This special issue is dedicated to the 3rd Estoril Vigotsky Conference-the biannual international scientific event held in Estoril, Portugal on 16-18 June 2014. The organizing committee honored the wide impact of Lev Vygotsky's works on contemporary psychology and included Vigotskyan League of Portuguese Language and the Institute Quintino Aires, in collaboration with the Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Russian University of Humanities (Russia, Moscow), IPAF-Instituto Vigotsky (São Paulo, Brazil) and Andricard (Luanda, Angola). The editorial board of our journal is very grateful to Professor Quintino-Aires for organization of this outstanding conference and to Professor Margarida César for contribution to this special issue. L.S. Vygotsky founded the socio-cultural approach to understanding cognitive processes in child development and introduced the genetic (developmental) method for their study. He also introduced the concept of cultural tools or mediational means, in his belief the higher mental functions to be products of social processes. The Theory and methodology section starts with an article by Andrei I. Podolskiy that discusses the practical implementation of another outstanding theory within the cultural-historical approach-by P.Ya. Galperin. The article's title There's nothing so practical as a good theory could be the motto of this special issue, because it includes classic theoretical papers as well as applied research and empirical data from professional practice. From the standpoints of the intersubjectivity concept, Anatoly N. Krichevets explores Lev Vygotsky's quintessential statement that "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: on the social and on the individual levels-first between people (interpsychological) and then within the child (intrapsychological)". Pedro Ferreira Alves joins developmental psychologists and cognitive scientists around the world in discussion of L.S. Vygotsky and J. Piaget's dialogue on formation of scientific concepts. The idea of external mediation in rehabilitation of mental functioning became the basis of major neuropsychological developments, including the works by A.R. Luria. The largest section of the issue is dedicated to current questions of neuropsychology and clinical psychology.

ResumoContext-aware systems take into account the user current context (such as location, time and activity) to enrich the user interaction with the application. In the last decade, this topic has seen numerous developments that demonstrate its relevance and usefulness, a trend that was accelerated with the recent widespread availability of powerful mobile devices (such as smartphones) that include a myriad of sensors which enable applications to capture the user environment for a large number of people.This paper examines the specific issues that occur in distributed context-aware systems, where the captured contextual information may travel a long distance before being used in an actual application. To better understand those issues, we propose a taxonomy derived from four layers that can typically be found in these systems: Capture, Inference, Distribution and Consumption. The common principles outlined in the taxonomy are then applied to some real applications, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. 2011-05-17Abstract Context-aware systems take into account the user current context (such as location, time and activity) to enrich the user interaction with the application. In the last decade, this topic has seen numerous developments that demonstrate its relevance and usefulness, a trend that was accelerated with the recent widespread availability of powerful mobile devices (such as smartphones) that include a myriad of sensors which enable applications to capture the user environment for a large number of people. This paper examines the specific issues that occur in distributed context-aware systems, where the captured contextual information may travel a long distance before being used in an actual application.To better understand those issues, we propose a taxonomy derived from four layers that can typically be found in these systems: Capture, Inference, Distribution and Consumption. The common principles outlined in the taxonomy are then applied to some real applications, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

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Abstract. Social network applications (SNAs) can have a tremendous impact in raising awareness to important controversial topics such as religion or politics. Sharing and liking are powerful tools to make some of those topics emerge to a global scale, as already witnessed in the recent Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions.However, in several countries the simple act of liking an anti-government article or video can be (and has already been) used to pursue and detain activists. Therefore, it is of utmost relevance to allow anyone to anonymously "like" any social network content (e.g. at Facebok) even in presence of malicious administrators managing the social network infrastructure.We present anonyLikes, a protocol which allows SNAs users to "like" a certain post (e.g., news, photo, video) without revealing their identity (even to the SNA itself) but still make their "like" count to the total number of "likes". This is achieved using cryptographic techniques such as homomorphic encryption and shared threshold key pairs. In addition, the protocol ensures all other desirable properties such as preventing users from "liking" a particular post more than once, while preserving anonymity.The anonyLikes protocol is fully implemented using Facebook as an example and can be easily used by developers (e.g. Facebook itself or other social network applications and infrastructures) to provide an alternative "like" button called "anonyLike".

The broad availability and low cost of smartphones have justified their use for structural health monitoring (SHM) of bridges. This paper presents a smartphone application called App4SHM, as a customized SHM process for damage detection. App4SHM interrogates the phone’s internal accelerometer to measure accelerations, estimates the natural frequencies, and compares them with a reference data set through a machine learning algorithm properly trained to detect damage in almost real time. The application is tested on data sets from a laboratory beam structure and two twin post-tensioned concrete bridges. The results show that App4SHM retrieves the natural frequencies with reliable precision and performs accurate damage detection, promising to be a low-cost solution for long-term SHM. It can also be used in the context of scheduled bridge inspections or to assess bridges’ condition after catastrophic events.