Brazilian Consensus on Photoprotection

Brazil is a country of continental dimensions with a large heterogeneity of climates and massive mixing of the population. Almost the entire national territory is located between the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, and the Earth axial tilt to the south certainly makes Brazil one of the countries of the world with greater extent of land in proximity to the sun. The Brazilian coastline, where most of its population lives, is more than 8,500 km long. Due to geographic characteristics and cultural trends, Brazilians are among the peoples with the highest annual exposure to the sun. Epidemiological data show a continuing increase in the incidence of nonmelanoma and melanoma skin cancers. Photoprotection can be understood as a set of measures aimed at reducing sun exposure and at preventing the development of acute and chronic actinic damage. Due to the peculiarities of Brazilian territory and culture, it would not be advisable to replicate the concepts of photoprotection from other developed countries, places with completely different climates and populations. Thus the Brazilian Society of Dermatology has developed the Brazilian Consensus on Photoprotection, the first official document on photoprotection developed in Brazil for Brazilians, with recommendations on matters involving photoprotection

A Parallel Algebraic Constraint Solver for Integer Programming

Conventional methods for solving integer programming (IP) are based on heuristic searching algorithms. Recently, the tools of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry have bought new insights to integer programming via the theory of Grobner bases. The key idea is to encode IP problems into a special ideal associated with the constraint matrix A and the cost (object) function C. An important property of the ideal is that its Grobner bases correspond directly to the test sets of the IP problem. Using a proper test set, the optimal value of the cost function can be computed by constructing a monotonic path from the initial non-optimal solution of the problem to the optimal solution. Thus, IP can be solved without using intensive heuristic search. This approach is particularly interesting from the point of view of parallelism due to the inherent parallelism of the Buchberger algorithm that can be used to compute the Grobner bases. This paper presents a parallel geometric Buchberger algo..