Saltwater Chronicles investigates the notion of “islandness” in contemporary Newfoundland readership through two in-depth case studies of book clubs as representational spaces in the elaboration of local knowledge and identities. We demonstrate how select Newfoundland readers perform acts of regeneration…

Eighty years after the discovery of penicillin, the interest of this ß-lactam antibiotic at industrial level is still remarkable. Despite the good background knowledge, little is known on how Penicillin chrysogenum became a good penicillin overproducer, and much of the…

Background: Recently, proteins and peptides have become an added value to foodstuffs due to new knowledge
about its structural analyses as related to antioxidant and anticancer activity. Our goal was to evaluate if protein
fractions from cacao seeds show antitumor…

Resource management and performance models constitute important aspects for parallel applications' performance analysis and tuning. Defining performance models associated with the application structure has been proven useful for implementing dynamic tuning tools. However, for extending this strategy to complex pplications…

Understanding how materials deform and break is a subject of critical importance in industry. At the same time, it requires from the knowledge of the basic processes governing the phenomenon and hence, fundamental physics research is a must. The presence…

From the earliest hardware and software days to the internet era, complexity of computer systems has been something computer scientists, engineers, and programmers have had to deal with. Important fields of research and technology have originated, developed, or matured as…

This thesis explores how an agent can autonomously learn about its environment
just by interacting with it. This is not an easy task, since traditional
machine learning algorithms strongly depend on the user's intervention to define
the data to…

In June 2008, the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association (ABIA) and the Indian NGO SAHARA submitted a joint pre-grant opposition to the patent application of Tenofovir Disoproxil Fumarate in India. This joint action provides a pertinent case model of the potential…

CMOS IC scaling has provided significant improvements in electronic circuit performance.
Advances in test methodologies to deal with new failure mechanisms and nanometer issues
are required. Interconnect opens are an important defect mechanism that requires detailed
knowledge of its physical…

When Alexander Dent arrived in Brazil in 1998, he was unaware of the existence of the rural genres that are the focus of this book. He had listened to bossa nova, MPB, Tropicália, death metal, forró, and techno, among other…