Dust in the Small Magellanic Cloud

Observations of reddened stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) indicate that the interstellar grains in that galaxy may show distinct optical properties from those in the galaxy. The ultimate aim of this research is to determine the extinction law in the direction of these three objects, correlating the results with polarimetric data and building dust models that fit both extinction and polarization. UV extinction and optical polarization data suggest that stars with the 'typical' SMC extinction, i.e., with no bump at bluer wavelengths than the galaxy, have wavelengths of maximum polarization smaller than the galactic average. This shows that the carbon abundance is not the only parameter distinguishing the dust properties for the galaxy and the SMC, the grain size distribution being another distinguishing factor

Bank regulations and loan contracts

This study examines empirically how bank regulations adopted in lender countries influence the characteristics of loan contracts, using a sample of 46,453 loans made by 278 large commercial banks around 39 countries, to borrowers in 83 countries, in the period from 1998 to 2006. Our findings indicate that the stringency of capital regulations have an inverse U-shaped relationship with priced risk characteristics (spread and maturity) of loan contracts. In addition, more powerful official supervision is associated with riskier loan contracts. Both official supervisory power and private monitoring work as substitutes to capital regulation to reduce the (priced) risk measures of loan contracts when capital stringency is low. For higher capital stringency, supervision and private monitoring complement capital regulation in reducing loan contracts risk measures. Finally, we found that a country’s degrees of legal enforcement and bank industry competition complement capital and private monitoring regulations to improve risk characteristics of loan contracts. The evidence highlights the importance of how bank lending practices are affected by bank regulations and their interactions with themselves and other institutional country factors.The authors wish to thank the financial support of the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia from Spain (grant # SEJ2006-09401)

Multicolor optical polarimetry of reddened stars in the small Magellanic cloud

First results of an on-going program to determine the wavelength dependence of the interstellar optical polarization of reddened stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are presented. IUE observations of reddened stars in the SMC (Bouchet et al. 1985) generally show marked differences in the extinction law as compared to both the Galaxy and the Large Megallanic Cloud. The aim here is to determine the wavelength dependence of the optical linear polarization in the direction of several such stars in the SMC in order to further constrain the dust composition and size distribution in that galaxy

Banks' ownership structure, risk and performance

This paper studies empirically the effect of ownership concentration on the risk and performance of commercial banks, controlling for shareholders protection laws, bank regulations, and other country and bank specific traits. The sample used comprises 795 banks of 47 countries, in the period from 1997 to 2007. Our main finding is the existence of a cubic relationship between ownership concentration and bank performance. Such evidence is supportive of theoretical hypotheses of effective monitoring at low levels of ownership concentration, expropriation or losses connected to managerial discretion at moderate ownership concentration, and high costs of expropriation at high levels of ownership concentration. We also find that ownership concentration is more important to increase the performance of banks with low concentrated ownership structures, when legal protection of shareholders is low, and that capital regulations stringency is effective in simultaneously reducing risk and improving performance of banks. Regarding bank risk, we find a U-shape relationship between ownership concentration and earnings volatility, supporting that shareholder’s incentive to take risk prevails when her equity stake is above a threshold.The authors wish to thank the financial support of the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia (grant # SEJ2006- 09401)

A Status Assessment of Perkinsiosis, Bonamiosis, and Mateiliosis in Commercial Marine Bivalves from Southern Brazil

14 páginas, 1 figura, 3 tablas.-- Simone Sühnel ... et al.The protozoans Perkinsus marinus, Perkinsus olseni, Bonamia ostreae, Bonamia exitiosa, and Marteilia refringens are responsible for some of the most detrimental diseases in the production of cultivated shellfish worldwide and are classified as notifiable diseases by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE). This study examined the general health status of wild and cultured bivalves from southern Brazil and included diagnostic tests for the presence of Perkinsus sp., Bonamia sp., andMarteilia sp. Cultured bivalves included the mangrove oyster Crassostrea gasar (syn. Crassostrea brasiliana), the brown mussel Perna perna, the lion's paw scallop Nodipecten nodosus, andwing pearl oyster Pteria hirundo. Themangrove oyster Crassostrea rhizophorae and the carib pointed venus clam Anomalocardia brasiliana (syn. Anomalocardia flexuosa) were collected from wild populations. A variety of parasitic or commensal organisms were detected by histology including Ancistrocoma-like and Spenophrya-like organisms; Bucephalus genus, Nematopsis sp., Steinhausia sp., and Tylocephalum sp.; unidentified trematode; unknown protozoan and metazoans; and an amoeba parasite. Hemocytic infiltration was most commonly associated with parasitized animals. Histological, culture and molecular diagnostic tests did not find any evidence of the presence of OIE-listed pathogens or related species in this study. Although the current survey did not identify any pathogens or diseases of concern, it provides baseline health assessment data for these species against which any future disease developments or significant changes in population health can be compared. These data are also valuable with respect to the development and implementation of public policies related to aquatic animal healthWe would like to thank to the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture, Brazil, for the research support provided to the Fundaçao de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Santa Catarina (FAPESC), Brazil; the National Council of Technological and ScientificDevelopment, Brazil (CNPq-558222/2008-0), for supporting themacro- andmicroscopical analysis and for providing a grant (CNPq-301072/2007-8); the Coordenaçao de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior (CAPES), Brazil, for post-doctoral scholarship support for SS; the Pacific Biologic Station and Vancouver Island University (VIU) in Canada for supporting the molecular studiesPeer reviewe

Análise de Geoprocessamento no IV inventário de uso e cobertura do Brasil com Sensoriamento Remoto em séries temporais

TCC(graduação) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Centro de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas. GeografiaEste trabalho descreve as atividades desenvolvidas na empresa Agrosatélite Geotecnologia Aplicada e apresenta os procedimentos, materiais, análises e resultados referentes ao IV inventário nacional de gases do efeito estufa decorrentes do uso e mudanças na cobertura da terra no Brasil. O mapeamento foi feito em ambiente SIG a partir de imagens LANDSAT 5 comparando as imagens de 1994, 2002 e 2010 das quais pertenceram aos inventários feitos até então, com as do LANDSAT 8 nas imagens de 2016. Os estudos sobre a certificação das interpretações das imagens contaram ainda com a ferramenta SATVeg que é feita pela Embrapa a partir dos sensores MODIS, estes atestam os índices de vegetação através de gráficos EVI (enhanced vegetation index) em séries temporais. Os produtos finais SIG foram gerados para uma escala 1:125000, sendo que a menor parcela de área mapeável por convenção foi da ordem de 6,25 hectares. Palavras-chave: Sensoriamento Remoto. Sistemas de Informação Geográfica. Biomas. Uso da Terra

OpenFlowMon: a fully distributed monitoring framework for virtualized environments

Proceedings of: 2021 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN), 9 November 2021, Heraklion, Greece.Network monitoring allows a continuous assessment on the health and performance of the network infrastructure. With the significant change on how networks are deployed and operated, mainly due to the advent of virtualization technologies, alternative monitoring approaches are emerging to provide a finer-grained flow monitoring to complement already existing mechanisms and capabilities. In this paper, we proposed and developed an Open-Source Flow Monitoring Framework (OpenFlowMon), a fully distributed monitoring framework implemented solely with open-source solutions. This framework is used to assess the performance and the overhead introduced by two different flow monitoring approaches: (i) switch level and (ii) compute node level monitoring. Results show that monitoring at compute node level not only reduces the overhead but also mitigates a potential complex post-processing in east-to-west traffic.This work has been (partially) funded by H2020 EU/TW 5G-DIVE (Grant 859881) and H2020 5Growth (Grant 856709)