Statistical Signs of Social Influence on Suicides

Certain currents in sociology consider society as being composed of autonomous individuals with independent psychologies. Others, however, deem our actions as strongly influenced by the accepted standards of social behavior. The later view was central to the positivist conception of society when in 1887 \'Emile Durkheim published his monograph Suicide (Durkheim, 1897). By treating the suicide as a social fact, Durkheim envisaged that suicide rates should be determined by the connections (or the lack of them) between people and society. Under the same framework, Durkheim considered that crime is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life and serves a social function. In this sense, and regardless of its extremely deviant nature, crime events are somehow capable to release certain social tensions and so have a purging effect in society. The social effect on the occurrence of homicides has been previously substantiated (Bettencourt et al., 2007; Alves et al., 2013), and confirmed here, in terms of a superlinear scaling relation: by doubling the population of a Brazilian city results in an average increment of 135 % in the number of homicides, rather than the expected isometric increase of 100 %, as found, for example, for the mortality due to car crashes. Here we present statistical signs of the social influence on the suicide occurrence in cities. Differently from homicides (superlinear) and fatal events in car crashes (isometric), we find sublinear scaling behavior between the number of suicides and city population, with allometric power-law exponents, $\beta = 0.836 \pm 0.009$ and $0.870 \pm 0.002$, for all cities in Brazil and US, respectively. The fact that the frequency of suicides is disproportionately small for larger cities reveals a surprisingly beneficial aspect of living and interacting in larger and more complex social networks.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Non-Local Product Rules for Percolation

Despite original claims of a first-order transition in the product rule model proposed by Achlioptas et al. [Science 323, 1453 (2009)], recent studies indicate that this percolation model, in fact, displays a continuous transition. The distinctive scaling properties of the model at criticality, however, strongly suggest that it should belong to a different universality class than ordinary percolation. Here we introduce a generalization of the product rule that reveals the effect of non-locality on the critical behavior of the percolation process. Precisely, pairs of unoccupied bonds are chosen according to a probability that decays as a power-law of their Manhattan distance, and only that bond connecting clusters whose product of their sizes is the smallest, becomes occupied. Interestingly, our results for two-dimensional lattices at criticality shows that the power-law exponent of the product rule has a significant influence on the finite-size scaling exponents for the spanning cluster, the conducting backbone, and the cutting bonds of the system. In all three cases, we observe a continuous variation from ordinary to (non-local) explosive percolation exponents.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Transport on exploding percolation clusters

We propose a simple generalization of the explosive percolation process [Achlioptas et al., Science 323, 1453 (2009)], and investigate its structural and transport properties. In this model, at each step, a set of q unoccupied bonds is randomly chosen. Each of these bonds is then associated with a weight given by the product of the cluster sizes that they would potentially connect, and only that bond among the q-set which has the smallest weight becomes occupied. Our results indicate that, at criticality, all finite-size scaling exponents for the spanning cluster, the conducting backbone, the cutting bonds, and the global conductance of the system, change continuously and significantly with q. Surprisingly, we also observe that systems with intermediate values of q display the worst conductive performance. This is explained by the strong inhibition of loops in the spanning cluster, resulting in a substantially smaller associated conducting backbone.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Programa para a estimativa do custo e produção de energia eléctrica para uma residência

Este trabalho apresenta um programa de computador que permite determinar o custo e a produção de energia proporcionada por abastecimento pela empresa fornecedora de energia eléctrica e por instalações fotovoltaicas, eólicas e híbridas (fotovoltaicas e eólicas), em função da localização da instalação em território lusitano. Este programa leva em consideração a economia efectuada e o prazo de amortização do investimento. O programa foi realizado com a utilização das seguintes linguagens de programação: HTML, JavaScript e PHP. Pretende-se disponibilizar o uso deste programa através da Internet, para que a sua utilização possa ser alargada ao máximo número de pessoas possível.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), financiadora com fundos FEDER e OE do Projecto POCTI/ESE/48242/2002

Synthesis of 2,6-bis-(oxazolyl)pyridine ligands for luminescent Ln(III) complexes

Submitted to the European Journal of Organic ChemistryNew bis-(oxazolyl)pyridine ligands for Ln(III) ions were prepared using a expeditious methodology from threonine and dipicolinic acid chloride. The synthetic strategy includes a dehydration step to give a bis-dehydroaminobutyric acid derivative followed by bromination and cyclization with DBU. Photophysical studies of Eu(III) and Tb(III) complexes of these ligands showed that the 2,6-bis-(oxazolyl)pyridine moiety acts as an effective sensitizer for lanthanide luminescence and indicate the formation of 3:1 complexes [Ln-(bis-(oxazole)pyridine)3]3+.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), QREN, FEDER/E

Towards a genome-wide transcriptogram: the Saccharomyces cerevisiae case

A genome modular classification that associates cellular processes to modules could lead to a method to quantify the differences in gene expression levels in different cellular stages or conditions: the transcriptogram, a powerful tool for assessing cell performance, would be at hand. Here we present a computational method to order genes on a line that clusters strongly interacting genes, defining functional modules associated with gene ontology terms. The starting point is a list of genes and a matrix specifying their interactions, available at large gene interaction databases. Considering the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome we produced a succession of plots of gene transcription levels for a fermentation process. These plots discriminate the fermentation stage the cell is going through and may be regarded as the first versions of a transcriptogram. This method is useful for extracting information from cell stimuli/responses experiments, and may be applied with diagnostic purposes to different organisms

2D cloud template matching - a comparison between iterative closest point and perfect match

Self-localization of mobile robots in the environment is one of the most fundamental problems in the robotics field. It is a complex and challenging problem due to the high requirements of autonomous mobile vehicles, particularly with regard to algorithms accuracy, robustness and computational efficiency. In this paper we present the comparison of two of the most used map-matching algorithm, which are the Iterative Closest Point and the Perfect Match. This category of algorithms are normally applied in localization based on natural landmarks. They were compared using an extensive collection of metrics, such as accuracy, computational efficiency, convergence speed, maximum admissible initialization error and robustness to outliers in the robots sensors data. The test results were performed in both simulated and real world environments.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Cardiac Troponin T and Illness Severity in the Very-Low-Birth-Weight Infant

Introduction. Respiratory distress are very common in Very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) infants and Myocardial injury may play a role in the disease outcome. Cardiac troponin T (cTnT) is the most useful marker of injury in adult population, but has not been extensively studied in this population. Aim. To study the role of cTnT in VLBW infants and its association with clinical outcomes. Methods. All VLBW infants admitted to our NICU were included in the study. Echocardiography and blood samples for cTnT determination were collected at 24 and 48 hours of life, and values >0.1 ng/mL were considered CTnT-positive values. Results. A total of 116 neonates had their blood samples collected. The median cTnT concentration within 24 hours was 0.191 (0.1–0.79) ng/mL and within 48 hours was 0.293 (0.1–1.0) ng/mL. A logistic regression analysis showed that PDA, low GA, and use of dopamine were independently associated with positive cTnT and abnormal Dopplerfluxometry and diuretics use had protective effects and was independently associated with troponin values. Conclusion. We observed a high prevalence of positivecTnT values in VLBW infants associated with illness severity. Our findings suggest that cTnT may be a useful and early marker of myocardial injury in VLBW infants

Random networks with q-exponential degree distribution

We use the configuration model to generate networks having a degree distribution that follows a $q$-exponential, $P_q(k)=(2-q)\lambda[1-(1-q)\lambda k]^{1/(q-1)}$, for arbitrary values of the parameters $q$ and $\lambda$. We study the assortativity and the shortest path of these networks finding that the more the distribution resembles a pure power law, the less well connected are the corresponding nodes. In fact, the average degree of a nearest neighbor grows monotonically with $\lambda^{-1}$. Moreover, our results show that $q$-exponential networks are more robust against random failures and against malicious attacks than standard scale-free networks. Indeed, the critical fraction of removed nodes grows logarithmically with $\lambda^{-1}$ for malicious attacks. An analysis of the $k_s$-core decomposition shows that $q$-exponential networks have a highest $k_s$-core, that is bigger and has a larger $k_s$ than pure scale-free networks. Being at the same time well connected and robust, networks with $q$-exponential degree distribution exhibit scale-free and small-world properties, making them a particularly suitable model for application in several systems.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure