Conduzir o banquete da vida: a presença feminina na obra de Muriel Spark

Pós-graduação em Letras - FCLAS

Latin America’s emergence in global services A new driver of structural change in the region?

Includes bibliography.

How do driver compensation schemes affect bus system performance?: a comparison between fixed wage and "guerra por el boleto" in Santiago, Chile.

Two systems of bus driver compensation exist in Santiago, Chile. The majority of drivers are paid per passenger transported, which leads to drivers trying to maximize the number of passengers each one conveys. Some of these effects are beneficial, such as a more active effort to minimize the problem of bus bunching, while others, such as aggressive driving, can be harmful. Drivers are said to "race" and the term "War for the Fare" is commonly used. Drivers also pay freelance workers called "sapos" to provide spacing information. Similar phenomena occur in other Latin American capitals.The other system, a fixed wage, is used by 2 companies holding recently awarded concessions for routes feeding metro stations.This paper discusses, quantitatively and qualitatively, the effects of these two compensation systems on accidents, quality of service, attitudes of both users and drivers, and average waiting times for passengers.

The Panama Canal expansion: A driver of change for global trade flows

Includes bibliography.

Dialogic reading of a novel for children: effects on text comprehension

Estudos experimentais têm demonstrado efeitos positivos da leitura dialógica de livros ilustrados (leitura em voz alta intercalada com prompts e feedback para verbalizações por parte do ouvinte) sobre o vocabulário e a expressão verbal de crianças pequenas. Este estudo verificou o efeito da leitura dialógica sobre a compreensão textual de um romance infanto-juvenil por três crianças de 7-8 anos, utilizando um delineamento de sujeito único. Na Condição A, o texto era lido sem intervenções. Na Condição B, a leitura era intercalada com intervenções dialógicas baseadas nas funções narrativas presentes no texto. As medidas de compreensão mostraram um desempenho superior na Condição B para os dois participantes submetidos ao delineamento B-A-B, mas não para o participante submetido ao delineamento A-B-A. São discutidas possíveis interações da leitura dialógica com características do gênero textual e a necessidade de replicações sistemáticas com um maior número de sessões e reversões das condições.

Construction and validation of an instrument to assess the reading comprehension of students from the third to the fifth grades of elementary school

Objetivo:Este estudo teve como objetivo construir e validar um instrumento de avaliação da compreensão de leitura a fim de caracterizar o perfil de leitura e detectar dificuldades de compreensão em escolares do terceiro ao quinto ano do Ensino Fundamental.Métodos:Participaram 378 escolares divididos em trés grupos para avaliação da compreensão de proposições literais e inferenciais de micro e macroestruturas de dois textos expositivos e dois textos narrativos por meio de questões de múltipla escolha.Resultados:Os dados analisados estatisticamente indicaram valores do teste alfa de Cronbach apresentando consisténcia interna nos quatros textos aplicados para os trés grupos.Conclusão:Foi possível constatar que os escolares apresentaram menor número de erros com o aumento da escolarização e que cada tipo de texto apresentou uma dificuldade específica para os escolares.

FINITE ELEMENT SIMULATIONS FOR THE COMPREHENSION OF PHYSICAL PHENOMENA INVOLVED IN ELECTRIC IMPEDANCE TOMOGRAPHY OF MASONRY STRUCTURES

The paper describes the preliminary studies of University of Minho on the use of Electric Impedance/Resistance Tomography to assess masonry structures. The study is focused on the analysis of values of current and voltage resulting from the use of an electrical source with voltage and frequency values from a distribution network. The analysis is made from results obtained through computer simulations, using a three-dimensional model of the idealized masonry structures. A finite element program was used for the simulations. Three types of electrodes were used in simulations, and the analysis of the results led to significant conclusions. Later masonry specimens were built and a series of preliminary tests were carried out in the laboratory. The comparative analysis of simulated and experimental results allowed identifying the factors that have influence on the physical results.

Avaliação da usabilidade de representações cartográficas em diferentes escalas para sistema de navegação e guia de rota em automóvel

Pós-graduação em Ciências Cartográficas - FCT

Situational and Driver Characteristics Associated With Deervehicle Collisions in Southeastern Michigan

Deer-vehicle collisions (DVCs) create societal impacts throughout the range of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginanus). In Michigan reported DVCs increased by nearly 60% between 1992-2003, with current estimates at more than 65,000 DVCs per year and a mean of $2,300 vehicle damage. To better understand where to direct education and information programs, we used Office of Highway Safety Planning (OHSP) data, 2001-2003, to profile driver characteristics and accident situations of DVCs in Washtenaw, Oakland, and Monroe Counties in Michigan. Each county varies in intensity of land use, human and deer densities, and available deer habitat. Deer density in Washtenaw, Oakland, and Monroe Counties was 49.5, 21.9 and 8.9 per mi2, respectively, and the annual rate of DVCs in these counties was 5.3, 2.6 and 1.8 per 1,000 licensed drivers. Drivers are at particular risk of being involved in DVCs between 6pm- 6am, which includes dawn and dusk commuting hours, and night. Single lane roads and roads with higher posted speed limits provided greater risk to drivers of involvement in a DVC. Middle-aged drivers, particularly males, were at increased risk deer-related collisions. Results from this study will be combined with survey research to determine how best to educate drivers about risk factors that make occurrence of a DVC more likely.

Tragedy on grade crossing: driver failure or systemic fragility?

In 2010, an accident occurred in Americana-SP, Brazil, involving two trains and one bus on a Grade Crossing, when 10 people died and 17 were injured including workers. This paper aims to analyze the accident using the Model of Analysis and Prevention of Work Accidents (MAPA). The method provides observation of work, interviews and analysis of documents to understand precedents of the event in the following stages: to understand the usual work from the involved people, the changes occurred in the system, the operation of barriers, managerial and organizational aspects. By the end, measures are suggested to avoid new occurrences. The accident took place at night in a site with insufficient lighting. The working conditions of bus drivers, train operators and watchmen are inadequate. There were only symbolic barriers (visual and acoustic signals) triggered manually by watchman upon train operator radio communication. The fragility of the barrier system associated to poor lighting and short time to trigger the signaling seem to play a critical role in the event. Contrary to the official report which resulted in guilt of the bus driver, the conclusion of the paper emphasizes the fragility of the safety system and the need of level crossing reproject.

Two-Item Sentence Comprehension by a Dog (Canis familiaris)

Syntax use by non-human animals remains a controversial issue. We present here evidence that a dog may respond to verbal requests composed of two independent terms, one referring to an object and the other to an action to be performed relative to the object. A female mongrel dog, Sofia, was initially trained to respond to action (point and fetch) and object (ball, key, stick, bottle and bear) terms which were then presented as simultaneous, combinatorial requests (e. g. ball fetch, stick point). Sofia successfully responded to object-action requests presented as single sentences, and was able to flexibly generalize her performance across different contexts. These results provide empirical evidence that dogs are able to extract the information contained in complex messages and to integrate it in directed performance, an ability which is shared with other linguistically trained animals and may represent a forerunner of syntactic functioning.

Outlining new frontiers for the comprehension of obsessive-compulsive disorder: a review of its relationship with fear and anxiety

Anxiety is an important component of the psychopathology of the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). So far, most interventions that have proven to be effective for treating OCD are similar to those developed for other anxiety disorders. However, neurobiological studies of OCD came to conclusions that are not always compatible with those previously associated with other anxiety disorders. OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study is to review the degree of overlap between OCD and other anxiety disorders phenomenology and pathophysiology to support the rationale that guides research in this field. RESULTS: Clues about the neurocircuits involved in the manifestation of anxiety disorders have been obtained through the study of animal anxiety models, and structural and functional neuroimaging in humans. These investigations suggest that in OCD, in addition to dysfunction in cortico-striatal pathways, the functioning of an alternative neurocircuitry, which involves amygdalo-cortical interactions and participates in fear conditioning and extinction processes, may be impaired. CONCLUSION: It is likely that anxiety is a relevant dimension of OCD that impacts on other features of this disorder. Therefore, future studies may benefit from the investigation of the expression of fear and anxiety by OCD patients according to their type of obsessions and compulsions, age of OCD onset, comorbidities, and patterns of treatment response.

Column generation for a multitrip vehicle routing problem with time windows, driver work hours, and heterogeneous fleet

This study addresses a vehicle routing problem with time windows, accessibility restrictions on customers, and a fleet that is heterogeneous with regard to capacity and average speed. A vehicle can performmultiple routes per day, all starting and ending at a single depot, and it is assigned to a single driverwhose totalwork hours are limited.Acolumn generation algorithmis proposed.The column generation pricing subproblem requires a specific elementary shortest path problem with resource constraints algorithm to address the possibility for each vehicle performingmultiple routes per day and to address the need to set the workday’s start time within the planning horizon. A constructive heuristic and a metaheuristic based on tabu search are also developed to find good solutions.

Diseño de un amplificador operacional totalmente integrado CMOS que funcione como driver para cargas capacitivas elevadas

Presentación del Proyecto Fin de Carrera titulado "Diseño de un Amplificador Operacional totalmente integrado CMOS que funcione como driver para cargas capacitivas elevadas"