Repositório RCAAP

Recensão crítica a comentário ao Livro XV dos Annales de Tácito (CUP).

Recensão crítica a obra sobre aspectos materiais da escrita epistolar no mundo greco-romano.

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O ensino e a aprendizagem da escrita gráfica são processos complementares longos e evolutivos que, tradicionalmente, envolvem profundamente tanto professores quanto crianças. Da parte do professor, requer-se que este transmita e exemplifique as formas correctas de executar os movimentos cinestésicos da caligrafia. Dos alunos espera-se a execução continuada dos exercícios, para aperfeiçoamento das suas capacidades de coordenação motora. É frequente, durante este processo de ensino/aprendizagem, o professor dirigir fisicamente o aluno, exemplificando a sequência de movimentos correcta. Por outro lado, o aluno necessita que o professor lhe indique se o seu aproveitamento nessas tarefas é positivo, ou negativo. Neste último caso, o professor terá de efectuar um acompanhamento mais próximo para auxiliar a criança a ultrapassar as limitações demonstradas. Havendo uma tão grande dependência entre estes dois intervenientes, procurou-se desenvolver uma solução capaz de fornecer a autonomização necessária a ambos, que se reflecte na redução significativa dos tempos das tarefas de acompanhamento prolongado individual de cada aluno, libertando o professor para que este possa desenvolver um trabalho mais especializado junto dos que revelem maiores dificuldades na aprendizagem da escrita caligráfica. Neste sentido, desenvolveu-se uma plataforma, baseada em dispositivos tácteis – tablet PC, que suportou a construção de duas ferramentas protótipo: uma direccionada para assistir os professores nas tarefas de definição de exercícios e visualização das suas execuções pelos alunos, e outra para fornecer o suporte necessário às crianças para execução dos exercícios com capacidades de retorno visual para ajuda e orientação em tempo real, e com um mecanismo de classificação do gesto efectuado. Estas ferramentas de trabalho visam autonomizar professor e alunos e optimizar a produtividade de ambos. As duas ferramentas foram submetidas a uma avaliação inicial, cujos resultados parecem confirmar as premissas que fundamentaram este trabalho.

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Western Iberia Early Neolithic has been described as an ultimate and very altered form of the Mediterranean Neolithisation process. Despite its Atlantic position, this territory – corresponding mainly to Central/Southern Portugal – is, in its physical and cultural geography, a Mediterranean landscape deeply connected to a historical process arriving from beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. The presence of cardial pottery led archaeologists to ascribe Portuguese Early Neolithic to a Mediterranean impressed Pottery cultural area, and according to demic diffusion models, small pioneer groups carrying the Neolithic package originated there. Recently, the archaeological record for the Western Mediterranean Neolithisation is becoming more complex and longer lasting cardial dominance over the seas has been disputed. Previous Neolithic groups seafaring the Mediterranean coasts with Impressa style pottery could have reached Iberian Peninsula by 5600–5400 cal BC, proving that by the mid-sixth millennium, different cultural entities were moving in the Western Mediterranean regardless of their genetic features. The main goal of this study is to disclose this cultural diversity in Western Iberia using a robust chronological database and debating how different proxies, like pottery styles and ancient DNA (aDNA), reveal it in Western Iberia. While recognising the Mediterranean input to Western Iberia groups, mapping the variability and the significance of different decoration techniques, such as cardial, false acacia leaf, impressed stripes, and using the aDNA to identify continuities/changes in ancient populations are here as tools to understand when, who, and how new kids came to the block. To do so, different disciplinary boundaries are crossed, and some transdisciplinary critical aspects are also commented.

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As ferramentas de processamento da linguagem natural são cada vez mais usadas na automatização de processos no contexto de aquisição de segunda língua e no tratamento de dados de falantes não-nativos. Um dos principais passos intermédios na construção destas ferramentas de processamento automático de dados de falantes não-nativos é a análise sintática automática, realizada por parsers. No entanto, a maioria dos parsers assume que o texto a ser analisado respeita a norma, uma vez que estes foram treinados e avaliados com esse tipo de texto. Por conseguinte, o seu uso em textos de aprendentes de uma L2 poderá afetar o seu desempenho e originar resultados menos fiáveis. O conhecimento das limitações específicas do parser ao lidar com este tipo de texto pode ser muito vantajoso e influenciar a forma como usamos estes sistemas. É com vista a contribuir para uma melhor compreensão deste aspeto que se desenvolveu este projeto. Neste âmbito, foi feita uma avaliação do desempenho de dois parsers de dependências baseados em paradigmas diferentes – baseado em regras vs. baseado em estatística. Foi selecionado um corpus de aprendentes de Português L2/LE com o objetivo de identificar os tipos de erro de aprendentes que mais frequentemente alteram a análise produzida pelos parsers. A análise dos resultados permitiu, entre outras coisas, verificar que os erros com maior impacto nos outputs produzidos são os mesmos em ambos os parsers. No entanto, também se verificaram diferenças significativas entre as análises produzidas pelos sistemas de diferentes paradigmas, principalmente ao nível de padrões de alteração dos outputs dos sistemas perante a presença/ausência de certos tipos de erro. Este trabalho contribuiu, assim, para elucidar os desafios que os parsers poderão enfrentar quando lhes são apresentados textos produzidos por aprendentes, abrindo portas para o desenvolvimento futuro de ferramentas dedicadas ao tratamento deste tipo de texto, tais como sistemas de deteção automática de erros e de identificação automática de proficiência.

On 12th January 2020, a municipal initiative to plant 100,000 trees across Lisbon began. Several hundred people joined the efort at four locations near large public housing estates. The feel-good event drew families with young children and around 20,000 trees were planted. The following day work began on a new urban park at Praça de Espanha, a major trafc intersection where thousands of cars pass each day to and from the city centre. The latter €16 million project will connect the celebrated Gulbenkian Gardens to the Monsanto Green Corridor and is part of a broader regeneration plan for the Avenida de Berna and Praça de Espanha area, which in the next decade is expected to be consolidated into a new fnancial centre. Both initiatives are part of the Lisbon 2020 Green Capital of Europe programme, an award which has been used by the City Council as the centrepiece of Lisbon’s push to re-fashion itself as a green city. They capture the way environmental celebrations tend to oscillate between an afective, altruist dimension and a competitive one. The frst plays with people’s desire to ‘contribute as best they can’ to a better urban environment, provide simple ecological experiences for their children, and produce shaded space that reduces overall urban temperatures; the second illustrates the type of city plans associated with green growth and green gentrifcation, whereby investment on quality, sophisticated green space is part of broader plans to attract capital and reconfgure particular spaces to attract more afuent populations (Anguelovski et al., 2019) [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected the city of Guayaquil. The complex dynamics associated with the geography of SARS-CoV-2 made it difficult to monitore the spread of COVID-19 in Ecuador. Data collection and reporting were, in most cases, some of the main obstacles to understanding the (realtime) situation of COVID-19 outbreak. This study presents a crowdsourcing initiative to complement data collection efforts that inform the progress of contagion in Ecuador. We used a digital survey to collect information regarding positive cases and symptoms associated with COVID-19. We further developed an online dashboard that shows descriptive statistics based on collected data. In total, there were 1450 responses. Additional information such as geographical data led to the identification and visualization of the areas with the highest prevalence of symptoms associated with COVID-19 in some of the main urban areas of Guayaquil city.

Biological invasions continue to threaten the stability of ecosystems and societies that are dependent on their services. Whilst the ecological impacts of invasive alien species (IAS) have been widely reported in recent decades, there remains a paucity of information concerning their economic impacts. Europe has strong trade and transport links with the rest of the world, facilitating hundreds of IAS incursions, and largely centralised decision-making frameworks. The present study is the first comprehensive and detailed effort that quantifies the costs of IAS collectively across European countries and examines temporal trends in these data. In addition, the distributions of costs across countries, socioeconomic sectors and taxonomic groups are examined, as are socio-economic correlates of management and damage costs. Total costs of IAS in Europe summed to US$140.20 billion (or €116.61 billion) between 1960 and 2020, with the majority (60%) being damage-related and impacting multiple sectors. Costs were also geographically widespread but dominated by impacts in large western and central European countries, i.e. the UK, Spain, France, and Germany. Human population size, land area, GDP, and tourism were significant predictors of invasion costs, with management costs additionally predicted by numbers of introduced species, research effort and trade. Temporally, invasion costs have increased exponentially through time, with up to US$23.58 billion (€19.64 billion) in 2013, and US$139.56 billion (€116.24 billion) in impacts extrapolated in 2020. Importantly, although these costs are substantial, there remain knowledge gaps on several geographic and taxonomic scales, indicating that these costs are severely underestimated. We, thus, urge increased and improved cost reporting for economic impacts of IAS and coordinated international action to prevent further spread and mitigate impacts of IAS populations

Invasive alien species are responsible for a high economic impact on many sectors worldwide. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of studies assessing these impacts in Central and South America. Investigating costs of invasions is important to motivate and guide policy responses by increasing stakeholders’ awareness and identifying action priorities. Here, we used the InvaCost database to investigate (i) the geographical pattern of biological invasion costs across the region; (ii) the monetary expenditure across taxa and impacted sectors; and (iii) the taxa responsible for more than 50% of the costs (hyper-costly taxa) per impacted sector and type of costs. The total of reliable and observed costs reported for biological invasions in Central and South America was USD 102.5 billion between 1975 and 2020, but about 90% of the total costs were reported for only three countries (Brazil, Argentina and Colombia). Costs per species were associated with geographical regions (i.e., South America, Central America and Islands) and with the area of the countries in km2. Most of the expenses were associated with damage costs (97.8%), whereas multiple sectors (77.4%), agriculture (15%) and public and social welfare (4.2%) were the most impacted sectors. Aedes spp. was the hyper-costly taxon for the terrestrial environment (costs of USD 25 billion) and water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) was the hyper-costly taxon for the aquatic environment (USD 179.9 million). Six taxa were classified as hyper-costly for at least one impacted sector and two taxa for at least one type of cost. In conclusion, invasive alien species caused billions of dollars of economic burden in Central and South America, mainly in large countries of South America. Costs caused by invasive alien species were unevenly distributed across countries, impacted sectors, types of costs and taxa (hyper-costly taxa). These results suggest that impacted sectors should drive efforts to manage the species that are draining financial sources.

Invasive alien species (IAS) negatively impact the environment and undermine human well-being, often resulting in considerable economic costs. The Mediterranean basin is a culturally, socially and economically diverse region, harbouring many IAS that threaten economic and societal integrity in multiple ways. This paper is the first attempt to collectively quantify the reported economic costs of IAS in the Mediterranean basin, across a range of taxonomic, temporal and spatial descriptors. We identify correlates of costs from invasion damages and management expenditures among key socioeconomic variables, and determine network structures that link countries and invasive taxonomic groups. The total reported invasion costs in the Mediterranean basin amounted to $27.3 billion, or $3.6 billion when only realised costs were considered, and were found to have occurred over the last three decades. Our understanding of costs of invasions in the Mediterranean was largely limited to a few, primarily western European countries and to terrestrial ecosystems, despite the known presence of numerous high-impact aquatic invasive taxa. The vast majority of costs were attributed to damages or losses from invasions ($25.2 billion) and were mostly driven by France, Spain and to a lesser extent Italy and Libya, with significantly fewer costs attributed to management expenditure ($1.7 billion). Overall, invasion costs increased through time, with average annual costs between 1990 and 2017 estimated at $975.5 million. The lack of information from a large proportion of Mediterranean countries, reflected in the spatial and taxonomic connectivity analysis and the relationship of costs with socioeconomic variables, highlights the limits of the available data and the research effort needed to improve a collective understanding of the different facets of the costs of biological invasions. Our analysis of the reported costs associated with invasions in the Mediterranean sheds light on key knowledge gaps and provides a baseline for a Mediterranean-centric approach towards building policies and designing coordinated responses. In turn, these could help reach socially desirable outcomes and efficient use of resources invested in invasive species research and management.

No futuro que se aproxima, será cada vez mais necessário determinar a posição precisa de alguém, no espaço e no tempo, de uma forma fidedigna. Dentro de poucos anos esta necessidade vai ser coberta pelo sistema de navegação de rádio satélite Galileo, uma iniciativa lançada pela União Europeia (UE) e a Agência Espacial Europeia (ESA). Este sistema assegurará a sua complementaridade com os actuais sistemas de posicionamento existentes, o GPS, americano, e o GLONASS, russo. A missão Galileo é constituída por uma constelação de 30 satélites que serão coordenados através do Spacecraft Constellation Planning Facility (SCPF). Integrado no SCPF, existe um componente, o Planning Request Handler (PRQ), responsável por receber pedidos de controlo dos satélites por parte de outros sistemas. O PRQ tem como principais competências a validação dos pedidos recebidos e a sua inserção num repositório de dados. O PRQ é constituído por um servidor e uma pequena aplicação gráfica que permitirá a submissão de pedidos no sistema por um operador. Este documento aborda todo o trabalho realizado no desenvolvimento do componente Planning Request Handler durante o estágio: desenho, implementação e validação. Este documento pretende, além de demonstrar o trabalho realizado, transmitir uma apreciação da minha experiência na entrada no mundo profissional e do estágio.

In 1900 research on cutaneous sensation was defined by histological techniques defining sensory receptors in skin, leading to undetermined conceptual problems when considered in relation to Brown-Séquard's startling finding that there were two qualitatively different afferent pathways in the spinal cord. Four modalities were considered to function as the determinants of sensory input. In 1903 Rivers and Head carried out the first interventional study of human cutaneous sensation, and analysed the return of sensation following section and immediate suture of the dorsal cutaneous branch of Head's left radial nerve. This resulted in the revolutionary idea summarised in his description of protopathic and epicritic sensory systems in peripheral sensory nerve. Although this concept was at best seen as controversial and even ridiculed by some of his many contemporaneous critics, more recently this concept has proven a fundamentally important stimulus to understanding the physiology of cutaneous sensation. His writings show him to have been capable of deeply instructive thought, based on his clinical experience and his admiration of Hughlings Jackson's teaching concerning the hierarchical organisation of brain function. First and foremost a clinician neuroscientist, his ideas were ahead of their time and not understood.

There is a strong genetic contribution to Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) risk, with heritability estimates of up to 60%. Both Mendelian and small effect variants have been identified, but in common with other conditions, such variants only explain a little of the heritability. Genomic structural variation might account for some of this otherwise unexplained heritability. We therefore investigated association between structural variation in a set of 25 ALS genes, and ALS risk and phenotype. As expected, the repeat expansion in the C9orf72 gene was identified as associated with ALS. Two other ALS-associated structural variants were identified: inversion in the VCP gene and insertion in the ERBB4 gene. All three variants were associated both with increased risk of ALS and specific phenotypic patterns of disease expression. More than 70% of people with respiratory onset ALS harboured ERBB4 insertion compared with 25% of the general population, suggesting respiratory onset ALS may be a distinct genetic subtype.

Marcel Mauss’ classic essay on the person (1938) remains to this day a central point of reference for all social scientists: be they social psychologists, social historians, sociologists, or any kind of anthropologist. Whilst there is no doubt that the notions of person and relation that he proposed are still among our central tools of analysis, his interpretation of their role as categories has changed significantly. One of the principal difficulties we experience today in reading Mauss’ unruly essay is what he means when he speaks of catégories de l’esprit humain. This paper traces the background of Mauss’ use of personhood and relation as categories to the French neo-Kantian school of philosophy (Charles Renouvier and Octave Hamelin in particular), and attempts to situate Mauss’ argument by relation to contemporary trends in anthropological thinking concerning relation and embodied cognition.

Since the early twentieth century, generation has been a recurrent concept in social analysis. In spite of successive bouts of critique and periods of relative neglect, the category has never been abandoned. In this article, drawing inspiration from a broad range of thinkers – such as José Ortega y Gasset, Karl Mannheim, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall – we review and fine tune our conceptual toolkit regarding generations, making more explicitly visible its affordances for social analysis in times of crisis. We focus on the problem of intergenerational overlap of contemporaneity and the contradictions that emerge from it. We argue that the notion of coevalness can help us resolve some of these contradictions – for example, the lag between contemporaneity and generational awareness – and introduce, through its horizontal connotations, a decolonising ethical stance. Favouring a processual understanding of generation, we recommend ‘conjunctural analysis’ as the most flexible analytical framework for resolving the intersectional contradictions and overlaps of generational categorisation.

Much of the literature on quality of democracy is case study-oriented and focused on nation states. Theoretical work and, in particular, comparative empirical research on the quality of local democracy are less advanced. This paper contributes to our understanding of how democracy works from below. It develops a conceptual framing and employs a multidimensional index of the quality of democracy across all 278 municipalities in mainland Portugal by focusing on procedural dimensions of democratic performance at three levels of legitimacy: input, throughput, and output. Regression analysis is then used as a preliminary test of the usefulness of these measures of quality of local democracy and to uncover associations between them and a range of political and socioeconomic factors. The results suggest that municipalities led by independent mayors, with larger populations and higher levels of multiculturalism are likelier to be associated with ‘better’ local democracy.