Browsing by Issue Date, starting with "2007"
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- Legal and political regulation of higher education in Portugal: an evolutionary perspective on the current policy issues and the problem of orderPublication . Caetano, João Carlos; Curado, Henrique; Jacquinet, MarcThe higher education system in Europe is currently under stress and the debates over its reform and future are gaining momentum. Now that, for most countries, we are in a time for change, in the overall society and the whole education system, the legal and political dimensions have gained prominence, which has not been followed by a more integrative approach of the problem of order, its reform and the issue of regulation, beyond the typical static and classical cost-benefit analyses. The two classical approaches for studying (and for designing the policy measures of) the problem of the reform of the higher education system - the cost-benefit analysis and the legal scholarship description - have to be integrated. This is the argument of our paper that the very integration of economic and legal approaches, what Warren Samuels called the legal-economic nexus, is meaningful and necessary, especially if we want to address the problem of order (as formulated by Joseph Spengler) and the overall regulation of the system. On the one hand, and without neglecting the interest and insights gained from the cost-benefit analysis, or other approaches of value for money assessment, we will focus our study on the legal, social and political aspects of the regulation of the higher education system and its reform in Portugal. On the other hand, the economic and financial problems have to be taken into account, but in a more inclusive way with regard to the indirect and other socio-economic costs not contemplated in traditional or standard assessments of policies for the tertiary education sector. In the first section of the paper, we will discuss the theoretical and conceptual underpinning of our analysis, focusing on the evolutionary approach, the role of critical institutions, the legal-economic nexus and the problem of order. All these elements are related to the institutional tradition, from Veblen and Commons to Spengler and Samuels. The second section states the problem of regulation in the higher education system and the issue of policy formulation for tackling the problem. The current situation is clearly one of crisis with the expansion of the cohorts of young students coming to an end and the recurrent scandals in private institutions. In the last decade, after a protracted period of extension or expansion of the system, i. e., the continuous growth of students, universities and other institutions are competing harder to gain students and have seen their financial situation at risk. It seems that we are entering a period of radical uncertainty, higher competition and a new configuration that is slowly building up is the growth in intensity, which means upgrading the quality of the higher learning and getting more involvement in vocational training and life-long learning. With this change, and along with other deep ones in the Portuguese society and economy, the current regulation has shown signs of maladjustment. The third section consists of our conclusions on the current issue of regulation and policy challenge. First, we underline the importance of an evolutionary approach to a process of change that is essentially dynamic. A special attention will be given to the issues related to an evolutionary construe of policy analysis and formulation. Second, the integration of law and economics, through the notion of legal economic nexus, allows us to better define the issues of regulation and the concrete problems that the universities are facing. One aspect is the instability of the political measures regarding the public administration and on which the higher education system depends financially, legally and institutionally, to say the least. A corollary is the lack of clear strategy in the policy reforms. Third, our research criticizes several studies, such as the one made by the OECD in late 2006 for the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, for being too static and neglecting fundamental aspects of regulation such as the logic of actors, groups and organizations who are major players in the system. Finally, simply changing the legal rules will not necessary per se change the behaviors that the authorities want to change. By this, we mean that it is not only remiss of the policy maker to ignore some of the critical issues of regulation, namely the continuous non-respect by academic management and administrative bodies of universities of the legal rules that were once promulgated. Changing the rules does not change the problem, especially without the necessary debates form the different relevant quarters that make up the higher education system. The issues of social interaction remain as intact. Our treatment of the matter will be organized in the following way. In the first section, the theoretical principles are developed in order to be able to study more adequately the higher education transformation with a modest evolutionary theory and a legal and economic nexus of the interactions of the system and the policy challenges. After describing, in the second section, the recent evolution and current working of the higher education in Portugal, we will analyze the legal framework and the current regulatory practices and problems in light of the theoretical framework adopted. We will end with some conclusions on the current problems of regulation and the policy measures that are discusses in recent years.
- Ensino experimental: integração de aprendizagensPublication . Duarte, M.; Felizardo, D.Com esta comunicação pretende-se apresentar a metodologia desenvolvida âmbito do projecto “Conto a conto experimentamos a ciência”, financiado pelo POCI2010, através do concurso Ciência Viva VI. Esta metodologia reconhece que as crianças são naturalmente curiosas sobre o mundo que as rodeia, revelando uma grande apetência por actividades “hands-on”. Este interesse particular por actividades experimentais faz com que o ensino experimental das ciências possa ser utilizado como potenciador e integrador de outras aprendizagens.
- A avaliação Psicológica no modelo do Psicodrama MorenianoPublication . Veiga, Sofia
- Scheduling maintenance activities of electric power transmission networks using an hybrid constraint methodPublication . Gomes, Nuno; Pinheiro, Raul; Vale, Zita; Ramos, CarlosIn this paper we present a Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) based model, and hybrid solving method for the Scheduling of Maintenance Activities in the Power Transmission Network. The model distinguishes from others not only because of its completeness but also by the way it models and solves the Electric Constraints. Specifically we present a efficient filtering algorithm for the Electrical Constraints. Furthermore, the solving method improves the pure CLP methods efficiency by integrating a type of Local Search technique with CLP. To test the approach we compare the method results with another method using a 24 bus network, which considerers 42 tasks and 24 maintenance periods.
- Da necessidade de uma patente comunitáriaPublication . Lucas, Eugénio PereiraDa necessidade de uma patente comunitária
- Paulo Coelho traído ou traduzido em "A Bruxa de Portobello"?Publication . Antunes Garcia Anacleto Matias, Maria HelenaProcedendo a um levantamento linguístico-tradutivo algo exaustivo das obras de Paulo Coelho "A Bruxa de Portobello" e a sua versão em Inglês de Margaret Jull Costa "The Witch of Portobello", propõe-se uma reflexão acerca da importância das retroversões de autores Lusófonos para Inglês, nomeadamente do autor Brasileiro mais lido da actualidade. Também se refere a (des)necessidade de adaptações de Português do Brasil para o Português Europeu no que toca particularmente ao caso da literatura ficcional. Faz-se uma sinopse comentada da obra literária em questão devido à necessária contextualização. A enumeração dos casos tradutivos dignos de nota foi dividida segundos os seguintes pontos essenciais: há uma Introdução seguida de uma descrição comentada do enredo do romance, as opções tradutivas onde há diferenças entre as duas versões são referidas e brevemente comentadas caso a caso; depois temos os pontos das opções tradutológicas questionáveis e das boas opções culminando com o aventar da hipótese que até há melhoramentos na versão inglesa em relação ao original português analisado. Segue-se um capítulo em que são listados os aforismos típicos de Paulo Coelho e que consideraria Máximas de Vida, e finalmente a conclusão vem a seguir a alguns comentários analíticos e reflexões mais pessoais.
- Preliminary discussion on globally prioritized medium access for multi-channel wireless systemsPublication . Andersson, Björn; Pereira, Nuno; Tovar, EduardoWe discuss the development of a simple globally prioritized multi-channel medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless networks. This protocol provides “hard” pre-run-time real-time guarantees to sporadic message streams, exploits a very large fraction of the capacity of all channels for “hard” real-time traffic and also makes it possible to fully utilize the channels with non real-time traffic when hard real-time messages do not request to be transmitted. The potential of such protocols for real-time applications is discussed and a schedulability analysis is also presented.
- IGTAI - an Idea Generation Tool for Ambient InteligencePublication . Freitas, Carlos Filipe; Marreiros, Goreti; Ramos, CarlosToday, business group decision making is an extremely important activity. A considerable number of applications and research have been made in the past years in order to increase the effectiveness of decision making process. In order to support the idea generation process, IGTAI (Idea Generation Tool for Ambient Intelligence) prototype was created. IGTAI is a Group Decision Support System designed to support any kind of meetings namely distributed, asynchronous or face to face. It aims at helping geographically distributed (or not) people and organizations in the idea generation task, by making use of pervasive hardware in a meeting room, expanding the meeting beyond the room walls by allowing a ubiquitous access through different kinds of equipment. This paper focus on the research made to build IGTAI prototype, its architecture and its main functionalities, namely the support given in the different phases of the idea generation meeting.
- Cournot model with investments to change the market sizePublication . Pinto, Alberto A.; Ferreira, Fernanda A.; Ferreira, Miguel; Oliveira, Bruno M. P. M.We present a new deterministic dynamical model on the market size of Cournot competitions, based on Nash equilibria of R&D investment strategies to increase the size of the market of the firms at every period of the game. We compute the unique Nash equilibrium for the second subgame and the profit functions for both firms. Adding uncertainty to the R&D investment strategies, we get a new stochastic dynamical model and we analyse the importance of the uncertainty to reverse the initial advantage of one firm with respect to the other.
- Real-time tracking and reporting of dynamic events in hierarchical wireless sensor networksPublication . Koubâa, Anis; Sallay, Hassen; Alves, MárioWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are highly distributed systems in which resource allocation (bandwidth, memory) must be performed efficiently to provide a minimum acceptable Quality of Service (QoS) to the regions where critical events occur. In fact, if resources are statically assigned independently from the location and instant of the events, these resources will definitely be misused. In other words, it is more efficient to dynamically grant more resources to sensor nodes affected by critical events, thus providing better network resource management and reducing endto- end delays of event notification and tracking. In this paper, we discuss the use of a WSN management architecture based on the active network management paradigm to provide the real-time tracking and reporting of dynamic events while ensuring efficient resource utilization. The active network management paradigm allows packets to transport not only data, but also program scripts that will be executed in the nodes to dynamically modify the operation of the network. This presumes the use of a runtime execution environment (middleware) in each node to interpret the script. We consider hierarchical (e.g. cluster-tree, two-tiered architecture) WSN topologies since they have been used to improve the timing performance of WSNs as they support deterministic medium access control protocols.