Functionalized Mesoporous Solids Based On Magadiite And [al]-magadiite.

Novel hybrid mesoporous and functionalized materials with controllable surface area and pore dimensions with functional basic sites (-NH2) were synthesized from magadiite and [Al]-magadiite as layered silicate precursors. The variable pore structure and properties of these materials were investigated in these solids by using different CTA(+)/Na(+) (CTA(+) = cetyltrimethylammonium cation) molar ratios in the pre-modification step with aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTS) and tetraethoxysilane (TEOS). Characterizations were carried out by different techniques to probe the effects of the amounts of interlayer surfactant in the synthesis of the pillared and/or grafted materials. The crystalline structures of magadiite and [Al]-magadiite layers were maintained as evidenced by FT-IR and SAED and contain pillars and aminopropyl groups in the interlayer space. The hybrid solids were compared to the pillared forms (H. M. Moura, F. A. Bonk and H. O. Pastore, Eur. J. Mineral., 2012, 24, 903) and to the aminopropyl-grafted forms and presented the properties of both solids with the CO2 adsorption capability improved considerably.4310471-8

A Routing/Assignment Problem in Garden Maintenance Services

We address a routing/assignment problem posed by Neoturf, which is a Portuguese company working in the area of project, building and garden’s main- tenance. The aim is to define a procedure for scheduling and routing efficiently its clients of garden maintenance services. The company has two teams available throughout the year to handle all the maintenance jobs. Each team consists of two or three employees with a fully-equipped vehicle capable of carrying out every kind of maintenance service. At the beginning of each year, the number and frequency of maintenance interventions to conduct during the year, for each client, are agreed. Time windows are established so that visits to the client should occur only within these periods. There are clients that are supposed to be always served by the same team, but other clients can be served indifferently by any of the two teams. Since clients are geographically spread over a wide region, the total distance traveled while visiting clients is a factor that weighs heavily on the company costs. Neoturf is con- cerned with reducing these costs, while satisfying agreements with its clients. We give a mixed integer linear programming formulation for the problem, discuss lim- itations on the size of instances that can be solved to guarantee optimality, present a modification of the Clarke and Wright heuristic for the vehicle routing with time windows, and report preliminary computational results obtained with Neoturf data.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

TaXEm: a tool for aiding the evaluation of domain topic.

The notorious advances in textual information storage need fast and effcient tools to organize, retrieve and browse this information and tools for knowledge extraction. A very interesting way to organize specific domain information is the topic taxonomy building. Moreover a great challenge in this research area is the result evaluation and validation. This evaluation can be carried out through objective measures or through a subjective analysis, which is based on the domain specialist judgment. The measures CQM and SQM [1] are used to evaluate a generated taxonomy against a reference taxonomy. A reference taxonomy is constructed by human and consolidated through its community use along the years. The CQM is used to evaluate the generated taxonomy relatively to the selected descriptors for each taxonomy node; on the other hand, the SQM is used to evaluate the taxonomy structure. As these objective measures do not encompass the specialist knowledge, the specialist evaluation is very important. However the human evaluation is expensive, because this task involves readiness, time and dedication from the specialists. In this way, the TaXEm tool claims to reduce the subjective evaluation costs. The TaXEm (Taxonomia em XML da Embrapa) tool offers subsidies for carrying out a taxonomy (semi)automatic evaluation, which allows the user to implement some automatic evaluation before going on a subjective evaluation.Propor 2010. Demonstration

Easily labelling hierarchical document clusters.

One of the problems of automatic models that generate topic taxonomies is the process of creating the most significant term list that discriminates each document group. In this paper, a new method to label document hierarchical clusters is proposed, which is completely independent from the clustering method. This method automatically decides the number of the words in each label list, avoids word repetitions in a tree branch and provides a kind of cutting for the cluster tree. The obtained results were tested as search queries in a retrieval process and showed a very good performance. Additionally, the use of the method was experimented by some specialists in the text collection domain, trying to evaluate their understanding and expectations over the results

Oral Health-Related Quality of Life in Brazilian Patients Wearing Three Types of Lower Dentures: Psychosocial and Clinical Aspects

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the oral health-related Quality of Life (QoL) of patients with edentulous lower jaws rehabilitated with conventional or implant-supported dentures. In the quest for greater QoL, especially among the elderly, it is important to evaluate how the use of dentures impacts physical and emotional well-being. Brazilian health care policy makers should be informed of the advantages of rehabilitation with implant-supported dentures. A cohort of 78 edentulous seniors was divided into three groups of 26 according to denture type: Conventional (CD), Implant-Supported Overdenture (IOD) and Fixed-Implant Prosthesis (FIP). To evaluate QoL, clinical and sociodemographic information was collected and the OHIP-20 questionnaire was administered, using a 5-point frequency scale, including a “don’t know” option. Chewing and pronunciation were less impacted in FIP and IOD than in CD (p=0.013 and p=0.027, respectively), while patients in the CD group reported more adaptation difficulties (p=0.006) and more frequent avoidance of hard-to-chew foods (p=0.032). The majority reported no interference of dentures with appearance and social life, regardless of denture type. Depending on the patient’s biological and financial circumstances, implant-supported dentures is the form of rehabilitation of edentulism providing the greatest improvement in QoL. The reported limitations and difficulties had no significant impact on satisfaction and QoL

Facilitando a avaliação de taxonomias de tópicos automaticamente geradas no domínio do agronegócio.

O custo de avaliação de taxonomias automaticamente geradas costuma ser alto se realizado exclusivamente por especialistas do domínio. Neste trabalho propõe-se uma forma de validação objetiva para o vocabulário automaticamente obtido, com o qual uma taxonomia automaticamente gerada é representada. Para isso, o vocabulário gerado é comparado ao de uma taxonomia pré-existente, já validada, bem aceita e que use um thesaurus ou dicionário específico do domínio. Como taxonomias validadas foram utilizadas algumas árvores da Agência de Informação Embrapa e como vocabulário padrão o contido no Thesagro.SBIAgro 2009

Constraining Nonstandard Neutrino-Electron Interactions

We present a detailed analysis on nonstandard neutrino interactions (NSI) with electrons including all muon and electron (anti)-neutrino data from existing accelerators and reactors, in conjunction with the ``neutrino counting'' data (e- e+ -> nu nu gamma) from the four LEP collaborations. First we perform a one-parameter-at-a-time analysis, showing how most constraints improve with respect to previous results reported in the literature. We also present more robust results where the NSI parameters are allowed to vary freely in the analysis. We show the importance of combining LEP data with the other experiments in removing degeneracies in the global analysis constraining flavor-conserving NSI parameters which, at 90 % and 95 % C.L., must lie within unique allowed regions. Despite such improved constraints, there is still substantial room for improvement, posing a big challenge for upcoming experiments.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures. Final version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Decavanadate interactions with actin: cysteine oxidation and vanadyl formation

Incubation of actin with decavanadate induces cysteine oxidation and oxidovanadium(IV) formation. The studies were performed combining kinetic with spectroscopic (NMR and EPR) methodologies. Although decavanadate is converted to labile oxovanadates, the rate of deoligomerization can be very slow (half-life time of 5.4 h, at 25 ◦C, with a first order kinetics), which effectively allows decavanadate to exist for some time under experimental conditions. It was observed that decavanadate inhibits F-actin-stimulated myosin ATPase activity with an IC50 of 0.8 mMV10 species, whereas 50 mMof vanadate or oxidovanadium(IV) only inhibits enzyme activity up to 25%. Moreover, from these three vanadium forms, only decavanadate induces the oxidation of the so called “fast” cysteines (or exposed cysteine, Cys-374) when the enzyme is in the polymerized and active form, F-actin, with an IC50 of 1 mMV10 species. Decavanadate exposition to F- and G-actin (monomeric form) promotes vanadate reduction since a typical EPR oxidovanadium(IV) spectrum was observed. Upon observation that V10 reduces to oxidovanadium(IV), it is proposed that this cation interacts with G-actin (Kd of 7.48 ± 1.11 mM), and with F-actin (Kd = 43.05 ± 5.34 mM) with 1:1 and 4:1 stoichiometries, respectively, as observed by EPR upon protein titration with oxidovanadium(IV). The interaction of oxidovanadium(IV) with the protein may occur close to the ATP binding site of actin, eventually with lysine-336 and 3 water molecules

Metodologia para a comparação de diferentes métodos de descrição de agrupamentos hierárquicos de documentos independentes do algoritmo de agrupamento.

Para facilitar a compreensão de uma coleção de documentos, pode-se organizá-la em grupos hierárquicos e obter descritores para cada um dos grupos automaticamente. O problema que se apresenta é decidir entre métodos de agrupamentos e de descrição dos grupos, que sejam eficientes e apresentem bons resultados. Particularmente, este trabalho apresenta uma proposta para a comparação entre resultados obtidos a partir de métodos de seleção de descritores em agrupamentos hierárquicos de documentos, especificamente para métodos independentes do algoritmo de agrupamento utilizado. Para esses métodos, dado um agrupamento hierárquico, o objetivo é selecionar descritores (palavras ou sentenças) discriminativos dos grupos, preferencialmente sem repetição de descritores ao longo dos efetivamente representativo da coleção de textos agrupada. Dessa forma, torna-se imperativo encontrar uma medida que verifique a efetividade da discriminação para os descritores selecionados, bem como uma medida de qualidade destes. Nessa proposta, a discriminação é medida por meio da avaliação dos resultados de um processo de recuperação de informações, que utiliza os descritores para formar as expressões de busca. A qualidade é medida pela variabilidade do vocabulário obtido e sua representatividade em relação ao conjunto total de atributos utilizado para o agrupamento dos documentos. Essas medidas e processo de validação respeitam a hierarquia produzida pelo agrupamento, bem como padronizações e validações confiáveis do ponto de vista estatístico. Os experimentos e os resultados obtidos mostram que essa metodologia é capaz de avaliar seguramente a diferença de efetividade entre métodos de descrição de agrupamentos hierárquicos, tendo sido aplicada a dezesseis coleções de textos e quatro diferentes métodos de descrição.bitstream/item/32407/1/BolPesq26.pd

Multiplicação de brotos in vitro em três cultivares de bananeira.

Apesar de ser considerada uma das plantas mais consumidas no Brasil, a produtividade média da banana no país é de 10 t/ ha/ ano, sendo que algumas doenças se constituem os principais fatores por esse baixo rendimento. A utilização de mudas de cultivares melhoras e livres de doenças é uma alternativa para aumentar a produtividade Para isso, a técnica de micropropagação tem se mostrado eficaz para a obtenção de mudas sadias e de qualidade e auxiliado os programas de melhoramento genético para a multiplicação rápida de genótipos selecionados. Visando a multiplicação rápida de três cultivares via micropropagação foi realizada a assepsia de ápices caulinares e inoculados em meio MS, com BAP 2,5 mg/L no estabelecimento e BAP 4,5 mg/L durante vários subcultivos. Os resultados mostraram que houve uma produtividade média de 2,03 brotos por ápice caulinar entre as cultivares, e a cultivar PV 0376 apresentou maior, multiplicação de brotos em relação as outras cultivares, média de 2,26 brotos, seguidas de 2,10 e 1,75 nas cultivares Pacovan ken e Thap maeo, respectivamente