Slaves, freedmen and free men of colour in the transition from slavery in Brazil. A case study: The life, times and ideas of Dom Obá II d'Africa, Prince of the People, c.1845-1890

This work is an attempt to recover aspects of the daily life, the cultural ambience and the symbolic universe which existed amongst slaves, freedmen and free men of colour in 19th Century Brazil through a case study of the life and ideas of the self-styled Dom Oba II d'Africa (Oba meaning king in Yoruba), a "street character" who lived in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the final decades of both slavery and Empire. To his social superiors Dom Oba was half-crazy; to Rio's slaves, freedmen and free men of colour, he was revered as a royal prince, the Prince of the People. For the historian he represents an unsuspected link between the dominant groups of the day and the common Brazilian people, then emerging from the breakdown of traditional society. In the first four chapters, the thesis attempts to reconstruct the life of Dom Oba as thoroughly as is possible in view of the fragmentary nature of the documentation. The next two chapters (5 and 6) are, on the one hand, an investigation into the nature of his relationship with the Brazilian Emperor, Dom Pedro II, and on the other, into the extent and nature of his leadership within his own kingdom, the "little Africa" of Rio de Janeiro. Chapter 7 deals with the general range of Dom Oba's ideas and in particular his thinking on political and social questions, on the process of abolition and on inter-racial relationships. The last chapter is a discussion of the roots of and the influences on Dom Oba's ideas, his basic suppositions and symbols and his vision of history

EARNINGS MANAGEMENT AND ECONOMIC CRISES IN THE BRAZILIAN CAPITAL MARKET

The 2008 economic crisis challenged accounting, either demanding recognition and measurement criteria well adjusted to this scenario or even questioning its ability to inform appropriately entities’ financial situation before the crisis occurred. So, our purpose was to verify if during economic crises listed companies in the Brazilian capital market tended to adopt earnings management (EM) practices. Our sample consisted in 3,772 firm-years observations, in 13 years – 1997 to 2009. We developed regression models considering discretionary accruals as EM proxy (dependent variable), crisis as a macroeconomic factor (dummy variable of interest), ROA, market-to-book, size, leverage, foreign direct investment (FDI) and sector as control variables. Different for previous EM studies two approaches were used in data panel regression models and multiple crises were observed simultaneously. Statistics tests revealed a significant relation between economic crisis and EM practices concerning listed companies in Brazil in both approaches used

Statistics, distillation, and ordering emergence in a two-dimensional stochastic model of particles in counterflowing streams

In this paper, we proposed a stochastic model which describes two species of particles moving in counterflow. The model generalizes the theoretical framework describing the transport in random systems since particles can work as mobile obstacles, whereas particles of one species move in opposite direction to the particles of the other species, or they can work as fixed obstacles remaining in their places during the time evolution. We conducted a detailed study about the statistics concerning the crossing time of particles, as well as the effects of the lateral transitions on the time required to the system reaches a state of complete geographic separation of species. The spatial effects of jamming were also studied by looking into the deformation of the concentration of particles in the two-dimensional corridor. Finally, we observed in our study the formation of patterns of lanes which reach the steady state regardless the initial conditions used for the evolution. A similar result is also observed in real experiments involving charged colloids motion and simulations of pedestrian dynamics based on Langevin equations, when periodic boundary conditions are considered (particles counterflow in a ring symmetry). The results obtained through Monte Carlo numerical simulations and numerical integrations are in good agreement with each other. However, differently from previous studies, the dynamics considered in this work is not Newton-based, and therefore, even artificial situations of self-propelled objects should be studied in this first-principle modeling.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figure