Regional subsidies and industrial prospects of lagging regions

Large and sustained differences in economic performance across regions of developing countries have long provided motivation for fiscal incentives designed to encourage firm entry in lagging areas. Empirical evidence in support of these policies has, however, been weak at best. This paper undertakes a direct evaluation of the most prominent fiscal incentive policy in Brazil, the Fundos Constitucionais de Financiamento (Constitutional Funds). In doing so, we exploit valuable features of the Brazilian Ministry of Labor's RAIS data set to address two important elements of firm location decisions that have the potential to bias an assessment of the Funds: (i) firm “family structure” (in particular, proximity to headquarters for vertically integrated firms), and (ii) unobserved spatial heterogeneity (with the potential to confound the effects of the Funds). We find that the pull of firm headquarters is very strong relative to the Constitutional Funds for vertically integrated firms, but that, with non-parametric controls for time invariant spatial heterogeneity, the Funds provide statistically and economically significant incentives for firms in many of the targeted industries.

Using a panel structure to discuss the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle in developing countries

The purpose of this paper is to test the implications of current account solvency for the savinginvestment correlation in developing countries. Since solvency is a long-run phenomenon, and given that the power of the standard unit root and cointegration tests is low, we exploit the panel structure of the sample of 29 developing countries. We find evidence that saving and investment are cointegrated and that the current account is stationary. Therefore, the Feldstein-Horioka correlations are not a puzzle in the sense they reflect the intertemporal budget constraint. The same results are obtained for different subsamples (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) and for different periods of time (1960-74 and 1975-96). We, then, suggest that an error correction model should distinguish between the long-run correlation, which reflects the solvency condition, and the short-run correlation, which could measure capital mobility.

Sociedade em conta de participação : riscos de descaracterização do tipo societário e suas consequências

Este trabalho se dispõe a analisar as características das sociedades em conta de participação ou SCP’s, seus principais usos, os riscos de sua descaracterização e suas respectivas consequências. As SCP’s experimentaram crescimento de sua importância e uso nos últimos anos, sendo constatadas na estruturação de diversos tipos de negócios, com destaque na área imobiliária e na realização de investimentos. Como um dos tipos societários admitidos pela legislação, as SCP’s possuem grande plasticidade em sua utilização, adaptando-se às diversas necessidades de seus usuários. Algumas características específicas, no entanto, devem ser observadas pelas partes, sob risco de sua descaracterização. É o caso do papel dos sócios participantes, que não poderão se envolver na execução do objeto da SCP, nem contribuir para a formação do seu patrimônio especial com serviços que tenham relação direta com o seu objeto. E os riscos vão além daqueles previstos no Código Civil, que aponta a solidariedade, com o sócio ostensivo, do sócio participante perante terceiros afetados. Do ponto de vista fiscal, poderá haver a descaracterização da SCP para se considerar a prestação de serviços, quando ocorrerá a incidência de tributos sobre os pagamentos feitos ao sócio participante a título de dividendos. Outros riscos e consequências em modelos de negócio adotados foram explorados e apontados ao longo do trabalho, em que as SCP’s são utilizadas para dissimular uma situação jurídica, de modo a gozar de alguma vantagem. É o caso da previsão de distribuição de resultado em SCP com bens ou coisa certa e não com capital, poderia dissimular um contrato de compra e venda, e quando tal SCP for formada por um grupo de pessoas, poderia dissimular um consórcio para entrega de bens, regido pela Lei 11.795/2008. A divulgação pública de SCP, para captação de investidores, poderia caracterizar a operação como um contrato de investimento coletivo, regulado pela Lei 6.385/1976. Ao final foram listados, como sugestão, alguns cuidados a serem observados para se evitar os riscos apontados ao longo deste trabalho.

Susceptibility of mosquito vectors to Dirofilaria immitis on Madeira Island, Portugal

Dirofilaria immitis (Leidy, 1856), an agent of heartworm disease, is an important parasite from both the veterinary standpoint and as a model to study human filariasis. It is a mosquito-borne filarial nematode which inhabits the right ventricle and pulmonary arteries of dogs. D. immitis is an important disease agent on Madeira Island with about 30% of dogs testing positive for this worm. Nevertheless, the vectors of this parasite in Madeira have never been studied, nor has the interaction between pathogen and vector, or the environmental variables that might influence heartworm transmission. Innate susceptibility to infection is only one component of vector competence, and field isolation of naturally infected mosquitoes has shown the capability of D. immitis to exploit a great diversity of vector species under natural conditions. The purpose of this work was to determine which mosquitoes are vectors of heartworm disease, the relation between population density and environment, and the association between immune response of the vector to the filarial parasite. Seasonal abundance of Culex theileri and Culex pipiens molestus was studied. Correlation and canonical correspondence analysis were performed using abundance data of these two species with selected weather variables, including mean temperature, relative humidity and accumulated precipitation. The most important factor determining Cx. theileri abundance was accumulated precipitation, while Cx. pipiens molestus abundance did not have any relationship with weather variables. Field studies were performed to verify whether Cx. theileri Theobald functions as a natural vector of D. immitis on Madeira Island, Portugal. Cx. theileri tested positive for D. immitis for the first time. The same study was made regarding Cx. p. molestus. Two abnormal L2 stage filarial worms were found in Malpighian tubules in field caught Cx. p. molestus. In the laboratory, two strains of Cx. p. molestus were studied for their susceptibility to D. immitis. None presented infective-stage larvae. Finally, because Cx. p. molestus is an autogenous mosquito, we evaluated the reproductive costs when this mosquito mounts an immune response against D. immitis in the absence of a blood meal. This mosquito showed an active immune response when inoculated intrathoracically with microfilariae (mf) of the heartworm. The ovaries from mosquitoes undergoing melanotic encapsulation developed more eggs than those which could not melanize the mf. This fact is contradictory with some previous studies of reproductive costs in Armigeres subalbatus and Ochlerotatus trivittatus, and it was the first time that an autogenous mosquito was used to study this subject.

High performance green buildings

This work aims to study and analyze strategies and measures to improve energy performance in residential and service buildings, in order to minimize energy losses and energy consumption. Due to the high energy dependence of European Union (EU), including Portugal and Slovenia, and high percentage of energy consumption in the building sector, there was a need to adopt strategies at European level with ambitious goals. This came to force EU - Member States to take measures to achieve the proposed targets for energy consumption reduction. To this end, EU - Member States have adapted the laws to their needs and formed specialized agencies and qualified experts on energy certification, which somehow evaluate buildings according to their performance. In this study, the external characteristics of the building in order to meet its thermal needs and from there to survey the existing and possible constructive solutions to be used at the envelope will be examined, in order to increase comfort and reduce the need of use technical means of air conditioning. The possibility of passive heating and ventilation systems also will be discussed. These techniques are developed in parallel with the deployment and design of the building. In this manner, to reduce the energy consumption, various techniques and technologies exploit natural resources. Thus, appear the more sustainable and efficient buildings, so-called Green Buildings have been appeared. The study ends with the identification of measures used in several buildings, proving the economic return in the medium to long term, as well as the satisfaction of their users.

Parallel Cyclostationarity-Exploiting Algorithm for Energy-Efficient Spectrum Sensing

The evolution of wireless communication systems leads to Dynamic Spectrum Allocation for Cognitive Radio, which requires reliable spectrum sensing techniques. Among the spectrum sensing methods proposed in the literature, those that exploit cyclostationary characteristics of radio signals are particularly suitable for communication environments with low signal-to-noise ratios, or with non-stationary noise. However, such methods have high computational complexity that directly raises the power consumption of devices which often have very stringent low-power requirements. We propose a strategy for cyclostationary spectrum sensing with reduced energy consumption. This strategy is based on the principle that p processors working at slower frequencies consume less power than a single processor for the same execution time. We devise a strict relation between the energy savings and common parallel system metrics. The results of simulations show that our strategy promises very significant savings in actual devices.

Projeto de um edifício para fins educacionais com foco na racionalização do consumo de água

The urban growth without the prior infrastructure has caused many environmental impacts such as the damage to quality of the water resources in the cities. Along with natural scarcity in some regions, this is one of the factors that limit the availability of drinking water. As a result, the conservation of drinking water is becoming one of the major concerns in sustainable architectural projects. Within this context, this dissertation proposes to develop the design of an educational building focusing on water consumption rationalization. The proposed project is located in UFRN Campus at Currais Novos, an area of warm and dry climate and low rainfall. The proposal seeks to integrate ways to reduce water consumption o to architecture, in order to exploit the advantages and savings. After quantifying the benefits achieved, it was concluded that it is possible to reduce significantly the drinking water consumption in educational buildings in universities using three principles: reduction the water consumption at the point of use, replacement of the water source and internal recycling. Calculations and simulations indicated that the proposed building may have water consumption up to 56% lower than if it would be provided by conventional facilities. Rationalization of water consumption brings direct and indirect benefits, with influences on the environmental, social and economic fields

Análise da recuperação em reservatório de gás com baixa permeabilidade (TIGHT GAS) através do fraturamento hidráulico

With the increasing of energetic consumption in the worldwile, conventional reservoirs, known by their easy exploration and exploitation, are not being enough to satisfy this demand, what has made necessary exploring unconventional reservoirs. This kind of exploration demands developing more advanced technologies to make possible to exploit those hydrocarbons. Tight gas is an example of this kind of unconventional reservoir. It refers to sandstone fields with low porosity, around 8%, and permeabilities between 0.1 and 0.0001 mD, which accumulates considerable amounts of natural gas. That natural gas can only be extracted by applying hydraulic fracturing, aiming at stimulating the reservoir, by creating a preferential way through the reservoir to the well, changing and making easier the flow of fluids, thus increasing the productivity of those reservoirs. Therefore, the objective of this thesis is analyzing the recovery factor of a reservoir by applying hydraulic fracturing. All the studies were performed through simulations using the IMEX software, by CMG (Computer Modelling Group), in it 2012.10 version

A doorway to Borromean halo nuclei: the Samba configuration

We exploit the possibility of new configurations in three-body halo nuclei, Samba type (the neutron-core form a bound system) as a doorway to Borromean systems. The nuclei Be-12, B-15, N-23 and F-27 are of such nature, in particular N-23 with a half-life of 37.7 s and a halo radius of 6.07 fm is an excellent example of Samba-halo configuration. The fusion below the barrier of the Samba halo nuclei with heavy targets could reveal the so far elusive enhancement and a dominance of one-neutron over two-neutron transfers, in contrast to what was found recently for the Borromean halo nucleus He-6 + U-238.

Uma solução para geração automática de trilhas em língua brasileira de sinais em conteúdos multimídia

Deaf people have serious difficulties to access information. The support for sign languages is rarely addressed in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Furthermore, in scientific literature, there is a lack of works related to machine translation for sign languages in real-time and open-domain scenarios, such as TV. To minimize these problems, in this work, we propose a solution for automatic generation of Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS) video tracks into captioned digital multimedia contents. These tracks are generated from a real-time machine translation strategy, which performs the translation from a Brazilian Portuguese subtitle stream (e.g., a movie subtitle or a closed caption stream). Furthermore, the proposed solution is open-domain and has a set of mechanisms that exploit human computation to generate and maintain their linguistic constructions. Some implementations of the proposed solution were developed for digital TV, Web and Digital Cinema platforms, and a set of experiments with deaf users was developed to evaluate the main aspects of the solution. The results showed that the proposed solution is efficient and able to generate and embed LIBRAS tracks in real-time scenarios and is a practical and feasible alternative to reduce barriers of deaf to access information, especially when human interpreters are not available

Contribuição para o estudo do embarque de uma rede neural artificial em field programmable gate array (FPGA)

This study shows the implementation and the embedding of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) in hardware, or in a programmable device, as a field programmable gate array (FPGA). This work allowed the exploration of different implementations, described in VHDL, of multilayer perceptrons ANN. Due to the parallelism inherent to ANNs, there are disadvantages in software implementations due to the sequential nature of the Von Neumann architectures. As an alternative to this problem, there is a hardware implementation that allows to exploit all the parallelism implicit in this model. Currently, there is an increase in use of FPGAs as a platform to implement neural networks in hardware, exploiting the high processing power, low cost, ease of programming and ability to reconfigure the circuit, allowing the network to adapt to different applications. Given this context, the aim is to develop arrays of neural networks in hardware, a flexible architecture, in which it is possible to add or remove neurons, and mainly, modify the network topology, in order to enable a modular network of fixed-point arithmetic in a FPGA. Five synthesis of VHDL descriptions were produced: two for the neuron with one or two entrances, and three different architectures of ANN. The descriptions of the used architectures became very modular, easily allowing the increase or decrease of the number of neurons. As a result, some complete neural networks were implemented in FPGA, in fixed-point arithmetic, with a high-capacity parallel processing

Caracterização de superfícies seletivas de freqüência e de antenas fractais para aplicações em redes sem fio

This work aims to investigate the behavior of fractal elements in planar microstrip structures. In particular, microstrip antennas and frequency selective surfaces (FSSs) had changed its conventional elements to fractal shapes. For microstrip antennas, was used as the radiating element of Minkowski fractal. The feeding method used was microstrip line. Some prototypes were built and the analysis revealed the possibility of miniaturization of structures, besides the multiband behavior, provided by the fractal element. In particular, the Minkowski fractal antenna level 3 was used to exploit the multiband feature, enabling simultaneous operation of two commercial tracks (Wi-Fi and WiMAX) regulated by ANATEL. After, we investigated the effect of switches that have been placed on the at the pre-fractal edges of radiating element. For the FSSs, the fractal used to elements of FSSs was Dürer s pentagon. Some prototypes were built and measured. The results showed a multiband behavior of the structure provided by fractal geometry. Then, a parametric analysis allowed the analysis of the variation of periodicity on the electromagnetic behavior of FSS, and its bandwidth and quality factor. For numerical and experimental characterization of the structures discussed was used, respectively, the commercial software Ansoft DesignerTM and a vector network analyzer, Agilent N5230A model

Classificação Automática de Modulação Digital com uso de Correntropia para Ambientes de Rádio Cognitivo

Modern wireless systems employ adaptive techniques to provide high throughput while observing desired coverage, Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity. An alternative to further enhance data rate is to apply cognitive radio concepts, where a system is able to exploit unused spectrum on existing licensed bands by sensing the spectrum and opportunistically access unused portions. Techniques like Automatic Modulation Classification (AMC) could help or be vital for such scenarios. Usually, AMC implementations rely on some form of signal pre-processing, which may introduce a high computational cost or make assumptions about the received signal which may not hold (e.g. Gaussianity of noise). This work proposes a new method to perform AMC which uses a similarity measure from the Information Theoretic Learning (ITL) framework, known as correntropy coefficient. It is capable of extracting similarity measurements over a pair of random processes using higher order statistics, yielding in better similarity estimations than by using e.g. correlation coefficient. Experiments carried out by means of computer simulation show that the technique proposed in this paper presents a high rate success in classification of digital modulation, even in the presence of additive white gaussian noise (AWGN)

Layer-by-Layer Technique as a New Approach to Produce Nanostructured Films Containing Phospholipids as Transducers in Sensing Applications

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

Study of the interaction between cardiolipin bilayers and methylene blue in polymer-based Layer-by-Layer and Langmuir films applied as membrane mimetic systems

An increase of the reports involving mimetic systems has been observed. Briefly, these systems use biological phospholipids to exploit specific interactions between membrane-models and drugs. Here, the Layer-by-Layer (LbL) and Langmuir techniques were used to investigate the interaction between cardiolipin (CLP-negative phospholipid) and a cationic-like drug methylene blue (MB). Supported by a cationic polyelectrolyte (PAH), LbL films containing PAH/(CLP + MB) and PAH/(CLP + MB + AgNP) were grown up to 14 bilayers. The optical microscopy analysis revealed a decrease of the CLP vesicle sizes in the presence of MB as a possible consequence of the MB action onto the mechanical properties of the CLP membrane. From FTIR spectra, changes mainly related to peak position and band intensity and shape were observed in the spectra from PAH/CLP when in the presence of MB. The latter supports that the interactions between the phosphate and amine charged groups from CLP and PAH, respectively, established during the LbL film fabrication, besides the CLP hydrocarbon environment, are influenced by the presence of MB. Using the micro-Raman technique, a chemical mapping was build based on MB spectrum by resonance Raman scattering (RRS) and surface-enhanced resonance Raman scattering (SERRS). The later phenomenon was activated by Ag nanoparticles (AgNPs) trapped within the LbL film allowing collecting spectra for a single bilayer of PAH/(CLP + MB + AgNP). A rough estimation showed a SERRS amplification of 10(3) in comparison to RRS spectra. As a complementary approach, Langmuir films of CLP in the presence of co-spread MB were investigated through surface pressure vs mean molecular area (pi-A) isotherms. The results showed that for concentrations of MB below 100 mol%, the drug is expelled to water subphase for high values of surface pressure (condensed phase). For concentration at 100% and higher, the MB keeps bound to CLP floating monolayer. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.