An approach to absorptive capacity based on the Portuguese textile industry

The main purpose of this research is to identify the hidden knowledge and learning mechanisms in the organization in order to disclosure the tacit knowledge and transform it into explicit knowledge. Most firms usually tend to duplicate their efforts acquiring extra knowledge and new learning skills while forgetting to exploit the existing ones thus wasting one life time resources that could be applied to increase added value within the firm overall competitive advantage. This unique value in the shape of creation, acquisition, transformation and application of learning and knowledge is not disseminated throughout the individual, group and, ultimately, the company itself. This work is based on three variables that explain the behaviour of learning as the process of construction and acquisition of knowledge, namely internal social capital, technology and external social capital, which include the main attributes of learning and knowledge that help us to capture the essence of this symbiosis. Absorptive Capacity provides the right tool to explore this uncertainty within the firm it is possible to achieve the perfect match between learning skills and knowledge needed to support the overall strategy of the firm. This study has taken in to account a sample of the Portuguese textile industry and it is based on a multisectorial analysis that makes it possible a crossfunctional analysis to check on the validity of results in order to better understand and capture the dynamics of organizational behavior.

An approach to absorptive capacity based on the Portuguese textile industry(Final version)

The main purpose of this research is to identify the hidden knowledge and learning mechanisms in the organization in order to disclosure the tacit knowledge and transform it into explicit knowledge. Most firms usually tend to duplicate their efforts acquiring extra knowledge and new learning skills while forgetting to exploit the existing ones thus wasting one life time resources that could be applied to increase added value within the firm overall competitive advantage. This unique value in the shape of creation, acquisition, transformation and application of learning and knowledge is not disseminated throughout the individual, group and, ultimately, the company itself. This work is based on three variables that explain the behaviour of learning as the process of construction and acquisition of knowledge, namely internal social capital, technology and external social capital, which include the main attributes of learning and knowledge that help us to capture the essence of this symbiosis. Absorptive Capacity provides the right tool to explore this uncertainty within the firm it is possible to achieve the perfect match between learning skills and knowledge needed to support the overall strategy of the firm. This study has taken in to account a sample of the Portuguese textile industry and it is based on a multisectorial analysis that makes it possible a crossfunctional analysis to check on the validity of results in order to better understand and capture the dynamics of organizational behavior.

Cancer incidence projections for Lisbon and Santarém districts: an aid to radiotherapy services planning

Will the existing means in Radiotherapy respond to the needs of the potential user population in 2014 for Lisbon and Santarém districts? Number of treatment units? Number of Radiotherapy Technologists? Temporal variations of the dimension and age structure of the populations: Coastal areas/Interior areas, Urban areas/Rural areas. Temporal variations in the incidence of several types of cancer. Overall objectives: evaluate of the necessities of Radiotherapy for Lisbon and Santarém districts in 2014 and elaboration of proposals that aim the access/use for the potential user population.

Two-way MANCOVA: an application to public health

The aim of this work is to use the MANCOVA model to study the influence of the phenotype of an enzyme - Acid phosphatase - and a genetic factor - Haptoglobin genotype - on two dependent variables - Activity of Acid Phosphatase (ACP1) and the Body Mass Index (BMI). Therefore it's used a general linear model, namely a multivariate analysis of covariance (Two-way MANCOVA). The covariate is the age of the subject. This covariate works as control variable for the independent factors, serving to reduce the error term in the model. The main results showed that only the ACP1 phenotype has a significant effect on the activity of ACP1 and the covariate has a significant effect in both dependent variables. The univariate analysis showed that ACP1 phenotype accounts for about 12.5% of the variability in the activity of ACP1. In respect to this covariate it can be seen that accounts for about 4.6% of the variability in the activity of ACP1 and 37.3% in the BMI.

The electric vehicle integration into the power system: an application to the portuguese case

Electric vehicles (EV) offer a great potential to address the integration of renewable energy sources (RES) in the power grid, and thus reduce the dependence on oil as well as the greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. The high share of wind energy in the Portuguese energy mix expected for 2020 can led to eventual curtailment, especially during the winter when high levels of hydro generation occur. In this paper a methodology based on a unit commitment and economic dispatch is implemented, and a hydro-thermal dispatch is performed in order to evaluate the impact of the EVs integration into the grid. Results show that the considered 10 % penetration of EVs in the Portuguese fleet would increase load in 3 % and would not integrate a significant amount of wind energy because curtailment is already reduced in the absence of EVs. According to the results, the EV is charged mostly with thermal generation and the associated emissions are much higher than if they were calculated based on the generation mix.

EVIV: An end-to-end verifiable Internet voting system

Traditionally, a country's electoral system requires the voter to vote at a specific day and place, which conflicts with the mobility usually seen in modern live styles. Thus, the widespread of Internet (mobile) broadband access can be seen as an opportunity to deal with this mobility problem, i.e. the adoption of an Internet voting system can make the live of voter's much more convenient; however, a widespread Internet voting systems adoption relies on the ability to develop trustworthy systems, i.e. systems that are verifiable and preserve the voter's privacy. Building such a system is still an open research problem. Our contribution is a new Internet voting system: EVIV, a highly sound End-to-end Verifiable Internet Voting system, which offers full voter's mobility and preserves the voter's privacy from the vote casting PC even if the voter votes from a public PC, such as a PC at a cybercafe or at a public library. Additionally, EVIV has private vote verification mechanisms, in which the voter just has to perform a simple match of two small strings (4-5 alphanumeric characters), that detect and protect against vote manipulations both at the insecure vote client platform and at the election server side. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

An Interface to Retrieve Personal Memories Using an Iconic Visual Language

Relevant past events can be remembered when visualizing related pictures. The main difficulty is how to find these photos in a large personal collection. Query definition and image annotation are key issues to overcome this problem. The former is relevant due to the diversity of the clues provided by our memory when recovering a past moment and the later because images need to be annotated with information regarding those clues to be retrieved. Consequently, tools to recover past memories should deal carefully with these two tasks. This paper describes a user interface designed to explore pictures from personal memories. Users can query the media collection in several ways and for this reason an iconic visual language to define queries is proposed. Automatic and semi-automatic annotation is also performed using the image content and the audio information obtained when users show their images to others. The paper also presents the user interface evaluation based on tests with 58 participants.

Water quality issues in rivers, lakes and reservoirs in Asian countries: an approach to the problems and the methodologies

Water covers over 70% of the Earth's surface, and is vital for all known forms of life. But only 3% of the Earth's water is fresh water, and less than 0.3% of all freshwater is in rivers, lakes, reservoirs and the atmosphere. However, rivers and lakes are an important part of fresh surface water, amounting to about 89%. In this Master Thesis dissertation, the focus is on three types of water bodies – rivers, lakes and reservoirs, and their water quality issues in Asian countries. The surface water quality in a region is largely determined both by the natural processes such as climate or geographic conditions, and the anthropogenic influences such as industrial and agricultural activities or land use conversion. The quality of the water can be affected by pollutants discharge from a specific point through a sewer pipe and also by extensive drainage from agriculture/urban areas and within basin. Hence, water pollutant sources can be divided into two categories: Point source pollution and Non-point source (NPS) pollution. Seasonal variations in precipitation and surface run-off have a strong effect on river discharge and the concentration of pollutants in water bodies. For example, in the rainy season, heavy and persistent rain wash off the ground, the runoff flow increases and may contain various kinds of pollutants and, eventually, enters the water bodies. In some cases, especially in confined water bodies, the quality may be positive related with rainfall in the wet season, because this confined type of fresh water systems allows high dilution of pollutants, decreasing their possible impacts. During the dry season, the quality of water is largely related to industrialization and urbanization pollution. The aim of this study is to identify the most common water quality problems in Asian countries and to enumerate and analyze the methodologies used for assessment of water quality conditions of both rivers and confined water bodies (lakes and reservoirs). Based on the evaluation of a sample of 57 papers, dated between 2000 and 2012, it was found that over the past decade, the water quality of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs in developing countries is being degraded. Water pollution and destruction of aquatic ecosystems have caused massive damage to the functions and integrity of water resources. The most widespread NPS in Asian countries and those which have the greatest spatial impacts are urban runoff and agriculture. Locally, mine waste runoff and rice paddy are serious NPS problems. The most relevant point pollution sources are the effluents from factories, sewage treatment plant, and public or household facilities. It was found that the most used methodology was unquestionably the monitoring activity, used in 49 of analyzed studies, accounting for 86%. Sometimes, data from historical databases were used as well. It can be seen that taking samples from the water body and then carry on laboratory work (chemical analyses) is important because it can give an understanding of the water quality. 6 papers (11%) used a method that combined monitoring data and modeling. 6 papers (11%) just applied a model to estimate the quality of water. Modeling is a useful resource when there is limited budget since some models are of free download and use. In particular, several of used models come from the U.S.A, but they have their own purposes and features, meaning that a careful application of the models to other countries and a critical discussion of the results are crucial. 5 papers (9%) focus on a method combining monitoring data and statistical analysis. When there is a huge data matrix, the researchers need an efficient way of interpretation of the information which is provided by statistics. 3 papers (5%) used a method combining monitoring data, statistical analysis and modeling. These different methods are all valuable to evaluate the water quality. It was also found that the evaluation of water quality was made as well by using other types of sampling different than water itself, and they also provide useful information to understand the condition of the water body. These additional monitoring activities are: Air sampling, sediment sampling, phytoplankton sampling and aquatic animal tissues sampling. Despite considerable progress in developing and applying control regulations to point and NPS pollution, the pollution status of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs in Asian countries is not improving. In fact, this reflects the slow pace of investment in new infrastructure for pollution control and growing population pressures. Water laws or regulations and public involvement in enforcement can play a constructive and indispensable role in environmental protection. In the near future, in order to protect water from further contamination, rapid action is highly needed to control the various kinds of effluents in one region. Environmental remediation and treatment of industrial effluent and municipal wastewaters is essential. It is also important to prevent the direct input of agricultural and mine site runoff. Finally, stricter environmental regulation for water quality is required to support protection and management strategies. It would have been possible to get further information based in the 57 sample of papers. For instance, it would have been interesting to compare the level of concentrations of some pollutants in the diferente Asian countries. However the limit of three months duration for this study prevented further work to take place. In spite of this, the study objectives were achieved: the work provided an overview of the most relevant water quality problems in rivers, lakes and reservoirs in Asian countries, and also listed and analyzed the most common methodologies.