Nowadays technologies relate to so many aspects in our daily life that makes society eager for more and more ways of using it. To keep up with this new technological world, all economic sectors, from industry to services, are trying to adapt their products into this new reality. Presently, cultural heritage is already a field where the application of technology allows a static site to be converted into an intelligent environment, with detailed information about a specific monument or historical place, becoming more interesting, not only for local habitants, but also for tourists. This paper describes an application that allows tourists, managers and historical sites' habitants to experience a completely new way of discovering those places, offering a visit with detailed real-time information taking into account their personal interests. Tourists will have at their disposal a full set of optimized routes, combining their interests with their visiting time.

This paper presents a study of the behaviour and load capacity of Steel Fibre Reinforced Concrete (SFRC) flat slabs under monotonically increased concentrated vertical loads. The SFRC was used only in the local region of the slab-column connection, as the rest of the slab was cast using normal concrete (NC) without fibres. The six experimental test specimens had a thickness of 150 mm with different longitudinal reinforcement ratios, using a non-uniform distribution over the slab width. The concretes used were made with different Dramix® 4D 65/60 BG steel fibre contents (0%, 0.5 %, 0.75% and 1.0% volume content). The slab tests were complemented by flexural tests on notched-beams. This made it possible to determine the tension behaviour of the different concretes used, through a linear post-cracking behavior and inverse analysis. The inverse analysis made it possible to define the stress-crack opening relationship that characterize the tension behaviour of SFRC and to relate it to the observed behaviour and load capacity of the tested slabs. The tests results show that the tensile behaviour of the SFRC plays an important role in the behavioural and load capacity of the slabs and that it can be considered relevant to physically based models.

This paper presents an experimental study of four flat slab specimens subjected to combined vertical and horizontal cyclic loading. Steel fibre-reinforced concrete (SFRC) was used only in the local region of the slab–column connection, while the rest of the slabs were cast using normal concrete. The specimens measured 4·15 m × 1·85 m × 0·15 m and were connected to two steel half columns by 0·25 m × 0·25 m rigid steel plates, prestressed against the slab using steel bolts, to ensure monolithic behaviour. The specimens were tested using an innovative test setup system that accounted for important factors, such as the ability of bending moment redistribution, line of inflection mobility and assured equal vertical displacements at the opposite slab borders, and symmetrical shear forces. Results show that the presence of SFRC in the slab–column connection region is effective in increasing the deformation capacity of slab–column connections, allowing the increase of horizontal drift ratios.

The present study aims to understand the potentialities and implications,
to the teacher and her practice, of the use of formative assessment with the support
of educational technology.
Regarding the research methodology, this study is part of the research on own
practice. The participants were the teacher, who was simultaneously a researcher,
and the students of a 9th grade class.
In the course of this experience it was found that the use of formative assessment
allows, on the one hand, the student to realize what he manages to understand, and
what he has to do to overcome what are less consolidated parts of the content in
study; and, on the other, the teacher to detect in a timely manner the difficulties of
the student and to change strategies to allow the student to overcome his difficulties.
The lack of time, the difficulties in managing the curriculum and the existence of
national exams are three of the main obstacles mentioned by the teachers for the
non-realization of formative assessment. In this experience it was found that the use
of new technologies turns possible to overcome these limitations.
This type of assessment had a very positive impact on teacher’s practice and in the
learning of the students.
Keywords: assessment; formative assessment; new technologies.

Purpose The antique structures are part of the inheritance that our elders left, being important to preserve their memories. It is important to preserve, rehabilitate and restore the historic buildings protecting the cultural patrimony, attending to the actual comfort and habitability requirements. It is necessary to study the behaviour of the various elements that compose antique structures (masonry and wood) in order to develop assessment measures according to the characteristics of the original materials. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach An experimental campaign to characterize the mechanical behaviour of the wood of the roof of the �sequeiro� of �Quinta Lobeira de Cima�, a building from the twentieth century located in Minho, was carried out. The tested wood specimens are from two different species: chestnut and oak. Compression, tension and static flexion tests according to parallel to the grain direction were performed. Other parameters, such as density, moisture content and longitudinal modulus of elasticity in compression and in tension, were also obtained. The measurement of displacements was made with Digital Image Correlation (DIC). Findings The results of this study show the similarity between experimental and empirical values for the studied woods species. Originality/value This original study aimed at characterizing the mechanical properties using DIC of wood of the roof of the �sequeiro� of �Quinta Lobeira de Cima�, a building from the twentieth century located in Minho (Portugal). This study is part of master thesis of Jo�o Martins, an original research work.

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The cyclic shift graph of a monoid is the graph whose vertices are the elements of the monoid and whose edges connect elements that are cyclic shift related. The Patience Sorting algorithm admits two generalizations to words, from which two kinds of monoids arise, the $\belr$ monoid and the $\bell$ (also known as Bell) monoid. Like other monoids arising from combinatorial objects such as the plactic and the sylvester, the connected components of the cyclic shift graph of the $\belr$ monoid consists of elements that have the same number of each of its composing symbols. In this paper, with the aid of the computational tool SageMath, we study the diameter of the connected components from the cyclic shift graph of the $\belr$ monoid.

Within the theory of monoids, the cyclic shift relation, among other relations, generalizes the relation of conjugacy for groups. We examine several of these relations for both the $\belr$ and the $\bell$ monoids.

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Kashiwara's crystal graphs have a natural monoid structure that arises by identifying words labelling vertices that appear in the same position of isomorphic components. The celebrated plactic monoid (the monoid of Young tableaux), arises in this way from the crystal graph for the q-analogue of the general linear Lie algebra gln, and the so-called Kashiwara operators interact beautifully with the combinatorics of Young tableaux and with the Robinson–Schensted–Knuth correspondence. The authors previously constructed an analogous ‘quasi-crystal’ structure for the related hypoplactic monoid (the monoid of quasi-ribbon tableaux), which has similarly neat combinatorial properties. This paper constructs an analogous ‘crystal-type’ structure for the sylvester and Baxter monoids (the monoids of binary search trees and pairs of twin binary search trees, respectively). Both monoids are shown to arise from this structure just as the plactic monoid does from the usual crystal graph. The interaction of the structure with the sylvester and Baxter versions of the Robinson–Schensted–Knuth correspondence is studied. The structure is then applied to prove results on the number of factorizations of elements of these monoids, and to prove that both monoids satisfy non-trivial identities.