Madurez sintáctica: influencia de las TIC en sus índices y estudio comparativo entre las generaciones pre y post-internet

There is a growing concern about the poor quality of the writing of children and teenagers because of the continuous and constant exposure to the new technologies. Increasingly parents complain that their children spend too much time with their phones, tablets, computers, video games, etc. There is also an increase in the number of teachers who complain about their students’ writing skills. Some of the most prominent criticisms are loss of vocabulary, simplified syntax and the poor spelling of the compositions. To verify if these criticisms are motivated or not by the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) is what moved us to initiate this doctoral dissertation entitled “The influence of ICT on ratings of syntactic maturity: a comparative study between pre- and post-internet generations”. We aim to know if a daily and constant exposure to the ICT can affect the syntactic maturity rates of children and teenagers. We also want to find out if there are differences between the levels of syntactic maturity of today’s students and those of the 1990s, when there were no ICT and internet. In order to do this, we have carried out a quantitative analysis taking as a reference previous studies by generativist researchers in the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic world and we have used the same units of measure (T-unit and clause). We collected a corpus of 382 essays, half argumentative and half descriptive, from 191 individuals. We have analyzed them according to ten dependent variables or syntactic maturity rates and other independent variables (Hours in internet, Course, Sex, Location, Type of school) by applying techniques of descriptive and inferential statistics...

Particle Swarm Optimization Based Reactive Power Dispatch for Power Networks with Distributed Generation

Reactive power is critical to the operation of the power networks on both safety aspects and economic aspects. Unreasonable distribution of the reactive power would severely affect the power quality of the power networks and increases the transmission loss. Currently, the most economical and practical approach to minimizing the real power loss remains using reactive power dispatch method. Reactive power dispatch problem is nonlinear and has both equality constraints and inequality constraints. In this thesis, PSO algorithm and MATPOWER 5.1 toolbox are applied to solve the reactive power dispatch problem. PSO is a global optimization technique that is equipped with excellent searching capability. The biggest advantage of PSO is that the efficiency of PSO is less sensitive to the complexity of the objective function. MATPOWER 5.1 is an open source MATLAB toolbox focusing on solving the power flow problems. The benefit of MATPOWER is that its code can be easily used and modified. The proposed method in this thesis minimizes the real power loss in a practical power system and determines the optimal placement of a new installed DG. IEEE 14 bus system is used to evaluate the performance. Test results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Remember Not to Forget Furman: A Response to Professor Smith

Professor Robert J. Smith encourages readers, lawyers, and courts to forget Furman v. Georgia and to focus instead on death penalty challenges grounded in the diminished culpability of nearly all capital defendants. We applaud Professor Smith’s call to focus on the mental and emotional characteristics that reduce the blameworthiness of so many of those charged with capital crimes; recognizing diminished culpability as the rule rather than the exception among capital defendants conveys a reality that rarely finds its way into reported cases. We are troubled, however, by Professor Smith’s call to “forget Furman.” We believe the title and the article’s efforts to undermine Furman-based challenges disserve Professor Smith’s principal goal — addressing the United States’ broken death penalty system.

Incorporating global positioning data in real time P2P audio/video streams for mobile devices

We propose an original method to geoposition an audio/video stream with multiple emitters that are at the same time receivers of the mixed signal. The achieved method is suitable for those comes where a list of positions within a designated area is encoded with a degree of precision adjusted to the visualization capabilities; and is also easily extensible to support new requirements. This method extends a previously proposed protocol, without incurring in any performance penalty.

P2P audio/video protocol with global positioning data in real time for mobile devices

In this paper, we propose an original method to geoposition an audio/video stream with multiple emitters that are at the same time receivers of the mixed signal. The obtained method is suitable when a list of positions within a known area is encoded with precision tailored to the visualization capabilities of the target device. Nevertheless, it is easily adaptable to new precision requirements, as well as parameterized data precision. This method extends a previously proposed protocol, without incurring in any performance penalty.

Comparative study of RPSALG algorithm for convex semi-infinite programming

The Remez penalty and smoothing algorithm (RPSALG) is a unified framework for penalty and smoothing methods for solving min-max convex semi-infinite programing problems, whose convergence was analyzed in a previous paper of three of the authors. In this paper we consider a partial implementation of RPSALG for solving ordinary convex semi-infinite programming problems. Each iteration of RPSALG involves two types of auxiliary optimization problems: the first one consists of obtaining an approximate solution of some discretized convex problem, while the second one requires to solve a non-convex optimization problem involving the parametric constraints as objective function with the parameter as variable. In this paper we tackle the latter problem with a variant of the cutting angle method called ECAM, a global optimization procedure for solving Lipschitz programming problems. We implement different variants of RPSALG which are compared with the unique publicly available SIP solver, NSIPS, on a battery of test problems.

Urban environmental degradation and the standard of living: the case of the Spanish mining industry (1870–1930)

This paper analyses the consequences of urban environmental degradation on the well-being of Spanish miners. It is based on analyses of differences in mortality and height. The first part of the paper examines new hypotheses regarding the urban penalty. We take into consideration existing works in economic theory that address market failures when analysing the higher urban death rate. We explain the reduction in height using the model recently created by Floud, Fogel, Harris and Hong for British cities. The second part of the paper presents information demonstrating that the urban areas in the two largest mining areas in Spain (Bilbao and the Cartagena-La Unión mountain range) experienced a higher death rate relative to rural areas as a consequence of market failures derived from what we term an ‘anarchic urbanisation’.

Deterioro medioambiental urbano y mortalidad: el caso de Alcoi (1860-1910)

Para la realización de este trabajo, Antonio Escudero y Salvador Salort se han beneficiado del proyecto de investigación del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad HAR 2010-21941-C03-01.

First Draught of substitute, [1799 February]

One folio-sized leaf containing a handwritten draft of the substitute clause providing Cambridge a year to provide evidence that Harvard exceeded £500 in real estate income. The clause was included in the annual tax act, approved on February 28, 1799 (Chapter 75).

Substitute, [1799 February]

Fragment of paper containing a handwritten copy of the substitute clause. The clause was included in the annual tax act, approved on February 28, 1799 (Chapter 75).

No. 6 Rough Draught of Memorial of Col. Officers, [1799 February]

Four folio-sized leaves containing a handwritten draft of a petition to the Massachusetts General Court from the Harvard President and Professors regarding the addition of a clause in a pending tax act denying tax exemptions to the Harvard College officers. The petition specifically responds to the statements in the January 1799 memorial of the Committee of the Town of Cambridge.

Notification from William Cutler to the selectmen of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that Dr. Philip Brukowitz and wife were inhabiting his father's house in Cambridge, 1758 April 25

Single page notification addressed to the selectmen of Cambridge, Massachusetts, dated 25 April 1758, in which William Cutler writes that he took into his father’s Cambridge house as tenants Dr. George Philip Brukowitz and his wife, from Woburn, Massachusetts. After the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721, the town of Cambridge enacted a requirement in 1723 that no resident would receive or admit any non-resident family into their homes for the space of a month without informing the town selectmen. The penalty for failing to do so was twenty shillings.

The future of the Eurozone and the role of the German Constitutional Court. Research Papers in Law, 05/2012

[Introduction.] Necessary reforms towards a deepened and increased European shaped economic, financial and budgetary policy, paraphrased with the term “fiscal union”, could possibly reach constitutional limits. In its EFSF judgment1, the German Constitutional Court, following the Lisbon judgment in which certain government tasks were determined as being part of the “constitutional identity”2, connected the budget right of the parliament via the principle of democracy to the eternity clause of Art. 79 para 3 Basic Law. A transfer of essential parts of the budget right of the German Bundestag, which would be in conflict with the German constitution, is said to exist when the determination of the nature and amount of the tax affecting the citizens is largely regulated on the supranational level and thereby deprived of the Bundestag’s right to disposition. A reform of the Economic and Monetary Union that touches the core of the budget right can, according to the German Federal Court, with regard to Art. 79 (3) of the Basic Law only be realized by way of Art. 146 of the Basic Law, thus with a new constitution given by the people that replaces the Basic Law.3

Complexidade textual e progressão escolar em dois registos : um estudo de correlação baseado em um corpus quasi-longitudinal

Tese de doutoramento, Linguística (Linguística Educacional), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2016

A admissibilidade jurídico-penal do crime de burla por omissão

O estudo da problemática da admissibilidade jurídico-penal do crime de burla por omissão, enquadrando-se na órbitra dos crimes comissivos por omissão, impõe, a título de questão prévia, a análise do conteúdo e alcance da cláusula de equiparação da omissão à acção, ínsita no art. 10.º do C.P, e, bem assim, a indagação do seu fundamento e da sua compatibilidade com o princípio jurídico-constitucional da legalidade das normas incriminadoras e suas exigências de determinação típica decorrentes dos princípios nullum crimen sine (prævia) lege e nulla poena sine (prævia) lege., matéria a que nos debruçaremos na Parte I da presente dissertação e que deverá ser essencialmente entendida à luz do princípio da dignidade da pessoa humana e da necessidade de um equilíbrio entre a certeza e a segurança jurídicas com a tutela de determinados bens-jurídicos fundamentais, enquanto pilares essenciais de qualquer Estado de Direito Democrático. Na parte II, tentaremos determinar o significado e alcance da conduta enganosa e astuciosa do crime de burla, previsto e punido pelo n.º 1 do art.º 217.º do C.P., desbravando, antes de mais, a sua evolução normativa até aos tempos hodiernos, após o que definiremos a estrutura normativa do tipo. Buscaremos, de seguida, uma aproximação ao conceito de engano e a determinação das formas e modalidades que a conduta enganosa e astuciosa poderá assumir: Exigirá a conduta típica uma mise-en-scène perpetrada pelo agente ou poderá bastar-se com uma mera mentira? Alcançada a sua (possível) determinação, estaremos já em condições de nos debruçarmos sobre a problemática da admissibilidade jurídico-penal da burla por omissão, altura em que, sob uma perspectiva crítica e acompanhada da análise igualmente crítica de casos, avançaremos com argumentos favoráveis e contrários a essa admissibilidade, sem, naturalmente, deixarmos de auscultar a tendência de entendimento da nossa Jurisprudência.