Does corruption inhibit foreign direct investment?

Globalization creates new opportunities for firms to invest abroad and many economies are making active efforts to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in order to promote economic growth. Decisions to invest abroad depend on a complex set of factors, but the least corrupt countries may attract more foreign direct investment because they provide a more favorable climate for investors. In this paper we investigate the impact of corruption on FDI inflows in 73 countries, over the period 1998-2008. Our results suggest that countries where corruption is lower, the FDI inflows are greater, and so controlling corruption may be an important strategy for increase FDI inflows.

Synthesis of molecular biomimetics

Biomimetics has paved the way toward new materials and technologies inspired in Nature. Biomolecules and their supramolecular organization have today a leading role in biomimetics, benefiting from the recent advances in nanotechnology. The production of biomimetic materials may be however a difficult task, because Nature does it very well. The use of several building blocks assembled in bottom-up arrangement is without doubt at the core of this process. Such building blocks include different molecules or molecular arrangements, of synthetic or natural origin, such as amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, carbon allotropes, dendrimers, or organosilanes, among others. The most common approaches to produce synthetic biomimetic materials are reported herein, with special emphasis to building blocks and their supramolecular arrangement.

Synthesis of an antibody-like material for the detection of Albumin

6th Graduate Student Symposium on Molecular Imprinting

Automated Synthesis Procedure of RF Discrete Tuning Differential Capacitance Circuits

The paper presents a RFDSCA automated synthesis procedure. This algorithm determines several RFDSCA circuits from the top-level system specifications all with the same maximum performance. The genetic synthesis tool optimizes a fitness function proportional to the RFDSCA quality factor and uses the epsiv-concept and maximin sorting scheme to achieve a set of solutions well distributed along a non-dominated front. To confirm the results of the algorithm, three RFDSCAs were simulated in SpectreRF and one of them was implemented and tested. The design used a 0.25 mum BiCMOS process. All the results (synthesized, simulated and measured) are very close, which indicate that the genetic synthesis method is a very useful tool to design optimum performance RFDSCAs.

New Concepts Towards the Synthesis of Digital Circuits Through Genetic Algorithms

This paper analyses the performance of a Genetic Algorithm using two new concepts, namely a static fitness function including a discontinuity measure and a fractional-order dynamic fitness function, for the synthesis of combinational logic circuits. In both cases, experiments reveal superior results in terms of speed and convergence to achieve a solution.

Revalorization of spent coffee residues by a direct agronomic approach

Spent coffee grounds (SCG) represent a high-volume food waste worldwide, and several reuse approaches have been attempted. Herein, a greenhouse field experiment was carried out by cultivating Batavia lettuce with 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and 30% (v/v) espresso SCG directly composted in the soil. Healthy vegetables were obtained for all treatments, without yield loss for up to 10% SCG. A progressive increment of green color intensity with increasing SCG content was observed, corroborated by the increase of their photosynthetic pigments (chlorophylls and carotenoids). Furthermore, total ascorbic acid and tocopherols showed statistical significant increases (p < 0.001) between control and all tested groups. Marked variations of nutritionally relevant minerals, particularly potassium, phosphorous and sodium were also revealed at higher percentage treatments (20% and 30%). This approach constitutes a clean, direct, simple and cost-effective measure to produce value-added vegetables, while reducing food waste disposal.

Kalman tracking linear predictor for vowel intelligibility enhancement on european portuguese HMM based speech synthesis

The recent developments on Hidden Markov Models (HMM) based speech synthesis showed that this is a promising technology fully capable of competing with other established techniques. However some issues still lack a solution. Several authors report an over-smoothing phenomenon on both time and frequencies which decreases naturalness and sometimes intelligibility. In this work we present a new vowel intelligibility enhancement algorithm that uses a discrete Kalman filter (DKF) for tracking frame based parameters. The inter-frame correlations are modelled by an autoregressive structure which provides an underlying time frame dependency and can improve time-frequency resolution. The system’s performance has been evaluated using objective and subjective tests and the proposed methodology has led to improved results.

Adaptive filtering for high quality HMM based speech synthesis

In this work an adaptive filtering scheme based on a dual Discrete Kalman Filtering (DKF) is proposed for Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based speech synthesis quality enhancement. The objective is to improve signal smoothness across HMMs and their related states and to reduce artifacts due to acoustic model's limitations. Both speech and artifacts are modelled by an autoregressive structure which provides an underlying time frame dependency and improves time-frequency resolution. Themodel parameters are arranged to obtain a combined state-space model and are also used to calculate instantaneous power spectral density estimates. The quality enhancement is performed by a dual discrete Kalman filter that simultaneously gives estimates for the models and the signals. The system's performance has been evaluated using mean opinion score tests and the proposed technique has led to improved results.

Gestão de recursos humanos na indústria do turismo em Portugal: tendências futuras do capital humano: um estudo exploratório em unidades hoteleiras no Distrito de Coimbra

No setor do turismo, devido a evolução social e tecnológica, surgiram exigências relativamente ao conhecimento, inovação, informação e qualidade, que resultaram numa maior procura de perfis profissionais adaptados às necessidades a médio prazo (Eurico, 2012). Assim, as unidades hoteleiras têm sentido uma forte necessidade de recrutar e reter pessoas qualificadas e capazes de antecipar múltiplos fatores decisivos na satisfação do cliente. Neste sentido, o presente estudo procura explorar e compreender as tendências futuras ao nível do Capital Humano na indústria do Turismo, mais especificamente no que respeita as unidades hoteleiras, tendo como amostra unidades localizadas no distrito de Coimbra. A análise incidiu nas competências específicas requeridas no setor, qualificações, formação profissional, recrutamento e seleção, sistema de remuneração e recompensa e do sistema de progressão na carreira. Assim, foi escolhido para o presente estudo a metodologia qualitativa, em que os dados foram recolhidos a partir do inquérito por entrevista realizado a sete Diretores e um assistente de direção de oito unidades hoteleiras no Distrito de Coimbra. Para o tratamento dos dados foi aplicada a análise do conteúdo através do processo de preparação das entrevistas transcritas, que, após uma leitura exaustiva, foram transformados em unidades de análise que permitiram a criação de categorias dessas unidades. Após a criação de categorias de análise foi possível realizar a descrição através de uma síntese dos dados fazendo uso de citações diretas dos dados recolhidos. Por fim, foi realizada a interpretação dos dados que traduz-se na relação das categorias das unidades de análise e a fundamentação teórica presente neste estudo (Santos, 2012). Os resultados obtidos a partir deste estudo revelam que os requisitos exigidos para os colaboradores e para determinadas práticas de gestão de recursos humanos nas unidades hoteleiras atualmente e num futuro próximo serão essencialmente os mesmos. Todavia, foi possível estabelecer o perfil ideal dos futuros colaboradores das unidades hoteleiras e tendências de práticas de gestão de recursos humanos como formação e desenvolvimento, recrutamento e seleção, planos de progressão na carreira e sistemas de remuneração e recompensa. Foi igualmente possível verificar que a maioria das unidades hoteleiras analisadas é de pequena e média dimensão não dispõe de um departamento de Recursos Humanos, sendo aplicada pelos gestores de topo.