Nonlinearities and Price Puzzle in Brazil

What is called a price puzzle is a positive and persistent response of ination to a unit shock in the interest rate's innovation. Using a VAR to analyse monetary policy in Brazil, this paper comes to the conclusion that when nonlinearities in the data were considered, most of this e_ect vanishes. This is done _rstly by checking if the series are unit root processes or nonlinear trend stationary. After that a nonparametric co-trending analysis was applied. The test result favored a common nonlinear trend between ination and the interest rate, which seems to a_ect the system innovation analysis, inducing most of the price puzzle e_ect.Monetary Policy, Nonlinearities, Nonlinear Trend, Co-Trending, Common Treds, Price Puzzle

Forecasting Quarterly Brazilian GDP Growth Rate With Linear and NonLinear Diffusion Index Models

This paper uses linear and non-linear diffusion index models and combination of them to produce one-step-ahead forecast of quarterly Brazilian GDP growth rate. The non-linear diffusion index models are not only parsimonious ones, but they also purport to describe economic cycles through a Threshold diffusion index model and a Markov-Switching diffusion index model.Forecasting, Brazilian GDP, Diffusion Index, Threshold, Markov-Switching

VO2 thin films and nanoparticles for energy-saving applications in architectural elements

Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is a promising material with large interest in construction industry and architecture, due to its thermochromic properties. This material may be used to create "smart" coatings that result in improvements in the buildings energy efficiency, by reducing heat exchanges and, consequently, the need for acclimatization. In this work, VO2 thin films and coatings were produced and tested in laboratory, to apply in architectural elements, such as glass, rooftop tiles and exterior paints. Thin films were produced by RF magnetron sputtering and VO2 nanoparticles were obtained through hydrothermal synthesis, aiming to create "smart" windows and tiles, respectively. These coatings have demonstrated the capability to modulate the transmittance of infrared radiation by around 20%. The VO2 nanoparticle coatings were successfully applied on ceramic tiles. The critical temperature was reduced to around 40ºC by tungsten doping. Ultimately, two identical house models were built, in order to test the VO2 coatings, in real atmospheric conditions during one of the hottest months of the year, in Portugal – August

ForamViT-GAN: Exploring New Paradigms in Deep Learning for Micropaleontological Image Analysis

Micropaleontology in geosciences focuses on studying the evolution of microfossils (e.g., foraminifera) through geological records to reconstruct past environmental and climatic conditions. This field heavily relies on visual recognition of microfossil features, making it suitable for computer vision technology, specifically deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), to automate and optimize microfossil identification and classification. However, the application of deep learning in micropaleontology is hindered by limited availability of high-quality, high-resolution labeled fossil images and the significant manual labeling effort required by experts. To address these challenges, we propose a novel deep learning workflow combining hierarchical vision transformers with style-based generative adversarial network algorithms to efficiently acquire and synthetically generate realistic high-resolution labeled datasets of micropaleontology in large volumes. Our study shows that this workflow can generate high-resolution images with a high signal-to-noise ratio (39.1 dB) and realistic synthetic images with a Frechet inception distance similarity score of 14.88. Additionally, our workflow provides a large volume of self-labeled datasets for model benchmarking and various downstream visual tasks, including fossil classification and segmentation. For the first time, we performed few-shot semantic segmentation of different foraminifera chambers on both generated and synthetic images with high accuracy. This novel meta-learning approach is only possible with the availability of high-resolution, high-volume labeled datasets. Our deep learning-based workflow shows promise in advancing and optimizing micropaleontological research and other visual-dependent geological analyses

Brazilian key-thinkers on education

It is almost a consensus among the Brazilians that, in order to solve the social issues, the education must be improved. Thus, the present study aimed to analyze the Brazilian key-thinkers on education. Rui Barbosa, Fernando de Azevedo, Anísio Teixeira, Cecília Meireles, and Paulo Freire were selected because they worked to develop some aspects of education: politics, educational system, philosophy of education, childhood education and pedagogical methods. These intellectuals fought against powerful societal forces, but they did not give up on transforming the Brazilian education, and, consequently, the Brazilian society. Therefore, they were selected to represent the Brazilian key-thinkers on education

Digital Complex Correlator for a C-band Polarimetry survey

The international Galactic Emission Mapping project aims to map and characterize the polarization field of the Milky Way. In Portugal it will cartograph the C-band sky polarized emission of the Northern Hemisphere and provide templates for map calibration and foreground control of microwave space probes like ESA Planck Surveyor mission. The receiver system is equipped with a novel receiver with a full digital back-end using an Altera Field Programmable Gate Array, having a very favorable cost/performance relation. This new digital backend comprises a base-band complex cross-correlator outputting the four Stokes parameters of the incoming polarized radiation. In this document we describe the design and implementation of the complex correlator using COTS components and a processing FPGA, detailing the method applied in the several algorithm stages and suitable for large sky area surveys.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures; submitted to Experimental Astronomy, Springe