Integrated didactics: an example of a curriculum model enhancing knowledge crossing

In this paper, we introduce an innovative course in the Portuguese Context, the Master's Course in “Integrated Didactics in Mother Tongue, Maths, Natural and Social Sciences”, taking place at the Lisbon School of Education and discussing in particular the results of the evaluation made by the students who attended the Curricular Unit - Integrated Didactics (CU-ID). This course was designed for in-service teachers of the first six years of schooling and intends to improve connections between different curriculum areas. In this paper, we start to present a few general ideas about curriculum development; to discuss the concept of integration; to present the principles and objectives of the course created as well as its structure; to describe the methodology used in the evaluation process of the above mentioned CU-ID. The results allow us to state that the students recognized, as positive features of the CU-ID, the presence in all sessions of two teachers simultaneously from different scientific areas, as well as invitations issued to specialists on the subject of integration and to other teachers that already promote forms of integration in schools. As negative features, students noted a lack of integrated purpose, applying simultaneously the four scientific areas of the course, and also indicated the need to be familiar with more models of integrated education. Consequently, the suggestions for improvement derived from these negative features. The students also considered that their evaluation process was correct, due to the fact that it was focused on the design of an integrated project for one of the school years already mentioned.

Gestão integrada de ativos num contexto real

Trabalho Final de Mestrado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia de Manutenção

Análise estocástica com recurso a ferramentas informáticas no planeamento de empreitadas de construção

O presente trabalho, desenvolvido sob a orientação do Prof. Jaime Gabriel Silva, centra-se na procura e aplicação de metodologias de planeamento com apoio de ferramentas informáticas de análise de risco, que permitem realizar, em tempo útil, o cálculo dos prazos resultantes de inúmeras combinações possíveis associadas à incerteza das durações das atividades, recorrendo a modelos estocásticos. O trabalho aborda inicialmente o contexto da Gestão na Construção, com particular enfase na Gestão do Risco. Nessa fase inicial, fez-se também um pequeno inquérito a profissionais com diferentes níveis de responsabilidade organizacional e empresas do setor. A parte fundamental do trabalho, incide nos procedimentos a adotar na elaboração do planeamento de empreitadas. Nesta parte do trabalho, introduzem-se os conceitos da análise de risco com recurso a uma ferramenta informática de apoio, o @Risk, que permite a utilização do Método de Monte Carlo, para obtenção de resultados num contexto de uma tomada de decisão baseada no risco. Refira-se que houve vários contactos com o fornecedor do programa, que permitiram tirar partido de outro programa da Palisade, Evolver, direcionado para otimização matemática, podendo ser utilizado, por exemplo, na perspetiva da minimização dos custos, o que pode interessar pela relação destes com as opções adotadas na elaboração do planeamento de empreendimentos. Finalmente, toma-se um exemplo real do planeamento de uma empreitada em execução à data da realização deste trabalho, onde se aplicaram os conceitos desenvolvidos no trabalho, confrontando os resultados com o andamento da obra.

An example-based generator of XSLT programs

XSLT is a powerful and widely used language for transforming XML documents. However, its power and complexity can be overwhelming for novice or infrequent users, many of whom simply give up on using this language. On the other hand, many XSLT programs of practical use are simple enough to be automatically inferred from examples of source and target documents. An inferred XSLT program is seldom adequate for production usage but can be used as a skeleton of the final program, or at least as scaffolding in the process of coding it. It should be noted that the authors do not claim that XSLT programs, in general, can be inferred from examples. The aim of Vishnu—the XSLT generator engine described in this chapter—is to produce XSLT programs for processing documents similar to the given examples and with enough readability to be easily understood by a programmer not familiar with the language. The architecture of Vishnu is composed by a graphical editor and a programming engine. In this chapter, the authors focus on the editor as a GWT Web application where the programmer loads and edits document examples and pairs their content using graphical primitives. The programming engine receives the data collected by the editor and produces an XSLT program.

Fast mobility support in low-power wireless networks: smart-HOP over RPL/6LoWPAN

With the emergence of low-power wireless hardware new ways of communication were needed. In order to standardize the communication between these low powered devices the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) released the 6LoWPAN stand- ard that acts as an additional layer for making the IPv6 link layer suitable for the lower-power and lossy networks. In the same way, IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low- Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) has been proposed by the IETF Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks (ROLL) Working Group as a standard routing protocol for IPv6 routing in low-power wireless sensor networks. The research performed in this thesis uses these technologies to implement a mobility process. Mobility management is a fundamental yet challenging area in low-power wireless networks. There are applications that require mobile nodes to exchange data with a xed infrastructure with quality-of-service guarantees. A prime example of these applications is the monitoring of patients in real-time. In these scenarios, broadcast- ing data to all access points (APs) within range may not be a valid option due to the energy consumption, data storage and complexity requirements. An alternative and e cient option is to allow mobile nodes to perform hand-o s. Hand-o mechanisms have been well studied in cellular and ad-hoc networks. However, low-power wireless networks pose a new set of challenges. On one hand, simpler radios and constrained resources ask for simpler hand-o schemes. On the other hand, the shorter coverage and higher variability of low-power links require a careful tuning of the hand-o parameters. In this work, we tackle the problem of integrating smart-HOP within a standard protocol, speci cally RPL. The simulation results in Cooja indicate that the pro- posed scheme minimizes the hand-o delay and the total network overhead. The standard RPL protocol is simply unable to provide a reliable mobility support sim- ilar to other COTS technologies. Instead, they support joining and leaving of nodes, with very low responsiveness in the existence of physical mobility.

Lugar, Espaço e Geografia - Do Real ao Virtual na Sociedade do Conhecimento

As alterações sociais, culturais, tecnológicas ou puramente virtuais a que se assiste são indiscutíveis e, porventura, irreversíveis. O ritmo da evolução tecnológica não permite pausas. A crescente densidade das redes e a velocidade dos fluxos de informação fazem aumentar a complexidade da análise, contrastando com uma diminuição dos tempos de resposta. Observa-se uma dinâmica cada vez mais acentuada no processo de transição entre a informação e o conhecimento, acelerando os inputs que influenciam ou dominam as práticas sociais, políticas e simbólicas da vida. Este artigo analisa conceitos como “informação” e “conhecimento” e outros, mais geográficos, como “lugar” e “espaço”; e de que forma pode a sua dinâmica influenciar o território, que deixa de ser (apenas) real para passar a ser, também, virtual. A Sociedade do Conhecimento surge a partir da Sociedade da Informação, num contexto evolucional da cadeia de valor “dado-informação-conhecimento-sabedoria” e onde o elevado potencial tecnológico extravasa as noções tradicionais da Geografia. Para ajudar a compreender as mutações observadas no território, explicando as suas causas e consequências surge a Geografia da Sociedade do Conhecimento, um ramo da Geografia vocacionado para a análise do desenvolvimento sócio-económico da sociedade moderna.

Internet Geography: Spaces of Innovation

Information Society plays an important role in all kinds of human activity, inducing new forms of economic and social organization and creating knowledge. Over the last twenty years of the 20th century, large investments in telecommunication networks were made to approach economies and put an end to the asymmetries. The most isolated regions were the beneficiaries of this new technological investment’s wave disseminating trough the territories. The new economic scenarios created by globalisation make high capacity backbones and coherent information society polity, two instruments that could change regions fate and launch them in to an economic development context. Technology could bring international projection to services, products and could be the differentiating element between a national and an international economic strategy. So, the networks and its fluxes are becoming two of the most important variables to the economies. Measuring and representing this new informational accessibility, mapping new communities, finding new patterns and localisation models, could be today’s challenge. In the physical/real space, location is defined by two or three geographical co-ordinates. In the network/virtual space or in cyberspace, geography seems incapable to define location, because it doesn’t have a good model. Trying to solve the problem and based on geographical theories and concepts, new fields of study came to light. Internet Geography is one example. In this paper and using Internet Geography and informational cartography, it was possible to observe and analyse the spacialisation of the Internet phenomenon trough the distribution of the IP addresses in the Portuguese territory. This work shows the great potential and applicability of this indicator to regional development studies, and at the same time. The IP address distribution of Country Code Top Level Domains (.pt for Portugal) could show the same economic patterns, reflecting territorial inflexibility or, by opposition, new regional hierarchies. The spatial concentration or dispersion of top level domains seems to be a good instrument to analyse the info-structural dynamic and economic development of a territory, especially at regional level. At the same time it shows that information technologies are essential to innovation and competitive advantage.

Real Time Internet DGPS Service

The accuracy of the Navigation Satellite Timing and Ranging (NAVSTAR) Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements is insufficient for many outdoor navigation tasks. As a result, in the late nineties, a new methodology – the Differential GPS (DGPS) – was developed. The differential approach is based on the calculation and dissemination of the range errors of the GPS satellites received. GPS/DGPS receivers correlate the broadcasted GPS data with the DGPS corrections, granting users increased accuracy. DGPS data can be disseminated using terrestrial radio beacons, satellites and, more recently, the Internet. Our goal is to provide mobile platforms within our campus with DGPS data for precise outdoor navigation. To achieve this objective, we designed and implemented a three-tier client/server distributed system that establishes Internet links with remote DGPS sources and performs campus-wide dissemination of the obtained data. The Internet links are established between data servers connected to remote DGPS sources and the client, which is the data input module of the campus-wide DGPS data provider. The campus DGPS data provider allows the establishment of both Intranet and wireless links within the campus. This distributed system is expected to provide adequate support for accurate (submetric) outdoor navigation tasks.

Beliefs and Conflicts in a Real World Multi-Agent System

In a real world multiagent system, where the agents are faced with partial, incomplete and intrinsically dynamic knowledge, conflicts are inevitable. Frequently, different agents have goals or beliefs that cannot hold simultaneously. Conflict resolution methodologies have to be adopted to overcome such undesirable occurrences. In this paper we investigate the application of distributed belief revision techniques as the support for conflict resolution in the analysis of the validity of the candidate beams to be produced in the CERN particle accelerators. This CERN multiagent system contains a higher hierarchy agent, the Specialist agent, which makes use of meta-knowledge (on how the con- flicting beliefs have been produced by the other agents) in order to detect which beliefs should be abandoned. Upon solving a conflict, the Specialist instructs the involved agents to revise their beliefs accordingly. Conflicts in the problem domain are mapped into conflicting beliefs of the distributed belief revision system, where they can be handled by proven formal methods. This technique builds on well established concepts and combines them in a new way to solve important problems. We find this approach generally applicable in several domains.

Comunidade real, comunidade imaginada: observação participante em contexto de estágio numa associação cultural: relatório de estágio

Relatório de Estágio submetido à Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Teatro - especialização em Teatro e Comunidade.

Real-time scheduling with resource sharing on heterogeneous multiprocessors

Consider the problem of scheduling a task set τ of implicit-deadline sporadic tasks to meet all deadlines on a t-type heterogeneous multiprocessor platform where tasks may access multiple shared resources. The multiprocessor platform has m k processors of type-k, where k∈{1,2,…,t}. The execution time of a task depends on the type of processor on which it executes. The set of shared resources is denoted by R. For each task τ i , there is a resource set R i ⊆R such that for each job of τ i , during one phase of its execution, the job requests to hold the resource set R i exclusively with the interpretation that (i) the job makes a single request to hold all the resources in the resource set R i and (ii) at all times, when a job of τ i holds R i , no other job holds any resource in R i . Each job of task τ i may request the resource set R i at most once during its execution. A job is allowed to migrate when it requests a resource set and when it releases the resource set but a job is not allowed to migrate at other times. Our goal is to design a scheduling algorithm for this problem and prove its performance. We propose an algorithm, LP-EE-vpr, which offers the guarantee that if an implicit-deadline sporadic task set is schedulable on a t-type heterogeneous multiprocessor platform by an optimal scheduling algorithm that allows a job to migrate only when it requests or releases a resource set, then our algorithm also meets the deadlines with the same restriction on job migration, if given processors 4×(1+MAXP×⌈|P|×MAXPmin{m1,m2,…,mt}⌉) times as fast. (Here MAXP and |P| are computed based on the resource sets that tasks request.) For the special case that each task requests at most one resource, the bound of LP-EE-vpr collapses to 4×(1+⌈|R|min{m1,m2,…,mt}⌉). To the best of our knowledge, LP-EE-vpr is the first algorithm with proven performance guarantee for real-time scheduling of sporadic tasks with resource sharing on t-type heterogeneous multiprocessors.

Efficient schedulability tests for real-time embedded systems with urgent routines

Task scheduling is one of the key mechanisms to ensure timeliness in embedded real-time systems. Such systems have often the need to execute not only application tasks but also some urgent routines (e.g. error-detection actions, consistency checkers, interrupt handlers) with minimum latency. Although fixed-priority schedulers such as Rate-Monotonic (RM) are in line with this need, they usually make a low processor utilization available to the system. Moreover, this availability usually decreases with the number of considered tasks. If dynamic-priority schedulers such as Earliest Deadline First (EDF) are applied instead, high system utilization can be guaranteed but the minimum latency for executing urgent routines may not be ensured. In this paper we describe a scheduling model according to which urgent routines are executed at the highest priority level and all other system tasks are scheduled by EDF. We show that the guaranteed processor utilization for the assumed scheduling model is at least as high as the one provided by RM for two tasks, namely 2(2√−1). Seven polynomial time tests for checking the system timeliness are derived and proved correct. The proposed tests are compared against each other and to an exact but exponential running time test.

Planning smart cities using wireless low energy monitoring systems

Thesis to obtain the Master Degree in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering

Study in real conditions and in laboratory of the application of expanded agglomerated cork as exterior wall covering

The interest of the study on the implementation of expanded agglomerated cork as exterior wall covering derives from two critical factors in a perspective of sustainable development: the use of a product consisting of a renewable natural material-cork-and the concern to contribute to greater sustainability in construction. The study aims to assess the feasibility of its use by analyzing the corresponding behaviour under different conditions. Since this application is relatively recent, only about ten years old, there is still much to learn about the reliability of its long-term properties. In this context, this study aims to deepen and approach aspects, some of them poorly studied and even unknown, that deal with characteristics that will make the agglomerate a good choice for exterior wall covering. The analysis of these and other characteristics is being performed by testing both under actual exposure conditions, on an experimental cell at LNEC, and on laboratory. In this paper the main laboratory tests are presented and the obtained results are compared with the outcome of the field study. © (2015) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland.