Optimization of Dengue Epidemics: a test case with different discretization schemes

The incidence of Dengue epidemiologic disease has grown in recent decades. In this paper an application of optimal control in Dengue epidemics is presented. The mathematical model includes the dynamic of Dengue mosquito, the affected persons, the people's motivation to combat the mosquito and the inherent social cost of the disease, such as cost with ill individuals, educations and sanitary campaigns. The dynamic model presents a set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations. The problem was discretized through Euler and Runge Kutta schemes, and solved using nonlinear optimization packages. The computational results as well as the main conclusions are shown.Comment: Presented at the invited session "Numerical Optimization" of the 7th International Conference of Numerical Analysis and Applied Mathematics (ICNAAM 2009), Rethymno, Crete, Greece, 18-22 September 2009; RepositoriUM, id: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/1083

Dimensionless Fluctuation Balance Principle: New Statistical Perspectives Applied to Boltzmann, Planck, Fermi-Dirac, Bose-Einstein and Schr\"odinger Distributions

In this work we propose a completely new way to obtain statistics distributions from fluctuations balance. By dimensionless fluctuation analysis we obtain Boltzmann, Planck, Fermi-Dirac, Bose-Einstein and Schr\"odinger Distributions using the same fundamental principle. Our result point to a general foundation that was successful verified to principal Physics Distributions. We name it as Dimensionless Fluctuation Balance Principle. This is a great achievement which enable us to discuss exchange between different physical quantities, like we do when treat energy conservation when some type of energy is converted to another, but with more generality, because we can exchange one physical quantity to any other. All physics model which needs distribution can take advantage of methodology presented in this paper including: Statistical Physics, Schr\"odinger's Quantum Mechanics, Nanomaterials, Thin Films and New Materials Modeling. Keywords: Fluctuations, PDEs, Boltzmann, Planck, Entropy, Fermi-Dirac, Bose-Einstein, Schr\"odinger, Distributions

The Potential Clinical and Economic Value of Primary Tumour Identification in Metastatic Cancer of Unknown Primary Tumour: A Population-Based Retrospective Matched Cohort Study.

PurposeSeveral genomic tests have recently been developed to identify the primary tumour in cancer of unknown primary tumour (CUP). However, the value of identifying the primary tumour in clinical practice for CUP patients remains questionable and difficult to prove in randomized trials.ObjectiveWe aimed to assess the clinical and economic value of primary tumour identification in CUP using a retrospective matched cohort study.MethodsWe used the Manitoba Cancer Registry to identify all patients initially diagnosed with metastatic cancer between 2002 and 2011. We defined patients as having CUP if their primary tumour was found 6 months or more after initial diagnosis or never found during the course of disease. Otherwise, we considered patients to have metastatic cancer from a known primary tumour (CKP). We linked all patients with Manitoba Health databases to estimate their direct healthcare costs using a phase-of-care approach. We used the propensity score matching technique to match each CUP patient with a CKP patient on clinicopathologic characteristics. We compared treatment patterns, overall survival (OS) and phase-specific healthcare costs between the two patient groups and assessed association with OS using Cox regression adjustment.ResultsOf 5839 patients diagnosed with metastatic cancer, 395 had CUP (6.8%); 1:1 matching created a matched group of 395 CKP patients. CUP patients were less likely to receive surgery, radiation, hormonal and targeted therapy and more likely to receive cytotoxic empiric chemotherapeutic agents. Having CUP was associated with reduced OS (hazard ratio [HR] 1.31; 95% confidence interval 1.1-1.58), but this lost statistical significance with adjustment for treatment differences. CUP patients had a significant increase in the mean net cost of initial diagnostic workup before diagnosis and a significant reduction in the mean net cost of continuing cancer care.ConclusionIdentifying the primary tumour in CUP patients might enable the use of more effective therapies, improve OS and allow more efficient allocation of healthcare resources

Os dilemas no Conselho de Comunicação Social : espaço de consenso ou arena de interesses?

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Comunicação, 2004.Esta dissertação analisou o trabalho realizado pelo Conselho de Comunicação Social em seu primeiro ano de funcionamento, entre 25 de junho de 2002 a 30 de junho de 2003. Uma bandeira na luta pela democratização da comunicação, a instalação do órgão foi saudada como o início de uma nova etapa no relacionamento do Congresso Nacional e do Poder Executivo com a sociedade civil no debate e na elaboração das políticas públicas do setor. No entanto, a análise dos dados e o balanço das atividades realizadas pelo Conselho indicam que essa expectativa não se realizou e apontam a inoperância e a indefinição do papel do colegiado junto ao Poder Legislativo. Apesar de ter apenas função consultiva, os conselheiros só conseguiram aprovar dois pareceres elaborados por seus integrantes. Nesse primeiro ano de mandato, o órgão não se manifestou sobre centenas de matérias que, por lei, seriam de sua competência. De acordo com a hipótese levantada por essa pesquisa, foi possível determinar que as dificuldades e impasses verificados no colegiado são resultado, em grande medida, das diferentes concepções entre os conselheiros sobre o modelo de funcionamento e de deliberação política do colegiado. Tais divergências refletem distintas tradições teóricas, especialmente as que se constituem a partir dos conceitos de esfera pública e hegemonia.This dissertation has analyzed the work of the Social Communication Council during its fírst year of existence, from June 25th of 2002 to June 30th of 2003. Considered a symbol in the struggle for the democratization of communication, the creation of this board was celebrated as the beginning of a new phase in the relationship between Congress, the Executive Branch and Society in the debate and formulation of communication’s policies. However, the analysis of the data researched and the examination of the activities performed by the Council have indicated that the expectations towards it have not been fulfilled, showing its inertia and the indefinition of its role within the Legislative Branch. Despite the Council’s exclusive consultive duty, its members have succeeded in approving only two of their legislative reports. During its fírst year, the Council was not able to evaluate hundreds of important issues that, by law, should be under its competence. The hypothesis raised by this research allowed determining that the difficulties and impasses faced by the board are the result, in great extent, of the different notions presented by its members in relation to its way of work and political deliberation. These differences reflect distinct theoretical traditions, especially those inherited from the concepts of public sphere and hegemony

Bibliometric trend analysis of non-conventional (alternative) therapies in veterinary research

Background: There is an increased interest in Non-Conventional Therapies (NCTs), often referred to as complementary and alternative medicines, in veterinary clinical practice. Aim: To map the bibliometric outputs of NCTs in veterinary medicine, and identify which are most prevalent, and the extent to which their publishing has increased. Methods: Text mining algorithms were applied to detect 17 NCTs-related terms (acupuncture, ayurveda/ayurvedic, traditional Chinese medicine, traditional medicine, chiropractic, electroacupuncture, essential oil, plant extract, ethnopharmacology, herbal medicine, homeopathy, low-level laser therapy, medicinal plant, natural product, osteopathy, phytotherapy, and massage) in the title, abstract or keywords of all retrievable literature until 2020 under the PubMed MeSH term ‘veterinary’ (N = 377 556). Point prevalence, incidence by decade and cumulative incidence were calculated. Results: Bibliometric trend analysis revealed an overall increase in NCTs-related terms over the last 20 years, with a substantial growth of studies mentioning plant extracts, essential oils and medicinal plants. Traditional Chinese medicine, herbal medicine and natural product have also increased in the same period, although their numbers remain low. Conversely, reference to acupuncture has decreased in the last decade when compared with the previous decade, whereas references to homeopathy, electroacupuncture, osteopathy and chiropractic remained scarce, suggesting that their use in veterinary clinical practice may not be based on published evidence. Conclusion: Further reviews to explore this issue are warranted, differentiating secondary from primary literature, and assessing relevance and methodological quality of individual studies, following the principles of evidence-based veterinary medicine

RISO-GCT – Determinação do contexto temporal de conceitos em textos.

Devido ao crescimento constante da quantidade de textos disponíveis na Web, existe uma necessidade de catalogar estas informações que surgem a cada instante. No entanto, trata-se de uma tarefa árdua e na qual seres humanos são incapazes de realizar esta tarefa de maneira manual, tendo em vista a quantidade incontável de dados que são disponibilizados a cada segundo. Inúmeras pesquisas têm sido realizadas no intuito de automatizar este processo de catalogação. Uma vertente de grande utilidade para as várias áreas do conhecimento humano é a indexação de documentos com base nos contextos temporais presentes nestes documentos. Esta não é uma tarefa trivial, pois envolve a análise de informações não estruturadas presentes em linguagem natural, disponíveis nos mais diversos idiomas, dentre outras dificuldades. O objetivo principal deste trabalho é criar uma abordagem capaz de permitir a indexação de documentos, determinando mapas de tópicos enriquecidos com conceitos e as respectivas informações temporais relacionadas. Tal abordagem deu origem ao RISO-GCT (Geração de Contextos Temporais), componente do Projeto RISO (Recuperação da Informação Semântica de Objetos Textuais), que tem como objetivo criar um ambiente de indexação e recuperação semântica de documentos possibilitando uma recuperação mais acurada. O RISO-GCT utilizou os resultados de um módulo preliminar, o RISO-TT (Temporal Tagger), responsável por etiquetar informações temporais presentes em documentos e realizar o processo de normalização das expressões temporais encontradas. Deste processo foi aperfeiçoada a abordagem responsável pela normalização de expressões temporais, para que estas possam ser manipuladas mais facilmente na determinação dos contextos temporais. . Foram realizados experimentos para avaliar a eficácia da abordagem proposta nesta pesquisa. O primeiro, com o intuito de verificar se o Topic Map previamente criado pelo RISO-IC (Indexação Conceitual), foi enriquecido com as informações temporais relacionadas aos conceitos de maneira correta e o segundo, para analisar a eficácia da abordagem de normalização das expressões temporais extraídas de documentos. Os experimentos concluíram que tanto o RISO-GCT, quanto o RISO-TT incrementado obtiveram resultados superiores aos concorrentes.Due to the constant growth of the number of texts available on the Web, there is a need to catalog that information which appear at every moment. However, it is an arduous task in which humans are unable to perform this task manually, given the increased amount of data available at every second. Numerous studies have been conducted in order to automate the cataloging process. A research line with utility for various areas of human knowledge is the indexing of documents based on temporal contexts present in these documents. This is not a trivial task, as it involves the analysis of unstructured information present in natural language, available in several languages, among other difficulties. The main objective of this work is to create a model to allow indexing of documents, creating topic maps enriched with the concepts in text and their related temporal information. This approach led to the RISO-GCT (Temporal Contexts Generation), a part of RISO Project (Semantic Information Retrieval on Text Objects), which aims to create a semantic indexing environment and retrieval of documents, enabling a more accurate recovery. RISO-GCT uses the results of a preliminary module, the RISO-TT (Temporal Tagger) responsible the labeling temporal information contained in documents and carrying out the process of normalization of temporal expressions. Found. In this module the normalization of temporal expressions has been improved, in order allow a richer temporal context determination. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach proposed a in this research. The first, in order to verify that the topic map previously created by RISO-IC has been correctly enriched with temporal information related to the concepts correctly, and the second, to analyze the effectiveness of the normalization of expressions extracted from documents. The experiments concluded that both the RISO-GCT, as the RISO-TT, which was evolved during this work, obtained better results than similar tools

Garantias do crédito à exportação: normas internacionais

O comércio internacional não tem, por hipótese, fronteiras nem barreiras e está regulado por um conjunto de normas chamado a nova lex mercatória, que se apresenta sob quatro pilares fundamentais: os usos profissionais; os contratos tipo; as regulações ditadas pelo assento de cada profissão ou suas associações representativas; e a jurisprudência arbitral.Número padronizado: v. 40, n. 3 (1983)Revista do Serviço Público, ano 40 v.111, n. 3, p. 41Política ExternaPolíticas EconômicasNúmero padronizado: v. 40, n. 3 (1983)Revista do Serviço Público, ano 40 v.111, n. 3, p. 4