Equity in five Mediterranean countries

Public education systems ought to be equitable, ensuring equal opportunities to all students, irrespective of the socioeconomic status of their families. This political desideratum is based upon, not only on ethical considerations, but also – and mainly – by the need of fostering economic development and progress. To develop, at maximum, the potential of each and every individual in a community, it is imperative to reduce human resource lost and, consequently, to improve wealth creation. However, there exists the belief that the more equitable an education system is, the poorer it behaves in terms of learning standards. In fact, relevant empirical evidence points on the opposite direction: according to PISA – Programme for International Student Assessment, countries like Korea, Finland, Canada and Japan, “combine high average performance with equity and have a large proportion of top-performing students, which demonstrates that excellence and equity can go together”. According to OECD, “Equity in education has two dimensions. The first is fairness, which implies ensuring that personal and social circumstances – for example gender, socioeconomic status or ethnic origin – should not be an obstacle to achieving educational potential. The second is inclusion, which implies ensuring a basic minimum standard of education for all – for example that everyone should be able to read, write and do simple arithmetic.”. The present research lies on the utilization of a set of indicators to encompass different factors and sources of inequity. To understand these factors, four groups of students were identified, considering the economic, social and cultural status of their families (low or high) and the performance (low or high) they exhibit in the PISA mathematics tests (in 2003 and 2012), Taking into consideration the percentage of each one of these groups it is possible to perform a risk analysis (calculating relative risks, attributable risks, and odds ratio). This research aims at improving the understanding of the factors which affect the performance of education systems, in particular, those related with (i) unequal distribution of school resources, (ii) differences between public and private schools, and (iii) dissimilar conditions between rural and urban schools. In this research a set of variables were selected and analysed in order to study three different levels of analysis: individual (gender, grade repetition, and immigrant status), family (economic, social and cultural status), and school (public/private, location, class size, and resources), for five Mediterranean countries.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Parallel strategies for Direct Multisearch

Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.Direct multisearch (DMS) is a derivative-free optimization class of algorithms, suited for computing approximations to the complete Pareto front of a given multiobjective optimization problem. In DMS class, constraints are addressed with an extreme barrier approach, only evaluating feasible points. It has a well-supported convergence analysis and simple implementations present a good numerical performance, both in academic test sets and in real applications. Recently, this numerical performance was improved with the definition of a search step based on the minimization of quadratic polynomial models, corresponding to the algorithm BoostDMS. In this work, we propose and numerically evaluate strategies to improve the performance of BoostDMS, mainly through parallelization applied to the search and to the poll steps. The final parallelized version not only considerably decreases the computational time required for solving a multiobjective optimization problem, but also increases the quality of the computed approximation to the Pareto front. Extensive numerical results will be reported in an academic test set and in a chemical engineering application.preprintpublishe

Correlação entre distância genética e heterose para comprimento de panícula por cruzamento dialélico entre acessos de arroz (Oryza sativa L.) de base genética ampla.

O objetivo desse trabalho foi correlacionar os dados de distância genética de Rogers modificada por Wright e a heterose observada no caractere comprimento de panícula, um dos componentes de produtividade do arroz, dos 120 híbridos obtidos nesses cruzamentos

Animal protein-based soft materials for tissue engineering applications

Proteins have long been used in coatings for cell culture plates and to supplement cell culture media. Due to their unmatched biocompatibility, biodegradability, bioactivity and immune-privilege, the interest in proteins rapidly advanced for the design and engineering of more complex substrates for biomedical applications. In this chapter, the proteins typically used in the design and fabrication of biomedical devices are presented and discussed, with particular focus in human-based platforms. However, restrictions in the use of protein-derived materials are associated with their limited processability and stability, but to overcome this, multiple bioconjugation techniques have been described and are herein presented. An overview of current protein-based materials that have found clinical application and that have been commercialized is also provided.publishe

Reaproveitamento da adubação nitrogenada de cobertura do milho safrinha consorciado com cultivares de brachiaria.

O objetivo deste trabalho foi estudar as respostas de produtividade do milho safrinha cultivado em consórcio com plantas forrageiras como a Brachiaria brizantha cv. Marandú, cv. Xaraés e Brachiaria ruziziensis em combinação com diferentes doses de nitrogênio aplicadas em cobertura nas entrelinhas do milho e estudar a dinâmica da palhada destas plantas de após a retirada da cultura granífera. O trabalho foi realizado na área experimental da Universidade do Oeste Paulista, em Presidente Prudente, SP. Foi utilizado o delineamento experimental de blocos casualizados, com quatro repetições e parcelas subdivididas, tendo os seguintes tratamentos nas parcelas: monocultivo de milho, consórcio de milho com a forrageira B. brizantha cv. Marandú, consórcio de milho com a B. brizantha cv. Xaraés e consórcio de milho com a B. ruziziensis, semeadas em linhas aos 45 DAE do milho no meio das entrelinhas da cultura do milho; e nas subparcelas quatro níveis de adubação nitrogenada de cobertura efetuada no mesmo dia da semeadura das Brachiarias, em linhas enterradas utilizando-se as doses de 0, 20, 40 e 80 kg ha-1 de N, na fonte uréia. Os resultados foram submetidos à ANAVA utilizando o teste Tukey a 5% de probabilidade para comparar as médias dos tratamentos ou regressão polinomial para estudo das doses. As Brachiarias brizantha cv. Xaraés e cv. Marandú, semeadas nas entrelinhas do milho safrinha, apresentaram alta capacidade de aproveitamento do N aplicado em cobertura na lavoura de grãos, com forte resposta em termos de produção de palhada

Selective cell recruitment and spatially controlled cell attachment on instructive chitosan surfaces functionalized with antibodies

Bioactive constructs to guide cellular mobilization and function have been proposed as an approach for a new generation of biomaterials in functional tissue engineering. Adult mesenchymal stem cells have been widely used as a source for cell based therapeutic strategies, namely tissue engineering. This is a heterogeneous cell population containing many subpopulations with distinct regenerative capacity. Thus, one of the issues for the effective clinical use of stem cells in tissue engineering is the isolation of a highly purified, expandable specific subpopulation of stem cells. Antibody functionalized biomaterials could be promising candidates to isolate and recruit specific cell types. Here we propose a new concept of instructive biomaterials that are able to recruit and purify specific cell types from a mixed cell population. This biomimetic concept uses a target-specific chitosan substrate to capture specific adipose derived stem cells. Specific antibodies were covalently immobilized onto chitosan membranes using bis[sulfosuccinimidyl] suberate (BS3). Quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) was used to monitor antibody immobilization/adsorption onto the chitosan films. Specific antibodies covalently immobilized kept their bioactivity and captured specific cell types from a mixed cell population. Microcontact printing allowed to covalently immobilize antibodies in patterns and simultaneously a spatial control in cell attachmentThe authors acknowledge the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for the fellowships SFRH/BD/61390/2009 (C.A.C) and SFRH/BPD/45206/2008 (A.M.F), and also to the International Max-Planck-Research School (C.A.C) for the financial support. We are grateful to Hospital da Prelada for the donations. This work was carried out under the scope of the EU 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. NMP4-SL-2009-229292 (Find&Bind)

The design of a digital coincidence-detection trigger system for a RPC-based pet

A complex task for PET cameras is the design of an appropriate coincidence-detection trigger as it usually encompasses coincidences in a large number of channels and tight time specifications. Those requirements are even greater for a resistive plate chamber (RPC)-based detector technology as the time window specification is quite small (in the order of a few hundred picoseconds) and the number of coincidence-channels can be quite large (more than 100 in a large camera). In this work we discuss on-going work aimed at implementing the coincidence-detection algorithm inside a FPGA along with the necessary TDCs. The use of the developed solution in a first prototype of an RPC-based small animal PET and its scalability to the case of a human, all-body, PET, is discussed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Digestibilidade de gerações de perfilhos do capim Tanzânia.

O objetivo do presente experimento foi determinar o efeito da intensidade e do ciclo de pastejo sobre a digestibilidade in vitro da matéria orgânica de gerações de perfilhos de capim Tanzânia. O delineamento experimental foi de blocos completos ao acaso com três tratamentos (intensidade de pastejo alta, média e baixa) e quatro repetições. As gerações de perfilhos eram identificadas com fios de arame coloridos. Um dia antes de cada pastejo duas amostras eram cortadas por parcela e a digestibilidade in vitro da matéria orgânica de cada geração determinada. A digestibilidade das gerações de perfilhos foi maior nas áreas submetidas a elevada intensidade de pastejo e decresceu com o avanço da idade (redução de 3 a 6 pontos percentuais de digestibilidade por ciclo) .Os efeitos negativos do florescimento sobre o valor nutritivo da forragem podem ser reduzidos através de práticas de manejo que promovam uma maior renovação de perfilhos

Project WILAS – West Iberia Lithosphere and Astenosphere Structure

The lithosphere of Iberia has been formed through a number of processes of continental collision and extension: in Lower Paleozoic, the collision of three tectonics blocks produced the Variscan Orogeny, the main event of formation of the lithosphere. The subsequent Mesozoic rifting and breakup of the Pangea had a profound effect on the continental crust of Iberia. Since the Miocene, the southern interaction between Africa and Iberia is characterized by a diffuse convergent margin that originates a vast area of deformation. The impact of this complex tectonic in the structure of the Lithosphere remains an incognito, especially in its western part. Project WILAS (PTDC/CTE-GIX/097946/2008) is a 3 years project funded by FCT in which a temporary network of more than 20 BB seismic stations is being deployed in Portugal between 2010-2012. It will extend to the western border of Iberia the coverage of the TOPO-IBERIA project. The project aims to image the 3D structure beneath W Iberia. The knowledge of the Crust, Lithosphere and Astenosphere seismic structure must be dealt at different scales, involving different but complementary methods

Efeito do sistema de cultivo e do meio de cultura sobre o crescimento de calos embriogênicos de cafeeiro.

Neste trabalho comparou-se a produção de calos embriogênicos em meio líquido com a de meio gelificado usando-se dois meios de cultura recomendados para café arábica: CP (van Boxtel & Berthouly, 1996) e SM (Teixeira et al. 2004