Internet Geography: New Spaces of Information

The objective of great investments in telecommunication networks is to approach economies and put an end to the asymmetries. The most isolated regions could be the beneficiaries of this new technological investments 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 or 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 and 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. The Internet Geography, Cybergeography or Geography of Cyberspace are only three examples. 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 Internet dissemination and regional development studies. The Portuguese territory is seen in a completely new form: the IP address distribution of Country Code Top Level Domains (.pt) could show new regional hierarchies. The spatial concentration or dispersion of top level domains seems to be a good instrument to reflect the info-structural dynamic and economic development of a territory, especially at regional level.

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.

Transient Spaces: unsettling boundaries and norms at the cultural event Noc Noc, Guimarães, Portugal

Cities are increasingly expected to be creative, inventive and to exhibit intense expressivity. In the past decades many cities have experienced growing pressure to produce and stage cultural events of different sorts and to develop new strategies that optimize competitive advantages, in order to promote themselves and to boost and sell their image. Often these actions have relied on heavy public investment and major private corporation sponsoring, but it is not always clear or measured how successful and reproductive these investments have been. In the context of strained public finances and profound economic crisis of European peripheral countries, events that emerge from local communities and have low budgets, which manage to create significant fluxes of visitors and visibility, assume an increased interest. In order to reflect and sketch possible answers, we look to an emerging body of literature concerning creative cities, and we focus on the organisation of a particular cultural event and its impact and assimilation into a medium size Portuguese city. This paper looks at the two editions (2011 and 2012) of one of such events – Noc Noc – organized by a local association in the city of Guimarães, Portugal. Inspired by similar events, Noc Noc is based on creating transient spaces of culture which are explored by artists and audiences, by transforming numerous homes into ephemeral convivial and playful social ‘public’ environments. The event is based on a number of cultural venues/homes scattered around the old and newer city, which allows for an informal urban exploration and an autonomous rambling and getting lost along streets. This strategy not only disrupts the cleavages between public and private space permitting for various transgressions, but it also disorders normative urban experiences and unsettles the dominant role of the city council as the culture patron of the large majority of events. Guimarães, an UNESCO World Heritage City was the European Capital of Culture in 2012, with a public investment of roughly 73 million euro. By interviewing a sample of people who have hosted these transitory art performances and exhibitions, sometimes doubling as artists, the events’ organizers and by experience both editions of the event, this paper illustrates how urban citizens’ engagement and motivations in a low budget cultural event can strengthen community ties. Furthermore, it also questions the advantages of large scale high budget events, and how this event may be seen as unconscious counter movement against a commodification of cultural events and everyday urban experience at large, engaging with the concepts of staging and authenticity.

Reconceptualising public spaces of (IN)equality: sensing and creating layers of visibility

Tese apresentada para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Doutor em Geografia e Planeamento Territorial - Especialidade: Geografia Humana

Uncertain Spaces: Virtual Configurations in Contemporary Art and Museums

Contém artigos apresentados na International Conference “Uncertain Spaces: Virtual Configurations in Contemporary Art and Museums”, na Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisboa), 31 Outubro - 1 de Novembro de 2014) de: Helena Barranha e Susana S. Martins - Introduction: Art, Museums and Uncertainty (pp.1-12); Alexandra Bounia e Eleni Myrivili - Beyond the ‘Virtual’: Intangible Museographies and Collaborative Museum Experiences (pp.15-32); Annet Dekker - Curating in Progress. Moving Between Objects and Processes (pp.33-54); Giselle Beiguelman - Corrupted Memories. The aesthetics of Digital Ruins and the Museum of the Unfinished (pp.55-82); Andrew Vaas Brooks - The Planetary Datalinks (pp.85-110); Sören Meschede - Curators’ Network: Creating a Promotional Database for Contemporary Visual Arts (pp.11-130); Stefanie Kogler - Divergent Histories and Digital Archives of Latin American and Latino Art in the United States – Old Problems in New Digital Formats (pp.131-156); Luise Reitstätter e Florian Bettel - Right to the City! Right to the Museum!(pp.159-182); Roberto Terracciano - On Geo-poetic systems: virtual interventions inside and outside the museum space (pp.183-210); e, Catarina Carneiro de Sousa e Luís Eustáquio - Art Practice in Collaborative Virtual Environments (pp.211-240).

Augmenting spaces and creating interactive experiences using video camera networks

This research addresses the problem of creating interactive experiences to encourage people to explore spaces. Besides the obvious spaces to visit, such as museums or art galleries, spaces that people visit can be, for example, a supermarket or a restaurant. As technology evolves, people become more demanding in the way they use it and expect better forms of interaction with the space that surrounds them. Interaction with the space allows information to be transmitted to the visitors in a friendly way, leading visitors to explore it and gain knowledge. Systems to provide better experiences while exploring spaces demand hardware and software that is not in the reach of every space owner either because of the cost or inconvenience of the installation, that can damage artefacts or the space environment. We propose a system adaptable to the spaces, that uses a video camera network and a wi-fi network present at the space (or that can be installed) to provide means to support interactive experiences using the visitor’s mobile device. The system is composed of an infrastructure (called vuSpot), a language grammar used to describe interactions at a space (called XploreDescription), a visual tool used to design interactive experiences (called XploreBuilder) and a tool used to create interactive experiences (called urSpace). By using XploreBuilder, a tool built of top of vuSpot, a user with little or no experience in programming can define a space and design interactive experiences. This tool generates a description of the space and of the interactions at that space (that complies with the XploreDescription grammar). These descriptions can be given to urSpace, another tool built of top of vuSpot, that creates the interactive experience application. With this system we explore new forms of interaction and use mobile devices and pico projectors to deliver additional information to the users leading to the creation of interactive experiences. The several components are presented as well as the results of the respective user tests, which were positive. The design and implementation becomes cheaper, faster, more flexible and, since it does not depend on the knowledge of a programming language, accessible for the general public.

Relação entre coordenação motora e comportamento sedentário, em crianças

Relatório de atividade profissional de mestrado em Ensino de Educação Física nos Ensinos Básico e Secundário

Search for heavy long-lived multi-charged particles in pp collisions at √s = 8 TeV using the ATLAS detector

A search for heavy long-lived multi-charged particles is performed using the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Data collected in 2012 at s√=8 TeV from pp collisions corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb−1 are examined. Particles producing anomalously high ionisation, consistent with long-lived massive particles with electric charges from |q|=2e to |q|=6e are searched for. No signal candidate events are observed, and 95% confidence level cross-section upper limits are interpreted as lower mass limits for a Drell--Yan production model. The mass limits range between 660 and 785 GeV.

Search for long-lived, weakly interacting particles that decay to displaced hadronic jets in proton--proton collisions at s√=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A search for the decay of neutral, weakly interacting, long-lived particles using data collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC is presented. This analysis uses the full dataset recorded in 2012: 20.3 fb−1 of proton--proton collision data at s√=8 TeV. The search employs techniques for reconstructing decay vertices of long-lived particles decaying to jets in the inner tracking detector and muon spectrometer. Signal events require at least two reconstructed vertices. No significant excess of events over the expected background is found, and limits as a function of proper lifetime are reported for the decay of the Higgs boson and other scalar bosons to long-lived particles and for Hidden Valley Z′ and Stealth SUSY benchmark models. The first search results for displaced decays in Z′ and Stealth SUSY models are presented. The upper bounds of the excluded proper lifetimes are the most stringent to date.

Search for pair-produced long-lived neutral particles decaying in the ATLAS hadronic calorimeter in pp collisions at s√ = 8 TeV

The ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is used to search for the decay of a scalar boson to a pair of long-lived particles, neutral under the Standard Model gauge group, in 20.3 fb−1 of data collected in proton--proton collisions at s√ = 8 TeV. This search is sensitive to long-lived particles that decay to Standard Model particles producing jets at the outer edge of the ATLAS electromagnetic calorimeter or inside the hadronic calorimeter. No significant excess of events is observed. Limits are reported on the product of the scalar boson production cross section times branching ratio into long-lived neutral particles as a function of the proper lifetime of the particles. Limits are reported for boson masses from 100 GeV to 900 GeV, and a long-lived neutral particle mass from 10 GeV to 150 GeV.

Searches for heavy long-lived charged particles with the ATLAS detector in proton--proton collisions at s√ = 8 TeV

Searches for heavy long-lived charged particles are performed using a data sample of 19.8 fb−1 from proton--proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of s√ = 8 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. No excess is observed above the estimated background and limits are placed on the mass of long-lived particles in various supersymmetric models. Long-lived tau sleptons in models with gauge-mediated symmetry breaking are excluded up to masses between 440 and 385 GeV for tan(beta) between 10 and 50, with a 290 GeV limit in the case where only direct tau slepton production is considered. In the context of simplified LeptoSUSY models, where sleptons are stable and have a mass of 300 GeV, squark and gluino masses are excluded up to a mass of 1500 and 1360 GeV, respectively. Directly produced charginos, in simplified models where they are nearly degenerate to the lightest neutralino, are excluded up to a mass of 620 GeV. R-hadrons, composites containing a gluino, bottom squark or top squark, are excluded up to a mass of 1270, 845 and 900 GeV, respectively, using the full detector; and up to a mass of 1260, 835 and 870 GeV using an approach disregarding information from the muon spectrometer.

Search for massive, long-lived particles using multitrack displaced vertices or displaced lepton pairs in pp collisions at s =8TeV with the ATLAS detector

Many extensions of the Standard Model posit the existence of heavy particles with long lifetimes. This article presents the results of a search for events containing at least one long-lived particle that decays at a significant distance from its production point into two leptons or into five or more charged particles. This analysis uses a data sample of proton-proton collisions at s√ = 8 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb−1 collected in 2012 by the ATLAS detector operating at the Large Hadron Collider. No events are observed in any of the signal regions, and limits are set on model parameters within supersymmetric scenarios involving R-parity violation, split supersymmetry, and gauge mediation. In some of the search channels, the trigger and search strategy are based only on the decay products of individual long-lived particles, irrespective of the rest of the event. In these cases, the provided limits can easily be reinterpreted in different scenarios.

Model spaces and Toeplitz kernels in reflexive Hardy spaces

This paper considers model spaces in an Hp setting. The existence of unbounded functions and the characterisation of maximal functions in a model space are studied, and decomposition results for Toeplitz kernels, in terms of model spaces, are established

Nutzen und Erfolgsfaktoren von Coworking Spaces

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Prototype based clustering in high-dimensional feature spaces

...In dieser Arbeit untersuche ich den ”Fluch der Dimensionen” mittels dem Begriff der Distanzkonzentration. Ich zeige, dass dieser Effekt im Datenmodell mittels der paarweisen Kovarianzkoeffizienten der Randverteilungen beschrieben werden kann. Zusätzlich vergleiche ich 10 prototypbasierte Clusteralgorithmen mittels 800.000 Clusterergebnissen von künstlich erzeugten Datensätzen. Ich erforsche, wie und warum Clusteralgorithmen von der Anzahl der Merkmale beeinflusst werden. Mit den Clusterergebnissen untersuche ich außerdem, wie gut 5 der populärsten Clusterqualitätsmaße die tatsächliche Clusterqualität schätzen.