The interception process in tropical rain forests: a literature review and critique (*).

A review of the literature on measurements of rain water interception processes by forests is made. Information on Africa, Central and South America, and Asia is given. A general analysis is made and the need to further the measurements under field conditions is stressed.

Visões do Império : a 1ª EXposição Colonial de 1934 e alguns dos seus álbuns

A Primeira Exposição Colonial Portuguesa realizada no Porto em 1934 foi a consequência visível do impulso que Salazar quis dar à «política colonial» portuguesa e a uma orientação imperial em que colonizar e civilizar as populações indígenas eram as palavras de ordem. Como corolário da exposição foram produzidos, entre outros, dois importantes álbuns, hoje documentos de inegável interesse histórico, não só enquanto discurso de propaganda do regime do Estado Novo, mas também enquanto narrativas visuais ou “visões do Império”. São eles, o Álbum Fotográfico da autoria do fotógrafo Domingos Alvão e o Álbum Comemorativo, com reproduções de pinturas e desenhos do pintor Eduardo Malta. Neste trabalho pretendemos reflectir sobre essas “visões do Império”, pois elas expressam uma visualidade e um imaginário que se traduz em práticas sociais, em valores e em relações de dominação que definem uma política do olhar, onde o corpo se torna um espaço de inscrição, bem como de categorização racial e cultural. Em suma, é através dessas imagens que vemos as relações de poder e as formas de dominação sobre o outro, que impregnaram a exposição.

O Estado Novo e a vila do Seixal (1926-1961): um percurso político e socio-económico do concelho durante a ditadura

Esta dissertação de Mestrado tem como objectivo analisar a evolução política, económica e social do concelho do Seixal (localizado no Distrito de Setúbal) durante o período entre 1926 (implantação da Ditadura Militar) e o início dos Anos 60 (início das Guerra Colonial Portuguesa), atendendo a questões principais como a dinâmica do funcionamento regime do Estado Novo português dentro do concelho, o desenvolvimento económico deste (concedendo destaque ao facto da posição do Seixal como concelho industrial) e os focos de oposição política ao regime presentes. A escolha do tema deve-se ao interesse de auxiliar a contribuição para o desenvolvimento da História Local/Regional e a defesa da memória histórica das chamadas regiões “periféricas” do país.

Bone turnover markers for early detection of fracture healing disturbances: A review of the scientific literature

Imaging techniques are the standard method for assessment of fracture healing processes. However, these methods are perhaps not entirely reliable for early detection of complications, the most frequent of these being delayed union and non-union. A prompt diagnosis of such disorders could prevent prolonged patient distress and disability. Efforts should be directed towards the development of new technologies for improving accuracy in diagnosing complications following bone fractures. The variation in the levels of bone turnover markers (BTMs) have been assessed with regard to there ability to predict impaired fracture healing at an early stage, nevertheless the conclusions of some studies are not consensual. In this article the authors have revised the potential of BTMs as early predictors of prognosis in adult patients presenting traumatic bone fractures but who did not suffer from osteopenia or postmenopausal osteoporosis. The available information from the different studies performed in this field was systematized in order to highlight the most promising BTMs for the assessment of fracture healing outcome.

Workplace ergonomics in lean production environments: A literature review

BACKGROUND: Lean Production Systems (LPS) have become very popular among manufacturing industries, services and large commercial areas. A LPS must develop and consider a set of work features to bring compatibility with workplace ergonomics, namely at a muscular, cognitive and emotional demands level. OBJECTIVE: Identify the most relevant impacts of the adoption of LPS from the ergonomics point of view and summarizes some possible drawbacks for workplace ergonomics due to a flawed application of the LPS. The impacts identified are focused in four dimensions: work pace, intensity and load; worker motivation, satisfaction and stress; autonomy and participation; and health outcome. This paper also discusses the influence that the work organization model has on workplace ergonomics and on the waste elimination previewed by LPS. METHODS: Literature review focused LPS and its impact on occupational ergonomics conditions, as well as on the Health and Safety of workers. The main focus of this research is on LPS implementations in industrial environments and mainly in manufacturing industry workplaces. This is followed by a discussion including the authors’ experience (and previous research). RESULTS: From the reviewed literature it seems that there is no consensus on how Lean principles affect the workplace ergonomics since most authors found positive (advantages) and negative (disadvantages) impacts. CONCLUSIONS: The negative impacts or disadvantages of LPS implementations reviewed may result from the misunderstanding of the Lean principles. Possibly, they also happen due to partial Lean implementations (when only one or two tools were implemented) that may be effective in a specific work context but not suitable to all possible situations as the principles of LPS should not lead, by definition, to any of the reported drawbacks in terms of workplace ergonomics.

Business intelligence in banking: A literature analysis from 2002 to 2013 using Text Mining and latent Dirichlet allocation

telligence applications for the banking industry. Searches were performed in relevant journals resulting in 219 articles published between 2002 and 2013. To analyze such a large number of manuscripts, text mining techniques were used in pursuit for relevant terms on both business intelligence and banking domains. Moreover, the latent Dirichlet allocation modeling was used in or- der to group articles in several relevant topics. The analysis was conducted using a dictionary of terms belonging to both banking and business intelli- gence domains. Such procedure allowed for the identification of relationships between terms and topics grouping articles, enabling to emerge hypotheses regarding research directions. To confirm such hypotheses, relevant articles were collected and scrutinized, allowing to validate the text mining proce- dure. The results show that credit in banking is clearly the main application trend, particularly predicting risk and thus supporting credit approval or de- nial. There is also a relevant interest in bankruptcy and fraud prediction. Customer retention seems to be associated, although weakly, with targeting, justifying bank offers to reduce churn. In addition, a large number of ar- ticles focused more on business intelligence techniques and its applications, using the banking industry just for evaluation, thus, not clearly acclaiming for benefits in the banking business. By identifying these current research topics, this study also highlights opportunities for future research.

Da 'portugalidade' à lusofonia

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências da Comunicação (Especialidade em Teoria da Cultura)

Extracting kinetic information from literature with KineticRE

To better understand the dynamic behavior of metabolic networks in a wide variety of conditions, the field of Systems Biology has increased its interest in the use of kinetic models. The different databases, available these days, do not contain enough data regarding this topic. Given that a significant part of the relevant information for the development of such models is still wide spread in the literature, it becomes essential to develop specific and powerful text mining tools to collect these data. In this context, this work has as main objective the development of a text mining tool to extract, from scientific literature, kinetic parameters, their respective values and their relations with enzymes and metabolites. The approach proposed integrates the development of a novel plug-in over the text mining framework @Note2. In the end, the pipeline developed was validated with a case study on Kluyveromyces lactis, spanning the analysis and results of 20 full text documents.

O outro lado da guerra colonial. Memórias na primeira pessoa

Comunicação oral, não submetida para publicação.

Um estudo sobre gênero no Brasil do século XIX: o caso Anna Jansen, a Rainha do Maranhão

Dissertação de mestrado em Contabilidade

Literatura russa em Portugal: das vias de difusão aos sentidos de receção: o caso de Leão Tolstói

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências da Literatura (área de especialização em Literatura Comparada).

Normal aging and decision-making: a systematic review of the literature of the last 10 years

Objective Conduct a systematic review to investigate whether healthy elderly have deficits in the decision-making process when compared to the young. Methods We performed a systematic search on SciELO, Lilacs, PsycINFO, Scopus and PubMed database with keywords decision making and aging (according to the description of Mesh terms) at least 10 years. Results We found nine studies from different countries, who investigated 441 young and 377 elderly. All studies used the IOWA Gambling Task as a way of benchmarking the process of decision making. The analysis showed that 78% of the articles did not have significant differences between groups. However, 100% of the studies that assessed learning did find relevant differences. Furthermore, studies that observed the behavior of individuals in the face of losses and gains, 60% of articles showed that the elderly has more disadvantageous choices throughout the task. Conclusion: The consulted literature showed no consensus on the existence of differences in performance of the decision-making process between old and young, but it is observed that the elderly has deficits in learning and a tendency to fewer advantageous choices.

Cultural studies as the new humanities

The purpose of this study is to argue that Cultural Studies may be regarded as the new humanities. Cultural Studies focus on ethnic, post-colonial, communication, anthropological, ethnographic and feminist studies, and only ‘very marginally’ have they shown an interest in literature and literary studies (Aguiar & Silva, 2008). But those fields, which ‘Social Science’ rather than the ‘Arts’ have invested in (Ibid., p. 254), are the touchstone of modernity. Today, the concept we have of humankind is, to a large extent, played out in these areas. The questioning of both humankind and modernity has as backdrop the technologically-driven shift of culture from word to image (Martins, 2011 a). My proposal takes into account this debate, while underscoring how Cultural Studies are engaged in what is current and contemporary, which means, in the present and everyday life.

Women users of crack: systematic review of Brazilian literature

ABSTRACT Objective To present Brazilian’s empirical studies that address this issue between the period of 2004 to 2014. Methods It is a Brazilian literature Systematic Review using the descriptors “crack cocaine” AND “women”, in the database Scopus, Lilacs, Medline and SciELO. Results From the 785 articles found, 16 articles contemplated the inclusion criteria. It was evidenced that the use of crack by women is related to physical and sexual violence, provoking HIV risks in consequence of prostitution, and social prejudice. Conclusion Given this reality, studies evaluating treatments in the Brazilian context are essential, according the specificities of women crack users.