Do encantamento dos números à realidade dos fatos: conciliação entre os balanços patrimonial e social da ALUNORTE

The social balance is turning into an instrument capable of identifying the Organizational Commitment socio-environmental. The objective of the Social Balance is to present the application of company resources on socio-environmental investments internally and externally. The research was developed based on the Balance Social and Sheet from Alumina North Brazil S / A, ALUNORTE, for fiscal years 2008 and 2009, with the purpose of describing the finding of the Balance Social and Sheet from ALUNORTE about social responsibility. To validate the proposal were doing comparisons between accounting and financial datas from Alunorte and Y.Yamada, in order to highlight what they say and indicators confirm the privileges of the first against second

Volatilidade dos retornos e governança: um estudo de eventos da crise do subprime

The financial crisis that occurred between the years 2007 and 2008, known as the subprime crisis, has highlighted the governance of companies in Brazil and worldwide. To monitor the financial risk, quantitative tools of risk management were created in the 1990s, after several financial disasters. The market turmoil has also led companies to invest in the development and use of information, which are applied as tools to support process control and decision making. Numerous empirical studies on informational efficiency of the market have been made inside and outside Brazil, revealing whether the prices reflect the information available instantly. The creation of different levels of corporate governance on BOVESPA, in 2000, made the firms had greater impairment in relation to its shareholders with greater transparency in their information. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the subprime financial crisis has affected, between January 2007 and December 2009, the volatility of stock returns in the BM&BOVESPA of companies with greater liquidity at different levels of corporate governance. From studies of time series and through the studies of events, econometric tests were performed by the EVIEWS, and through the results obtained it became evident that the adoption of good practices of corporate governance affect the volatility of returns of companies

Fatores litogênicos em pacientes com litíase urinária de Fortaleza, Ceará

Lithiasis is considered a public health issue due to its high prevalence and rates of recurrence. Objective: To identify risk factors for lithiasis in kidney stone patients from Fortaleza, Brazil. In the first stage of the study, the medical records of 197 patients with urinary lithiasis covering the period 1996 2006 were analyzed with regard to clinical and metabolic data. In the second stage, 340 kidney stones were submitted to morphological examination under 10x magnification. According to the external morphology and the cut surface, the stones were classified as pure or mixed, and major and minor components were identified. In addition, the stone fragments of 25 patients treated with lithotripsy were submitted to morphological analysis. In the third stage, a subsample of 50 stones was used in a double-blind comparison of morphological and chemical findings. Results were expressed as concordant, partly concordant (discordant for minor components) or discordant (discordant for major components). The average age of first symptoms was 35.8±13.3 years, with no significant difference between the genders. The male/female ratio was 1:1.7. Recurrence was reported in 53.3% of cases. The main metabolic changes observed were hypernatriuria (80.7%), hypercalciuria (48.7%), low urine volume (43.7%), hyperoxaluria (30.5%) and hyperuricosuria (17.3%). Pure stones represented 34.7% of the total sample of 340 stones. The most common route of elimination was spontaneous for pure stones (49.1%) and surgical for mixed stones (50.5%). Pure stones consisted most frequently of calcium oxalate (OxCa) (59.3%) and uric acid (UA) (23.7%), the former prevalent in women, the latter prevalent in men. The most frequently observed component in mixed stones was OxCa (67.1%), followed by carbapatite (11.2%) and struvite (7.9%). The main components were OxCa and UA for men, and carbapatite and struvite for women. Nearly half (48%) the 25 analyzed fragments were pure, consisting of calcium oxalate dihydrate (COD) (56%), calcium oxalate monohydrate (COM) (48%), phosphate (32%) and UA (20%). Four patients (16%) had infectious stones. In the chemical analysis of the subsample of 50 stones, the most 64 frequently observed major components were calcium (70%), oxalate (66%), ammonium (56%), urate (28%) and carbonate (24%). In the morphological analysis, the main components were calcium and magnesium phosphate (32%), COM (24%), UA (20%), COD (18%) and cystine (6%). Morphological and chemical findings were totally concordant for 38% of the stones, partly concordant in 52% and discordant in 10%. Conclusion: The risk factors for lithiasis in kidney stone patients from Fortaleza (Brazil) were hyperoxaluria, hypercalciuria with or without hypernatriuria, hyperuricosuria and low urine volume

Emprego de redes neurais artificiais supervisionadas e não supervisionadas no estudo de parâmetros reológicos de excipientes farmacêuticos sólidos

In this paper artificial neural network (ANN) based on supervised and unsupervised algorithms were investigated for use in the study of rheological parameters of solid pharmaceutical excipients, in order to develop computational tools for manufacturing solid dosage forms. Among four supervised neural networks investigated, the best learning performance was achieved by a feedfoward multilayer perceptron whose architectures was composed by eight neurons in the input layer, sixteen neurons in the hidden layer and one neuron in the output layer. Learning and predictive performance relative to repose angle was poor while to Carr index and Hausner ratio (CI and HR, respectively) showed very good fitting capacity and learning, therefore HR and CI were considered suitable descriptors for the next stage of development of supervised ANNs. Clustering capacity was evaluated for five unsupervised strategies. Network based on purely unsupervised competitive strategies, classic "Winner-Take-All", "Frequency-Sensitive Competitive Learning" and "Rival-Penalize Competitive Learning" (WTA, FSCL and RPCL, respectively) were able to perform clustering from database, however this classification was very poor, showing severe classification errors by grouping data with conflicting properties into the same cluster or even the same neuron. On the other hand it could not be established what was the criteria adopted by the neural network for those clustering. Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) and Neural Gas (NG) networks showed better clustering capacity. Both have recognized the two major groupings of data corresponding to lactose (LAC) and cellulose (CEL). However, SOM showed some errors in classify data from minority excipients, magnesium stearate (EMG) , talc (TLC) and attapulgite (ATP). NG network in turn performed a very consistent classification of data and solve the misclassification of SOM, being the most appropriate network for classifying data of the study. The use of NG network in pharmaceutical technology was still unpublished. NG therefore has great potential for use in the development of software for use in automated classification systems of pharmaceutical powders and as a new tool for mining and clustering data in drug development

Do encantamento dos números à realidade dos fatos: conciliação entre os balanços patrimonial e social da ALUNORTE

The social balance is turning into an instrument capable of identifying the Organizational Commitment socio-environmental. The objective of the Social Balance is to present the application of company resources on socio-environmental investments internally and externally. The research was developed based on the Balance Social and Sheet from Alumina North Brazil S / A, ALUNORTE, for fiscal years 2008 and 2009, with the purpose of describing the finding of the Balance Social and Sheet from ALUNORTE about social responsibility. To validate the proposal were doing comparisons between accounting and financial datas from Alunorte and Y.Yamada, in order to highlight what they say and indicators confirm the privileges of the first against second

Volatilidade dos retornos e governança: um estudo de eventos da crise do subprime

The financial crisis that occurred between the years 2007 and 2008, known as the subprime crisis, has highlighted the governance of companies in Brazil and worldwide. To monitor the financial risk, quantitative tools of risk management were created in the 1990s, after several financial disasters. The market turmoil has also led companies to invest in the development and use of information, which are applied as tools to support process control and decision making. Numerous empirical studies on informational efficiency of the market have been made inside and outside Brazil, revealing whether the prices reflect the information available instantly. The creation of different levels of corporate governance on BOVESPA, in 2000, made the firms had greater impairment in relation to its shareholders with greater transparency in their information. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the subprime financial crisis has affected, between January 2007 and December 2009, the volatility of stock returns in the BM&BOVESPA of companies with greater liquidity at different levels of corporate governance. From studies of time series and through the studies of events, econometric tests were performed by the EVIEWS, and through the results obtained it became evident that the adoption of good practices of corporate governance affect the volatility of returns of companies