Análise de ciclo de vida de empreendimentos Turísticos no PNPG

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia Civil

Relatório de estágio na Fundação Bracara Augusta - Loja Europa Jovem, com ênfase no caso de estudo sobre os impactos sócio económicos do Programa Juventude em Ação 2007-2013 no Município de Braga

Relatório de estágio de mestrado em Políticas Comunitárias e Cooperação Territorial

Thermal technologies in food processing

[Excerpt] Introduction: Thermal processing is probably the most important process in food industry that has been used since prehistoric times, when it was discovered that heat enhanced the palatability and the life of the heat-treated food. Thermal processing comprehends the heating of foods at a defined temperature for a certain length of time. However, in some foods, the high thermotolerance of certain enzymes and microorganisms, their physical properties (e.g.,highviscosity),ortheircomponents(e.g.,solidfractions) require the application of extreme heat treatments that not only are energy intensive, but also will adversely affect the nutritional and organoleptic properties of the food. Technologies such as ohmic heating, dielectric heating (which includes microwave heating and radiofrequency heating), inductive heating, and infrared heating are available to replace, or complement, the traditional heat-dependent technologies (heating through superheated steam, hot air, hot water, or other hot liquid, being the heating achieved either through direct contact with those agents – mostly superheated steam – or through contact with a hot surface which is in turn heated by such agents). Given that the “traditional” heatdependent technologies are thoroughly described in the literature, this text will be mainly devoted to the so-called “novel” thermal technologies. (...)

Caracterização de materiais plásticos usados na indústria têxtil e de vestuário por FTIR

Dissertação de mestrado em Técnicas de Caracterização e Análises Químicas

Immunologic evaluation in infective endocarditis

OBJECTIVE: To analyze the immune response in peripheral blood of patients with infective endocarditis. METHODS: We studied 10 patients with infective endocarditis, age range from 20 to 50 years-old, males and females, and 20 healthy subjects in the same age range. The diagnosis of the disease was based on the clinical picture, echocardiogram, and hemoculture based upon samples drawn and tested before the treatment started. The were no history of atopy or malnutrition, no autoimmune disease, and they were not using any immunosuppressant or antibiotic medication. RESULTS: The patients with endocarditis had significantly higher T and B lymphocyte, CD4+ and CD8+ cell counts, IgM and IgG serum levels, and C4 component of the complement than the control group; no significant difference concerning serum IgA and neutrophil oxidative metabolism; a significant decrease in C3, chemotaxis, and monocyte phagocytosis;cryoglobulins were detected in 66.6% of patients and they were formed by IgG, IgM, IgA, C3, and C4. CONCLUSION: The patients with infective endocarditis were immunocompetent in most sectors of immune response and, at a certain moment, an autoimmune component may be present.

Redes e nós da aprendizagem: a integração curricular no 1º ano da escolaridade obrigatória

Relatório de estágio de mestrado em Educação Pré-escolar e Ensino do 1º Ciclo do Ensino Básico

Insights into bacterial colony morphology evolution and diversification during infection development in cystic fibrosis

Tese de Doutoramento em Engenharia Biomédica.

Interactions between fiscal and monetary policy

Mestrado em Economia Monetária e Financeira

Publishing performances of spanish academics: 1970-2004

The aim of this note is to complement some of the results appearing in Dolado et al. (2003) article “Publishing Performance in Economics: Spanish Rankings” Particularly we want to focus on three issues: the robustness of the results regardless of the time span considered, the evaluation of a researcher to the advance of the knowledge, and to what extent the choice of a particular database to download the results can affect the results. Differences are significant when we expand the time period considered. There are also small but significant differences if we combine datasets to derive the rankings.

Employment by lotto revisited

We study employment by lotto (Aldershof et al., 1999), a matching algorithm for the so-called stable marriage problem. We complement Aldershof et al.'s analysis in two ways. First, we give an alternative and intuitive description of employment by lotto. Second, we disprove Aldershof et al.'s conjectures concerning employment by lotto for general matching markets.

Sensitivity of simulation results to competing SAM updates

Recently there has been a renewed research interest in the properties of non survey updates of input-output tables and social accounting matrices (SAM). Along with the venerable and well known scaling RAS method, several alternative new procedures related to entropy minimization and other metrics have been suggested, tested and used in the literature. Whether these procedures will eventually substitute or merely complement the RAS approach is still an open question without a definite answer. The performance of many of the updating procedures has been tested using some kind of proximity or closeness measure to a reference input-output table or SAM. The first goal of this paper, in contrast, is the proposal of checking the operational performance of updating mechanisms by way of comparing the simulation results that ensue from adopting alternative databases for calibration of a reference applied general equilibrium model. The second goal is to introduce a new updatin! g procedure based on information retrieval principles. This new procedure is then compared as far as performance is concerned to two well-known updating approaches: RAS and cross-entropy. The rationale for the suggested cross validation is that the driving force for having more up to date databases is to be able to conduct more current, and hopefully more credible, policy analyses.

Classical horizontal inequity and reranking: an integrated approach

The last 20 years have seen a significant evolution in the literature on horizontal inequity (HI) and have generated two major and "rival" methodological strands, namely, classical HI and reranking. We propose in this paper a class of ethically flexible tools that integrate these two strands. This is achieved using a measure of inequality that merges the well-known Gini coefficient and Atkinson indices, and that allows a decomposition of the total redistributive effect of taxes and transfers in a vertical equity effect and a loss of redistribution due to either classical HI or reranking. An inequality-change approach and a money-metric cost-of-inequality approach are developed. The latter approach makes aggregate classical HI decomposable across groups. As in recent work, equals are identified through a nonparametric estimation of the joint density of gross and net incomes. An illustration using Canadian data from 1981 to 1994 shows a substantial, and increasing, robust erosion of redistribution attributable both to classical HI and to reranking, but does not reveal which of reranking or classical HI is more important since this requires a judgement that is fundamentally normative in nature.

Serological studies on an outbreak of smallpox in the State of Bahia - Brazil in 1969

Four weeks after Containment Vaccination undertaken against the largest outbreak of smallpox occured in Brazil in 1969, that of the municipality of Utinga, Bahia, 99 samples of serum were collected from the local population. These samples were classified in four groups: a) - Individuals with a history of variola prior to the beginning of present outbreak in town (15 sera); "Previous smallpox group"; b) - Individuals with primary vaccination, with no record variola, at the time of containment measures (15 sera). "Primary vaccinated group"; c) - Individuals with no previous record of variola revaccinated with "take" at the time of containment (15 sera0, "Revaccinated group"; d) - Individuals who contracted variola in present outbreak (54 sera) these were subdivided in four sub-groups, according to dates on which cases ocurred, "Variola in outbreak group". Serological study of samples was done by tests of hemagglutination inhibition, neutralization, and complement fixation. It was observed that HI titers were significantly lower in cases of previous smallpox than in other groups. Although they were slightly higher on revaccinated individuals than on primary vaccinated group and than in the group of variola in outbreak, this difference was not significant. Those same antibodies were present in all cases of variola in outbreak, and it was found that titers decreased in direct proportion to time elapsed from occurrence of cases. Neutralizing antibodies proved to be significantly higher on the revaccinated group than on variola in outbreak group, and higher on these than on primary vaccinated and on the previous smallpox groups. In cases from the variola in outbreak it was verified that neutralizing antibodies remained stable, although with great variation in titers. Tests of complement fixation could not be undertaken on all samples, because many of them proved to have anticomplementarity. However, it was found that complement fixing antibodies diminished rapidly, becoming negative for earlier infections. Finally, the authors suggest that there would be some evidence that HI titers are lower in variola minor under Brazilian conditions than in variola major.

On punishment and well-being

The existence of punishment opportunities has been shown to cause efficiency in public goods experiments to increase considerably. In this paper we ask whether punishment also has a downside in terms of process dissatisfaction. We conduct an experiment to study the conjecture that an environment with stronger punishment possibilities leads to higher material but lower subjective well-being. The more general motivation for our study stems from the notion that people??s subjective well-being may be affected by the institutional environment they find themselves in. Our findings show that harsher punishment possibilities lead to signficantly higher well-being, controlling for earnings and other relevant variables. People derive independent satisfaction from interacting under the protection of strong punishment possibilities. These results complement the evidence on the neural basis of altruistic punishment reported in de Quervain et al. (2004).

Toward a comparative analysis of coming and going verbs in Spanish, German, and Polish

This work deals with coming and going verbs in three typologically distinct languages: a Romance one (Spanish), a Germanic one (German) and a Slavic one (Polish) within Fillmore`s (1966, 1971, 1975, 1982, 1983) framework. On the grounds of data description it is shown that visible linguistic phenomena, such as deixis or Aktionsart related clearly to the coming and going verbs, can be transcended, resorting to the more abstract notion called by the author, following Winston (1987) and Speas and Tenny (2003), “viewpoint”.