Microcrédito emancipatório no nordeste do Brasil? : estudo de caso do Crediamigo Comunidade nos municípios de Caucaia-Ce e Maranguape-Ce

This piece of work consists in a study case of Crediamigo Comunidade, a product from the portfolio of Crediamigo Program of Banco do Nordeste, that uses the methodology of the Comunitary Banks in the concession of low amount loan to poor communities. The main question consists to understand how the Crediamigo Comunidade is characterized faced to the conflict of emancipatory versus liberal paradigms, that exists in the microcredit area. The main objective will analyze how the mechanisms: social capital, empowerment, formation to credit education and better conditions for economic and social issues promoted in the specific objectives of this product, before the dipute between these paradigms. The method adopted analyzed, in a longitudinal perspective, the three years of the product s existence (jun/2005 to jul 2008). Primary and secondary data made possible to identify qualitatively, emancipatory and non emancipatory attributes in the actions and results of Crediamigo Comunidade. It is concluded that the Crediamigo Comunidade works in a liberal logic of the Crediamigo Program, consequently, his focus is not in the emancipation of the poorest clients. The empowerment is individual and not communitary or Freiriano ; the social capital relations enlarges itself in its bounding and bridging ties, but not in its linkage ties, to have access to politic actors and consequently communitary strengthen. All the formation in the Crediamigo is strictly commercial. These characteristics happen by the liberal paradigm in the Crediamigo management and of all of its products, including the Crediamigo Comunidade

Graph analysis of verbal fluency test discriminate between patients with Alzheimer’s disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment and normal elderly controls

Verbal fluency is the ability to produce a satisfying sequence of spoken words during a given time interval. The core of verbal fluency lies in the capacity to manage the executive aspects of language. The standard scores of the semantic verbal fluency test are broadly used in the neuropsychological assessment of the elderly, and different analytical methods are likely to extract even more information from the data generated in this test. Graph theory, a mathematical approach to analyze relations between items, represents a promising tool to understand a variety of neuropsychological states. This study reports a graph analysis of data generated by the semantic verbal fluency test by cognitively healthy elderly (NC), patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment – subtypes amnestic(aMCI) and amnestic multiple domain (a+mdMCI) - and patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Sequences of words were represented as a speech graph in which every word corresponded to a node and temporal links between words were represented by directed edges. To characterize the structure of the data we calculated 13 speech graph attributes (SGAs). The individuals were compared when divided in three (NC – MCI – AD) and four (NC – aMCI – a+mdMCI – AD) groups. When the three groups were compared, significant differences were found in the standard measure of correct words produced, and three SGA: diameter, average shortest path, and network density. SGA sorted the elderly groups with good specificity and sensitivity. When the four groups were compared, the groups differed significantly in network density, except between the two MCI subtypes and NC and aMCI. The diameter of the network and the average shortest path were significantly different between the NC and AD, and between aMCI and AD. SGA sorted the elderly in their groups with good specificity and sensitivity, performing better than the standard score of the task. These findings provide support for a new methodological frame to assess the strength of semantic memory through the verbal fluency task, with potential to amplify the predictive power of this test. Graph analysis is likely to become clinically relevant in neurology and psychiatry, and may be particularly useful for the differential diagnosis of the elderly.