Resumo Este artigo examina o contexto e as implicações da pandemia por Covid-19 na cidade de Belo Horizonte (BH) nos primeiros 80 dias da doença. Utilizamos um recorte analítico descritivo para mensurar a evolução dos casos, o excesso de óbitos, a taxa de transmissibilidade do vírus e a pressão da doença sobre o sistema de saúde de BH e região, através da taxa de ocupação hospitalar nos leitos públicos. Além disso, identificamos as principais políticas de contenção adotadas pelas autoridades locais, bem como as implicações da redução do distanciamento social. Nossos resultados demonstram que o Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS), bem gerido, é fundamental para o enfrentamento da pandemia e a mitigação de suas consequências para a população. O processo de flexibilização que se inicia tem imposto novos desafios que requererão monitoramento atento das autoridades e da sociedade.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) makes use of Artificial Intelligence algorithms to extract meaningful information from unstructured texts, i.e., content that lacks metadata and cannot easily be indexed or mapped onto standard database fields. It has several applications, from sentiment analysis and text summary to automatic language translation. In this work, we use NLP to figure out similar structural linguistic patterns among several different languages. We apply the word2vec algorithm that creates a vector representation for the words in a multidimensional space that maintains the meaning relationship between the words. From a large corpus we built this vectorial representation in a 100-dimensional space for English, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, Basque, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian. Then, we calculated the fractal dimensions of the structure that represents each language. The structures are multi-fractals with two different dimensions that we use, in addition to the token-dictionary size rate of the languages, to represent the languages in a three-dimensional space. Finally, analyzing the distance among languages in this space, we conclude that the closeness there is tendentially related to the distance in the Phylogenetic tree that depicts the lines of evolutionary descent of the languages from a common ancestor.

One hundred years after the flu pandemic of 1918, the world faces an outbreak of a new severe acute respiratory syndrome, caused by a novel coronavirus. With a high transmissibility, the pandemic has spread worldwide, creating a scenario of devastation in many countries. By the middle of 2021, about 3% of the world population had been infected and more than 4 million people had died. Different from the H1N1 pandemic, which had a deadly wave and ceased, the new disease is maintained by successive waves, mainly produced by new virus variants and the small number of vaccinated people. In the present work, we create a version of the SIR model using the spatial localization of persons, their movements, and considering social isolation probabilities. We discuss the effects of virus variants, and the role of vaccination rate in the pandemic dynamics. We show that, unless a global vaccination is implemented, we will have continuous waves of infections.

The robustness and reliability of scale-free networks are tested as a fuse network. The idea is to examine the robustness of a scale-free network when links are irreversibly removed after failing. Due to inherent characteristics of the fuse network model, the sequence of links removal is deterministic and conditioned to fuse tolerance and connectivity of its ends. It is a different situation from classical robustness analysis of complex networks, when they are usually tested under random fails and deliberate attacks of nodes. The use of this system to study the fracture of elastic material brought some interesting results.

The estimated production of world electronic waste until 2017 is approximately 6 Gt. Despite this enormous problem, there are no clear regulations regarding the orientation for disposal or treatment of this type of residuals in many countries. There is a federal public policy in Brazil that supports a network of Computer Reconditioning Centers—CRCs. These CRCs train young people and recover or recycle electronic equipment. Through this work, CRCs produce interlocking plastic pavers for application on pavements from recycled electronic industry waste. This article presents the characterization of these interlocking paver’s mechanical properties when applied on the pavement. This characterization is a necessary step to show the effectiveness of this product. We show that the plastic pavers behave similarly to the artifacts manufactured in concrete, thus creating commercial opportunities for this initiative, and contributing to the Brazilian Solid Waste Policy.

This paper proposes a representation of national innovation systems (NSIs) as a moving and interacting universe of points in a three-dimensional space. This universe moves and expands, following the technological leadership of the most advanced NSIs. This expansion is not homogeneous, leading to different groups that when analyzed uncovers the center-periphery divide – a moving frontier. Each NSI is a point in a three-dimensional universe, condensing three data: GDP per capita, scientific articles per capita, patents per capita. Looking at NSIs populating a universe offers a point of view that brings new elements our interpretation, therefore this paper is organized to investigate the changes in this expanding universe: its population, how to measure its expansion, the clustering of NSIs, frontiers between groups, trajectories of selected countries.