Spectrophotometric evaluation of color changes of esthetic brackets stored in potentially staining solutions

The purpose of this study was to evaluate, in vitro, the chromatic behavior of esthetic brackets stored in potentially staining solutions. The sample were divided into four groups according to the commercial brand and stored in four different solutions (distilled water, cola soda, coffee and mouthrinse) at 37°C for 14 days. Possible color changes measured according to the CIE L*a*b* color system with a spectrophotometer at five intervals of time after storage. The statistical analysis was carried out using ANOVA to 1%, Tukey's tests and decomposition of interactions with a significance level of 5%.The color changes were dependent on the solution, storage time and the brand of brackets. The largest color changes were observed in the G3, followed by G2, G1/G4. The esthetic brackets do not present satisfactory and stable chromatic behavior.

A importância da gestão da comunicação e da informação nas empresas socialmente responsáveis

This paper studies the communication and information management in the perspective of corporate social responsibility. We assume that a company becomes socially responsible when it’s necessary implementing a communication and information policy able to align their business management processes to social responsibility policies, thus creating the necessary, fundamental synergy to their audiences. We raised the hypothesis that corporate social responsibility, in order to be incorporated on a business process management, necessarily involves a transformation in the form of information management and communication - understood as strategic skills which enable the generation of knowledge creation value and the acquisition of awareness of ethical conduct and company's corporate organizational culture as a mirror, reflected to its internal and external audiences. Therefore, this study was supported by a case study in a retail company in Bauru city, regarded as a socially responsible company. Thus, we proceeded to develop a descriptive-exploratory field research, by using the technique of structured interviews which were conducted with the most representative considered leaders of the company - management, store managers, responsible CSR department and advertising agency

Persuasão ou performance: as estratégias comunicacionais para transformar o rúgbi em paixão nacional

This paper analyzes the communication strategy of the Brazilian Rugby Confederation in the promotion of sport in the country, with three television campaigns developed since 2010 together with manufacturer Topper. One of the goals of the organization is to make the sport better known among the Brazilian public, with a view to inclusion of rugby in the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Very popular in countries colonized by Britain, the sport still has little visibility in the national sports scene, something to be transformed in organizational communication and advertising.

A mulher escrita: notas sobre a (in)visibilidade feminina no material didático do ensino médio de Língua Portuguesa e Literatura do estado de São Paulo

Pós-graduação em Educação - FCT

Do Students Progress if They Self-Assess? A Study in Small-Group Work

In this action research study of my classroom of 8th grade mathematics, I investigated the effects of self-assessment on student group work. Data was collected to see how self-assessment affected small-group work, usage of precise mathematical vocabulary, and student attitudes toward mathematics. Self-assessment allowed the students to periodically evaluate their own learning and their involvement in math class. I discovered that the vast majority of students enjoy working in small-groups, and they feel they are good group members. Evidence in regard to use of precise mathematical vocabulary showed an increased awareness in the importance of its usage. Student attitudes toward mathematics remained positive and unchanged throughout the research. As a result of this research, I plan to continue use of small-group work and selfassessment. I will continue emphasis on the inclusion of precise mathematical vocabulary as well as on training on cooperative learning strategies.

Atenção primária à saúde e a construção de sentidos para a saúde bucal: leitura construcionista social sobre discursos de idosos

Dentistry is nowadays open to new ideas about the constructions of meanings for oral health. This openness tallies with the social production of health and shows the need to contextualize the social, historical and sundry knowledge in the development of oral health for different communities. The scope of this research is to build meanings for oral health with a group of elderly people. With this in mind, we propose an approximation between the discourses of the elderly on oral health and the Social Constructionist discourse. Thus, we interviewed 14 elderly people registered with a Family Health Unit in Ribeirao Preto in the State of Sao Paulo in the first semester of 2010. This enabled us to identify two Interpretative Repertoires with the use of Discourse Analysis, which showed the relationship between: 1 Lack of dental information and assistance in childhood; and 2 - Primary Healthcare constructing meaning for oral health. We concluded that Social Constructionism assists epistemologically for the construction of meaning for oral health and that Primary Healthcare is essential for valuing healthcare for the construction of meaning for oral health on the part of the elderly by fostering conditions for self care and healthy attitudes.

Processo maturacional, insatisfação corporal e comportamento alimentar inadequado em jovens atletas

Objetivo O objetivo deste estudo foi analisar a associação entre o processo maturacional, a insatisfação corporal e o comportamento alimentar inadequado, de acordo com o sexo, em jovens atletas. Métodos Participaram da pesquisa 580 indivíduos, de ambos os sexos, pertencentes a diferentes modalidades esportivas. Foram avaliados a maturação sexual, a maturação somática, a insatisfação corporal e o comportamento alimentar inadequado, por meio dos Critérios de Tanner, banco de Lohman, Body Shape Questionnaire e Eating Attitudes Test, respectivamente. O percentual de gordura foi estimado pela medição das dobras cutâneas, e a aferição de peso e de estatura foi utilizada para calcular o índice de massa corporal. Realizaram-se modelo Univariado de Covariância, regressão logística binária e regressão linear múltipla para análise dos dados. Resultados Os resultados demonstraram diferenças estatisticamente significativas (p<0,05) na insatisfação corporal entre os estágios maturacionais. Além disso, os meninos pré-púberes e púberes apresentaram maior probabilidade de insatisfação corporal em relação aos atletas pós-púberes (p<0,05), e o modelo de regressão logística mostrou associação entre os estágios maturacionais e o comportamento alimentar inadequado apenas no sexo masculino (p<0,05). Nas meninas, o processo maturacional explicou em 9% e 7% a variância da insatisfação corporal (p<0,05) e comportamento alimentar inadequado (p<0,05), respectivamente.

Analysis of surface hardness of artificially aged resin composites

This study evaluated the effect of artificially accelerated aging (AAA) on the surface hardness of eight composite resins: Filtek Z250, Filtek Supreme, 4 Seasons, Herculite, P60, Tetric Ceram, Charisma, and Filtek Z100. Sixteen specimens were made from the test piece of each material, using an 8.0 × 2.0 mm teflon matrix. After 24 hours, eight specimens from each material were submitted to three surface hardness readings using a Shimadzu Microhardness Tester for 5 seconds at a load of 50 gf. The other eight specimens remained in the artificially accelerated aging machine for 382 hours and were submitted to the same surface hardness analysis. The means of each test specimen were submitted to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (p > 0.05), ANOVA and Tukey test (p < 0.05). With regard to hardness (F = 86.74, p < 0.0001) the analysis showed significant differences among the resin composite brands. But aging did not influence the hardness of any of the resin composites (F = 0.39, p = 0.53). In this study, there was interaction between the resin composite brand and the aging factors (F = 4.51, p < 0.0002). It was concluded that notwithstanding the type of resin, AAA did not influence surface hardness. However, with regard to hardness there was a significant difference among the resin brands.

Letteratura postmoderna e comunicazione pubblicitaria, problemi teorici e analisi testuali

Premise: In the literary works of our anthropological and cultural imagination, the various languages and the different discursive practices are not necessarily quoted, expressly alluded to or declared through clear expressive mechanisms; instead, they rather constitute a substratum, a background, now consolidated, which with irony and intertextuality shines through the thematic and formal elements of each text. The various contaminations, hybridizations and promptings that we find in the expressive forms, the rhetorical procedures and the linguistic and thematic choices of post-modern literary texts are shaped as fluid and familiar categories. Exchanges and passages are no longer only allowed but also inevitable; the post-modern imagination is made up of an agglomeration of discourses that are no longer really separable, built up from texts that blend and quote one another, composing, each with its own specificities, the great family of the cultural products of our social scenario. A literary work, therefore, is not only a whole phenomenon, delimited hic et nunc by a beginning and an ending, but is a fragment of that complex, dense and boundless network that is given by the continual interrelations between human forms of communication and symbolization. The research hypothesis: A vision is delineated of comparative literature as a discipline attentive to the social contexts in which texts take shape and move and to the media-type consistency that literary phenomena inevitably take on. Hence literature is seen as an open systematicity that chooses to be contaminated by other languages and other discursive practices of an imagination that is more than ever polymorphic and irregular. Inside this interpretative framework the aim is to focus the analysis on the relationship that postmodern literature establishes with advertising discourse. On one side post-modern literature is inserted in the world of communication, loudly asserting the blending and reciprocal contamination of literary modes with media ones, absorbing their languages and signification practices, translating them now into thematic nuclei, motifs and sub-motifs and now into formal expedients and new narrative choices; on the other side advertising is chosen as a signification practice of the media universe, which since the 1960s has actively contributed to shaping the dynamics of our socio-cultural scenarios, in terms which are just as important as those of other discursive practices. Advertising has always been a form of communication and symbolization that draws on the collective imagination – myths, actors and values – turning them into specific narrative programs for its own texts. Hence the aim is to interpret and analyze this relationship both from a strictly thematic perspective – and therefore trying to understand what literature speaks about when it speaks about advertising, and seeking advertising quotations in post-modern fiction – and from a formal perspective, with a search for parallels and discordances between the rhetorical procedures, the languages and the verifiable stylistic choices in the texts of the two different signification practices. The analysis method chosen, for the purpose of constructive multiplication of the perspectives, aims to approach the analytical processes of semiotics, applying, when possible, the instruments of the latter, in order to highlight the thematic and formal relationships between literature and advertising. The corpus: The corpus of the literary texts is made up of various novels and, although attention is focused on the post-modern period, there will also be ineludible quotations from essential authors that with their works prompted various reflections: H. De Balzac, Zola, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Calvino, etc… However, the analysis focuses the corpus on three authors: Don DeLillo, Martin Amis and Aldo Nove, and in particular the followings novels: “Americana” (1971) and “Underworld” (1999) by Don DeLillo, “Money” (1984) by Martin Amis and “Woobinda and other stories without a happy ending” (1996) and “Superwoobinda” (1998) by Aldo Nove. The corpus selection is restricted to these novels for two fundamental reasons: 1. assuming parameters of spatio-temporal evaluation, the texts are representative of different socio-cultural contexts and collective imaginations (from the masterly glimpses of American life by DeLillo, to the examples of contemporary Italian life by Nove, down to the English imagination of Amis) and of different historical moments (the 1970s of DeLillo’s Americana, the 1980s of Amis, down to the 1990s of Nove, decades often used as criteria of division of postmodernism into phases); 2. adopting a perspective of strictly thematic analysis, as mentioned in the research hypothesis, the variations and the constants in the novels (thematic nuclei, topoi, images and narrative developments) frequently speak of advertising and inside the narrative plot they affirm various expressions and realizations of it: value ones, thematic ones, textual ones, urban ones, etc… In these novels the themes and the processes of signification of advertising discourse pervade time, space and the relationships that the narrator character builds around him. We are looking at “particle-characters” whose endless facets attest the influence and contamination of advertising in a large part of the narrative developments of the plot: on everyday life, on the processes of acquisition and encoding of the reality, on ideological and cultural baggage, on the relationships and interchanges with the other characters, etc… Often the characters are victims of the implacable consequentiality of the advertising mechanism, since the latter gets the upper hand over the usual processes of communication, which are overwhelmed by it, wittingly or unwittingly (for example: disturbing openings in which the protagonist kills his or her parents on the basis of a spot, former advertisers that live life codifying it through the commercial mechanisms of products, sons and daughters of advertisers that as children instead of playing outside for whole nights saw tapes of spots.) Hence the analysis arises from the text and aims to show how much the developments and the narrative plots of the novels encode, elaborate and recount the myths, the values and the narrative programs of advertising discourse, transforming them into novel components in their own right. And also starting from the text a socio-cultural reference context is delineated, a collective imagination that is different, now geographically, now historically, and from comparison between them the aim is to deduce the constants, the similarities and the variations in the relationship between literature and advertising.

Teoria e prassi del product placement. Il caso dei film contemporanei per adolescenti (ITA/USA 2006-2010)

Through this research I have tried to demonstrate how the evolution of the newest marketing strategies - that work towards engaging relationships with consumers, thus building an emotional connection between the brand and the user- can be considered as a response to the evolution of young audiences and consumers. More specifically, I have analized product placement as a cultural and social phenomena above all, and not only as an economical one, thus demonstrating all the social and cultural practices that this tool implies. The approach I have chosen to do so, is historical-analytical, particularly focusing on the evolution of the society and of the consumer, especially for what teenagers (both as audiences and as consumers) are concerned.

Una prospettiva storico-filosofica sull'evoluzione del curricolo di fisica nella scuola: problemi e innovazioni pedagogiche

Negli ultimi vent’anni sono state proposte al livello internazionale alcune analisi dei problemi per le scienze nella scuola e diverse strategie per l’innovazione didattica. Molte ricerche hanno fatto riferimento a una nuova nozione di literacy scientifica, quale sapere fondamentale dell’educazione, indipendente dalle scelte professionali successive alla scuola. L’ipotesi di partenza di questa ricerca sostiene che alcune di queste analisi e l’idea di una nuova literacy scientifica di tipo non-vocazionale mostrino notevoli limiti quando rapportate al contesto italiano. Le specificità di quest’ultimo sono state affrontate, innanzitutto, da un punto di vista comparativo, discutendo alcuni documenti internazionali sull’insegnamento delle scienze. Questo confronto ha messo in luce la difficoltà di ottenere un insieme di evidenze chiare e definitive sui problemi dell’educazione scientifica discussi da questi documenti, in particolare per quanto riguarda i dati sulla crisi delle vocazioni scientifiche e sull’attitudine degli studenti verso le scienze. Le raccomandazioni educative e alcuni progetti curricolari internazionali trovano degli ostacoli decisivi nella scuola superiore italiana anche a causa di specificità istituzionali, come particolari principi di selezione e l’articolazione dei vari indirizzi formativi. Il presente lavoro si è basato soprattutto su una ricostruzione storico-pedagogica del curricolo di fisica, attraverso l’analisi delle linee guida nazionali, dei programmi di studio e di alcuni rappresentativi manuali degli ultimi decenni. Questo esame del curricolo “programmato” ha messo in luce, primo, il carattere accademico della fisica liceale e la sua debole rielaborazione culturale e didattica, secondo, l’impatto di temi e problemi internazionali sui materiali didattici. Tale impatto ha prodotto dei cambiamenti sul piano delle finalità educative e degli strumenti di apprendimento incorporati nei manuali. Nonostante l’evoluzione di queste caratteristiche del curricolo, tuttavia, l’analisi delle conoscenze storico-filosofiche utilizzate dai manuali ha messo in luce la scarsa contestualizzazione culturale della fisica quale uno degli ostacoli principali per l’insegnamento di una scienza più rilevante e formativa.

Development of guidelines for microbiological control in microbrewery

Over the past 15 years the Italian brewing scene showed interesting changes, especially with regard to the creation of many breweries with an annual production of less than 10,000 hectoliters. The beers produced by microbreweries are very susceptible to attack by spoilage micro-organisms that cause the deterioration of beer quality characteristics. In addition, most of the microbreweries do not practice heat treatments of stabilization and do not carry out quality checks on the product. The high presence of beer spoilage bacteria is an economic problem for the brewing industry because it can damage the brand and it causes high costs of product retrieval. This thesis project was aimed to study the management of the production process in the Italian microbreweries within a production less than 10,000 hl. In particular, the annual production, type of plant, yeast management, process management, cleaning and sanitizing of a representative sample of microbreweries were investigated. Furthermore was made a collection of samples in order to identify, with simple methods, what are spoilage bacteria more present in the Italian craft beers. 21% of the beers analysed were positive at the presence of lactic acid bacteria. These analytical data show the importance of understanding what are the weak points of the production process that cause the development of spoilage bacteria. Finally, the thesis examined the actual production of two microbreweries in order to understand the process management that can promote the growth of spoilage bacteria in beer and production plant. The analysis of the data for the two case studies was helpful to understand what are the critical points where the microorganisms are most frequently in contact with the product. The hygiene practices are crucial to ensure the quality of the finished product, especially in the case of non-pasteurized beer.

Am I (un)safe here? Chemotherapy patients' perspectives towards engaging in their safety

To assess chemotherapy patients' perceptions of safety and their attitudes towards participating in error-prevention strategies.

Poverty in Slovenia: A Conseqence of Economic Transition

Slovenia is considered to be one of the most successful Central and Eastern European countries undergoing the process of transition. It has a high GDP per capita (the highest in the Visegrad group) amounting to about 7200 US dollars (at the exchange rates pertaining during Ms. Stropnik's research). In 1994, a low rate of inflation, a low level of public debt and almost balanced public finances, were all positive elements. However, there is a darker side, for instance the dramatic increase in unemployment and (somewhat less dramatic) fall in production during the transition period. This analysis aimed to provide insights into what is actually happening at the household level, since households are the ultimate bearers of macroeconomic and social change. The final output totalled 166 pages in English and Slovenian, available also on disc. The income concept used by Ms. Stropnik is that of the disposable (monetary) household income, i.e. the cash income of all household members - including social security transfers and family benefits, and the net sum of taxes and social security contributions - plus the equivalent of domestic production, used in the household. Non-monetary income sources, such as household own production, benefits in kind, subsidies for goods and services, and fringe benefits, were not taken into account. The concept of relative and objective poverty was followed. Poverty means having less than others in society, it is a state of relative deprivation. Objective aspects of the situation, e.g. command over resources (i.e. the household income) and the relative position of the household in the income distribution, determine who is poor and who is not. Changes in household composition - an increase in the number of pensioners, unemployed and self-employed, concomitant with a large decrease in the number of employees - obviously played a part in the changing structure of household income sources during this period. The overall decrease in the share of wages and salaries from primary employment in 1993 is to be observed in all income deciles. On the other hand, the importance of salaries gained from secondary employment has increased in all deciles. The lower seven deciles experienced a sharp rise in the share of social benefits in the period 1988-1993, mostly because of the increase in the number of persons entitled to claim unemployment benefits. In Slovenia, income inequality has increased considerably during the 1988-1993 period. To make matters worse, the large increase in income inequality occurred in a period of falling real incomes. In 1983 the bottom decile disposed of 3.8 percent and the top decile disposed of 23.4 percent of total monetary income in Slovenia, whereas by 1993 the same statistics revealed 3.1 percent and 18.9 percent respectively. Unemployment greatly increases the risk of living in poverty. In 1993, 35 per cent of all unemployed persons in Slovenia were living in the lowest income quintile. Ms. Stropnik found certain features that were specific to Slovenia and not shared by most countries in transition. For example, the relative income position of pensioners has improved. Retirement did not increase the risk of poverty in 1993 as much as it did in 1983 and 1988. Also, it appears that children have not been particularly hard-hit by the transition upheavals. The incidence of poverty amongst children has not increased in the period 1983-1993. Children were also fairly evenly distributed across income quintiles. In 1983, 11.8 percent of households with children aged 18 or less were poor. In 1993, this figure was 8.4 per cent. On the other hand, poor households with children were, in comparison with other households of the same type, poorer in 1993 than in 1983. Ms. Stropnik also analysed the impact of social transfers. Her conclusion was that the level of social transfers prevented them from being successful in alleviating poverty. Family policy transfers (child allowances, child tax allowances, subsidised child care) did, however, contribute to the lowering of income inequality between families with and without children, and amongst families with different numbers of children. Ms. Stropnik is determined that the results of her research be used in the creation of social policy aimed at helping the poor. She quotes Piachaud approvingly: "If the term 'poverty' carries with it the implication and moral imperative that something should be done about it, then the study of poverty is only ultimately justifiable if it influences individual and social attitudes and actions."

NIKH: 1914

This digital object was funded in part through a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The digitalization of this object was part of a collaborative effort with the Washington Research Library Consortium and George Washington University.