Voices in search of a reader: the polyphonic writing of António Lobo Antunes

This paper aims at analysing the writing of the Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes, considered one of the major writers in European Literature with 26 books published, by focusing on the strategies deployed in his texts of creating micro-narratives within the main frame, and conveying the elements of individual and collective memory, past and present, the self and the others, using various voices and silences. Lobo Antunes incorporates in his writing his background as a psychiatrist at a Mental Hospital in Lisbon, until 1985 (when he decided to commit exclusively to writing), his experience as a doctor in the Portuguese Colonial War battlefield, but also the daily routines of the pre and post 25th of April 1974 (Portuguese Revolution) with subtle and ironic details of the life of the middle and upper class of Lisbon‘s society: from the traumas of the war to the simple story of the janitor, or the couple who struggles to keep their marriage functional, everything serves as material to develop and interweave a complex plot, that a lot of readers find too enwrapped and difficult to follow through. Some excerpts taken from his first three novels and books of Chronicles and his later novel – Ontem não te Vi em Babilónia (2006) – will be put forward to exemplify the complexity of the writing and the main difficulties of the reader, lost in a multitude of narrators‘ voices. Recently, Lobo Antunes has commented on his work stating: What I write can be read in the darkness. This paper aims at throwing some light by unfolding some of the strategies employed to defy new borders in the process of reading.

Digital marketing strategies

Internship Report presented to Instituto de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto for the Master’s degree in Marketing Digital under the guidance of Dr. José Magalhães Author Note This internship was carried out under the Erasmus Program for college students and under the agreement between the sending institution, Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto and the host company, eRise, located in Budapest, Hungary, under the guidance of Vilmos Schwarz.

Virtual communities of practice: investigating motivations and constraints in the processes of knowledge creation and transfer

With accelerated market volatility, faster response times and increased globalization, business environments are going through a major transformation and firms have intensified their search for strategies which can give them competitive advantage. This requires that companies continuously innovate, to think of new ideas that can be transformed or implemented as products, processes or services, generating value for the firm. Innovative solutions and processes are usually developed by a group of people, working together. A grouping of people that share and create new knowledge can be considered as a Community of Practice (CoP). CoP’s are places which provide a sound basis for organizational learning and encourage knowledge creation and acquisition. Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoP's) can perform a central role in promoting communication and collaboration between members who are dispersed in both time and space. Nevertheless, it is known that not all CoP's and VCoP's share the same levels of performance or produce the same results. This means that there are factors that enable or constrain the process of knowledge creation. With this in mind, we developed a case study in order to identify both the motivations and the constraints that members of an organization experience when taking part in the knowledge creating processes of VCoP's. Results show that organizational culture and professional and personal development play an important role in these processes. No interviewee referred to direct financial rewards as a motivation factor for participation in VCoPs. Most identified the difficulty in aligning objectives established by the management with justification for the time spent in the VCoP. The interviewees also said that technology is not a constraint.

Learning in higher education: strategies to overcome challenges faced by adult students - lessons drawn from two studies in portugal

Int’l J. of Information and Communication Technology Education, 3(2), 1-14, April-June 2007

Learning business strategies for competitive electronic marketplaces

This paper presents a Multi-Agent Market simulator designed for developing new agent market strategies based on a complete understanding of buyer and seller behaviors, preference models and pricing algorithms, considering user risk preferences and game theory for scenario analysis. This tool studies negotiations based on different market mechanisms and, time and behavior dependent strategies. The results of the negotiations between agents are analyzed by data mining algorithms in order to extract rules that give agents feedback to improve their strategies. The system also includes agents that are capable of improving their performance with their own experience, by adapting to the market conditions, and capable of considering other agent reactions.

Virtual power producers market strategies

This paper presents MASCEM - a multi-agent based electricity market simulator. MASCEM uses game theory, machine learning techniques, scenario analysis and optimisation techniques to model market agents and to provide them with decision-support. This paper mainly focus on the MASCEM ability to provide the means to model and simulate Virtual Power Producers (VPP). VPPs are represented as a coalition of agents, with specific characteristics and goals. The paper detail some of the most important aspects considered in VPP formation and in the aggregation of new producers and includes a case study.

Multi-agent electricity market simulation with dynamic strategies & virtual power producers

Distributed energy resources will provide a significant amount of the electricity generation and will be a normal profitable business. In the new decentralized grid, customers will be among the many decentralized players and may even help to co-produce the required energy services such as demand-side management and load shedding. So, they will gain the opportunity to be more active market players. The aggregation of DG plants gives place to a new concept: the Virtual Power Producer (VPP). VPPs can reinforce the importance of these generation technologies making them valuable in electricity markets. In this paper we propose the improvement of MASCEM, a multi-agent simulation tool to study negotiations in electricity spot markets based on different market mechanisms and behavior strategies, in order to take account of decentralized players such as VPP.

Mergers and acquisitions as strategies of business expansion in the pharmaceutical industry

Introduction: The present paper deals with the issue of the increasing usage of corporation mergers and acquisitions strategies within pharmaceutical industry environment. The aim is to identify the triggers of such business phenomenon and the immediate impact on the financial outcome of two powerful biopharmaceutical corporations: Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, which have been sampled due to their successful approach of the tactics in question. Materials and Methods: In order to create an overview of the development steps through mergers and acquisitions, the historical data of the two corporations has been consulted, from their official websites. The most relevant events were then associated with adequate information from the financial reports and statements of the two corporations indulged by web-based financial data providers. Results and Discussions: In the past few decades Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline have purchased or merged with various companies in order to monopolize new markets, diversify products and services portfolios, survive and surpass competitors. The consequences proved to be positive although this approach implies certain capital availability. Conclusions: Results reveal the fact that, as far as the two sampled companies are concerned, acquisitions and mergers are reactions at the pressure of the highly competitive environment. Moreover, the continuous diversification of the market’s needs is also a consistent motive. However, the prevalence and the eminence of mergers and acquisition strategies are conditioned by the tender offer, the announcer’s caliber, research and development status and further other factors determined by the internal and external actors of the market.

Ant colony search algorithm for the optimal power flow problem

To maintain a power system within operation limits, a level ahead planning it is necessary to apply competitive techniques to solve the optimal power flow (OPF). OPF is a non-linear and a large combinatorial problem. The Ant Colony Search (ACS) optimization algorithm is inspired by the organized natural movement of real ants and has been successfully applied to different large combinatorial optimization problems. This paper presents an implementation of Ant Colony optimization to solve the OPF in an economic dispatch context. The proposed methodology has been developed to be used for maintenance and repairing planning with 48 to 24 hours antecipation. The main advantage of this method is its low execution time that allows the use of OPF when a large set of scenarios has to be analyzed. The paper includes a case study using the IEEE 30 bus network. The results are compared with other well-known methodologies presented in the literature.

Derivative-free optimization and filter methods to solve nonlinear constrained problems

In real optimization problems, usually the analytical expression of the objective function is not known, nor its derivatives, or they are complex. In these cases it becomes essential to use optimization methods where the calculation of the derivatives, or the verification of their existence, is not necessary: the Direct Search Methods or Derivative-free Methods are one solution. When the problem has constraints, penalty functions are often used. Unfortunately the choice of the penalty parameters is, frequently, very difficult, because most strategies for choosing it are heuristics strategies. As an alternative to penalty function appeared the filter methods. A filter algorithm introduces a function that aggregates the constrained violations and constructs a biobjective problem. In this problem the step is accepted if it either reduces the objective function or the constrained violation. This implies that the filter methods are less parameter dependent than a penalty function. In this work, we present a new direct search method, based on simplex methods, for general constrained optimization that combines the features of the simplex method and filter methods. This method does not compute or approximate any derivatives, penalty constants or Lagrange multipliers. The basic idea of simplex filter algorithm is to construct an initial simplex and use the simplex to drive the search. We illustrate the behavior of our algorithm through some examples. The proposed methods were implemented in Java.

Entrepreneurship Strategies in a Portuguese and in a Polish Region

In the present paper we will consider strategies of innovation, risk and proactivity as entre/ intrapreneurship strategies. This study was done in a Portuguese and in a Polish region. In Portugal the region was Vale do Sousa, located in the northern Portugal. The Polish region was Lublin Voivodeship and it is situated in the south-eastern part of the country. The study focused on Industrial and Construction sectors. In order to get a valid sample, a group of 251 firms were analysed in Portugal, and 215 in Poland. However, the minimum sample size in Poland should be 323. Since this is a work in progress, we are aiming for this number of questionnaires. Each strategy was analysed individually for both regions and the results pointed to a lack of culture of entrepreneurship in firms’ management. Only Proactivity presented a positive result in firms’ management. Polish firms tend to be more innovative and more risk takers, while in proactivity Portuguese ones present a slightly higher result. Combining the strategy results, it was possible to identify that 61.2% of Portuguese firms present a low level of entrepreneurship, while 60% of Polish firms present a moderate level. Considering intrapreneurship good levels, while Portugal account for 5.2% this figure is 19.1% in Poland.

Entrepreneurship Strategies in Family and Non-family Businesses

The goal of the present paper is to analyse the classic entrepreneurship strategies (Innovation, Risk and Proactivity) in small and medium-sized businesses. However as presented in the title, the study will go further by comparing the results of those strategies in familiar and nonfamiliar businesses. This study was carried on in construction and industry sectors, in the region of Vale do Sousa, in the north of Portugal. In order to classify businesses as familiar or non-familiar types two criterion were adopted: (1) Management Control, (2) Family Employability. On the opposite to some studies that present a larger percentage of familiar businesses in national and European entrepreneurial fabric, the criterion used leaded to a larger number of non-familiar businesses (53%). The results showed that in general SMEs in this region are not following entrepreneurship strategies. Analysing the entire sample without a separation of businesses by nature (familiar/non-familiar) only proactivity showed to be more present in the managerial decisions. There is a lack of innovation and risk culture. Comparing the groups only on proactivity tests was possible to verify some differences. It was concluded that non-familiar businesses are more proactive than familiar ones. Between those groups there are no statistical differences on the means of the variables innovation and risk. At the same time some tests were conducted to test the differences on the variable entrepreneurship. The results were similar to innovation and risk strategies: There are no significant differences on entrepreneurship between these groups of businesses.

Os Gestores, as empresas, e as estratégias empreendedoras: O caso das empresas industriais e da construção na região do Vale do Sousa

In the present paper, entrepreneurship strategies and its relations with managers and management are analysed in order to evaluate who are the real entrepreneurs. This study was done in a region of northern Portugal (Vale do Sousa) and focus on Industrial and Construction sectors. The region is composed of six concelhos in some of which it is possible to identify some industrial districts. In order to get a valid sample, a group of 251 firms were analysed. The results present a high level of risk aversion and some findings that go with literature on innovation, such as higher levels of education lead to more innovative managers, or young managers are more innovative. It was concluded, that those managers that were able to search and explore opportunities in the past, present better levels of entrepreneurship in their firms.

User modeling and recommendation strategies for tourism

Mestrado em Engenharia Informática

Melhoria do processo de atendimento a clientes

Esta dissertação, que foi desenvolvida no seio da Divisão de Equipamento Industrial (DEI) da empresa Toyota Caetano Portugal, S.A. (TCAP), consiste na análise do processo de atendimento a clientes, a partir de uma investigação efectuada no escritório oficinal (EO) do sector Após-Venda Empilhadores (AVE). A recolha de dados, bem como o acompanhamento do processo de atendimento a clientes, têm como objectivo perceber quais as principais dificuldades do processo, para posteriormente ser definida a estratégia a utilizar no sentido de combater os pontos críticos do relacionamento com os clientes. Esta investigação permitiu identificar várias dificuldades no registo de pedidos de assistência, na pesquisa de informação e também no acesso aos dados pelo cliente. Assim, foi criado um protótipo informático com capacidade para dar resposta às deficiências identificadas. Foram analisados os requisitos necessários para o sistema de informação de suporte e transformado o processo de tratamento de dados (pedidos de assistência, pesquisas, acessos…), até aqui manual, num processo automático, inovador e acima de tudo funcional. Pretende-se desta forma, oferecer um serviço de confiança aos clientes gerando uma lealdade duradoura e acrescentar valor à empresa.