Abstract
Seven silicate rocks used as ornamental stones and having different surface finishing were submitted to salt fog atmospheres in order to compare different susceptibilities to alteration. Polished, honed, hammered and flamed finishing types were tested. Rocks come from Portugal, Brazil and Angola and are widely commercialized. Samples covered quartz rich rocks, silica saturated and undersaturated rocks, mono and plurimineralic rocks, coarse and fine grained rocks. Mineral composition, texture and open porosity showed to be important parameters which determine mass loss among samples, but the finishing type was very effective within samples. Mass loss and porosity increase are higher on hammered samples, contrasted with the lowest loss values on polished samples. The effect of surface hydrophobicity and roughness on the samples having polished finishing was also analysed by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and water contact angle (WCA), indicating that texture and mineral diversity influence the hydrophobic character of the rock surfaces.

Abstract
The challenge of resilience is becoming increasingly important on the path to exascale capability in High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. With clock frequencies unlikely to increase as aggressively as they have in the past, future large scale HPC systems aspiring exaflop capability will need an exponential increase in the count of the ALUs and memory modules deployed in their design [Kogge 2008]. The Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) of the system however, scales inversely to the number of components in the system. Furthermore, these systems will be constructed using devices that are far less reliable than those used today, as transistor geometries shrink and the failures due to chip manufacturing variability, effects of transistor aging as well as transient soft errors will become more prevalent. Therefore the sheer scale of future exascale supercomputers, together with the shrinking VLSI geometries will conspire to make faults and failures increasingly the norm rather than the exception. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

Abstract
The central idea of the Web of Data is to interlink the information available in the Web, most of which is actually stored in databases rather than in static HTML pages. Tools to convert relational data into semantic web formats and publish then as linked data are essential to fulfill the vision of a web of data available for automatic processing, as web content is currently available to humans. This paper presents DaPress, a simple tool to publish linked data on the Web, that maps a relational database to an RDF triplestore and creates a SPARQL access point. The paper reports the use of DaPress to publish the database of Authenticus, a system that automatically assigns publication authors to known Portuguese researchers and institutions. © Teresa Costa and José Paulo Leal.

Abstract
In this chapter, the authors propose and describe an identity management framework that allows users to asynchronously control and effectively share sensitive dynamic data, thus guaranteeing security and privacy in a simple and transparent way. Their approach is realised by a fully secure mobile identity digital wallet, running on mobile devices (Android devices), where users can exercise discretionary control over the access to sensitive dynamic attributes, disclosing their value only to pre-authenticated and authorised users for determined periods of time. For that, the authors rely on an adaptation of the OAuth protocol to authorise and secure the disclosure of personal-private user data by the usage of token exchange and new XML Schemas to establish secure authorisation and disclosure of a set of supported dynamic data types that are being maintained by the personal mobile digital wallet. The communication infrastructure is fully implemented over the XMPP instant messaging protocol and is completely compatible with the public XMPP large messaging infrastructures already deployed on the Internet for real time XML document interchange. Copyright (C) 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

Abstract
In this work, a resonant tunnelling diode-photo-detector based microwave oscillator is amplitude modulated using an optical signal. The modulated free running oscillator is coupled to an antenna and phase locked by a wireless carrier that allows remote extraction of the information contained in the modulation. An off-the-shelf demodulator has been used to recover the envelope of the baseband data originally contained in the optical signal. Data were successfully transmitted at a rate of 1 MSym/s with a bit error rate below 10-6. (c) 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 55:1728-1730, 2013

Abstract
The access to instruments that allow higher autonomy to people is increasing and the scientific community is giving special attention on designing and developing such systems. Intelligent Wheelchairs (IW) are an example of how the knowledge on robotics and artificial intelligence may be applied to this field. IWs can have different interfaces and multimodal interfaces enabling several inputs such as head movements, joystick, facial expressions and voice commands. This paper describes the foundations for creating a simple procedure for extracting user profiles, which can be used to adequately select the best IW command mode for each user. The methodology consists on an interactive wizard composed by a flexible set of simple tasks presented to the user, and a method for extracting and analyzing the user's execution of those tasks. The results showed that it is possible to extract simple user profiles, using the proposed method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.