Brincadeira: marcos temporais e memória

A brincadeira, expressão maior das culturas lúdicas da infância e do saber popular infantil que colora o folclore das crianças e que entre elas constitui prática singular, tem marcos temporais indeléveis que lhe (de)marcaram um tempo e que a memória guardou para sempre. A linearidade que, durante quase todo o tempo antes da chegada da TV, a brincadeira transportou, a revolução das suas práticas que a partir daí se operou e acentuou com a chegada das novas tecnologias da comunicação e informação à vida das crianças e a consequente transformação radical do seu habitus lúdico (da rua para casa e daqui para o quarto) balizam eras distintas de tempos sociais paralelas às que ditaram, consequentemente, a transformação que as artes de e para brincar foram, historicamente, sofrendo. Ao resgatar a brincadeira pela voz das crianças, muitas das vezes expressa pela voz dos adultos que hoje são, faz-se o registo, que neste artigo se guarda, de um pedaço da herança cultural lúdica que foi passando entre as quatro gerações que estudamos qualitativamente a partir de entrevistas grupais feitas em contexto familiar, que serviram de base para o que a seguir fica relatado. A brincadeira e a parafernália que a acompanha fazem parte da história de vida de todos nós e, por isso, a cada um cabe velar para que nunca pereça.

O Balanced Scorecard no sector de controlo contabilístico

Mestrado em Contabilidade e Gestão das Instituições Financeiras

Comunicação com os colaboradores num grupo de comunicação social: estudo de caso

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Gestão Estratégica das Relações Públicas.

‘Thy love afar is spite at home' Emerson, Thoreau and Carey: an alternative perspective of communication in US

The conquest of the West by the stagecoaches and then by railway, Ford and the automobile civilization, the Moon landing by Apollo 11, Microsoft, Apple, CNN, Google and Facebook have appeared to us as celebratory examples of the willingness and ability of the US to overcome the distance and the absence through so-called modern progress of transportation and communication. Undoubtedly, the imaginary and the instrumental power associated to transports and communication of the last century and a half are identified with the mental images that the world has of the US. A world that has eagerly imported and copy their technology and technological culture. Beyond the illusions, this attempting, which has always been praised to transcende space and eclipse the time to get to places and peole increasingly distant and fast, has always a dark side: the political control of population, commercial advertising, the spread of the rumors, noise and gossip. However, since at least the nineteenth century, the political project incorporated in modern transportation and communication technologies was not shared by some of the most remarkable thinkers in the US not only in that century, but also in the 20th century. This paper begins by rescue Ralph W. Emerson and Henry D. Thoreau legacy regarding to communication. Emerson conceived communication as a give-and-take with no coordination between the two, and does not involve contact with the other. Thoreau, in turn, argued that modern trasnportation and communications inventions are but pretty toys which distract attention from serious things, nothing more than 'improved means to an end that is not perfected.' Secondly, we show that this skeptical view of the techological improvement of transport and communication was proceed in an original way with James W. Carey, a media studies thinker who became known for his criticism of the transmission view of communication.

BAM framework for OMS using open source technologies

No início da década de 90, as empresas começaram a sentir a necessidade de melhorar o acesso à informação das suas actividades para auxiliar na tomada de decisões. Desta forma, no mundo da informática, emergiu o sector Business Intelligence (BI) composto inicialmente por data warehousing e ferramentas de geração de relatórios. Ao longo dos anos o conceito de BI evoluiu de acordo com as necessidades empresariais, tornando a análise das actividades e do desempenho das organizações em aspectos críticos na gestão das mesmas. A área de BI abrange diversos sectores, sendo o de geração de relatórios e o de análise de dados aqueles que melhor preenchem os requisitos pretendidos no controlo de acesso à informação do negócio e respectivos processos. Actualmente o tempo e a informação são vantagens competitivas e por esse mesmo motivo as empresas estão cada vez mais preocupadas com o facto de o aumento do volume de informação estar a tornar-se insustentável na medida que o tempo necessário para processar a informação é cada vez maior. Por esta razão muitas empresas de software, tais como Microsoft, IBM e Oracle estão numa luta por um lugar neste mercado de BI em expansão. Para que as empresas possam ser competitivas, a sua capacidade de previsão e resposta às necessidades de mercado em tempo real é requisito principal, em detrimento da existência apenas de uma reacção a uma necessidade que peca por tardia. Os produtos de BI têm fama de trabalharem apenas com dados históricos armazenados, o que faz com que as empresas não se possam basear nessas soluções quando o requisito de alguns negócios é de tempo quase real. A latência introduzida por um data warehouse é demasiada para que o desempenho seja aceitável. Desta forma, surge a tecnologia Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) que fornece análise de dados e alertas em tempo quase real sobre os processos do negócio, utilizando fontes de dados como Web Services, filas de mensagens, etc. O conceito de BAM surgiu em Julho de 2001 pela organização Gartner, sendo uma extensão orientada a eventos da área de BI. O BAM define-se pelo acesso em tempo real aos indicadores de desempenho de negócios com o intuito de aumentar a velocidade e eficácia dos processos de negócio. As soluções BAM estão a tornar-se cada vez mais comuns e sofisticadas.

Design of improved rail-to-rail low-distortion and low-stress switches in advanced CMOS technologies

This paper describes the efficient design of an improved and dedicated switched-capacitor (SC) circuit capable of linearizing CMOS switches to allow SC circuits to reach low distortion levels. The described circuit (SC linearization control circuit, SLC) has the advantage over conventional clock-bootstrapping circuits of exhibiting low-stress, since large gate voltages are avoided. This paper presents exhaustive corner simulation results of a SC sample-and-hold (S/H) circuit which employs the proposed and optimized circuits, together with the experimental evaluation of a complete 10-bit ADC utilizing the referred S/H circuit. These results show that the SLC circuits can reduce distortion and increase dynamic linearity above 12 bits for wide input signal bandwidths.

UMTS versus DVB-SH na transmissão de sinais de vídeo

Dissertação para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia de Electrónica e Telecomunicações

Learning techniques for automatic email message tagging

A organização automática de mensagens de correio electrónico é um desafio actual na área da aprendizagem automática. O número excessivo de mensagens afecta cada vez mais utilizadores, especialmente os que usam o correio electrónico como ferramenta de comunicação e trabalho. Esta tese aborda o problema da organização automática de mensagens de correio electrónico propondo uma solução que tem como objectivo a etiquetagem automática de mensagens. A etiquetagem automática é feita com recurso às pastas de correio electrónico anteriormente criadas pelos utilizadores, tratando-as como etiquetas, e à sugestão de múltiplas etiquetas para cada mensagem (top-N). São estudadas várias técnicas de aprendizagem e os vários campos que compõe uma mensagem de correio electrónico são analisados de forma a determinar a sua adequação como elementos de classificação. O foco deste trabalho recai sobre os campos textuais (o assunto e o corpo das mensagens), estudando-se diferentes formas de representação, selecção de características e algoritmos de classificação. É ainda efectuada a avaliação dos campos de participantes através de algoritmos de classificação que os representam usando o modelo vectorial ou como um grafo. Os vários campos são combinados para classificação utilizando a técnica de combinação de classificadores Votação por Maioria. Os testes são efectuados com um subconjunto de mensagens de correio electrónico da Enron e um conjunto de dados privados disponibilizados pelo Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC). Estes conjuntos são analisados de forma a perceber as características dos dados. A avaliação do sistema é realizada através da percentagem de acerto dos classificadores. Os resultados obtidos apresentam melhorias significativas em comparação com os trabalhos relacionados.

RFID together with multi-agent systems to control global value chains

Nowadays, the cooperative intelligent transport systems are part of a largest system. Transportations are modal operations integrated in logistics and, logistics is the main process of the supply chain management. The supply chain strategic management as a simultaneous local and global value chain is a collaborative/cooperative organization of stakeholders, many times in co-opetition, to perform a service to the customers respecting the time, place, price and quality levels. The transportation, like other logistics operations must add value, which is achieved in this case through compression lead times and order fulfillments. The complex supplier's network and the distribution channels must be efficient and the integral visibility (monitoring and tracing) of supply chain is a significant source of competitive advantage. Nowadays, the competition is not discussed between companies but among supply chains. This paper aims to evidence the current and emerging manufacturing and logistics system challenges as a new field of opportunities for the automation and control systems research community. Furthermore, the paper forecasts the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies integrated into an information and communication technologies (ICT) framework based on distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) supported by a multi-agent system (MAS), as the most value advantage of supply chain management (SCM) in a cooperative intelligent logistics systems. Logistical platforms (production or distribution) as nodes of added value of supplying and distribution networks are proposed as critical points of the visibility of the inventory, where these technological needs are more evident.

General Insights into Word Choice in Business Communication

Words are the smallest units of messages. Attention should be given to each word used to be sure it is the most effective one. An effective word is one that the receiver will understand and that will elicit the wanted response. The ability to choose words by (a) using a dictionary and a thesaurus and (b) following some of the principles of business communication described in this text can be improved.

Technical considerations concerning digital technologies

This chapter addresses technical issues concerning digital technologies. Radiological equipment and technique are briefly introduced together with a discussion about requirements and advantages of digital technologies. Digital technologies offer several advantages when compared to conventional analogical systems, or screen–film (SF) systems. While in clinical practice the practitioners should be aware of technical factors such as image acquisition, management of patient dose, and diagnostic image quality. Thus, digital technologies require an up-to-date scientific knowledge concerning their use in projection radiography. In this chapter, technical considerations concerning digital technologies are provided.

Digital radiology and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS)

Plain radiography still accounts for the vast majority of imaging studies that are performed at multiple clinical instances. Digital detectors are now prominent in many imaging facilities and they are the main driving force towards filmless environments. There has been a working paradigm shift due to the functional separation of acquisition, visualization, and storage with deep impact in the imaging workflows. Moreover with direct digital detectors images are made available almost immediately. Digital radiology is now completely integrated in Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) environments governed by the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard. In this chapter a brief overview of PACS architectures and components is presented together with a necessarily brief account of the DICOM standard. Special focus is given to the DICOM digital radiology objects and how specific attributes may now be used to improve and increase the metadata repository associated with image data. Regular scrutiny of the metadata repository may serve as a valuable tool for improved, cost-effective, and multidimensional quality control procedures.

A Service Integration Platform for Collaborative Networks

Integrated manufacturing constitutes a complex system made of heterogeneous information and control subsystems. Those subsystems are not designed to the cooperation. Typically each subsystem automates specific processes, and establishes closed application domains, therefore it is very difficult to integrate it with other subsystems in order to respond to the needed process dynamics. Furthermore, to cope with ever growing marketcompetition and demands, it is necessary for manufacturing/enterprise systems to increase their responsiveness based on up-to-date knowledge and in-time data gathered from the diverse information and control systems. These have created new challenges for manufacturing sector, and even bigger challenges for collaborative manufacturing. The growing complexity of the information and communication technologies when coping with innovative business services based on collaborative contributions from multiple stakeholders, requires novel and multidisciplinary approaches. Service orientation is a strategic approach to deal with such complexity, and various stakeholders' information systems. Services or more precisely the autonomous computational agents implementing the services, provide an architectural pattern able to cope with the needs of integrated and distributed collaborative solutions. This paper proposes a service-oriented framework, aiming to support a virtual organizations breeding environment that is the basis for establishing short or long term goal-oriented virtual organizations. The notion of integrated business services, where customers receive some value developed through the contribution from a network of companies is a key element.

Communication: The criticality of self-assembled rigid rods on triangular lattices

The criticality of self-assembled rigid rods on triangular lattices is investigated using Monte Carlo simulation. We find a continuous transition between an ordered phase, where the rods are oriented along one of the three (equivalent) lattice directions, and a disordered one. We conclude that equilibrium polydispersity of the rod lengths does not affect the critical behavior, as we found that the criticality is the same as that of monodisperse rodson the same lattice, in contrast with the results of recently published work on similar models. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3556665]

Side information creation for efficient Wyner-Ziv video coding: Classifying and reviewing

Video coding technologies have played a major role in the explosion of large market digital video applications and services. In this context, the very popular MPEG-x and H-26x video coding standards adopted a predictive coding paradigm, where complex encoders exploit the data redundancy and irrelevancy to 'control' much simpler decoders. This codec paradigm fits well applications and services such as digital television and video storage where the decoder complexity is critical, but does not match well the requirements of emerging applications such as visual sensor networks where the encoder complexity is more critical. The Slepian Wolf and Wyner-Ziv theorems brought the possibility to develop the so-called Wyner-Ziv video codecs, following a different coding paradigm where it is the task of the decoder, and not anymore of the encoder, to (fully or partly) exploit the video redundancy. Theoretically, Wyner-Ziv video coding does not incur in any compression performance penalty regarding the more traditional predictive coding paradigm (at least for certain conditions). In the context of Wyner-Ziv video codecs, the so-called side information, which is a decoder estimate of the original frame to code, plays a critical role in the overall compression performance. For this reason, much research effort has been invested in the past decade to develop increasingly more efficient side information creation methods. This paper has the main objective to review and evaluate the available side information methods after proposing a classification taxonomy to guide this review, allowing to achieve more solid conclusions and better identify the next relevant research challenges. After classifying the side information creation methods into four classes, notably guess, try, hint and learn, the review of the most important techniques in each class and the evaluation of some of them leads to the important conclusion that the side information creation methods provide better rate-distortion (RD) performance depending on the amount of temporal correlation in each video sequence. It became also clear that the best available Wyner-Ziv video coding solutions are almost systematically based on the learn approach. The best solutions are already able to systematically outperform the H.264/AVC Intra, and also the H.264/AVC zero-motion standard solutions for specific types of content. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.