Case-study: CTT, the mail going public

The main purpose of this case-study is to analyse CTT’s privatisation process, a previously Government-owned firm, which went public in 2013, under the terms of the adjustment program agreed between Portugal, the European institutions (ECB and European Commission) and the IMF. The emphasis will be placed on the IPO process, but also on the company itself (its history, current situation and prospects for its new phase, as a publicly listed company). This piece of work aims to evaluate the different alternatives for the privatisation of the company along with the respective implications, as well as the outcome of the actual decision taken by the Portuguese Government. One key aspect of the case is also to understand the importance that the privatisation of the Royal Mail, which can be seen as a peer of the Portuguese company, in the unfolding of the process and in the choice of the privatisation model. The case intends to show how the British process influenced the subsequent option of the Portuguese entities to sell CTT through an IPO, instead of a trade sale. All in all, the overall objective of this case-study is to analyse CTT’s successful sale process, which created the first Portuguese company with 100% free-float. 3 On the last days of November 2013, Steven Bernstein was staring at the window of his office overlooking downtown Manhattan, not even noticing the intense rain that was pouring down. As senior manager at ABC Fund, a pension fund responsible for managing more than 800 million dollars, his thoughts were focused on a very important decision that ABC Fund would have to make in just a matter of days. The American pension fund was considering whether or not to invest in the upcoming Initial Public Offering of CTT- Correios de Portugal, the Government-owned Portuguese mail company. Is this investment opportunity in accordance with the risk profile of a pension fund? Is it a wise decision to acquire shares in a Portuguese company when the country is at the centre of the European Sovereign debt crisis, going through a very demanding economic adjustment program imposed by its bail-out creditors? Would the creation of Portugal's Postal Bank make CTT a sure bet today when its price does not fully reflect the future benefits from entering financial services? Those were some of the questions that were constantly in Mr. Bernstein’s mind over the last couple of days and he was struggling to find the answers

Semiclassical thermodynamics of scalar fields

We present a systematic semiclassical procedure to compute the partition function for scalar field theories at finite temperature. The central objects in our scheme are the solutions of the classical equations of motion in imaginary time, with spatially independent boundary conditions. Field fluctuations -- both field deviations around these classical solutions, and fluctuations of the boundary value of the fields -- are resummed in a Gaussian approximation. In our final expression for the partition function, this resummation is reduced to solving certain ordinary differential equations. Moreover, we show that it is renormalizable with the usual 1-loop counterterms.Comment: 24 pages, 5 postscript figure

Chromosomal analyses of Salticinae and Lyssomaninae reveal a broad occurrence of the 2n male=28, X(1)X(2)0 karyotype within Salticidae

Brazil possesses the richest fauna of Salticidae in the world, including 560 specieshowever, no representative of the Brazilian fauna has been cytogenetically analyzed up to now. It has been demonstrated that karyotype data are a useful source for discussions on the phylogeny and chromosome differentiation of some salticid lineages. In this work, the first chromosome study of salticid species from Brazil is presented, with the addition of five genera to the 38 previously investigated worldwide. The analysis of mitotic and/or meiotic cells revealed 2n male = 28, X(1)X(2)0 in Asaracus sp., Coryphasia sp., Chira sp., Frigga quintensis (Tullgren, 1905), and Lyssomanes pauper Mello-Leitao, 1945. This karyotype constitution is the most common for Salticidae, occurring in species of distinct clades. The diploid number 2n female = 28 observed in Hasarius adansoni (Audouin, 1826) is unexpected, differing in one autosomal pair from the karyotype previously registered for males of the same species. The cytogenetic information reported here reinforces the wide occurence of 2n male = 28, X(1)X(2)0 within Salticidae, including species belonging to different clades and biogeographical regions. This karyotype is a shared character of Salticidae + Philodromidae, found exclusively in these families within Dionycha, suggesting its sister relationship already proposed in the literature.Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico, CNPqFundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo, FAPESPUniv Fed Mato Grosso do Sul, UFMS, Setor Biol Geral, Ctr Ciencias Biol & Saude, BR-79070900 Campo Grande, MS, BrazilUniv Estadual Mato Grosso do Sul, UEMS, Unidade Univ Ivinhema, BR-79740000 Ivinhema, MS, BrazilUniv Estadual Mato Grosso do Sul, UEMS, Unidade Univ Mundo Novo, BR-79790000 Mundo Novo, MS, BrazilInst Butantan, Lab Especial Colecoes Zool, Av Vital Brasil 1500, BR-05503900 Sao Paulo, SP, BrazilUniv Fed Sao Paulo, UNIFESP, Dept Ciencias Biol, Av Prof Artur Riedel 275, BR-09972270 Diadema, SP, BrazilUniv Fed Sao Paulo, UNIFESP, Dept Ciencias Biol, Av Prof Artur Riedel 275, BR-09972270 Diadema, SP, BrazilCNPq: 471821/2008-0CNPq: 303028/2014-9FAPESP: 2011/21643-1Web of Scienc

INTEGRAÇÃO DA FERRAMENTA MULTIPROVA AO SISTEMA INTEGRADO DE GESTÃO DE ATIVIDADES ACADÊMICAS

Este artigo descreve a iniciativa de integração entre dois sistemas de software no contexto acadêmico de uma universidade federal. Os sistemas envolvidos nessa ação são: o SIGAA, que é um sistema de informação web institucional que informatiza diversos procedimentos da área acadêmica, e o Multiprova, que é uma ferramenta que permite ao docente gerar, de forma controlada, variações nos aspectos acessórios do enunciado e das alternativas das questões. Esta iniciativa tem como propósito contribuir com o processo de ensino-aprendizagem,  através  do  uso  de  tecnologia,  ajudando  a  vencer desafios, como o gerenciamento de turmas grandes e geração de feedbacks rápidos de aprendizagem aos discentes e docentes

Analysis of Bio-h2 Production Routes from Biomass Gasification

The use of hydrogen (H2) as an energy carrier may have an important role in the near future. Nowadays, H2 is mostly produced from fossil fuels, thus, it is urgent to prove the viability of alternative and sustainable processes to obtain H2. Gasification of renewable sources like biomass that are widely available, inexpensive and carbon-neutral is considered a viable technical, economic and environmental alternative for H2 production. The first step of biohydrogen (bio-H2) production through biomass gasification is the production of syngas (gasification gas). Syngas cleaning and upgrading procedures are essential to remove undesirable compounds and to increase bio-H2 content. Steam reforming and water gas shift reactions are also crucial to increase bio-H2 content in syngas. Next, bio-H2 separation from other gaseous compounds is needed to finally obtain bio-H2 at the required purification level. Although some of the mentioned technologies are proven and available on the market for similar applications, some drawbacks and technological challenges for the overall process need to be overcome to improve the overall techno-economic feasibility. This paper aims to analyse and discuss different bio-H2 production routes from biomass gasification to c the most promising ones

ABACATES ‘BREDA’ SUBMETIDOS A DIFERENTES DOSES DE RADIAÇÃO UV-C

O abacate (Persea americana Mill.) é um fruto muito consumido devido às suas excelentes características organolépticas, mas, por apresentar vida útil reduzida após a colheita, é preciso que tecnologias que prolonguem sua vida útil, como a radiação, sejam utilizadas. Neste sentido, o objetivo deste trabalho foi analisar diferentes doses de radiação UV-C na conservação pós-colheita de abacates ʽBreda’. Os frutos foram colhidos, transportados ao laboratório, lavados e submetidos a diferentes doses de radiação UV-C, sendo: controle - 0,0 kJ m-2 (sem exposição à radiação), 1,0; 2,0 e 3,0 kJ m-2. Após a exposição às doses de radiação, os frutos foram armazenados a 10±0,18°C e 60±4,73% UR por 21 dias e avaliados a cada três dias quanto à perda de massa fresca, firmeza, coloração, índice de maturação e teores de ácido ascórbico, com três repetições. Os dados obtidos foram submetidos à análise de variância (P≤0,05), e, quando significativos, foi realizada a análise de regressão. Com base nos resultados obtidos constatou-se que a dose de 1,0 kJ m-2 foi eficaz na elevação da luminosidade e manteve baixa a porcentagem de perda de massa. Palavras-chave: Persea americana Mill. Qualidade. Pós-colheita

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe