Gender Matters! Analyzing Global Cultural Gender Preferences for Venues Using Social Sensing

Gender differences is a phenomenon around the world actively researched by social scientists. Traditionally, the data used to support such studies is manually obtained, often through surveys with volunteers. However, due to their inherent high costs because of manual steps, such traditional methods do not quickly scale to large-size studies. We here investigate a particular aspect of gender differences: preferences for venues. To that end we explore the use of check-in data collected from Foursquare to estimate cultural gender preferences for venues in the physical world. For that, we first demonstrate that by analyzing the check-in data in various regions of the world we can find significant differences in preferences for specific venues between gender groups. Some of these significant differences reflect well-known cultural patterns. Moreover, we also gathered evidence that our methodology offers useful information about gender preference for venues in a given region in the real world. This suggests that gender and venue preferences observed may not be independent. Our results suggests that our proposed methodology could be a promising tool to support studies on gender preferences for venues at different spatial granularities around the world, being faster and cheaper than traditional methods, besides quickly capturing changes in the real world

The effect on the GHG emissions and energy consumption of MSW management practices on Porto City

The present case study was developed for the municipality of Porto, the second largest city of Portugal that has near 300 000 inhabitants. Due to legislative evolution, some changes have been implemented on MSW management practices since 1990 leading to meaningful improvements on energy consumption and greenhouse gases emissions. Two situations were compared: (i) the first one concerns the situation in 1990 where the MSW produced was collected, a meaningful fraction of it was composted and the residual waste dumped; and, (ii) the second situation where the EU legislation on recycling targets for packaging material and diversion of organic waste from landfills was taken into account, including an incineration plant on the management system. Greenhouse gas emissions from these two management scenarios were calculated based on an inventory model developed by White et al (1992). Weighting factors for the different gases based on the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were used to aggregate the emissions values and obtain a simple and comparable result for each situation. Results show the advantage of the 2000 practices both in terms of energy consumption and emissions of gases with greenhouse effect

Identificação de um gene de virulência (p74) de um vírus isolado da lagarta-do-álamo Condylorrhiza vestigialis.

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