Abstract
The current financial crisis highlights real problems profoundly related to the level of financial knowledge. Some studies suggest that many individuals, including small business owners, do not have adequate financial skills to be able to handle their finances. The term "financial literacy" summarizes the set of knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to enable recognition and understanding of the foundations of personal finance. Informed and literate individuals are able to make responsible decisions. Our paper presents the preliminary results obtained with the Portuguese StudentFinance2012 survey. A total of 612 university students from seven different institutions agreed to participate and complete the survey. The sample has an average age of 23.67 years and is gender balanced. Students were classified in three course areas such as engineering, business and management, or design and tourism. Most respondents frequent a degree course, being the university mostly a public institution. A majority of our students has solely funded by their parents or family. By analyzing the total amount of financial products, we obtained an average of 2.57 financial products by student. To analyze financial literacy, our study developed measures such students' financial involvement, financial knowledge and parents influence and explore it as a function to issues such as age, gender, course area, course type, type of university and parental funding. The results suggest that the financial involvement of students evolves over time (as age increases, the financial involvement also increases) and confirm significant dependence with demographic variables such as gender, age, or course, among others. For the financial knowledge the results are encouraging, with students to show interesting levels of knowledge. We also identified relations of dependence with age, gender and course, among many others. Parental influence was analyzed by the level of agreement with statements related to the perceptions of the influence and behavior of parents about money, budgeting, saving and paying bills. The main results indicate that parents are a positive influence and that studentsare experiencing a financial behaviour that integrates the family.

Abstract
The Darwinian Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO) is an evolutionary algorithm that extends the Particle Swarm Optimization using natural selection to enhance the ability to escape from sub-optimal solutions. An extension of the DPSO to multi-robot applications has been recently proposed and denoted as Robotic Darwinian PSO (RDPSO), benefiting from the dynamical partitioning of the whole population of robots, hence decreasing the amount of required information exchange among robots. This paper further extends the previously proposed algorithm adapting the behavior of robots based on a set of context-based evaluation metrics. Those metrics are then used as inputs of a fuzzy system so as to systematically adjust the RDPSO parameters (i.e., outputs of the fuzzy system), thus improving its convergence rate, susceptibility to obstacles and communication constraints. The adapted RDPSO is evaluated in groups of physical robots, being further explored using larger populations of simulated mobile robots within a larger scenario.

Abstract
This paper presents a piezoresistive pressure sensor with a measurement span of 1MPa and capable to withstand peak pressures around 10MPa. The sensor design, based on a square membrane, was optimized for enhanced sensitivity, high linearity and low sensitivity variations between fabricated samples. Being the asymmetry of the mechanical stress peaks, the ratio between the membrane area and its thickness, and the tolerances of the bulk micromachining process considered for the optimal positioning of the piezoresistive sensing elements. Practical results show a mean sensitivity of 30.9mV/V/MPa with a standard deviation of 0.65mV/V/MPa and a linearity error of 0.15% of the scale span. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd....Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the Symposium Cracoviense Sp. z.o.o.

Abstract
There is a need for a language able to reconcile the recent upsurge of interest in quantitative methods in the software sciences with logic and set theory that have been used for so many years in capturing the qualitative aspects of the same body of knowledge. Such a lingua franca should be typed, polymorphic, diagrammatic, calculational and easy to blend with traditional notation. This paper puts forward typed linear algebra (LA) as a candidate notation for such a role. Typed LA emerges from regarding matrices as morphisms of suitable categories whereby traditional linear algebra is equipped with a type system. In this paper we show typed LA at work in describing weighted (probabilistic) automata. Some attention is paid to the interface between the index-free language of matrix combinators and the corresponding index-wise notation, so as to blend with traditional set theoretic notation. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

Abstract
It is reported a long-period grating (LPG) dynamic interrogation technique based on the modulation of fiber Bragg gratings located in the readout unit of the system. It permits to attenuate the effect of the 1/f noise of the electronics in the resolution of the LPG-based sensing head. The concept is tested to detect variations of the external refractive index and a resolution of 2.0 x 10(-4) NIR was achieved without system optimization. Additionally, the effect in the sensor resolution when introducing Erbium and Raman optical amplification is experimentally investigated.

Abstract
This paper presents an aspect-oriented library to support parallelization of Java applications for distributed memory environments, using a message-passing approach. The library was implemented using AspectJ language, and aims to provide a set of mechanisms to make easier to parallelize applications, as well as to solve well known problems of parallelization, such as lack of modularity and reusability. We compare the advantages of this method over the traditional approach, and we discuss differences to recent approaches that address the same problem. Results show benefits over other approaches, and, in most of cases, a competitive performance. © 2012 ACM.