Fishing in the inner sea

This work is a practice-led research that inhabits the frontier between the tradition in Portuguese ceramic tiles and contemporary art assembling painting, glass and ceramics under the idea of rhizome. The concept, borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari book A thousand Plateaus (1988), is used as a metaphor for the creative process developed under reflexive practice. Anchored in a framework that concerns contemporary authors and artists regarding creativity, studio practice in ceramics and glass, and driven from a praxis based research, this dissertation describes and reflects on: i) the site for the emergent ideas – the graphic diary; ii) the territory for the development of glass and ceramic forms – studio practice; iii) the paths, pitfalls, connections that constitute such rhizomatic proposal under the glass and ceramic creative process to render the work visible. The final displacement of works as an installation results exactly form the rhizome structure underneath the creative process followed in this research. As an outcome, a rhizomatic proposal for creative process in glass and ceramic practice-led research is thus offered for future studio practice-based research

O princípio da igualdade como limitação à atuação do Estado

Neste artigo, a essência emblemática do sentido da igualdade, aplicado à esfera social e jurídica, é tematizada teórica e historicamente. Virtualizada pela interpretação hermenêutica, a intenção posta na análise é a de compreender o teor da crise que ensejou as possibilidades de um compromisso democrático com uma igualdade relativa, que no Estado Social contemporâneo expressa-se como direito e como técnica. Como direito, essa igualdade relativa vinculou-se à concepção liberal, dando-lhe prosseguimento ao restringir e limitar a atuação do Estado; como técnica inseriu-se no espaço social da chamada Constituição aberta, configurando-se como a mais valiosa das garantias sociais

Jurisdição constitucional e legitimidade (algumas observações sobre o Brasil)

CONSTITUCIONAL justice comprises two conditions: one with a judicial-formal character (theoretical), the other of political-substantial character (pragmatic). The preservation of constitutionality, being a premise of democracy, becomes ever more relevant, and gives rise to the need of establishing a neutral and impartial court to mediate constitutional conflicts. Legitimacy in constitutional issues is altogether more political than judicial. In Brazil, the Executive Branch increasingly seeks to preserve constitutionality in the interests of the governing group, rather than for the sake of constitutional order. This leads to the so-called Provisional Executive Orders, which frequently go against constitutional principles of the system's essence. Grave cautionary warnings regarding the independence and legitimacy of the country's constitutional justice revolve around two crucial issues: those made by the President and the need to spin off from the Judiciary Branch the court of justice that acts as guardian of the Constitution. Largely, the crisis in the Brazilian Judiciary has been a crisis of the Federal Supreme Court.DUAS são as condições da justiça constitucional: uma de caráter jurídico-formal (teórica); outra de caráter político-substancial (pragmática). Cresce a relevância do controle da constitucionalidade, pois ela é uma premissa da democracia. Daí a necessidade do estabelecimento de uma instância neutra, mediadora e imparcial dos conflitos constitucionais. Toda legitimidade em matéria constitucional é mais política que jurídica. No Brasil, o Poder Executivo busca fazer o controle da constitucionalidade cada vez mais no interesse do grupo governante e cada vez menos no interesse da ordem constitucional. Disso resultam as Medidas Provisórias que, com freqüência, ferem princípios constitucionais da essência do sistema. Graves reparos à independência e à legitimidade da justiça constitucional no país giram ao redor de dois pontos cruciais: a pelo presidente da Repblica e a necessidade de desmembrar do Poder Judiciário a corte de justiça que exerce o papel de guarda da Constituição. A crise do Judiciário brasileiro tem sido em grande parte a crise do Supremo Tribunal Federal

Accurate prediction of major histocompatibility complex class II epitopes by sparse representation via ℓ 1-minimization

Background: The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is responsible for presenting antigens (epitopes) on the surface of antigen-presenting cells (APCs). When pathogen-derived epitopes are presented by MHC class II on an APC surface, T cells may be able to trigger an specific immune response. Prediction of MHC-II epitopes is particularly challenging because the open binding cleft of the MHC-II molecule allows epitopes to bind beyond the peptide binding groove; therefore, the molecule is capable of accommodating peptides of variable length. Among the methods proposed to predict MHC-II epitopes, artificial neural networks (ANNs) and support vector machines (SVMs) are the most effective methods. We propose a novel classification algorithm to predict MHC-II called sparse representation via 1-minimization. Results: We obtained a collection of experimentally confirmed MHC-II epitopes from the Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Resource (IEDB) and applied our 1-minimization algorithm. To benchmark the performance of our proposed algorithm, we compared our predictions against a SVM classifier. We measured sensitivity, specificity abd accuracy; then we used Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis to evaluate the performance of our method. The prediction performance of MHC-II epitopes of the 1-minimization algorithm was generally comparable and, in some cases, superior to the standard SVM classification method and overcame the lack of robustness of other methods with respect to outliers. While our method consistently favoured DPPS encoding with the alleles tested, SVM showed a slightly better accuracy when “11-factor” encoding was used. Conclusions: 1-minimization has similar accuracy than SVM, and has additional advantages, such as overcoming the lack of robustness with respect to outliers. With 1-minimization no model selection dependency is involved

El carácter pioneiro de la Constitución de México de 1917

El constitucionalismo social tiene una trayectoria que va de la doctrina al texto legislativo, de la idea al hecho, de la utopía a la realidad, de lo abstracto a lo concreto. De forma habitual, aquél se encuentra impregnado de valores o principios que históricamente le han dado legitimidad. En realidad, la esfera teórica en la que se desarrolló la base de tal constitucionalismo es aquella en la que prevalece el pensamiento de igualdad vinculado a una noción de justicia. En esa base se combinan elementos doctrinarios, ideológicos y utópicos cuyas raíces se remontan a pensadores de la estatura de Platón y Rousseau, de Aristóteles y Althusius, de Tomás Moro y Saint-Simon, de Santo Tomás de Aquino y Proudhon, de Carlos Marx y Haroldo Laski. Ya la esfera pragmática, a su vez, comienza a dibujarse en la modernidad con la Constitución francesa de 1793, que, de cierta forma, radicalizó la Revolución por el tenaz empeño de sus constituyentes em hacer que la igualdad subiera por la escalera de las instituciones hasta alcanzar un escalón tan alto como el de la libertad. Sin embargo, el constitucionalismo social, subyacente a aquel estatuto revolucionario, y que tiene ahí su certificado de nacimiento en el campo de la positividad, sólo toma realmente complexión definida y concreta, filtrada en el espíritu, en la conciencia y en la vocación de la contemporaneidad, a partir de la promulgación de la carta magna de México, de 1917. En efecto, el tratamiento normativo de la materia social brilla precursoramente en el texto mexicano, a saber: en sus artículos 3o., 4o., 5o., 25 al 28 y 123, los cuales, a nuestro ver, tienen un contenido cualitativo y cuantitativo, cuyo alcance excede al de la Constitución de Weimar promulgada en 1919, dos años después.Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociale