Authentic leadership in school organizations

This research study, descriptive and exploratory in nature, had as objectives to know the perceptions of the teacher/students of a graduation course in Educational Sciences about their leaders, measured and evaluated through the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) and to verify if existed differences between the public and private school organizations in the four characteristics defined for the ALQ: a) self-conscious; b) transparency; c) moral/ethics; d) balanced processing. A non-probabilistic sample by convenience consisted of 86 participants from Brazil. The results of this research study show that the level of authenticity of the leader, in the four characteristics defined for the ALQ, in the perception of the subjects inquired, is above of the moderate level. Having in account the type of school organization (public or private), the differences found in the levels of the four characteristics defined for the ALQ were not statistically significant even though, the leaders of the private schools demonstrated to possess slightly higher values in the four analysed sub areas.

Olfactory perception threshold assessment of volatile acidity in Madeira wines

Madeira wine is a fortified wine with impact in the Madeira Island’s economy. Similarly to other wines, its acidity should be well controlled in order to ensure Madeira wine quality, mostly the volatile acidity. Due to Madeira wine complex flavour, it is crucial to get a better knowledge about the volatile acidity impact in its features, namely determine the perception limit of acetic acid and ethyl acetate, as both are the main contributors for volatile acidity. Firstly, the olfactory perception threshold of volatile acidity was assessed by a trained and an untrained panel, using 5 and 10 years-old Sercial and Malvasia wines. Moreover, the current work also presents the evolution of organic acids, acetic acid and ethyl acetate during 540 days of ageing of Madeira wines (Malvasia, Bual, Verdelho and Sercial), comparing the same wines aged by both traditional ageing processes: canteiro and estufagem. Other wine samples, aged in wood casks (canteiro) for at least 5 years, were also evaluated. HS-SPME followed by GC-MS analysis was used to determine ethyl acetate concentration and IEC-HPLC-DAD was used for the organic acids determination, including acetic acid. The results indicated that acetic acid and ethyl acetate olfactory perception threshold depends essentially on wine’s age. Concerning acetic acid, the untrained panel was in average 5.45 g/L (5 years-old) and 6.22 g/L (10 years-old). Training the expert panel to recognize acetic acid odour, the values decreased for 1.44 g/L (5 years-old) and 1.87 g/L (10 years-old), but still remained higher than the established volatile acidity legal limits. Ethyl acetate threshold was similar for both panels (in average 327.97 mg/L). Both compounds tend to increase exponentially with age, being more evident in sweet wines. Organic acids in young Madeira wines depend mostly on the nature of grape varieties, but this difference is minimized with wine ageing.