Avaliação do desempenho reprodutivo do Cavalo-Marinho Hippocampus reidi (GINSBURG 1933) do estuário do Rio Potengi (Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil) com vistas ao seu cultivo em bases sustentáveis

Os cavalos-marinhos têm cativado a imaginação e a curiosidade dos seres humanos por centenas de anos. No entanto, nos dias de hoje, esses animais correm um sério risco de extinção por fatores como a pesca desordenada para suprir os mercados de peixes ornamentais e da medicina tradicional chinesa e principalmente, a destruição do seu habitat. Nesse contexto, é crescente o número de estudos sobre a ecologia, a biologia (reprodutiva, especialmente) e o cultivo de várias espécies do gênero Hippocampus, inclusive para fins conservacionistas e de recomposição de estoques. Duas espécies de cavalos-marinhos são encontradas no Brasil: Hippocampus reidi Ginsburg 1933 e Hippocampus erectus Perry. No entanto, as informações sobre essas espécies estão basicamente restritas ao seu grau de ocorrência ou a sua área de ocupação. No presente estudo, foi avaliado o desempenho reprodutivo de Hippocampus reidi do estuário do rio Potengi (05° 47' 42'' S; 35° 12' 34'' W), em Natal, Rio Grande do Norte. Para tanto, cavalos-marinhos grávidos (n = 38) foram coletados no referido estuário nos meses de setembro, outubro e novembro de 2008 e julho, agosto, setembro e outubro de 2009 e mantidos em laboratório até que liberassem os filhotes. O comprimento padrão (CPA), altura (ATA), volume da bolsa (VB) e peso úmido (PuA) dos adultos, bem como o comprimento padrão (CPF), altura (ATF), peso úmido (PuF) e peso seco (PsF) dos filhotes foram determinados. Os resultados obtidos mostraram que houve correlações significativas entre o CPA e a ATA (r²=0,171), CPA e PuA (r²=0,624), CPA e VB (r²=0,256), ATA e PuA (r²=0,788), PuA e VB (r²=0,211), CPF e ATF (r²=0,903) e CPF e PsF (r²=0,163). A análise de correspondência (AC) que associou as classes do comprimento padrão dos adultos (CPA) e o volume da bolsa de H. reidi ao número de filhotes mostrou que animais entre 19 cm e 21 cm e com volume de bolsa entre 3 mL e 4 mL foram os que liberaram o maior número de filhotes. Os resultados do presente estudo também indicam que o tamanho mínimo de captura recomendado pela CITES (10 cm de altura) para H. reidi deve ser revisto, uma vez que não foram encontrados animais menores que 13,5 cm que estivessem grávidos. Finalmente, o número médio de filhotes por desova obtido no presente estudo (n = 775 ± 398 filhotes) realçou o potencial reprodutivo de H. reidi e a necessidade de estudos adicionais com esta espécie

A diversidade de lagartos na Caatinga é mediada pelos térmitas?

Intending to explain the extraordinary lizard coexistence levels found in Australian deserts, Morton & James (1988) figured out a hypothesis which defends that the termite diversity would bring about lizard radiation. This study aims to verify the validation of that hypothesis in Caatinga lizard assemblages. This study also objectives verifying if the termite defense mechanisms influence their consuming levels by lizards and if this pattern differs between different lizard lineages. Termites were collected using a standardized sampling protocol of termites. Besides using haphazard sampling, we collect lizards with 108 pitfall traps in each area. Intending to check the linkage between the termite and lizard assemblages, the lizard stomach contents were analyzed and then a canonical correspondence analysis was performed. The presence of nonrandom patterns of diet overlap among the lizard species was also examined. Aiming to check if the defense mechanisms of termite influence their consuming pattern by lizards it was performed a laboratory experiment where termite with different defense mechanisms were offered to lizards of two different lineages. We verified that lizard assemblages do not consume termites according to termite abundance in ecosystems. Furthermore, mean niche overlap lizard species did not differ significantly from that expected by chance. We found that termite chemical defense mechanism does influence the termite s pattern consuming by lizards. These results do not corroborate premises which support Morton & James hypothesis (1988) and point out that lizard do not chose termites based on their abundance, but, trying to avoid consuming termites which exhibit chemical defense mechanisms. This defense mechanism, however, may not be the only explanation to patterns of termite s consuming by lizards.

As aulas régias da Capitania da Bahia (1759 1827): pensamento, vida e trabalho de nobres professores

Simultanément à l' expulsion des jésuites du contrôles de l' éducaton formeI du royaume portugais, l'Ordre du 28 juin 1759 a décrété une reforme générale aux études, comme une des partie d'un ensemble de mesures modernisatoires qui ont été établisent dans le Royaume et dans ses domaines à la période comprise entre 1750 et 1777, pendant le royaume de D. José I et sous la direction de son principal ministre, Sebastião José Carvalho e MeIo, plus connu par le titre de noblesse de Marquis de Pombal. Notre thèse, locaIisée notament à la Capitanie de Bahia (Capitanie - division politique administrative du Brésil Colonie) entre les années de 1759 à 1827, a comme objet d'études les singularités du magistère bahianais et comme objectif, à partir de Ia référence théorique de l'histoire sociale des idées, comprendre comment les membres de cette nouvelle catégorie professionelle, crée pour préparés des cadres professionels mais bien qualifiés pour exercer leurs fonctions de burocratie de l'État, ont pris contact avec la pensée reforniste ilustré portugais du siècle XVIII, ont été véhiculé autant par des étrangérisés, comme par la législation pombalina (du Marquis de Pombal) et comme cet ensembIe théorique rapporté à la pensée, la vie et le travail d'enseignant de ces premiers représentants du magistère bahianais. L' analyse de la documentation (des lettres, et des ordres royals, des licences officielles pour exercer la fonction, et des serments des professeurs royal pour les plusieurs villages et capitanies; registres de correspondence reçues et envoyées par les chambres des villages; registres et correspondences expédiées par plusieurs autorités; provisions; tous les types de licences et autorisations; désignation; testament et inventaires) montre que les professeurs royals, malgré la quantité pas très nombreuses de membres, ont été extremement actifs sur les décisions les plus importantes de la période de celle qui est connue comme la crise du système colonial, qui, en Bahia, a eu ses particularités dans un mouvement d' émancipation politique seulement au mois de juillet 1823. Finallement, on a le but, dans le contenu de cette thèse de doctorat, d'offrir une connaissance sur l'histoire de l'éducation brésilienne et bahianaise qu' on retrouve encore entouré de doutes, préjugements et imterpretations équivoques qui insistent d'anaIyser le Brésil sous un stigmate du retard du royaume portugais, malgré sa production récente dans l'historiographie

As organizações não-governamentais e a educação básica oferecida aos pobres: do consenso da oferta à ação privatizante

This work articulates a discussion about the role of the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in the social policies scenario, privileging the basic education directed to the poor in Brazil, in the period from 1992 to 2002. It is a relevant theme, particularly due to the importance of the NGOs in both the national and international scope actions. The study assumes that the NGOs are instruments of control (social control) that filter the social demands towards the State, specially regarding the basic education directed to the poor. It also discusses the process of acknowledgement e expansion of the NGOs as a result of the political and economic conjuncture leading to the State reform, which had an impact on the field of social policies. A close examination of these complex relations was only possible through the understanding of the third sector establishment, having the NGOs as the main means. In this movement, relevant information of the reality are considered in order to delimit the extents of this phenomenon, with a brief reference to its origins, to the marks of its conjunctural relations, registering the multiple faces of these Organizations and the constutive elements of the debate among different visions regarding the third sector, having the NGOs as a part of its composition. With this approach, documents and publications by the NGOs and the government are researched. Based on this material, the purposes announced by these organizations are analyzed, considering the Brazilian social, political and economic conjuncture. The State of Maranhão has been chosen as an example of this context, due to the high levels of poverty and low school performance, and also given that a great many NGOs actions are more and more being held in that location in order to promote social policies. It has been concluded that the NGOs help strengthen the theses that show the decrease in the State responsibilities on free, public and quality education, and that such principle is being negotiated through the partners actions

Cultura organizacional e comprometimento dos funcionários do Soleil Suíte Hotel

This study examines the relationship of the types of organizational culture perceived in a business hotel with the nature of the link between individual and organization. This linkage between commitment and organizational culture has been little explored, both national and international, requiring more studies. Thus, the survey was conducted in Soleil Suite Hotel, located on the beach of Ponta Negra, city of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte. The independent variable of the proposed model was represented by the types of organizational culture, while the dependent variable was represented by the four dimensions of commitment. It was used in addition to the correspondence analysis, the arithmetic mean, the Pearson s correlation and the simple regression analysis. The results indicated the existence of relationship of the types of organizational culture with the kind of commitment shown by the officials, where the cultures of Group and Innovative, capable of generating an environment dedicated to the work as a team, the development and professional growth of the employees, as well as the creativity and individual freedom of each one to try new things, encourage the dominance of the dimensions Affective, Affiliative and Normative of the tie person-organization

Adoção de tecnologias móveis em empresas do Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco e Ceará

One of the best examples of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) evolutions is on the high capability of storing and processing data into smaller devices, creating a new business condition, the mobility . This mobility in a deeper analysis proposes a business remodeling in many different areas (business segmentations), through the Internet anywhere at any time, allowing managers and researchers to think again their actual models that work nowadays in companies and public institutions, modifying the way internal and external clients can be attended. This thesis analyzes issues on mobile business adoption, technological evolutions and the impacts caused by this new reality the access to information anywhere at any time . This research is exploratory and shows a compilation of similar papers and thesis describing how was conducted the survey within 50 companies in the states of Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco and Ceará. The statistics analysis showed the different level of mobile technology usage from simple voice communications to wide band data transmission. The analysis pointed that canonic correlation was the most effective type of analysis to describe the relations among all groups of variables showing which of them are relevant, or not, for mobile technology adoption

Uso de renderização volumétrica e realidade virtual para problemas de percolação na engenharia

In the recovering process of oil, rock heterogeneity has a huge impact on how fluids move in the field, defining how much oil can be recovered. In order to study this variability, percolation theory, which describes phenomena involving geometry and connectivity are the bases, is a very useful model. Result of percolation is tridimensional data and have no physical meaning until visualized in form of images or animations. Although a lot of powerful and sophisticated visualization tools have been developed, they focus on generation of planar 2D images. In order to interpret data as they would be in the real world, virtual reality techniques using stereo images could be used. In this work we propose an interactive and helpful tool, named ZSweepVR, based on virtual reality techniques that allows a better comprehension of volumetric data generated by simulation of dynamic percolation. The developed system has the ability to render images using two different techniques: surface rendering and volume rendering. Surface rendering is accomplished by OpenGL directives and volume rendering is accomplished by the Zsweep direct volume rendering engine. In the case of volumetric rendering, we implemented an algorithm to generate stereo images. We also propose enhancements in the original percolation algorithm in order to get a better performance. We applied our developed tools to a mature field database, obtaining satisfactory results. The use of stereoscopic and volumetric images brought valuable contributions for the interpretation and clustering formation analysis in percolation, what certainly could lead to better decisions about the exploration and recovery process in oil fields

Um sistema de visão para navegação robusta de uma plataforma robótica semi-autônoma

Large efforts have been maden by the scientific community on tasks involving locomotion of mobile robots. To execute this kind of task, we must develop to the robot the ability of navigation through the environment in a safe way, that is, without collisions with the objects. In order to perform this, it is necessary to implement strategies that makes possible to detect obstacles. In this work, we deal with this problem by proposing a system that is able to collect sensory information and to estimate the possibility for obstacles to occur in the mobile robot path. Stereo cameras positioned in parallel to each other in a structure coupled to the robot are employed as the main sensory device, making possible the generation of a disparity map. Code optimizations and a strategy for data reduction and abstraction are applied to the images, resulting in a substantial gain in the execution time. This makes possible to the high level decision processes to execute obstacle deviation in real time. This system can be employed in situations where the robot is remotely operated, as well as in situations where it depends only on itself to generate trajectories (the autonomous case)

Mapeamento robótico 2,5-D com representação em grade de ocupação-elevação

This work introduces a new method for environment mapping with three-dimensional information from visual information for robotic accurate navigation. Many approaches of 3D mapping using occupancy grid typically requires high computacional effort to both build and store the map. We introduce an 2.5-D occupancy-elevation grid mapping, which is a discrete mapping approach, where each cell stores the occupancy probability, the height of the terrain at current place in the environment and the variance of this height. This 2.5-dimensional representation allows that a mobile robot to know whether a place in the environment is occupied by an obstacle and the height of this obstacle, thus, it can decide if is possible to traverse the obstacle. Sensorial informations necessary to construct the map is provided by a stereo vision system, which has been modeled with a robust probabilistic approach, considering the noise present in the stereo processing. The resulting maps favors the execution of tasks like decision making in the autonomous navigation, exploration, localization and path planning. Experiments carried out with a real mobile robots demonstrates that this proposed approach yields useful maps for robot autonomous navigation

VCO Banda Larga Integrado para Receptor a Cinco Portas

This work presents an wideband ring VCO for cognitive radio five-port based receivers. A three-stage differential topology using transmission gate was adopted in order to maintain wide and linear tuning range and a low phase-noise. Monte-Carlo analysis were performed for phase-shift response of individual stages, which is an important figure of merit in five-port works. It was observed a fairly linear correlation between control voltage and oscillation frequency in the range between 200 MHz and 1800 MHz. The VCO was preliminarily designed for IBM 130nm CMOS technology

Multi-resolução com fóvea móvel para redução e abstração de dados em tempo real

We propose a new approach to reduction and abstraction of visual information for robotics vision applications. Basically, we propose to use a multi-resolution representation in combination with a moving fovea for reducing the amount of information from an image. We introduce the mathematical formalization of the moving fovea approach and mapping functions that help to use this model. Two indexes (resolution and cost) are proposed that can be useful to choose the proposed model variables. With this new theoretical approach, it is possible to apply several filters, to calculate disparity and to obtain motion analysis in real time (less than 33ms to process an image pair at a notebook AMD Turion Dual Core 2GHz). As the main result, most of time, the moving fovea allows the robot not to perform physical motion of its robotics devices to keep a possible region of interest visible in both images. We validate the proposed model with experimental results

Teste de acidez graxa como índice de qualidade em arroz

Pesquisas visando a redução de perdas de grãos e sementes durante o armazenamento têm ocupado destaque em vários países. Dentro deste contexto, a avaliação da eficácia de um índice de qualidade de boa aplicabilidade, com metodologia simples e de resposta imediata visando tomadas rápidas de decisão é de suma importância. O presente trabalho, conduzido no Laboratório de Processamento de Produtos Agrícolas UNESP, Botucatu/SP teve como objetivos: (a) estabelecer correspondência entre o nível de ácidos graxos livres e as classes de vigor em sementes; (b) estabelecer correspondência entre o nível de ácidos graxos livres e a classificação comercial por tipos, em grãos de arroz (Oryza sativa L.). A correspondência entre o nível de ácidos livres e as classes de vigor em sementes foi avaliada utilizando-se sementes envelhecidas artificialmente, obtendo-se assim níveis diferenciados de vigor. A correspondência entre o nível de ácidos graxos livres e a classificação por tipos, em grãos de arroz, foi realizada utilizando-se amostras de arroz com as porcentagens máximas de grãos defeituosos permitidos pela legislação vigente. Utilizou-se a análise de variância de um delineamento inteiramente ao acaso e, para comparação entre médias, aplicou-se o teste de Tukey ao nível de 5% de probabilidade. Por meio dos resultados obtidos, observou-se que o teste de acidez graxa mostrou-se exeqüível para avaliar o vigor de sementes de arroz. Na pesquisa que buscava uma correspondência entre os valores de acidez graxa e classificação comercial, os dados revelaram a tendência do nível de ácidos graxos livres acompanhar a classificação comercial por tipos.

Técnicas visuais de localização e mapeamento simultâneos sem extração de primitivas geométricas da imagem

In Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM - Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), a robot placed in an unknown location in any environment must be able to create a perspective of this environment (a map) and is situated in the same simultaneously, using only information captured by the robot s sensors and control signals known. Recently, driven by the advance of computing power, work in this area have proposed to use video camera as a sensor and it came so Visual SLAM. This has several approaches and the vast majority of them work basically extracting features of the environment, calculating the necessary correspondence and through these estimate the required parameters. This work presented a monocular visual SLAM system that uses direct image registration to calculate the image reprojection error and optimization methods that minimize this error and thus obtain the parameters for the robot pose and map of the environment directly from the pixels of the images. Thus the steps of extracting and matching features are not needed, enabling our system works well in environments where traditional approaches have difficulty. Moreover, when addressing the problem of SLAM as proposed in this work we avoid a very common problem in traditional approaches, known as error propagation. Worrying about the high computational cost of this approach have been tested several types of optimization methods in order to find a good balance between good estimates and processing time. The results presented in this work show the success of this system in different environments

Mamíferos de médio e grande porte e sua relação com o mosaico de habitats na cuesta de Botucatu, Estado de São Paulo, Brasil

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Distribuição ambiental e temporal das comunidades de macroalgas de riachos da Serra da Prata, Estado do Paraná, Sul do Brasil

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