Show Me a Land due date card

This is a due date card for the book titled Show Me a Land, with stamped dates from 1940-1941.

Effects of climate and land management changes on conservation : of mediterranean cork oak woodlands and their bird communities

Tese de doutoramento (co-tutela), Biologia (Biologia da Conservação), Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, University of East Anglia, School of Environmental Sciences, 2014

Impacts of climate variability and extremes on carbon uptake by land ecosystems

Tese de doutoramento, Ciências Geofísicas e da Geoinformação (Deteção Remota), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2015

An Evaluation of Complex Adaptive Evolvable System Simulation

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-03

Self-help, Saving and Suburbanisation - the Birkbeck Freehold Land and Building Societies, their Bank and the London Mechanics’ Institute 1851 – 1911.

The Birkbeck Freehold Land and Building Societies were launched in 1851 in the London Mechanics’ Institute, secured its survival, and eventually replaced its premises with the architectural ‘phantasmagoria’ of the Birkbeck Bank. Prior to its collapse in 1911 ‘the Birkbeck’ was a major element in the English property based financial system and contributed significantly to the suburban growth of London. The Institute, Societies and Bank shared a Utilitarian vision of social progress through self-help that was at times hotly contested by the radical champions of the social classes that they were initially formed to assist. Their parallel histories are attested today by ‘Birkbeck’ toponyms (including roads, pubs and a railway station) in the London landscape.

Multi-apprentice learning for meta-heuristics parameter tuning in a multi agent scheduling system

The scheduling problem is considered in complexity theory as a NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. Meta-heuristics proved to be very useful in the resolution of this class of problems. However, these techniques require parameter tuning which is a very hard task to perform. A Case-based Reasoning module is proposed in order to solve the parameter tuning problem in a Multi-Agent Scheduling System. A computational study is performed in order to evaluate the proposed CBR module performance.

The electric vehicle integration into the power system: an application to the portuguese case

Electric vehicles (EV) offer a great potential to address the integration of renewable energy sources (RES) in the power grid, and thus reduce the dependence on oil as well as the greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. The high share of wind energy in the Portuguese energy mix expected for 2020 can led to eventual curtailment, especially during the winter when high levels of hydro generation occur. In this paper a methodology based on a unit commitment and economic dispatch is implemented, and a hydro-thermal dispatch is performed in order to evaluate the impact of the EVs integration into the grid. Results show that the considered 10 % penetration of EVs in the Portuguese fleet would increase load in 3 % and would not integrate a significant amount of wind energy because curtailment is already reduced in the absence of EVs. According to the results, the EV is charged mostly with thermal generation and the associated emissions are much higher than if they were calculated based on the generation mix.

On the development of an automatic voice pleasantness classification and intensity estimation system

In the last few years, the number of systems and devices that use voice based interaction has grown significantly. For a continued use of these systems, the interface must be reliable and pleasant in order to provide an optimal user experience. However there are currently very few studies that try to evaluate how pleasant is a voice from a perceptual point of view when the final application is a speech based interface. In this paper we present an objective definition for voice pleasantness based on the composition of a representative feature subset and a new automatic voice pleasantness classification and intensity estimation system. Our study is based on a database composed by European Portuguese female voices but the methodology can be extended to male voices or to other languages. In the objective performance evaluation the system achieved a 9.1% error rate for voice pleasantness classification and a 15.7% error rate for voice pleasantness intensity estimation.

Assessment and optimization of wind energy integration into the power systems: application to the portuguese system

The increasing integration of wind energy in power systems can be responsible for the occurrence of over-generation, especially during the off-peak periods. This paper presents a dedicated methodology to identify and quantify the occurrence of this over-generation and to evaluate some of the solutions that can be adopted to mitigate this problem. The methodology is applied to the Portuguese power system, in which the wind energy is expected to represent more than 25% of the installed capacity in a near future. The results show that the pumped-hydro units will not provide enough energy storage capacity and, therefore, wind curtailments are expected to occur in the Portuguese system. Additional energy storage devices can be implemented to offset the wind energy curtailments. However, the investment analysis performed show that they are not economically viable, due to the present high capital costs involved.