O refúgio no direito internacional contemporâneo: entre a segurança nacional e a proteção do indivíduo

O direito internacional dos refugiados constitui um dos mais importantes mecanismos de proteção internacional do indivíduo, sendo objeto de Convenção com alto número de ratificações e de legislação nacional ainda mais protetiva. Não obstante o amplo acervo normativo disponível, desenvolvido para lidar com os desafios impostos pelos frequentes fluxos migracionais que marcaram a primeira metade do século XX, fenômenos recentes tornaram evidente a necessidade de revisão, ainda que parcial, de sua estrutura. Políticas de controle de fronteiras adotadas na Europa levaram ao incremento do fluxo de refugiados entre Estados do Sul. Paralelamente, a transferência de parte do controle para fora das águas territoriais europeias fenômeno observado também no sudeste asiático põe o direito internacional dos refugiados em confronto com a regulamentação do direito do mar. Enquanto isto, o Brasil, por não possuir histórico recente relevante de recebimento de migrantes, enfrenta grande dificuldade para garantir até mesmo o reconhecimento da condição de refugiado. Neste contexto, é imprescindível o enfrentamento de tais problemas, compatibilizando o instituto do refúgio com as necessidades das primeiras décadas do século XXI.

Marine cage culture and the environment: twenty-first century science informing a sustainable industry

Technological innovation has made it possible to grow marine finfish in the coastal and open ocean. Along with this opportunity comes environmental risk. As a federal agency charged with stewardship of the nation’s marine resources, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requires tools to evaluate the benefits and risks that aquaculture poses in the marine environment, to implement policies and regulations which safeguard our marine and coastal ecosystems, and to inform production designs and operational procedures compatible with marine stewardship. There is an opportunity to apply the best available science and globally proven best management practices to regulate and guide a sustainable United States (U.S.) marine finfish farming aquaculture industry. There are strong economic incentives to develop this industry, and doing so in an environmentally responsible way is possible if stakeholders, the public and regulatory agencies have a clear understanding of the relative risks to the environment and the feasible solutions to minimize, manage or eliminate those risks. This report spans many of the environmental challenges that marine finfish aquaculture faces. We believe that it will serve as a useful tool to those interested in and responsible for the industry and safeguarding the health, productivity and resilience of our marine ecosystems. This report aims to provide a comprehensive review of some predominant environmental risks that marine fish cage culture aquaculture, as it is currently conducted, poses in the marine environment and designs and practices now in use to address these environmental risks in the U.S. and elsewhere. Today’s finfish aquaculture industry has learned, adapted and improved to lessen or eliminate impacts to the marine habitats in which it operates. What progress has been made? What has been learned? How have practices changed and what are the results in terms of water quality, benthic, and other environmental effects? To answer these questions we conducted a critical review of the large body of scientific work published since 2000 on the environmental impacts of marine finfish aquaculture around the world. Our report includes results, findings and recommendations from over 420 papers, primarily from peer-reviewed professional journals. This report provides a broad overview of the twenty-first century marine finfish aquaculture industry, with a targeted focus on potential impacts to water quality, sediment chemistry, benthic communities, marine life and sensitive habitats. Other environmental issues including fish health, genetic issues, and feed formulation were beyond the scope of this report and are being addressed in other initiatives and reports. Also absent is detailed information about complex computer simulations that are used to model discharge, assimilation and accumulation of nutrient waste from farms. These tools are instrumental for siting and managing farms, and a comparative analysis of these models is underway by NOAA.

Simulation of three-dimensional viscous flow in turbomachinery geometries using a solution-adaptive unstructured mesh methodology

This paper presents a numerical method for the simulation of flow in turbomachinery blade rows using a solution-adaptive mesh methodology. The fully three-dimensional, compressible, Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations with k-ε turbulence modeling (and low Reynolds number damping terms) are solved on an unstructured mesh formed from tetrahedral finite volumes. At stages in the solution, mesh refinement is carried out based on flagging cell faces with either a fractional variation of a chosen variable (like Mach number) greater than a given threshold or with a mean value of the chosen variable within a given range. Several solutions are presented, including that for the highly three-dimensional flow associated with the corner stall and secondary flow in a transonic compressor cascade, to demonstrate the potential of the new method.

A Preliminary study of the defensive spines of some Malayan freshwater fishes

The defensive spines of fifteen Malayan freshwater fishes have been studied morphologically. The classification of spines has been slightly modified from the previous work of Fernando and Fernando (1960). They are divided into simple, denticle-bearing and venom-carrying. The simple spines are further sub-divided into single and multiple and the denticle-bearing into Bagriid and Clariid types. The latter agree morphologically with the venom-carrying spines of previously studied forms and may be a degenerate condition. Simple spines occur singly in the Cyprinidae where they are found at the anterior end of the dorsal fin. A spine of similar structure occurs in the catfish Glyptothorax. In the families Anabantidae, Cichlidae and Mastacenbelidae simple spines occur as a series. Denticle-bearing spines occur in the catfishes (Order-Nematognathi). Those having denticles on one face occur in the Bagridae, Siluridae, Sisoridae, and Akysidae. They are referred to as Bagriid type. In the other type denticles occur on the anterior and posterior faces of the spine. They are referred to as Clariid type. None of the Malayan species studied had venom-carrying spines and they are unlikely to be found in the freshwater species. The functioning of the defensive mechanism whose morphological bases are spines is discussed and the relation between the size and habitat on the effectiveness of the spines is mentioned. The evolution of defensive spines is discussed briefly.

The effects of pile flexibility on pile-loading in laterally spreading slopes

Piles passing through laterally spreading slopes can be subjected to considerable loads by the soil flowing past them. Many case histories have been documented of piles which suffered failure as a result of horizontal loads exerted by the flowing soil. This paper details the results of a series of dynamic centrifuge tests carried out at Cambridge University Engineering Department, to investigate the transfer of load from the spreading soil to the piles passing through it, with particular emphasis on the effective stress state of soil elements immediately upslope and downslope of the pile. This soil stress state can be calculated by virtue of instrumentation measuring both horizontal total stress and pore pressures at locations close to the upslope and downslope faces of the piles. By comparison of results obtained for both rigid and flexible piles, conclusions will be drawn as to the effects of pile flexibility on modifying the behavior of the soil-pile system.

Face recognition from video

In spite of over two decades of intense research, illumination and pose invariance remain prohibitively challenging aspects of face recognition for most practical applications. The objective of this work is to recognize faces using video sequences both for training and recognition input, in a realistic, unconstrained setup in which lighting, pose and user motion pattern have a wide variability and face images are of low resolution. In particular there are three areas of novelty: (i) we show how a photometric model of image formation can be combined with a statistical model of generic face appearance variation, learnt offline, to generalize in the presence of extreme illumination changes; (ii) we use the smoothness of geodesically local appearance manifold structure and a robust same-identity likelihood to achieve invariance to unseen head poses; and (iii) we introduce an accurate video sequence "reillumination" algorithm to achieve robustness to face motion patterns in video. We describe a fully automatic recognition system based on the proposed method and an extensive evaluation on 171 individuals and over 1300 video sequences with extreme illumination, pose and head motion variation. On this challenging data set our system consistently demonstrated a nearly perfect recognition rate (over 99.7%), significantly outperforming state-of-the-art commercial software and methods from the literature. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.

Abundance and composition of benthic fauna in Penaeus monodon Fabricius culture pond on the west coast of Malaysia peninsular

This paper reports a study on the benthic faunal abundance and diversity of tiger shrimp P. monodon culture ponds in Perak, west coast of Malaysia Peninsular. Sampling was carried out at three weeks interval throughout the 116 days culture period. In addition, water temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity, transparency, pH and organic matter of soil were also measured. Results showed that the major groups of macro-benthos comprised of gastropod, foraminifera, polychaetes, bivalve and insects; whereas the meio-benthos comprised of harpacticoid copepods, ostracods, nematodes, gastropods, foraminifera, bivalve, insects, crustacean nauplii and polychaetes. In macro-benthos, the abundance of different sizes of Gastropods increased throughout the culture duration. This consisted of 37-98.20% for <1cm length, 1.80-61.50% for 1-2cm length and 1.18—1.30% for >2cm length. Other macro and meio-benthic organisms decreased linearly with the culture period. The depletion symptom indicates that the culture species may have intensively preyed upon the consumable (<0.5cm in size) benthic fauna together with detritus and artificial diet; or could have been caused by pond bottom deterioration via uneaten feed, faces and toxic gases.

Aging effects on early-stage face perception: An ERP study

We compared early stages of face processing in young and older participants as indexed by ERPs elicited by faces and non-face stimuli presented in upright and inverted orientations. The P1 and N170 components were larger in older than in young participant

Face-based Selection of Corners in 3D Substructuring

In most recent substructuring methods, a fundamental role is played by the coarse space. For some of these methods (e.g. BDDC and FETI-DP), its definition relies on a 'minimal' set of coarse nodes (sometimes called corners) which assures invertibility of local subdomain problems and also of the global coarse problem. This basic set is typically enhanced by enforcing continuity of functions at some generalized degrees of freedom, such as average values on edges or faces of subdomains. We revisit existing algorithms for selection of corners. The main contribution of this paper consists of proposing a new heuristic algorithm for this purpose. Considering faces as the basic building blocks of the interface, inherent parallelism, and better robustness with respect to disconnected subdomains are among features of the new technique. The advantages of the presented algorithm in comparison to some earlier approaches are demonstrated on three engineering problems of structural analysis solved by the BDDC method.

High order schemes on three-dimensional general polyhedral meshes - Application to the level set method

In this article, we detail the methodology developed to construct arbitrarily high order schemes - linear and WENO - on 3D mixed-element unstructured meshes made up of general convex polyhedral elements. The approach is tailored specifically for the solution of scalar level set equations for application to incompressible two-phase flow problems. The construction of WENO schemes on 3D unstructured meshes is notoriously difficult, as it involves a much higher level of complexity than 2D approaches. This due to the multiplicity of geometrical considerations introduced by the extra dimension, especially on mixed-element meshes. Therefore, we have specifically developed a number of algorithms to handle mixed-element meshes composed of convex polyhedra with convex polygonal faces. The contribution of this work concerns several areas of interest: the formulation of an improved methodology in 3D, the minimisation of computational runtime in the implementation through the maximum use of pre-processing operations, the generation of novel methods to handle complex 3D mixed-element meshes and finally the application of the method to the transport of a scalar level set. © 2012 Global-Science Press.

Wrapping the cube and other polyhedra

An infinite series of twofold, two-way weavings of the cube, corresponding to 'wrappings', or double covers of the cube, is described with the aid of the two-parameter Goldberg- Coxeter construction. The strands of all such wrappings correspond to the central circuits (CCs) of octahedrites (four-regular polyhedral graphs with square and triangular faces), which for the cube necessarily have octahedral symmetry. Removing the symmetry constraint leads to wrappings of other eight-vertex convex polyhedra. Moreover, wrappings of convex polyhedra with fewer vertices can be generated by generalizing from octahedrites to i-hedrites, which additionally include digonal faces. When the strands of a wrapping correspond to the CCs of a four-regular graph that includes faces of size greater than 4, non-convex 'crinkled' wrappings are generated. The various generalizations have implications for activities as diverse as the construction of woven-closed baskets and the manufacture of advanced composite components of complex geometry. © 2012 The Royal Society.

Achieving robust face recognition from video by combining a weak photometric model and a learnt generic face invariant

In spite of over two decades of intense research, illumination and pose invariance remain prohibitively challenging aspects of face recognition for most practical applications. The objective of this work is to recognize faces using video sequences both for training and recognition input, in a realistic, unconstrained setup in which lighting, pose and user motion pattern have a wide variability and face images are of low resolution. The central contribution is an illumination invariant, which we show to be suitable for recognition from video of loosely constrained head motion. In particular there are three contributions: (i) we show how a photometric model of image formation can be combined with a statistical model of generic face appearance variation to exploit the proposed invariant and generalize in the presence of extreme illumination changes; (ii) we introduce a video sequence re-illumination algorithm to achieve fine alignment of two video sequences; and (iii) we use the smoothness of geodesically local appearance manifold structure and a robust same-identity likelihood to achieve robustness to unseen head poses. We describe a fully automatic recognition system based on the proposed method and an extensive evaluation on 323 individuals and 1474 video sequences with extreme illumination, pose and head motion variation. Our system consistently achieved a nearly perfect recognition rate (over 99.7% on all four databases). © 2012 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.

Learning based automatic face annotation for arbitrary poses and expressions from frontal images only

Statistical approaches for building non-rigid deformable models, such as the Active Appearance Model (AAM), have enjoyed great popularity in recent years, but typically require tedious manual annotation of training images. In this paper, a learning based approach for the automatic annotation of visually deformable objects from a single annotated frontal image is presented and demonstrated on the example of automatically annotating face images that can be used for building AAMs for fitting and tracking. This approach employs the idea of initially learning the correspondences between landmarks in a frontal image and a set of training images with a face in arbitrary poses. Using this learner, virtual images of unseen faces at any arbitrary pose for which the learner was trained can be reconstructed by predicting the new landmark locations and warping the texture from the frontal image. View-based AAMs are then built from the virtual images and used for automatically annotating unseen images, including images of different facial expressions, at any random pose within the maximum range spanned by the virtually reconstructed images. The approach is experimentally validated by automatically annotating face images from three different databases. © 2009 IEEE.

A flexural crack model for damage detection in reinforced concrete structures

The use of changes in vibration data for damage detection of reinforced concrete structures faces many challenges that obstruct its transition from a research topic to field applications. Among these is the lack of appropriate damage models that can be deployed in the damage detection methods. In this paper, a model of a simply supported reinforced concrete beam with multiple cracks is developed to examine its use for damage detection and structural health monitoring. The cracks are simulated by a model that accounts for crack formation, propagation and closure. The beam model is studied under different dynamic excitations, including sine sweep and single excitation frequency, for various damage levels. The changes in resonant frequency with increasing loads are examined along with the nonlinear vibration characteristics. The model demonstrates that the resonant frequency reduces by about 10% at the application of 30% of the ultimate load and then drops gradually by about 25% at 70% of the ultimate load. The model also illustrates some nonlinearity in the dynamic response of damaged beams. The appearance of super-harmonics shows that the nonlinearity is higher when the damage level is about 35% and then decreases with increasing damage. The restoring force-displacement relationship predicted the reduction in the overall stiffness of the damaged beam. The model quantitatively predicts the experimental vibration behaviour of damaged RC beams and also shows the damage dependency of nonlinear vibration behaviour. © 2011 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.

Plastic limit solution for the response of plate anchors under combined translational and torsional undrained loading

Plate anchors are increasingly being used to moor large floating offshore structures in deep and ultradeep water. These facilities impart substantial vertical uplift loading to plate anchors. However, extreme operating conditions such as hurricane loading often result in partial system failures, with significant change in the orientation of the remaining intact mooring lines. The purpose of this study is to investigate the undrained pure translational (parallel to plate) and torsional bearing capacity of anchor plates idealized as square and rectangular shaped plates. Moreover, the interaction response of plate anchors under combined translational and torsional loading is studied using a modified plastic limit analysis (PLA) approach. The previous PLA formulation which did not account for shear-normal force interaction on the vertical end faces of the plate provides an exact solution to the idealized problem of an infinitely thin plate but only an approximate solution to the problem of a plate of finite thickness. This is also confirmed by the three-dimensional finite element (FE) results, since the PLA values exceed FE results as the thickness of the plate increases. By incorporating the shear-normal interaction relationship in the modified solution, the torsional bearing capacity factors, as well as the plate interaction responses are enhanced as they show satisfactory agreement with the FE results. The interaction relationship is then obtained for square and rectangular plates of different aspect ratios and thicknesses. The new interaction relationships could also be used as an associated plastic failure locus for combined shear and torsional loading to predict plastic displacements and rotations in translational and torsional loading modes as well. Copyright © 2011 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE).