Southern Brazilian rivers and streams have been intensively affected by human activities, especially agriculture and the release of untreated domestic sewage. However, data about the aquatic macroinvertebrates in these streams are scarce and limited to only certain groups. In addition, studies focusing on the structure and spatial distribution of these communities are lacking. This study analyz...

If inflation occurs after the breaking of Peccei-Quinn symmetry then large values of the breaking scale F , which are forbidden in conventional axion cosmology, are permitted, provided that we inhabit a region of the Multiverse where the initial misalignment is small. Regions having approximately this initial misalignment may occupy a small volume of the Multiverse, but they contain a large fra...

A survey of adult behaviour of Culex (Culex) species was carried out from August 1992 through December 1993 in a human modified (anthropic) environment in the Ribeira Valley, S. Paulo State, Brazil. Culex nigripalpus dominated the catches at several sites and it's tendency to increase in the anthropic environment became quite clear. Nevertheless no high level of synanthropy was demonstrated. So...

We propose a numerical test of fundamental physics based on the complexity measure of a general set of functions. The analysis can be carried out for any scientific experiment and might lead to a better understanding of the underlying theory. From a cosmological perspective, the anthropic description of fundamental constants can be explicitly tested by our procedure. We perform a simple numeric...

We describe a significant practical consequence of taking anthropic biases into account in deriving predictions for rare stochastic catastrophic events. The risks associated with catastrophes such as asteroidal/cometary impacts, supervolcanic episodes, and explosions of supernovae/gamma-ray bursts are based on their observed frequencies. As a result, the frequencies of catastrophes that destroy...

Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from theorygenerated probability distributions that allow for selection effects—generally expressed in terms of assumptions about anthropic conditionalization and how typic...

I consider the puzzles arising from four interrelated problems involving “anthropic” reasoning, and in particular the “Self-Sampling Assumption” (SSA) — that one should reason as if one were randomly chosen from the set of all observers in a suitable reference class. The problem of Freak Observers might appear to force acceptance of SSA if any empirical evidence is to be credited. The Sleeping ...