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Nowadays, the issue of rural development has a central place on the agenda of policy-makers, prompting a discussion on the instrumental and procedural options of public policies. This paper seeks to contribute to the reflection on the potentialities and limitations of promoting rural development based on innovative strategies sustained by territorial governance modalities, which entail an active involvement of local agents, especially local authorities. For this, it takes as case studies three public policy experiences led by local authorities within a Portuguese low-density region, with one of the lowest development rates among EU regions. Specifically, it aims to discuss: (a) the effectiveness of adopting innovative policies in the context of low-density rural areas; and (2) the role of territorial governance in the success of those policies. The research followed a document analysis and interviews with local development actors. The analysis suggests that peripheral rural areas are not condemned to human desertification. There is a wide spectrum of opportunities for these areas. They can bring together a strategic view of the future, and an institutional leadership capable of dynamizing an adjusted territorial governance model. This is the challenge currently facing rural development policy. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

We propose an innovative Agent-Based model of street protests with multiple actors: police agents, three types of protesters ("hardcore", "hangers- on" and "passers-by"), and "media" agents that seek to witness and publish episodes and situations of violence. Agents have multiple goals and action selection is performed using a "personality" vector together with context rules that provide adaptation. Protesters turn active or violent according to the threshold rule proposed by Epstein, and police agents arrest violent protesters within their move range if they have sufficient backup. The model was applied to a scenario where policemen defend a government building from protesters and described several emergent crowd patterns in real protests, such as clustering of violent and active protesters and formation of a confrontation line moving back and forth with localized fights. Violent behavior was restricted to the initially more aggressive protesters and did not propagate to the bulk of the crowd. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

In this work we describe the introduction of quantitative measures of emergent crowd patterns in an existing Agent-Based model (ABM) of street protests with multiple actors (police, protester and 'media' agents). The model was applied to a scenario of a police force defending a government building which protesters seek to invade. The improved model provided a coherent 'narrative' of the simulations and highlighted the realistic and unrealistic aspects of the agents' interactions. Two new types of police agents – 'defensive' and 'offensive' – were introduced, leading to a realistic model representation of police cordons defending a site or charging to disperse clusters of violent protesters. The new quantitative measures provided information on cluster size and orientation of clusters of violent protesters, as well as police coverage and protester breaching of the defensive perimeter, together with the time history of the bursts of localized fights and arrests. It was shown how the quantitative measures of the emergent properties can be used for both parameterization and validation of the model. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

In two experimental studies, we explored the politicized use of immigrant stereotypes by members of the Portuguese host society. Our goal was to demonstrate that stereotypes strategically vary to support political arguments and mobilize others towards one's political position. In Study 1, the way in which participants described immigrants varied as a function of (a) whether or not they were provided with the opportunity to mobilize an ingroup audience, (b) the direction in which they sought to mobilize that audience, and (c) the instrumentality of particular stereotypical traits in a given argumentative context. Study 2 examined the cognitive processes underlying the strategic expression of stereotypes, by measuring implicit stereotyping and manipulating participants' ability to do cognitive work prior to and during stereotype expression. The findings showed that (a) variability in stereotype expression was matched by a consonant variability in implicit representations of immigrants, and that (b) the ability to do cognitive work was a necessary condition for variability in stereotype expression to emerge. Taken together, these findings suggest that strategic effects in stereotype expression are underpinned by strategic work on intra-psychic representations. We conclude by discussing the complementarity between strategic and cognitive explanations of stereotype expression, as well as by arguing the possibility of a more predictive approach to the politicized use of stereotypes. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

he synchrotron radiation total reflection X-ray fluorescence (SRTXRF) technique was used for the analysis of heavy metals in produced watersamples from oil field in Rio Grande do Norte, in order to determine potential sources of pollution. Since the inorganic components in producedwater generally resembling sea water, pre-concentration procedures have been applied to increase the concentration of the analyte of interest andto minimize the salt matrix effects. This technique allows us to determine the contents of V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Hg and Pb in 20 producedwater samples. The great majority of the sampling points presented low elemental concentration value. However, in some sample, the Fe, Ni, Cu,Zn and Hg concentration were higher than the established limits by the Brazilian legislation

Sociologists coined the term "anomie" to describe societies that are characterized by disintegration and deregulation. Extending beyond conceptualizations of anomie that conflate the measurements of anomie as 'a state of society' and as a 'state of mind', we disentangle these conceptualizations and develop an analysis and measure of this phenomenon focusing on anomie as a perception of the 'state of society'. We propose that anomie encompasses two dimensions: a perceived breakdown in social fabric (i.e., disintegration as lack of trust and erosion of moral standards) and a perceived breakdown in leadership (i.e., deregulation as lack of legitimacy and effectiveness of leadership). Across six studies we present evidence for the validity of the new measure, the Perception of Anomie Scale (PAS). Studies 1a and 1b provide evidence for the proposed factor structure and internal consistency of PAS. Studies 2a-c provide evidence of convergent and discriminant validity. Finally, assessing PAS in 28 countries, we show that PAS correlates with national indicators of societal functioning and that PAS predicts national identification and well-being (Studies 3a & 3b). The broader implications of the anomie construct for the study of group processes are discussed.