Genetic structure in a tropical lek-breeding bird, the blue manakin (Chiroxiphia caudata) in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest

Determining the genetic structure of tropical bird populations is important for assessing potential genetic effects of future habitat fragmentation and for testing hypotheses about evolutionary mechanisms promoting diversification. Here we used 10 microsatellite DNA loci to describe levels of genetic differentiation for five populations of the lek-mating blue manakin (Chiroxiphia caudata), sampled along a 414-km transect within the largest remaining continuous tract of the highly endangered Atlantic Forest habitat in southeast Brazil. We found small but significant levels of differentiation between most populations. F-ST values varied from 0.0 to 0.023 (overall F-ST = 0.012) that conformed to a strong isolation by distance relationship, suggesting that observed levels of differentiation are a result of migration-drift equilibrium. N(e)m values estimated using a coalescent-based method were small (<= 2 migrants per generation) and close to the minimum level required to maintain genetic similarity between populations. An implication of these results is that if future habitat fragmentation reduces dispersal between populations to even a small extent, then individual populations may undergo a loss of genetic diversity due to an increase in the relative importance of drift, since inbreeding effective population sizes are relatively small (N-e similar to 1000). Our findings also demonstrate that population structuring can occur in a tropical bird in continuous habitat in the absence of geographical barriers possibly due to behavioural features of the species.

Mean-field description of a dynamical collapse of a fermionic condensate in a trapped boson-fermion mixture

We suggest a time-dependent dynamical mean-field-hydrodynamic model for the collapse of a trapped boson-fermion condensate and perform numerical simulation based on it to understand some aspects of the experiment by Modugno et al. [Science 297, 2240 (2002)] on the collapse of the fermionic condensate in the K-40-Rb-87 mixture. We show that the mean-field model explains the formation of a stationary boson-fermion condensate at zero temperature with relative sizes compatible with experiment. This model is also found to yield a faithful representation of the collapse dynamics in qualitative agreement with experiment. In particular we consider the collapse of the fermionic condensate associated with (a) an increase of the number of bosonic atoms as in the experiment and (b) an increase of the attractive boson-fermion interaction using a Feshbach resonance. Suggestion for experiments of fermionic collapse using a Feshbach resonance is made.

Universal scaling in a trapped Fermi super-fluid in the BCS-unitarity crossover

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

Determination of pesticides multiresidues in shallow groundwater in a cotton-growing region of Mato Grosso, Brazil

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Planejamento e controle da produção de cilindros para laminação: um estudo de caso quantitativo

Este trabalho apresenta um modelo de otimização-simulação aplicado em um estudo de caso real no setor de cilindros para laminação de uma siderúrgica, buscando melhorar o gerenciamento da área/equipamento gargalo da linha de produção. A simulação atuou em conjunto com um modelo de otimização da programação linear inteira (PLI) para melhorar o atendimento de prazo junto aos clientes em uma produção não seriada. Como resultado deste procedimento combinado da PLI e simulação, o processo produtivo foi otimizado e as filas de espera e o lead-time foram reduzidos, melhorando o atendimento aos clientes.

Loss of imprinting and loss of heterozygosity on 11p15.5 in head and neck squamous cell carcinomas

Background. IGF2 and H19 are reciprocal imprinted genes with paternal and maternal monoallelic expression, respectively. This is interesting, because IGF2 is known as a growth factor, and H19 encodes a RNA with putative tumor suppressor action. Furthermore, IGF2 and H19 are linked genes located on chromosome 11p15.5, a common site of loss of heterozygosity in human cancers.Methods. We performed an allelic-typing assay using a PCR-RFLP-based method for identification of heterozygous Informative cases in head and neck squamous cell carcinomas. Tumoral total RNA was extracted from each of the heterozygotes and further studied by RT-PCR analysis.Results. We detected the expression of the IGF2 gene in 10 of 10 informative cases. Two cases exhibited LOI of the IGF2 gene as evidenced by biallelic expression, and in another case, LOH was coupled with monoallelic expression of this growth factor. LOI for the H19 gene was observed in 1 of 14 informative samples analyzed. In this case, we also detected parallel mono-allelic expression of the IGF2 gene. Down-regulation of the H19 gene was observed in 10 of 14 cases.Conclusion. These findings support the hypothesis that H19 may be a tumor suppressor gene involved In head and neck carcinogenesis. Furthermore, our data showed that genetic and epigenetic chances at 11p15.5 could lead to abnormal expression of imprinted genes in HNSCC. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Classificação automática de padrões projetados por um sistema de luz estruturada

One of the main problems in Computer Vision and Close Range Digital Photogrammetry is 3D reconstruction. 3D reconstruction with structured light is one of the existing techniques and which still has several problems, one of them the identification or classification of the projected targets. Approaching this problem is the goal of this paper. An area based method called template matching was used for target classification. This method performs detection of area similarity by correlation, which measures the similarity between the reference and search windows, using a suitable correlation function. In this paper the modified cross covariance function was used, which presented the best results. A strategy was developed for adaptative resampling of the patterns, which solved the problem of deformation of the targets due to object surface inclination. Experiments with simulated and real data were performed in order to assess the efficiency of the proposed methodology for target detection. The results showed that the proposed classification strategy works properly, identifying 98% of targets in plane surfaces and 93% in oblique surfaces.

Infrared face recogniton by optimum-path forest

This paper presents a novel, fast and accurate appearance-based method for infrared face recognition. By introducing the Optimum-Path Forest classifier, our objective is to get good recognition rates and effectively reduce the computational effort. The feature extraction procedure is carried out by PCA, and the results are compared to two other well known supervised learning classifiers; Artificial Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines. The achieved performance asserts the promise of the proposed framework. ©2009 IEEE.

A regularized nonlinear diffusion approach for texture image denoising

In this paper a new partial differential equation based method is presented with a view to denoising images having textures. The proposed model combines a nonlinear anisotropic diffusion filter with recent harmonic analysis techniques. A wave atom shrinkage allied to detection by gradient technique is used to guide the diffusion process so as to smooth and maintain essential image characteristics. Two forcing terms are used to maintain and improve edges, boundaries and oscillatory features of an image having irregular details and texture. Experimental results show the performance of our model for texture preserving denoising when compared to recent methods in literature. © 2009 IEEE.

Extração de vias combinando métodos de detecção de regiões e linhas em imagens de intensidade de pulso laser

This paper aims at extracting street centerlines from previously isolated street regions by using the image of laser scanning intensity. In this image, streets are easily identified, since they manifest as dark, elongate ribbons contrasting with background objects. The intensity image is segmented by using the region growing technique, which generates regions representing the streets. From these regions, the street centerlines are extracted in two manners. The first one is through the Steger lines detection method combined with a line length thresholding by which lines being shorter than a minimum length are removed. The other manner is by combining the skeletonization method of regions based on the Medial Axis Transform and with a pruning process to eliminate as much as possible the ramifications. Experiments showed that the Steger-based method provided results better than the method based on skeletonization.

Education and income distribution in urban Brazil, 1976-1996

Includes bibliography

Decay of photo-induced conductivity in Sb-doped SnO2 thin films, using monochromatic light of about bandgap energy

Doping tin dioxide (SnO2) with pentavalent Sb5+ ions leads to an enhancement in the electrical conductivity of this material, because Sb5+ substitutes Sn4+ in the matrix, promoting an electronic density increase in the conduction band, due to the donor-like nature of the doping atom. Results of computational simulation, based on the Density Functional Theory (DFT), of SnO2:4%Sb and SnO2:8%Sb show that the bandgap magnitude is strongly affected by the doping concentration, because the energy value found for 4 at%Sb and 8 at%Sb was 3.27 eV and 3.13 eV, respectively, whereas the well known value for undoped SnO2 is about 3.6 eV. Sb-doped SnO2 thin films were obtained by the sol-gel-dip-coating technique. The samples were submitted to excitation with below theoretical bandgap light (450 nm), as well as above bandgap light (266 nm) at low temperature, and a temperature-dependent increase in the conductivity is observed. Besides, an unusual temperature and time dependent decay when the illumination is removed is also observed, where the decay time is slower for higher temperatures. This decay is modeled by considering thermally activated cross section of trapping centers, and the hypothesis of grain boundary scattering as the dominant mechanism for electronic mobility. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Fuzzy community structure detection by particle competition and cooperation

Identification and classification of overlapping nodes in networks are important topics in data mining. In this paper, a network-based (graph-based) semi-supervised learning method is proposed. It is based on competition and cooperation among walking particles in a network to uncover overlapping nodes by generating continuous-valued outputs (soft labels), corresponding to the levels of membership from the nodes to each of the communities. Moreover, the proposed method can be applied to detect overlapping data items in a data set of general form, such as a vector-based data set, once it is transformed to a network. Usually, label propagation involves risks of error amplification. In order to avoid this problem, the proposed method offers a mechanism to identify outliers among the labeled data items, and consequently prevents error propagation from such outliers. Computer simulations carried out for synthetic and real-world data sets provide a numeric quantification of the performance of the method. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

Ajuste de modelos estruturais aplicado em problema de contato

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Enumeração celular pela quantificação absoluta por PCR em tempo real de culturas de bradirrizóbios

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)