Enhancing comprehension in low achievement 9th grades: a quasi-experiment study

This article describes the application of a Comprehension Strategies Programme (CSP) designed to improve the reading comprehension of students with learning difficulties. The programme was implemented with 102 ninth grade students from Portuguese public schools with low achievement on a particular subject: Portuguese. An evaluation was done on the effects of the programme on reading comprehension and on school achievement. The Experimental Group presented significant improvements when compared to the Control Group (n=108) on the dimensions considered. This indicates that the CSP an bring benefits to low achieving students who have Portuguese as a mother tongue.

Motivating sustainable goal choices and providing effective feedback

Overconsumption of natural resources and the associated environmental hazards are one of today’s most pressing global issues. In the western world, individual consumption in homes and workplaces is a key contributor to this problem. Reflecting the importance of individual action in this domain, this thesis focuses on studying and influencing choices related to sustainability and energy consumption made by people in their daily lives. There are three main components to this work. Firstly, this thesis asserts that people frequently make ineffective consumption reduction goal choices and attempts to understand the rationale for these poor choices by fitting them to goalsetting theory, an established theoretical model of behavior change. Secondly, it presents two approaches that attempt to influence goal choice towards more effective targets, one of which deals with mechanisms for goal priming and the other of which explores the idea that carefully designed toys can exert influence on children’s long term consumption behavior patterns. The final section of this thesis deals with the design of feedback to support the performance of environmentally sound activities. Key contributions surrounding goals include the finding that people choose easy sustainable goals despite immediate feedback as to their ineffectiveness and the discussion and study of goal priming mechanisms that can influence this choice process. Contributions within the design of value instilling toys include a theoretically grounded framework for the design of such toys and a completed and tested prototype toy. Finally, contributions in designing effective and engaging energy consumption feedback include the finding that negative feedback is best presented verbally compared with visually and this is exemplified and presented within a working feedback system. The discussions, concepts, prototypes and empirical findings presented in this work will be useful for both environmental psychologists and for HCI researchers studying eco-feedback.

O fazer do psicólogo no núcleo de apoio à saúde da família

The Brazilian Ministry of Health regulated in 2008 the Family Health Support Nucleus (FHSN) as a device for support and complementarity to the Family Health Strategy. The FHSN, through the matrix support, potentiates the Family Health teams on dealing with a great variety of demands and activities that are under their responsibilities. It is structured in teams of professionals from various health specialties, among which is the mental health. In preliminary studies we noticed that the psychologists have been the main representatives of mental health professionals at the FHSN from Rio Grande do Norte (RN-Brazil). On this scenario, this study intends to problematize the professional practice of the psychologists who work at the FHSN teams in RN, regarding how their work is done, discussing it under the perspective of collective health and the directions for the basic health care on Brazilian s health system. Still as a goal, in more specific ways: identify the forms of professional insertion of the psychologists in this field; characterize the work done by the psychologist at the FHSN (developed activities); and produce an analysis of the characteristics and limits of those actions, from theoretical and methodological references based on Marxian ontology. Were performed semistructured interviews with psychologists working in the oldest FHSN teams form RN. We conducted the analysis of the material following the blocks of information: determinants of the psychologist entry at the services, training for current practice; operation of FHSN; activities performed by FHSN team and the psychologist; joint actions; and limits of psychology practice in the FHSN. An important result, we observed the little articulation of practicing between the psychology and other professionals and teams, further indicating the prevalence of the traditional medical model (individual and outpatient) as guidance of their performance instead of the matrix logic that is the foundation of the proposed action for the FHSN. We also emphasize the potential of psychologists actions at the FHSN on contributing to the achievement of comprehensive care

Relação poder-saber e formas de resistência em documentos educacionais governamentais sobre ensino de língua estrangeira

Considerando o discurso político-educacional como meio de manifestação de poder, este artigo tem como objetivo propor reflexões acerca da relação poder-saber em documentos educacionais de diferentes esferas governamentais, nos quais se apresentam eventuais formas de resistência. Para verificar como se dá essa relação, serão analisadas as Orientações Curriculares para o Ensino Médio: Linguagens, Códigos e suas Tecnologias, documento elaborado pela Secretaria de Educação Básica (SEB) e a Proposta Curricular do Estado de São Paulo: Língua Estrangeira Moderna - Inglês, da Secretaria da Educação de São Paulo (SEE), publicadas em 2006 e 2008, respectivamente. Para tanto, o arcabouço teórico será embasado em conceitos sobre a relação poder-saber, formas de resistência e regimes de verdade amplamente discutidos por Foucault (1971, 2008), Pêcheux (1990), Mascia (2002), Bertoldo (2003), Coracini (2003), Gregolin (2004), Orlandi (2006), Veiga-Neto (2007), Possenti (2007) e Amarante (2009). Por meio da análise desses documentos, notou-se a presença de traços argumentativos que contribuem para o estabelecimento de um regime de verdade, perpassado por relações de poder-saber. Além disso, os resultados obtidos apontam para polêmicas existentes entre as Orientações Curriculares Nacionais e a Proposta Curricular do Estado de São Paulo no que concerne aos pressupostos teóricos e orientações práticas para o ensino e aprendizagem de línguas.

The workload and plasma ion concentration in a training match session of high-goal (elite) polo ponies

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Millennium development goals. 2006 report: a look at gender equality and empowerment of women in Latin America and the Caribbean

Includes bibliography

Millennium development goals: advances in environmentally sustainable development in Latin America and the Caribbean

Includes bibliography

Regional integration and the issue of choosing an appropriate exchange-rate regime in Latin America

Includes bibliography

The gender perspective in economic and labour policies: state of the art in Latin America and the Caribbean

Includes bibliography

The elusive goal of regional development: between the black box and the political agenda

Includes bibliography

Automatic segmentation of latent fingerprints

Latent fingerprints are routinely found at crime scenes due to the inadvertent contact of the criminals' finger tips with various objects. As such, they have been used as crucial evidence for identifying and convicting criminals by law enforcement agencies. However, compared to plain and rolled prints, latent fingerprints usually have poor quality of ridge impressions with small fingerprint area, and contain large overlap between the foreground area (friction ridge pattern) and structured or random noise in the background. Accordingly, latent fingerprint segmentation is a difficult problem. In this paper, we propose a latent fingerprint segmentation algorithm whose goal is to separate the fingerprint region (region of interest) from background. Our algorithm utilizes both ridge orientation and frequency features. The orientation tensor is used to obtain the symmetric patterns of fingerprint ridge orientation, and local Fourier analysis method is used to estimate the local ridge frequency of the latent fingerprint. Candidate fingerprint (foreground) regions are obtained for each feature type; an intersection of regions from orientation and frequency features localizes the true latent fingerprint regions. To verify the viability of the proposed segmentation algorithm, we evaluated the segmentation results in two aspects: a comparison with the ground truth foreground and matching performance based on segmented region. © 2012 IEEE.

International competitiveness: agreed goal, hard task

Includes bibliography