OS IMPACTOS DAS POLÍTICAS DE INCLUSÃO ESCOLAR NA FORMAÇÃO E NA PRÁTICA DE PROFESSORES

A pesquisa analisou as tendências de formação de professores na perspectiva da educação inclusiva ante as exigências do cotidiano escolar que desde a década de 1990 vem apresentando uma demanda crescente de estudantes com necessidades educacionais especiais nas salas comuns do ensino regular. A inclusão escolar é um processo que depende da combinação de vários fatores, não é responsabilidade apenas do professor. Entretanto, questionamos: Será que os professores estão sendo preparados para pensar nesta perspectiva, de planejar para a diversidade da sala de aula, especialmente na vertente de alunos com deficiência intelectual, de realizar um trabalho em equipe com professores especialistas? A reflexão sobre a formação e a prática de professores na sala de aula inclusiva faz parte do processo de inclusão, ainda em construção. Eis a questão que norteou esta pesquisa, no sentido de revelar impactos das políticas de inclusão escolar nos cursos de formação de professores e na prática docente, revelando conflitos, resistências, contradições, avanços e mecanismos de exclusão implícitos na proposta da inclusão, contribuindo ainda, para a discussão sobre o papel da universidade como locus privilegiado de formação docente. Os resultados da pesquisa apontaram para uma superficialidade na formação de professores na perspectiva da educação inclusiva. A ação investigativa articulou as políticas públicas de formação de professores, as Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para as licenciaturas, os dispositivos legais, a sustentação teórica e os instrumentos de investigação para coordenadores, estudantes de Pedagogia e de Letras e professores do Ensino Fundamental em exercício.

Using interior point algorithms for the solution of linear programs with special structural features

Linear Programming (LP) is a powerful decision making tool extensively used in various economic and engineering activities. In the early stages the success of LP was mainly due to the efficiency of the simplex method. After the appearance of Karmarkar's paper, the focus of most research was shifted to the field of interior point methods. The present work is concerned with investigating and efficiently implementing the latest techniques in this field taking sparsity into account. The performance of these implementations on different classes of LP problems is reported here. The preconditional conjugate gradient method is one of the most powerful tools for the solution of the least square problem, present in every iteration of all interior point methods. The effect of using different preconditioners on a range of problems with various condition numbers is presented. Decomposition algorithms has been one of the main fields of research in linear programming over the last few years. After reviewing the latest decomposition techniques, three promising methods were chosen the implemented. Sparsity is again a consideration and suggestions have been included to allow improvements when solving problems with these methods. Finally, experimental results on randomly generated data are reported and compared with an interior point method. The efficient implementation of the decomposition methods considered in this study requires the solution of quadratic subproblems. A review of recent work on algorithms for convex quadratic was performed. The most promising algorithms are discussed and implemented taking sparsity into account. The related performance of these algorithms on randomly generated separable and non-separable problems is also reported.

A critical evaluation of theories of nationalism

This thesis considers the main theoretical positions within the contemporary sociology of nationalism. These can be grouped into two basic types, primordialist theories which assert that nationalism is an inevitable aspect of all human societies, and modernist theories which assert that nationalism and the nation-state first developed within western Europe in recent centuries. With respect to primordialist approaches to nationalism, it is argued that the main common explanation offered is human biological propensity. Consideration is concentrated on the most recent and plausible of such theories, sociobiology. Sociobiological accounts root nationalism and racism in genetic programming which favours close kin, or rather to the redirection of this programming in complex societies, where the social group is not a kin group. It is argued that the stated assumptions of the sociobiologists do not entail the conclusions they draw as to the roots of nationalism, and that in order to arrive at such conclusions further and implausible assumptions have to be made. With respect to modernists, the first group of writers who are considered are those, represented by Carlton Hayes, Hans Kohn and Elie Kedourie, whose main thesis is that the nation-state and nationalism are recent phenomena. Next, the two major attempts to relate nationalism and the nation-state to imperatives specific either to capitalist societies (in the `orthodox' marxist theory elaborated about the turn of the twentieth century) or to the processes of modernisation and industrialisation (the `Weberian' account of Ernest Gellner) are discussed. It is argued that modernist accounts can only be sustained by starting from a definition of nationalism and the nation-state which conflates such phenomena with others which are specific to the modern world. The marxist and Gellner accounts form the necessary starting point for any explanation as to why the nation-state is apparently the sole viable form of polity in the modern world, but their assumption that no pre-modern society was national leaves them without an adequate account of the earliest origins of the nation-state and of nationalism. Finally, a case study from the history of England argues both the achievement of a national state form and the elucidation of crucial components of a nationalist ideology were attained at a period not consistent with any of the versions of the modernist thesis.

La traduction des discours politiques au Canada

This work focuses on translated political speeches made by Canadas prime minister during times of national crises. Delivered orally in both English and French, this translation-based political discourse is examined in a tripartite manner, offering the reader contextualisation of the corpus researched; description of the translation shifts encountered; and interpretation of the discourse varies greatly depending on the era observed. Since the latter half of the 20th century, for instance, different text types have been assigned to different categories of translators. As for translative shifts revealed in the corpus, they have been categorised as either paratextual or textual divergences. Paratextual differences indicate that the Canadian prime ministers national statements in English and French do not necessarily seek to portray symmetry between what is presented in each language. Each version of a national speech thus retains a relative degree of visual autonomy. In sum, accumulated instances of paratextual divergence suggest an identifiable paratextual strategy, whereby translation contributes to the illusion that there is only one federal language: the readers. The deployment of this paratextual strategy obscures the fact that such federal expression occurs in two official languages. The illusion of monolingualism generates two different world views one for each linguistic community. Similarly, another strategy is discerned in the analysis of translative textual shifts a textual strategy useful in highlighting some of the power struggles inherent in translated federal expression. Textual interpretation of data identifies four federal translation tendencies: legitimisation and characterisation of linguistic communities; dislocation of the speech-event; neutralisation of (linguistic) territory; and valorisation of federalism.

Niederdeutsch im Internet. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen computervermittelter Kommunikation für den Spracherhalt:possibilities and limitations of computer-mediated communication for language preservation

Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die Frage, in welchem Maße sich Institutionen, die niederdeutsche Kulturszene und individuelle Sprecher des Niederdeutschen moderne Kommunikationstechnologien wie das Internet zunutze machen und ob computervermittelte Kommunikation helfen kann, dem Rückgang des Niederdeutschen Einhalt zu gebieten. Die grundsätzliche Herangehensweise ist eine soziolinguistische, die das Internet als sozialen Handlungsraum versteht, in dem Individuen und Institutionen kommunizieren. Für eine derartige Perspektive stehen weniger das Medium oder das Genre im Mittelpunkt des Interesses als vielmehr das kommunizierende Individuum und die Sprachgemeinschaft, in diesem Fall die virtuelle Sprachgemeinschaft. Based on studies that analyse the potential of computer-mediated communication (cmc) to help fight language shift in lesser-used languages, this paper discusses the situation of Low German in Northern Germany. Over the last three decades, Low German has lost more than half of its active speakers. The article raises the question of whether and, if so, how Low German speakers make use of cmc to stem this tide. Following a sociolinguistic approach focussed on the individual speakers who use the Internet as a space for social interaction, it gives an overview of the discursive field of Low German on the internet and analyses in detail the most popular Low German discussion board. It shows that one of the main obstacles to a more successful use of cmc can be found in speakers' complex attitude toward written Low German. © Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart.

A language for self-adaptive system requirements

Self-adaptive systems have the capability to autonomously modify their behaviour at run-time in response to changes in their environment. Such systems are now commonly built in domains as diverse as enterprise computing, automotive control systems, and environmental monitoring systems. To date, however, there has been limited attention paid to how to engineer requirements for such systems. As a result, selfadaptivity is often constructed in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we argue that a more rigorous treatment of requirements relating to self-adaptivity is needed and that, in particular, requirements languages for self-adaptive systems should include explicit constructs for specifying and dealing with the uncertainty inherent in self-adaptive systems. We present some initial thoughts on a new requirements language for selfadaptive systems and illustrate it using examples from the services domain. © 2008 IEEE.

RELAX:incorporating uncertainty into the specification of self-adaptive systems

Self-adaptive systems have the capability to autonomously modify their behaviour at run-time in response to changes in their environment. Self-adaptation is particularly necessary for applications that must run continuously, even under adverse conditions and changing requirements; sample domains include automotive systems, telecommunications, and environmental monitoring systems. While a few techniques have been developed to support the monitoring and analysis of requirements for adaptive systems, limited attention has been paid to the actual creation and specification of requirements of self-adaptive systems. As a result, self-adaptivity is often constructed in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we argue that a more rigorous treatment of requirements explicitly relating to self-adaptivity is needed and that, in particular, requirements languages for self-adaptive systems should include explicit constructs for specifying and dealing with the uncertainty inherent in self-adaptive systems. We present RELAX, a new requirements language for selfadaptive systems and illustrate it using examples from the smart home domain. © 2009 IEEE.

A data structure for improved gp analysis via efficient computation and visualisation of population measures

Population measures for genetic programs are defined and analysed in an attempt to better understand the behaviour of genetic programming. Some measures are simple, but do not provide sufficient insight. The more meaningful ones are complex and take extra computation time. Here we present a unified view on the computation of population measures through an information hypertree (iTree). The iTree allows for a unified and efficient calculation of population measures via a basic tree traversal. © Springer-Verlag 2004.

Automatic Translation of MSC Diagrams into Petri Nets

Development-engineers use in their work languages intended for software or hardware systems design, and test engineers utilize languages effective in verification, analysis of the systems properties and testing. Automatic interfaces between languages of these kinds are necessary in order to avoid ambiguous understanding of specification of models of the systems and inconsistencies in the initial requirements for the systems development. Algorithm of automatic translation of MSC (Message Sequence Chart) diagrams compliant with MSC’2000 standard into Petri Nets is suggested in this paper. Each input MSC diagram is translated into Petri Net (PN), obtained PNs are sequentially composed in order to synthesize a whole system in one final combined PN. The principle of such composition is defined through the basic element of MSC language — conditions. While translating reference table is developed for maintenance of consistent coordination between the input system’s descriptions in MSC language and in PN format. This table is necessary to present the results of analysis and verification on PN in suitable for the development-engineer format of MSC diagrams. The proof of algorithm correctness is based on the use of process algebra ACP. The most significant feature of the given algorithm is the way of handling of conditions. The direction for future work is the development of integral, partially or completely automated technological process, which will allow designing system, testing and verifying its various properties in the one frame.

Naturally occurring data as research instrument:analyzing examination responses to study the novice programmer

In New Zealand and Australia, the BRACElet project has been investigating students' acquisition of programming skills in introductory programming courses. The project has explored students' skills in basic syntax, tracing code, understanding code, and writing code, seeking to establish the relationships between these skills. This ITiCSE working group report presents the most recent step in the BRACElet project, which includes replication of earlier analysis using a far broader pool of naturally occurring data, refinement of the SOLO taxonomy in code-explaining questions, extension of the taxonomy to code-writing questions, extension of some earlier studies on students' 'doodling' while answering exam questions, and exploration of a further theoretical basis for work that until now has been primarily empirical.

Intercompreensão de línguas românicas: uma proposta para a leitura literária plurilíngue no ensino fundamental

The developed research aimed to investigate how students behave on elementary school in a plurilingual context, based on Intercomprehension of Romanic Languages with literary texts in the classroom. The theoretical framework prioritizes authors who consider reading literary text as an essential tool to the formation of reading and writing skills for students, such as: Amarilha (1997; 2003; 2007), Resende (1993), Kleiman, (1999), Villardi (1997), Aguiar (1991), Perrone-Moisés (2000), Lajolo (1993), Zilberman (1991), Cosson (2006), Andrade, Melo-Pfeifer, Santos, (2009), Sá; De Carlo; Antoine (2011), Alas Martins (2014), Doyé (2005), Souza, (2013), and others, according to the intercomprehension approach and plurilingualism. We use questionnaires as a methodological resources for this research, and we applied some activities that was developed based on intercomprehension from literary texts which represent three types of Romanic languages (Spanish, French and Italian), in addition to the participant observation in classes with students of the 8th grade from an elementary public school in the city of Natal (RN). The students could read and (inter) understand some texts of classic literature in those Latin languages and also in Portuguese, whose titles include “D. Quixote de la mancha” by Miguel de Cervantes; “O pequeno príncipe” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; and “Pinóquio” by Carlo Collodi. The data analysis shows that students understood the lessons with plurilingual texts as something which goes beyond the structure of language teaching, awakening themselves to the knowledge of new languages and cultures, and linguistic diversity as motivation at the time of understanding and literature as transforming element to Citizen formation of students.

Transplanting diglossia: attitudes towards Standard and Cypriot Greek among London’s Greek Cypriot community

The linguistic situation in Greek-speaking Cyprus has been traditionally described as a textbook case of diglossia à la Ferguson (1959) with Standard Modern Greek (SModGr) being labelled as the High variety and Cypriot Greek (CypGr), the regional ModGr variety of Cyprus, being labelled the Low variety (Arvaniti, 2011; Moschonas, 1996). More recently, however, it has been proposed that the linguistic repertoire available to speakers features an array of forms of CypGr, which is best described as a continuum ranging from basilectal to acrolectal varieties (Katsoyannou et al., 2006; Tsiplakou et al., 2006). The basilectal end encompasses low prestige varieties predominantly spoken in rural areas. The acrolectal end is occupied by the version of SModGr used in the public domain in Cyprus (Arvaniti, 2006/2010). SModGr is known to carry high prestige in Cyprus. Speakers of CypGr describe speakers of the standard as more attractive, more intelligent, more interesting and more educated than speakers of the Cypriot dialect (Papapavlou, 1998). In this paper, I explore the relation between SModGr and CypGr in a diasporic setting, namely, the Greek Cypriot community of London. The United Kingdom is home to a sizeable Greek Cypriot community, whose population is presently estimated to fall between 200,000 and 300,000 individuals (Christodoulou-Pipis, 1991; National Federation of Cypriots in the UK). Similarly to the Cyprus homeland, the members of the Greek Cypriot parikia (‘community’) share a rich linguistic repertoire, which, in addition to varieties of Greek, crucially includes English. As is often the case with diasporas, the parikia does not form a homogeneous speech community in that not all of its members have an equally good command of Greek or even English. Rather, different types of monolingual and bilingual speakers are found including a large number of heritage speakers in the sense of Benmamoun et al. (2013), Montrul (2008, 2015) and Polinsky & Kagan (2007). Twenty British-born heritage speakers of CypGr were interviewed on their attitudes towards the different varieties of Greek. Results indicate that the prestige relation between SModGr and CypGr that holds in Cyprus has been transplanted to the parikia. SModGr is widely perceived as the prestigious variety and is described in positive terms (‘correct’, ‘proper’). The use of CypGr, on the other hand, enjoys covert prestige: it is perceived as an index of solidarity and in-group membership but at the same time is also viewed by heritage speakers as reminiscent of the hardship and lack of education of the generation that brought CypGr to the UK. In certain cases, the use of CypGr by heritage speakers is actively discouraged by the first generation not only in the public domain but also in private domains such as the home. Active discouragement targets both lexical and grammatical variants that are traditionally associated with basilectal varieties of CypGr, and heritage language features, especially the adoption of morphologically adapted loanwords from English. References Arvaniti, Amalia. 2006/2010. Linguistic practices in Cyprus and the emergence of Cypriot Standard Greek. Mediterranean Language Review 17, 15–45. Benmamoun, Elabbas, Silvina Montrul & Maria Polinsky. 2013. Heritage languages and their speakers: opportunities and challenges for linguists. Theoretical Linguistics 39(3/4), 129–181. Christodoulou-Pipis, Irina. 1991. Greek Outside Greece: Language Use by Greek-Cypriots in Britain. Nicosia: Diaspora Books. Ferguson, Charles A. 1959. Diglossia. Word 15(2), 325–340. Katsoyannou, Marianna, Andreas Papapavlou, Pavlos Pavlou & Stavroula Tsiplakou. 2006. Didialektikes koinotites kai glossiko syneches: i periptosi tis kypriakis [Bidialectal communities and linguistic continuum: the case of Cypriot Greek]. In Mark Janse, Brian D. Joseph & Angela Ralli (eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory, Mytilene, Greece, 30 September – 3 October 2004, 156–171. Patras: University of Patras. Montrul, Silvina A. 2008. Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism: Re-examining the Age Factor. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Montrul, Silvina. 2015. The Acquisition of Heritage Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moschonas, Spiros. 1996. I glossiki dimorfia stin Kypro [Diglossia in Cyprus]. In “Ischyres” – “Astheneis” Glosses stin Evropaiki Enosi: Opseis tou glossikou igemonismou [“Strong” – “Weak” Languages in the European Union: Aspects of Linguistic Imperialism], 121–128. Thessaloniki: Kentro Ellinikis Glossas. Polinsky, Maria & Olga Kagan. 2007. Heritage languages: in the ‘wild’ and in the classroom. Languages and Linguistics Compass 1(5), 368–395. Tsiplakou, Stavroula, Andreas Papapavlou, Pavlos Pavlou & Marianna Katsoyannou. 2006. Levelling, koineization and their implications for bidialectism. In Frans L. Hinskens (Eds.), Language Variation – European Perspectives: Selected Papers from the Third International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 3), Amsterdam, June 2005, 265–279. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE OF DATABASE-CENTRIC APPLICATIONS THROUGH PROGRAM ANALYSIS

Modern software applications are becoming more dependent on database management systems (DBMSs). DBMSs are usually used as black boxes by software developers. For example, Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) is one of the most popular database abstraction approaches that developers use nowadays. Using ORM, objects in Object-Oriented languages are mapped to records in the database, and object manipulations are automatically translated to SQL queries. As a result of such conceptual abstraction, developers do not need deep knowledge of databases; however, all too often this abstraction leads to inefficient and incorrect database access code. Thus, this thesis proposes a series of approaches to improve the performance of database-centric software applications that are implemented using ORM. Our approaches focus on troubleshooting and detecting inefficient (i.e., performance problems) database accesses in the source code, and we rank the detected problems based on their severity. We first conduct an empirical study on the maintenance of ORM code in both open source and industrial applications. We find that ORM performance-related configurations are rarely tuned in practice, and there is a need for tools that can help improve/tune the performance of ORM-based applications. Thus, we propose approaches along two dimensions to help developers improve the performance of ORM-based applications: 1) helping developers write more performant ORM code; and 2) helping developers configure ORM configurations. To provide tooling support to developers, we first propose static analysis approaches to detect performance anti-patterns in the source code. We automatically rank the detected anti-pattern instances according to their performance impacts. Our study finds that by resolving the detected anti-patterns, the application performance can be improved by 34% on average. We then discuss our experience and lessons learned when integrating our anti-pattern detection tool into industrial practice. We hope our experience can help improve the industrial adoption of future research tools. However, as static analysis approaches are prone to false positives and lack runtime information, we also propose dynamic analysis approaches to further help developers improve the performance of their database access code. We propose automated approaches to detect redundant data access anti-patterns in the database access code, and our study finds that resolving such redundant data access anti-patterns can improve application performance by an average of 17%. Finally, we propose an automated approach to tune performance-related ORM configurations using both static and dynamic analysis. Our study shows that our approach can help improve application throughput by 27--138%. Through our case studies on real-world applications, we show that all of our proposed approaches can provide valuable support to developers and help improve application performance significantly.

Sistemas curriculares para la gestión de información y conocimiento institucional. Estudio de caso

La organización del conocimiento en el contexto de las Ciencias de la Información tiene como esencia la información y el conocimiento debidamente documentado o registrado. La organización del conocimiento como proceso, envuelve tanto la descripción física como de los contenidos de los objetos informacionales. Y el producto de ese proceso descriptivo es la representación de los atributos de un objeto o conjunto de objetos. Las representaciones son construidas por lenguajes elaborados específicamente para los objetivos de la organización en los sistemas de información. Lenguajes que se subdividen en lenguajes que describen el documento (el soporte físico del objeto) y lenguajes que describen la información (los contenidos).A partir de esta premisa la siguiente investigación tiene como objetivo general analizarlos sistemas de Gestión de Información y Conocimiento Institucional principalmente los que proponen utilizar el Currículum Vitae del profesor como única fuente de información, medición y representación de la información y el conocimiento de una organización. Dentro delos principales resultados se muestra la importancia de usar el currículo personal como fuente de información confiable y normalizada; una síntesis de los principales sistemas curriculares que existen a nivel internacional y regional; así como el gráfico del modelo de datos del caso de estudio; y por último, la propuesta del uso de las ontologías como principal herramienta para la organización semántica de la información en un sistema de gestión de información y conocimiento.