The role of cultural mega events in the enhancement of city’s image attributes: differences between engaged and attendee participants

In a time of fierce competition between regions, an image serve as a basis to develop a strong sense of community, which fosters trust and cooperation that can be mobilized for regional growth. A positive image and reputation could be used in the promotional activities of the region benefiting all the stakeholders as a whole. Mega cultural events are frequently used to attract tourists and investments to a region, but also to enhance the city’s image. This study adopts a marketing/communication perspective of city’s image, and intends to explain how the image of the city is perceived by their residents. Specifically, we intend to compare the perceptions of residents that effectively participated in the Guimarães European Capital of Culture (ECOC) 2012 (engaged residents), and the residents that only assisted to the event (attendees). Several significant findings are reported and their implications for event managers and public policy administrators presented, along with the limitations of the study.

Cultural mega-events and the enhancement of a city's image: differences between engaged participants and attendees

A city’s image can serve as the basis upon which to develop a strong sense of community. This, in turn, fosters trust and cooperation which may attract tourists and investment, and drive regional economic growth. One strategy to enhance a city’s image is to host cultural mega-events. This study focuses on Guimarães, one of the European Capitals of Culture of 2012, and adopts a marketing communication perspective to explore issues of city image. The objective of the study reported was to understand whether images of Guimarães improved after it hosted the cultural mega-event. To attain this goal, we compare the perceptions of residents who participated in the event (engaged participants) and attendees. Several significant findings are reported and their implications for event managers and public policy administrators are presented, along with the limitations of the study.

27th International Police Executive Symposium, Washington DC, USA, Urban Security: Challenges for 21st Century Global Cities

Goncalo de Melo Bandeira Counter-Terrorism, State of Emergency and Human Rights. In the global cities, the fight against terrorism is a way forward. Prevention of terrorism is another possible way. There are legal systems where the prevailing idea is combating terrorism. Fight, because is possible: life imprisonment or informal death penalty or even torture. While other jurisdictions only follow the prevention of terrorist crime: the retribution and positive general prevention and the resocialization. There may be extreme cases also in restorative justice. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris on 11.13.2015 have shown to the different types of police several problems. Some of those are: the declaration of State of emergency and the consequent restriction of human rights as the privacy of human communication or the liberty of travel by local city citizens or foreign citizens or the public entertainment shows, the problem of money laundering and the restriction of the business as usual, the vicious circle of more isolation from some urban communities, v.g. muslims, and other citizens also; and, brevitatis causa, the criminological problem of the causes and consequences of terrorism.

Motivations to visit and image destination of Guimarães: differences between Portuguese and foreign tourists during 2012 Guimarães European Capital of Culture (ECOC)

Guimarães hosted the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) during the year of 2012. This study investigates the differences between Portuguese and foreign tourists regarding the main motivations to visit Guimarães and the retained perceived image of the destination. To achieve that purpose a survey was administered to 390 tourists that visited the city during the cultural event. The results show that tourists who visited Guimarães are relatively young, wealthy, employed and well educated. They are touring around the northern part of the country which includes an itinerary beginning in Porto, and extended to other important neighboring cities such as Braga or Viana do Castelo. The main motivations to visit the city, for both Portuguese and foreign tourists, are its historical heritage and the title of ECOC, the associated cultural events and celebrations that take place during 2012. However, these items were more valued by foreigners than Portuguese tourists. Using a factor analysis the tourists’ perceived attributes of Guimarães were described in four dimensions: “material heritage”, “intangible heritage”, “cultural performance”, and “sport and education”. Although foreigners and nationals perceived the tourism attributes of the city differently, the comparison of the mean scores of the four factors across Portuguese and foreigner tourists reveals that the most valued and least valued factors are common to both groups.

The Museum Of All: Institutional Communication Practices in a Participatory Networked World

The Museum Of All: Institutional Communication Practices in a Participatory Networked World

Espectador Activo: Comunicação audiovisual institucional num mundo de redes participativas

Once delighted by the moving image advent as a new method of realistically presenting reality, the viewer has been reposition himself towards the audiovisual contents he consumes, as he is given the opportunity to create and share his own perspective of that reality. We are living in a new technological setting, governed mainly by factors of interactivity, digital systems and technological convergence. The research project that we will present in this paper focuses on the subject of participatory media and the way cultural institutions are increasingly facing the inevitability of a profound revision of their traditional parameters of unidirectional communication, given the increasing availability of tools for audiovisual production as well as the diversity of networked communication contexts. The Serralves Foundation with its Museum of Contemporary Art, in Porto, Portugal, was the subject of a fi rst study of an empirical nature: a series of audiovisual objects were developed, in order to generate material for analysis and proposition. In this new stage of the project, our aim is to identify new procedures and practices that may be effectively implemented within the institutional universe. We intend to propose effi cient audiovisual communication contexts, including the maximizing of the relationship between institutions and audiences regarding dimensions that are traditionally outside the institutional radar: identity, narrative and affection. The project is currently in the process of surveying and categorization, with the aim of producing a map of different vocations and positions of the various institutions in regards to the aforementioned issues, which require participatory communication.

An image processing application for quantification of protein aggregates in Caenorhabditis elegans

Protein aggregation became a widely accepted marker of many polyQ disorders, including Machado-Joseph disease (MJD), and is often used as readout for disease progression and development of therapeutic strategies. The lack of good platforms to rapidly quantify protein aggregates in a wide range of disease animal models prompted us to generate a novel image processing application that automatically identifies and quantifies the aggregates in a standardized and operator-independent manner. We propose here a novel image processing tool to quantify the protein aggregates in a Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) model of MJD. Confocal mi-croscopy images were obtained from animals of different genetic conditions. The image processing application was developed using MeVisLab as a platform to pro-cess, analyse and visualize the images obtained from those animals. All segmenta-tion algorithms were based on intensity pixel levels.The quantification of area or numbers of aggregates per total body area, as well as the number of aggregates per animal were shown to be reliable and reproducible measures of protein aggrega-tion in C. elegans. The results obtained were consistent with the levels of aggrega-tion observed in the images. In conclusion, this novel imaging processing applica-tion allows the non-biased, reliable and high throughput quantification of protein aggregates in a C. elegans model of MJD, which may contribute to a significant improvement on the prognosis of treatment effectiveness for this group of disor-ders

Do silêncio à acção.

From silence to action: silence taken as a foundational action that allows creative processes. It is a blankness that precedes the moment of creation but also stands for a search for perfection, the un-representable, the Sublime. The ‘art moment’ is that what is created from such emptiness, in the vertiginous abyss from nowhere to action. We will work this complex process of understanding if an action precedes the silence or if the silence precedes the action. Analyzing art process, considering its phases, from the tension between either to create or not to create will be related with the potency refereed by Agamben regarding Bartleby: starting with blankness, with the invisibility of potency, when communication is urgent. When “the blues” are called into participation, when the melancholic state installs the potency of the work both to grow or be doubted, of to do or not to do, how do we read agency? Is silence the action? Should the action rest in silence? What to do? Remain in the state of pure potency or prove the impossibility to create form? Nowadays, the pensive image counters the logic of the narrative action. On the one hand, the image extends the action on the other hand suspends any given presumption. The artistic process carries on, in its poetic freedom, a search without the enslavement of representational forms.

Automated image analysis of lung branching morphogenesis from microscopic images of fetal rat explants

Background: Regulating mechanisms of branching morphogenesis of fetal lung rat explants have been an essential tool for molecular research. This work presents a new methodology to accurately quantify the epithelial, outer contour and peripheral airway buds of lung explants during cellular development from microscopic images. Methods: The outer contour was defined using an adaptive and multi-scale threshold algorithm whose level was automatically calculated based on an entropy maximization criterion. The inner lung epithelial was defined by a clustering procedure that groups small image regions according to the minimum description length principle and local statistical properties. Finally, the number of peripheral buds were counted as the skeleton branched ends from a skeletonized image of the lung inner epithelial. Results: The time for lung branching morphometric analysis was reduced in 98% in contrast to the manual method. Best results were obtained in the first two days of cellular development, with lesser standard deviations. Non-significant differences were found between the automatic and manual results in all culture days. Conclusions: The proposed method introduces a series of advantages related to its intuitive use and accuracy, making the technique suitable to images with different lightning characteristics and allowing a reliable comparison between different researchers.

Direct communication versus virtual communication in virtual teams

Several studies suggest that computer-mediated communication can lead to decreases in group effectiveness and reduce satisfaction levels in terms of trust and comfort of its users. Supported by an experiment, where the emotional or affective aspects of communication were tested with the experimentation of two architectures, Direct Communication Architecture (DCA) and the Virtual Communication Architecture (VCA) this paper validates the thesis that, from the users’ perspective, there is no opposition to the acceptance of virtual environments and interfaces for communication, and that these environments are able to cope with the reconfiguration dynamics requirements of virtual teams or client-server relations in a virtual enterprise operation.

Automated image analysis of lung branching morphogenesis

Regulating mechanisms of branchingmorphogenesis of fetal lung rat explants have been an essential tool formolecular research.This work presents a new methodology to accurately quantify the epithelial, outer contour, and peripheral airway buds of lung explants during cellular development frommicroscopic images. Methods.Theouter contour was defined using an adaptive and multiscale threshold algorithm whose level was automatically calculated based on an entropy maximization criterion. The inner lung epithelium was defined by a clustering procedure that groups small image regions according to the minimum description length principle and local statistical properties. Finally, the number of peripheral buds was counted as the skeleton branched ends from a skeletonized image of the lung inner epithelia. Results. The time for lung branching morphometric analysis was reduced in 98% in contrast to themanualmethod. Best results were obtained in the first two days of cellular development, with lesser standard deviations. Nonsignificant differences were found between the automatic and manual results in all culture days. Conclusions. The proposed method introduces a series of advantages related to its intuitive use and accuracy, making the technique suitable to images with different lighting characteristics and allowing a reliable comparison between different researchers.

Use of Performance Measurement in the Public Sector: the case of the police service

Many public organisations have been under great pressure in recent years to increase the efficiency and transparency of outputs, to rationalise the use of public resources, and to increase the quality of service delivery. In this context, public organisations were encouraged to introduce the New Public Management reforms with the goal of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the performance organisation through a new public management model. This new public management model is based on measurement by outputs and outcomes, a clear definition of responsibilities, the transparency and accountability of governmental activities, and on a greater value for citizens. What type of performance measurement systems are used in police services? Based on the literature, we see that multidimensional models, such as the Balanced Scorecard, are important in many public organisations, like municipalities, universities, and hospitals. Police services are characterised by complex, diverse objectives and stakeholders. Therefore, performance measurement of these public services calls for a specific analysis. Based on a nationwide survey of all police chiefs of the Portuguese police force, we find that employee performance measurement is the main form of measurement. Also, we propose a strategic map for the Portuguese police service.