Political ideologies and attitudes towards income inequality in the US: a critical discourse analysis of CNN and Fox News opinion articles

The topic of the thesis is media discourse about current state if income inequality in the US, and political ideologies as influences behind the discourse. The data consists of four opinion articles, two from CNN and two from Fox News. The purpose of the study was to examine how media represents income inequality as an issue, and if the attitudes conveyed are concerned or indifferent. Previous studies have indicated that the level of income is often seen as a personal responsibility, and such perspective can be linked with Republican ideology. In contrast, the Democrats typically express more concern about the consequences of inequality. CNN has been previously considered to have a Democratic bias, and Fox News has been considered to have Republican bias, which is one reason why these two news channels were chosen as the sources of the data. The study is a critical discourse analysis, and the methods applied were sociocognitive approach, which analyzes the social and cognitive factors affecting the discourse, and appraisal framework, which was applied to scrutinize the expressed attitudes more closely by identifyind specific linguistic features. The appraisal framework includes studying such features as affect, judgment and appreciation, which offer a more detailed analysis on the attitudes present in the articles. The sociocognitive approach, additionally, offers a way of analyzing a more broad context affecting the articles. The findings were then compared, to see if there are differences between the articles, or between the news sites with alleged bias. The findings showed that CNN, with alleged Democratic bias, had a more symphatetic attitude towards income inequality, whereas Fox News, with more Republican views, showed clearly less concern towards the issue. Moreover, the Fox News articles had such dubious claims that the underlying ideology behind the articles could be even supporting of income inequality, as it allows the rich to pursue all the wealth they can without having to give anything away. The results, thus, suggest that the political ideologies may a significant effect on media discourse, which, in turn, may have a significant effect on the attitudes of the public towards great issues that could require prompt measures.

Contributos para uma leitura do cartaz na obra gráfica de João Machado

Dissertação de Mestrado para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Design de Comunicação, apresentada na Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade Técnica.

Contributos para uma leitura do cartaz na obra gráfica de João Machado

Dissertação de Mestrado para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Design de Comunicação, apresentada na Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade Técnica.

Contributo da Guarda Nacional Republicana para a formação na CEPOL : O caso do curso de “Mentoring, Monitoring and Advising”

O curso da Academia Europeia de Polícia designado de “Mentoring, Monitoring and Advising” é essencialmente dirigido a elementos das Forças e Serviços de Segurança que vão desempenhar funções em missões de gestão de crises fora da União Europeia. O esforço cooperacional é no sentido de uniformizar procedimentos quando os elementos das várias políciais da União Europeia vão desempenhar essas missões em países terceiros, sendo relevantes para estas situações as tarefas de orientar, monitorizar e aconselhar. Torna-se desta forma pertinente analisar qual a importância deste curso, organizado pela Guarda Nacional Republicana, no âmbito da formação na Academia Europeia de Polícia. No sentido de analisar da melhor forma a importância suprarreferida, foi utilizado como base de trabalho os Relatórios de Reação à Formação que contêm informação relativo a este curso nos últimos 3 anos. A metodologia adotada neste trabalho de investigação resume-se à análise documental, mais precisamente aos relatórios que contêm questionários onde os participantes e os formadores respondem no final de cada curso para recolher a perceção e opinião dos mesmos. Depois de efetuar a análise, é possível chegar à conclusão de quais os aspetos considerados pelos participantes de pouco ou muito positivo e o que sugerem para os próximos cursos. Concluiu-se que o curso organizado pela Guarda Nacional Republicana encontra-se a um nível bastante satisfatório. No entanto, o curso deveria prolongar-se relativamente ao tempo do mesmo pois os participantes referiram que o período de formação neste âmbito é muito reduzido e desta forma, a atividade torna-se demasiada intensa e cansativa, não conseguindo manter o nível de aprendizagem elevada. Este curso contribui para a obtenção de uma certificação internacional realçando a afirmação da excelência da formação da Guarda Nacional Republicana.

A novel concept-level approach for ultra-concise opinion summarization

The Web 2.0 has resulted in a shift as to how users consume and interact with the information, and has introduced a wide range of new textual genres, such as reviews or microblogs, through which users communicate, exchange, and share opinions. The exploitation of all this user-generated content is of great value both for users and companies, in order to assist them in their decision-making processes. Given this context, the analysis and development of automatic methods that can help manage online information in a quicker manner are needed. Therefore, this article proposes and evaluates a novel concept-level approach for ultra-concise opinion abstractive summarization. Our approach is characterized by the integration of syntactic sentence simplification, sentence regeneration and internal concept representation into the summarization process, thus being able to generate abstractive summaries, which is one the most challenging issues for this task. In order to be able to analyze different settings for our approach, the use of the sentence regeneration module was made optional, leading to two different versions of the system (one with sentence regeneration and one without). For testing them, a corpus of 400 English texts, gathered from reviews and tweets belonging to two different domains, was used. Although both versions were shown to be reliable methods for generating this type of summaries, the results obtained indicate that the version without sentence regeneration yielded to better results, improving the results of a number of state-of-the-art systems by 9%, whereas the version with sentence regeneration proved to be more robust to noisy data.

Juego de escondidas entre Dios y el ser humano en la poesía de Antonio Machado

Se ponen de relieve las elaboraciones y los tratamientos de la imagen de Dios presentes en la poesía de Machado. Mediante un análisis de textos significativos, subraya las discrepancias del poeta ante las concepciones tradicionales de un Dios abstracto y de un Jesús sufriente, a las que el hablante propone el apego a un Jesús histórico, dador de una palabra imperecedera. El análisis se desarrolla mediante un examen del discurso poemático, de sus recursos estilísticos, fónicos y semánticos.This articIe emphasizes the interpretations and treatments of the image of God in Machado's poetry. By analyzing significant texts, this study points out the poet's discrepancies with the traditional conceptions of an abstract God and a suffering Christ, for which the speaker proposes a preference for a historical Jesus whose word will never perish. The analysis examines the poetic discourse, addressing stylistic, phonetic and semantic features.