The Democracy Defibrillator: The Decline of Canadian Voter Turnout in Federal Elections, and Suggestions for Revitalisation

This Major Research Paper analyses the decline of voter turnout in Canadian federal elections since 1988, looking at some of the reasoning for this and discussing some solutions for the growth of turnout in the future. As well as analyzing the issue of youth voting in particular, the paper discusses several possibilities to fix the system, utilising case study to find concepts that worked elsewhere. Specifically, the extension of the minimum voting age to 16 years old, changes to the voting system (in terms of moving away from First Past The Post) and mandatory voting laws are discussed as possible remedies to the issue. The paper demonstrates how these concepts have worked in countries analogous to Canada and ideas for how they might be applied here. The paper builds on the work of many political scientists, most prominently Henry Milner, to marry discussions on how to improve democracy with discussions on how we engage potential voters, under the thought process that the answers should largely be the same: we do so by making the system more representative of the will of all Canadians of voting age. There is no one way of doing this, but by applying several measures that have worked when applied to the most analogous cases we can find, we can have the best chance of revitalising Canada’s democracy for this generation and all the generations after. Canadian democracy is not dead. We are not in a crisis. That is precisely why now is the proper time to fix this problem, to put a jolt, as it were, into the system so that we can make changes before the problem gets so big that it cannot be ignored. With that, I present The Democracy Defibrillator

Reliability of reinforced concrete beams in port structures in the bending ultimate limit state

Este trabalho tem por objetivo estudar a confiabilidade estrutural nos projetos de vigas portuárias de concreto armado levando em consideração as prescrições da NBR 6118:2014. Foi considerado o desempenho de vigas sob carregamentos pesados em ambientes agressivos de zonas portuárias, verificando a influência da variação de parâmetros de projeto sobre a segurança da estrutura. A verificação da confiabilidade estrutural dos projetos se deu através da avaliação do índice de confiabilidade segundo o Método de Confiabilidade de Primeira Ordem (FORM ”“ First Order Reliability Method), o qual foi aplicado para a verificação do estado limite-último de flexão para as vigas dimensionadas e com redução na área efetiva de aço da armadura de tração devido à corrosão. Foram realizados estudos paramétricos para avaliar a confiabilidade das vigas de acordo com a variação da resistência característica à compressão do concreto, carregamento permanente, carregamento variável e taxa de armadura tracionada. Os resultados se mostraram coerentes, tendo o índice de confiabilidade apresentado grande variação para relações de carregamento variável elevada e redução da taxa de armadura tracionada, concluindo com a necessidade de revisar os coeficientes de segurança propostos pela norma brasileira para cargas variáveis

Equine-assisted therapy and practitioner´s well-being in the context of physical and mental health: a systematic review / A equoterapia e o bem-estar do praticante no âmbito da saúde física e mental: uma revisão sistemática

Background: Equine-assisted therapy has contributed to the treatment of a considerable range of pathologies and problems related to physical and mental health of people with some type of disability.Aims: This systematic review whose protocol is registered on the PROSPERO platform n. CRD42020221415, aimed to analyze the contribution of equine-assisted therapy verified in the literature as a possibility for improving the well-being of practitioners with physical or mental health problems.Methodology: A systematic review of the literature was performed in six databases from the research question in the PICO format “Can individuals with physical or mental health problems (Population), who practice equine-assisted therapy (Intervention) get improvements in their well-being (Outcomes)?”Results: The state of art presents a repetition of studies on the same health problems and lacks others.1956 articles were found, but only 11 were selected and of these, 9 presented positive results in their interventions.Conclusion: It is concluded that equine-assisted therapy can promote improvements in the well-being of practitioners regardless of the health problems to be treated, but future studies need to investigate disabilities not yet analyzed. 

End-to-End Discriminative Deep Network for Liver Lesion Classification

Colorectal liver metastasis is one of most aggressive liver malignancies. While the definition of lesion type based on CT images determines the diagnosis and therapeutic strategy, the discrimination between cancerous and non-cancerous lesions are critical and requires highly skilled expertise, experience and time. In the present work we introduce an end-to-end deep learning approach to assist in the discrimination between liver metastases from colorectal cancer and benign cysts in abdominal CT images of the liver. Our approach incorporates the efficient feature extraction of InceptionV3 combined with residual connections and pre-trained weights from ImageNet. The architecture also includes fully connected classification layers to generate a probabilistic output of lesion type. We use an in-house clinical biobank with 230 liver lesions originating from 63 patients. With an accuracy of 0.96 and a F1-score of 0.92, the results obtained with the proposed approach surpasses state of the art methods. Our work provides the basis for incorporating machine learning tools in specialized radiology software to assist physicians in the early detection and treatment of liver lesions

A note on comonotonicity and positivity of the control components of decoupled quadratic FBSDE

In this small note we are concerned with the solution of Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (FBSDE) with drivers that grow quadratically in the control component (quadratic growth FBSDE or qgFBSDE). The main theorem is a comparison result that allows comparing componentwise the signs of the control processes of two different qgFBSDE. As a byproduct one obtains conditions that allow establishing the positivity of the control process.Comment: accepted for publicatio

The positioning system of the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope

The ANTARES neutrino telescope, located 40km off the coast of Toulon in the Mediterranean Sea at a mooring depth of about 2475m, consists of twelve detection lines equipped typically with 25 storeys. Every storey carries three optical modules that detect Cherenkov light induced by charged secondary particles (typically muons) coming from neutrino interactions. As these lines are flexible structures fixed to the sea bed and held taut by a buoy, sea currents cause the lines to move and the storeys to rotate. The knowledge of the position of the optical modules with a precision better than 10cm is essential for a good reconstruction of particle tracks. In this paper the ANTARES positioning system is described. It consists of an acoustic positioning system, for distance triangulation, and a compass-tiltmeter system, for the measurement of the orientation and inclination of the storeys. Necessary corrections are discussed and the results of the detector alignment procedure are described

A estiagem de 2023 como evento hidrológico severo na bacia do Amazonas.

Os processos de enchente e vazante são eventos comuns em qualquer sistema hidrológico. Em alguns casos, em função de condições naturais ou antrópicas, tais eventos podem ocorrer de maneira extrema, trazendo diversos prejuízos à população. Na região Amazônica, a proximidade das comunidades com os cursos d'água e a sua alta dependência dos rios como vias de transporte, tornam a população ainda mais suscetível a eventos extremos como cheias e inundações. Este artigo visa demonstrar a evolução do evento da estiagem de 2023 na Bacia do Amazonas, que contempla os rios Solimões-Amazonas, Negro, Purus, Madeira e Branco, bem como retratar os eventos climáticos ocorridos que provocaram o evento severo na região e o papel do monitoramento hidrológico nesse contexto. Este estudo analisou os relatórios técnicos de Monitoramento climático da Bacia Amazônica e também boletins técnicos de monitoramento hidrológico da Bacia do Amazonas de 2023, emitido pelo Serviço Geológico do Brasil.Flood and drought processes are common events in any hydrological system. In some cases, due to natural or anthropogenic conditions, these events can occur in an extreme way, causing a great deal of damage to the population. In the Amazon region, the proximity of communities to watercourses and their high dependence on rivers for transportation make the population even more susceptible to extreme events such as floods. This article aims to demonstrate the evolution of the 2023 drought event in the Amazon Basin, which includes the Solimões-Amazonas, Negro, Purus, Madeira and Branco rivers, as well as portraying the climatic events that caused the severe event in the region and the role of hydrological monitoring in this context. This study analyzed the Amazon Basin technical reports on climate monitoring and also technical bulletins on hydrological monitoring in 2023 issued by the Geological Survey of Braz

DEPURADORA DE BARRANCO SECO Y TELDE [Material gráfico]

Copia digital. Madrid : Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, 201