Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos

Abstract: Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5–22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3–19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8–144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries.

Abstract: Summary Background Raised blood pressure is an important risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and chronic kidney disease. We estimated worldwide trends in mean systolic and mean diastolic blood pressure, and the prevalence of, and number of people with, raised blood pressure, defined as systolic blood pressure of 140 mm Hg or higher or diastolic blood pressure of 90 mm Hg or higher. Methods For this analysis, we pooled national, subnational, or community population-based studies that had measured blood pressure in adults aged 18 years and older. We used a Bayesian hierarchical model to estimate trends from 1975 to 2015 in mean systolic and mean diastolic blood pressure, and the prevalence of raised blood pressure for 200 countries. We calculated the contributions of changes in prevalence versus population growth and ageing to the increase in the number of adults with raised blood pressure. Findings We pooled 1479 studies that had measured the blood pressures of 19·1 million adults. Global age-standardised mean systolic blood pressure in 2015 was 127·0 mm Hg (95% credible interval 125·7–128·3) in men and 122·3 mm Hg (121·0–123·6) in women; age-standardised mean diastolic blood pressure was 78·7 mm Hg (77·9–79·5) for men and 76·7 mm Hg (75·9–77·6) for women. Global age-standardised prevalence of raised blood pressure was 24·1% (21·4–27·1) in men and 20·1% (17·8–22·5) in women in 2015. Mean systolic and mean diastolic blood pressure decreased substantially from 1975 to 2015 in high-income western and Asia Pacific countries, moving these countries from having some of the highest worldwide blood pressure in 1975 to the lowest in 2015. Mean blood pressure also decreased in women in central and eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and, more recently, central Asia, Middle East, and north Africa, but the estimated trends in these super-regions had larger uncertainty than in high-income super-regions. By contrast, mean blood pressure might have increased in east and southeast Asia, south Asia, Oceania, and sub-Saharan Africa. In 2015, central and eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and south Asia had the highest blood pressure levels. Prevalence of raised blood pressure decreased in high-income and some middle-income countries; it remained unchanged elsewhere. The number of adults with raised blood pressure increased from 594 million in 1975 to 1·13 billion in 2015, with the increase largely in low-income and middle-income countries. The global increase in the number of adults with raised blood pressure is a net effect of increase due to population growth and ageing, and decrease due to declining age-specific prevalence. Interpretation During the past four decades, the highest worldwide blood pressure levels have shifted from high-income countries to low-income countries in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa due to opposite trends, while blood pressure has been persistently high in central and eastern Europe. Funding Wellcome Trust.

Abstract: In many aspects of human activity, there has been a continuous struggle between the forces of centralization and decentralization. Computing exhibits the same phenomenon; we have gone from mainframes to PCs and local networks in the past, and over the last decade we have seen a centralization and consolidation of services and applications in data centers and clouds. We position that a new shift is necessary. Technological advances such as powerful dedicated connection boxes deployed in most homes, high capacity mobile end-user devices and powerful wireless networks, along with growing user concerns about trust, privacy, and autonomy requires taking the control of computing applications, data, and services away from some central nodes (the "core") to the other logical extreme (the "edge") of the Internet. We also position that this development can help blurring the boundary between man and machine, and embrace social computing in which humans are part of the computation and decision making loop, resulting in a human-centered system design. We refer to this vision of human-centered edge-device based computing as Edge-centric Computing. We elaborate in this position paper on this vision and present the research challenges associated with its implementation.

Abstract: This paper introduces the use of the voltage multiplier technique applied to the classical non-isolated dc-dc converters in order to obtain high step-up static gain, reduction of the maximum switch voltage, zero current switching turn-on. The diodes reverse recovery current problem is minimized and the voltage multiplier also operates as a regenerative clamping circuit, reducing the problems with layout and the EMI generation. These characteristics allows the operation with high static again and high efficiency, making possible to design a compact circuit for applications where the isolation is not required. The operation principle, the design procedure and practical results obtained from the implemented prototypes are presented for the single-phase and multiphase dc-dc converters. A boost converter was tested with the single-phase technique, for an application requiring an output power of 100 W, operating with 12 V input voltage and 100 V output voltage, obtaining efficiency equal to 93%. The multiphase technique was tested with a boost interleaved converter operating with an output power equal to 400 W, 24 V input voltage and 400 V output voltage, obtaining efficiency equal to 95%.

Abstract: Document-level sentiment classification aims to automate the task of classifying a textual review, which is given on a single topic, as expressing a positive or negative sentiment. In general, supervised methods consist of two stages: (i) extraction/selection of informative features and (ii) classification of reviews by using learning models like Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Nai@?ve Bayes (NB). SVM have been extensively and successfully used as a sentiment learning approach while Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have rarely been considered in comparative studies in the sentiment analysis literature. This paper presents an empirical comparison between SVM and ANN regarding document-level sentiment analysis. We discuss requirements, resulting models and contexts in which both approaches achieve better levels of classification accuracy. We adopt a standard evaluation context with popular supervised methods for feature selection and weighting in a traditional bag-of-words model. Except for some unbalanced data contexts, our experiments indicated that ANN produce superior or at least comparable results to SVM's. Specially on the benchmark dataset of Movies reviews, ANN outperformed SVM by a statistically significant difference, even on the context of unbalanced data. Our results have also confirmed some potential limitations of both models, which have been rarely discussed in the sentiment classification literature, like the computational cost of SVM at the running time and ANN at the training time.