User-generated insight of Rio’s Rocinha favela tour: Authentic attraction or vulnerable living environment?

Urban transformations help shape new opportunities and create/re-create awareness in everyday living environments. It is not transformation in the infrastructural sense, but transformation in the form of a service industry producing socio-economic change that can result in inclusion and exclusion of people in the community—thus affecting the everyday living environment. Within this, we need to consider the tourist gaze and how users who visit/tour vulnerable living environments report perceptions of their experiences on forums such as TripAdvisor, which helps researchers frame understandings of commodification, opportunities/awareness and even authenticity (each addressed in this paper). This paper evaluates TripAdvisor posts of ‘Rio’s Rocinha Favela Tour’. In many respects, the notion of commodification, and even authenticity, runs through each theme, but the analysis and data posted to TripAdvisor challenges us to consider how a favela becomes a consumer product, or a tourist attraction. The Rocinha Favela tour is widely publicised to prospective visitors as a chance to experience a living and working favela. Given Rocinha has become a popular attraction in Rio, this leads to the second theme: opportunity or awareness. Opportunities do exist for people in the community to get involved in tourism, and turning the favela into a product helps shape and maintain awareness. The third theme builds on and relates to the previous two, but focuses more on the semblances of authenticity that emerges. To link the points highlighted in this paper, a discussion of soft power concerns relationships bonded through economic and cultural influence. Because favelas have become distinct attractions, it is cultural appeal and a different (residential) side of the city that persuades travellers to visit. Online and social media platforms for more than a decade now have played an important role today in projecting images and promoting authentic experiences based on user-perceptions, and this paper looks at how the users communicate their experiences

CO2-assisted hydrolytic hydrogenation of cellulose and cellulose-based waste into sorbitol over commercial Ru/C

A single-step protocol was developed for the hydrolytic hydrogenation of microcrystalline cellulose into sorbitol over commercial carbon-supported Ru, in the presence of gaseous CO2 as an acid source and molecular hydrogen as a reductant. Under these conditions, cellulose was first hydrolysed to glucose by reversibly formed carbonic acid in water and then instantaneously hydrogenated on Ru/C. By tuning the reaction parameters, such as temperature, time and the relative pressure of CO2 and hydrogen gas, cellulose was fully converted at 220 & DEG;C in 18 h under 30 and 40 bar of H-2 and CO2, respectively, with a sorbitol yield of 81%. Blank experiments revealed that without a catalyst and hydrogen, the reaction exhibited <5% conversion and glucose was the only detected product when the reaction was performed under CO2 pressure. XRD measurements on CO2-treated cellulose surprisingly revealed no noticeable changes in the crystallinity index (<10% with respect to microcrystalline cellulose), suggesting that hydrolytic hydrogenation took place on crystalline, not amorphous, cellulose. Furthermore, not only several cellulosic feedstocks, including filter paper, cotton wool, and cotton fiber, but also typical cellulose-based wastes such as a cardboard pizza box were also tested and under the optimized conditions sorbitol was obtained with yields ranging from 56% up to 72% in all cases. No less significant was the Ru/C catalyst stability, which could be recycled at least six times without any noticeable activity loss

Qualidade de solo e água como indicadores de recuperação de áreas degradadas submetidas a manejo agroflorestal.

bitstream/CNPS-2010/14933/1/bpd100-2006-qual-solo-agua.pd

Patterns of Extinction Risk and Threat for Marine Vertebrates and Habitat-Forming Species in the Tropical Eastern Pacific

Marine conservation activities around the globe are largely undertaken in the absence of comprehensive species-specific information. To address this gap, complete regional species assemblages of major marine taxa are being progressively assessed against the Categories and Criteria of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. The present study is the first analysis of entire major components of the biota of a large marine biogeographic region conducted in the Tropical Eastern Pacific (TEP). It is based on recently completed IUCN Red List assessments for all known species of bony and cartilaginous shorefishes, corals, mangroves, and seagrasses in the TEP. Twelve percent of the \u3e1600 species assessed are in threatened categories, indicative of elevated extinction risk. Spatial analysis of all assessed taxonomic groups, including previous IUCN Red List assessments for seabirds, marine mammals, and marine turtles, highlights specific geographical areas of elevated threatenedspecies richness. The distribution of threatened species in the TEP is primarily linked to areas with high rates of overfishing, habitat loss, and increasing El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event impacts, as well as oceanic islands with high stochastic risk factors for endemic species. Species assigned to the highest threat categories have life history traits that likely decrease their resilience to various regional and site-specific threats. Comprehensive information in the form of IUCN Red List assessments combined with spatial analysis will greatly help to refine both site- and species-specific marine conservation priorities in the TEP

A Revised Approach for One-Dimensional Time-Dependent Heat Conduction in a Slab

Classical Green's and Duhamel's integral formulas are enforced for the solution of one dimensional heat conduction in a slab, under general boundary conditions of the first kind. Two alternative numerical approximations are proposed, both characterized by fast convergent behavior. We first consider caloric functions with arbitrary piecewise continuous boundary conditions, and show that standard solutions based on Fourier series do not converge uniformly on the domain. Here, uniform convergence is achieved by integrations by parts. An alternative approach based on the Laplace transform is also presented, and this is shown to have an excellent convergence rate also when discontinuities are present at the boundaries. In both cases, numerical experiments illustrate the improvement of the convergence rate with respect to standard methods

Desenvolvimento inicial de milho em função e doses de ureia aplicadas em semeadura.

A ureia é o fertilizante nitrogenado mais utilizado, contudo apresenta altas perdas de NH 3 pelo processo de volatilização. A fertilização com ureia no momento da semeadura pode comprometer a germinação, e, por conseguinte a população final da lavoura. Testaram -se três doses de ureia, calculadas com base na área superficial (AS), no volume do vaso (VV) e no número de plantas (NP), para a aplicação de 20 kg N ha-1.Asunidades experimentais foram vasos contendo 7 kg de solo, onde foram semeadas 6 sementes do híbrido AG 1051, sendo a adubação realizada ao lado e abaixo da linha de semeadura. A maior dose de ureia, obtida com base no numero de plantas, proporcionou menor germinação no terceiro dia após a semeadura, provavelmente devido a maior condutividade elétrica e maior volatilização de NH 3 a que foram submetidas às plantas deste tratamento

Epigenome-wide association study reveals decreased average methylation levels years before breast cancer diagnosis

Interest in the potential of DNA methylation in peripheral blood as a biomarker of cancer risk is increasing. We aimed to assess whether epigenome-wide DNA methylation measured in peripheral blood samples obtained before onset of the disease is associated with increased risk of breast cancer. We report on three independent prospective nested case-control studies from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC-Italy; n = 162 matched case-control pairs), the Norwegian Women and Cancer study (NOWAC; n = 168 matched pairs), and the Breakthrough Generations Study (BGS; n = 548 matched pairs). We used the Illumina 450k array to measure methylation in the EPIC and NOWAC cohorts. Whole-genome bisulphite sequencing (WGBS) was performed on the BGS cohort using pooled DNA samples, combined to reach 50× coverage across ~16 million CpG sites in the genome including 450k array CpG sites. Mean β values over all probes were calculated as a measurement for epigenome-wide methylation

Potencial do uso de zeólitas na agropecuária

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