Uma ferramenta de autoavaliação científica que muitos investigadores ainda não usam

 

Agora que vários concursos para lugares de professor catedrático começaram a exigir valores mínimos de h-index na plataforma Scopus, como há tempos dei conta aqui https://pachecotorgal.com/2023/08/05/mais-um-concurso-para-um-lugar-de-professor-catedratico-que-exige-um-h-index-minimo-igual-ou-superior-a-15-2/ aproveito agora para divulgar uma forma simples de estimar a previsão de crescimento do h-index Scopus.

Depois de aceder ao perfil do investigador na plataforma Scopus:

1.º Clique em “Search results format”.

2.º Clique em “Citation overview”.

3.º Não selecione a opção predefinida “All documents on this page”; escolha a segunda opção.

4.º Clique no ícone “Export” para gerar um ficheiro em formato CSV.

5.º Faça o upload do referido ficheiro para um modelo de IA e solicite uma análise da evolução anual das citações dos seus artigos, identificando quais os trabalhos que continuam a ganhar impacto, quais os que parecem ter estabilizado e de que forma essa dinâmica poderá influenciar a previsão futura de crescimento do h-index Scopus.

Esta estimativa não deve ser vista apenas como um exercício prospetivo, mas também como uma ferramenta útil de autoavaliação científica. Ao analisar a evolução das citações dos seus artigos, cada investigador pode perceber se a sua produção científica se encontra numa trajetória sustentada de crescimento em termos de impacto, ou se, pelo contrário, começou a revelar sinais de estagnação. Essa informação pode ajudar a ajustar estratégias de publicação, colaboração e até a selecionar temas de investigação mais competitivos.

Recordo que, há cinco anos, divulguei no meu primeiro blogue um estudo realizado por investigadores Alemães, com base numa amostra de mais de mil professores daquele país, que revelou que quase 40% não sabiam como se calculava o h-index ou julgavam sabê-lo, mas falharam um teste básico sobre o seu cálculo. Segundo os autores desse artigo, este resultado revelava um paradoxo significativo, pois uma métrica capaz de influenciar carreiras académicas, reputações científicas e processos de avaliação continuava a ser mal compreendida por uma parte considerável da comunidade académica alemã. https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/04/university-of-dusseldorfdo-researchers.html

PS - Para o meu caso concreto, a previsão estimou um h-index Scopus de 68 em 2030 num cenário otimista e de 65 num cenário conservador. Por uma questão de prudência, decidi registar no meu perfil ORCID uma estimativa inferior: 63.  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7767-6787

On Europe’s catastrophic collapse, managed with excellence all the way to disaster

https://19-paheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2026/06/europes-cooling-emergency-preventing.html

On 6 June, in the post linked above, I wrote that Europe was beginning to draw a cruel new shadow line across its cities: between those who can buy their way into cooled interiors and those forced to endure the street, the workplace, the bus stop, the school, the hospital corridor and the overheated flat. Less than three weeks later, that warning already looks almost too mild.

What Europe is now experiencing is not simply another heatwave. It is the exposure of a profound political failure. Governments have spent years producing adaptation strategies, resilience plans, climate-neutral slogans and urban-transition documents, while millions still live, work and study in buildings dangerously unprepared for extreme heat. This is not an accident. It is the predictable result of treating overheating as a secondary problem until it becomes a public-health emergency.

The new heatwave sweeping across Europe has broken records, closed schools, disrupted transport, strained hospitals and pushed vulnerable people into danger. But the most damning sign is now even clearer: extreme heat is shutting down power plants. Nuclear reactors that rely on river water for cooling have had to reduce output because rivers are becoming too warm. Electricity demand rises precisely when the power system becomes more fragile. https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/24/1139676/europe-heat-power-plants/

Nor is this only an energy problem. Across England, hospitals have declared critical incidents as radiotherapy machines, MRI scanners, IT systems and entire cooling units failed under extreme heat. Treatments were delayed, diagnostics stalled, and the machinery on which modern medicine depends was defeated by conditions that policymakers knew were coming. This is not an unfortunate technical malfunction. It is the consequence of running essential public infrastructure with too little resilience, too little investment and too much political complacency.  https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/25/hospitals-nhs-england-critical-incidents-machines-it-fail-extreme-heat

Europe is discovering, in real time, that it cannot simply air-condition its way out of climate failure. The hotter it gets, the more cooling people need; the more cooling people need, the more pressure falls on energy and hospital systems already destabilised by heat. This is the vicious circle now becoming visible: extreme heat increases the demand for protection while weakening the very systems meant to provide it. Europe’s climate failure is no longer only environmental or social. It is becoming systemic and increasingly politically explosive.

PS - I had already warned in March 2022 about new physiological evidence published in the Journal of Applied Physiology that weakened one of the last comforting assumptions about human survival under extreme heat: the humid-heat limit may be closer to 31 ºC wet-bulb, not 35 ºC, even for healthy young people. For the elderly, the sick and the poor, the margin is smaller still. No wonder Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert had already written in 2019: “With regard to the climate crisis, yes, it’s time to panic.” https://pachecotorgal.com/2022/03/27/a-climatic-hell-in-the-making-and-a-study-that-reduces-the-chances-of-survival-of-a-healthy-human-being/ 

U.Minho: 5 dúvidas e uma omissão reitoral

https://www.publico.pt/2026/06/24/opiniao/opiniao/campus-europeu-reinvencao-universidades-2179190 

Sobre o artigo artigo acessível no link supra, do Engenheiro Pedro Arezes, Reitor da Universidade do Minho, faz sentido perguntar:

Se o grave problema na academia europeia é haver menos jovens na Europa, como é que pôr os mesmos jovens a circular entre universidades europeias resolve a grave escassez demográfica que o artigo diagnostica?

Será que o artigo propõe realmente uma solução para o sistema universitário europeu ou na verdade propõe apenas uma vantagem competitiva para as universidades do Norte da Europa ?

Não é plausível que a mobilidade europeia, em vez de reforçar a coesão territorial, possa pelo contrário acelerar a concentração de estudantes nas universidades europeias mais competitivas como foi referido aqui para o caso concreto dos investigadores?

Afinal, quando leões convidam ovelhas para uma “aliança estratégica”, convém tratar a palavra “estratégica” com prudência, quase sempre a estratégia pertence aos leões e ás ovelhas fica reservado um mero papel sacrificial.

Se a própria crise resulta da falta de jovens europeus, que sentido faz colocar no centro da solução a circulação interna dos mesmos jovens, e não a atração dos estudantes talentosos que a Europa ainda não consegue captar?

Ou será que a Europa já deitou a toalha ao chão e já assumiu que é absolutamente incapaz de competir com os EUA na atracção de talento a nível mundial e já nem sequer consegue impedir o seu próprio talento de fugir para os EUA como foi referido aqui ? 

E isto precisamente num momento em que o errático, destrutivo e racista mandato de Trump ofereceu à Europa a melhor oportunidade de uma geração para disputar aos EUA os estudantes mais talentosos do planeta. Uma oportunidade que nem sequer exige uma Europa genial, basta uma Europa menos resignada, menos burocrática e com um mínimo de ambição estratégica.

Recordo que ontem mesmo se ficou a saber que as bolsas milionárias ERC Advanced Grants mais do que duplicaram a atração de cientistas de topo de fora da Europa: nove vêm dos EUA, dois do Canadá e dois da Austrália. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/sharp-rise-erc-advanced-grant-applications-outside-europe 

A lição é por isso fácil de perceber, quando a Europa põe dinheiro a sério, prestígio científico e condições reais em cima da mesa, o talento vem. Quando porém oferece apenas discursos sobre mobilidade interna, limita-se a pôr a escassez a circular. O problema, portanto, não é apenas fazer circular os mesmos jovens europeus entre as muitas universidades europeias. É atrair os jovens talentosos que ainda cá não estão.  E essa diferença entre redistribuir a escassez europeia, sem criar um único estudante e conseguir captar talento a nível mundial é a omissão mais evidente do artigo do Reitor da UMinho.

Revisitar uma culpa que ninguém quer atribuir na gravíssima crise da habitação

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2025/07/uma-das-grandes-culpadas-pela-crise-da.html

No dia 20 de julho de 2025, publiquei neste blogue um post de título “Uma das grandes culpadas pela crise da habitação de que curiosamente ninguém fala”, onde defendi uma ideia incómoda mas inegável: a crise da habitação em Portugal não se explica apenas pela especulação, pela burocracia ou pela falta de políticas públicas. Também passa pela enorme incapacidade de modernização de uma parte significativa das empresas de construção.

Nesse post, lembrei o contraste gritante com aquilo que nessa área ocorre na China, onde a construção industrializada permite erguer edifícios de vários andares em poucos dias. É precisamente nessa sequência que divulgo abaixo a estrutura de um livro que estou a editar com alguns catedráticos chineses, que será publicado pela prestigiada editora Elsevier. 

Este livro analisa os avanços recentes na habitação prefabricada, destacando o papel da inovação digital, da sustentabilidade e da industrialização na transformação da construção residencial. O livro começa por abordar os materiais circulares e de base biológica. Em seguida, explora diferentes sistemas e estratégias de habitação prefabricada, desde soluções em betão modular, aço, impressão 3D, e edifícios de energia positiva. A parte final centra-se em ferramentas digitais, passaportes de materiais, avaliação de carbono incorporado, análise multicritério, e a utilização da inteligência artificial explicável para otimizar o desempenho ambiental, económico e técnico da construção prefabricada.

Ch. 1 – Introduction to Advances in Prefabricated Housing: Digital Innovation, Sustainability, and the Future of Residential Construction

SECTION I — Circular and Bio-Based Material Systems for Prefabricated Construction

Ch. 2 – Bio-Based Materials for Industrialised Construction: Hemp, Straw, Cork and Natural Fibres

Ch. 3 – Mycelium-Based Composites in Prefabricated and Modular Construction: Performance, Applications, and Adoption Barriers

Ch. 4 – Recycled and Waste-Derived Materials in Prefabricated Construction: Performance, Durability, and Circularity Pathways

Ch. 5 – Circular Reuse of Demolished Concrete Components in Prefabricated Construction: Life-Cycle Assessment and Engineering Practice

Ch. 6 – Implementation of Circular Economy Principles in Modular Construction

Ch. 7 – Assessing Building Deconstruction Potential Through a Disassembly Ease Index for Circular Construction

---

SECTION II — Prefabricated Housing Systems, Design Strategies and Implementation Pathways

Ch. 8 – Design Strategies for Modular Prefabricated Concrete Housing: Integrating Flexibility, Thermal Comfort, and Sustainability

Ch. 9 – Engineering and Economic Feasibility of a Prefabricated Steel Construction Ecosystem for Low-Rise Residential Buildings

Ch. 10 – Techno-Economic Feasibility of Modular 3D-Printed Detached Housing

Ch. 11 – Residential Shipping Container Buildings: Structural Modifications and Carbon Footprint Analysis

Ch. 12 – Designing Modular Positive Energy Residential Buildings for Semi-Arid Climates: Integration of Active and Passive Solar Strategies

Ch. 13 – Toward Sustainable Housing in Developing Countries

Ch. 14 – Identifying and Prioritizing Barriers to Modular Construction in Affordable Housing

---

SECTION III — Digital Tools, Carbon Assessment and AI-Enabled Optimisation

Ch. 15 – Circular Material Passports for Prefabricated and Modular Construction: Digital Enablers, Implementation Barriers, and Future Research Priorities

Ch. 16 – Embodied Carbon in Prefabricated Buildings

Ch. 17 – Multicriteria Analysis and Machine Learning-Based Prediction of Prefabricated Construction Performance

Ch. 18 – Component-Scale Carbon Assessment and Optimization of Prefabricated Concrete Supply Chains Using Machine Learning and Explainable AI

The 52.7% Problem: Why the AI Scientist Still Cannot Be Trusted with Evidence

 

A new paper, Benchmarking LLM Agents on Meta-Analysis Articles from Nature Portfolio, quietly punctures, rather painfully, one of the most seductive illusions of the AI age: that fluent machines are already competent scientific readers. When asked to perform one of science’s most consequential tasks, selecting the correct studies for a meta-analysis, they remain alarmingly unreliable.

The authors built MetaSyn 442 expert-curated reviews from Nature Portfolio, paired with eligibility criteria, a corpus of ~140,000 PubMed articles, the verified correct studies, and deliberate look-alikes that seem right but break the rules. The result: even with a retrieval ceiling of 90.9%, no system recovered more than 52.7% of the studies that actually belonged. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17041

Science is not about finding relevant-sounding papers; it is about separating the relevant from the merely adjacent. Two studies can share the same disease, the same intervention, the same vocabulary and only one belongs. AI is excellent at producing the appearance of understanding, and far weaker at the disciplined exclusions on which reliability depends. A missed study is not just a missing citation  it can be a missing warning. A wrongly included one can distort an effect size, manufacture false consensus, or become the wrong guideline, the wrong standard, the wrong public decision, masquerading as reliable synthesis.

Figure 6 is the humiliation hidden behind the benchmark. The problem is not only that AI misses studies or includes the wrong ones. The four systems read the same 88 reviews and answer in four incompatible ways: scientific pretence. Even GPT-5, with its polished structure and more convincing tone, still collapses under judgement and cannot make evidence synthesis trustworthy. ProtoMA retreats into “mixed” conclusions in more than 80% of cases; DeepSeek-R1 fails to produce a clear directional conclusion in 80% of the test papers.

This should worry us, because academia already rewards the appearance of productivity over the slow dignity of judgement. Universities, publishers, and funders all want more output, faster. Into that system walks generative AI, offering to accelerate everything, as if acceleration were automatically a virtue. But accelerate what? Evidence synthesis is not boring clerical work to be automated away  it is the intellectual immune system of science, the process by which we decide what counts and why. The danger is not an AI that knows nothing; it is one that knows enough to be persuasive but not enough to be trustworthy.

ENAAC 2030, as superficialidades do costume e a engenharia civil no seu labirinto

Em face do conteúdo dos emails infra, é evidente que interessa-me particularmente o conceito de climate proofing, inserido na Estratégia Nacional de Adaptação às Alterações Climáticas 2030 (ENAAC 2030) que foi ontem aprovada pelo Governo. Infelizmente, o que ali se encontra é de uma pobreza intelectual confrangedora: fala-se em incorporar critérios, mas não se nomeia um único, conseguindo-se pelo contrário a proeza de maximizar o nível de superficialidade do texto.

Que o Governo, e os seus muitos assessores, percebam pouco de engenharia civil não é propriamente surpreendente. Recordo, aliás, que o Governo de António Costa teve a brilhante ideia de mandar constituir um Conselho Nacional de Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação onde até havia, por exemplo, um especialista em ciências políticas, mas onde não havia um único engenheiro civil. E, de forma improvável, vários anos depois, o Governo de Luís Montenegro conseguiu através do Despacho n.º 12699/2024, de 24 de outubro, repetir exatamente o mesmo ignorante erro, quase como se essa área científica não fosse minimamente relevante. 

O que é, porém, mais grave é que os engenheiros civis atualmente existentes no mercado também não tiveram uma formação que os capacite verdadeiramente para projectarem o tal climate proofing. Isso ficou aliás bem demonstrado numa entrevista pouco inspirada ao Expresso, no passado mês de fevereiro, em que um antigo Bastonário da Ordem dos Engenheiros, diplomado na longínqua década de 70, deu a entender que bastaria aumentar a velocidade de projeto da acção vento para acautelar a segurança das construções face ao agravamento da ocorrência dessa acção por conta das alterações climáticas. https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2026/02/engenharia-civil-em-portugal-azar-dos.html

Para piorar a situação, uma análise aos planos curriculares dos cursos de Engenharia Civil do IST, da Universidade do Porto e da U.NOVA mostra que os engenheiros civis que estão atualmente a ser formados também ainda não dispõem de uma preparação robusta nesta área. Aliás, como recordei há vários meses, se em pleno ano de 2026 ainda há investigadores que necessitam de lembrar o óbvio ululante: "In a century shaped by climate disruption, resource scarcity, and cascading hazards, structural safety can no longer be confined to the binary question of collapse under a rare event....The profession must adopt a new design ethos: one that values performance over prescription, flexibility over excess, and resilience over redundancy...To meet this moment, engineering education, professional standards, and institutional missions must adapt. Future (civil) engineers must be trained not just in mechanics but in climate science...and sustainable design thinking. Codes and contracts must reward recovery capacity and carbon efficiency, not just compliance...."  Isso significa que falta ainda muito para que essa mensagem passe efectivamente à prática e falta ainda mais para que comecem a ser formados diplomados em Engenharia Civil segundo esta nova filosofia.

Em suma, o problema não está apenas na ligeireza conceptual da ENAAC 2030; está no vazio técnico, académico e institucional que ela expõe. Invoca-se o climate proofing como se a importação de uma expressão em inglês bastasse para produzir competência. Mas adaptar infraestruturas às alterações climáticas não se faz com vacuidades ministeriais: exige formação especializada, critérios quantificados, normas atualizadas, e modelos capazes de incorporar a incerteza climática futura.

_________________________________________________________________________

De: F. Pacheco Torgal 
Enviado: 10 de junho de 2026 13:21
Assunto: A febre da adaptação do ambiente construído às alterações climáticas

 

O facto de o livro mencionado no email infra, para o qual comecei agora a convidar os responsáveis pelos capítulos, ter sido, entre os muitos que editei, o único cuja segunda edição a Elsevier me solicitou apenas 3 (três) anos após a publicação da primeira quando, por regra, tal só acontece ao fim de 5 (cinco anos) deverá certamente querer dizer alguma coisa. Talvez seja febre

Cumprimentos

Pacheco Torgal

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7767-6787

__________________________________________________________________________

De: Deschamps, Bernard
Enviado: 9 de junho de 2026 14:34
Para: F. Pacheco Torgal 
Assunto: Re: Invitation to contribute chapter nº19 to second the edition of Elsevier book- Adapting the Built Environment for Climate Change

 

Dear Pacheco-Torgal,

 

Thank you for your interest in my work. Yes, I would be interested in contributing by delivering the Chapter 19. Let me know what the next step would be.

 

Bernard Deschamps

Sciences de l’environnement

UQAM

De : "F. Pacheco Torgal" 
Date : mardi 9 juin 2026 à 06:22
À : Bernard Deschamps 
Objet : Invitation to contribute chapter nº19 to second the edition of Elsevier book- Adapting the Built Environment for Climate Change

 

Dear Colleague,

 

I am currently co-editing a second edition of the Scopus indexed book "Adapting the Built Environment for Climate Change." https://shop.elsevier.com/books/adapting-the-built-environment-for-climate-change/pacheco-torgal/978-0-323-95336-8 

 

The table of contents, consisting of 22 chapters, is provided below. In this context, I would like to inquire whether you would be interested in delivering Chapter Nº 19. The deadline for submitting the first draft is 31 of December of 2026.

Each chapter must contain a minimum of 5,000 words, excluding references. 

Best regards

Pacheco Torgal

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7767-6787

The $1.5 Billion Fairy Tale: Why Swapping the Grant for "X-Labs" Will Feed Serfdom

 

A well-known researcher whom I cited in a paper I submitted last month to Accountability in Research has now published an interesting article in Science. He accepts that research grants are bureaucratic, conservative and wasteful of scientists’ time, but warns against seductively romanticising the “X-Labs” now being promoted as their replacement. His central point is that block-funded institutes do not abolish bureaucracy; they risk creating new hierarchies, entrenched rigidities and unaccountable concentrations of institutional power and patronage. Grants, for all their defects, still preserve something essential: scientific mobility, intellectual independence, multiple routes to funding and the graduate education system on which future science depends. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aej2947?

The occasion is not a minor one. The US National Science Foundation has just committed a strategic $1.5 billion over a decade to these independent, milestone-driven institutes — organisations designed to bypass not only the traditional grant system, but also, more unsettlingly, the universities that remain the institutional engine of almost all the country’s basic science.

For my part, I would like to recall my own posts from 2023, because I have already walked the other side of this argument, and I am not about to pretend otherwise.In The Economist’s “The World Ahead 2024” — what constitutes the most efficient method for financing scientific endeavours? I argued that any honest discussion had to begin with the cost of the existing system. That cost is not merely financial. That post opened with the great unspoken scandal of the grant system: the sheer amount of human life it consumes. Australian researchers, in a single year, collectively spent an astonishing 614 years writing grant applications.

The post then examined the alternatives. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, founded in 1953, stands apart precisely because it funds researchers, not projects — generously, for seven years or more — and then largely leaves them alone. The result? Nearly twice as many highly cited articles as the standard funding model, and a record that includes more than thirty Nobel prizes. The success was so difficult to ignore that it helped inspire, in 2021, the creation of a new research institute at Stanford — the Arc Institute — built on a similar principle.

So should I now applaud the National Science Foundation for finally seeing the light and writing a $1.5 billion cheque to the "fund people, not projects" ? I should not — and here is the distinction the reformers are careful never to draw. What made Howard Hughes work was never that it was an institute. It was that it was a private foundation that selected ruthlessly for excellence, held its people to account, and retained the courage to let them go. A state-run X-Lab, handed to the very incumbents who built the present bureaucracy, will do the precise opposite. Block funding does not abolish bureaucracy it shelters it. It is the institutional cousin of that obscene rubber stamp in my own country: a country whose last scientific Nobel Prize dates back more than 70 years, but where the machinery of self-congratulation has somehow discovered that  75% of research units were classified as "Excellent or Very Good" !!! 

This is why the author I cited is right, though for a reason he barely dares to state plainly: the grant’s one redeeming virtue is that it follows the scientist. A researcher trapped under a feudal director can still walk out and take the money with them. That portability — not block funding, not institutional palaces, not another taxpayer-financed grotesque sanctuary for incumbents — is the only serious antidote to academic serfdom academia has ever devised.

O recorde mundial de mais de 10 anos da Universidade de Harvard acaba de ser batido por uma universidade Chinesa

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-day-harvard-lost-first-place-and.html

No post acessível no link supra, comentei para os meus leitores estrangeiros — em especial os dos EUA e da Alemanha, que nos últimos tempos têm sido os que mais visitam o meu blogue — que a famosa universidade de Harvard, por muitos anos ídolo científico do Ocidente e símbolo máximo da sua autoconfiança académica, acaba de perder o primeiro lugar do Nature Index 2026 para a Zhejiang University. O prestígio acumulado não publica artigos, não cria massa crítica nem garante liderança nenhuma; apenas anestesia quem prefere viver da reputação passada em vez de olhar para os números do presente.

Recordo que não foi certamente por acaso que, desde 2021, venho defendendo a necessidade de uma colaboração estratégica muito mais intensa entre as universidades portuguesas e as universidades chinesas. No texto abaixo, identifiquei frontalmente as instituições nacionais que mais cedo perceberam a importância dessas parcerias — e, por contraste, aquelas que, por crassa ignorância ou grossa incompetência, continuaram presas a colaborações com países irremediavelmente pouco ou mesmo nada competitivos. https://pachecotorgal.com/2023/07/29/colaboracoes-internacionais-das-instituicoes-de-ensino-superior__negligencia-ou-incompetencia/

Há dois anos, a minha percentagem de publicações, na conhecida base de literatura científica indexada Scopus, em coautoria com investigadores chineses era de 17%. Entretanto, subiu para 19%. Não se trata de um mero detalhe estatístico: é um indicador de alinhamento com uma transformação profunda da ciência mundial. E é uma percentagem muito superior à de vários investigadores portugueses altamente citados, que continuam, por conta de uma inexplicável miopia estratégica, a aproveitar de forma manifestamente insuficiente a extraordinária ascensão científica da China. https://pachecotorgal.com/2024/12/08/estarao-os-investigadores-mais-citados-de-portugal-a-aproveitar-devidamente-a-notavel-ascensao-da-ciencia-chinesa/

Harvard University Falls from First Place for the First Time in More Than a Decade

 

For the first time in more than a decade, Harvard University is no longer the world’s leading university for high-quality research output, according to one influential index. In the Nature Index 2026 Research Leaders rankings, first place among universities now belongs to Zhejiang University. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3356931/chinas-zhejiang-university-tops-harvard-nature-index-world-academic-rankings

This is not a routine reshuffling of a league table. It is another sign that the symbolic geography of global science is being redrawn. Harvard remains an extraordinary institution — that is not in question. The real question is what a ranking like this actually measures. Pure scientific excellence? Or scale, state strategy, institutional concentration, funding power and the capacity to transform thousands of researchers into visible, countable, indexed output?

This is not the first warning. In an earlier post, The Decline of the Great American Research University, I argued that China’s rise should be taken seriously without being romanticised. It reflects strategic investment, institutional scale and aggressive talent attraction, but also a system still burdened by research-integrity problems and real limits to deep, original creativity. That is exactly why Harvard’s fall is so revealing: not because China has solved the problem of scientific excellence, but because the West has spent too long pretending that inherited prestige could substitute for strategy.

Scientific leadership is not inherited like an aristocratic title; it is built — won by those who invest, plan, protect talent, concentrate resources, and create systems capable of producing knowledge at scale. For decades the West admired its reflection in rankings it largely designed, assuming the world would stay permanently cast as supplier, imitator, or junior partner from a permanently subordinate position. That comfort is now becoming expensive. 

The myth that weakened this week is not that the West still does great science — of course it does — but that it would always do the best science simply because it once did. That is not confidence; it is intellectual laziness dressed as civilisation, marketed as historical inevitability. Real decline begins there: defending superiority with memories, slogans, and institutional nostalgia while others build their future with laboratories, researchers, funding, and policy. Prestige can perfume decay with ceremony for a while. It cannot stop the rot.

Declaration of competing interests - I am an editorial board member of the Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE A Applied Physics & Engineering 

PS — Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness now reads less like a policy document and more like an early autopsy warning written before the funeral. https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2024/12/where-is-courage-ercs-maria-leptin.html

A TU Munich Study Shows German Smart Cities Are Smarter on Paper Than in Practice

 

A recent study in npj Urban Sustainability analysed 61 smart city strategy documents from major German cities against 30 criteria for sustainable-digital transformation, sorting them into front-runners, middle range, and laggards. The result should make urban technocrats rather mercilessly uncomfortable: everyone has learned to say “sustainability”; far fewer have learned to build it into strategy. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-026-00418-w

What separates the front-runners is not the digital vocabulary, the dashboards, or the ritual invocation of sensors that consultants bill by the hour. It is governance: alignment with supra-regional policy frameworks, citizen participation that is institutionalized rather than decorative, and impact measurement built into the strategy itself — so that when promises fail, the failure has an address before the next press release, not just another invoice in disguise.

The most revealing finding lies in the regression analysis. Population size? Not significant. Economic development? Not significant. Political composition of the city council? Not significant. The only factor positively associated with an integrated strategy was participation in the smart city funding programme — external money arriving with conditions and reporting obligations. Cities did not do better because they were big, rich or governed by the “right” party. They did better when someone upstream forced them to think before they spent.

Yes, the study scores documents, not outcomes. That makes the result worse, not better: these are the cities’ self-portraits, written with every incentive to flatter, and many still could not fake coherence. A city does not become smart by collecting data, any more than a university becomes excellent by collecting rankings. It becomes smarter when digitalization is forced to serve social justice, ecological responsibility and democratic accountability. Strip that away, and the “smart city” is the most expensive euphemism urban marketing invented.

P.S. - But perhaps Germany is not the scandal here. Perhaps Germany is the warning. If this happens with a national Smart City Charter, federal funding and a reputation for administrative seriousness, imagine what the same audit — if anyone dared to run it — would find where "smart city" is just a password for EU money — and no one checks the work.

A Universidade que premeia quem sempre se cala e castiga quem ainda ousa pensar

Depois de dois posts anteriores com títulos tão pouco equívocos como um publicado no dia 25 de Maio, “A quem interessa fabricar uma Academia que ladra baixinho e nunca morde?”, que se tornou o 5.º mais visualizado nos últimos trinta dias, ou um outro, publicado no dia 29 de Maio, que conseguiu tornar-se muito rapidamente o 2.º mais visualizado no mesmo período, sobre “A extraordinária falta de vergonha de uma conhecida universidade pública”, é quase reconfortante porém nada surpreendente ler, na primeira semana de Junho, um artigo da revista Sábado intitulado “O medo na academia, o espelho do país”.

O autor escreve sobre uma academia asfixiante, onde a crítica deixou de ser entendida como dever intelectual e passou a ser tratada como delito disciplinar informal. Um espaço onde quem ousa discordar arrisca isolamento, o silêncio administrativo, a exclusão de redes, o bloqueio de oportunidades e outras formas higiénicas de punição institucional, discreta, eficaz, cobarde, rotineira, silenciosa e exemplar que raramente deixam impressões digitais.

Mas o ponto mais inquietante suscitado pelo artigo é outro: este medo não fica fechado dentro das universidades. Transborda para a sociedade. Quando os académicos se calam por receio de represálias, os cidadãos percebem que até aqueles que deveriam pensar livremente aprenderam a falar em voz baixa. E quando a inteligência pública se ajoelha diante do medo disciplinador, a confiança nas instituições não pode senão apodrecer.

Não admira por isso que numa lista dos países cujos cidadãos mais confiam nas instituições públicas, Portugal nem sequer consegue aparecer entre os 20 primeiros colocados. Afinal, que confiança merecem as instituições públicas se até a academia que devia vigiá-las e expor os seus abusos se domesticou ao ponto de transformar a autocensura em método, o silêncio em carreira e a cobardia em prudência institucional, respeitável e conveniente?

PS - É curioso, ou talvez apenas deprimente, ver como o tema não envelhece. Há cinco anos questionei: "Como pode a Universidade interpelar a sociedade se os próprios professores têm medo de falar?". Cinco anos depois, a pergunta morreu de excesso de evidência. O medo deixou de ser sintoma para ser regime. A liberdade académica continua lá, claro — embalsamada com todas as honras, nos regulamentos, nos discursos solenes, e nas cerimónias oficiais. Existe onde não incomoda. Onde seria necessária, faz-se cadáver.

Climate Apartheid and the Cruel Shadow Line of Segregation Across European Cities

https://shop.elsevier.com/books/eco-efficient-materials-for-reducing-cooling-needs-in-buildings-and-construction/pacheco-torgal/978-0-12-820791-8

As my colleagues and I prepare the new edition of Eco-efficient Materials for Reducing Cooling Needs in Buildings and Construction (linked above), the heat dome that suffocated Europe in late May 2026 made clear: cooling can no longer be dismissed as a footnote to the climate crisis. It is becoming a precondition for survival, dignity, social equality and ordinary urban life in increasingly overheated cities. Portugal registered a May temperature record of 40.3 °C in Mora, while France endured its hottest May day ever recorded — midsummer arriving weeks too early on a continent warming more than twice as fast as the global average.

A recent study reveals what this overheating actually does to urban life across different social groups. Writing in PNAS Nexus, researchers analysed mobile-phone mobility data covering 13 million people, providing an unusually large-scale picture of how extreme heat alters everyday movement and activity. They found that mobility falls by up to 10% on hot days and by as much as 20% on hot afternoons, precisely when exposure becomes most dangerous and the need for effective cooling becomes most urgent.https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/5/4/pgag078/8651395

Predictably, the burden is not shared equally. Older adults retreat most sharply from daily life, while lower-income people remain more exposed because avoiding work is a privilege they cannot afford. Social mixing declines and activity drains from city centres. Extreme heat does not merely raise electricity bills or mortality figures; it quietly turns cities into places where normal life becomes increasingly reserved for those with the resources to escape indoors.

The conclusion should now be impossible to avoid: cooling is no longer a matter of comfort, architectural refinement or reduced energy consumption. It is about whether people can still work, move, meet and inhabit their cities as Europe rapidly, relentlessly and dangerously overheats — and whether the poorest will once again be forced to pay the highest price. Eco-efficient cooling materials are no longer a niche energy-saving solution. They are part of the basic infrastructure required to prevent liveable cities from becoming a climatic privilege.

PS - The brutal truth behind all this is simple: when a city begins to divide between those who can buy their way into cooled interiors and those condemned to endure the street, the bus stop, the workplace and the overheated flat, we are no longer merely describing a heatwave. We are watching segregation being modernised quietly, brutally, and in plain sight — drawn no longer on maps, but on overheated bodies and homes, in poverty-weighted degrees Celsius.

Europe’s Humiliating Exodus: How Rigged Excellence Betrays Its Peripheral Talent

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-humiliating-lie-behind-europes.html

In the previous post, linked above, I argued that Europe’s technological humiliation is not the result of insufficient talent, but of its refusal to give talent the power to matter. The continent trains exceptional researchers, deprives them of the compute, capital and scale needed to compete, and then acts surprised when the United States absorbs them. But emigration is only the end of the betrayal. Long before Europe loses researchers across the Atlantic, it abandons many at home — by reserving the laboratories, networks, investment and institutional advantages that make innovation possible for regions rich enough to possess them.

A paper just published in Higher Education makes the pattern unusually clear. Examining direct university patenting across 2,886 institutions in 31 European countries and 295 regions between 2011 and 2019, it lands on precisely the kind of finding European policymakers adore: universities drawing a larger share of their revenue from competitive, third-party funding file more patents, and patents with greater citation impact, than those relying mainly on core public allocations. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-026-01687-1?

More competition, more entrepreneurship, more innovation: the familiar Brussels catechism. But the sermon collapses the moment one asks where this supposedly meritocratic machinery actually works. The relationship between third-party funding and university patenting is strongest in Europe’s richest regions, weaker in middle-income ones, and negligible in the poorest. In other words, the funding system does not level the field; it pours further advantage into the regions already equipped with laboratories, industrial partners, investors, networks and prestige. 

Europe calls it excellence. In practice, it is accumulated advantage receiving another instalment. The numbers expose the underlying obscenity. The concentration is not merely uncomfortable; it is grotesque. Universities in just five countries — Germany, the UK, France, Belgium and Switzerland — account for more than 70% of all direct patent application, while 73% of the universities examined filed no direct patents at all.

This is the missing half of Europe's talent story. The continent concentrates opportunity in a narrow core, leaves everyone else to compete in a game whose decisive assets were handed out long before the whistle, and then acts surprised when its most ambitious researchers — having found that even Europe's privileged core cannot match the scale on offer in California — leave the continent altogether. Talent flows uphill at every level: from the periphery to the core, and from the core to America.

The mechanism is brutally simple. Poorer regions are told to compete harder in a system whose laboratories, industrial partners, venture capital, reputations and grant-winning machinery are already concentrated among the winners. When the periphery predictably struggles, it is lectured about ambition and entrepreneurial culture. And the winners applaud. Europe has built one of its most elegant, deeply cynical and politically useful machines: a device for laundering inherited advantage through the vocabulary of merit. Historical concentration becomes competitive success. Institutional wealth becomes performance. Regional privilege becomes innovation policy. And geography, at last, is renamed excellence.

PS - My own country offers a revolting illustration of how Europe betrays its peripheral talent. Portugal uses scarce public money to train scientists such as Cristiana Pires, Fábio Rosa and Filipe Pereira — only for a system rigged in favour of Europe’s rich core where they can build an innovative cancer-biotech company worth tens of millions of euros. The poor periphery pays for the brains; the wealthy core captures the company, the investment, the qualified jobs and the wealth. Europe calls it scientific mobility. The honest name is organised extraction: rich countries becoming richer by absorbing the stolen future of poorer ones. 

Update after 1 day - Blogger analytics indicate that the majority of views for this post come from the USA (17%), Germany (16%), Finland (6%) and Sweden (5%).

Improváveis competências femininas num mundo cada vez mais dominado pela IA

 

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2024/08/agressividade-feminina-um-mundo.html

Na sequência do post anterior, dedicado à agressividade feminina, talvez seja agora de elementar justiça celebrar uma jovem mulher cuja força não se mede pela capacidade de agredir, como acontece com muitas outras, mas por uma invulgar capacidade de reconstruir.

Lin Guoer é uma jovem chinesa que pega num gerador diesel coberto de ferrugem e óleo, muitas vezes mais velho do que ela própria, desmonta-o até ao último parafuso, limpa-lhe as entranhas, rebobina-lhe o motor, remove-lhe a corrosão e devolve-o ao mundo a trabalhar como se a sucata tivesse acabado de receber uma segunda vida. https://www.youtube.com/@linguoermechanic

Depois de diplomada em Engenharia Hidráulica e Hidroeléctrica, Lin Guoer regressou à sua terra natal, onde se dedica a transformar máquinas abandonadas na matéria-prima de uma carreira improvável: a de influenciadora da mecânica. Motores diesel, bombas de água, geradores, motosserras, etc etc etc tudo aquilo que lhe chega às mãos enferrujado ou dado como morto reaparece nos seus vídeos desmontado, recuperado e novamente operacional.

A imprensa chinesa chama-lhe “Mulan da mecânica”, e a designação não é despropositada: perante redes sociais cada vez mais transformadas num monumento à vacuidade e à superficialidade, onde a maquilhagem, o consumo exibicionista e a exposição narcísica valem como substitutos de qualquer competência, Lin Guoer oferece algo radicalmente mais raro — competência técnica indiscutível. Cada vídeo revela paciência, destreza manual e a capacidade de devolver uma nova "vida" ao que outros rapidamente condenariam à sucata.

PS - A história de Lin Guoer tem ainda uma outra leitura. Num post de 27 de Maio de 2025 escrevi: "hoje mesmo o catedrático jubilado Robert Reich, ter defendido no seu blogue, que muitos dos empregos do futuro não necessitarão de uma formação de ensino superior". A isso soma-se ainda o facto do último número da revista The Economist revelar que a geração Z demonstra um interesse crescente por profissões técnicas e muito menos por formações académicas. https://www.economist.com/international/2025/12/18/ditch-textbooks-and-learn-how-to-use-a-wrench-to-ai-proof-your-job Durante décadas, o Ocidente desprezou quem sabia construir, soldar, reparar e dar uma nova vida a coisas velhas. A ironia cruel é que, num mundo cada vez mais saturado de diplomas, muitos deles que nem sequer valem um caracol, e crescentemente ameaçado pela inteligência artificial, recuperar um motor "morto" pode afinal valer muito mais do que muitas profissões consideradas superiores.

The Humiliating Lie Behind Europe’s Technological Decline: That It Lacks Talent

Every few months, Brussel produces another report explaining why Europe is falling behind in artificial intelligence, and every few months it reaches for the same comforting vocabulary: not enough talent, not enough graduates, not enough "ecosystem.". It is an elegant alibi because it avoids the humiliating truth. As a recent Bruegel analysis makes clear, Europe’s problem is not a shortage of brains or ideas. It is a shortage of compute and capital — the two things the continent has been unwilling to finance at the scale required.

Consider Mistral, the company Europe presents as proof that it still belongs in the AI race. Its flagship models were trained on Microsoft Azure. It opened an office in Palo Alto to attract Silicon Valley engineers and venture capital. Its attempt to build European sovereign compute has secured roughly €830 million for infrastructure and GPUs, barely a down payment in an industry now being shaped investment measured in hundreds, of billions. Europe’s AI champion still depends on American cloud power and still has to go to California to find the scale.  https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/europe-needs-strategy-close-artificial-intelligence-compute-gap

The broader record is more brutal. Mario Draghi’s 2024 competitiveness report noted that no EU company founded from scratch in the previous fifty years had reached a market capitalisation above €100 billion. Half a century without producing a new corporate giant of that scale. And the failure is no longer confined to start-ups or frontier models. In a previous post, I examined the disturbing weakness of Germany in AI publication intensity: Europe’s industrial powerhouse, the country wrapped in the mythology of engineering supremacy, was already being outperformed by Portugal and several much smaller economies. The industrial verdict is now even more humiliating. In 2025, the United States produced roughly forty large foundation models, China about fifteen, and the entire European Union around three. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/issue-brief/what-drives-the-divide-in-transatlantic-ai-strategy/

Then comes the figure that should bury the talent fairy tale: around 12% of EU artificial-intelligence PhDs relocate to the United States within five years. Europe trains the researchers, congratulates itself on the excellence of its universities, denies them the compute, capital and industrial scale needed to compete — and then watches them leave for the very ecosystem Europe claims it wants to rival. This is not simply a continent losing an AI race. It is a continent refusing to enter it on serious terms. Europe did not run out of talent. It starved talent of scale and exported it to its competitors. 

PS — In August 2024, I noted that the companies producing the most highly cited AI research and patents were concentrated in the United States and China, with Europe already humiliatingly absent. What then looked like a warning now reads as a continental autopsy report. https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-list-of-companies-that-are.html