El espíritu del aggiornamientocatólico: arquitectura, diálogo y participación activ

The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council aimed, in the words used by Pope John XXIII, the aggiornamento of the Catholic Church. The inseparable complementariness between the concept of resourcing and of openness to a new world led to a change of the paradigm of the church temple to the house for the living stones. It is in this context where it comes to light the opportunity to explore the contributions of two non-Christians architects: Aldo van Eyck, and Lina Bo Bardi. In their works and especially in their thoughts it is possible to recognize an elective affinity with the spirit of the Christian aggiornamento.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A ermida do Cristo do Silêncio

The present text faces methodologically the research process that gained form and expression with the registration, in 2008, of a PhD thesis program, submitted to the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, under the title: «Liturgy and architecture. Thinking a place for the liturgy: the aggiornamento as a program? » The circumstance of a theoretical reflection that developed at the same time of the project exercise would consolidate the need to articulate both processes. In a sense, one could say that the project gained – as a synthesis of a process of materialization of ideas, isolated in the research - the condition of object of study. The project of the «Christ of silence chapel» dealt with the same set of questions: how are architecture and liturgy inseparable and convergent in the project of a return to the originality of the Christian place? Moreover, how does this condition manifest itself in the process of the architectural project of a vacated space to welcome, all who seek recollection and the celebration of the liturgy?info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

New approaches to crop yield insurance in developing countries:

Natural disasters can be extremely disruptive to farmers and to others whose incomes depend on a successful crop. Society can gain from more efficient sharing of crop and natural disaster risks. However, the costs associated with traditional agricultural risk programs have historically exceeded the gains from improved risk sharing. This paper explores government intervention in agricultural risk markets and discusses new approaches to risk sharing with limited government involvement. In particular, we build the case for introducing negotiable state-contingent contracts settled on area crop yield estimates or locally appropriate weather indices. These instruments could replace traditional crop insurance at a lower cost to government while meeting the risk management needs of a wider clientele.Crop yields., Insurance, Agricultural Crops., Developing countries.,

Dendroecology of Drimys brasiliensis Miers (Winteraceae) in two Atlantic cloud forests in Paraná State, Southern Brazil.

Ameridendro

A simple benchmark for mesothelioma projection for Great Britain

Background: It is of considerable interest to forecast the future burden of mesothelioma mortality. Data on deaths are available, whereas no measure of asbestos exposure is available. Methods: We compare two Poisson models: a response-only model with an age-cohort specification and a multinomial model with epidemiologically motivated frequencies. Results: The response-only model has 5% higher peak mortality than the dose-response model. The former performs slightly better in out-of-sample comparison. Conclusion: Mortality is predicted to peak at about 2100 deaths around 2017 among males in cohorts until 1966 and below 90 years of age. The response-only model is a simple benchmark that forecasts just as well as more complicated models

Mode-coupling approach to non-Newtonian Hele-Shaw flow

The Saffman-Taylor viscous fingering problem is investigated for the displacement of a non-Newtonian fluid by a Newtonian one in a radial Hele-Shaw cell. We execute a mode-coupling approach to the problem and examine the morphology of the fluid-fluid interface in the weak shear limit. A differential equation describing the early nonlinear evolution of the interface modes is derived in detail. Owing to vorticity arising from our modified Darcy's law, we introduce a vector potential for the velocity in contrast to the conventional scalar potential. Our analytical results address how mode-coupling dynamics relates to tip-splitting and side branching in both shear thinning and shear thickening cases. The development of non-Newtonian interfacial patterns in rectangular Hele-Shaw cells is also analyzed.Comment: 14 pages, 5 ps figures, Revtex4, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Fatty acids profile and thermal properties of macauba palm pulp oil from Cerrados and Pantanal biomes, Brazil.

Pôster

Combined model-free and model-sensitive reinforcement learning in non-human primates

Contemporary reinforcement learning (RL) theory suggests that potential choices can be evaluated by strategies that may or may not be sensitive to the computational structure of tasks. A paradigmatic model-free (MF) strategy simply repeats actions that have been rewarded in the past; by contrast, modelsensitive (MS) strategies exploit richer information associated with knowledge of task dynamics. MF and MS strategies should typically be combined, because they have complementary statistical and computational strengths; however, this tradeoff between MF/MS RL has mostly only been demonstrated in humans, often with only modest numbers of trials. We trained rhesus monkeys to perform a two-stage decision task designed to elicit and discriminate the use of MF and MS methods. A descriptive analysis of choice behaviour revealed directly that the structure of the task (of MS importance) and the reward history (of MF and MS importance) significantly influenced both choice and response vigour. A detailed, trial-by-trial computational analysis confirmed that choices were made according to a combination of strategies, with a dominant influence of a particular form of model sensitivity that persisted over weeks of testing. The residuals from this model necessitated development of a new combined RL model which incorporates a particular credit assignment weighting procedure. Finally, response vigor exhibited a subtly different collection ofMFand MS influences. These results provide new illumination onto RL behavioural processes in non-human primates