This paper reports on the use of different approaches for measuring the efficiency of major Brazilian port terminals. Two of the most important approaches, DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) and SFA (Stochastic Frontier Analysis), were performed on data collected from 25 terminals. The findings indicate that the majority of Brazilian terminals are running short on capacity due to the export boom that has occurred over the past few years and due to the lack of investment in capacity expansion. Furthermore, efficiency measurements derived from a reduced model with only one input and one output were explained based on variables such as type of cargo handled (container or bulk), connectivity of the terminal to railroads, and control (state or private) of the terminal. Implications and directions for future research are explored.(soy, iron ore, oil, frozen orange juice, petrochemicals, coffee, sugar, ethanol, pulp, etc.); the other half was due to manufactured products (processed meat, automobiles, steel, aircraft, appliances, auto parts, etc.).According to Curcino (2007), the Brazilian Federal Law 8630-amended in 1993 and also known as the 'Port Modernization' Law-was the path for port privatization, leasing of terminals, installation of local port authorities, and labour deregulation, breaking up with the state monopoly on the sector. Although investments in capacity expansion have been minimal from that period to these days, the comparison of several ports in terms of their overall efficiency has become an essential part of the Brazilian microeconomic reform agenda for sustaining economic growth based on foreign trade (Fleury and Hijjar, 2008). For example, in 2006, a federal authority linked to the Transportation Ministry was created to monitor operational bottlenecks and to allocate investments among Brazilian ports and terminals. Since then, performance measurements of ports and terminals are conducted on a more systematic way by Brazilian authorities, albeit they are still based on several traditional single output/single input productivity indexes.Traditionally, the performance of ports and terminals has been variously evaluated by numerous attempts at calculating and seeking to optimize the operational productivity of cargo handling at the berth and in the terminal area . In recent years, approaches such as DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis), FDH (Free Disposal Hull) (Cullinane et al., 2005), and SFA (Stochastic Frontier Analysis) (Cullinane and Song, 2003; have been increasingly utilized to analyse production and performance of ports and terminals. It must be noted, however, that FDH and SFA are less frequently used than DEA, the technique that presents the largest amount of applications in this sector (see Panayides et al., 2009, for a comprehensive list of references). Within port operations, the use of DEA is increasing, while the application of FDH remains low.Despite its original shortcomings, such as not allowing for error or random shock measurement 1 and not being capable to account for the impact of cont...

Resumo A regionalização é uma estratégia de hierarquização dos serviços de saúde que orienta a descentralização das ações e serviços. Existem, entretanto, desafios para efetivar a regionalização, tais como as dificuldades para integrar e coordenar as ações e serviços, em diferentes espaços geográficos, com distintas gestões para atender as necessidades de saúde na escala, qualidade e custos adequados. Nesse contexto, surgem os consórcios públicos enquanto solução organizacional para suprir as necessidades de coordenação e integração entre os entes federativos. Os benefícios dos consórcios são o ganho de escala na prestação de serviços, a racionalidade de processos e de despesas, a realização de projetos conjuntos que seriam inviáveis de forma isolada. O objeto deste artigo é realizar uma investigação sobre como os consórcios intermunicipais de saúde conseguem obter melhor desempenho no que tange aos processos de aquisição e contratação de serviços de forma cooperativa, através de uma revisão bibliográfica narrativa. Os resultados da revisão foram divididos em 3 blocos: i) definições e conceitos dos consórcios públicos, ii) definições e conceitos sobre consórcios intermunicipais de saúde (CIS), iii) estudos de caso de CIS no Brasil.

Academia has been concerned with plagiarism in last ten years. Literature has shown several works in many areas about this issue. These works cite as explanations for cybercheating: lack of knowledge about plagiarism and its legislation, easy obtention of academic material, and incacpacity of paraphrasing. The goal of this article is presenting the results of a survey about copyrights acomplished with Production Engineering students in Rio de Janeiro, and actions for curb academic dishonesty. This survey indicated lack of information about the subject, and the use of unqualified sources of information.

A identificação correta dos autores é fator crítico em estudos de Análise de Redes Sociais (ARS) que envolvem redes de coautoria. O objetivo do trabalho é apresentar as diferenças de propriedades entre três redes de coautoria geradas com formas distintas de considerar o nome dos autores. Foi adotado o método bibliométrico. As redes foram construídas com base em 28.916 artigos sobre sustentabilidade, indexados no ISI/Web of Science, fazendo uso do software Pajek. Na análise, foram comparadas as seguintes propriedades: densidade, grau médio, componente gigante, distribuição dos graus, distância média, diâmetro da rede e coeficiente de clusterização de Watts-Strogatz. Os resultados indicaram grandes diferenças entre as redes, sugerindo que estudos de coautoria, fazendo uso de ARS, podem ter resultados comprometidos, caso não haja o tratamento adequado dos nomes dos autores. Diante do crescimento das aplicações de ARS, faz-se necessário o desenvolvimento de estudos e ferramentas voltados para mitigar a ocorrência desses erros.

Purpose The interest in life cycle assessment (LCA) studies has increased over the years, and one of the main ways of disseminating these studies is through the publication of articles in scientific journals. Coauthorship relations form a social network where it is possible to identify how research is organized and structured in a specific field of knowledge. This paper aims to show the spread of these studies and the configuration of a collaboration network based on coauthorship relations between researchers of LCA considering some properties of social networks. Methods The research was based on a bibliometric approach of 1,386 articles related to LCA and published in journals indexed in the ISI/Web of Science until 2008. A free software, Pajek, which has been largely used for the representation and analysis of social networks, was employed in this work. The properties of social networks analyzed in this study were power law, degrees of separation, giant component, and clustering. Results and discussion The research showed a social network formed by 2,598 authors from 60 countries, 88% of coauthored articles, a mean of 1.87 authors per article; the distribution of articles per author follows a power law (f (z)= 2,134.3×z −2.544 ) with a high regression coefficient (R 2 = 0.9704), a degree of separation of 6.5, a giant component embracing 37% of the authors, and a clustering coefficient of 0.75. The LCA coauthorship network has properties following power law patterns similar to other nets such as WWW. The community forms a giant component which is still small, but which, nevertheless, might experience considerable growth in the near future. The average distance between authors follows the smallworld hypothesis. The clustering degree was also coherent with other scientific communities. Conclusions In spite of being an area with less than 20 years of publications registered in the ISI/Web of Science, LCA is now experiencing fast dissemination involving a large number of articles, authors, and institutions. The LCA's coauthorship network can be characterized as a scientific community with properties verified in other networks of more consolidated academic collaboration.