A pesquisa em Ensino de Química como área estratégica para o desenvolvimento da Química

This paper presents an overview of the development of chemical education as a research area and some of its contributions to society. Although science education is a relatively recent area of research, it went through an expressive development in the last decades. As in the whole world, in Brazil also such development is attested by the expressive number of scientific societies, specialized journals, and meetings with growing attendance in the areas of science education in general and chemical education in particular. Following are the main contributions of research in science education related to chemistry teaching: adoption of teaching-learning principles in chemistry education; contextualization of chemical knowledge; interdisciplinary approach to chemistry teaching; use of the history of science for the definition of contents and for the design of curricula and teaching tools; development of specific disciplines for the initial and in-service training of chemistry teachers; publication of innovative chemistry textbooks by university-based research groups; elaboration of official guidelines for high-school level; and evaluation of chemistry textbooks to be distributed to high-school students by the Brazilian government. In spite of a positive impact of such initiatives, science education in Brazil still faces many problems, as indicated by poor results in international evaluations (such as the Program for International Student Assessment). However, changes in such a scenario depend less on the research in chemical education than on the much-needed governmental initiatives aiming at the improvement of both attractiveness of teaching career and structural conditions of public schools. In conclusion, new government investments in education are necessary for continuing the development of chemistry; moreover, scientific societies and decision makers in educational policies should take into consideration the contributions originated from the chemical education research area.

A new approach to evaluate immobilization of β-galactosidase on Eupergit® C: structural, kinetic, and thermal characterization

This study aimed to evaluate β-galactosidase immobilization. For this purpose, the ionic strength of the buffer, reaction time, amount of the immobilization support, and pH were evaluated by a central composite design. Assay 8, which consisted of 1.5 mol L-1 phosphate buffer (pH 7.5) and a reaction time of 2 h, produced the maximum yield. Eupergit® C (400 mg) was subsequently used as an immobilization support. Immobilization kinetics wereinvestigated, and a significant increase in the yield was obtained after immobilization compared with that obtained from assay 8 (22.0 U mL-1 vs. 15.6 U mL-1). The enzyme efficiency of actuation was evaluated using o-nitrophenyl-β-D-galactopyranoside and lactose, with lactose providing better results. The reuse of β-galactosidase was evaluated, and more than 50% of the initial enzyme activity was maintained after five cycles of use. Enzyme characterization revealed that immobilization improved some aspects of the thermostability of β-galactosidase.

Resources and capabilities approach to online strategy – Multiple-case study of Finnish magazines' online services

Most Finnish periodical magazines have a website, often an online service. The objective of this thesis is to understand the magazines’ resources and capabilities and match them with online strategies’ goals and objectives. The thesis’ theoretical part focuses on explaining and classifying resources, capabilities, goals and objectives, and applying everything into Finnish magazine publishing context. In the empirical part, there is a comparative case study of four magazines. The findings indicate that with cooperating, advertising and community hosting capabilities magazines may utilize their human, brand, content and customer base resources. The resources can be further addressed to reach profitability, customer-centricity and brand congruency goals.

Images of imagination : an aesthetic approach to education

Visual art practice has generally been described as a lonely affair, thinking about what an artist has experienced in the outside world. This study is an inquiry into a visual art practice of another kind: the relational one. The research purpose is twofold. The first purpose is to shed light on a visual artist’s conceptions of art, education and scholarship. The second purpose is to by reasoning on imagination and a rhizomatic formation interpret the relations created between art, multimodality and literacy learning as an aesthetic approach to education. By inquiry into a specific collaborated long-term art practice, the study conveys how the meaning making elements of an arts based learning practice gradually transform an artist’s and a teacher’s concepts of art education to an aesthetic approach to education. In the art practice examined the typical Finnish rye bread and a poem have represented a cultural theme that has been elaborated through art conventions. The poem and the rye bread have in the art practice been articulated as cultural representations of as well as symbolic projections on the Swedishspeaking minority culture in Finland. The study connects art informed inquiry to a hermeneutic research rationale where the research reasoning is generated through a rhizomatic alliance between empiric data and theories. The reasoning is constructed as an interpretation pattern that expands throughout the study. The study arguments that the rhizome as an aesthetic formation can be appropriate to refer to when articulating arts based meaning making and when creating arts based educational strategies, dialogues, aesthetic learning and multimodal literacy in education. The study investigates an aesthetic approach to research in education, which means that the art practice surveyed is interpreted through articulation appropriate to poetic aspects of art, education and research.

Consistency from the perspective of an experimental systems approach to the sciences and their epistemic objects

It is generally accepted that the development of the modern sciences is rooted in experiment. Yet for a long time, experimentation did not occupy a prominent role, neither in philosophy nor in history of science. With the 'practical turn' in studying the sciences and their history, this has begun to change. This paper is concerned with systems and cultures of experimentation and the consistencies that are generated within such systems and cultures. The first part of the paper exposes the forms of historical and structural coherence that characterize the experimental exploration of epistemic objects. In the second part, a particular experimental culture in the life sciences is briefly described as an example. A survey will be given of what it means and what it takes to analyze biological functions in the test tube.

Of pearls and pigs : a conceptual-semantic Tiernet approach to formal representation of structure and variation of phraseological units

"Helmiä sioille", pärlor för svin, säger man på finska om någonting bra och fint som tas emot av en mottagare som inte vill eller har ingen förmåga att förstå, uppskatta eller utnyttja hela den potential som finns hos det mottagna föremålet, är ointresserad av den eller gillar den inte. För sådana relativt stabila flerordiga uttryck, som är lagrade i språkbrukarnas minnen och som demonstrerar olika slags oregelbundna drag i sin struktur använder man inom lingvistiken bl.a. termerna "idiom" eller "fraseologiska enheter". Som en oregelbundenhet kan man t.ex. beskriva det faktum att betydelsen hos uttrycket inte är densamma som man skulle komma till ifall man betraktade det som en vanlig regelbunden fras. En annan oregelbundenhet, som idiomforskare har observerat, ligger i den begränsade förmågan att varieras i form och betydelse, som många idiom har jämfört med regelbundna fraser. Därför talas det ofta om "grundform" och "grundbetydelse" hos idiom och variationen avses som avvikelse från dessa. Men när man tittar på ett stort antal förekomstexempel av idiom i språkbruk, märker man att många av dem tillåter variation, t.o.m. i sådan utsträckning att gränserna mellan en variant och en "grundform" suddas ut, och istället för ett idiom råkar vi plötsligt på en "familj" av flera besläktade uttryck. Allt detta väcker frågan om hur dessa uttryck egentligen ska vara representerade i språket. I avhandlingen utförs en kritisk granskning av olika tidigare tillvägagångssätt att beskriva fraseologiska enheter i syfte att klargöra vilka svårigheter deras struktur och variation erbjuder för den lingvistiska teorin. Samtidigt presenteras ett alternativt sätt att beskriva dessa uttryck. En systematisk och formell modell som utvecklas i denna avhandling integrerar en beskrivning av idiom på många olika språkliga nivåer och skildrar deras variation i form av ett nätverk och som ett resultat av samspel mellan idiomets struktur och kontexter där det förekommer, samt av interaktion med andra fasta uttryck. Modellen bygger på en fördjupande, språkbrukbaserad analys av det finska idiomet "X HEITTÄÄ HELMIÄ SIOILLE" (X kastar pärlor för svin).

Bag-of-Features Approach to Unsupervised Visual Object Categorisation

The large and growing number of digital images is making manual image search laborious. Only a fraction of the images contain metadata that can be used to search for a particular type of image. Thus, the main research question of this thesis is whether it is possible to learn visual object categories directly from images. Computers process images as long lists of pixels that do not have a clear connection to high-level semantics which could be used in the image search. There are various methods introduced in the literature to extract low-level image features and also approaches to connect these low-level features with high-level semantics. One of these approaches is called Bag-of-Features which is studied in the thesis. In the Bag-of-Features approach, the images are described using a visual codebook. The codebook is built from the descriptions of the image patches using clustering. The images are described by matching descriptions of image patches with the visual codebook and computing the number of matches for each code. In this thesis, unsupervised visual object categorisation using the Bag-of-Features approach is studied. The goal is to find groups of similar images, e.g., images that contain an object from the same category. The standard Bag-of-Features approach is improved by using spatial information and visual saliency. It was found that the performance of the visual object categorisation can be improved by using spatial information of local features to verify the matches. However, this process is computationally heavy, and thus, the number of images must be limited in the spatial matching, for example, by using the Bag-of-Features method as in this study. Different approaches for saliency detection are studied and a new method based on the Hessian-Affine local feature detector is proposed. The new method achieves comparable results with current state-of-the-art. The visual object categorisation performance was improved by using foreground segmentation based on saliency information, especially when the background could be considered as clutter.

The Dark Side of International Business? Stakeholder Approach to Human Trafficking in Finnish Construction and Service Sectors

Human trafficking is not a new phenomenon. It has existed in various forms for ages around the world. Some researchers have even compared it to slavery, calling it the modern form of slavery in the 21st century. This study is particularly interested in the role of work-related human trafficking in Finnish business. In order for something to be called work-related human trafficking, the concepts of forced labour and human trafficking have to overlap. From the economic point of view, human trafficking is governed by the laws of supply and demand. In many countries the global pressure on cutting costs has created two trends: the increased supply of migrant workers and the deregulation of labour markets. These competitive pressures can have an adverse impact on the conditions of employment and, in the worst cases, can lead to forced labour and trafficking. In fact, trafficking has become one of the most profitable illicit industries worldwide, generating tremendous profits due to its low costs and huge profits. Therefore, it is important to investigate the phenomenon from the business point of view. This study is a qualitative research conducted by using theme interviews as a research approach. Altogether 13 interviews have been conducted and some secondary data has been used in order to find out what the role of human trafficking is in Finnish business. The special sectors investigated are the Finnish construction and service sectors. The theory framework used in this study follows the stakeholder approach. The relevant stakeholder groups for this study are: ‘institutions and authorities’, ‘law enforcement’, ‘management’ and ‘employees – potential victims’ of trafficking. With the help of these stakeholder groups, a holistic picture of the phenomenon is formed. It can be concluded that the role of human trafficking is complicated but it does exist in Finnish business. It appears in low-cost business sectors where the demand for cheap labour is high. Thus, often the victims are foreigners who do not know the culture or the Finnish conditions of employment. Especially smaller Finnish companies are at risk of getting involved in human trafficking or related exploitation cases since monitoring is much more scarce in these firms than in larger companies. The risk of human trafficking and exploitation is also higher at the bottom of the complicated subcontracting chains or when using foreign recruitment agencies. Thus, the study believes that active and intensive collaboration between the company’s different stakeholder groups is needed in order to prevent work-related human trafficking from flourishing in Finland.

Quasiclassical Approach to the Vortex State in Iron-based Superconductors

The quasiclassical approach was applied to the investigation of the vortex properties in the ironbased superconductors. The special attention was paid to manifestation of the nonlocal effects of the vortex core structure. The main results are as follows: (i) The effects of the pairing symmetries (s+ and s₊₊) on the cutoff parameter of field distribution, ξh, in stoichiometric (like LiFeAs) and nonstoichiometric (like doped BaFe₂As₂) iron pnictides have been investigated using Eilenberger quasiclassical equations. Magnetic field, temperature and impurity scattering dependences of ξh have been calculated. Two opposite behavior have been discovered. The ξh /ξc2 ratio is less in s+ symmetry when intraband impurity scattering (Γ₀) is much larger than one and much larger than interband impurity scattering (Γπ), i.e. in nonstoichiometric iron pnictides. Opposite, the value ξh /ξc2 is higher in s+ case and the field dependent curve is shifted upward from the "clean" case (Γ₀ = Γπ = 0) for stoichiometric iron pnictides (Γ₀ = Γπ ≪ 1). (ii) Eilenberger approach to the cutoff parameter, ξh, of the field distribution in the mixed state of high

The Application of Enterprise Architecture Approach to Military Concept Development–Case Study

Abstract—Concept development and experimentation (CD&E) plays an important role in driving strategic transformation in the military community. Defence architecture frameworks, such as the NATO architecture framework, are considered excellent means to support CD&E. There is not much empirical evidence, however, to indicate how enterprise architectures (EA) are applied in the military community or particularly in military CD&E. Consequently, this paper describes and discusses empirical application of the EA approach in CD&E. The research method in the paper is a case study. Situational method engineering (SiME) is used as a framework to adapt the EA approach to the case project of the paper. The findings of the paper suggest that the EA is applicable to CD&E work, although all aspects of the original concept could not be expressed in the EA model of the case project. The results also show that the SiME method can support in applying the EA framework to the CD&E in the case project.

A multidisciplinary approach to diagnose naturally occurring bovine tuberculosis in Brazil

A herd infected naturally with tuberculosis was investigated by different diagnostic methods. Ninety days after a screening test that identified 21 cows as skin test positive, a Comparative Intradermal Tuberculin Test (CITT) was performed in those 21 cows and in 29 other randomly selected skin test negative cows. Milk samples and nasal swabs were collected prior to the CITT for bacteriological culture and PCR, while blood samples were collected for IFN release and antibody responses to MPB70 and MPB83, at three time points post tuberculin injection. Animals positive by CITT were slaughtered and disease confirmation undertaken. Based on the Kappa test, IFN was comparable to the standard tests (culture, PCR and CITT) at all three sampling points. Results from both antibody ELISAs were similar but were not comparable to the standard tests. T-test analysis of the CITT, IFN and ELISAs demonstrated that their performances were not correlated. There is increasing recognition that individually, available diagnostic tests do not detect all infected cattle. Therefore, a comprehensive strategy for the diagnosis of bovine TB should include test results for the detection of both cellular and humoral immune responses where there may be animals at different stages of infection.

The Anchoring Bias of Investors and the 52-Week High Momentum Strategy in the OMX Helsinki Stock Exchange: Psychological Approach to Market Efficiency

The behavioural finance literature expects systematic and significant deviations from efficiency to persist in securities markets due to behavioural and cognitive biases of investors. These behavioural models attempt to explain the coexistence of intermediate-term momentum and long-term reversals in stock returns based on the systematic violations of rational behaviour of investors. The study investigates the anchoring bias of investors and the profitability of the 52-week momentum strategy (GH henceforward). The relatively highly volatile OMX Helsinki stock exchange is a suitable market for examining the momentum effect, since international investors tend to realise their positions first from the furthest security markets by the time of market turbulence. Empirical data is collected from Thomson Reuters Datastream and the OMX Nordic website. The objective of the study is to provide a throughout research by formulating a self-financing GH momentum portfolio. First, the seasonality of the strategy is examined by taking the January effect into account and researching abnormal returns in long-term. The results indicate that the GH strategy is subject to significantly negative revenues in January, but the strategy is not prone to reversals in long-term. Then the predictive proxies of momentum returns are investigated in terms of acquisition prices and 52-week high statistics as anchors. The results show that the acquisition prices do not have explanatory power over the GH strategy’s abnormal returns. Finally, the efficacy of the GH strategy is examined after taking transaction costs into account, finding that the robust abnormal returns remain statistically significant despite the transaction costs. As a conclusion, the relative distance between a stock’s current price and its 52-week high statistic explains the profits of momentum investing to a high degree. The results indicate that intermediateterm momentum and long-term reversals are separate phenomena. This presents a challenge to current behavioural theories, which model these aspects of stock returns as subsequent components of how securities markets respond to relevant information.

A new approach to evaluate imperfection sensitivity in asymmetric bifurcation buckling analysis

A direct procedure for the evaluation of imperfection sensitivity in bifurcation problems is presented. The problems arise in the context of the general theory of elastic stability for discrete structural systems, in which the energy criterion of stability of structures and the total potential energy formulation are employed. In cases of bifurcation buckling the sensitivity of the critical load with respect to an imperfection parameter e is singular at the state given by epsilon =0, so that, a regular perturbation expansion of the solution is not possible. In this work we describe a direct procedure to obtain the relations between the critical loads, the generalized coordinates at the critical state, the eigenvector, and the amplitude of the imperfection, using singular perturbation analysis. The expansions are assumed in terms of arbitrary powers of the imperfection parameter, so that both exponents and coefficients of the expansion are unknown. The solution of the series exponents is obtained by searching the least degenerate solution. The formulation is here applied to asymmetric bifurcations, for which explicit expressions of the coefficients are obtained. The use of the method is illustrated by a simple example, which allows consideration of the main features of the formulation.