Mobile Internet : perspectives from the Stakeholders

Mobile internet represents a major new trend in communication technologies use and consumption, but few evidence exists that confirms claims of novelty and social change in association with this technology use. This paper characterizes the use of mobile internet in a southern European country and associated patterns of use, focusing both on users’ profiles, forms of access, motivations to use and most popular activities undertaken via this technology, from a diffusion of innovations and social adoption of technologies perspectives, and tries to compare mobile it with fixed access to the internet in order to validate possible transformations that point to new social configurations. We seek to understand the way stakeholders perceive and characterize the European context of mobile internet. The depicted study involved a qualitative stage consisting of a set of interviews with mobile communications industry representatives and market research community in the country. These interviews were analysed in Nvivo, leading to the following eleven main categories that are explored throughout the paper: smartphones in Europe, mobile internet in Europe, users profiles, obstacles to the spread, forms of access, forms of use, motivations to use mobile internet, limitations of smartphones, apps, digital divide VS digital union and predictions for the future, as well as several subcategories forming a tree categorization. According to the data collected, mobile phones’ sales are decreasing in Europe and worldwide but on the other hand smartphones are having an exponential growth which leads to the democratization of internet access via mobile devices. As a consequence of this, it is believed that mobile internet access will soon exceed the fixed one. Mobile internet users are multiplatform, they exploit all the possibilities of mobility and they are spending less time on computers. The main obstacles to the spread of mobile internet are the high prices of price plans and there is still a lack of information and knowledge regarding the service. Mobile internet users are developing new online surfing behaviours based on apps and less in browsers and social networks represent a very high share of internet traffic through mobile phones. With mobility, “dead time” is turning into useful time and users are more likely to be available to try new services and analyze products. Innovative services concerning geolocation, consumerism, share and relationships are growing and it is necessary to highlight that mobile internet allows calling and texting, which can turn telecommunications companies into the role of Dump Pipes. This exploratory design raises questions in relation with mobile internet access and its social consequences, and provides interesting indicative research results relevant for future research in this area.

The construction of the museological object

"Exhibiting is or should be to work against ignorance, especially against the most refractory of all ignorance: the pre-conceived idea of stereo typed culture. To exhibit is to take a calculated risk of disorientation - in the etymological sense : ( to lose your bearings), disturbs the harmony, the evident , and the consensus, that constitutes the common place ( the banal). Needless to say however it is obvious that an exhibition that deliberately tries to scandalise will create an inverted perversion which results in an obscurantist pseudo-luxury - culture ... between demagogy and provocation, one has to find visual communication's subtle itinerary. Even though an intermediary route is not so stimulating : as Gaston Bachelard said "All the roads lead to Rome, except the roads of compromise."

Práticas de liderança para uma escola inclusiva

Pensar numa escola de todos e para todos é pensar e reconhecer a heterogeneidade dos alunos que a frequentam e responder a cada um deles segundo as suas necessidades. Assim, uma liderança forte é absolutamente vital para o desenvolvimento de ofertas educativas orientadas para a diversidade, incentivando todos os intervenientes a construir uma cultura de colaboração e reflexão. A escolha do problema a ser investigado, tendo como pergunta de partida, que práticas de liderança levar a cabo num projeto educativo para uma escola efetivamente inclusiva, surgiu da reflexão autobiográfica, das atuais funções da investigadora, enquanto elemento da Direção de uma escola, e da caracterização do agrupamento de escolas ao qual pertence. Com base na revisão de literatura, procurou-se clarificar e definir conceitos, aprofundar conhecimentos, de forma a reconhecer o que já foi feito, através de uma reflexão sobre o desenvolvimento do agrupamento em estudo, e propor ações/práticas de liderança a melhorar ou outras ainda não realizadas, com o objetivo que o mesmo seja efetivamente inclusivo.

A ponderação de bens em Direito Administrativo

Quando duas normas jurídicas entram em conflito não resolúvel por inexistência de normas de conflito (o que acontece em especial no domínio dos direitos fundamentais ou quando se tentam aplicar princípios jurídicos), a solução em direito não pode ser por subsunção, tem de ser através da ponderação. A ponderação não deve ser subjetiva, mas objetiva, baseada num sistema controlável externamente. O sistema neste momento internacionalmente mais reputado de fazer a ponderação é a fórmula do peso de Robert Alexy. Aqui explica-se em que consiste a ponderação de bens, a sua origem e expressão noutros países, a sua admissibilidade, a referida fórmula, e defende-se a aplicação de um sistema alternativo baseado na teoria psicológica da pirâmide das necessidades humanas, de Abraham Maslow. Verifica-se a validade das teses testando-as em casos concretos. Faz-se ainda a aplicação destes princípios a problemas próprios do direito administrativo.

O papel da liderança na promoção de uma dinâmica de escola aprendente- um projeto em desenvolvimento

A época atual exige que a escola se reformule e se adapte às exigências locais, nacionais e mundiais com as quais se confronta. O professor, ator principal das mudanças requeridas, vê aumentar significativamente as suas funções, necessitando de uma formação que corresponda às suas necessidades e que terá de efetivar ao longo de toda a sua vida profissional. Contudo, a formação proposta pelos centros de formação nem sempre se afigura a mais adequada. Para mudar, a escola precisa de lideranças fortes que apostem numa formação que vá ao encontro das necessidades sentidas e tente dar respostas eficazes. Tendo por base estes pressupostos, o presente projeto pretende investigar, no contexto particular de uma determinada escola, o modo como a(s) lideranças promovem uma dinâmica de escola aprendente e dinamizam formações que correspondam às necessidades sentidas. Este estudo permite-nos concluir que a(s) liderança(s) é um dos fatores que influencia fortemente o plano de formação, muito embora não seja o único. O entendimento que a(s) lideranças têm da formação, do desenvolvimento profissional e do futuro da escola, condiciona fortemente a dinâmica de escola que aprende. Decorrente da visão sobre a formação na escola alvo deste estudo, construiu-se um plano de ação de formação que assenta na criação de uma equipa de formação, team-teaching, centrada na escola, trabalhando colaborativamente, para dar início ao que poderá ser a solução para o problema identificado: uma formação que responda efetivamente e eficazmente às necessidades de formação dos professores da escola para fazer face às exigências da escola atual. Assim, partindo do team-teaching no departamento de línguas, tentar-se-á alargar a experiência e criar as bases para uma formação que promova a dinâmica de escola aprendente.

The construction of the museological object

Exhibiting is or should be to work against ignorance, especially against the most refractory of all ignorance: the pre-conceived idea of stereo typed culture. To exhibit is to take a calculated risk of disorientation - in the etymological sense: (to lose your bearings), disturbs the harmony, the evident , and the consensus, that constitutes the common place (the banal). Needless to say however it is obvious that an exhibition that deliberately tries to scandalise will create an inverted perversion which results in an obscurantist pseudo-luxury - culture ... between demagogy and provocation, one has to find visual communication's subtle itinerary. Even though an intermediary route is not so stimulating: as Gaston Bachelard said "All the roads lead to Rome, except the roads of compromise." It is becoming ever more evident that museums have undergone changes that are noticeable in numerous areas. As well as the traditional functions of collecting, conserving and exhibiting objects. museums have tried to become a means of communication, open and aware of the worries of modern society. In order to do this , it has started to utilise modern technology now available and lead by the hand of "marketing" and modern business management.

Museu de arte popular : memórias de poder

Tendo como pano de fundo o Museu de Arte Popular, o presente trabalho procura compreender a decisão política que determinou o seu encerramento em 2008, enquadrando-a no período histórico vivido pela sociedade portuguesa desde o ano de 1948, data em que foi inaugurado, até aos nossos dias. É traçado o registo biográfico do Museu, assim como a matriz institucional que a ele preside, pretendendo-se, com o auxílio de informação produzida em várias áreas científicas complementares da museologia e presente em fontes documentais de arquivo, estabelecer uma descrição dos seus principais aspectos caracterizantes – onde se inclui a descrição do percurso institucional, do espaço expositivo, acervo, – bem como das relações funcionais verificadas entre o Museu e as diferentes tutelas dos períodos do Estado Novo e da Democracia. (Dissertação Mestrado Museologia Departamento de Museologia ULHT)

Efficiency and social inclusion: implications for the museum profession

In the late 1980s Stephen Weil (1990) raised the question of the extent to which museum work could be considered a profession, the extent to which it had been professionalized, and in what ways this professionalization was facilitated or impeded by the changing circumstances of museum work, its organizational and governance context and its already multiplying roles vis-à-vis public culture and society at large. Although Weil‘s thoughts were situated in the American museum context of the mid-1980s, many of his thoughts apply to contexts beyond the US, and some of the questions he raised about the potential for professionalising museum work still resonate with the current situation of museum work. This paper tries to pose and approach a host of questions that, whilst in the main echoing Stephen Weil‘s mid-1980s reflections, are reconfigured in light of some sweeping changes in the nature of museum work, its mode of governance and its governing norms and values.

Democracia procedimental con enfoque intercultural. Una asignatura pendiente para el Estado de Derechos (Tema Central)

El presente trabajo pretende evidenciar cómo la democracia de los estados plurinacionales, como Ecuador, si bien ha realizado avances importantes en cuanto a la universalización de la participación política dentro de un sistema democrático, ni siquiera se ha planteado la posibilidad de pluriculturizar los mecanismos por los que se manifiesta la voluntad popular. el hecho de contar con un único sistema electoral, estatal y construido a partir de un enfoque formalista de democracia liberal, como regla de la mayoría, puede producir efectos de participación en desventaja en relación a sectores sociales cuyas tradiciones y formas de participación política son distintas pero no por ello, menos democráticas, si las comparamos con el sistema electoral estatal, de ahí que, el autor plantea esta inquietud como una provocación al debate académico y social sobre el tema.

Surrealismo en el Paraguay (Dossier: Literaturas de la integración, el Sur y su diversidad)

El surrealismo, nacido en los años 20, y arribado pronto al Paraguay con revistas literarias extranjeras (aunque no por sus textos fundacionales, sino por producciones de escritores aledaños al movimiento), no tuvo relevancia en la escena de la poesía paraguaya hasta lograr instalarse dos décadas más tarde, evidente o subrepticiamente, en el quehacer poético nacional. La intención de este ensayo es mostrar cuáles fueron las condiciones necesarias para que este movimiento influyera en la literatura paraguaya, específicamente en la poesía, y de qué modo esta influencia logró que la poesía fuera lo que naturalmente debía ser: paraguaya y actual. A la par, insertos a lo largo del ensayo, se incluyen suficientes textos para mostrar la evolución de este proceso, y para dar además una mínima antología –obligada tal vez por lo recóndito del tema.

The creation of euro area financial safety nets. Bruegel Working Paper 2012/09, July 2012

The financial crisis has exposed the need to devise stronger and broader international and regional safety nets in order to deal with economic and financial shocks and allow for countries to adjust. The euro area has developed several such mechanisms over the last couple of years through a process of trial and error and gradual enhancement and expansion. Their overall architecture remains imperfect and leaves areas of vulnerabilities. This paper provides an overview of the recent financial stability mechanisms and their various shortcomings and tries to brush the outline of a more comprehensive safety net architecture that would coherently address the banking, sovereign and external imbalances crises against both transitory and more permanent shocks. It aims to provide a roadmap for further improvements of the current mechanism and the creation of new devices including a banking resolution mechanism and amore powerfulmechanismto provide financial assistance addressing both the sovereign and external dimensions of the shocks thereby reducing the need for the ECB to fill the current void.

A comparative study of Java and C performance in two large-scale parallel applications

In the 1990s the Message Passing Interface Forum defined MPI bindings for Fortran, C, and C++. With the success of MPI these relatively conservative languages have continued to dominate in the parallel computing community. There are compelling arguments in favour of more modern languages like Java. These include portability, better runtime error checking, modularity, and multi-threading. But these arguments have not converted many HPC programmers, perhaps due to the scarcity of full-scale scientific Java codes, and the lack of evidence for performance competitive with C or Fortran. This paper tries to redress this situation by porting two scientific applications to Java. Both of these applications are parallelized using our thread-safe Java messaging system—MPJ Express. The first application is the Gadget-2 code, which is a massively parallel structure formation code for cosmological simulations. The second application uses the finite-domain time-difference method for simulations in the area of computational electromagnetics. We evaluate and compare the performance of the Java and C versions of these two scientific applications, and demonstrate that the Java codes can achieve performance comparable with legacy applications written in conventional HPC languages. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Sbiancare un etiope. La pelle cangiante di un topos antico

The book is part of a multi-year investigation on the historical construction and representation of ethnic otherness through the use of language, and focuses on the history of the tópos expressed by the proverb Lavare/sbiancare un etiope (‘to wash an Ethiop white’), a tópos which is traceable in different languages across many centuries (and since II c. A.D.), which stays for either ‘to attempt the impossible’ or ‘to do something useless’. The research also tries to shine a light upon the cultural and social contexts in which ‘Ethiopian’ otherness have generated. Its final goal is to find out how the washing-the-Ethiopian tópos (in its verbal and iconographical forms) has become long-lasting, ductile and semantically productive key expression whose heterogeneous use not only document but also produce and fix otherness in time.

Comovement in UK real estate sector returns

Engle et al. (1990) distinguish between 'heat waves' and 'meteor showers' in an analogy which tries to differentiate between particular effects, not transmitted among markets, and general effects, which tend to affect all the markets, although different markets can be affected to different degrees. This paper applies this approach to the study of the monthly returns of four real estate market sectors: Office, Retail, Industrial and Retail Warehouses in the UK over the period 1979:2 to 1997:12. A VAR methodology used with the aim of detecting the causal relations and dynamic interactions among sector returns, as well as the transmission mechanisms of their information flows. The results obtained permit us to conclude that there is a good deal of integration between the monthly return time series for all the sectors. Therefore, diversification across real estate market sectors does not allow for the reduction of risk without sacrificing expected returns.

Tarabotti fra omissioni e femminismo: il mistero della sua formazione

This paper given at the conference "Donne a Venezia" in May 2008 discloses the complexity of Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652), a proto-feminist polemist and writer who lived all her life in a remoted convent, Sant'Anna in Castello, in a remoted part of Venice. Despite having been cloistered at the age of 11, according to her account, she managed to publish her books and become a recognised member of the République des Lettres. How did she manage to develop her incredibly modern ideas, suggesting women should study and work and avoid getting married with astronomical dowries? The article deals with entirely new documents, uncovered in archives and tries to provide an answer to such dearing questions.