Essential steps to providing reliable results using the Analytical Quality Assurance Cycle

Considering how demand for quality assurance (QA) has grown in analytical laboratories, we show the trends in analytical science, illustrated through international standard ISO/IEC 17025, validation, measurements of uncertainty, and quality-control (QC) measures. A detailed review of the history of analytical chemistry indicates that these concepts are consistently used in laboratories to demonstrate their traceabilities and competences to provide reliable results. We propose a new approach for laboratory QA, which also develops a diagram to support routine laboratories (which generally apply a quality system, such as ISO/IEC 17025) or research laboratories (that have some difficult applying this international standard). This approach, called the Analytical Quality Assurance Cycle (AQAC), presents the major QA concepts and the relationships between these concepts in order to provide traceability and reliable results. The AQAC is a practical tool to support the trend towards QA in analytical laboratories. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Necessidades de saúde, políticas públicas e gênero: a perspectiva das práticas profissionais

Examina-se a relação entre políticas públicas e práticas dos profissionais, relativamente às necessidades de saúde. Em abordagem teórico-conceitual, as práticas são definidas como desempenhos permeados por determinantes técnico-cien­tíficos e sócio-históricos para a produção social de um trabalho, analisando-se suas possibilidades de mudanças culturais, éticas e políticas, para um agir crítico das desigualdades de gênero. Tomando-se a atenção integral à saúde dos homens, examina-se a relevância da distinção entre necessidades masculinas e femininas, enquanto realidades parciais não necessariamente convergentes na (re)produção daquelas desigualdades. Igualmente se examinam as práticas profissionais, como realidade parcial e distinta das políticas, estabelecendo relações não imediatas. Desenvolve-se que são obstáculos simbólicos e práticos para mudanças: a normalização biomédica redutora das necessidades, a cultura do trabalho autônomo e da abordagem individualizante das necessidades, a cultura tradicional de gênero conservando práticas desiguais para homens e mulheres e a ausência de inscrição dos direitos como parte do agir profissio­nal. Isto exige propostas específicas às práticas de saúde e às necessidades masculinas para maior convergência com as reformas das políticas.

Predicting Delta Ferrite Content in Stainless Steel Castings

The distribution of delta ferrite fraction was measured with the magnetic method in specimens of different stainless steel compositions cast by the investment casting (lost wax) process. Ferrite fraction measurements published in the literature for stainless steel cast samples were added to the present work data, enabling an extensive analysis about practical methods to calculate delta ferrite fractions in stainless steel castings. Nineteen different versions of practical methods were formed using Schaeffler, DeLong, and Siewert diagrams and the nickel and chromium equivalent indexes suggested by several authors. These methods were evaluated by a detailed statistical analysis, showing that the Siewert diagram, including its equivalent indexes and iso-ferrite lines, gives the lowest relative errors between calculated and measured delta ferrite fractions. Although originally created for stainless steel welds, this diagram gives relative errors lower than those for the current ASTM standard method (800/A 800M-01), developed to predict ferrite fractions in stainless steel castings. Practical methods originated from a combination of different chromium/nickel equivalent indexes and the iso-ferrite lines from Schaeffler diagram give the lowest relative errors when compared with combinations using other iso-ferrite line diagrams. For the samples cast in the present work, an increase in cooling rate from 0.78 to 2.7 K/s caused a decrease in the delta ferrite fraction, but a statistical hypothesis test revealed that this effect is significant in only 50% of the samples that have ferrite in their microstructures.

TITANS OF CAPITALISM IN THE MODERNIZATION OF BRAZILIAN TERRITORY: URBAN AND AWARDS PUBLIC ASSISTANCE DURING THE FIRST REPUBLIC (1889-1930)

In Brazil, the newly created Republic expressed interests of the elite increasingly committed to foreign capital. The Rio de Janeiro saw accumulate vast resources in trade and finance, deriving for industrial applications. The city appears as articulator of Brazilian territory and mediation between it and the international market. In the capital of the Republic, the conservative plan would sweep the old city and inaugurate images copied from Europe and installed in the tropics with civilizing purpose. This materialized with infrastructure financing and loans to entrepreneurs in Europe and North America, awarded public service concessions. The project relied on strong support of mayors (members or representatives of the companies involved in the reforms). This work aims to address the relationship between the mayors of Rio de Janeiro during the First Republic and international capital, focusing on strategies for the production of new spaces in motion the modernization of Brazil and its international image.

QuMinS: fast and scalable querying, mining and summarizing multi-modal databases

Given a large image set, in which very few images have labels, how to guess labels for the remaining majority? How to spot images that need brand new labels different from the predefined ones? How to summarize these data to route the user’s attention to what really matters? Here we answer all these questions. Specifically, we propose QuMinS, a fast, scalable solution to two problems: (i) Low-labor labeling (LLL) – given an image set, very few images have labels, find the most appropriate labels for the rest; and (ii) Mining and attention routing – in the same setting, find clusters, the top-'N IND.O' outlier images, and the 'N IND.R' images that best represent the data. Experiments on satellite images spanning up to 2.25 GB show that, contrasting to the state-of-the-art labeling techniques, QuMinS scales linearly on the data size, being up to 40 times faster than top competitors (GCap), still achieving better or equal accuracy, it spots images that potentially require unpredicted labels, and it works even with tiny initial label sets, i.e., nearly five examples. We also report a case study of our method’s practical usage to show that QuMinS is a viable tool for automatic coffee crop detection from remote sensing images.