Synthesis, reactivity studies, and cytotoxicity of two trans-Iodidoplatinum(II) complexes. Does photoactivation work?

trans-Platinum complexes have been the landmark in unconventional drugs prompting the development of innovative structures that might exhibit chemical and biological profiles different to cisplatin. Iodido complexes signaled a new turning point in the platinum drug design field when their cytotoxicity was reevaluated and reported. In this new study, we have synthesized and evaluated diodidoplatinum complexes trans-[PtI2(amine)(pyridine)] bearing aliphatic amines (isopropylamine and methylamine) and pyridines in trans configuration. X-ray diffraction data support the structural characterization. Their cytotoxicity has been evaluated in tumor cell lines such as SAOS-2, A375, T-47D, and HCT116. Moreover, we report their solution behavior and reactivity with biological models. Ultraviolet-a (UVA) irradiation induces an increase in their reactivity towards model nucleobase 5′-GMP in early stages, and promotes the release of the pyridine ligand (spectator ligand) at longer reaction times. Density Functional calculations have been performed and the results are compared with our previous studies with other iodido derivatives.MINECO CTQ-2015-68779

A systematic comparison of supervised classifiers

Pattern recognition techniques have been employed in a myriad of industrial, medical, commercial and academic applications. To tackle such a diversity of data, many techniques have been devised. However, despite the long tradition of pattern recognition research, there is no technique that yields the best classification in all scenarios. Therefore, the consideration of as many as possible techniques presents itself as an fundamental practice in applications aiming at high accuracy. Typical works comparing methods either emphasize the performance of a given algorithm in validation tests or systematically compare various algorithms, assuming that the practical use of these methods is done by experts. In many occasions, however, researchers have to deal with their practical classification tasks without an in-depth knowledge about the underlying mechanisms behind parameters. Actually, the adequate choice of classifiers and parameters alike in such practical circumstances constitutes a long-standing problem and is the subject of the current paper. We carried out a study on the performance of nine well-known classifiers implemented by the Weka framework and compared the dependence of the accuracy with their configuration parameter configurations. The analysis of performance with default parameters revealed that the k-nearest neighbors method exceeds by a large margin the other methods when high dimensional datasets are considered. When other configuration of parameters were allowed, we found that it is possible to improve the quality of SVM in more than 20% even if parameters are set randomly. Taken together, the investigation conducted in this paper suggests that, apart from the SVM implementation, Weka's default configuration of parameters provides an performance close the one achieved with the optimal configuration

Resistências à igualdade de género na política

Perante a desigualdade de género que existe na política em todo o mundo, nas últimas décadas têm sido implementadas medidas de ação positiva no sentido de promover a representação das mulheres, como foi o caso em Portugal, com a aprovação da Lei da Paridade, em 2006. Contudo, estas medidas têm gerado controvérsia, polarizando opiniões no debate público. Este artigo apresenta uma reflexão sobre os principais resultados de uma investigação efetuada no âmbito de uma tese de doutoramento (Santos, 2010), na qual participaram profissionais da política (deputadas/os) e não profissionais (estudantes universitárias/os), que procurou contribuir para aprofundar o conhecimento sobre a desigualdade de género no contexto da política, bem como sobre os obstáculos/resistências às medidas destinadas a combatê-la

Good practices for a literature survey are not followed by authors while preparing scientific manuscripts

The number of citations received by authors in scientific journals has become a major parameter to assess individual researchers and the journals themselves through the impact factor. A fair assessment therefore requires that the criteria for selecting references in a given manuscript should be unbiased with respect to the authors or the journals cited. In this paper, we advocate that authors should follow two mandatory principles to select papers (later reflected in the list of references) while studying the literature for a given research: i) consider similarity of content with the topics investigated, lest very related work should be reproduced or ignored; ii) perform a systematic search over the network of citations including seminal or very related papers. We use formalisms of complex networks for two datasets of papers from the arXiv repository to show that neither of these two criteria is fulfilled in practice

Análise emergética dos sistemas de pesca no pantanal

Os sistemas de pesca (profissional-artesanal, subsistência e amadora) constituem atividades econômicas muito importantes no Pantanal. Por meio da análise emergética será avaliado seu desempenho. As primeiras análises revelam que a pesca profissional artesanal utiliza amplamente os recursos naturais, com pouca entrada de recursos econômicos externos, e o peixe é vendido para turistas e comunidade local; os fluxos são internos ao ecossistema e as externalidades são mínimas. A pesca de subsistência mostra ser auto-suficiente. A pesca amadora, por outro lado, requer maior infra-estrutura, as articulações com a economia local são limitadas e gera vários tipos de externalidades negativas. In the “Pantanal”, a very big Brazilian wetland, fishery is an important economic activity that is carried out under three modalities: professional-artisanal, subsistence and touristic. Their ecological and thermodynamic performance will be studied using the emergy methodology. As first stage of this analysis, it was realized an information recovery in order to prepare the systems diagrams. The diagrams revealed the dependence of each one of fishery systems with local and external resources. Subsistence fishery is sustainable but doesn’t have product for sale. Professional-artisanal fishery interacts with different markets and uses a small quantity of external inputs. Touristic fishery depends on infra-structure investments and do not interact in adequate form with local economy

Caracterização socieconômica da comunidade do Amolar, sub-região do Paraguai, Corumbá, MS.

Este trabalho teve o objetivo de coletar informações qualitativas e quantitativas sobre as relações sociais e econômicas existentes entre os moradores do entorno da RPPN-EEB, comunidade do Amolar, sub-região do Rio Paraguai, Corumbá, MS.bitstream/item/161346/1/CT92.pd

Correlations between climate network and relief data

In the last few years, the scientific community has witnessed an ongoing trend of using ideas developed in the study of complex networks to analyze climate dynamics. This powerful combination, usually called climate networks, can be used to uncover non-trivial patterns of weather changes throughout the years. Here we investigate the temperature network of the North American region and show that two network characteristics, namely degree and clustering, have marked differences between the eastern and western regions. We show that such differences are a reflection of the presence of a large network community on the western side of the continent. Moreover, we provide evidence that this large community is a consequence of the peculiar characteristics of the western relief of North America

Correlations between climate network and relief data

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Correlations between climate network and relief data

Peer reviewedPublisher PD