Origens da vida

We present a historical perspective about the ideas concerning the origin of life. After displaying the main topics necessary for understanding life's origin, the main characteristics of the present life forms and their relationships are shown, suggesting a common ancestor. The conditions for prebiotic chemistry in terrestrial or interplanetary environments are reviewed. We put in context the arguments about the early origin of replicators versus metabolism. The very narrow window for life settlement in the early Earth is stressed, pointing to the likelihood of life arising in other places in the Universe. Finally, we present the cornerstones of current search for life outside our planet.

Crédito e pequena cafeicultura no oeste paulista: Franca/SP 1890-1914

This article turns on the importance of the small coffee production in the coffee complex economy between 1890 and 1914. We argue here the relations of work, the forms of financing and the way as the small coffee production inserts itself in this universe. We use as priority sources the employment contracts that involved the formation and/or the treatment of coffee trees and the Writes of mortgage debts, both recorded in Notarial Books, documents not used by historiography in a systematical way. We turns our look for a region marked predominantly for small and the middle producing farms of coffee, observing the dynamics of the accumulation in a period of expansion and crisis of the coffee economy.

Structural change and productivity growth, 20 years later: old problems, new opportunities

Includes bibliography

Entusiastas da cultura: o universo do livro e suas representações nas cartas do Centro Cultural Euclides da Cunha

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Testing gaussianity, homogeneity, and isotropy with the cosmic microwave background

We review the basic hypotheses which motivate the statistical framework used to analyze the cosmic microwave background, and how that framework can be enlarged as we relax those hypotheses. In particular, we try to separate as much as possible the questions of gaussianity, homogeneity, and isotropy from each other. We focus both on isotropic estimators of nongaussianity as well as statistically anisotropic estimators of gaussianity, giving particular emphasis on their signatures and the enhanced cosmic variances that become increasingly important as our putative Universe becomes less symmetric. After reviewing the formalism behind some simple model-independent tests, we discuss how these tests can be applied to CMBdata when searching for large-scale anomalies. Copyright © 2010 L. Raul Abramo and Thiago S. Pereira.

Conceptual spaces and consciousness: Integrating cognitive and affective processes

In the book Conceptual Spaces: the Geometry of Thought [2000] Peter Gärdenfors proposes a new framework for cognitive science. Complementary to symbolic and subsymbolic [connectionist] descriptions, conceptual spaces are semantic structures constructed from empirical data representing the universe of mental states. We argue that Gärdenfors' modeling can be used in consciousness research to describe the phenomenal conscious world, its elements and their intrinsic relations. The conceptual space approach affords the construction of a universal state space of human consciousness, where all possible kinds of human conscious states could be mapped. Starting from this approach, we discuss the inclusion of feelings and emotions in conceptual spaces, and their relation to perceptual and cognitive states. Current debate on integration of affect/emotion and perception/cognition allows three possible descriptive alternatives: emotion resulting from basic cognition; cognition resulting from basic emotion, and both as relatively independent functions integrated by brain mechanisms. Finding a solution for this issue is an important step in any attempt of successful modeling of natural or artificial consciousness. After making a brief review of proposals in this area, we summarize the essentials of a new model of consciousness based on neuro-astroglial interactions. © 2011 World Scientific Publishing Company.

A teoria de Norbert Elias: uma análise do ser professor

No presente artigo, conforme o entendimento de que modelos te- óricos subsidiam a compreensão de fenômenos investigativos, objetivou-se elucidar os conceitos da teoria sociológica de Norbert Elias, considerando-se que esta é uma excelente fonte de análise para se compreender o universo do ser professor, apesar de o autor não abordar diretamente questões relacionadas ao campo da educação. A partir do conceito de configuração, é possível dizer que a constituição do ser professor resulta das diferentes configurações nas quais ele está imerso, pois, de acordo com Elias, as pessoas (professores, pais, gestores, ministros, alunos etc.) modelam suas ideias a partir de todas as suas experiências e, essencialmente, das experiências vividas no interior do próprio grupo. É observável que as configurações, formadas por grupos interdependentes de pessoas, e não por indivíduos singulares, apresentam-se cada vez mais ampliadas nos contextos escolares, com funções especializadas e específicas (professores, alunos, diretores, coordenadores, supervisores, secretários etc.), em grupos que se tornam cada vez mais funcionalmente dependentes. As cadeias de interdependência estão mais diferenciadas e, consequentemente, mais opacas e dificilmente controláveis por parte de quaisquer grupos ou indiví- duos. Portanto, uma melhor compreensão será possível quando se estudar empiricamente as configurações que estão em jogo na educação brasileira. Daí se justifica a análise das configurações e das teias de interdependência em que os professores estão envolvidos. Enfim, a aplicação dos modelos de competição abordados por Elias possibilita evidenciar as problemáticas sociológicas do ser professor, tornando-as mais evidentes e facilitando o entendimento do jogo para reorganizá-lo em termos de equilíbrio na teia social.

A cidade da flânerie, do vazio e da errância em Estorvo, de Chico Buarque

This article aims to perform a reading of Estorvo (1991), by Chico Buarque, trying to show that you have in the work, setting up an urban poetics of emptiness and wandering through the individual unfolded the protagonist wandering dazed and without the right direction, performs on the streets of a big city. In this respect, it is interesting to observe how a fragmented narrative - in whole and in language that conforms - is consistent with the picture of the experience of a character who, in the midst of an urban setting - with brief references to elements of the universe rural - through the experience of mutual incomprehension, violence and the impossibility of a full communication with each other, always in a dazed condition and lost flâneur.

A Hermenêutica no Campo Organizacional: Duas possibilidades interpretativistas de pesquisa

The present text has the objective of presenting theoretical considerations regarding two types of strategy of research: phenomenology and ethnography. Based on a hermeneutic approach, the two conceptual propositions are presented, the first being dealt with in the sociological context, and the second presented as an anthropological basis. Their similar uses in an organizational context - as well as their differences - are highligthed according to the theoretical contributions of authors belonging to the qualitative universe of organizational research. The text reveals, by the presentations of reported theoretical assumptions, the relevance of the interpretative perspective for the conduction of research that has the organization as object of study, in the pursuit of the identification of ways of constructing the social reality that is the result of the analysis of meanings and experiences lived by the participants, highlighting the importance of the bond between researcher and the research object The theoretical discussion regarding the two perspectives allows to observe the competence of the phenomenological and ethnographic research practice within the field of organizational studies, showing their methodological possibilities to identify dynamics that relate to the experience of life, favoring the analysis of the human being as a phenomenon of interpretation. © FECAP.

Dental students' familiarity with the medical management of dental patients at Brazilian dental schools

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Structural changes and productivity in Latin American industry, 1970-1996

Includes bibliography

From cytoplasm to environment: The inorganic ingredients for the origin of life

Early in its history, Earth's surface developed from an uninhabitable magma ocean to a place where life could emerge. The first organisms, lacking ion transporters, fixed the composition of their cradle environment in their intracellular fluid. Later, though life adapted and spread, it preserved some qualities of its initial environment within. Modern prokaryotes could thus provide insights into the conditions of early Earth and the requirements for the emergence of life. In this work, we constrain Earth's life-forming environment through detailed analysis of prokaryotic intracellular fluid. Rigorous assessment of the constraints placed on the early Earth environment by intracellular liquid will provide insight into the conditions of abiogenesis, with implications not only for our understanding of early Earth but also the formation of life elsewhere in the Universe. Copyright © 2013, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. 2013.

Structural change and productivity growth 20 years later: old problems, new opportunities. Summary

Includes bibliography

Black holes in realistic branes: Black string-like objects?

A realistic model describing a black string-like object in an expanding Universe is analyzed in the context of the McVittie's solution of the Einstein field equations. The bulk metric near the brane is provided analogously to previous solutions for black strings. In particular, we show that at least when the Hubble parameter on the brane is positive, a black string-like object seems to play a fundamental role in the braneworld scenario, generalizing the standard black strings in the context of a dynamical brane. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.

Post-sphaleron baryogenesis and an upper limit on the neutron-antineutron oscillation time

A recently proposed scenario for baryogenesis, called post-sphaleron baryogenesis (PSB), is discussed within a class of quark-lepton unified framework based on the gauge symmetry SU(2)L×SU(2) R×SU(4)c realized in the multi-TeV scale. The baryon asymmetry of the Universe in this model is produced below the electroweak phase transition temperature after the sphalerons have decoupled from the Hubble expansion. These models embed naturally the seesaw mechanism for neutrino masses and predict color-sextet scalar particles in the TeV range which may be accessible to the LHC experiments. A necessary consequence of this scenario is the baryon-number-violating ΔB=2 process of neutron-antineutron (n-n̄) oscillations. In this paper we show that the constraints of PSB, when combined with the neutrino oscillation data and restrictions from flavor changing neutral currents mediated by the colored scalars, imply an upper limit on the n-n̄ oscillation time of 5×1010 sec regardless of the quark-lepton unification scale. If this scale is relatively low, in the (200-250) TeV range, τn-n̄ is predicted to be less than 1010 sec, which is accessible to the next generation of proposed experiments. © 2013 American Physical Society.