Judicial Risk and Credit Market Performance: Micro Evidence from Brazil Payroll Loans

A large body of literature has stressed the institution-development nexus as critical in explaining differences in countries' economic performance. The empirical evidence, however, has been mainly at the aggregate level, associating macro performance with measures of quality of institutions. This paper, by relating a judicial decision on the legality of payroll debit loans in Brazil to bank-level decision variables, provides micro evidence on how creditor legal protection affects market performance. Payroll loans are personal loans with principal and interests payments directly deducted from the borrowers' payroll check, which, in practice, makes a collateral out of future income. In June 2004, a high-level federal court upheld a regional court ruling that had declared payroll deduction illegal. Using personal loans without payroll deduction as a control group, we assess whether the ruling had an impact on market performance. Evidence indicates that it had an adverse impact on risk perception, interest rates, and amount lent.

Oligonucleotide sequences forming short self-complimentary hairpins can expedite the down-regulation of Coprinopsis cinerea genes

Gene silencing in fungi is often induced by dsRNA hairpin forming constructs the preparation of which can require multiple cloning steps. To simplify gene silencing in the filamentous fungi we have evaluated a high throughput cloning method for target sequences using the homobasidiomycete Coprinopsis cinerea, the GFP reporter and a commercially available vector system. The pSUPER RNAi System™, which was developed for mammalian experiments, exploits the human H1 Polymerase III (Pol III) RNA gene promoter and expedites cloning/expression of specific user-defined oligonucleotide sequences to form short self-complimentary hairpins. Transformation of C. cinerea with pSUPER constructs harboring specific oligonucleotides (19 nt stem length) enabled recovery of transformants with reduced transcripts of the GFP transgene, that were less fluorescent in protein assays and microscopic phenotypes. This technological advance should expedite functional genomic studies in C. cinerea and has wider potential for utility in other homobasidiomycete and filamentous fungi

Determinants of self-medication with NSAIDs in a Portuguese community pharmacy

Licence CC BY-NC-ND http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"Background: Non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are a widely used therapeutic group in the world, and particularly in the Portuguese population. Objective: To compare NSAID’s use by prescription and self-medication acquisition and to determine the pattern of indication of NSAIDs, their usage profile and possible implications for patients’ safety. Methods: A cross-sectional design was used where individuals presenting at a community pharmacy requesting NSAIDs during the study period (one month) were invited to answer a face-to-face interview where socio-demographic characteristics, the indication pattern and previous experience of side effects were assessed. A follow-up interview was performed one week later to assess the incidence of adverse effects. The study was ethically approved. Results: A sample of 130 NSAIDs users was recruited, comprising mostly women (n=87; 66.9%), actively employed (n=77; 59.2%) and presenting a mean age of 49.5 years old (SD=20.49). An equal proportion of individuals acquired NSAIDs by self-medication and with medical prescription (n=65; 50%). Over 4/5 of patients (n=57; 87.7%) acquiring NSAIDs without a prescription were self-medicated by their own initiative, and only 10.8% (n=7) had been advised by the pharmacist. The most commonly acquired active substances were ibuprofen and diclofenac. Self-medicated users more frequently resorted to topical NSAIDs following short term treatments. The major underlying condition motivating NSAIDs sought were musculoskeletal disorders (45.0%), regardless of the regimen. An important proportion of prevalent users of NSAIDs reported previous experience of adverse effects (11.3%). One week after initiating NSAID therapy, a small proportion of patients reported incidence of adverse effects. Conclusion: Self-medication with NSAIDs is sought for numerous medical conditions. Reported adverse effects (prevalent and incident) confirm the need for a more rational use of NSAIDs and ongoing pharmacovigilance.

An evaluation study for improving gap flow simulations in coastal areas on Portugal

Winds inferred by Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites are a very important source of spatial wind field behavior along coastal areas particularly on small coastal areas that are temporary affected by strong flow disturbances mainly driven from land to the ocean. Gap flow circulations, among others, are an example of such wind phenomena disturbances which are not yet described by regional atmospheric models nor by CFD modeling. Such situations could compromise both offshore wind resource and park deployment studies on places affected by the presence of these phenomena types. A possible way to overcome this situation is the usage of SAR images assimilated into regional atmospheric models using certain type of assimilation techniques. In this work, a real case occurred in a coastal area in Portugal will be taken into account. A strong gap flow occurred during the beginning of the night 9 December 2010 was captured by a SAR image which was assimilated into the model. Some validation meteorological stations were used for validation purposes taken into account scenarios performed with and without wind SAR assimilation. Spatial results lead to the conclusion that the assimilation of SAR images improves the wind pattern results which reflects how SAR assimilation into the mesoscale models are important for simulating the coastal wind flow patterns

Environmental risk assessment in a contaminated estuary: an integrated weight of evidence approach as a decision support tool

Environmental risk assessment of complex ecosystems such as estuaries is a challenge, where innovative and integrated approaches are needed. The present work aimed at developing an innovative integrative methodology to evaluate in an impacted estuary (the Sado, in Portugal, was taken as case study), the adverse effects onto both ecosystem and human health. For the purpose, new standardized lines of evidence based on multiple quantitative data were integrated into a weight of evidence according to a best expert judgment approach. The best professional judgment for a weight of evidence approach in the present study was based on the following lines of evidence: i) human contamination pathways; ii) human health effects: chronic disease; iii) human health effects: reproductive health; iv) human health effects: health care; v) human exposure through consumption of local agriculture produce; vi) exposure to contaminated of water wells and agriculture soils; vii) contamination of the estuarine sedimentary environment (metal and organic contaminants); viii) effects on benthic organisms with commercial value; and ix) genotoxic potential of sediments. Each line of evidence was then ordinally ranked by levels of ecological or human health risk, according to a tabular decision matrix and expert judgment. Fifteen experts scored two fishing areas of the Sado estuary and a control estuarine area, in a scale of increasing environmental risk and management actions to be taken. The integrated assessment allowed concluding that the estuary should not be regarded as impacted by a specific toxicant, such as metals and organic compounds hitherto measured, but by the cumulative risk of a complex mixture of contaminants. The proven adverse effects on species with commercial value may be used to witness the environmental quality of the estuarine ecosystem. This method argues in favor of expert judgment and qualitative assessment as a decision support tool to the integrative management of estuaries. Namely it allows communicating environmental risk and proposing mitigation measures to local authorities and population under a holistic perspective as an alternative to narrow single line of evidence approaches, which is mandatory to understand cause and effect relationships in complex areas like estuaries.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Improving offshore wind resource assessments using a data assimilation technique

Wind research and industry partners in collaboration with the EU have created the FP7 NORSEWInD project with the main objective of delivering to the North, Baltic and Irish Sea areas high quality wind atlases for offshore wind resource assessment. The state-of-the-art atmospheric mesoscale model WRF is used to map the wind resource at 90m a.g.l. for the North Sea area. A model domain with a spatial resolution of 20x20 km is used to simulate a winter and a summer month (November 2008 and July 2009). It is coupled with a Newtonian relaxation assimilation technique to ingest surface wind data provided from QuikSCAT (QS) satellite and sea surface temperature (SST) data from GHRSST Level 4 analysis. Wind results from the model are validated against observational data from the anemometric mast FINO1 and the spatial improvement of the average wind field at 90 m a.g.l is calculated. Improvements of more than 5% were obtained from using data assimilation on the overall domain. Each source has shown a distinct impact on the analyzed periods. The QS assimilation had higher impact during the summer period whereas SST assimilation was significant during the winter period. At FINO 1 location, improvements on the vertical wind profile were obtained from the SST assimilation. The MAE and RMSE statistical parameters were slightly improved

Impacte da assimilação de dados de vento provenientes de satélite em ambiente offshore: caso de estudo da Berlenga

Com o acentuado desenvolvimento da capacidade de produção de energia eólica onshore, onde Portugal já excede,actualmente, 3500 MW de capacidade instalada, é de esperar que este número ascenda a patamares muito elevados, tendo em conta os objectivos ambiciosos que a União Europeia planeia para o sector até 2020, prevendo-se que, em 2013, Portugal atinja a meta dos 5100M de capacidade instalada. No entanto, o recurso eólico onshore nacional não é infinito, tendo o LNEG já estimado uma meta nacional para a capacidade eólica sustentável onshore para Portugal Continental de, aproximadamente, 6000MW [1], capacidade só ultrapassável com a libertação de região actualmente protegidas ambientalmente de forma severa, bem como com a introdução de impactos naõ desprezáveis sobre as populações, que seria desejável evitar. Desta forma, e para um horizonte temporal além de 2013, há que fomentar e redireccionar as oportunidades de investimento do sector para outro nicho de mercado que se espera emergente, e que é o aproveitamento da energia eólica offshore que o País dispõe [2]

A first methodology for wind energy resource assessment in urbanised areas in Portugal

The onshore wind power capacity in Portugal has increased very rapidly in the last five years and this high rate of development is expected to continue up to 2013 although at a slower rate. By then almost all sustainable onshore resource assessment will be deployed. Nevertheless, the full exploitation of the wind resource in Portugal offers other possibilities, among them the installation of small wind turbines (SWT), namely micro-turbines for domestic use in urban and constructed environments. To contribute to the needs of developers, investors and the overall population’s expectations and needs into this newer type of renewable market, a new a new line of research related to the wind resource assessment in urban and constructed areas was initiated. The present work presents a first user-friendly method to assess the urban wind potential at low experimental and computational costs, compatible with the scale of investment of micro-generation. A case study, where an urban area is identified and treated as very complex topography, was characterized in terms of wind resource, being the preliminary results presented here