1,800 research outputs found
Sustainability indicators in cooperative management of recyclable materials
Following the promulgation of the National Solid Waste Policy in 2010, legal
provisions, government programs and sectoral agreements have been implemented, but without
the expected efficiency in relation to recycling. It should be noted that Cooperatives of Recyclable
Material Pickers (CRMP) should play a leading role in this regard, but they do not have adequate
management to be economically, socially and environmentally sustainable, depending on
assistance to maintain the activity. Aiming to elucidate this issue, in this paper was made an
institutional diagnosis of the category of waste pickers using the Gramacho region in the city of
Duque de Caxias (Rio de Janeiro) as a case study. It was carried out an evaluation of the historical
context of the neighbourhood, and it was drawn up a semi-structured questionnaire in 12 of the
18 cooperatives in the region. The data were interpreted through a SWOT matrix and the Venn
diagram. A matrix was proposed and elaborated with 15 sustainability indicators specific to the
CRMC reality in order to evaluate and monitor the management of cooperatives. After collecting
the primary data, it was possible to validate the matrix of indicators with indexes of cultural,
economic, political and ecological sustainability of the cooperatives. It was found that the matrix
of indicators facilitated the understanding of the data and the comparison between the indicators.
This tool can help decision-making, creation of action plans and identification of demands by the
cooperative waste pickers themselves, without the presence of an analyst or technician
A Redução Da Maioridade Penal Diminui A Violência? Evidências De Um Estudo Comparado
This paper tests the hypothesis that decreasing the age of criminal majority will reduce violence. Methodologically, the research design uses spatial analysis, descriptive and multivariate statistics to examine an original dataset created based on secondary sources. We focus on juvenile judicial system in comparative perspective centering in two variables: (1) age of criminal majority and (2) age of criminal responsibility. The general average of criminal majority tends to 18 years, while the average age of criminal responsibility tends to 11 years. The result shows a negative correlation between the age of criminal majority and homicides rates. That means that countries with lower age of criminal majority have higher rates of violence. With this paper we hope to contribute in the discussion regarding criminal majority reduction in Brazil and in the development of specific public policies to reduce violence.22111813
Measuring what counts : the case of rumour stance classification
Stance classification can be a powerful tool for understanding whether and which users believe in online rumours. The task aims to automatically predict the stance of replies towards a given rumour, namely support, deny, question, or comment. Numerous methods have been proposed and their performance compared in the RumourEval shared tasks in 2017 and 2019. Results demonstrated that this is a challenging problem since naturally occurring rumour stance data is highly imbalanced. This paper specifically questions the evaluation metrics used in these shared tasks. We re-evaluate the systems submitted to the two RumourEval tasks and show that the two widely adopted metrics – accuracy and macro-F1 – are not robust for the four-class imbalanced task of rumour stance classification, as they wrongly favour systems with highly skewed accuracy towards the majority class. To overcome this problem, we propose new evaluation metrics for rumour stance detection. These are not only robust to imbalanced data but also score higher systems that are capable of recognising the two most informative minority classes (support and deny)
Productive efficiency and density and viscosity studies of biodiesels from vegetable oil mixtures
Received: January 31st, 2021 ; Accepted: April 10th, 2021 ; Published: April 29th, 2021 ; Correspondence: [email protected] in Brazil the minimum content of biodiesel in mixtures is 11% and,
according to Brazilian laws, the goal is to reach 15% in volume in diesel fuel available for final
consumers by 2023. Therefore, studies about different matrices of biodiesel and distinct mixtures
are essential. The present work had two goals, the first one was to analyse physico-chemical
properties of 16 biofuels produced from soybean and cotton oils, using S10 diesel, in mixtures
B8, B10, B20 and B30. The second goal was to verify the vantages and disadvantages of biodiesel
production through prior mixing of the oils, before and after the transesterification process. All
biofuels produced presented results of specific mass values at 20 °C and kinematic viscosity at
40 °C within the limits established by ANP Resolution no 30/2016 and International Resolutions.
The soybean B20 biofuel showed the best overall results, with the second highest production
yield of 65.36%, the fifth lowest kinematic viscosity with 3.48 mm s
-1
. The mixture of soybean
and cotton oils before the transesterification process presented the highest production yield when
compared with the production from a single oil or biodiesel mixtures. The results found proved
to be satisfactory and corroborate to continue with the increase of biodiesel in the mixture with
diesel to B15 until 2023 and support the possibility of planning for a gradual increase of this
mixture in the following years
Multi-score Learning for Affect Recognition: the Case of Body Postures
An important challenge in building automatic affective state
recognition systems is establishing the ground truth. When the groundtruth
is not available, observers are often used to label training and testing
sets. Unfortunately, inter-rater reliability between observers tends to
vary from fair to moderate when dealing with naturalistic expressions.
Nevertheless, the most common approach used is to label each expression
with the most frequent label assigned by the observers to that expression.
In this paper, we propose a general pattern recognition framework
that takes into account the variability between observers for automatic
affect recognition. This leads to what we term a multi-score learning
problem in which a single expression is associated with multiple values
representing the scores of each available emotion label. We also propose
several performance measurements and pattern recognition methods for
this framework, and report the experimental results obtained when testing
and comparing these methods on two affective posture datasets
Toxic language detection in social media for Brazilian Portuguese : new dataset and multilingual analysis
Hate speech and toxic comments are a common concern of social media platform users. Although these comments are, fortunately, the minority in these platforms, they are still capable of causing harm. Therefore, identifying these comments is an important task for studying and preventing the proliferation of toxicity in social media. Previous work in automatically detecting toxic comments focus mainly in English, with very few work in languages like Brazilian Portuguese. In this paper, we propose a new large-scale dataset for Brazilian Portuguese with tweets annotated as either toxic or non-toxic or in different types of toxicity. We present our dataset collection and annotation process, where we aimed to select candidates covering multiple demographic groups. State-of-the-art BERT models were able to achieve 76% macro-F1 score using monolingual data in the binary case. We also show that large-scale monolingual data is still needed to create more accurate models, despite recent advances in multilingual approaches. An error analysis and experiments with multi-label classification show the difficulty of classifying certain types of toxic comments that appear less frequently in our data and highlights the need to develop models that are aware of different categories of toxicity
Chiral phase boundary of QCD at finite temperature
We analyze the approach to chiral symmetry breaking in QCD at finite
temperature, using the functional renormalization group. We compute the running
gauge coupling in QCD for all temperatures and scales within a simple truncated
renormalization flow. At finite temperature, the coupling is governed by a
fixed point of the 3-dimensional theory for scales smaller than the
corresponding temperature. Chiral symmetry breaking is approached if the
running coupling drives the quark sector to criticality. We quantitatively
determine the phase boundary in the plane of temperature and number of flavors
and find good agreement with lattice results. As a generic and testable
prediction, we observe that our underlying IR fixed-point scenario leaves its
imprint in the shape of the phase boundary near the critical flavor number:
here, the scaling of the critical temperature is determined by the
zero-temperature IR critical exponent of the running coupling.Comment: 39 pages, 8 figure
Mass spectrometry based metabolomics comparison of liver grafts from donors after circulatory death (DCD) and donors after brain death (DBD) used in human orthotopic liver transplantation
Use of marginal liver grafts, especially those from donors after circulatory death (DCD), has been considered as a solution to organ shortage. Inferior outcomes have been attributed to donor warm ischaemic damage in these DCD organs. Here we sought to profile the metabolic mechanisms underpinning donor warm ischaemia. Non-targeted Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) mass spectrometry metabolomics was applied to biopsies of liver grafts from donors after brain death (DBD; n = 27) and DCD (n = 10), both during static cold storage (T1) as well as post-reperfusion (T2). Furthermore 6 biopsies from DBD donors prior to the organ donation (T0) were also profiled. Considering DBD and DCD together, significant metabolic differences were discovered between T1 and T2 (688 peaks) that were primarily related to amino acid metabolism, meanwhile T0 biopsies grouped together with T2, denoting the distinctively different metabolic activity of the perfused state. Major metabolic differences were discovered between DCD and DBD during cold-phase (T1) primarily related to glucose, tryptophan and kynurenine metabolism, and in the post-reperfusion phase (T2) related to amino acid and glutathione metabolism. We propose tryptophan/kynurenine and S-adenosylmethionine as possible biomarkers for the previously established higher graft failure of DCD livers, and conclude that the associated pathways should be targeted in more exhaustive and quantitative investigations
ANÁLISE GEOMORFOLOGICA PRELIMINAR DO CORRÉGO DO CERRADO NO MUNICÍPIO DE CANÁPOLIS/MG
Historicamente rios e cidades estiveram intrinsecamente ligados, foi através dos rios que impérios se desenvolveram. Entender a dinâmica do relevo e dos rios é importante para compreender os problemas ambientais e sociais, já que o relevo é fator preponderante para o plantio e/ou povoamento. Neste contexto, o presente trabalho tem por objetivo fazer um levantamento preliminar da geomorfologia do Córrego do Cerrado que drena o município de Canápolis/MG, por meio de revisões bibliográfica e campo
- …