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We propose a short instrument for measuring financial literacy among young adults: Youth Financial Literacy Short Scale (YFLSS). An instrument with questions on financial knowledge, financial attitude, and financial behavior was applied with 1126 young Brazilians, whose dimensions and items were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis, structural equation modeling and hierarchical cluster analysis. The scale proposed allows for developing an indicator that defines whether an individual has a high or low level of financial literacy. Financial behavior is what most impacts young people, representing 53.6% of financial literacy, followed by financial attitude. Financial knowledge represents only 11.1%. These results show what will make a difference in order to have a financially literate society is the effort to put these lessons into practice and change the behavior of young people. Regarding the limitations, the scale was developed in the context of application on paper and self-administered, changes in these parameters may require adaptations of language and format. Despite construction efforts, the Youth Financial Literacy Short Scale still needs cross-cultural validation. Finally, the YFLSS is a breakthrough in literature because it was built specifically for young audiences and it is a short instrument with only 12 questions to measure the three dimensions of financial literacy: financial knowledge, attitude, and behavior.

The inference of politically-oriented information from text data is a popular research topic in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at both text- and author-level. In recent years, studies of this kind have been implemented with the aid of text representations ranging from simple count-based models (e.g., bag-of-words) to sequence-based models built from transformers (e.g., BERT). Despite considerable success, however, we may still ask whether results may be improved further by combining these models with additional text representations. To shed light on this issue, the present work describes a series of experiments to compare a number of strategies for political bias and ideology inference from text data using sequence-based BERT models, syntax-and semantics-driven features, and examines which of these representations (or their combinations) improve overall model accuracy. Results suggest that one particular strategy - namely, the combination of BERT language models with syntactic dependencies - significantly outperforms well-known count- and sequence-based text classifiers alike. In particular, the combined model has been found to improve accuracy across all tasks under consideration, outperforming the SemEval hyperpartisan news detection top-performing system by up to 6%, and outperforming the use of BERT alone by up to 21%, making a potentially strong case for the use of heterogeneous text representations in the present tasks.

Lawsonia intracellularis is the etiologic agent of porcine proliferative enteropathy (PPE), an inflammatory bowel disease with a major economic impact on the pig industry. The serological diagnosis of PPE can be performed using Blocking or Indirect ELISA, Immunoperoxidase Monolayer Assay (IPMA) and Indirect Fluorescence Antibody Test (IFAT). Here, we designed a most sophisticated immunological method for the detection of porcine anti-L. intracellularis IgGs, named Flow Cytometry Antibody Test - FCAT. This assay uses whole, live-attenuated L. intracellularis bacteria derived from a commercial vaccine. For the assay, we set up the optimal antigen concentration (106 bacterium/assay), primary antibody dilution (1:100), time of incubation (20 min), antigen stability (15 days), precision (coefficient of variation - CV < 10%), reproducibility (CV ≤ 13%) and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC). When using a cut-off of >15.15% for FCAT, we determined that it showed a sensitivity of 98.8% and specificity of 100%. The rate of agreement with IPMA was 84.09% with a kappa index of 0.66. FCAT was used to screen 1,000 sera from non-vaccinated pigs housed in 22 different farms and we found that 730 pigs (73%) from 16 farms (72.7%) had L. intracellularis IgG. This high prevalence confirms that L. intracellularis is endemic on Brazilian pig farms. Finally, we determined that FCAT is an easy to perform diagnostic assay and we would highly recommend it for: i) seroepidemiological studies; ii) evaluation of infection dynamics; and iii) characterization of the humoral response profile induced by vaccines.

This study calls into question the default computation of the disposition effect that uses the average purchase price as a reference point. We show, through a lab experiment, that the reference price of participants can change depending on the experimental behavioral design that is used. Our results show that for the control group, different reference prices do not show significant differences in the computation of the disposition effect, thus supporting the use of the average purchase price as a reference. However, this is not the case for participants in the treatment group. With the addition of experimental treatment concerning the disclosure of the final balance of the participants, the reference prices to compute the disposition effect showed statistically significant differences. The need to display their results caused these participants to use the first purchase price as a reference point when selling their assets.

Introduction: Various endogenous and exogenous processes contribute to the production of oxidative stress, of which anticancer drugs may be one. This study aimed at evaluating the effect of breast cancer chemotherapy on oxidative stress. Material and Methods: Oxidative markers and antioxidant defense molecules were monitored in 59 women undergoing a year of treatment for breast cancer. Results: During the treatment, the levels of vitamin C and glutathione decreased, while both malondialdehyde and protein carbonyl products increased. Vitamin E levels were affected to a smaller extent. The patients were grouped by principal component analysis using their oxidative stress profiles according to the time of the chemotherapy and 95.9% of the total variance was explained by the first three principal components. Conclusion: The oxidative stress profile of the study population was modified extensively during one year of exposure to antineoplastic drugs.

Objetivos: diversas pesquisas apresentam as mulheres como menos educadas financeiramente do que os homens. No entanto, este artigo inova ao buscar explicar se as diferenças de gênero são influenciadas pela estrutura dos instrumentos utilizados para avaliar a educação financeira, ou seja, o efeito framing das categorias de resposta. Metodologia: foi realizado um quase-experimento com 489 estudantes universitários, os quais responderão a dois questionários, um seguido do outro, diferindo-se nas questões de conhecimento financeiro, com ou sem a opção de resposta “não sei” em cada questão. Já para análise dos dados foram utilizadas estatísticas descritivas e técnicas de análise multivariada. Resultados: comprovou-se a hipótese do estudo de que parte das diferenças de gênero em educação financeira é devida ao fato das mulheres marcarem mais a opção “não sei”, especialmente nas questões que representam níveis mais avançados de conhecimento financeiro. Mais especificamente, constatou-se que o uso do “não sei” aumenta, em média, a diferença de gênero em 67%, comprovando a existência do efeito framing. Contribuições: como principal contribuição deste trabalho, evidencia-se a importância dos pesquisadores analisarem em quais situações o uso da alternativa “não sei” é realmente importante e qual tratamento deverá ser incorporado às suas análises para avaliação do seu impacto, especialmente em estudos de gênero. Além disso, fica evidente a necessidade de metodologias mais específicas a fim de promover cursos de educação financeira, não apenas focados para o ensino de conceitos financeiros, mas com ações que desenvolvam a autoconfiança dos indivíduos, em especial, das mulheres.