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City-level circuity factors have been introduced to quantify and compare the directness of vehicular travel across different cities. While these city-level factors help to improve the quality of distance approximation functions for city-wide vehicle movements, more granular factors are needed to obtain accurate shortest path distance approximations for last-mile transportation systems that are typically characterized by local trips. More importantly, local circuity factors encode valuable information about the efficiency and complexity of the urban road network, which can be leveraged to inform policy and practice. In this paper, we quantify and analyze local network circuity leveraging contemporary traffic datasets. Using the city of São Paulo as our primary case study and a combination of supervised and un-supervised machine learning methods, we observe significant heterogeneities in local network circuity, explained by dimensional and topological properties of the road network. Locally, real trip distances are about twice as long as distances predicted by the L 1 norm. Results from São Paulo are compared to seven additional urban areas in Latin America and the United States. At a coarse-grained level of analysis, we observe similar correlations between road network properties and local circuity across these cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article summarizes the conference papers presented at the ninth biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM). The IASFM conference was held January 9-13, 2005 in São Paulo, Brazil and was hosted by the Pontifical Catholic University and the Latin American Parliament. The conference featured 168 papers, primarily of applied research, presented by 200 academics, policymakers, practitioners, and government representatives. This was the first time that IASFM met in Latin America; the conference was simultaneously translated in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. The conference focused on the number of cases and causes of forced migration as well as possible repatriation of migrants. Smuggling and human trafficking was also addressed.

Abstract São Paulo, Brazil's largest city, is also home to one of the largest Chinese populations in Latin America, with only Lima being indubitably larger. This paper briefly describes the history and present situation of the Chinese community in São Paulo, with a focus on the contemporary mainland Chinese who make up the majority. The fieldwork for this research was conducted in the months of March to June 2011, and the findings are based on the accounts provided by Brazilian, Chinese and Sino-Brazilian respondents supplemented by the existing Brazilian, Chinese and international scholarship on the subject, as well as Brazilian and Chinese press reports and internet publications. Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]