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Existing literature has examined transnational migration in the border zone of Beni Ensar (Morocco) and Melilla (Spain) from various perspectives. However, there is relatively little exploration of the experience of crossing this border. This article aims to address this gap by utilizing qualitative research conducted with migrants assisted by the Spanish Red Cross. The work employs a theoretical framework of migration trajectories and focuses on three types of border crossing experiences: by land, by sea, and as unaccompanied minors. The objective is to comprehend how participants describe the Beni Ensar-Melilla border area, the strategies they employ to navigate the border, and the significance of crossing it for them. I argue that, firstly, in order to navigate this challenging borderland, participants needed to cooperate with other migrants and demonstrate persistence. Additionally, unaccompanied minors relied on specific laws and reception conditions. Secondly, the act of migrating is linked to ideal plans in Europe that, if realized, have the potential to enhance the lives of participants and their families.

Abstract This paper conducts a scientometric analysis and systematic literature review to identify the trends in microfinance outcomes from the perspective of their recipients, specifically more vulnerable people, while also focusing on the demand side. Applying the keywords “co-occurrence networks” and “citation networks,” we examined 524 studies indexed on the ISI Web of Science database between 2012 and March 2021. The subsequent content analysis of bibliometric-coupled articles concerns the main research topics in this field: the socioeconomic outcomes of microfinance, the dichotomy between social performance and the mission drift of microfinance institutions, and how entrepreneurship and financial innovation, specifically through crowdfunding, mitigate poverty and empower the more vulnerable. The findings reinforce the idea that microfinance constitutes a distinct field of development thinking, and indicate that a more holistic approach should be adopted to boost microfinance outcomes through a better understanding of their beneficiaries. The trends in this field will help policymakers, regulators, and academics to examine the nuts and bolts of microfinance and identify the most relevant areas of intervention.

This article presents the results regarding a systematic literature review procedure on digital twins applied to precision agriculture. In particular, research and development activities aimed at the use of digital twins, in the context of predictive control, with the purpose of improving soil quality. This study was carried out through an exhaustive search of scientific literature on five different databases. A total of 158 articles were extracted as a result of this search. After a first screening process, only 11 articles were considered to be aligned with the current topic. Subsequently, these articles were categorised to extract all relevant information, using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses methods. Based on the obtained results, there are two main conclusions to draw: First, when compared with industrial processes, there is only a very slight rising trend regarding the use of digital twins in agriculture. Second, within the time frame in which this work was carried out, it was not possible to find any published paper on the use of digital twins for soil quality improvement within a model predictive control context.

Prensa periódica, intelectuales y mundialización:"momentos globales" en la esfera pública de Buenos Aires (1870-1940).

This research explores a university-industry collaboration based on the case study of an innovation project based on Stanford University's ME310 Design Innovation program. The Porto Design Factory and IKEA Industry joined forces to tackle a problem using what has come to be called a human-centered design approach. The case study provides an understanding of outcomes that reveal the potential of using a human-centered design approach to solve technical problems while enhancing customer experience. It also identifies the benefits that each institution gained by collaborating. The outcomes show that companies benefit from building interfaces with external partners, and that universities are relevant players in the innovation ecosystem, satisfying their third mission of being entrepreneurial institutions.

El artículo analiza las visitas de los escritores Paulo Barreto (1915) y Julia Lopes de Almeida (1922) a Argentina, en el contexto de la diplomacia cultural informal desarrollada por los diarios de Buenos Aires y de Río de Janeiro, procurando establecer el impacto que pueden haber tenido en la circulación de la literatura brasileña en publicaciones periódicas argentinas. Se destaca la retórica de la gran prensa comercial y de los mencionados escritores sobre el periodismo y los viajes y se discute el papel que el mercado de lectores de Buenos Aires desempeñó en la formación del campo literario en Brasil.

O presente estudo tem como objetivo avaliar os efeitos da suplementação de glutamina sobre as alterações imunológicas ocasionadas pelo excesso de treinamento em atletas. Trata-se de uma revisão sistemática realizada nas bases de dados PubMed, Bireme e Scopus, utilizando os descritores “glutamine”, “overtraining” e ”athletes” e o operador booelano “and”. Foram incluídos artigos publicados no período de 1990 a 2015 em múltiplos idiomas. Os artigos foram submetidos a escala de Jadad para avaliação da qualidade metodológica e três revisores foram recrutados para evitar viés de seleção. A partir dos critérios de inclusão e exclusão, foram selecionados 4 artigos. Todos os artigos apresentaram pontuação ≥ 3 na escala de Jadad, sendo considerados de boa qualidade metodológica. Os estudos avaliados foram de curta duração e apresentaram participantes com diferentes características, como diferenças no tipo de esporte praticado, idade dos participantes e dose da suplementação de glutamina. Em conclusão, parece haver dados suficientes demonstrando a influência que o exercício físico intenso tem sobre a concentração plasmática de glutamina, porém, há controvérsias sobre os efeitos positivos da ingestão de glutamina sobre parâmetros imunológicos de atletas submetidos ao exercício físico extenuante. Sendo assim, mais estudos com a suplementação de glutamina a longo prazo são necessários para confirmar os seus reais efeitos sobre a melhora da imunidade em atletas submetidos ao treinamento excessivo. ABSTRACT Effects of glutamine supplementation on the immune system in athletes subjected to overtraining: a systematic review The current study aims to evaluate the effects of glutamine supplementation on the immunological changes induced by overtraining in athletes. A systematic review was performed on PubMed, Bireme and Scopus databases, using the keywords “glutamine”, “overtraining”, ”athletes” and the Boolean operator “and”. Only articles published between the years of 1990 and 2015 in multiple languages were included. The pre-selected articles were submitted to the Jadad scale to evaluate the methodological quality of the studies and three reviewers were recruited to perform the article search in order to avoid selection bias. After application of the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 4 studies were considered for this review. All the selected articles had a score >_3 on Jadad scale, which implies good methodological quality. The evaluated studies performed short duration and had participants with different characteristics, including differences in the type of sport practiced, the participant’s age and glutamine supplementation dose. In conclusion, there appears to be sufficient data demonstrating the influence of intense physical exercise on plasma glutamine concentration however there are controversies relating to the positive effects of glutamine intake on immunological parameters of athletes subjected to strenuous exercises. Therefore, further studies investigating long-term glutamine supplementation are necessary in order to confirm the real effects of this supplementation in improved immunity in athletes subjected to excessive training.

Fertigation is a widely used crop growing method that consists on the precise injection of a nutrient solution that commonly consists on a mixture of three basis components (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) diluted in water. This nutritive suspension is delivered to the plants with a frequency and relative basis contents that depends on the plant’s type, its vegetative state and actual environmental conditions. This production process is becoming increasingly popular due to several advantages over more traditional approaches such as more control on the plant fertilisers and an increasing reduction of irrigation water. This is achieved by an increase complexity on the crop growing process management which requires a technological layer responsible for mixing the nutrients and monitoring the local environmental conditions. Despite this technical component, the short and long term management decisions depend almost exclusively on the grower’s experience and intuition. This type of human-on-the-loop control can lead to a suboptimal use of resources wish can translate into reduction of economic profit and an can lead to waste of water and fertilisers. In this context, decision support mechanisms based on artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can be of extreme relevance in order to steer the grower decisions and increase the overall production process efficiency. The performance of those types of approaches strongly relies on the availability of data which can be both local and global. This work deals with the architecture of a sensor network which will be responsible to gather local information on the actual growing conditions. Those conditions are usually not homogeneous within the complete production plant and must be taken into consideration. In particular, the current architecture vision will consider those clusters, where the environmental conditions are similar, as cyberphysical devices. These devices will consist on vegetative production area, sensor networks and local control of irrigation state.

A buildings resilience to seismic activity can be increased by providing ways for the structure to dynamically counteract the effect of the Earth’s crust movements. This ability is fundamental in certain regions of the globe, where earthquakes are more frequent, and can be achieved using different strategies. State-of-the-art anti-seismic buildings have, embedded on their structure, mostly passive actuators such as base isolation, Tuned Mass Dampers (TMD) and viscous dampers that can be used to reduce the effect of seismic or even wind induced vibrations. The main disadvantage of this type of building vibration reduction strategies concerns their inability to adapt their properties in accordance to both the excitation signal or structural behaviour. This adaption capability can be promoted by adding to the building active type actuators operating under a closed-loop. However, these systems are substantially larger than passive type solutions and require a considerable amount of energy that may not be available during a severe earthquake due to power grid failure. An intermediate solution between these two extremes is the introduction of semi-active actuators such as magneto–rheological dampers. The inclusion of magneto–rheological actuators is among one of the most promising semi-active techniques. However, the overall performance of this strategy depends on several aspects such as the actuators number and location within the structure and the vibration sensors network. It can be the case where the installation leads to a non-collocated system which presents additional challenges to control. This paper proposes to tackle the problem of controlling the vibration of a non-collocated three-storey building by means of a brain–emotional controller tuned using an evolutionary algorithm. This controller will be used to adjust the stiffness coefficient of a magneto–rheological actuator such that the building’s frame oscillation under earthquake excitation, is mitigated. The obtained results suggest that, using this control strategy, it is possible to reduce the building vibration to secure levels.

Ao substituir Machado de Assis como principal cronista do jornal carioca Gazeta de Notícias, Olavo Bilac propôs a seus leitores uma mudança de linguagem literária. Todavia, ele manteve uma das características da crônica de outros escritores do século XIX, sobretudo de Machado de Assis, na tematização dos problemas cotidianos da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. A leitura de algumas crônicas destes dois autores permite iluminar duas interpretações distintas sobre a história argentina, sobre a realidade brasileira e sobre as relações entre Argentina e Brasil, entre a crise final do Império e as reformas urbanas do Rio de Janeiro no início do século XX.

Forest biomass has gained increasing interest in the recent years as a renewable source of energy in the context of climate changes and continuous rising of fossil fuels prices. However, due to its characteristics such as seasonality, low density, and high cost, the biomass supply chain needs further optimization to become more competitive in the current energetic market. In this sense and taking into consideration the fact that the transportation is the process that accounts for the higher parcel in the biomass supply chain costs, this work proposes a multilayer model predictive control based strategy to improve the performance of this process at the operational level. The proposed strategy aims to improve the overall supply chain performance by forecasting the system evolution using behavioural dynamic models. In this way, it is possible to react beforehand and avoid expensive impacts in the tasks execution. The methodology is composed of two interconnected levels that closely monitor the system state update, in the operational level, and delineate a new routing and scheduling plan in case of an expected deviation from the original one. By applying this approach to an experimental case study, the concept of the proposed methodology was proven. This novel strategy enables the online scheduling of the supply chain transport operation using a predictive approach.

This work addresses the problem of finding the best controller parameters in order to improve the response of a single degree-of-freedom structural system under earthquake excitation. The control paradigm considered is based on brain emotional learning (BEL) and the actuation over the building dynamics is carried out by changing the stiffness of a magneto-rheological damper. A typical BEL-based controller requires the definition of several parameters which can prove difficult and non-intuitive to obtain. For this reason, an evolutionary-based search technique has been added to the current problem framework in order to automate the controller design. In particular, the particle swarm optimization method is chosen as the evolutionary based technique to be integrated within the current control paradigm. The obtained results suggest that, indeed, it is possible to parametrize a BEL controller using an evolutionary-based algorithm. Moreover, a simulation shows that the obtained results can outperform the ones obtained by manual tuning each controller parameter individually.

The point prediction quality is closely related to the model that explains the dynamic of the observed process. Sometimes the model can be obtained by simple algebraic equations but, in the majority of the physical systems, the relevant reality is too hard to model with simple ordinary differential or difference equations. This is the case of systems with nonlinear or nonstationary behaviour which require more complex models. The discrete time-series problem, obtained by sampling the solar radiation, can be framed in this type of situation. By observing the collected data it is possible to distinguish multiple regimes. Additionally, due to atmospheric disturbances such as clouds, the temporal structure between samples is complex and is best described by nonlinear models. This paper reports the solar radiation prediction by using hybrid model that combines support vector regression paradigm and Markov chains. The hybrid model performance is compared with the one obtained by using other methods like autoregressive (AR) filters, Markov AR models, and artificial neural networks. The results obtained suggests an increasing prediction performance of the hybrid model regarding both the prediction error and dynamic behaviour.

RESUMO O artigo analisa as visitas de jornalistas brasileiros a Buenos Aires e de jornalistas argentinos ao Rio de Janeiro, nas quais alguns exerceram o papel de mediadores culturais. Estas visitas reforçaram uma sociabilidade burguesa transnacional e foram apresentadas pela imprensa como um movimento de aproximação entre Argentina e Brasil, constituindo-se no que se pode chamar de uma diplomacia cultural informal.