Abstract
Lead is a potent toxicant associated with adverse cardiovascular effects and hypertension in children. Yet, few studies have determined if autonomic dysfunction associated with lead exposure involves brain regions which regulate autonomic responses. Central autonomic nuclei such as the nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS) and hypothalamic defence area (HDA) may be particularly sensitive to lead infiltration because they are adjacent to ventricles and areas with semi-permeable blood-brain-barriers. To understand if autonomic nuclei are sensitive to lead accumulation Wistar rats were exposed to lead from the gestational period and lead levels were quantified in brain regions that regulate arterial pressure: the NTS and the HDA. Energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) was used to quantify total brain lead levels and revealed no differences between exposed and control tissues; measured values were close to the detection limit (2 mu g/g). Electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry (ETAAS) was also used, which has a greater sensitivity, to quantify lead. There was similar to 2.1 mu g/g lead in the NTS and similar to 3.1 mu g/g lead in the HDA of exposed rats, and no lead in the control rats. There were greater lead levels in the HDA (similar to 50%) as compared with the NTS. Pathology studies revealed more prominent lead granules in the HDA as compared with the NTS. Increased microglia and astrocyte activation was also noted in the NTS of lead exposed rats as compared with the HDA. Regional differences in neuro-inflammatory responses likely contribute to heterogeneous lead accumulation, with enhanced clearance of lead in the NTS. Future studies will resolve the mechanisms underpinning tissue-specific lead accumulation.

Abstract
In RoboCup Middle Size league (MSL) the main referee uses assisting technology, controlled by a second referee, to support him, in particular for conveying referee decisions for robot players with the help of a wireless communication system. In this paper a vision-based system is introduced, able to interpret dynamic and static gestures of the referee, thus eliminating the need for a second one. The referee's gestures are interpreted by the system and sent directly to the Referee Box, which sends the proper commands to the robots. The system is divided into four modules: a real time hand tracking and feature extraction, a SVM (Support Vector Machine) for static hand posture identification, an HMM (Hidden Markov Model) for dynamic unistroke hand gesture recognition, and a FSM (Finite State Machine) to control the various system states transitions. The experimental results showed that the system works very reliably, being able to recognize the combination of gestures and hand postures in real-time. For the hand posture recognition, with the SVM model trained with the selected features, an accuracy of 98,2% was achieved. Also, the system has many advantages over the current implemented one, like avoiding the necessity of a second referee, working on noisy environments, working on wireless jammed situations. This system is easy to implement and train and may be an inexpensive solution.

Abstract
The work described in this paper is part of the development of a framework to support the joint execution of cooperative missions by a group of robotic vehicles, in a simulated, augmented or real environment. Such framework brings forward the need for formal languages in which to specify the group of vehicles that compose a team; the scenario in which they will operate; and the definition of the mission to be performed (surveillance, pollution detection, search and rescue operations, and so on). This paper presents the Mission Description Language (MDL), a XML dialect that describes the specifics of a mission to be performed by a team of autonomous vehicles. The MDL definition decomposes a mission into a number of possibly dependent phases and uses high-level concepts that facilitate the specification of a mission by both experts and non-experts. The dialect was defined using XML Schema, with all the required information being integrated in the definition. An interface was developed and incorporated into the framework, as to allow for the creation and edition of XML files following the defined schema. Once the information is correctly specified, it can be used in the framework, thus facilitating the process of mission specification and deployment. A survey answered by both practitioners and researchers shows that the degree of satisfaction with MDL is elevated (the overall evaluation of MDL achieved a 3.97 score (out of 5), with 82.05% of the answers being equal to or above 4); also, the usability of the interface was evaluated, having achieved a score of 82.9 in the SUS scale. These results imply that MDL is flexible enough to represent several types of missions, through a user-friendly interface.

Abstract
Renewable technologies are suitable investments to achieve a low carbon electricity production system and to reduce the external energy dependency of Portugal in a long term period. The aim of this work was to develop and evaluate a variety of scenarios to promote these goals until 2030. A long-term electricity expansion planning model is used to design these scenarios and multi-criteria analysis is applied in the evaluation. The results demonstrated that imposing a minimum contribution of renewable energy sources (RES) for the electricity system, can be more costly than imposing CO2 emissions limitations. Taking into account the technical criteria, scenarios with high coal power share are favoured. However, under a pure social approach, the best scenario would be a 100% RES electricity system. When environmental and economic dimensions are more valued, the best options seems to be the ones with higher investments on natural gas and wind power plants.

Abstract
The increased presence of parallel computing platforms brings concerns to the general purpose domain that were previously prevalent only in the specific niche of high-performance computing. As parallel programming technologies become more prevalent in the form of new emerging programming languages and extensions of existing languages, additional safety concerns arise as part of the paradigm shift from sequential to parallel behaviour. In this paper, we propose various syntax extensions to the Ada language, which provide mechanisms whereby the compiler is given the necessary semantic information to enable the implicit and explicit parallelization of code. The model is based on earlier work, which separates parallelism specification from concurrency implementation, but proposes an updated syntax with additional mechanisms to facilitate the development of safer parallel programs. Copyright 2014 ACM.

Abstract