Differences in the perception of interest representation: a comparision of Brasília and Brussels lobbying activity

The research topic of this paper is focused on the analysis of how trade associations perceive lobbying in Brussels and in Brasília. The analysis will be centered on business associations located in Brasília and Brussels as the two core centers of decision-making and as an attraction for the lobbying practice. The underlying principles behind the comparison between Brussels and Brasilia are two. Firstof all because the European Union and Brazil have maintained diplomatic relations since 1960. Through these relations they have built up close historical, cultural, economic and political ties. Their bilateral political relations culminated in 2007 with the establishment of a Strategic Partnership (EEAS website,n.d.). Over the years, Brazil has become a key interlocutor for the EU and it is the most important market for the EU in Latin America (European Commission, 2007). Taking into account the relations between EU and Brazil, this research could contribute to the reciprocal knowledge about the perception of lobby in the respective systems and the importance of the non-market strategy when conducting business. Second both EU and Brazilian systems have a multi-level governance structure: 28 Member States in the EU and 26 Member States in Brazil; in both systems there are three main institutions targeted by lobbying practice. The objective is to compare how differences in the institutional environments affect the perception and practice of lobbying, where institutions are defined as ‘‘regulative, normative, and cognitive structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to social behavior’’ (Peng et al., 2009). Brussels, the self-proclaimed "Capital of Europe”, is the headquarters of the European Union and has one of the highest concentrations of political power in the world. Four of the seven Institutions of the European Union are based in Brussels: the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council and the European Commission (EU website, n.d.). As the power of the EU institutions has grown, Brussels has become a magnet for lobbyists, with the latest estimates ranging from between 15,000 and 30,000 professionals representing companies, industry sectors, farmers, civil society groups, unions etc. (Burson Marsteller, 2013). Brasília is the capital of Brazil and the seat of government of the Federal District and the three branches of the federal government of Brazilian legislative, executive and judiciary. The 4 city also hosts 124 foreign embassies. The presence of the formal representations of companies and trade associations in Brasília is very limited, but the governmental interests remain there and the professionals dealing with government affairs commute there. In the European Union, Brussels has established a Transparency Register that allows the interactions between the European institutions and citizen’s associations, NGOs, businesses, trade and professional organizations, trade unions and think tanks. The register provides citizens with a direct and single access to information about who is engaged in This process is important for the quality of democracy, and for its capacity to deliver adequate policies, matching activities aimed at influencing the EU decision-making process, which interests are being pursued and what level of resources are invested in these activities (Celgene, n.d). It offers a single code of conduct, binding all organizations and self-employed individuals who accept to “play by the rules” in full respect of ethical principles (EC website, n.d). A complaints and sanctions mechanism ensures the enforcement of the rules and addresses suspected breaches of the code. In Brazil, there is no specific legislation regulating lobbying. The National Congress is currently discussing dozens of bills that address regulation of lobbying and the action of interest groups (De Aragão, 2012), but none of them has been enacted for the moment. This work will focus on class lobbying (Oliveira, 2004), which refers to the performance of the federation of national labour or industrial unions, like CNI (National Industry Confederation) in Brazil and the European Banking Federation (EBF) in Brussels. Their performance aims to influence the Executive and Legislative branches in order to defend the interests of their affiliates. When representing unions and federations, class entities cover a wide range of different and, more often than not, conflicting interests. That is why they are limited to defending the consensual and majority interest of their affiliates (Oliveira, 2004). The basic assumption of this work is that institutions matter (Peng et al, 2009) and that the trade associations and their affiliates, when doing business, have to take into account the institutional and regulatory framework where they do business.

Show me the money and I will bring you the head: evaluation of the effects of self-interest and anger on whistleblowing

Though many of those who decided to report wrongdoings in their organizations were able to tell their stories (e.g. Bamford, 2014, Armenakis 2004), it is fair to say that there is still much left to uncover. The paper aims to contribute to the literature in three ways. First, it provides preliminary evidence that the wrongdoing linked with individual financial loss leads to higher whistleblowing rate. Secondly, it shows how the experience of anger is related to the higher likelihood to report the wrongdoer but only if the wrongful act is perceived as a cause of one’s financial loss. Finally, the paper establishes first steps for the future development of an experimental procedure that would enable to predict, and measure whistleblowing behavior in the lab environment.

Welfare cost of inflation considering adoption decisions and interest-bearing deposits

Attanasio et al. (JPE, 2002) have used microeconomic data on households to provide new estimates of the welfare costs of infiation using Bailey's unidimensional welfare measure as a basis for their calculations. Such a measure does not properly take into consideration lhe fact that the majority of households in their sample (58.7 percent) holds not only bank deposits and currency, but also a second type of interest-bearing assct. This work devises alternative formulas which account for the existence of bank deposits and a sccond interest-bearing asset in the economy, as well as for adoption decisions regarding alternative financiai technologies.

Development of a novel microextraction by packed sorbent-based approach followed by ultrahigh pressure liquid chromatography as a powerful technique for quantification phenolic constituents of biological interest in wines

A novel analytical approach, based on a miniaturized extraction technique, the microextraction by packed sorbent (MEPS), followed by ultrahigh pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC) separation combined with a photodiode array (PDA) detection, has been developed and validated for the quantitative determination of sixteen biologically active phenolic constituents of wine. In addition to performing routine experiments to establish the validity of the assay to internationally accepted criteria (linearity, sensitivity, selectivity, precision, accuracy), experiments are included to assess the effect of the important experimental parameters on the MEPS performance such as the type of sorbent material (C2, C8, C18, SIL, and M1), number of extraction cycles (extract-discard), elution volume, sample volume, and ethanol content, were studied. The optimal conditions of MEPS extraction were obtained using C8 sorbent and small sample volumes (250 μL) in five extraction cycle and in a short time period (about 5 min for the entire sample preparation step). The wine bioactive phenolics were eluted by 250 μL of the mixture containing 95% methanol and 5% water, and the separation was carried out on a HSS T3 analytical column (100 mm × 2.1 mm, 1.8 μm particle size) using a binary mobile phase composed of aqueous 0.1% formic acid (eluent A) and methanol (eluent B) in the gradient elution mode (10 min of total analysis). The method gave satisfactory results in terms of linearity with r2-values > 0.9986 within the established concentration range. The LOD varied from 85 ng mL−1 (ferulic acid) to 0.32 μg mL−1 ((+)-catechin), whereas the LOQ values from 0.028 μg mL−1 (ferulic acid) to 1.08 μg mL−1 ((+)-catechin). Typical recoveries ranged between 81.1 and 99.6% for red wines and between 77.1 and 99.3% for white wines, with relative standard deviations (RSD) no larger than 10%. The extraction yields of the MEPSC8/UHPLC–PDA methodology were found between 78.1 (syringic acid) and 99.6% (o-coumaric acid) for red wines and between 76.2 and 99.1% for white wines. The inter-day precision, expressed as the relative standard deviation (RSD%), varied between 0.2% (p-coumaric and o-coumaric acids) and 7.5% (gentisic acid) while the intra-day precision between 0.2% (o-coumaric and cinnamic acids) and 4.7% (gallic acid and (−)-epicatechin). On the basis of analytical validation, it is shown that the MEPSC8/UHPLC–PDA methodology proves to be an improved, reliable, and ultra-fast approach for wine bioactive phenolics analysis, because of its capability for determining simultaneously in a single chromatographic run several bioactive metabolites with high sensitivity, selectivity and resolving power within only 10 min. Preliminary studies have been carried out on 34 real whole wine samples, in order to assess the performance of the described procedure. The new approach offers decreased sample preparation and analysis time, and moreover is cheaper, more environmentally friendly and easier to perform as compared to traditional methodologies.

Method of numerical correction of errors occasioned by delay of records during the monitoring of environmental variables of interest for animal production

As condições de ambiente térmico e aéreo, no interior de instalações para animais, alteram-se durante o dia, devido à influência do ambiente externo. Para que análises estatísticas e geoestatísticas sejam representativas, uma grande quantidade de pontos distribuídos espacialmente na área da instalação deve ser monitorada. Este trabalho propõe que a variação no tempo das variáveis ambientais de interesse para a produção animal, monitoradas no interior de instalações para animais, pode ser modelada com precisão a partir de registros discretos no tempo. O objetivo deste trabalho foi desenvolver um método numérico para corrigir as variações temporais dessas variáveis ambientais, transformando os dados para que tais observações independam do tempo gasto durante a aferição. O método proposto aproximou os valores registrados com retardos de tempo aos esperados no exato momento de interesse, caso os dados fossem medidos simultaneamente neste momento em todos os pontos distribuídos espacialmente. O modelo de correção numérica para variáveis ambientais foi validado para o parâmetro ambiental temperatura do ar, sendo que os valores corrigidos pelo método não diferiram pelo teste Tukey, a 5% de probabilidade dos valores reais registrados por meio de dataloggers.

Otimização de modelos de predição da perda de propagação aplicáveis em 3,5GHZ utilizando algoritmos genéticos

The telecommunications industry has experienced recent changes, due to increasing quest for access to digital services for data, video and multimedia, especially using the mobile phone networks. Recently in Brazil, mobile operators are upgrading their networks to third generations systems (3G) providing to users broadband services such as video conferencing, Internet, digital TV and more. These new networks that provides mobility and high data rates has allowed the development of new market concepts. Currently the market is focused on the expansion of WiMAX technology, which is gaining increasingly the market for mobile voice and data. In Brazil, the commercial interest for this technology appears to the first award of licenses in the 3.5 GHz band. In February 2003 ANATEL held the 003/2002/SPV-ANATEL bidding, where it offered blocks of frequencies in the range of 3.5 GHz. The enterprises who purchased blocks of frequency were: Embratel, Brazil Telecom (Vant), Grupo Sinos, Neovia and WKVE, each one with operations spread in some regions of Brazil. For this and other wireless communications systems are implemented effectively, many efforts have been invested in attempts to developing simulation methods for coverage prediction that is close to reality as much as possible so that they may become believers and indispensable tools to design wireless communications systems. In this work wasm developed a genetic algorithm (GA's) that is able to optimize the models for predicting propagation loss at applicable frequency range of 3.5 GHz, thus enabling an estimate of the signal closer to reality to avoid significant errors in planning and implementation a system of wireless communication

Sparse 1D discrete Dirac operators I: Quantum transport

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Sparse one-dimensional discrete Dirac operators II: Spectral properties

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

Vanadium and its complexes: The renewed interest in its biochemistry

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

Cauchy-Stieltjes Integral on Time Scales in Banach Spaces and Hysteresis Operators

The play operator has a fundamental importance in the theory of hysteresis. It was studied in various settings as shown by P. Krejci and Ph. Laurencot in 2002. In that work it was considered the Young integral in the frame of Hilbert spaces. Here we study the play in the frame of the regulated functions (that is: the ones having only discontinuities of the first kind) on a general time scale T (that is: with T being a nonempty closed set of real numbers) with values in a Banach space. We will be showing that the dual space in this case will be defined as the space of operators of bounded semivariation if we consider as the bilinearity pairing the Cauchy-Stieltjes integral on time scales.

Rhamnolipids and PHAs: Recent reports on Pseudomonas-derived molecules of increasing industrial interest

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

Multiscale Fractal Descriptors and Polynomial Classifier for Partial Pixels Identification in Regions of Interest of Mammographic Images

Computer systems are used to support breast cancer diagnosis, with decisions taken from measurements carried out in regions of interest (ROIs). We show that support decisions obtained from square or rectangular ROIs can to include background regions with different behavior of healthy or diseased tissues. In this study, the background regions were identified as Partial Pixels (PP), obtained with a multilevel method of segmentation based on maximum entropy. The behaviors of healthy, diseased and partial tissues were quantified by fractal dimension and multiscale lacunarity, calculated through signatures of textures. The separability of groups was achieved using a polynomial classifier. The polynomials have powerful approximation properties as classifiers to treat characteristics linearly separable or not. This proposed method allowed quantifying the ROIs investigated and demonstrated that different behaviors are obtained, with distinctions of 90% for images obtained in the Cranio-caudal (CC) and Mediolateral Oblique (MLO) views.

Multitrace operators and the generalized AdS/CFT prescription

We show that multitrace interactions can be consistently incorporated into an extended AdS conformal field theory (CFT) prescription involving the inclusion of generalized boundary conditions and a modified Legendre transform prescription. We find new and consistent results by considering a self-contained formulation which relates the quantization of the bulk theory to the AdS/CFT correspondence and the perturbation at the boundary by double-trace interactions. We show that there exist particular double-trace perturbations for which irregular modes are allowed to propagate as well as the regular ones. We perform a detailed analysis of many different possible situations, for both minimally and nonminimally coupled cases. In all situations, we make use of a new constraint which is found by requiring consistency. In the particular nonminimally coupled case, the natural extension of the Gibbons-Hawking surface term is generated.

Superstring vertex operators in an AdS(5) x S-5 background

A quantizable action has recently been proposed for the superstring in an AdS(5) x S-5 background with Ramond-Ramond flux. In this paper we construct physical vertex operators corresponding to on-shell fluctuations around the AdS(5) x S-5 background. The structure of these AdS(5) x S-5 vertex operators closely resembles the structure of the massless vertex operators in a flat background. (C) 2001 Elsevier B.V. B.V. All rights reserved.