A esfera como metáfora: representações do futebol no campo da literatura (leituras do tema no conto de ficção)

Football, understood as a phenomenon of sports practice and nearly universal coverage, can also be seen as a game whose operation circumvents the cultural universe of people who practice it. Much more than just a sport, so this game is a cultural phenomenon par excellence, bearing a communicational and aesthetic dimension whose occurrence has been spotted in various fields of scientific and cultural. Therefore, it is as game and as a phenomenon of culture, we intend to focus on football here as an object of study. Our aim is to investigate the sport in Brazil taking the Literature and Journalism as privileged instances of their representation in the media. Thus, the central idea of this research is to show when and how football has become a recurrent theme in Brazilian literature, starting with its journalistic approach until we get an overview of the aesthetic representation of the game, Literature as the main focus of attention and taking the genre of fiction story as material fact of their representation. With this approach, we intend to develop an overall view, overview of the literature about football in our country and at the same time, particularize this vision in some representative authors of it, like the writer-journalist Mario Filho (the historian, essayist on the modernization of chronic specific theme), José Lins do Rego (writer passionate about the game), Nelson Rodrigues (the esthetician that elevated the sport to the status of art by chronic), Lima Barreto (who along with Antonio de Alcantara Machado pioneered the formalized within the fiction) and the storytellers of the topic itself. In the end, we intend to infer the results of evaluations and reviews of books and authors listed, we have examined a wide sense, but also vertical (and which were focused on a socio-historical perspective and critical-aesthetic) within the assumption that seems be a homology between the way football practice amongst us will historically winning characteristics as to form a Brazilian school of football, and how our writers, journalists will be addressing the topic, which also would focus on creating a "Brazilian way" of telling literary football. The proof of this hypothesis operational work together with the development of historiography and the necessity arising from it, creating a "Guide to Reading football theme in fictional tale of Brazil" shut the focal perspective of this study

CENSUS HISTOGRAMS: A SIMPLE FEATURE EXTRACTION and MATCHING APPROACH FOR FACE RECOGNITION

Most face recognition approaches require a prior training where a given distribution of faces is assumed to further predict the identity of test faces. Such an approach may experience difficulty in identifying faces belonging to distributions different from the one provided during the training. A face recognition technique that performs well regardless of training is, therefore, interesting to consider as a basis of more sophisticated methods. In this work, the Census Transform is applied to describe the faces. Based on a scanning window which extracts local histograms of Census Features, we present a method that directly matches face samples. With this simple technique, 97.2% of the faces in the FERET fa/fb test were correctly recognized. Despite being an easy test set, we have found no other approaches in literature regarding straight comparisons of faces with such a performance. Also, a window for further improvement is presented. Among other techniques, we demonstrate how the use of SVMs over the Census Histogram representation can increase the recognition performance.

Framework for analysis and representation of external systems for online reactive-optimisation studies

The paper proposes a framework for the analysis and representation of external systems for online optimisation studies. The basis for this framework is the equivalent OPF (EOPF), an optimisation model obtained by partitioning of the OPF model. The EOPF is mathematically redefined in the paper to accommodate the concept of a buffer zone. The resulting model is more useful for online optimisation, since external information obtained through intercontrol-centre exchange contracts can be used to improve internal control calculation. Numerical results obtained with original studies involving the boundary-matching procedure have provided a conceptual basis for the definition of a buffer zone for optimisation studies with the EOPF. In the proposed framework, the accuracy of the external representation in optimisation studies is evaluated by comparing the controls obtained by an EOPF procedure with those obtained by the reference-optimisation procedure defined in this paper. The framework is then used to evaluate the accuracy of equivalent optimisation studies involving the IEEE 118-bus test system and the Brazilian South Southeast 810-bus system. The results show that the incorporation of a buffer zone improves the external system representation for all optimisation studies performed.

An efficient neural approach to economic load dispatch in power systems

A neural approach to solve the problem defined by the economic load dispatch in power systems is presented in this paper, Systems based on artificial neural networks have high computational rates due to the use of a massive number of simple processing elements and the high degree of connectivity between these elements the ability of neural networks to realize some complex nonlinear function makes them attractive for system optimization the neural networks applyed in economic load dispatch reported in literature sometimes fail to converge towards feasible equilibrium points the internal parameters of the modified Hopfield network developed here are computed using the valid-subspace technique These parameters guarantee the network convergence to feasible quilibrium points, A solution for the economic load dispatch problem corresponds to an equilibrium point of the network. Simulation results and comparative analysis in relation to other neural approaches are presented to illustrate efficiency of the proposed approach.

A DOE based approach for the design of RBF artificial neural networks applied to prediction of surface roughness in AISI 52100 hardened Steel turning

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Alternative proposal for Modal Representation of a Non-transposed Three-Phase Transmission Line with a Vertical Symmetry Plane

The objective of this paper is to show an alternative representation in time domain of a non-transposed three-phase transmission line decomposed in its exact modes by using two transformation matrices. The first matrix is Clarke's matrix that is real, frequency independent, easily represented in computational transient programs (EMTP) and separates the line into quasi-modes a, b and zero. After that, Quasi-modes a and zero are decomposed into their exact modes by using a modal transformation matrix whose elements can be synthesized in time domain through standard curve-fitting techniques. The main advantage of this alternative representation is to reduce the processing time because a frequency dependent modal transformation matrix of a three-phase line has nine elements to be represented in time domain while a modal transformation matrix of a two-phase line has only four elements. This paper shows modal decomposition process and eigenvectors of a non-transposed three-phase line with a vertical symmetry plane whose nominal voltage is 440 kV and line length is 500 km.

Reforma a vapor catalítica do metano: Otimização da produção e seletividade em hidrogênio por absorção in situ do CO2 produzido

Topics of research related to energy and environment have significantly grown in recent years, with the need of its own energy as hydrogen. More particularly, numerous researches have been focused on hydrogen as energy vector. The main portion of hydrogen is presently obtained by reforming of methane or light hydrocarbons (steam, oxy, dry or auto reforming). During the methane steam reforming process the formation of CO2 undesirable (the main contributor to the greenhouse effect) is observed. Thus, an oxide material (sorbent) can be used to capture the CO2 generated during the process and simultaneously shifting the equilibrium of water gas shift towards thermodynamically more favorable production of pure hydrogen. The aim of this study is to develop a material with dual function (catalyst/sorbent) in the reaction of steam reforming of methane. CaO is well known as CO2 sorbent due to its high efficiency in reactions of carbonation and easy regeneration through calcination. However the kinetic of carbonation decreases quickly with time and carbonation/calcination cycles. A calcium aluminate (Ca12Al14O33) should be used to avoid sintering and increase the stability of CaO sorbents for several cycles. Nickel, the industrial catalyst choice for steam reforming has been added to the support from different manners. These bi-functional materials (sorbent/catalyst) in different molar ratios CaO.Ca12Al14O33 (48:52, 65:35, 75:25, 90:10) were prepared by different synthesis methodologies, among them, especially the method of microwave assisted self-combustion. Synthesis, structure and catalytic performances of Ni- CaO.Ca12Al14O33 synthesized by the novel method (microwave assisted selfcombustion) proposed in this work has not being reported yet in literature. The results indicate that CO2 capture time depends both on the CaO excess and on operating conditions (eg., temperature and H2O/CH4 ratio). To be efficient for CO2 sorption, temperature of steam reforming needs to be lower than 700 °C. An optimized percentage corresponding to 75% of CaO and a ratio H2O/CH4 = 1 provides the most promising results since a smaller amount of water avoids competition between water and CO2 to form carbonate and hydroxide. If this competition is most effective (H2O/CH4 = 3) and would have a smaller amount of CaO available for absorption possibly due to the formation of Ca(OH)2. Therefore, the capture time was higher (16h) for the ratio H2O/CH4 = 1 than H2O/CH4 = 3 (7h) using as catalyst one prepared by impregnating the support obtained by microwave assisted self-combustion. Therefore, it was demonstrated that, with these catalysts, the CO2 sorption on CaO modifies the balance of the water gas-shift reaction. Consequently, steam reforming of CH4 is optimized, producing pure H2, complete conversion of methane and negligible concentration of CO2 and CO during the time of capture even at low temperature (650 °C). This validates the concept of the sorption of CO2 together with methane steam reforming

A representação social de educação tecnológica de docentes da Rede Federal de Educação Profissional e Tecnológica: CEFETs do Rio Grande do Norte

The aim of this study was to investigate the social representation of technological education teachers at the Federal Technological Education Network. The survey was conducted from 2007 to 2010, and the respondents were 275 teachers, 135 of the Federal Center for Technological Education (CEFET in portuguese) in the state of Amazonas, in Manaus unit headquarters; 140 of the CEFET in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, a unit based in Natal. We adopt the concept of technological education as the top level of professional education, that is to say, the undergraduate programs of short duration called technological courses. The Federal Technological Education Network gathers hundreds of related institutions, coordinated and supervised by the Office of Vocational and Technological Education of the Ministry of Education. Although many of these institutions offer courses in technology education, no research addressing this subject from the perspective of Social Representations Theory (SRT) was found in the literature. We seek to unravel the social representation of technological education of the teachers by adopting the procedural approach of SRT. This is a qualitative approach, focusing on significant aspects of the representative activity and the formation mechanisms of the representation. Therefore, we search the socio-genesis of the representation in the articulations between discourses, social institutions and practices. We initiated the research through applying critical reading and an analytical perspective on the historical and regulatory documents of technological education in Brazil, from the early twentieth century to the present day. We adopt the Procedure for Multiple Classifications (PMC) from the Free Words Association Technique (FWAT) to access the elements of representational content. For the analysis of the data obtained with FWAT and selection of major words / phrases pertinent to the semantic field of education technology, we used Hamlet II software. For the data analysis of PMC and Free Classification (FC) we used the SPSS ® (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) version 17.0 and used the method of multidimensional scaling - Multidimensional scaling - (MDS). The output from the central MDS takes the form of a set of scatterplots - "perceptual maps" - of which the points are the elements of the representational content. For the FC data analysis we used the Scalogram Multidimensional Analysis (SMA) - which makes use of the original data in its raw form and allows categorical data to be interpreted in the map as measures of (di)similarity. In order to help with the understanding of the settings of the perceptual maps of FC, we used the Content Analysis of the discourse fragments of the teachers interviewed. The results confirm our initial hypothesis regarding the presence of a single plot among the socio-cognitive study subjects, which is the basis for a social representation of technological education in line with the historic assumption of the dichotomy between mental and manual labor. In spite of the three merging representational elements of the representational content, the perceptual maps compiled from the MSA statistics corroborates the dichotomy, with the exception of the map relating to the subgroup of teachers belonging to the humanities

Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring in children with obstructive sleep apnea and primary snoring

Objective: To evaluate the systemic blood pressure (BP) during daytime and nighttime in children with sleep breathing disorders (SBD) and compare parameters of BP in children with diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSA) to those one with primary snoring (PS).Methods: Children, both genders, aged from 8 to 12 years, with symptoms of SBD realized an overnight polysomnography followed by a 24 h recording of ambulatory BP.Results: All subjects presented with a history of snoring 7 nights per week. Children who have apnea/hipoapnea index >= four or a apnea index >= one presented a mean BP of 93 +/- 7 mmHg and 85 +/- 9 mmHg diurnal and nocturnal respectively whereas children who have a apnea/hipoapnea < four or a apnea index < one presented 90 +/- 7 mmHg and 77 +/- 2 mmHg. Eight children out of fourteen, from OSA group, lost the physiologic nocturnal dipping of the blood pressure. Among OSA children 57% were considered non-dippers. Two (16%) have presented absence of nocturnal dipping among children with primary snoring. The possibility of OSA children loosing physiologic blood pressure dipping was 6.66 higher than the possibilities of patients from PS group.Discussion: Our results indicate that children with sleep apnea syndrome exhibit a higher 24 h blood pressure when compared with those of primary snoring in form of decreased degree of nocturnal dipping and increased levels of diastolic and mean blood pressure, according to previous studies in literature. OSA in children seems to be associated to the development of hypertension or other cardiovascular disease. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Evaluation of different protocols for anatomical studies in Parmeliaceae (lichenized Ascomycota)

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Occurrence of Microcerella halli (Engel) (Diptera, Sarcophagidae) in snake carrion in southeastern Brazil

Occurrence of Microcerella halli (Engel) (Diptera, Sarcophagidae) in snake carrion in southeastern Brazil. The occurrence of 27 second-instar larvae of the flesh fly Microcerella halli (Engel, 1931) (Diptera, Sarcophagidae) in a carcass of a snake usually called as Urutu, Bothrops alternatus (Dumeril, Bibron & Dumeril, 1854) (Serpentes, Viperidae, Crotalinae) is reported. The snake was kept in captivity in a snake farm in Morungaba, São Paulo state, Brazil. Descriptions of reptile carcass colonization by insects and general biological data of this flesh fly are scarce and this necrophagic behavior is described for the first time in literature.

Seasonal variation in natural populations of Drosophila spp. (Diptera) in two woodlands in the State of São Paulo, Brazil

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Natural radioactivity and radon exhalation rate in Brazilian igneous rocks

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Behavior of an albino vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus (E. Geoffroy) (Chiroptera, Phyllostomidae), in captivity

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Hq(4) symmetry: the linear q-harmonic oscillator based on generalized irreps of the q-deformed Heisenberg algebra

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)