In the electromagnetic spectrum, structural damage to living tissues per unit of absorbed energy tends to increase with the decrease of a wavelength which is evident not only for ultraviolet and ionizing radiation but also for the infrared and visible light. By causing thermal damage after absorbing energies that would be harmless for radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (EMF), tissues are eve...

In the electromagnetic spectrum, structural damage to living tissues per unit of absorbed energy tends to increase with the decrease of a wavelength which is evident not only for ultraviolet and ionizing radiation but also for the infrared and visible light. By causing thermal damage after absorbing energies that would be harmless for radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (EMF), tissues are eve...

This work presents the effects of low-LET radiations (electrons) on normal and modified cells DNA. The radiation-induced effects are assessed using the COMETassay. The results show that modified cells are more sensible to exposure than the normal ones. The dose-effect relationship follows a linear-no-threshold model suggested by BEIR VII.

This paper is the first to estimate the extent to which early childhood climatic shocks affect both cognitive and non-cognitive skills as measured at multiple points in childhood and adolescence. We assess the impact of rainfall observed in utero and during the first two years of life by analyzing a rich longitudinal study of rural youth in a poor province in China. Our empirical strategy entai...

For a central bank to fulfil its price stability mandate, the accurate assessment of inflation expectations is of crucial importance. Market participants gauging long-term investments have similar concerns about inflation. Traditionally, inflation expectations have been derived from models or through surveys of market participants’ opinions. In the mid to late 1990s financial markets started to...

This paper examines, for the Brazilian case, if break-even inflation rates (BEIR) extracted from fixed income securities is an unbiased estimator of consumer inflation, measured by the CPI. Our estimates suggest that BEIRs are informative about future inflation, especially for the maturity of three months. The main innovation of our work, however, is the method used for estimation, allowing us ...

Image metamorphosis, commonly known as morphing, is a powerful tool for visual effects that consists of the fluid transformation of one digital image into another. There are many techniques for image metamorphosis, but in all of them there is a need for a person to supply the correspondence between the features in the source image and target image. In this paper we use the Active Shape Models t...

Implicit surfaces have proved to be a particularly well suited and efficient model for animating and morphing shapes of arbitrary topologies. The Blob-Tree model is characterized as a hierarchical combination of skeletal primitives organized in a tree. The nodes hold blending, boolean and warping operators, which allows the design of complex objects. In this paper, we address the metamorphosis ...