EA and students with SEN: activities of daily living (ADL), water and their sustainable use

[Resumo] O presente artigo tem como objetivo dar a conhecer atividades desenvolvidas na disciplina de Ciências da Natureza, do 6º ano de escolaridade, com alunos com Necessidades Educativas Especiais (NEE), tendo subjacentes Atividades da Vida Diária (AVD) relacionadas com o consumo de água, visando a consciencialização para a importância deste recurso, bem como da necessidade da racionalização do seu consumo. A água potável é um bem cada vez mais escasso, sendo a sua utilização e governança sustentáveis, cada vez mais, um propósito que deverá envolver Toda a comunidade, o que implica incluir crianças/jovens com NEE, as quais poderão/deverão também contribuir para alcançar tais desígnios. Considerando a Escola uma instituição de ensino e aprendizagem essencialmente formal, onde o conhecimento do recurso água, a sua gestão e utilização sustentáveis são conteúdos curriculares de abordagem obrigatória para todos os alunos, foi elaborado um conjunto de atividades práticas alicerçadas nas AVD, permitindo dessa forma o envolvimento direto dos alunos com NEE nas mesmas, tornando-os cidadãos de pleno direito, mais conhecedores e, consequentemente, mais interventivos na comunidade e ambiente que integram[Abstract] The purpose of this article is to present activities developed in Natural Sciences discipline, of the 6th year of schooling, with students with special educational needs, with underlying daily life activities related to the consumption of water, aiming to raise awareness of the importance of this resource, as well as the need to rationalize its consumption. Potable water is an increasingly scarce resource, and its use and governance are increasingly sustainable, a purpose that should involve the whole community, which implies including children/young people who can/should also contribute to achieve such goals. Considering the School an essentially formal teaching and learning institution, where knowledge of the water resource, its sustainable management and use are mandatory curricular contents for all students, a set of practical activities based on the daily life activities were elaborated, thus allowing the direct involvement of all students in them, making them citizens with full rights, more knowledgeable and consequently more involved in the community and environment that they integrate

Modelling Patterns in Continuous Streams of Data

The untapped source of information, extracted from the increasing number of sensors, can be explored to improve and optimize several systems. Yet, hand in hand with this growth goes the increasing difficulty to manage and organize all this new information. The lack of a standard context representation scheme is one of the main struggles in this research area. Conventional methods for extracting knowledge from data rely on a standard representation or a priori relation, which may not be feasible for IoT and M2M scenarios. With this in mind we propose a stream characterization model in order to provide the foundations for a novel stream similarity metric. Complementing previous work on context organization, we aim to provide an automatic stream organizational model without enforcing specific representations. In this paper we extend our work on stream characterization and devise a novel similarity method

Dependence of the crossover exponent with the diffusion rate in the generalized contact process model

We study how the crossover exponent, phi, between the directed percolation (DP) and compact directed percolation (CDP) behaves as a function of the diffusion rate in a model that generalizes the contact process. Our conclusions are based in results pointed by perturbative series expansions and numerical simulations, and are consistent with a value phi = 2 for finite diffusion rates and phi = 1 in the limit of infinite diffusion rate.Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)CNPq(FAPERJ) Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeir

Legalidad y discreción en la gobernanza de bancos publicos: un análisis aplicado al caso de BNDES

Artigo publicado na Revista de Administração Pública, Rio de Janeiro, n. 51, jan./fev. 2017; Bibliografia: p. 125-127; Atribuição de Licença Creative Commons 4.0: permitida cópia, redistribuição, adaptação desde que atribuído crédito; Disponível também em: http://bibliotecadigital.fgv.br/ojs/index.php/rap/article/view/65940/pdf_99This article aims to evaluate the institutional design of the political delegation that shapes The Brazilian Development Bank’s (BNDES) financial activities. It employs a normative framework of administrative law, concerning the types of political delegation, and studies two of them: legality and discretion. Legal governance is a type of arrangement in which policy objectives are delegated by the Congress, while discretionary public governance policy objectives are defined in the Executive branch of government. Both types have different comparative advantages in governing policies. Whereas legality favors predictability and publicity, discretion enables flexibility and less political involvement. The main claim is that, due to Brazil’s institutional environment, discretionary governance has proven advantageous. BNDES has been kept from the games of political and parliamentary clientele and it has suitable operational flexibility to act in times of economic crisis. However, this configuration also has costs, including financial agenda opacity and social accountability deficits.O objetivo do artigo é avaliar o desenho institucional da relação de delegação política estabelecida na atuação do BNDES. Para isso, utiliza o referencial normativo do direito administrativo, respeitante às formas de delegação política, e trabalha com dois tipos de governança dessa delegação: a legal e a discricionária. A governança legal representa um tipo de arranjo em que os objetivos de política são delegados pelo Congresso, ao passo que na governança discricionária os objetivos públicos são definidos no âmbito do Executivo. Ambos os tipos têm diferentes vantagens comparativas para governar políticas públicas. Enquanto a legalidade favorece a previsibilidade e a publicidade, a discricionariedade enseja maior flexibilidade e menor envolvimento parlamentar. O argumento desenvolvido é o de que, em razão do ambiente institucional brasileiro, a governança discricionária tem se mostrado vantajosa. O BNDES tem sido preservado dos jogos de clientela político-parlamentar e tem garantido uma flexibilidade operacional para atuar em momentos de crise econômica. Por outro lado, essa conformação também apresenta custos, tais como: a relativa opacidade de sua agenda financeira e um menor controle social

Genetic and Environmental Modifiers of Somatic Trinucleotide Repeat Dynamics

The expansion of CAG•CTG trinucleotide repeat sequences has been identified as the genetic cause of several human diseases, including myotonic dystrophy type 1, Huntington disease, and an ever-increasing number of spinocerebellar ataxias. Once above a size threshold, the repeats become dramatically unstable in the germline and also throughout the soma, with a marked bias towards further expansion. Such expansions constitute a unique form of dynamic mutation, whose mechanism is poorly understood. While germline instability serves as the molecular basis for genetic anticipation; age-dependent, tissue-specific somatic instability most likely contributes to the tissue specificity, phenotypic variability and progressive nature of these conditions. The study of the mutation mechanism is therefore of major interest, as it may provide valuable clues towards a better understanding of disease pathophysiology. It is generally assumed that the repeat length changes arise through DNA polymerase slippage during DNA replication, however no direct evidence exists to support this hypothesis in mammalian systems. Transgenic mouse models of unstable CAG•CTG repeats have been previously generated, and shown to recreate the dynamic nature of somatic mosaicism observed in humans. Tissues from these mice have now been used in order to establish an in vitro cell culture system, where the repeat dynamics could be investigated under controlled conditions. Monitoring of repeat stability in these cells over long periods of time, and numerous population doublings, has revealed the progressive accumulation of larger alleles, as a result of repeat length changes in vitro, confirmed by single cell cloning. Selection of cells carrying longer repeats was observed during the first few passages of the cultures, and frequent additional selective sweeps were also detected at later stages. The highest levels of instability were observed in cultured kidney cells, whilst the transgene remained relatively stable in eye cells and very stable in lung cells, paralleling previous in vivo observations. More importantly, the levels of repeat instability in cultured cells did not correlate with cell proliferation rates, rejecting a simple association between length change mutations and cell division, and suggesting an important role for additional cell type-specific and possibly environmental trans-acting modifiers of repeat metabolism. The effects of multiple genotoxic agents on the mutational dynamics of expanded trinucleotide repeats were assessed in this tissue culture model of unstable DNA. The drugs tested were selected based on their ability to affect cell cycle progression, DNA polymerase activity, DNA methylation, intracellular levels of oxidative stress or DNA conformational metabolism. The analysis led to the identification of chemicals, such as aspirin, 5-azacytidine and 1-beta-D-arabinofuranosyl-cytosine that resulted in the deceleration of the rate of trinucleotide repeat expansion, particularly in a kidney clonal cell line carrying rapidly expanding repetitive tracts. These observations were reported in the absence of major changes in the rates of cell turnover. In contrast, forced cell cycle progression by exposure to caffeine resulted in a significantly higher rate of triplet repeat expansion. Increased levels of oxidative stress, generated in culture by exposure to a variety of drugs, were associated with reduced levels of repeat size variability, most likely through means of cell selection in culture. Since pathology in CAG'CTG-associated diseases is mediated by a variety of complex and unrelated molecular pathways, drug induced modification of DNA dynamics could present a possible therapeutical route for these disorders. Specifically, chemical treatments that resulted in suppression of somatic repeat expansion would be expected to be beneficial, whilst reversion of the expanded mutant repeat to the normal repeat size range, observed in the general population, would be predicted to be curative. Although preliminary, the findings described in this study may open new avenues in the search for novel therapeutical strategies. Mechanistic models of repeat length mutation based on DNA replication, recombination and repair have been proposed. The latter have implied the involvement of mammalian MutS homologues (Msh2, Msh3 and Msh6). In order to gain further insight into the molecular mechanisms driving trinucleotide repeat mutation, the involvement of a mammalian MutL homologue (Pms2) in the mutation dynamics was investigated. No significant differences were observed between Pms2+/+ and Pms2+/+ mice, suggesting that a single functional Pms2 allele is sufficient to maintain high levels of somatic mosaicism. The levels of Pms2 mRNA and protein in heterozygotes deficient for Pms2 have not yet been investigated. In contrast to what would be predicted by the replication slippage model, lower levels of trinucleotide somatic mosaicism were detected in homozygous Pms2-null mice, compared with age-matched controls, carrying either one or two functional copies of the Pms2 allele. In addition, a higher frequency of rare but large deletion events was detected in Pms2-/- animals. Both results proved statistically significant by single molecule analysis. These findings imply that, not only MMR enzymes that directly bind to DNA, but also proteins that are subsequently recruited by MutS proteins, play a central role in the accumulation of repeat length changes, arguing against a mutation mechanism mediated by stabilisation of alternative DNA secondary structures by MMR proteins. MMR gene polymorphisms and variants might therefore be considered potential determinants of trinucleotide repeat instability in humans, predicted to affect both age of onset and disease progression

O princípio da legalidade no Estado de Bem-Estar Social. Por uma abordagem dialética.

O propósito deste artigo é discutir o princípio da legalidade, tido como uma característica essencial do Estado de Direito. Este artigo pretende mostrar que, assim como ocorrido com o Estado de Direito, que se modificou desde o Liberalismo, também o princípio da legalidade sofreu modificações. No passado, o Estado Liberal de Direito demandava um tipo específico de legalidade, apta a permitir um desenvolvimento da sociedade livre de intervenções. A partir da década de 30 surge uma nova conformação de Estado de Direito, conhecido como Estado de Bem-Estar Social, provido de novas finalidades. Naturalmente, com isso, o princípio da legalidade sofreu alterações, a fim de permitir uma ação estatal voltada à consecução do desenvolvimento dos campos sociais e econômicos. De forma alguma esta transformação do Estado significa a morte do princípio da legalidade, ao contrário, significa sua nova conformação. Do ponto de vista deste artigo, uma abordagem dialética pode explicar como esta nova conformação de um mesmo princípio pode ocorrer

Roadmapping como instrumento integrador de projetos de P&D em institutos públicos

Com base em revisão bibliográfica e em um estudo de caso,\ud é\ud objetivo\ud deste artigo\ud propor\ud um processo\ud roadmapping\ud para integrar e alinhar projetos de pesquisa e de\ud desenvolvimento em Institutos Públicos. Na literatura,\ud a\ud pesquisa e\ud o\ud desenvolvimento\ud normalmente são considerados como processo único. Entretanto, a pesquisa e o\ud desenvolvimento\ud em\ud Institutos Públicos são\ud processos distintos, com lógicas de\ud organização e gerenciamento\ud igualmente distintos\ud , demandando\ud , por isso,\ud processos\ud específicos\ud de seleção quanto aos critérios e métodos de avaliação e escolha de projetos.\ud Um método que vem se consolidando e difundido c\ud om o propósito de alinhar e integrar\ud processos distintos é o\ud technology roadmapping\ud , que se mostrou uma técnica apropriada\ud para o alinhamento e integração de projetos de pesquisa e de desenvolvimento, por\ud explorar os vínculos entre planejamento estratégico\ud , diretrizes de P&D e seleção de\ud projetosThis article aims to propose a roadmapping process to integrate and align research and\ud development projects in public\ud institutions. It is based on literature review and a case study.\ud In the literature, research and development are usually considered as the sole process.\ud However, research and development in public institutions are distinct processes with also\ud distinct orga\ud nizational and management logics. So, they demand specific procedures\ud regarding the projects selection criteria and methods of evaluation. One method that has\ud been consolidated and disseminated in order to align and integrate different processes is\ud technol\ud ogy roadmapping, which has proved to be a suitable technique for the alignment\ud and integration of research and development projects by exploring the links among\ud strategic planning, R&D guidelines and project selectio