Body and transcendence in Virginia Woolf and Clarice Lispector = Corpo e transcendência em Virgínia Woolf e Clarice Lispector

Virginia Woolf and Clarice Lispector belong to quite different historical, political and cultural contexts. Beyond its antecedents and roots in European modernism, Brazilian modernism developed according to peculiar patterns and lines, cultivating, for example, more clearly political, nationalist and regionalist tendencies than happened in the British area. Molly Hite’s essay “Virginia Woolf’s Two Bodies” suggests the existence of two kinds of body represented and perhaps experienced by Virginia Woolf: “one kind was the body for others, the body cast in social roles”, the other, the “visionary body”, a second physical presence, which brings into play new perspectives on the female modernist body and new strategies of political and aesthetic representation. It is this “visionary body”, that, in many moments, intersects with transcendence. These two kinds of body are also present in Clarice Lispector’s work, structured, of course, around other complexities and gradations, explained by a different temporal context, but still touching common seminal questions. In Lispector, it is through the body cast in social roles that you reach the “visionary body” and transcendence. The movement is not a flight, as in Woolf, on the contrary it is a necessity, a condition to get to the essence.

Multiresponsive supramolecular systems for information processing at the molecular level

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Química Sustentável

Modeling and visualization of medical anesthesiology acts

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Web Processing Services for Forestry and Environmental Applications

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Extension and patterning of the vertebrate body

Dissertation presented to obrain the Ph.D degree in Biology. Developmental Biology

Valorisation of vegetable oil deodorizer distillate by enzymatic reaction and membrane processing

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutora em Engenharia Química e Bioquímica

Compact simulated countercurrent chromatography for downstream processing of (bio)pharmaceuticals

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Química e Bioquímica

Fractionation of hydro-ethanolic extracts from grape pomace through membrane processing: the effect of membrane and extracting media on process performance

The EM3E Master is an Education Programme supported by the European Commission, the European Membrane Society (EMS), the European Membrane House (EMH), and a large international network of industrial companies, research centers and universities

Coordinating development: uncovering the mechanisms that coordinate organ growth and patterning with the development of the whole body

Organisms produce correctly patterned structures across a wide range of organ and body sizes. Despite considerable work revealing the mechanisms that regulate the growth and patterning of organs, those responsible for coordinating organ development with whole-body development are still largely unknown.(...)

Development and efficiency optimizing of the human body energy converters

Nowadays it is known that the human body is continuous source of many types of energy and the devices used for collecting energy taken from the environment also have the required capabilities for the collection of the energy produced by the Human body (HB), but very limited and with very low efficiency. Low power and high yield converters are particularly needed in these cases of collecting energy from human activity and its movements due to the small amount of energy generated this way. But this situation can be improved. Enhancing or focusing the human movements by using mechanical amplifiers applied to the piezoelectric element. By doing so the input of energy in the element increases. As such increasing its output, therefore producing more energy.

Ionic liquids as catalysts of lignocellulosic biomass processing

The present work is devoted to study the pre-treatment of lignocellulosic biomass, especially wheat straw, by the application of the acidic ionic liquid (IL) such as 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium hydrogen sulphate. The ability of this IL to hydrolysis and conversion of biomass was scrutinised. The pre-treatment with hydrogen sulphate-based IL allowed to obtain a liquor rich in hemicellulosic sugars, furans and organic acids, and a solid fraction mainly constituted by cellulose and lignin. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the produced liquors were made by capillary electrophoresis and high-performance liquid chromatography. Pre-treatment conditions were set to produce xylose or furfural. Specific range of temperatures from 70 to 175 °C and residence times from 20.0 to 163.3 min were studied by fixing parameters such as biomass/IL ratio (10 % (w/w)) and water content (1.25 % (w/w)) in the pre-treatment process. Statistical modelling was applied to maximise the xylose and furfural concentrations. For the purpose of reaction condition comparison the severity factor for studied ionic liquid was proposed and applied in this work. Optimum conditions for xylose production were identified to be at 125 °C and 82.1 min, at which 16.7 % (w/w) xylose yield was attained. Furfural was preferably formed at higher pre-treatment temperatures and longer reaction time (161 °C and 104.5 min) reaching 30.7 % (w/w) maximum yield. The influence of water content on the optimum xylose formation was also studied. Pre-treatments with 5 and 10 % (w/w) water content were performed and an increase of 100 % and 140 % of xylose yield was observed, respectively, while the conversion into furfural maintained unchanged.

Towards an algorithmic skeleton framework for programming the Intel R Xeon PhiTM processor

The Intel R Xeon PhiTM is the first processor based on Intel’s MIC (Many Integrated Cores) architecture. It is a co-processor specially tailored for data-parallel computations, whose basic architectural design is similar to the ones of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), leveraging the use of many integrated low computational cores to perform parallel computations. The main novelty of the MIC architecture, relatively to GPUs, is its compatibility with the Intel x86 architecture. This enables the use of many of the tools commonly available for the parallel programming of x86-based architectures, which may lead to a smaller learning curve. However, programming the Xeon Phi still entails aspects intrinsic to accelerator-based computing, in general, and to the MIC architecture, in particular. In this thesis we advocate the use of algorithmic skeletons for programming the Xeon Phi. Algorithmic skeletons abstract the complexity inherent to parallel programming, hiding details such as resource management, parallel decomposition, inter-execution flow communication, thus removing these concerns from the programmer’s mind. In this context, the goal of the thesis is to lay the foundations for the development of a simple but powerful and efficient skeleton framework for the programming of the Xeon Phi processor. For this purpose we build upon Marrow, an existing framework for the orchestration of OpenCLTM computations in multi-GPU and CPU environments. We extend Marrow to execute both OpenCL and C++ parallel computations on the Xeon Phi. We evaluate the newly developed framework, several well-known benchmarks, like Saxpy and N-Body, will be used to compare, not only its performance to the existing framework when executing on the co-processor, but also to assess the performance on the Xeon Phi versus a multi-GPU environment.

UAV - based imagery processing using structure from motion and remote sensing technology

With the recent advances in technology and miniaturization of devices such as GPS or IMU, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles became a feasible platform for a Remote Sensing applications. The use of UAVs compared to the conventional aerial platforms provides a set of advantages such as higher spatial resolution of the derived products. UAV - based imagery obtained by a user grade cameras introduces a set of problems which have to be solved, e. g. rotational or angular differences or unknown or insufficiently precise IO and EO camera parameters. In this work, UAV - based imagery of RGB and CIR type was processed using two different workflows based on PhotoScan and VisualSfM software solutions resulting in the DSM and orthophoto products. Feature detection and matching parameters influence on the result quality as well as a processing time was examined and the optimal parameter setup was presented. Products of the both workflows were compared in terms of a quality and a spatial accuracy. Both workflows were compared by presenting the processing times and quality of the results. Finally, the obtained products were used in order to demonstrate vegetation classification. Contribution of the IHS transformations was examined with respect to the classification accuracy.

Image processing for displacement measurements

Since the invention of photography humans have been using images to capture, store and analyse the act that they are interested in. With the developments in this field, assisted by better computers, it is possible to use image processing technology as an accurate method of analysis and measurement. Image processing's principal qualities are flexibility, adaptability and the ability to easily and quickly process a large amount of information. Successful examples of applications can be seen in several areas of human life, such as biomedical, industry, surveillance, military and mapping. This is so true that there are several Nobel prizes related to imaging. The accurate measurement of deformations, displacements, strain fields and surface defects are challenging in many material tests in Civil Engineering because traditionally these measurements require complex and expensive equipment, plus time consuming calibration. Image processing can be an inexpensive and effective tool for load displacement measurements. Using an adequate image acquisition system and taking advantage of the computation power of modern computers it is possible to accurately measure very small displacements with high precision. On the market there are already several commercial software packages. However they are commercialized at high cost. In this work block-matching algorithms will be used in order to compare the results from image processing with the data obtained with physical transducers during laboratory load tests. In order to test the proposed solutions several load tests were carried out in partnership with researchers from the Civil Engineering Department at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL).