Questões de Inglês - Palavras conectivas | Connective words para Concurso

TEXT I

How music is the real language of political diplomacy

Forget guns and bombs, it is the power of melody that has changed the world

Marie Zawisza

Saturday 31 October 2015 10.00 GMT

Last modified on Tuesday 10 November 201513.19 GMT 

An old man plays his cello at the foot of a crumbling wall. The notes of the sarabande of Bach’s Suite No 2 rise in the cold air, praising God for the “miracle” of the fall of the Berlin Wall, as Mstislav Rostropovich later put it. The photograph is seen around the world. The date is 11 November 1989, and the Russian virtuoso is marching to the beat of history.

Publicity stunt or political act? No doubt a bit of both – and proof, in any case, that music can have a political dimension. Yo-Yo Ma showed as much in September when the cellist opened the new season of the Philharmonie de Paris with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As a “messenger of peace” for the United Nations, the Chinese American is the founder of Silk Road Project, which trains young musicians from a variety of cultures to listen to and improvise with each other and develop a common repertoire. “In this way, musicians create a dialogue and arrive at common policies,” says analyst Frédéric Ramel, a professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris. By having music take the place of speeches and peace talks, the hope is that it will succeed where diplomacy has failed.[…]

Curiously, the study of the role of music in international relations is still in its infancy. “Historians must have long seen it as something fanciful, because history has long been dominated by interpretations that stress economic, social and political factors,” says Anaïs Fléchet, a lecturer in contemporary history at the Université de Versailles-St-Quentin and co-editor of a book about music and globalisation.

“As for musicologists,” she adds, “until quite recently they were more interested in analysing musical scores than the actual context in which these were produced and how they were received.” In the 1990s came a cultural shift. Scholars were no longer interested solely in “hard power” – that is, in the balance of powers and in geopolitics – but also in “soft power”, where political issues are resolved by mutual support rather than force. […] 

Gilberto Gil sings while then UN secretary general Kofi Annan plays percussion at a September 2003 concert at the UN headquarters honouring those killed by a bomb at a UN office in Baghdad a month earlier. Photograph: Zuma/Alamy 

Since then, every embassy has a cultural attaché. The US engages in “audio diplomacy” by financing hip-hop festivals in the Middle East. China promotes opera in neighbouring states to project an image of harmony. Brazil has invested in culture to assert itself as a leader in Latin America, notably by establishing close collaboration between its ministries of foreign affairs and culture; musician Gilberto Gil was culture minister during Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva᾽s presidency from 2003 to 2008. He was involved in France’s Year of Brazil. As Fléchet recalls, “the free concert he gave on 13 July, 2005 at the Place de la Bastille was the pinnacle. That day, he sang La Marseillaise in the presence of presidents Lula and Jacques Chirac.” Two years earlier, in September 2003, Gil sang at the UN in honour of the victims of the 19 August bombing of the UN headquartes in Baghdad. He was delivering a message of peace, criticising the war on Iraq by the US: “There is no point in preaching security without giving a thought to respecting others,” he told his audience. Closing the concert, he invited then UN secretary general Kofi Annan on stage for a surprise appearance as a percussionist. “This highly symbolic image, which highlighted the conviction that culture can play a role in bringing people together, shows how music can become a political language,” Fléchet says. 

(adapted from http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/oct/31 /music-language-human-rights-political-diplomacy) 

                                             Smart Greenhouse

Control the light, watering, temperature, and humidity of your greenhouse – automatically.

                                                                                                                                  Kevin Farnham

      Smart Greenhouse, one of three professional category winner in the 2014 IoT Developer Challenge, is an Internet of Things (IoT) device and application that monitors and controls a greenhouse environment. The concept for Smart Greenhouse came into being after the core team – Dzmitry Yasevich, Pavel Vervenko, and Vladimir Redzhepov – attended JavaOne Russia in April 2013. There, the team saw presentations of a smart house, various robots, and other devices, all controlled by Java.

      Yasevich notes, “We were impressed by these solutions and had an idea to do something like that. Pavel Vervenko suggested making an automated greenhouse. Everyone liked the idea!”.

      First, the team selected the hardware. “We started to use Raspberry Pi as a basis”, Yasevich says. “It is a compact but fullfedged computer with 700 MHz and memory at 512 MB. This system costs around $35”.

      However, early on, a safety concern arose. “Current under high voltage passes in the greenhouse, and there is an automatic watering system, so it was necessary to properly consider all the aspects related to insulation”, Yasevich says.

(http://www.oraclejavamagazine-digital.com/8ef38d6e6f63e8971b9487ddb4bd4bdc/558dae0a/pp/javamagazine20150304-1429053481000c51ce41 0c1-pp.pdf?lm=1429053481000)