INFORMAR E ENTRETER: O PROCESSO DE PRODUÇÃO DA NOTÍCIA NO HOJE EM DIA

Sabe-se que o entretenimento está incorporado no cotidiano da sociedade moderna de maneira que ultrapassa apenas os momentos de lazer e ócio, fazendo-se presente nos ambientes profissionais, na educação e na informação. Em meio a essa nova concepção, a comunicação também percebe alterações, seja pela interatividade promovida pela midiatização, pelo novo aspecto da audiência, mais exigente e conectada, ou ainda pela hibridização de gêneros e formatos. Neste contexto, surgem programas de entretenimento, especialmente televisivos, que incorporam aspectos técnicos e práticos do jornalismo, incluindo a narrativa e os processos produtivos. Tais programas veiculam um conteúdo denominado de infotenimento, que mescla informação e entretenimento e, assim, a representação jornalística da vida social fica vinculada à distração e ao divertimento. A dissertação faz uma análise do processo de produção do conteúdo noticioso dentro de um programa de entretenimento e variedades que apresenta grande quantidade de conteúdo jornalístico em sua composição: o Hoje Em Dia, da Rede Record. Trata-se de um estudo qualitativo, do tipo estudo de caso, com uso de técnicas de observação direta, entrevistas semiabertas, pesquisa documental e análise de conteúdo. A questão da reprodutibilidade técnica de padrões e a inserção de elementos cotidianos aliados à indústria cultural e à comunicação em massa também é retratada nesta dissertação. A principal intenção é entender como é a dinâmica da produção jornalística em programas que visam entreter e, ao mesmo tempo, informar. De que maneira esses produtos híbridos da modernidade são pensados e como a teoria do infotenimento pode ser aliada às mediações comunicacionais da cultura.

Providing health information to the general public: a survey of current practices in academic health sciences libraries*

A questionnaire was mailed to 148 publicly and privately supported academic health sciences libraries affiliated with Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)–accredited medical schools in the United States and Canada to determine level of access and services provided to the general public. For purposes of this study, “general public” was defined as nonaffiliated students or health care professionals, attorneys and other nonhealth-related professionals, patients from affiliated or other hospitals or clinics, and general consumers. One hundred five (71%) libraries responded. Results showed 98% of publicly supported libraries and 88% of privately supported libraries provided access to some or all of the general public. Publicly supported libraries saw greater numbers of public patrons, often provided more services, and were more likely to circulate materials from their collections than were privately supported libraries. A significant number of academic health sciences libraries housed a collection of consumer-oriented materials and many provided some level of document delivery service, usually for a fee. Most allowed the public to use some or all library computers. Results of this study indicated that academic health sciences libraries played a significant role in serving the information-seeking public and suggested a need to develop written policies or guidelines covering the services that will be provided to minimize the impact of this service on primary clientele.

Information needs of rural health professionals: a review of the literature

This review analyzes the existing research on the information needs of rural health professionals and relates it to the broader information-needs literature to establish whether the information needs of rural health professionals differ from those of other health professionals. The analysis of these studies indicates that rural health practitioners appear to have the same basic needs for patient-care information as their urban counterparts, and that both groups rely on colleagues and personal libraries as their main sources of information. Rural practitioners, however, tend to make less use of journals and online databases and ask fewer clinical questions; a difference that correlates with geographic and demographic factors. Rural practitioners experience pronounced barriers to information access including lack of time, isolation, inadequate library access, lack of equipment, lack of skills, costs, and inadequate Internet infrastructure. Outreach efforts to this group of underserved health professionals must be sustained to achieve equity in information access and to change information-seeking behaviors.

Does the consumer’s variety-seeking behavior condition the willingness to travel further?

The objective of this study is to test the effect of the consumer’s variety-seeking behaviour on the distance the tourist is prepared to travel; that is, his/her willingness to travel further. The empirical application is carried out in Spain in a context with 26 destinations, by applying Mixed Logit Models. The results evidence that the variety-seeking behaviour reduces the dissuasive effect of distance.

Countermanding in rats as a practical model for investigation of adaptive control of behaviour, lifespan changes in behavioural control and neurotransmitter function

The countermanding paradigm was designed to investigate the ability to cancel a prepotent response when a stop signal is presented and allows estimation of the stop signal response time (SSRT), an otherwise unobservable behaviour. Humans exhibit adaptive control of behaviour in the countermanding task, proactively lengthening response time (RT) in expectation of stopping and reactively lengthening RT following stop trials or errors. Human performance changes throughout the lifespan, with longer RT, SSRT and greater emphasis on post-error slowing reported for older compared to younger adults. Inhibition in the task has generally been improved by drugs that increase extracellular norepinephrine. The current thesis examined a novel choice response countermanding task in rats to explore whether rodent countermanding performance is a suitable model for the study of adaptive control of behaviour, lifespan changes in behavioural control and the role of neurotransmitters in these behaviours. Rats reactively adjusted RT in the countermanding task, shortening RT after consecutive correct go trials and lengthening RT following non-cancelled, but not cancelled stop trials, in sessions with a 10 s, but not a 1 s post-error timeout interval. Rats proactively lengthened RT in countermanding task sessions compared to go trial-only sessions. Together, these findings suggest that rats strategically lengthened RT in the countermanding task to improve accuracy and avoid longer, unrewarded timeout intervals. Next, rats exhibited longer RT and relatively conserved post-error slowing, but no significant change in SSRT when tested at 12, compared to 7 months of age, suggesting that rats exhibit changes in countermanding task performance with aging similar to those observed in humans. Finally, acute administration of yohimbine (1.25, 2.5 mg/kg) and d-amphetamine (0.25, 0.5 mg/kg), which putatively increase extracellular norepinephrine and dopamine respectively, resulted in RT shortening, baseline-dependent effects on SSRT, and attenuated adaptive RT adjustments in rats in the case of d-amphetamine. These findings suggest that dopamine and norepinephrine encouraged motivated, reward-seeking behaviour and supported inhibitory control in an inverted-U-like fashion. Taken together, these observations validate the rat countermanding task for further study of the neural correlates and neurotransmitters mediating adaptive control of behaviour and lifespan changes in behavioural control.

Father, Mother, Child? Eight Trends in Family Life for Policymakers to Keep in Mind. Summary

The family is the first context for a child’s development, and the most important. This is where children begin to develop their own identities and first experience a sense of closeness, community and security. Family is a domain where learning takes place – for all generations. In their daily interactions, children, mothers and fathers learn from and with one another. They develop empathy and a sense of responsibility, and learn to deal with conflict. Values, beliefs and norms, passed on from parents to children, evolve in the course of everyday life. Thus parents exert an enormous influence on their children’s educational opportunities and overall life chances – as research in Germany and other countries has clearly shown.

Lightweight Internet Traffic Classification - A Subject Based Solution with Word Embeddings

Internet traffic classification is a relevant and mature research field, anyway of growing importance and with still open technical challenges, also due to the pervasive presence of Internet-connected devices into everyday life. We claim the need for innovative traffic classification solutions capable of being lightweight, of adopting a domain-based approach, of not only concentrating on application-level protocol categorization but also classifying Internet traffic by subject. To this purpose, this paper originally proposes a classification solution that leverages domain name information extracted from IPFIX summaries, DNS logs, and DHCP leases, with the possibility to be applied to any kind of traffic. Our proposed solution is based on an extension of Word2vec unsupervised learning techniques running on a specialized Apache Spark cluster. In particular, learning techniques are leveraged to generate word-embeddings from a mixed dataset composed by domain names and natural language corpuses in a lightweight way and with general applicability. The paper also reports lessons learnt from our implementation and deployment experience that demonstrates that our solution can process 5500 IPFIX summaries per second on an Apache Spark cluster with 1 slave instance in Amazon EC2 at a cost of $ 3860 year. Reported experimental results about Precision, Recall, F-Measure, Accuracy, and Cohen's Kappa show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposal. The experiments prove that words contained in domain names do have a relation with the kind of traffic directed towards them, therefore using specifically trained word embeddings we are able to classify them in customizable categories. We also show that training word embeddings on larger natural language corpuses leads improvements in terms of precision up to 180%.

Human factors requirements for real-time motorist information displays. Vol. 1 - design guide. Final report.

Federal Highway Administration, Office of Research, Washington, D.C.

Behaviour of the energy gap in a model of Josephson coupled Bose-Einstein condensates

In this work we investigate the energy gap between the ground state and the first excited state in a model of two single-mode Bose-Einstein condensates coupled via Josephson tunnelling. The ene:rgy gap is never zero when the tunnelling interaction is non-zero. The gap exhibits no local minimum below a threshold coupling which separates a delocalized phase from a self-trapping phase that occurs in the absence of the external potential. Above this threshold point one minimum occurs close to the Josephson regime, and a set of minima and maxima appear in the Fock regime. Expressions for the position of these minima and maxima are obtained. The connection between these minima and maxima and the dynamics for the expectation value of the relative number of particles is analysed in detail. We find that the dynamics of the system changes as the coupling crosses these points.

Influencing the perceived emotions of music with intent

Music is an immensely powerful affective medium that pervades our everyday life. With ever advancing technology, the reproduction and application of music for emotive and information transfer purposes has never been more prevalent. In this paper we introduce a rule-based engine for influencing the perceived emotions of music. Based on empirical music psychology, we attempt to formalise the relationship between musical elements and their perceived emotion. We examine the modification to structural aspects of music to allow for a graduated transition between perceived emotive states. This engine is intended to provide music reproduction systems with a finer grained control over this affective medium; where perceived musical emotion can be influenced with intent. This intent comes from both an external application and the audience. Using a series of affective computing technologies, an audience’s response metrics and attitudes can be incorporated to model this intent. A generative feedback loop is set up between the external application, the influencing process and the audience’s response to this, which together shape the modification of musical structure. The effectiveness of our rule system for influencing perceived musical emotion was examined in earlier work, with a small test study providing generally encouraging results.

Classifying an opponent's behaviour in robot soccer

This paper illustrates the prediction of opponent behaviour in a competitive, highly dynamic, multi-agent and partially observableenvironment, namely RoboCup small size league robot soccer. The performance is illustrated in the context of the highly successful robot soccer team, the RoboRoos. The project is broken into three tasks; classification of behaviours, modelling and prediction of behaviours and integration of the predictions into the existing planning system. A probabilistic approach is taken to dealing with the uncertainty in the observations and with representing the uncertainty in the prediction of the behaviours. Results are shown for a classification system using a Naïve Bayesian Network that determines the opponent’s current behaviour. These results are compared to an expert designed fuzzy behaviour classification system. The paper illustrates how the modelling system will use the information from behaviour classification to produce probability distributions that model the manner with which the opponents perform their behaviours. These probability distributions are show to match well with the existing multi-agent planning system (MAPS) that forms the core of the RoboRoos system.

SAÚDE E ESCOLA: UM ESTUDO DO COTIDIANO

A busca por melhores condições de vida da população passa pela escola, uma vez que ela desempenha um papel fundamental na Promoção da Saúde. Nesse sentido, a saúde em sua concepção integral foi o eixo desse trabalho, que buscou acessar a realidade social concreta do cotidiano da escola a fim de explorar o campo, buscando verificar os entraves para o atraso em desenvolvimento humano verificado em um país tão rico. A fim de alcançar esse objetivo lancei mão do estudo do cotidiano articulando as condições objetivas e as representações dos professores em torno das questões da Saúde na escola. O estudo histórico-crítico conduzido forneceu elementos para a reflexão realizada, mostrando que algumas representações de um determinado grupo de docentes estão alicerçadas em raízes antigas, que se assentam no movimento higienista do século XIX. Este encontrou na escola o campo ideal de doutrinação de seus ideais. Essas raízes sustentam o paradigma biomédico hegemônico na atualidade. O estudo empírico, realizado em uma escola estadual do município de Ribeirão Pires, revelou um cotidiano fragmentado, homogeneizado e hierarquizado. Fatores de oposição à cotidianidade também foram identificados e podem sinalizar mudanças posteriores em atividades superiores, como a legislação educacional. Esse estudo permite, assim, que políticas públicas possam ser elaboradas a partir da realidade do campo, pois é do cotidiano (atividades cotidianas) que surgem as grandes decisões e os instantes dramáticos de decisão e ação (atividades superiores).

REPRESENTAÇÕES SOCIAIS SOBRE A EDUCAÇÃO INFANTIL AS VOZES DAS PROFESSORAS

Este estudo identifica as representações sociais das professoras da Educação Infantil e do 1º ano do Ensino Fundamental sobre a Educação Infantil. Embasado nas reflexões de Moscovici (1978) e Jodelet (2004), na perspectiva da Teoria das Representações Sociais, concentra a reflexão nos discursos dos sujeitos participantes. São representações sociais forjadas no grupo e que denotam a compreensão dos seus membros sobre a realidade. Os discursos apresentados pelas professoras foram analisados pelo software ALCESTE e pelo programa EVOC. O processamento dos dados possibilitou reconhecer o espaço da Educação Infantil como um universo dinâmico de conhecimento e construção. As representações sociais apresentadas pelas professoras no transcorrer desta pesquisa nos revelam um discurso formado historicamente pelo grupo e marcado fortemente por sua formação teórica. Acompanhando o processo histórico, no qual a Educação Infantil foi gestada, verificamos algumas tendências que marcam o discurso das professoras hoje. Ao comparar a fala destes sujeitos, verifica-se que seus referenciais teóricos, sua trajetória educativa e o histórico social da Educação Infantil são fatores preponderantes para constituição de seu universo consensual e, consequentemente, das suas representações sociais. Os discursos das professoras confirmam que a história, a vivência no grupo e as teorias que embasaram sua formação contribuem para a constituição das representações sociais. Assim, as representações desvendam que as professoras pensam a Educação Infantil como o local propício para o desenvolvimento integral da criança, entremeado por atividades lúdico-pedagógicas, visando a formação do cidadão e sua inserção no universo escolar. A Educação Infantil está ancorada na ideia de desenvolvimento e as professoras objetivam tal representação na figura da árvore que cresce, da semente que germina, da escada que leva para fases superiores. Ao dialogar com os falatórios das professoras, compreendemos que as representações sociais estão presentes no seu cotidiano e compõem sua prática: falas e gestos dão conteúdo ao seu mundo.(AU0

Everyday use of Spanish among bilingual teachers in New York City and their attitudes toward the language

The attitudes that bilingual teachers have toward the use of foreign languages seem to have an effect on the success of bilingual education programs. In this study, our purpose is to shed light on how often bilingual teachers in New York City use Spanish in their everyday lives, and to examine their attitudes toward the use of Spanish in the U.S. Overall, results indicate only moderate frequencies of use of Spanish in everyday life among bilingual teachers. In addition, the study shows that bilingual teachers have a favorable attitude toward the use of Spanish in the U.S. However, bilingual teachers whose first language is English seem to have a more favorable attitude than those whose first language is Spanish. Among the native Spanish speakers, those born abroad show a more favorable attitude than those born in the U.S. Although no group seems to favor the use of lexical borrowings and code-switching, bilingual native Spanish-speaking teachers born in the U.S. seem to have a less favorable attitude than native Spanish-speaking teachers born abroad. In addition, native Spanish-speaking teachers born abroad seem to have a less favorable attitude toward lexical borrowings and code-switching than U.S.-born teachers whose first language is English. Recommendations for the training of bilingual teachers are discussed in the conclusions of the study.

The end of transition?:The role of informal economies in the post-Soviet space

This book challenges the accepted notion that the transition from the command economy to market based systems is complete across the post-Soviet space. While it is noted that different political economies have developed in such states, such as Russia’s ‘managed democracy’, events such as Ukraine gaining ‘market economy status’ by the European Union and acceding to the World Trade Organisation in 2008 are taken as evidence that the reform period is over. Such thinking is based on numerous assumptions; specifically that economic transition has defined start and end points, that the formal economy now has primacy over other forms of economic practices and that national economic growth leads to the ‘trickle down’ of wealth to those marginalised by the transition process. Based on extensive ethnographic and quantitative research, conducted in Ukraine and Russia between 2004 - 2007, this book questions these assumptions by stating that the economies that operate across post-Soviet spaces are far from the textbook idea of a market economy. Through this the whole notion of ‘transition’ is problematised and the importance of informal economies to everyday life is demonstrated. Using case studies of various sectors, such as entrepreneurial behaviour and the higher education system, it is also shown how corruption has invaded almost all sectors of the post-Soviet every day.