In this paper I examine Hume’s claims about the nature of moral sentiments (mainly in T 3.1.2) using as a foil the Kantian challenge to all material practical principles: they are all of the same type, being based on self-love and making all choices, including moral ones, hedonically fungible. The paper explores Hume’s views on pleasure as constitutive of moral sentiment as an answer to that challenge arguing that for him only pleasure is essentially valuable for beings like us. It thus grounds a notion of value which, through a “progressive or dynamic” view of human nature, informs a conception of moral pleasure – a “taste in character traits” – as a distinctive type of pleasure that is not amenable to a mere quantitative criterium to guide moral choice.

Healthy urban mobility is the concept that deals with how the physical structure of cities affect the mobility of the population and how it relates to collective health and well-being. The article seeks to share the experience of conducting a research on healthy urban mobility in the Cruzeiro Region in Porto Alegre (RS-Brazil) and the experiences and reflections raised during the survey. In order to make viable the large-scale survey in the territory, it became necessary the researchers' partnership with the local population, a relationship that caused tensions and adaptations. The text provides an analytical description of the survey steps, using the field diary and the research report as sources of information. As a result, the importance of community participation in association with academic research in the search for social transformations is highlighted, even though symbolic barriers must be overcomed. We hope, with this report, to share the lessons learned, which show mobility limitations faced by low-income residents and the challenge of transposing social and spatial segregation in large urban centers.

This paper proposes the use of regularization on the multivariable formulation of the Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning (VRFT). When the process to be controlled has a significant amount of noise, the standard VRFT approach, that uses the instrumental variable technique, provides estimates with very poor statistical properties. To cope with that, this paper considers the use of regularization on the estimation procedure, reducing the covariance error at the cost of inserting a small bias. Also, this paper explains different types of regularization matrices and presents the methodology to tune these matrices. In order to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed formulation, a numerical example is presented.