Extending the ADM formalism to Weyl geometry

In order to treat quantum cosmology in the framework of Weyl spacetimes we take the first step of extending the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner formalism to Weyl geometry. We then obtain an expression of the curvature tensor in terms of spatial quantities by splitting spacetime in (3+1)-dimensional form. We next write the Lagrangian of the gravitation field based in Weyl-type gravity theory. We extend the general relativistic formalism in such a way that it can be applied to investigate the quantum cosmology of models whose spacetimes are endowed with a Weyl geometrical structure.Comment: 10 page

A design framework for enabling sustainability in the clothing sector

This article discusses general strategies to enable environmental sustainability within the clothing sector, providing a framework for decision makers involved in the development of programs and policies for this sector. It initially revises the environmental impact of the clothing system and determines its key environmental sustainability priorities. The framework involves five evolutionary strategies for enabling sustainable consumption and production: 1) environmental improvement of flows throughout the supply chain; 2) environmental redesign of existing clothes; 3) design of new clothes intrinsically more sustainable; 4) design of cloth-service systems and 5) promoting life styles towards sufficient consumption. The practical implications of each strategy is analysed based on correspondent ex-post-facto case studies identified in Brazil, using data collected through literature review and desktop research

A Framework for Efficient Adaptively Secure Composable Oblivious Transfer in the ROM

Oblivious Transfer (OT) is a fundamental cryptographic protocol that finds a number of applications, in particular, as an essential building block for two-party and multi-party computation. We construct a round-optimal (2 rounds) universally composable (UC) protocol for oblivious transfer secure against active adaptive adversaries from any OW-CPA secure public-key encryption scheme with certain properties in the random oracle model (ROM). In terms of computation, our protocol only requires the generation of a public/secret-key pair, two encryption operations and one decryption operation, apart from a few calls to the random oracle. In~terms of communication, our protocol only requires the transfer of one public-key, two ciphertexts, and three binary strings of roughly the same size as the message. Next, we show how to instantiate our construction under the low noise LPN, McEliece, QC-MDPC, LWE, and CDH assumptions. Our instantiations based on the low noise LPN, McEliece, and QC-MDPC assumptions are the first UC-secure OT protocols based on coding assumptions to achieve: 1) adaptive security, 2) optimal round complexity, 3) low communication and computational complexities. Previous results in this setting only achieved static security and used costly cut-and-choose techniques.Our instantiation based on CDH achieves adaptive security at the small cost of communicating only two more group elements as compared to the gap-DH based Simplest OT protocol of Chou and Orlandi (Latincrypt 15), which only achieves static security in the ROM

Avaliação da resistência de materiais comerciais de tomateiro a oito viroses que afetam a cultura no Brasil.

O objetivo deste trabalho foi avaliar a resistência dos materiais de tomate palantados atualmente no país a oito dos principais vírus que afetam a cultura.Suplemento. Edição dos resumos do 44º Congresso Brasileiro de Fitopatologia, 2011, Bento Gonçalves. Resumo 777

Risk factors for infection with Giardia duodenalis in pre-school children in the city of Salvador, Brazil.

A cross-sectional study of 694 children aged 2 to 45 months selected from 30 clusters throughout the city of Salvador, Bahia (pop. 2.3 million) was carried out as part of a longitudinal study of diarrhoea in order to identify risk factors for infection with Giardia duodenalis. Variables studied included three social and demographic factors (such as mother's education and marital status), five relating to the peri-domestic environment (rubbish disposal, open sewers, paving of the street), seven relating to the home itself (house construction, susceptibility to flooding, water supply and sanitation) as well as a score for hygiene behaviour based on structured observation. After multivariate analysis using a hierarchical model, only four significant risk factors were found: (a) number of children in the household under five years (b) rubbish not collected from the house (c) presence of visible sewage nearby, and (d) absence of a toilet. All four were significant at the 1% level

U B V R I Photometry of Stellar Structures throughout the Disk of the Barred Galaxy NGC 3367

We report new detailed surface U, B, V, R, and I photometry of 81 stellar structures in the disk of the barred galaxy NGC 3367. The images show many different structures indicating that star formation is going on in the most part of the disk. NGC 3367 is known to have a very high concentration of molecular gas distribution in the central regions of the galaxy and bipolar synchrotron emission from the nucleus with two lobes (at 6 kpc) forming a triple structure similar to a radio galaxy. We have determined the U, B, V, R, and I magnitudes and U - B, B - V, U - V, and V - I colors for the central region (nucleus), a region which includes supernovae 2003 AA, and 79 star associations throughout NGC 3367. Estimation of ages of star associations is very difficult due to several factors, among them: filling factor, metallicity, spatial distribution of each structure and the fact that we estimated the magnitudes with a circular aperture of 16 pixels in diameter, equivalent to $6''.8\sim1.4$ kpc. However, if the colors derived for NGC 3367 were similar to the colors expected of star clusters with theoretical evolutionary star tracks developed for the LMC and had a similar metallicity, NGC 3367 show 51 percent of the observed structures with age type SWB I (few tens of Myrs), with seven sources outside the bright surface brightness visible disk of NGC 3367.Comment: Accepted for publication (abr 2007) in The Astronomical Journal (July 2007 issue

More Discriminants with the Brezing-Weng Method

The Brezing-Weng method is a general framework to generate families of pairing-friendly elliptic curves. Here, we introduce an improvement which can be used to generate more curves with larger discriminants. Apart from the number of curves this yields, it provides an easy way to avoid endomorphism rings with small class number

Female Genital Mutilation: Knowledge from Health Professionals

Portugal is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) a risk country for the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Objectives: To evaluate the knowledge that health professionals from Maternity Dr. Alfredo da Costa (MAC) have regarding FGM. Population and Methods: Analysis of surveys delivered to health professionals from MAC (a hospital dedicated to reproductive health), between April and June 2008, addressing issues related to the knowledge about FGM. Results: Authors collected 112 valid surveys involving 38 doctors, 48 nurses and 26 medical auxiliaries/administrative personnel. From the respondents, 106 (95%) had heard about FMG practice before, the media being the most reported source of information; 59 (53%) replied they could be able to recognize FGM cases in their clinical practice; however, only 31 (28%) claimed to know the FGM type classiication and 32 (29%) admitted to be prepared to recognize and manage these situations in their own clinical practice; 9 had been consulted explicitly by a FGM practice complication and 1 doctor had admitted having been asked to perform/execute FGM; 13 (12%) recognized that the Portuguese legislation its this practice. Regarding the practice of FGM, 100 (89%) of respondentes stated that it should not be maintained and 97 (87%) stated that it should not be tolerated. However, 42 (38%) considered that if these practices were a reality, then they should be medical assisted. Discussion: Health professionals can play an important role in eliminating the practice of FGM, not only by the proper clinical management of this situation, but also by preventing those communities at risk to resort to FGM. Most health professionals are not prepared to deal with FGM in their clinical practice. It is important to promote a better knowledge on the subject and to create protocols for proper clinical management

Aspectos agronômicos, fitopatológicos e socioeconômicos da sigatoka-negra na cultura da bananeira no Estado do Amapá

Sigatoka-negra da bananeira no Amapá: um desafio à pesquisa científica; A cultura da bananeira; Aspectos do melhoramento genético da bananeira; Sigatoka-negra: aspectos fitopatológicos no Amapá; Características físico-químicas de frutos de bananeiras resistentes à sigatoka-negra; Sigatoka-negra: repercussões socioeconômicas no Estado do Amapá; Dinâmica no desempenho da capacidade produtiva da bananicultura amapaense.bitstream/item/84394/1/AP-2011-aspectos-agronomicos-fitopatologicos-bananeiras.pd

A typing error in Tokeshi's test of bimodality

Copyright © 2003 Blackwell Publishing“One way to describe patterns of species distribution is to plot the frequency histograms using species–range-size data (Gaston, 1994; Brown, 1995; Gaston & Blackburn, 2000). Usually the untransformed geographical ranges of species are distributed following a ‘hollow curve’, i.e. most species have narrow ranges and very few have widespread distributions. This highly ‘right-skewed’ curve has been regarded as unimodal (e.g. Gaston, 1994). In some cases, however, the species-range-size distribution shows a bimodal pattern (Hanski, 1982; Brown, 1984, 1995; Gaston, 1994; Gaston & Blackburn, 2000), in which to the left-hand mode is added a right hand mode generated by the widespread group of species that occur in almost all sampled sites. The ‘core-satellite species hypothesis’ (Hanski, 1982) and the ‘resource usage model’ (Brown, 1984, 1995) were proposed to explain the finding that a few species are regionally common (widespread) and locally abundant (the ‘core’ species in Hanski’s model; the generalists or broad-niched species in Brown’s model), while most species can be regarded as having smaller ranges and low local abundances (the ‘satellite’ species in Hanski’s model; the specialists or narrow-niched species in Brown’s model). […]