Solidarity and Social Justice in Promoting Mental Health and Wellness among Impoverished People: Looking from Mercy and Liberation

This paper reflects on issues of justice and mental health from a theological approach that intends to show an ethics of social responsibility and caring ground on a new social Samaritan paradigm. It has the Brazilian context of public health as the starting point for its analysis and an example to support a theological perspective that stresses the crucial importance of a community-based approach able to integrate patient, family, ecclesial community, and society in order to shape public policies that respond to mental health demands and challenges. In addition, this paper suggests an ethics of personal, communal, and social responsibility to avoid marginalization of the mentally ill and enable them to live a healthy sociability according to their limitation and vulnerability. It urges for an ecclesial role in pastoral care for these people and public advocacy for their rights. It shows the Brazilian experience of Pastoral Healthcare in caring for the mentally ill and in advocating for their dignity and rights by its organization in three dimensions: caring – communitarian – sociopolitical

A logic for n-dimensional hierarchical refinement

Hierarchical transition systems provide a popular mathematical structure to represent state-based software applications in which different layers of abstraction are represented by inter-related state machines. The decomposition of high level states into inner sub-states, and of their transitions into inner sub-transitions is common refinement procedure adopted in a number of specification formalisms. This paper introduces a hybrid modal logic for k-layered transition systems, its first-order standard translation, a notion of bisimulation, and a modal invariance result. Layered and hierarchical notions of refinement are also discussed in this setting.Comment: In Proceedings Refine'15, arXiv:1606.0134

Resource Management in Distributed Camera Systems

The aim of this work is to investigate different methods to solve the problem of allocating the correct amount of resources (network bandwidth and storage space) to video camera systems. Here we explore the intersection between two research areas: automatic control and game theory. Camera systems are a good example of the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its impact on our daily lives and the environment. We aim to improve today’s systems, shift from resources over-provisioning to allocate dynamically resources where they are needed the most. We optimize the storage and bandwidth allocation of camera systems to limit the impact on the environment as well as provide the best visual quality attainable with the resource limitations. This thesis is written as a collection of papers. It begins by introducing the problem with today’s camera systems, and continues with background information about resource allocation, automatic control and game theory. The third chapter de- scribes the models of the considered systems, their limitations and challenges. It then continues by providing more background on the automatic control and game theory techniques used in the proposed solutions. Finally, the proposed solutions are provided in five papers.Paper I proposes an approach to estimate the amount of data needed by surveillance cameras given camera and scenario parameters. This model is used for calculating the quasi Worst-Case Transmission Times of videos over a network. Papers II and III apply control concepts to camera network storage and bandwidth assignment. They provide simple, yet elegant solutions to the allocation of these resources in distributed camera systems. Paper IV com- bines pricing theory with control techniques to force the video quality of cam- era systems to converge to a common value based solely on the compression parameter of the provided videos. Paper V uses the VCG auction mechanism to solve the storage space allocation problem in competitive camera systems. It allows for a better system-wide visual quality than a simple split allocation given the limited system knowledge, trust and resource constraints

Between Citizenship and Prisons: Criminalizing LGBTphobia in Brazil

This article aims at understanding, from the case of the criminalization of LGBTphobia in Brazil, how criminalizing demands were articulated by social movements with the defense of democracy and human rights. Considering that Brazilian LGBT activism has grown in struggles against the repression of the criminal justice system towards sexual and gender dissidents, we intend, at first, to understand how demands for criminalization policies arose among activists. Departing from queer criminological studies that have analyzed how gender and sexuality structure prisons and the criminal justice system, we reflect on how prisons and prison struggles have become structuring features of contemporary sexual politics. From this case, at last, we seek to illuminate aspects of the historical process underway in Brazil in the last decades in which democratization has gone hand in hand with the expansion of the criminal justice system and mass incarceration. The object of this study is the speeches of the hegemonic groups in the Brazilian LGBT movement, in order to investigate in them how demands for criminalization and incarceration were built. Thus, we are based on an empirical analysis of the documents produced by Brazilian LGBT activism since the 1980s, as manifestos, records of national meetings and law projects. In following the rising and rooting of this agenda, we argue that not only has LGBT phobia become a problem of crime and prison, but LGBT struggles have become criminalizing and carceral. Keywords: crime; LGBT movement; democracy; criminalizing rationality DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/11-11-10 Publication date:June 30th 2021