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Summary Aluminum smelting consumes large amounts of electricity and helps drive dam-building worldwide. Brazil plans to build dozens of hydroelectric dams in its Amazon region and in neighboring countries. Benefits are much less than is portrayed, partly because electricity is exported in electro-intensive products such as aluminum, creating little employment in Brazil. Dams perversely affect politics and social policies. Aluminum export offers an example of how a rethinking of energy use needs to be the starting point for revising energy policy. Dam impacts have been systematically underestimated, including population displacement and loss of livelihood (especially fisheries), biodiversity loss, and greenhouse-gas emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation has been regarded as crucial for organizations competing in dynamic environments. There is a close relationship between organizational strategies and organizational innovation practice. Regarding the competitive strategy, it is known that this may either stimulate or inhibit the practice. The production strategy, in turn, must be aligned with the competitive strategy and have a defined content (formed by competitive priorities and decision areas) in order to support the organization's competitive position. In this context, this paper aims to analyze how technological innovation (product and process) fits into the con- tent of the production strategy of an aluminum company in Sorocaba, São Paulo, Brazil. This is a descriptive and exploratory research, with a qualitative nature, which uses the case study as a method. The company analyzed in this research operates in metal, cement, power, steel, pulp, agribusiness and finance industries, besides investing in early-stage companies having a high growth potential. The business unit selected for the case study restricts its production to aluminum items, operating in the industries of transport, packaging, electrical, construction, and consumer goods. Among the key findings, it follows that, in this case, there is a greater incidence of process innovation than product innovation. As competitive priorities, there was an emphasis on flexibility and cost priorities. Innovation is not seen by the company as a competitive priority, however it was noticed that it often occurs in order to provide a better development of the priorities flexibility and cost. While some features related to decision areas make the practice of innovation easier, such as vertical integration, others (mainly organizational) might be improved to provide innovation with a better support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Saúde e Sociedade is the property of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Faculdade de Saude Publica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

How do the contemporary journalism have related the human life imbricated in its sociocultural diversity? From this question, this study aimed to investigate the narratives focusing on the character and its sociocultural dimension, practiced in the Brasileiros's magazine. In special, the purpose was to examine how the brazilian sociocultural diversity is addressed in the reports and covers, and examine how this way of doing journalism assigns meanings to narrative, also verify that the production of this report contributes to the ideal of journalism to be pluralistic and democratic. To meet these concerns were also analyzed 48 covers of Brasileiros's magazine and was analyzed a sample of reports printed between 2007 and 2011. The methodological procedures have resources Pragmatic Analysis of Narrative Journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview on the performance of one year of the Observatory of Public Broadcasting in Latin America. It reports actions such as follow-up news, analysis of broadcasting systems and research projects in development. It also summarizes the results attained in carried investigations, including a mapping of the structure of operation and management of public broadcasting; a survey aimed to verify the level of satisfaction regarding the Brazilian public radio and television, and content analysis of the programming in stations all over the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Perspectiva Econômica is the property of Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Among the several elements that influence the consumer to purchase and consume a product is the country of origin. The present paper aims to understand the influence of a country image on the purchase intentions regarding the products made in this country. It also verifies if there are differences in the magnitude of the country of origin effect, depending on the familiarity that consumers have towards the country, contributing thus to the deepening of knowledge on the theme. In order to do that, a descriptive quantitative study was performed, about the effects that Brazil image exerts on the purchase intentions that foreign consumers have towards Brazilian products. The sample used was composed of Dutch undergraduate students. The results indicate that there was an influence of Brazil image in the purchase of all Brazilian products researched: cow meat, fresh fruits, shoes and furniture. There were differences on the influence magnitude, depending on the familiarity the respondents had towards Brazil. The conclusions obtained by this research can help Brazilian firms to adopt more effective strategies in the trading of their products abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background, Aims and Scope. Life Cycle Assessment is a technique for evaluating the environmental performance of a given product by: identifying and quantifying the energy and raw materials used in its manufacturing process, as well as the emissions of pollutants to water, soil, and air inherent in this production, use and disposal, and evaluating the environmental impact associated with the use of energy and materials and the emissions of pollutants, thus identifying opportunities to improve the system in order to optimize the environmental performance of the product. CETEA (Packaging Technology Center) has conducted a Life Cycle Assessment - LCA study of aluminum can with emphasis in life cycle inventory, collecting data for the reference years 2000-2002. The goal of this paper is to present part of this complete study, focusing the influence of aluminum recycling rate on the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) of aluminum beverage cans in Brazil. Methods. The adopted methodology was based on the recommendations of SETAC - Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry and the ISO 14040 Standard, approved by the Sub-Committee 05 of the Environmental Administration Technical Committee, TC-207, from ISO - INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR STANDARDIZATION [1,2]. Data storage and modeling were performed by employing the PIRA Environmental Management System - PEMS [3]. Results. Taking into account the impact categories adopted in this study, it has been shown that recycling helps to improve the aluminum can environmental profile measured as LCI data. Discussion. For the transformed aluminum products, the recycling rate affects the values of the environmental parameters inventoried, but not in the same proportion, since the contribution of other stages of the product system life cycle and the recycling process remain unchanged, including the yield of this process. In general, the recycling balance is always positive due to the importance of the stages that precede the packaging production and the problem of increasing the municipal waste volume. Conclusions. The advantages of the recycling are obviously concentrated on the inventoried parameters related to the primary aluminum production and to the package disposal. The verified benefits of the recycling increase with the recycling rate enhancement. However, the effects on the inventory do not have the same magnitude of the recycling rate. This happens due to the relative contributions of the other life cycle stages, such as the transportation and sheet or can production. In agreement with the presented results, it is possible to conclude that the aluminum can recycling reduces part of the consumption of natural resources and the emissions associated to the stages previous to the production of the packaging. The parameters specifically related to the stage of aluminum production suffer reduction directly proportional to the increase of the recycling rate. In this way, all of the efforts made to increase the recycling rate will have a positive contribution to the LCI of the aluminum can. Recommendations. It is worth pointing out that LCA studies are iterative and dynamic. The data can always be refined, substituted or complemented with updated information in order to improve the representativeness of the analyzed sector. Perspectives. From this study, the aluminum sector in Brazil is able to quantify the benefits of future actions for environmental improvement of the Brazilian aluminum industry, as well as to contribute technically to Environmental Labeling initiatives regarding aluminum products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work proposes an extended model representing part of a huge aluminum industry load for short-term voltage stability investigations in time domain. The efforts were concentrated in the expansion of the industrial power distribution system model including explicit representation of the main transformers, capacitors, feeders and induction motors. The extended model is validated through a comparison between computer simulation results and the industry/power system utility recordings. A real sequence of events which took place in the Brazilian North Power System in the year of 2002 causing a complete industry breakdown (loss of bulk supply) was considered here for this purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article covers issues related to the aluminum industry. The aluminum production of Alcoa declined by 2 kiloton due to the temporary curtailment of the Eastalco, Maryland smelter. The Aluminum Corp. of China Ltd. (Chalco) has acquired a 55 percent interest in the Shandong Huayu Aluminum and Power Co. Ltd. The 2 million ton expansion of the Alumar Alumina Refinery in Brazil has been approved by BHP Billiton.