Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Flood Frequency Analysis (FFA) processes the available record of annual maximum flows of a river, to estimate predictions associated with low probabilities of exceedance, its reciprocal is the return period (Tr) in years. These predictions are the design floods, with which all hydraulic works are planned, designed, and reviewed hydrologically, such as reservoirs, protective embankments, channel rectifications, bridges and urban drainage works. In this work, a novel method of the FFA is described and applied, which incorporates additional hydrometric information in a mixed General Extreme Values (GEV) distribution; this procedure is aimed to accurately define the flood of Tr = 1 000 years. Initially, the information on average annual flow and annual maximum flow of all the hydrometric stations that make up the homogeneous region under study are processed. The above, with the approach of the enveloping curves and with the objective of defining an enveloping curve with zero probability of exceedance; whereby, defines the extreme maximum flow that is approached as asymptote by the upper part of the mixed GEV, which avoids an unreal increase in predictions. Lastly, based on each record of floods, synthetic sequences of 1 500 values are generated and one with similarity to the available data and more than ten floods of Tr > 150 years is chosen. To such a synthetic sequence a GEV distribution is adjusted, with the methods of moments L and LH, to select the one with the lowest standard error of fit. This distribution forms the lower part of the mixed GEV, until the point of inflection of Tr = 500 years. The described method was applied to the seven largest flood records of the Hydrological Region No. 10 (Sinaloa), Mexico and based on its results, the Conclusions were formulated, which highlight its advantages and suggest its application to estimate predictions of high return periods (100 ≤ Tr ≤ 1 000 years) more accurately, by incorporating regional hydrometric information.

It is possible to view the separation between secondary schooling and professional education as a movement that, once more, aims at keeping away from the State Universities the increasingly greater number of students that complete secondary education. With the help of a survey of the school trajectory of students that attended technical post-secondary courses in the Federal technical schools and in the National Service of Industrial Learning (SENAI) of Rio de Janeiro in the years 1999/2000, we analyse here the non-manifest character of the guidelines for professional education expressed in the Federal Law 2208/97. Once again, this document reflects the Government's attempt to reduce the number of places in State Universities. The experience of the students attending the technical post-secondary courses that were being ministered in the federal technical schools and at the SENAI in the city of Rio de Janeiro uninterruptedly during the late years of the 20th century can help us to understand the intentions behind the separation of secondary education from technical-level professional education and the possible repercussions of this separation for a large number of students now leaving secondary school.

In the past decades a number of studies has pointed to the existence of significant alterations in the contents and organization of health work. These alterations have led to changes in the professional training at the secondary and higher levels. Notwithstanding, few of those studies have attempted to analyse the process of technical work in the laboratories for R in health in this context. This article gathers elements about this process, and considers it as part of the practices for the production of techno-scientific knowledge and artefacts. Although insufficient for an exhaustive discussion on the subject, the gathered elements permitted us to deal with some of the major issues related to professional education in health, namely considerations about specialization, qualifications and the division between conception and execution. The discussion had as bases the description of the activities carried out by two technicians, one at the secondary level and the other at University level, in an R laboratory specializing in vaccines. The fieldwork had as bases the contributions of authors sharing the type of approach normally identified with "Social Studies on Science and Technology". Because they were grounded on the discussion of practices of techno-scientific research, the studies ended by contributing towards an investigation of the technicians', researchers' and assistants' work process.

This work discusses some of the issues related to the funding of the Brazilian National Health Service (SUS). In the first part of the paper, Ruben de Mattos advocates the creation of devices to guarantee a progressive increase in the public health budget. In the debater's view, the greatest challenge facing the government is the development - and the maintenance - of a system that can de facto guarantee universal and equalitarian access. Mattos also emphasizes the importance of the federal government's transfers of funds to local governments since the latter are seen as instrumental in the attempts to reduce inequality between regions and to encourage policies that will contribute to the SUS' consolidation. In the second part, Nilson do Rosário affirms that the 1990's fiscal adjustment, a consequence of the monetary stabilization policy, reduced the government's funding capacity with regard to health; due to the ensuing increase in social inequality, this had a series of adverse effects. Next, Mr. Rosário explains how the health sector responded to the demands for macroeconomic adjustment of public expenditure by means of substitutive strategies. It was in this context that the Family Health Programme (PSF) expanded rapidly, becoming a strategic item in the agenda for the expansion of basic outpatient care in this country.

The objective of this paper is to present the experience of the Training Programme for Local Agents of Vigilance in Health (Proformar) with its theoretical, methodological and operational bases. Proformar is a pedagogical proposal that combines ordinary classroom education with remote education as a methodological strategy to carry out a mass learning/teaching process. The aim of the programme is the nationwide re-training of the 26,660 old "guards of endemic diseases" from the National Foundation of Health (Funasa) - whose function is to work in the rural areas in the control of diseases and epidemics - and, in a next stage, in cooperation with states and municipalities, another 42,000 workers. We have used as reference the historic landmarks of the Sanitary Reform, in the area of health, and the Law of Guidelines and Bases (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases) in education to clarify the conceptual and didactic pedagogical choices in the elaboration of the programme by Polytechnic Health School Joaquim Venâncio/Fiocruz. Finally, we look at the processes of decentralization and municipalization as essential strategies for the consolidation of the Brazilian Health System (SUS) in a national dimension, giving emphasis to the need to clearly distinguish these two processes in terms of their ends and purposes.

In this article we intend to make a discussion about work-education-health, taking as reference one Program that conjugated researches on the relation health-work and formation of male and female workers of public schools, whose epistemological perspective was centered in the work activity and in the confrontation among scientific knowledge and the knowledge generated on the workers' experience. Constituting an 'amplified community of research', that associates researchers and workers in the same process, we intended to contribute for the understanding of the dynamics and conditions that can generate suffering and sickness or can facilitate the creation of strategies of life's and health's statement, considering the values conflicts that are present in the public service's work. Above all things, we tried to contribute for the identification of the effective problems to be faced, aiming to make the changes that the workers consider as priorities. After presenting this program and some of it's results, we signalled the necessity of the construction of research methods compatibles to the premise that the workers are detainers of an experience and an indispensable type of knowledge to the comprehension of the enigmatic relation between health and work, in the approach of promotion of health and statement of life.

The reform of the State is at the centre of the periphery countries' agenda; it fulfils the conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund and by the World Bank, as well as being part of the policies that aim at expanding the private sphere in detriment of the public one. Technological determinism - expressed by the globalisation ideology - and the use of a vocabulary that makes the discourses of both left and right seem very similar (as it occurs in the case of matters such as autonomy, civil society and the critique of statism) contribute towards the construction of the dominant ideology. Here we make a critique of the discourse that makes these reforms seem inexorable, support the rupture with the neo-liberal macroeconomic policies in order to guarantee the concretisation of the post neo-liberal transition and defend the opposition between the public and the private as a strategy for the construction of alternatives. We argue that the reforms will strengthen the dependent capitalist condition of this country and, widening its cultural heteronomy, will further intensify the existing educational and technological-scientific apartheid, with serious social consequences. We also suggest that the construction of an ethical and public State demands the strengthening of social movements, their autonomy vis-à-vis governments and the elaboration of critical theories related to the State in a society that is not subdued to the order of Capital.

Antônio Sérgio da Silva Arouca was born in Ribeirão Preto (SP) and graduated in Medicine by the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1966. In his role as consultant for the Pan-American Health Organization he worked in several countries. Arouca was Head of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) from 1985 to 1988 and under his direction the institution embarked in a successful process of democratization. He was the Brazilian Communist Party's candidate to the Vice-Presidency of Brazil. Arouca was federal deputy for two consecutive terms and occupied several positions in various health, scientific and technological commissions. As federal deputy, he took part in the founding of the Brazilian Health System (SUS) in the 80s. In 1986, he presided over the VIII National Conference on Health, a landmark in the concept of the Brazilian health system. In January this year he took over the Secretariat of Participatory Management of the Brazilian Health Ministry, was nominated Brazilian representative in the World Health Organization (WHO) and for the post of General Coordinator of the XII National Conference on Health. He died on 2 nd August 2003.

This article presents empirical and analytical considerations about the present configuration of the working classes. In opposition to the theses that propose that work has ended or is disappearing, the text attempts to propose a more comprehensive notion of work, as well as an analytical outline of the working class' way of being today and its new morphology. Thus the article intends to contrapose those theses that maintain that work is disappearing or being deconstructed.

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