The impact of Bolsa Família Program in the beneficiary fertility

The Bolsa Família Program is a Conditional Cash Transfer Program that was implemented in Brazil in 2003. Since the implementation of the program some of its effects were studied, but its effects on fertility decision has drawn a little attention. The objective of this paper is to evaluate if there is an impact of Bolsa Família Program in the fertility of beneficiaries. We use the Household Sample National Survey (PNAD) for the years 2004 and 2006 and estimate the first-differences for each year, to find the average treatment effect on treated (ATT). To find comparable groups of treatment and control, we use Propensity Score Matching methods. We compared the ATT outcomes for the two years and its estimated confidence intervals and found that there are no statistical differences between the ATT results in 2004 and 2006.fertility, conditional cash transfer, propensity score, Brazi.

Population aging and the rising costs of public pension in Brazil

This article examines the evolution of retirement in Brazil and its old-age support programs (public pension). The key objective is to show that given the current trend in population and size of the programs, their sustainability in the near future may be endangered. In this paper, we also provide a measure of public pension expenditure under different policy scenarios. This paper provides empirical evidence indicating that the absence of appropriate policies can aggravate adverse effects of population aging. We show that the public pension system works less efficiently than desired and that it is already in a weaker condition than systems in more developed nations. We contribute to the debate on how critical policy areas may reduce the potential economic impact of demographic changes.public pension system, population aging, demographic changes, forecasting.

First Step Towards Embedded Vision System for Pruning Wood Estimation

This paper focuses on the development and evaluation of a portable vision-based acquisition device for vineyards, equipped with a GPU-accelerated processing unit. The device is designed to perform in-field image acquisitions with high-resolution and dense information. It includes three vision systems: the Intel® RealSenseTM depth camera D435i, the Intel® RealSenseTM tracking camera T265, and a Basler RGB DART camera. The device is powered by an Nvidia Jetson Nano processing board for both simultaneous data acquisition and real-time processing. The paper presents two specific tasks for which the acquisition device can be useful: wood volume estimation and early bud counting. Acquisition campaigns were conducted in a commercial vineyard in Italy, capturing images of vine shoots and buds using the prototype device. The wood volume estimation software is based on image processing techniques, achieving an RMSE of 2.1 cm3 and a mean deviation of 1.8 cm3. The buds detection task is obtained by fine-tuning the YOLOv8 model on a purposely acquired custom dataset, achieving a promising F1-Score of 0.79

DEEP LEARNING FOR GESTURE RECOGNITION IN GYM TRAINING PERFORMED BY A VISION-BASED AUGMENTED REALITY SMART MIRROR

This paper illustrates the development and the validation of a smart mirror for sport training. The application is based the skeletonization algorithm MediaPipe and runs on an embedded device Nvidia Jetson Nano equipped with two fisheye cameras. The software has been evaluated considering the exercise biceps curl. The elbow angle has been measured by both MediaPipe and the motion capture system BTS (ground truth), and the resulting values have been compared to determine angle uncertainty, residual errors, and intra-subject and inter-subject repeatability. The uncertainty of the joints’ estimation and the quality of the image captured by the cameras reflect on the final uncertainty of the indicator over time, highlighting the areas of improvements for further developments

Evolution Of The Deaths Registry System In Brazil: Associations With Changes In The Mortality Profile, Under-registration Of Death Counts, And Ill-defined Causes Of Death.

This paper examines the spatial pattern of ill-defined causes of death across Brazilian regions, and its relationship with the evolution of completeness of the deaths registry and changes in the mortality age profile. We make use of the Brazilian Health Informatics Department mortality database and population censuses from 1980 to 2010. We applied demographic methods to evaluate the quality of mortality data for 137 small areas and correct for under-registration of death counts when necessary. The second part of the analysis uses linear regression models to investigate the relationship between, on the one hand, changes in death counts coverage and age profile of mortality, and on the other, changes in the reporting of ill-defined causes of death. The completeness of death counts coverage increases from about 80% in 1980-1991 to over 95% in 2000-2010 at the same time the percentage of ill-defined causes of deaths reduced about 53% in the country. The analysis suggests that the government's efforts to improve data quality are proving successful, and they will allow for a better understanding of the dynamics of health and the mortality transition.301721-3