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Injectable opioid therapy (prescribing heroin for heroin addicts to inject) remains a highly controversial and expensive option. Recent research has shown significant benefits for this therapy in otherwise refractory patients. The aim of this paper is to assess the public opinion regarding heroin prescribing to addicts and to determine what effect the cost of this might have on their opinions.

Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire after reading a vignette which described current opioid maintenance therapy. Two vignettes were generated and the experimental group was randomised to receive the additional information that the cost of heroin prescribing was £15,000 per addict, per year.

Questionnaires were received from 187 subjects (response rate 74 percent). For the control group, 23 percent agreed and 58 percent disagreed with prescribing heroin to addicts (23 vs 62). For the experimental group, where the additional cost of £15,000 per addict was introduced into the vignette, 10 percent agreed and 75 percent disagreed (10 vs 71). The difference was statistically significant (p<0.05; χ²). In total, 58 percent of people were opposed to the idea that heroin should be prescribed to heroin addicts on the National Health Service but this rises to 75 percent when the annual cost of prescribed heroin (£15,000) is included.

This study supports an earlier survey that showed over 80 percent of the general public opposed the prescription of diamorphine to addicts even to reduce crime. Heroin prescribing remains controversial and lacks public support.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the nature of hate-motivated crimes in Brazil by focusing on offenses against LGBTQI+ people and discussing the current legal approaches to combating hate-motivated crimes.

The paper draws on secondary sources and analysis of existing literature in the field, which is primarily in the Portuguese language.

There is no formal definition of hate crime in Brazil. However, it is estimated that Brazil has one of the highest rates of hate crimes perpetrated against LGBTQI+ people in the world, and lethal violence against this group has been on the increase since 2000, especially among black and brown LGBTQI+ people. In more than half of the lethal incidents in public places, often in large cities, the victims and the perpetrators are typically young. The study shows how the lack of a unified legal definition for hate-motivated crimes directly impacts LGBTQI+ people, poses challenges for organizations when collecting data on this group and highlights the need for legislation and enforcement agencies to promote transparency around hate crimes in Brazil.

The study shows how the lack of a unified legal definition for hate-motivated crimes directly impacts LGBTQI+ people, poses challenges for organizations when collecting data on this group and highlights the need for legislation and enforcement agencies to promote transparency around hate crimes in Brazil.

The paper contributes to the literature on gender violence through the analysis of various data sources, created and disseminated by advocacy agencies and other related institutions, on hate crimes against LGBTQI+ people in Brazil.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

The purpose of this paper is to present a four-level architecture that aims at integrating, publishing and retrieving ecological data making use of linked data (LD). It allows scientists to explore taxonomical, spatial and temporal ecological information, access trophic chain relations between species and complement this information with other data sets published on the Web of data. The development of ecological information repositories is a crucial step to organize and catalog natural reserves. However, they present some challenges regarding their effectiveness to provide a shared and global view of biodiversity data, such as data heterogeneity, lack of metadata standardization and data interoperability. LD rose as an interesting technology to solve some of these challenges.

Ecological data, which is produced and collected from different media resources, is stored in distinct relational databases and published as RDF triples, using a relational-Resource Description Format mapping language. An application ontology reflects a global view of these datasets and share with them the same vocabulary. Scientists specify their data views by selecting their objects of interest in a friendly way. A data view is internally represented as an algebraic scientific workflow that applies data transformation operations to integrate data sources.

Despite of years of investment, data integration continues offering scientists challenges in obtaining consolidated data views of a large number of heterogeneous scientific data sources. The semantic integration approach presented in this paper simplifies this process both in terms of mappings and query answering through data views.

This work provides knowledge about the Guanabara Bay ecosystem, as well as to be a source of answers to the anthropic and climatic impacts on the bay ecosystem. Additionally, this work will enable evaluating the adequacy of actions that are being taken to clean up Guanabara Bay, regarding the marine ecology.

Mapping complexity is traded by the process of generating the exported ontology. The approach reduces the problem of integration to that of mappings between homogeneous ontologies. As a byproduct, data views are easily rewritten into queries over data sources. The architecture is general and although applied to the ecological context, it can be extended to other domains.