This paper introduces an approach to ensure that such principles are observed along reconfigurations by verifying them against concrete specifications in a suitable logic. Architectures, reconfiguration scripts, and principles are specified in Archery, an architectural description language with formal semantics. Principles are encoded as constraints, which become formulas of a two-layer graded hybrid logic, where the upper layer restricts reconfigurations, and the lower layer constrains the resulting configurations. Constraints are verified by translating them into logic formulas, which are interpreted over models derived from Archery specifications of architectures and reconfigurations. Suitable notions of bisimulation and refinement, to which the architect may resort to compare configurations, are given, and their relationship with modal validity is discussed.

Internship report of blog translation at the company Menina Design Group

Dissertação de mestrado em Tradução e Comunicação Multilingue