Solid waste management in metropolitan areas: barriers and opportunities for intermunicipal arrangements in Brazil

Municipal solid waste issue has acquired a growing importance into urban management discussions, particularly in metropolitan areas. Although metropolitan regions were created for integrating public functions of common interest, it appears that the structures, in general, are limited to planning ��activities. In this context, the democratization process occurred in Brazil during 1980���s led to the ��strengthening of inter-municipal arrangements of voluntary cooperation, acquiring great expressiveness ��in metropolitan areas, responsible for 60% of waste generated in Brazil. However, despite the ��consortia emergence as an alternative management of metropolitan territory, its process of setting up and operation is not free of challenges and dilemmas. This paper starts with the hypothesis that ��inter-municipal consortia in metropolitan areas have high strength asymmetry and weak regional ��identity among municipalities, conditions that tend to create barriers to its concretization. In this ��context, this research aim ��to develop a comparative study of inter-municipal arrangements for solid ��waste management in the metropolitan areas of Curitiba (pr), Belo Horizonte (bh) and Salvador ��(ba), by identifying influence degree of regional identity and strength asymmetry in these arrangements. The multiple case study reveals an inverse proportionality relationship between regional ��identity and strength asymmetry among the municipalities, deeply influenced by political interinstitutional ��arrangement and the metropolitan area in which they are is inserted.

Option pricing in market models driven by telegraph processes with jumps

Esta tesis est�� dividida en dos partes: en la primera parte se presentan y estudian los procesos telegr��ficos, los procesos de Poisson con compensador telegr��fico y los procesos telegr��ficos con saltos. El estudio presentado en esta primera parte incluye el c��lculo de las distribuciones de cada proceso, las medias y varianzas, as�� como las funciones generadoras de momentos entre otras propiedades. Utilizando estas propiedades en la segunda parte se estudian los modelos de valoraci��n de opciones basados en procesos telegr��ficos con saltos. En esta parte se da una descripci��n de c��mo calcular las medidas neutrales al riesgo, se encuentra la condici��n de no arbitraje en este tipo de modelos y por ��ltimo se calcula el precio de las opciones Europeas de compra y venta.

Museums and quality, from the concept of the museum that carries out functions to the museum that provides services

Quality management Self-evaluation of the organisation Citizens/customers satisfaction Impact on society evaluation Key performance evaluation Good practices comparison (Benchmarking) Continuous improvement In professional environments, when quality assessment of museums is discussed, one immediately thinks of the honourableness of the directors and curators, the erudition and specialisation of knowledge, the diversity of the gathered material and study of the collections, the collections conservation methods and environmental control, the regularity and notoriety of the exhibitions and artists, the building���s architecture and site, the recreation of environments, the museographic equipment design. We admit that the roles and attributes listed above can contribute to the definition of a specificity of museological good practice within a hierarchised functional perspective (the museum functions) and for the classification of museums according to a scale, validated between peers, based on ���installed��� appreciation criteria, enforced from above downwards, according to the ���prestige��� of the products and of those who conceive them, but that say nothing about the effective satisfaction of the citizen/customers and the real impact on society. There is a lack of evaluation instruments that would give us a return of all that the museum is and represents in contemporary society, focused on being and on the relation with the other, in detriment of the ostentatious possession and of the doing in order to meet one���s duties. But it is only possible to evaluate something by measurement and comparison, on the basis of well defined criteria, from a common grid, implicating all of the actors in the self-evaluation, in the definition of the aims to fulfil and in the obtaining of results.

A comparison of diatom phosphorus transfer functions and export coefficient models as tools for reconstructing lake nutrient histories

1. We compared the baseline phosphorus (P) concentrations inferred by diatom-P transfer functions and export coefficient models at 62 lakes in Great Britain to assess whether the techniques produce similar estimates of historical nutrient status. 2. There was a strong linear relationship between the two sets of values over the whole total P (TP) gradient (2-200 mu g TP L-1). However, a systematic bias was observed with the diatom model producing the higher values in 46 lakes (of which values differed by more than 10 mu g TP L-1 in 21). The export coefficient model gave the higher values in 10 lakes (of which the values differed by more than 10 mu g TP L-1 in only 4). 3. The difference between baseline and present-day TP concentrations was calculated to compare the extent of eutrophication inferred by the two sets of model output. There was generally poor agreement between the amounts of change estimated by the two approaches. The discrepancy in both the baseline values and the degree of change inferred by the models was greatest in the shallow and more productive sites. 4. Both approaches were applied to two lakes in the English Lake District where long-term P data exist, to assess how well the models track measured P concentrations since approximately 1850. There was good agreement between the pre-enrichment TP concentrations generated by the models. The diatom model paralleled the steeper rise in maximum soluble reactive P (SRP) more closely than the gradual increase in annual mean TP in both lakes. The export coefficient model produced a closer fit to observed annual mean TP concentrations for both sites, tracking the changes in total external nutrient loading. 5. A combined approach is recommended, with the diatom model employed to reflect the nature and timing of the in-lake response to changes in nutrient loading, and the export coefficient model used to establish the origins and extent of changes in the external load and to assess potential reduction in loading under different management scenarios. 6. However, caution must be exercised when applying these models to shallow lakes where the export coefficient model TP estimate will not include internal P loading from lake sediments and where the diatom TP inferences may over-estimate TP concentrations because of the high abundance of benthic taxa, many of which are poor indicators of trophic state.