Os feriados, além de espaços de sociabilidade ou, mais precisamente, de lazer ou de não-trabalho institucional ou empresarial, são ou deveriam ser tempos de memória. Pode dizer-se que alguns dos feriados mais celebrados no domínio popular são certos feriados municipais e até os que correspondem às “festas das aldeias”, em que muitas vezes a celebração de um santo é apenas considerada como pretexto para a festa laica, à mesa ou em bailes populares. Esta reflexão é uma hipótese de trabalho que pode estimular não tanto historiadores, mas antropólogos, sociólogos, politólogos e jornalistas, ou ajudar os cidadãos a pensar sobre o significado que devem imprimir aos feriados.
In the 1960s and 1970s a series of observations and theoretical developments highlighted the presence of several anomalies which could, in principle, be explained by postulating one of the following two working hypotheses: (i) the existence of dark matter, or (ii) the modification of standard gravitational dynamics in low accelerations. In the years that followed, the dark matter hypothesis as an explanation for dark matter phenomenology attracted far more attention compared to the hypothesis of modified gravity, and the latter is largely regarded today as a non-viable alternative. The present article takes an integrated history and philosophy of science approach in order to identify the reasons why the scientific community mainly pursued the dark matter hypothesis in the years that followed, as opposed to modified gravity. A plausible answer is given in terms of three epistemic criteria for the pursuitworthiness of a hypothesis: (a) its problem-solving potential, (b) its compatibility with established theories and the feasibility of incorporation, and (c) its independent testability. A further comparison between the problem of dark matter and the problem of dark energy is also presented, explaining why in the latter case the situation is different, and modified gravity is still considered a viable possibility.
This article discusses the history of wine in (what is now) Portugal, within the global history of the region. The Phoenicians brought wine and viticulture to the southern and western coasts of Iberia in the eighth century bce. The Romans expanded viticulture to the entire Peninsula in the late second century bce. Wine survived the ‘Barbarian’ invasions and centuries of Islamic rule. A revival of viticulture followed the capture of Lisbon by Afonso Henriques in 1147. In the early days of the age of exploration, Portugal developed trade routes to Africa, India, the Far East, and South America. The long-distance sailing was facilitated by the colonization of the Madeira and Açores (Azores) archipelagos. The wines produced there became famous, especially in England and North America. The fortification of wine in the late seventeenth century resulted in the emergence of modern Madeiras and Ports. Following the 1755 ‘Lisbon’ earthquake, Pombal imposed strict geographical delimitations and winemaking rules in the Douro. Napoleon’s Peninsular War devastated the Portuguese economy, and then viticulture was badly hit by oïdium and phylloxera, the First World War, the Great Depression, Prohibition, and the Second World War. Portuguese wines finally emerged on the world scene after the Salazar dictatorship.
Natural selection has produced an extraordinary diversity of life histories spanning many orders of magnitude in body size, vital rates, and biological times. In general, big and cold organisms grow and reproduce slowly and live long lives; small and warm organisms grow and reproduce quickly and live short lives. The Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE) predicts equal and opposite scaling exponents of mass-specific biological rates (e.g., respiration, growth, and reproduction) and times (e.g., development, lifespan, and generation) as a function of size. However, empirical support for these predictions varies depending on trait and taxon. Here I: 1) provide background and mixed support for the quarter-power scaling exponents for life history rates and times predicted by MTE, 2) discuss possible explanations, including effects of natural selection on taxonomic and functional groups, and inadequate data for life history traits, 3) briefly summarize the Equal Fitness Paradigm (EFP) as a unifying theory of bioenergetics, life history and demography that does not depend on any particular allometric scalings, and 4) discuss ramifications of the EFP for other biological phenomena, including physiological performance metrics and trophic energetics of ecosystems. I draw mostly from my knowledge of mammals, yet in many cases the mammalian examples can be generalized to other organisms. I end with prospects for further evaluating and extending the EFP.
Jörg U. Ganzhorn, Jean-Basile Andriambeloson, Sylvia Atsalis
et al.
The concept of “facilitated restoration” aims at native biodiversity reinstatement with the help of animal seed dispersers attracted by fruiting trees. Yet, large-crowned trees will have to develop in the early stages of restoration; therefore, seed dispersal provided by small generalist mammals and birds that use rapidly growing herbs, shrubs, and small trees at early stages of forest succession would accelerate biodiversity restoration. Due to the elusive lifestyle of these small animals, it is unclear what species can contribute to the early stages of this process. Using the primate genus <i>Microcebus</i> (adult body mass about 60 g) as an example, we illustrate that these small generalists are possible seed dispersers in the early stages of forest restoration, not yet used by larger frugivores. We show that <i>Microcebus</i> spp. dispersed more seeds from herbs, shrubs, and small trees than large frugivorous primate species. These plants tend to have smaller seeds than large tree species and are often pioneer species not considered in forest restoration projects. Facilitating the colonization of restoration plots by generalist small seed dispersers that use shrubby habitats may improve plant diversity by adding a more natural sequence of successional stages towards mature forests in Madagascar and elsewhere in the tropics.
The aim of this article is to reflect on the presence of colonized women in photographs and other representations, such as drawings, posters, postcards, exhibition catalogues, newspapers and magazines, which were disseminated in the context of the Portuguese colonial expositions, and in exhibition spaces conceived by the Portuguese with a colonial component. Generally speaking, the exhibitions sought to put forward the progress, taking into account land, rail and sea transport, but also roads, communications, trade, industry, arts, architecture, culture, and the most recent advances in science and medicine. The exhibitions were also places where the logic of colonial models was staged, showing a clear relationship between colonial domination and gender representation. The research includes several materials produced throughout the 1930s (a fertile period regarding the Portuguese participation in this kind of international events) intended to publicize these exhibitions or serve as a complement to them. These materials may include art works or merely propagandistic works, or works that combine both components. The analysis will include materials associated with several exhibitions between 1931 and 1940, such as the International Colonial Exhibition of Paris (1931), the Lisbon Industrial Exhibition (1932), the Portuguese Colonial Exhibition in Porto (1934), the Exhibition of the Portuguese World in Lisbon (1940), and the Portugal of the Little Ones (Portugal dos Pequenitos) in Coimbra (1940). The contexts in which women appear and the way they are represented — as active beings (performing tasks), as contemplative beings (as in natural landscapes) or as objects of sexual desire, revealing the context of power (legislative, administrative, male and colonial) in which the images and the representations were produced — will be analyzed.
The starting point of this proposal is a collection of decorated <i>cuias</i>, preserved in Portugal and produced by Indigenous women in Grão-Pará in the 18th century. The objects in question are an exemplary case of the global art history of the Amazonian communities. In order to investigate them, it is necessary to consider the procurement and ritual use of <i>cuias</i> (fruits of the <i>cuieira</i> tree-<i>Crescentia cuyete</i>), the sophisticated techniques used to produce a durable, glossy, black varnish from <i>cumatê</i> (or <i>cumaté</i>, <i>cumati</i>), a natural dark red pigment extracted from the skins of the <i>cumatezeiro</i> or <i>axuazeiro</i> tree (<i>Myrcia atramentifera</i>), as well as the incorporation of fauna and flora motifs from Asian or Asian-inspired textiles and embroidery, which circulated worldwide. Their history brings together the nature of the forest, the myths of creation, and the knowledge and practices of Indigenous and riverine women, mainly from the lower Amazon. Studying these objects produced by Indigenous female painters in a colonial context of appropriation, in addition to contributing to their knowledge, can stimulate dialogues on the knowledge of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest with other locations in America, sharing their ancestry and resistance.
Diffusion on graphs is ubiquitous with numerous high-impact applications. In these applications, complete diffusion histories play an essential role in terms of identifying dynamical patterns, reflecting on precaution actions, and forecasting intervention effects. Despite their importance, complete diffusion histories are rarely available and are highly challenging to reconstruct due to ill-posedness, explosive search space, and scarcity of training data. To date, few methods exist for diffusion history reconstruction. They are exclusively based on the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) formulation and require to know true diffusion parameters. In this paper, we study an even harder problem, namely reconstructing Diffusion history from A single SnapsHot} (DASH), where we seek to reconstruct the history from only the final snapshot without knowing true diffusion parameters. We start with theoretical analyses that reveal a fundamental limitation of the MLE formulation. We prove: (a) estimation error of diffusion parameters is unavoidable due to NP-hardness of diffusion parameter estimation, and (b) the MLE formulation is sensitive to estimation error of diffusion parameters. To overcome the inherent limitation of the MLE formulation, we propose a novel barycenter formulation: finding the barycenter of the posterior distribution of histories, which is provably stable against the estimation error of diffusion parameters. We further develop an effective solver named DIffusion hiTting Times with Optimal proposal (DITTO) by reducing the problem to estimating posterior expected hitting times via the Metropolis--Hastings Markov chain Monte Carlo method (M--H MCMC) and employing an unsupervised graph neural network to learn an optimal proposal to accelerate the convergence of M--H MCMC. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.
Predicting the future trajectory of a person remains a challenging problem, due to randomness and subjectivity of human movement. However, the moving patterns of human in a constrained scenario typically conform to a limited number of regularities to a certain extent, because of the scenario restrictions and person-person or person-object interactivity. Thus, an individual person in this scenario should follow one of the regularities as well. In other words, a person's subsequent trajectory has likely been traveled by others. Based on this hypothesis, we propose to forecast a person's future trajectory by learning from the implicit scene regularities. We call the regularities, inherently derived from the past dynamics of the people and the environment in the scene, scene history. We categorize scene history information into two types: historical group trajectory and individual-surroundings interaction. To exploit these two types of information for trajectory prediction, we propose a novel framework Scene History Excavating Network (SHENet), where the scene history is leveraged in a simple yet effective approach. In particular, we design two components: the group trajectory bank module to extract representative group trajectories as the candidate for future path, and the cross-modal interaction module to model the interaction between individual past trajectory and its surroundings for trajectory refinement. In addition, to mitigate the uncertainty in ground-truth trajectory, caused by the aforementioned randomness and subjectivity of human movement, we propose to include smoothness into the training process and evaluation metrics. We conduct extensive evaluations to validate the efficacy of our proposed framework on ETH, UCY, as well as a new, challenging benchmark dataset PAV, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Quantum entanglement is a key resource, which grants quantum systems the ability to accomplish tasks that are classically impossible. Here, we apply Feynman's sum-over-histories formalism to interacting bipartite quantum systems and introduce entanglement measures for bipartite quantum histories. Based on the Schmidt decomposition of the matrix comprised of the Feynman propagator complex coefficients, we prove that bipartite quantum histories are entangled if and only if the Schmidt rank of this matrix is larger than 1. The proposed approach highlights the utility of using a separable basis for constructing the bipartite quantum histories and allows for quantification of their entanglement from the complete set of experimentally measured sequential weak values. We then illustrate the non-classical nature of entangled histories with the use of Hardy's overlapping interferometers and explain why local hidden variable theories are unable to correctly reproduce all observable quantum outcomes. Our theoretical results elucidate how the composite tensor product structure of multipartite quantum systems is naturally extended across time and clarify the difference between quantum histories viewed as projection operators in the history Hilbert space or viewed as chain operators and propagators in the standard Hilbert space.
Knowledge graphs have been adopted in many diverse fields for a variety of purposes. Most of those applications rely on valid and complete data to deliver their results, pressing the need to improve the quality of knowledge graphs. A number of solutions have been proposed to that end, ranging from rule-based approaches to the use of probabilistic methods, but there is an element that has not been considered yet: the edit history of the graph. In the case of collaborative knowledge graphs (e.g., Wikidata), those edits represent the process in which the community reaches some kind of fuzzy and distributed consensus over the information that best represents each entity, and can hold potentially interesting information to be used by knowledge graph refinement methods. In this paper, we explore the use of edit history information from Wikidata to improve the performance of type prediction methods. To do that, we have first built a JSON dataset containing the edit history of every instance from the 100 most important classes in Wikidata. This edit history information is then explored and analyzed, with a focus on its potential applicability in knowledge graph refinement tasks. Finally, we propose and evaluate two new methods to leverage this edit history information in knowledge graph embedding models for type prediction tasks. Our results show an improvement in one of the proposed methods against current approaches, showing the potential of using edit information in knowledge graph refinement tasks and opening new promising research lines within the field.
Knowledge on population dynamics of ecosystem's key-species is invaluable to understand how populations will respond to natural and human-induced perturbations. The amphipod Echinogammarus marinus is a key-species from European estuarine habitats with a distribution ranging from Norway to Portugal [1]. The present article contains supportive data related to a research article entitled ‘Comparing production and life-history traits of a key amphipod species within and between estuaries under different levels of anthropogenic pressure’ [2]. The present dataset presents the density, biomass, fecundity, and production of E. marinus in three estuaries under different anthropogenic pressure and, within each estuary, at three sampling sites, which differed in terms of the distance to the estuary mouth, vegetation cover, and organic matter content. Monthly environmental abiotic data and seasonal concentration of PAH and other contaminants are also provided. Sampling took place monthly for 13 months at low tide on intertidal mudflats. At each site, Fucus fronds containing E. marinus individuals were randomly collected. All E. marinus individuals were counted, sexed, and measured under a binocular stereo microscope to estimate the density and the biomass of E. marinus in Fucus fronds. Finally, the annual production of E. marinus at each sampling site was estimated through the size-frequency method. This dataset may be used to compare population traits of E. marinus populations across different estuaries and it may overall assist designing studies regarding population dynamics and designing management strategies in coastal systems, namely targeting at habitat conservation and restoration.
Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics, Science (General)
Background Suicide is one of the main causes of excess of premature death in psychotic patients. Published studies found that suicide risk begins in ultra-high risk of psychosis and continues in early years of the disease. Previous studies identifying predictive and risk factors associated with suicidality in first-episode psychosis (FEP) are highly inconsistent. Also, there are relatively few longitudinal studies on suicidal behaviour in FEP. The aim of this study was to examine prevalence, evolution and predictors of suicidal behaviour at baseline and the 12-month follow-up in patients presenting with FEP. Methods One hundred and eighteen patients presenting with FEP were recruited from two early psychosis units in Portugal. A comprehensive assessment examining socio-demographic and clinical characteristics was administered at baseline and the 12-month follow-up. Odds ratio were calculated using logistic regression analyses. McNemar test was used to evaluate the evolution of suicidal behaviour and depression prevalence from baseline to 12 months of follow-up. Results Follow-up data were available for 60 participants from the 118 recruited. Approximately 25.4% of the patients had suicidal behaviour at the baseline evaluation, with a significant reduction during the follow-up period to 13.3% ( p = 0.035). A multivariate binary logistic regression showed that a history of suicidal behaviour and depression at baseline independently predicted suicidal behaviour at baseline, and a history of suicidal behaviour and low levels of total cholesterol predicted suicidal behaviour at the 12-month follow-up. A significant proportion of patients also had depression at the baseline evaluation (43.3%), with the last month of suicidal behaviour at baseline independently predicting depression at this time. Conclusions The findings of our study indicate that suicidal behaviour was prevalent on the year after FEP. Patients with a history of suicidal behaviour, depression at baseline and low levels of cholesterol should undergo close evaluation, monitoring and possible intervention in order to reduce suicide risk in the early phases of psychosis.
Background The development of multicenter patient registries promotes the generation of scientific knowledge by using real-world data. A country-wide, web-based registry for inherited retinal dystrophies (IRDs) empowers patients and community organizations, while supporting formal partnerships research. We aim to describe the design, development and deployment of a country-wide, with investigators and stakeholders in the global aim to develop high-value, high-utility web-based, user-friendly and interoperable registry for IRDs—the IRD-PT. Results The IRD-PT is a clinical/genetic research registry included in the retina.pt platform ( https://www.retina.com.pt ), which was developed by the Portuguese Retina Study Group. The retina.pt platform collects data on individuals diagnosed with retinal diseases, from several sites across Portugal, with over 1800 participants and over 30,000 consultations to date. The IRD-PT module interacts with the retina.pt core system which provides a range of basic functions for patient data management, while the IRD-PT module allows data capture for the specific purpose of IRDs. All IRDs are coded accordingly to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) 9, ICD 10, ICD 11, and Orphanet Rare Disease Ontology (ORPHA codes) to make the IRD-PT interoperable with other IRD registries across the world. Furthermore, the genes are coded according to the Ontology of Genes and Genomes and Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, whereas signs and symptoms are coded according to the Human Phenotype Ontology. The IRD-PT module pre-launched at Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra , the largest reference center for IRDs in Portugal. As of April 1st 2020, finalized data from 537 participants were available for this preliminary analysis. Conclusions In the specific field of rare diseases, the use of registries increases research accessibility for individuals, while providing clinicians/investigators with a coherent data ecosystem necessary to boost research. Appropriate design and implementation of patient registries enables rapid decision making and ongoing data mining, ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes. We have described here the principles behind the design, development and deployment of a web-based, user-friendly and interoperable software tool aimed to generate important knowledge and collecting high-quality data on the epidemiology, genomic landscape and natural history of IRDs in Portugal.
Ramiro de Maeztu (1874-1936) fue uno de los periodistas españoles que más escribieron acerca de la Primera Guerra Mundial. Fue enviado al frente como reportero en cinco ocasiones –siempre adscrito al ejército británico–. Las crónicas resultantes son textos complejos, cuya fijación con espacios periféricos al combate (como hospitales, almacenes, campos de entrenamiento) desestabiliza el marco tradicional de qué es el centro y qué son los márgenes de la guerra. Por otro lado, la condición de Maeztu como ciudadano de un país neutral, pero que a la vez sentía una fuerte simpatía por uno de los bandos en lucha provoca importantes tensiones en la voz narrativa. Estos rasgos animan a analizarlos a la luz de los conceptos de escritura marginal y liminal.
Portugal is a low incidence country for tuberculosis (TB) disease. Now figuring among TB low incidence countries, it has since the 1990s reported multidrug resistant and extensively drug resistant (XDR) TB cases, driven predominantly by two strain-types: Lisboa3 and Q1. This study describes the largest characterization of the evolutionary trajectory of M/XDR-TB strains in Portugal, spanning a time-period of two decades. By combining whole-genome sequencing and phenotypic susceptibility data for 207 isolates, we report the geospatial patterns of drug resistant TB, particularly the dispersion of Lisboa3 and Q1 clades, which underly 64.2% and 94.0% of all MDR-TB and XDR-TB isolates, respectively. Genomic-based similarity and a phylogenetic analysis revealed multiple clusters (n = 16) reflecting ongoing and uncontrolled recent transmission of M/XDR-TB, predominantly associated with the Lisboa3 and Q1 clades. These clades are now thought to be evolving in a polycentric mode across multiple geographical districts. The inferred evolutionary history is compatible with MDR- and XDR-TB originating in Portugal in the 70’s and 80’s, respectively, but with subsequent multiple emergence events of MDR and XDR-TB particularly involving the Lisboa3 clade. A SNP barcode was defined for Lisboa3 and Q1 and comparison with a phylogeny of global strain-types (n = 28 385) revealed the presence of Lisboa3 and Q1 strains in Europe, South America and Africa. In summary, Portugal displays an unusual and unique epidemiological setting shaped by >40 years of uncontrolled circulation of two main phylogenetic clades, leading to a sympatric evolutionary trajectory towards XDR-TB with the potential for global reach.