Extended excitons and compact heliumlike biexcitons in type-II quantum dots.

We have used magneto-photoluminescence measurements to establish that InP/GaAs quantum dots have a type-II band (staggered) alignment. The average excitonic Bohr radius and the binding energy are estimated to be 15 nm and 1.5 meV respectively. When compared to bulk InP, the excitonic binding is weaker due to the repulsive (type-II) potential at the hetero-interface. The measurements are extended to over almost six orders of magnitude of laser excitation powers and to magnetic fields of up to 50 tesla. It is shown that the excitation power can be used to tune the average hole occupancy of the quantum dots, and hence the strength of the electron-hole binding. The diamagnetic shift coe±cient is observed to drastically reduce as the quantum dot ensemble makes a gradual transition from a regime where the emission is from (hydrogen-like) two-particle excitonic states to a regime where the emission from (helium-like) four-particle biexcitonic states also become significant

The use of linear programming to evaluate the impact of credit for investments in small goat farms.

Abstract: The PRONAF is a governmental program that subsidies the credit for investment to smallholder farming and improves the social development in Brazil. This research was carried out to evaluate the effect of increasing the values of credit for investment used for the PRONAF farmers in semi-arid areas, and their impact in the income and labor in smallholder farming production system. Economic data of dairy and meat goat systems of PRONAF farmers in ?Rio Grande do Norte?, Brazil was used. The limit of the model was the credit for investment, maximum number of animals in the system and the labor time. The current values of credit for investment (US$ 2,850.00) were increased by 25%, 50% and 100% and its impact analyzed in the farm income when considering milk and meat production. The maximum number of animals in the system was estimated by multiplying the carry capacity (1.5 heads/ha/year) plus the average pasture areas of PRONAF farms (35 ha). The maximum labor time, available for farm work, was 12 hours/day. This mathematical model was solved using linear programming with LINDO® software. When the credit for investment was expanded in 25 and 50%, the income of the system increased, respectively, to 22 and 41%. It happened because the values of credit allowed increasing the number of dairy goats in the system. However, this income was not enough to use and pay more than 5 hours/day in dairy goat system activities. When raising the credit for investment up to 100% it could increase the income of the system around 81%. It happened because the number of dairy goats grew up to 83% and the dairy production had better results than meat production. The system with more dairy goats produces enough income as to pay the farmer labor (7 hours/day) and during the other five hours could develop other activities. Therefore, the results of the analysis indicated that an increase in the credit for investment in small goat farms in semi-arid areas in Brazil could be addressed towards the dairy goat production, enhancing the income of families and employment opportunities.Edição de proceedings 9th International Goat Conference; 23th Conference ofthe Asociación Mexicana de Producción Caprinaat Queretaro, Mexico, in September 2008. XXIII Conference ofthe Asociación Mexicana de Producción Caprin

How impactful are public policies on environmental sustainability? Debating the Portuguese case of PO SEUR 2014–2020

Sustainable development is a key feature of national, European Union and global development strategies. The main research goal is to provide evidence on how impactful public policies on environmental sustainability in Portugal are at the regional level, in various policy areas. In this context, this paper analyses the main impacts of the Portuguese Operational Programme for Sustainability and Efficient Use of Resources (PO SEUR 2014–20). The research uses a territorial impact assessment (TIA) methodology (TARGET_TIA) to assess these impacts in five analytic dimensions (economy with low emissions, adaptation to climate change, risk prevention and management, environmental protection and resource efficiency) in the five mainland Portuguese NUTS 2. It concludes that, in overall terms, PO SEUR produced low to moderate positive impacts in all NUTS II and analysed dimensions, but it was particularly positive in measures fostering adaptation to climate change, and less impactful in measures supporting an economy with low emissions and resource efficiency in Portugal. Despite data limitations, the research provided adequate evidence that key public policies supporting environmental sustainability in Portugal are largely ineffective and inefficient in view of their policy goals and allocated funding. To turn this scenario around, the process of project selection needs to undergo significant improvements to better adjust the regional needs on environmental sustainability-related issues to the available funding. Moreover, on a policy strategic level, there needs to be support for a prosperous, modern, competitive and climate-neutral economy in Portugal via concrete actions exploring environmental capital and a green economy in urban areas.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Parallel strategies for Direct Multisearch

Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.Direct multisearch (DMS) is a derivative-free optimization class of algorithms, suited for computing approximations to the complete Pareto front of a given multiobjective optimization problem. In DMS class, constraints are addressed with an extreme barrier approach, only evaluating feasible points. It has a well-supported convergence analysis and simple implementations present a good numerical performance, both in academic test sets and in real applications. Recently, this numerical performance was improved with the definition of a search step based on the minimization of quadratic polynomial models, corresponding to the algorithm BoostDMS. In this work, we propose and numerically evaluate strategies to improve the performance of BoostDMS, mainly through parallelization applied to the search and to the poll steps. The final parallelized version not only considerably decreases the computational time required for solving a multiobjective optimization problem, but also increases the quality of the computed approximation to the Pareto front. Extensive numerical results will be reported in an academic test set and in a chemical engineering application.preprintpublishe

Sociospatial reading of favela: A comparative analysis from organic Portuguese cities

This research decodifies the favelas spatial system through its configuration in com- parison to historical organic structures aiming at searching similar self-organized processes. It is intended to observe in which way the configuration of such areas, read through their spatial patterns, affects their sociospatial dynamics and how it gets closer to common strategies for organizing the urban space: in which way favela reproduces historically consolidated spatial patterns inherent to organic cities? The Theory of The Social Logic of Space (Hillier & Han- son, 1984) is the theoretical, methodological and technical approach for this study, allowing to investigate such phenomena by means of its spatial complexity. The sample consists of 120 set- tlements around the world, explored according to a set of 26 configurational variables (among qualitative and quantitative, both geometric and topological), compared to a group of 45 Por- tuguese medieval towns (representative of organic cities). Findings show that the favelas recog- nized spatial patterns are mostly common to those associated with organic structures. Despite being much denser and apparently labyrinthine shapes, the internal dynamics of the favelas reveal positive global relationships. These settlements behave similarly to consolidated urban systems and share common spatial logics throughout world regions and distinct cultures, fea- ture which allows recognizing the self-organization strategy as essential to their structural and survival process.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An experience in building a parallel and distributed problem-solving environment

We describe our experimentation with the design and implementation of specific environments, consisting of heterogeneous computational, visualization, and control components. We illustrate the approach with the design of a problem-solving environment supporting the execution of genetic algorithms. We describe a prototype steering parallel execution, visualization, and steering. A life cycle for the development of applications based an genetic algorithms is proposed.publishersversionpublishe

Non-Linear Relativity in Position Space

We propose two methods for obtaining the dual of non-linear relativity as previously formulated in momentum space. In the first we allow for the (dual) position space to acquire a non-linear representation of the Lorentz group independently of the chosen representation in momentum space. This requires a non-linear definition for the invariant contraction between momentum and position spaces. The second approach, instead, respects the linearity of the invariant contraction. This fully fixes the dual of momentum space and dictates a set of energy-dependent space-time Lorentz transformations. We discuss a variety of physical implications that would distinguish these two strategies. We also show how they point to two rather distinct formulations of theories of gravity with an invariant energy and/or length scale.Comment: 7 pages, revised versio

Diagnóstico e tratamento da mastite.

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