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<jats:p>Electric vehicles (EVs) must be used as the primary mode of transportation as part of the gradual transition to more environmentally friendly clean energy technology and cleaner power sources. Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology has the potential to improve electricity demand, control load variability, and improve the sustainability of smart grids. The operation and principles of V2G and its varieties, the present classifications and types of EVs sold on the market, applicable policies for V2G and business strategy, implementation challenges, and current problem-solving techniques have not been thoroughly examined. This paper exposes the research gap in the V2G area and more accurately portrays the present difficulties and future potential in V2G deployment globally. The investigation starts by discussing the advantages of the V2G system and the necessary regulations and commercial representations implemented in the last decade, followed by a description of the V2G technology, charging communication standards, issues related to V2G and EV batteries, and potential solutions. A few major issues were brought to light by this investigation, including the lack of a transparent business model for V2G, the absence of stakeholder involvement and government subsidies, the excessive strain that V2G places on EV batteries, the lack of adequate bidirectional charging and standards, the introduction of harmonic voltage and current into the grid, and the potential for unethical and unscheduled V2G practices. The results of recent studies and publications from international organizations were altered to offer potential answers to these research constraints and, in some cases, to highlight the need for further investigation. V2G holds enormous potential, but the plan first needs a lot of financing, teamwork, and technological development.</jats:p>

Resumo O fascínio do Ocidente pela dicção poética oriental está atestado em várias latitudes e línguas, e resultou numa profícua produção na área da poesia. Sabe-se que a reinvenção da poesia chinesa da autoria de Pound, em grande medida na origem da sua proposta de revolução do idioma poético, nas primeiras décadas do séc. XX, assentou, na verdade, numa falácia; numa concepção errada da natureza da escrita chinesa (e japonesa) como essencialmente pictográfica e ideogramática, na base de propriedades expressivas reconhecidas na poesia que resultariam numa particular eficácia na apreensão e tradução do real. Pessanha enaltece, em termos similares aos da exaltação poundiana, a escrita da poesia chinesa clássica. Interessa-nos rever alguns inventários dos traços da dicção poética chinesa e japonesa que explicam que ela seja tomada como metonímia e metáfora da poesia, ou como meta e utopia da poesia, para perceber o que terá levado autores muito díspares a tentar a mão nos haikus, processo em que sondaremos algumas formulações poéticas em língua portuguesa. Consideramos também que esse fascínio por uma (sonhada) origem da dicção poética, quando cruzada com o habitar (não metafórico, neste caso) do pequenino enclave de Macau, de autores que nele lançaram raízes, resultou em alguns exercícios poéticos particularmente felizes e singulares. Serão trazidos à colação nesta abordagem poemas de Eugénio de Andrade, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, José Tolentino Mendonça, Yao Feng, Fernanda Dias e Fernando Sales Lopes.

"Student engagement is a catch-all term, irresistible to educators and policy makers, and serving many agendas and purposes. This ground-breaking book provides a powerful theory of student engagement, rooted in critical theory and social justice. It sets out a compelling argument for student engagement to promote social justice and to repel neoliberalism in, and through, higher education, addressing three key questions: -Student engagement in what? -Student engagement for what? -Student engagement for whom? The answers draw on Habermas, Honneth, Gramsci, Foucault, and Giroux in examining ideology, power, recognition, resistance, and student engagement, with examples drawn from across the world. It sets out key features, limitations and failures of neoliberalism in higher education, and indicates how student engagement can resist it. Student engagement calls for higher education institutions to be sites for challenge, debate on values and power, action for social justice, and for students to engage in the struggle to resist neoliberalism, taking action to promote social justice, democracy, and the public good. This book is essential reading for educators, researchers, managers and students in higher education, social scientists and social theorists. It is a call to reawaken higher education for social justice, human rights, democracy and freedoms"--

Exposure to continuous moderate noise levels is known to impair the auditory system leading to Noise-Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL) in animals including humans. The mechanism underlying noise-dependent auditory Temporary Threshold Shifts (TTS) is not fully understood. In fact, only limited information is available on vertebrates such as fishes, which share homologous inner ear structures to mammals and have the ability to regenerate hair cells. The zebrafish Danio rerio is a well-established model in hearing research providing an unmatched opportunity to investigate the molecular and physiological mechanisms of NIHL at the sensory receptor level. Here we investigated for the first time the effects of noise exposure on TTS and functional recovery in zebrafish, as well as the associated morphological damage and regeneration of the inner ear saccular hair cells. Adult specimens were exposed for 24h to white noise at various amplitudes (130, 140 and 150 dB re. 1 μPa) and their auditory sensitivity was subsequently measured with the Auditory Evoked Potential (AEP) recording technique. Sensory recovery was tested at different times post-treatment (after 3, 7 and 14 days) and compared to individuals kept under quiet lab conditions. Results revealed noise level-dependent TTS up to 33 dB and increase in response latency. Recovery of hearing function occurred within 7 days for fish exposed to 130 and 140 dB noise levels, while fish subject to 150 dB only returned to baseline thresholds after 14 days. Hearing impairment was accompanied by significant loss of hair cells only at the highest noise treatment. Full regeneration of the sensory tissue (number of hair cell receptors) occurred within 7 days, which was prior to functional recovery. We provide first baseline data of NIHL in zebrafish and validate this species as an effective vertebrate model to investigate the impact of noise exposure on the structure and function of the adult inner ear and its recovery process.

Ford Motor Company (Ford) is an American car manufacturer and one of the leading automobile manufacturers with over a century of history in the auto industry. The Company is headquartered in the United States, in Dearborn, Michigan. However, it has operations in over 125 countries around the world, including Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America, offering a wide range of vehicles under the Ford and Lincoln brands. The Company has demonstrated resilience and adaptability in response to shifts according to consumer preferences, technology advancements, and government regulations. The company has been investing constantly to restructure and position itself and remain competitive. Therefore, finding strategies to boost sales and get high returns from invested capital is a must for the company to keep its market share, even though this is still a challenge due to the nature of the automotive industry, which brings intense competition from both traditional and new entrants, particularly EV manufacturers. In this study the focus is not only to estimate the intrinsic value of Ford Motor Company as of 31, December 2023, but also to analyze essential aspects of the company including SWOT, PESTEL, and Porter’s five forces analysis to get a framework of internal and external environment of the company which enables us to identify strategic opportunities, competitive advantage, vulnerabilities, and threats of the Company. After understanding the dynamics of the company and the economic overview, which are crucial to predict the impact of key assumptions when evaluating the company’s intrinsic value. For the second part of our study, the attention goes to the financial analysis of both historical and forecasted financial statements that are extremely important to apply for the Discounted Cash Flow valuation methods and later to perform a sensitivity analysis to understand the Company’s financial performance. Therefore, Ford Motor Company’s intrinsic value from the three discounted cash flow models leads us to conclude that the Ford stock’s price is currently undervalued, and it is expected to grow in the future.

Abstract The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci's teaching on the goodness of human nature in The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven represents the fruit of the first encounter between Catholicism and Confucianism. This article will consider the Thomistic and neo‐Confucian sources in Ricci's enunciation of the Catholic doctrine on the goodness of human nature in this Chinese catechism. It will illustrate that Ricci developed his teaching, which is fundamentally Thomistic, with the help of terminology borrowed from the Chinese philosophical tradition. His distinction between the good of nature and the good of virtue leads to prioritising the cultivation of human nature. Ricci's teaching reflects the early modern Jesuits’ appreciation of human freedom. It also displays a Catholic reaction to the sixteenth‐century neo‐Confucian intellectual trend that ignored the importance of moral cultivation.

The doctrine of original sin gives people the impression that the goodness of human nature is under-evaluated in the Christian theological tradition. The Chinese philosopher Mencius is famous for his teaching on the goodness of human nature. Reading Mencius and Thomas Aquinas side by side, this article argues that the Mencian teaching on human nature brings us to affirm the goodness of human nature by recovering the significance of the image of God for the Christian doctrine of human nature. If we seek the goodness of human nature in the possibilities to become good, it is natural to see that even in the fallen state the possibilities of becoming like God remain in human nature imprinted with the image of God. It is open to the culmination of a gradual progression to its perfection.

Design for Classroom Units: A Collaborative Multicultural Studio Development with Chinese Students

The design thinking methodology is a problem-solving approach that involves empathising with end-users, (re)defining problems, brainstorming solutions creatively, and experimenting with prototypes and testing. It has been widely adopted in education to help students develop critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills in design. On the other hand, text-to-image artificial intelligence is a method used to generate images from natural language descriptors (usually referred to as prompts). Design thinking methodology can teach students to think creatively and critically about real-world problems when applied in the classroom. In the context of design teaching at the University of Saint Joseph, Macao, students use the design thinking methodology to develop innovative proposals for furniture design solutions. Combining design thinking methodologies with text-to-image artificial intelligence can further enhance the learning experience by allowing students to generate visual representations of their ideas during the ideation phase. The authors developed a systematic approach to generate images for ideation on furniture design based on prompting text-to-image (PTI). The analysis related students’ results who applied the design thinking methodology without using AI tools and the results generated using a standard text-to-image programme. By combining both methods, teachers can help students develop critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills, while also allowing them to generate visual representations in a different paradigm and, by so, being able to communicate their ideas with the most appropriate support for them.

Continuous cardiac monitoring has been increasingly adopted to prevent heart diseases, especially the case of Chagas disease, a chronic condition that can degrade the heart condition, leading to sudden cardiac death. Unfortunately, a common challenge for these systems is the low-quality and high level of noise in ECG signal collection. Also, generic techniques to assess the ECG quality can discard useful information in these so-called chagasic ECG signals. To mitigate this issue, this work proposes a 1D CNN network to assess the quality of the ECG signal for chagasic patients and compare it to the state of art techniques. Segments of 10 s were extracted from 200 1-lead ECG Holter signals. Different feature extractions were considered such as morphological fiducial points, interval duration, and statistical features, aiming to classify 400 segments into four signal quality types: Acceptable ECG, Non-ECG, Wandering Baseline (WB), and AC Interference (ACI) segments. The proposed CNN architecture achieves a $$0.90 \pm 0.02$$accuracy in the multi-classification experiment and also $$0.94 \pm 0.01$$when considering only acceptable ECG against the other three classes. Also, we presented a complementary experiment showing that, after removing noisy segments, we improved morphological recognition (based on QRS wave) by 33% of the entire ECG data. The proposed noise detector may be applied as a useful tool for pre-processing chagasic ECG signals.

"Jornalismo e Qualidade no Mundo de Expressão Portuguesa"propõe uma análise sobre a paisagem do jornalismo nos oitopaíses de língua oficial portuguesa - Portugal, Angola, Brasil, Cabo Verde, Moçambique, Guiné-Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipee Timor-Leste - e na Região Autónoma Especial de Macau. Olivro é uma reflexão sobre a legislação, o plano jurídico-constitucionalque enquadra os media no espaço lusófono, os contextosde mercado, as especificidades inscritas em fatoreshistóricos e económicos, em percursos políticos, bem comosobre as relações entre os media e os jornalistas e estes e opoder regulador do Estado.Os trabalhos reunidos nesta obra escrita por autores que partilhamentre si um dos idiomas mais falados do planeta, mostram as diferentes realidades do jornalismo no espaço dalíngua portuguesa, nomeadamente as suas redes de conhecimento, de empenho na promoção da qualidade da informação, de intercompreensão entre povos e culturas, de novas einovadoras formas de parcerias sociais com vista à partilha e àconstrução de mundividências.

The peacock blenny Salaria pavo is notorious for its extreme male sexual polymorphism, with large males defending nests and younger reproductive males mimicking the appearance and behavior of females to parasitically fertilize eggs. The lack of a reference genome has, to date, limited the understanding of the genetic basis of the species phenotypic plasticity. Here, we present the first reference genome assembly of the peacock blenny using PacBio HiFi long-reads and Hi-C sequencing data. The final assembly of the S. pavo genome spanned 735.90 Mbp, with a contig N50 of 3.69 Mbp and a scaffold N50 of 31.87 Mbp. A total of 98.77% of the assembly was anchored to 24 chromosomes. In total, 24,008 protein-coding genes were annotated, and 99.0% of BUSCO genes were fully represented. Comparative analyses with closely related species showed that 86.2% of these genes were assigned to orthogroups. This high-quality genome of S. pavo will be a valuable resource for future research on this species’ reproductive plasticity and evolutionary history.

<abstract><p>About 6.5 million people are infected with Chagas disease (CD) globally, and WHO estimates that $ &gt; million people worldwide suffer from ChHD. Sudden cardiac death (SCD) represents one of the leading causes of death worldwide and affects approximately 65% of ChHD patients at a rate of 24 per 1000 patient-years, much greater than the SCD rate in the general population. Its occurrence in the specific context of ChHD needs to be better exploited. This paper provides the first evidence supporting the use of machine learning (ML) methods within non-invasive tests: patients' clinical data and cardiac restitution metrics (CRM) features extracted from ECG-Holter recordings as an adjunct in the SCD risk assessment in ChHD. The feature selection (FS) flows evaluated 5 different groups of attributes formed from patients' clinical and physiological data to identify relevant attributes among 57 features reported by 315 patients at HUCFF-UFRJ. The FS flow with FS techniques (variance, ANOVA, and recursive feature elimination) and Naive Bayes (NB) model achieved the best classification performance with 90.63% recall (sensitivity) and 80.55% AUC. The initial feature set is reduced to a subset of 13 features (4 Classification; 1 Treatment; 1 CRM; and 7 Heart Tests). The proposed method represents an intelligent diagnostic support system that predicts the high risk of SCD in ChHD patients and highlights the clinical and CRM data that most strongly impact the final outcome.</p></abstract>

本研究採用質性研究法，旨在探討澳門教育碩士二年級學生的學習體驗、影響學習體驗的主要因素、學習過程中所面對的挑戰與困難，以及學生對課程優化的建議與期望。研究透過半結構式深度訪談十位教育碩士生，並加以整理與分析，以深入回應研究問題並歸納研究結論。研究結果顯示： （一）受訪學生普遍肯定課程對其專業知識和實務能力的提升作用，但指出理論與實踐之間存在明顯落差，特別是在統計分析與研究方法教學方面的支援不足。此外，積極的師生互動與同儕合作有助提升學習動機與成效，惟小組合作中常見的角色衝突、任務分配不均及教師指導不足等情況亦對學習體驗造成負面影響。 （二）影響學生學習體驗的關鍵因素包括：師資專業素質、院校資源配套、同儕互動質量及時間管理壓力。教師教學策略與專業水準對學習成效有直接影響，學生偏好案例導向與互動性強的教學形式。而院校資源方面，如數據庫使用受限、設施老化等問題亦限制了學生的學術發展。在職學生則面臨工作與學業角色衝突，影響學習的持續性與專注度。 （三）受訪學生普遍面臨理論與實踐銜接困難、學術能力落差、時間壓力與團隊協作挑戰等問題。跨專業學生對學術論文與與研究設計的掌握不足，需要更有系統的研究方法訓練。隨機分組亦導致成員能力不均，降低了合作效率。部份學生在資源使用與情緒管理方面亦顯得較為薄弱，進一步削弱其學習投入。課程定位與職業發展期望之間的落差對學習動機構成不利影響。 （四）學生建議課程可加強案例教學與實踐機會，增設研究方法進階訓練，並優化評價設計。採用更多元的評估形式。同時，應明確學術型與專業型課程的培訓目標，建立清晰的課程命名與專業認證制度，以提高學歷認受性及學生未來的就業競爭力。 最後，根據研究結果，本文提出若干針對澳門教育碩士課程之優化建議。並指出未來可延伸之研究方向，以持續深化對本澳教育碩士學習體驗的理解與關注。 This study adopted a qualitative research approach to explore the learning experiences of second-year Master of Education students in Macao. It investigated the factors that influenced their learning experiences, the challenges and difficulties encountered during their studies, and their expectations for curriculum improvement. Through semi-structured in-depth interviews with ten Master of Education students, the collected data was organized and analyzed to thoroughly address the research questions and summarize the research findings. The results indicate that: 1. Findings indicated that while participants generally affirmed the programme’s contribution to enhancing their professional knowledge and practical skills, they also identified a clear imbalance between theoretical instruction and practical application, particularly in the area of statistical analysis and research methodology. Positive student-teacher interactions and peer collaboration were seen to support motivation and learning outcomes. However, issues such as role conflict in group works, unequal task distribution, and insufficient teacher guidance negatively impacted their overall experience. 2. Key factors influencing students’ learning experiences included teacher quality, institutional support, peer relationships, and stress related to time management. Teaching strategies and educator’s expertise were found to directly affect course quality, with participants favouring case-based and interactive teaching approaches. However, limited access to databases and outdated facilities were seen as barriers to academic development. Working students also faced a conflict of roles between their professional responsibilities and academic commitments, which hindered their ability to maintain engagement. 3. Challenges commonly reported included difficulties bridging theory and practice, gaps in academic preparedness, time pressures, and team collaboration issues. Cross-disciplinary students often lacked a strong foundation in academic writing and research design and expressed a need for more structured research training. Random group allocation was seen to reduce group effectiveness. Additionally, some participants demonstrated limited capacity for resource use and emotional regulation, and this affected their learning engagement. Misalignment between course orientation and career expectations was also a factor in the decline in motivation. 4. Participants recommended increasing opportunities for case-based learning and hands-on experience, as well as enhancing research training and diversifying assessment methods. They also suggested clearer distinctions between academic and professional degree pathways and the establishment of a standardised course naming and a professional accreditation framework to improve recognition and employment competitiveness. Based on the findings, this study proposed several recommendations for improving the Master of Education curriculum in Macao. Future research directions are also suggested that may deepen an understanding of and support the development of postgraduate learning experiences within the local context.