O novo federalismo social e o Rio: desenho de programas complementares de transferência de renda condicionada

Brazilian public policy entered in the so-called new social federalism through its conditional cash transfers. States and municipalities can operate together through the nationwide platform of the Bolsa Familia Program (BFP), complementing federal actions with local innovations. The state and the city of Rio de Janeiro have created programs named, respectively, Renda Melhor (RM) and Família Carioca (FC). These programs make use of the operational structure of the BFP, which facilitates locating beneficiaries, issuing cards, synchronizing payment dates and access passwords and introducing new conditionalities. The payment system of the two programs complements the estimated permanent household income up to the poverty line established, giving more to those who have less. Similar income complementation system was subsequently adopted in the BFP and the Chilean Ingreso Ético Familiar, which also follow the principle of estimation of income used in the FC and in the RM. Instead of using the declared income, the value of the Rio cash transfers are set using the extensive collection of information obtained from the Single Registry of Social Programs (Cadastro Único): physical configuration of housing, access to public services, education and work conditions for all family members, presence of vulnerable groups, disabilities, pregnant or lactating women, children and benefits from other official transfers such as the BFP. With this multitude of assets and limitations, the permanent income of each individual is estimated. The basic benefit is defined by the poverty gap and priority is given to the poorest. These subnational programs use international benchmarks as a neutral ground between different government levels and mandates. Their poverty line is the highest of the first millennium goal of the United Nations (UN): US$ 2 per person per day adjusted for the cost of living. The other poverty line of the UN, US$ 1.25, was implicitly adopted as the national extreme poverty line in 2011. The exchange of methodologies between federal entities has happened both ways. The FC began with the 575,000 individuals living in the city of Rio de Janeiro who were on the payroll of the BFP. Its system of impact evaluation benefited from bi-monthly standardized examinations. In the educational conditionalities, the two programs reward students' progress, a potential advantage for those who most need to advance. The municipal program requires greater school attendance than that of the BFP and the presence of students’ parents at the bimonthly meetings held on Saturdays. Students must achieve a grade of 8 or improve at least 20% in each exam to receive a bi-monthly premium of R$50. In early childhood, priority is given to the poor children in the program Single Administrative Register (CadÚnico) to enroll in kindergarten, preschools and complementary activities. The state program reaches more than one million people with a payment system similar to the municipal one. Moreover, it innovates in that it transfers awards given to high school students to savings accounts. The prize increases and is paid to the student, who can withdraw up to 30% annually. The total can reach R$3,800 per low-income student. The State and the city rewarded already education professionals according to student performance, now completing the chain of demand incentives on poor students and their parents. Increased performance is higher among beneficiaries and the presence of their guardians at meetings is twice compared to non beneficiaries; The Houston program, also focuses on aligning the incentives to teachers, parents and students. In general, the plan is to explore strategic complementarities, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The objective is to stimulate, through targets and incentives, synergies between social actors (teachers, parents, students), between areas (education, assistance, work) and different levels of government. The cited programs sum their efforts and divide labor so as to multiply interactions and make a difference in the lives of the poor.

Depleting the curriculum: teaching digital platforms and curricular impoverishment

The paper aims at showing how curricular complexity tends to be depleted by the use of digital platforms based on the SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) standard, which was created with the main purpose of recycling content as it is supposed to be independent both from the context of learning and the supporting technology also deemed to be neutral, all surrounded by a rhetoric of innovation and “pedagogical” innovation. The starting point of the discussion is García Perez’s model of Traditional Didactics as a simple tool to show almost graphically that any ancient didactic model is far richer in terms of complexity than the linearity, in disguise most of the times but still visible under a not so sophisticated critical lens, of the interaction human-(reusable) content that is the basis of the SCORM standard. The paper also addresses some of the more common deliberate mix-ups related to those digital platforms, such as learning and teaching, content and learning object, systems of automatic teaching and learning management systems.

Maude Object-Oriented Action Tool

MAIDL, André Murbach; CARVILHE, Claudio; MUSICANTE, Martin A. Maude Object-Oriented Action Tool. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science. [S.l:s.n], 2008.

Sintered Sewage Sludge As Support Material Used In Drinking Water Filtration

The processing of industry and domestic effluents in wastewater treatment plants reduces the amount of polluted material and forms reusable water and dehydrated sludge. the generation of hazardous municipal sludge can be decreased, as well as the impact on surface and underground water and the risk to human health. The aim this study is to verify the possibility to use sintered sewage sludge as support material after thermal treatment in the production of a filtering material to water supply systems. After thermal treatment the sewage sludge ash was characterized by X-ray fluorescence (XRF), leaching test and water solubilization. Dehydration of sludge was performed by controlled heating at temperatures of 180 degrees C, 350 degrees C, 600 degrees C, 850 degrees C and 1000 degrees C for 3 hours.

Obtenção e caracterização de um compósito de poliuretano de mamona e pó de vidro para aplicações em insolantes térmicos

Thermal insulation is used to protect the heated or cooled surfaces by the low thermal conductivity materials. The rigid ricin polyurethane foams (PURM) are used for thermal insulation and depend on the type and concentration of blowing agent. Obtaining PURM occurs by the use of polyol, silicone, catalyst and blowing agent are pre -mixed, reacting with the isocyanate. The glass is reusable, returnable and recyclable heat insulating material, whose time of heat dissipation determines the degree of relaxation of its structure; and viscosity determines the conditions for fusion, operating temperatures, annealing, etc. The production of PURM composites with waste glass powder (PV) represents economical and renewable actions of manufacturing of thermal insulating materials. Based on these aspects, the study aimed to produce and characterize the PURM composites with PV, whose the mass percentages were 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 wt%. PURM was obtained commercially, while the PV was recycled from the tailings of the stoning process of a glassmaking; when the refining process was applied to obtain micrometer particles. The PURM + PV composites were studied taking into account the standard sample of pure PURM and the influence of the percentage of PV in this PURM matrix. The results of the chemical, physical and morphological characterization were discussed taking into account the difference in the microstructural morphology of the PURM+PV composites and the pure PURM, as well the results of the physicochemical, mechanical e thermophysical tests by values obtained of density, hardness, compressive strength, specific heat, thermal conductivity and diffusivity. In general, the structure of pure PURM showed large, elongated and regular pores, while PURM+PV composites showed irregular, small and rounded pores with shapeless cells. This may have contributed to reducing their mechanical strength, especially for PURM - PV50. The hardness and density were found to have a proportional relationship with the PV content on PURM matrix. The specific heat, thermal diffusivity and thermal conductivity showed proportional relationship to each other. So, this has been realized that the increasing the PV content on PURM matrix resulted in the rise of diffusivity and thermal conductivity and the decrease of the specific heat. However, the values obtained by the PURM composites were similar the values of pure PURM, mainly the PURM-PV5 and PURM-PV10. Therefore, these composites can be applied like thermal insulator; furthermore, their use could reduce the production costs and to preserve the environment

BSmart: desenvolvimento rigoroso de aplicações Java Card com base no método formal B

Java Card technology allows the development and execution of small applications embedded in smart cards. A Java Card application is composed of an external card client and of an application in the card that implements the services available to the client by means of an Application Programming Interface (API). Usually, these applications manipulate and store important information, such as cash and confidential data of their owners. Thus, it is necessary to adopt rigor on developing a smart card application to improve its quality and trustworthiness. The use of formal methods on the development of these applications is a way to reach these quality requirements. The B method is one of the many formal methods for system specification. The development in B starts with the functional specification of the system, continues with the application of some optional refinements to the specification and, from the last level of refinement, it is possible to generate code for some programming language. The B formalism has a good tool support and its application to Java Card is adequate since the specification and development of APIs is one of the major applications of B. The BSmart method proposed here aims to promote the rigorous development of Java Card applications up to the generation of its code, based on the refinement of its formal specification described in the B notation. This development is supported by the BSmart tool, that is composed of some programs that automate each stage of the method; and by a library of B modules and Java Card classes that model primitive types, essential Java Card API classes and reusable data structures

KitSmart: Uma biblioteca de componentes para o desenvolvimento rigoroso de aplicações Java Card com o método B

The development of smart card applications requires a high level of reliability. Formal methods provide means for this reliability to be achieved. The BSmart method and tool contribute to the development of smart card applications with the support of the B method, generating Java Card code from B specifications. For the development with BSmart to be effectively rigorous without overloading the user it is important to have a library of reusable components built in B. The goal of KitSmart is to provide this support. A first research about the composition of this library was a graduation work from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, made by Thiago Dutra in 2006. This first version of the kit resulted in a specification of Java Card primitive types byte, short and boolean in B and the creation of reusable components for application development. This work provides an improvement of KitSmart with the addition of API Java Card specification made in B and a guide for the creation of new components. The API Java Card in B, besides being available to be used for development of applications, is also useful as a documentation of each API class. The reusable components correspond to modules to manipulate specific structures, such as date and time. These structures are not available for B or Java Card. These components for Java Card are generated from specifications formally verified in B. The guide contains quick reference on how to specify some structures and how some situations were adapted from object-orientation to the B Method. This work was evaluated through a case study made through the BSmart tool, that makes use of the KitSmart library. In this case study, it is possible to see the contribution of the components in a B specification. This kit should be useful for B method users and Java Card application developers

X-ARM: um modelo de representação de artefatos de software

A great challenge of the Component Based Development is the creation of mechanisms to facilitate the finding of reusable assets that fulfill the requirements of a particular system under development. In this sense, some component repositories have been proposed in order to answer such a need. However, repositories need to represent the asset characteristics that can be taken into account by the consumers when choosing the more adequate assets for their needs. In such a context, the literature presents some models proposed to describe the asset characteristics, such as identification, classification, non-functional requirements, usage and deployment information and component interfaces. Nevertheless, the set of characteristics represented by those models is insufficient to describe information used before, during and after the asset acquisition. This information refers to negotiation, certification, change history, adopted development process, events, exceptions and so on. In order to overcome this gap, this work proposes an XML-based model to represent several characteristics, of different asset types, that may be employed in the component-based development. Besides representing metadata used by consumers, useful for asset discovering, acquisition and usage, this model, called X-ARM, also focus on helping asset developers activities. Since the proposed model represents an expressive amount of information, this work also presents a tool called X-Packager, developed with the goal of helping asset description with X-ARM

Especificação do tipo intervalar parametrizado em CASL

The interval datatype applications in several areas is important to construct a interval type reusable, i.e., a interval constructor can be applied to any datatype and get intervals this datatype. Since the interval is, of certain form, a set of elements limited for two bounds, left and right, with a order notions, then it s reasonable that interval constructor enclose datatypes with partial order. On the order hand, what we want is work with interval of any datatype like this we work with this datatype then. it s important to guarantee the properties of the datatype when maps to interval of this datatype. Thus, the interval constructor get a theory to parametrized interval type, i.e., a interval with generics parameters (for example rational, real, complex). Sometimes, the interval application in some algebras doesn t guarantee the mainutenance of their properties, for example, when we use interval of real, that satisfies the field properties, it doesn t guarantee the distributivity propertie. A form to surpass this problem Santiago introduced the local equality theory that weakened the notion of strong equality, and thus, allowing some properties are local keeped, what can be discard before. The interval arithmetic generalization aim to apply the interval constructor on ordered algebras weakened for local equality with the purpose of the keep their properties. How the intervals are important in applications with continuous data, it s interesting specify that theory using a specification language that supply a system development using intervals of form disciplined, trustworth and safe. Currently, the algebraic specification language, based in math models, have been use to that intention often. We choose CASL (Common Algebraic Specification Language) among others languages because CASL has several characteristics excellent to parametrized interval type, such as, provide parcialiy and parametrization

Utilizando programação orientada a aspectos no projeto de sistemas hardware desenvolvidos com SystemC

New programming language paradigms have commonly been tested and eventually incorporated into hardware description languages. Recently, aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has shown successful in improving the modularity of object-oriented and structured languages such Java, C++ and C. Thus, one can expect that, using AOP, one can improve the understanding of the hardware systems under design, as well as make its components more reusable and easier to maintain. We apply AOP in applications developed using the SystemC library. Several examples will be presented illustrating how to combine AOP and SystemC. During the presentation of these examples, the benefits of this new approach will also be discussed

Polishable and Renewable DNA Hybridization Biosensors

Routine applications of DNA hybridization biosensors are often restricted by the need for regenerating the single-stranded (ss) probe for subsequent reuse. This note reports on a viable alternative to prolonged thermal or chemical regeneration schemes through the mechanical polishing of oligonucleotide-bulk-modified carbon composite electrodes. The surface of these biocomposite hybridization biosensors can be renewed rapidly and reproducibly by a simple extrusion/polishing protocol. The immobilized probe retains its hybridization activity on confinement in the interior of the carbon paste matrix, with the use of fresh surfaces erasing memory effects and restoring the original target response, to allow numerous hybridization/measurement cycles. We expect that such reusable nucleic acid modified composite electrodes can be designed for a wide variety of biosensing applications.

A practical approach for biometric authentication based on smartcards

Cryptographic systems are safe. However, the management of cryptographic keys of these systems is a tough task. They are usually protected by the use of password-based authentication mechanisms, which is a weak link on conventional cryptographic systems, as the passwords can be easily copied or stolen. The usage of a biometric approach for releasing the keys is an alternative to the password-based mechanisms. But just like passwords, we need mechanisms to keep the biometrical signal safe. One approach for such mechanism is to use biometrical key cryptography. The cryptographic systems based on the use of biometric characteristics as keys are called biometrical cryptographic systems. This article presents the implementation of Fuzzy Vault, a biometrical cryptographic system written in Java, along with its performance evaluation. Fuzzy Vault was tested on a real application using smartcards.

TAO - A software platform for autonomous mobile robots

To date, different techniques of navigation for mobile robots have been developed. However, the experimentation of these techniques is not a trivial task because usually it is not possible to reuse the developed control software due to system incompabilities. This paper proposes a software platform that provides means for creating reusable software modules through the standardization of software interfaces, which represent the various robot modules. © 2012 ICROS.

An optimised electrochemical biosensor for the label-free detection of C-reactive protein in blood

C-reactive protein (CRP) is an acute phase protein whose levels are increased in many disorders. There exists, in particular, a great deal of interest in the correlation between blood serum levels and the severity of risk for cardiovascular disease. A sensitive, label-free, non-amplified and reusable electrochemical impedimetric biosensor for the detection of CRP in blood serum was developed herein based on controlled and coverage optimised antibody immobilization on standard polycrystalline gold electrodes. Charge transfer resistance changes were highly target specific, linear with log. CRP. concentration across a 0.5-50. nM range and associated with a limit of detection of 176. pM. Significantly, the detection limits are better than those of current CRP clinical methods and the assays are potentially cheap, relatively automated, reusable, multiplexed and highly portable. The generated interfaces were capable not only of comfortably quantifying CRP across a clinically relevant range of concentrations but also of doing this in whole blood serum with interfaces that were, subsequently, reusable. The importance of optimising receptor layer resistance in maximising assay sensitivity is also detailed. © 2012.

A novel LTCC electrochemical cell construction and characterization: A detection compartment for portable devices

In this work we described for the first time the construction of a 25 μL electrochemical cell from low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) material and carbon screen-printed electrode applicable in portable devices. Firstly, a carbon screen-printed electrode was prepared and characterized by cyclic voltammetry and scanning electron microscopy. Afterwards carbon polymeric film and metal pastes were dropped into the LTCC cell cavities in order to determine the device electrodes, and this arrangement was also electrochemically characterized. The great advantage of this promising device is the simple construction method and its widespread applicability in reusable portable devices. © 2013 The Royal Society of Chemistry.