AIDS and jail: social representations of women in freedom deprivation situations

Abstract OBJECTIVE To graspthe AIDS social representations built by freedom-deprived women. METHOD Descriptive study with a quali-quantitative approach that involved 174 convicted women in a women's prison in a capital city of the Brazilian northeastern region. Aword-association test was applied in October and November 2014, using AIDS as a stimulus. The corpuswas processed usingIramuteq software. Descending Hierarchical Classification and Correspondence Factor Analysis were applied. RESULTS The content that comprises the social representation of AIDS was influenced by the prison context, which was pervaded by a lack of assistance, lack of knowledge, discrimination, and suffering that disclosed vulnerability to HIV/AIDS factors such as unprotected sex and object sharing. This underlines the stigma and fear of the illness, in addition to favoring and supporting negative feelings and a sense of rejection. CONCLUSION To consider the use of this representational amalgam to ensure a comprehensive, contextualized care can help redirect practices, motivate self-care practices, and reduce prejudiced attitudes

A hyper-heuristic with two guidance indicators for bi-objective mixed-shift vehicle routing problem with time windows

In this paper, a Mixed-Shift Vehicle Routing Problem is proposed based on a real-life container transportation problem. In a long planning horizon of multiple shifts, transport tasks are completed satisfying the time constraints. Due to the different travel distances and time of tasks, there are two types of shifts (long shift and short shift) in this problem. The unit driver cost for long shifts is higher than that of short shifts. A mathematical model of this Mixed-Shift Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (MS-VRPTW) is established in this paper, with two objectives of minimizing the total driver payment and the total travel distance. Due to the large scale and nonlinear constraints, the exact search showed is not suitable to MS-VRPTW. An initial solution construction heuristic (EBIH) and a selective perturbation Hyper-Heuristic (GIHH) are thus developed. In GIHH, five heuristics with different extents of perturbation at the low level are adaptively selected by a high level selection scheme with the Hill Climbing acceptance criterion. Two guidance indicators are devised at the high level to adaptively adjust the selection of the low level heuristics for this bi-objective problem. The two indicators estimate the objective value improvement and the improvement direction over the Pareto Front, respectively. To evaluate the generality of the proposed algorithms, a set of benchmark instances with various features is extracted from real-life historical datasets. The experiment results show that GIHH significantly improves the quality of the final Pareto Solution Set, outperforming the state-of-the-art algorithms for similar problems. Its application on VRPTW also obtains promising results

Catálogo Taxonômico da Fauna do Brasil: setting the baseline knowledge on the animal diversity in Brazil

The limited temporal completeness and taxonomic accuracy of species lists, made available in a traditional manner in scientific publications, has always represented a problem. These lists are invariably limited to a few taxonomic groups and do not represent up-to-date knowledge of all species and classifications. In this context, the Brazilian megadiverse fauna is no exception, and the Catálogo Taxonômico da Fauna do Brasil (CTFB) (http://fauna.jbrj.gov.br/), made public in 2015, represents a database on biodiversity anchored on a list of valid and expertly recognized scientific names of animals in Brazil. The CTFB is updated in near real time by a team of more than 800 specialists. By January 1, 2024, the CTFB compiled 133,691 nominal species, with 125,138 that were considered valid. Most of the valid species were arthropods (82.3%, with more than 102,000 species) and chordates (7.69%, with over 11,000 species). These taxa were followed by a cluster composed of Mollusca (3,567 species), Platyhelminthes (2,292 species), Annelida (1,833 species), and Nematoda (1,447 species). All remaining groups had less than 1,000 species reported in Brazil, with Cnidaria (831 species), Porifera (628 species), Rotifera (606 species), and Bryozoa (520 species) representing those with more than 500 species. Analysis of the CTFB database can facilitate and direct efforts towards the discovery of new species in Brazil, but it is also fundamental in providing the best available list of valid nominal species to users, including those in science, health, conservation efforts, and any initiative involving animals. The importance of the CTFB is evidenced by the elevated number of citations in the scientific literature in diverse areas of biology, law, anthropology, education, forensic science, and veterinary science, among others

An ant colony algorithm for time-dependent vehicle routing problem with time windows

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) determines a set of vehicle routes originating and terminating at a single depot such that all customers are visited exactly once and the total demand of the customers assigned to each route does not violate the capacity of the vehicle. The objective is to minimize the total distance traveled by all vehicles. An implicit primary objective is to use the least number of vehicles. The Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) is a variant of VRP in which lower and upper limits for delivery times for each customer are imposed. The arrival at a customer outside the specified delivery times is either penalized (soft time windows) or strictly forbidden (hard time windows). In the Stochastic Vehicle Routing problem, the customer demands and/or the travel times between the customers may vary. In this study, we address the Time-dependent Vehicle Routing Problem with hard time windows. Time-dependency is the result of different traffic conditions in different time intervals throughout the scheduling horizon. We tackle this problem using an Ant Colony Optimization approach proposing a new visibility function. This function is based on the Clark and Wright savings measure and the time compatibility between the customers. The time compatibility is measured with possible arrival times to a customer given the customers’ time-windows and the corresponding time interval(s). The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested on the well-known benchmark instances from the literature

An ant colony-based matheuristic approach for solving a class of vehicle routing problems

We propose a matheuristic approach to solve several types of vehicle routing problems (VRP). In the VRP, a fleet of capacitated vehicles visits a set of customers exactly once to satisfy their demands while obeying problem specific characteristics and constraints such as homogeneous or heterogeneous fleet, customer service time windows, single or multiple depots. The proposed matheuristic is based on an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm which constructs good feasible solutions. The routes obtained in the ACO procedure are accumulated in a pool as columns which are then fed to an integer programming (IP) optimizer that solves the set-partitioning (-covering) formulation of the particular VRP. The (near-)optimal solution found by the solver is used to reinforce the pheromone trails in ACO. This feedback mechanism between the ACO and IP procedures helps the matheuristic better converge to high quality solutions. We test the performance of the proposed matheuristic on different VRP variants using the well-known benchmark instances from the literature. Our computational experiments reveal competitive results: we report 6 new best solutions and meet the best-known solution in 120 instances out of 193