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Limelight

Luís Fernandes, Pedro Carvalho and Luís Guardão

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"I remember a few years ago a research colleague of mine saying with some indignation that the authors of scientific papers should receive royalties when they transfer copyrights to the publishers. The rationale behind it was simple...", Alípio Jorge

Free Nonsense

"There are features that unite us, both Portuguese and Brazilian, and that are bigger than the language. And those are apparent in our way of being and in the way we live, in the refusal to live regulatory shapes and procedures that castrate the spontaneous.", José Celso Freire Júnior

Gallery of the Uncommon

Seca is kind of a cool guy and he tucked his meal in his comforted stomach, but one thing he brought for sure from the Azores: the certainty that some people are cooler than him...

Jobs 4 the Boys & Girls

In this section, the reader may find reference to public announcements made by INESC Porto offering grants, contracts and other opportunities of the same kind.

Biptoon

More scenes of how life goes merrily on...

 
 

Gallery of the Uncommon

Gallery of the Uncommon

INESC Porto researcher goes to the Azores through Facebook

Everyone talks about social networks and some spend more time on Facebook than working but apparently, there are also some who can really take the best from both worlds and manage to combine business and pleasure.

Luís Seca, one of the researchers of the Power Systems Unit (USE), was recently invited by IEP (Portuguese Electrical Institute) to do a presentation for the workshop on Renewable Energies in the Azores. So far, so good, except he had no clue about his presentation: place, time…, you know, details.

The reader will not be surprised if our story now reveals that four days before the supposed trip, our researcher receives an invitation on his Facebook page to become friends with some unknown person, who we will call person X. He realizes that he has a friend in common with person X, an Azorean he had studied with in college. Thinking that it could be someone he had met back then, combined with some naïveté, he accepts the request. After doing so, he notices that there is a photo of him on person X’s wall: a bit strange, to say the least … Tempted by curiosity, as any human being would be, he clicks on his own photo. And surprise of all surprises, he is directed to a page announcing:

"On 19 Feruary, 2 pm, at the Lynce Hotel, Ponta Delgada, there will be a colloquium on Energy Efficiency that will address the following themes: “LED Public Lighting”, discussed by Engineer David Marques of EnergiaViva/UrbanLEd, and “Integration of Renewable Sources of Energy in Electric Grids”, discussed by Engineer Luís Seca of INESC Porto and IEP. We will also present the first Azorean brand of solar thermal systems”.

Well, wasn’t he glad to have been informed…

Luís Seca is a cool kind of guy. Who needs formal and detailed invitations when there’s Facebook? He then, calmly waited for the universe to take him to his destination. Fortune favours the bold and, almost inevitably, two days later, he receives the vouchers for the plane ticket and for the hotel he was going to stay in. Officially, he didn’t know any other details – but do you think he didn’t take advantage of the opportunity?

Luís Seca is cool, but he takes precautions. That’s why we can say that, while inside the plane, it occurred to him that he could probably use his mobile phone to contact his eager boss Peças Lopes and, in an enlightened moment, try to figure out what would be the best material to present at the event: PowerPoint slides made in aeroplane, the usual technology.

At 9.30 pm, he arrives at the airport of Ponta Delgada. Luís Seca is cool but he has one addiction (no worth mentioning the others): he needs his cigarette after being stopped from smoking for several hours. Nothing better than grabbing the inevitable cylinder, and drawing some smoke while waiting for the taxi: there is no one in sight – and no one arriving. Finally, after half an hour, a distraction: a car passes by. Someone waves with familiarity... Who can that be? He looks closer: lo and behold, it’s the same face who added him as a friend on Facebook, Person X!

Cigarrettes and no taxi, all was combined. Go figure, they came to take him for dinner! Luís Seca is a kind of a cool guy and he tucked his meal in his comforted stomach, the one thing he brought with certainty back from the Azores. The lecture went well, and everything else had no setbacks, but we’re sure that the feeling that Mr. Magoo being is far more than a character of fiction  probably still haunts him today.