James W. Carey as critical theorist of the information age

This paper suggests that the thought of the North-American critical theorist James W. Carey provides a relevant perspective on communication and technology. Having as background American social pragmatism and progressive thinkers of the beginning of the 20th century (as Dewey, Mead, Cooley, and Park), Carey built a perspective that brought together the political economy of Harold A. Innis, the social criticism of David Riesman and Charles W. Mills and incorporated Marxist topics such as commodification and sociocultural domination. The main goal of this paper is to explore the connection established by Carey between modern technological communication and what he called the “transmissive model”, a model which not only reduces the symbolic process of communication to instrumentalization and to information delivery, but also politically converges with capitalism as well as power, control and expansionist goals. Conceiving communication as a process that creates symbolic and cultural systems, in which and through which social life takes place, Carey gives equal emphasis to the incorporation processes of communication.If symbolic forms and culture are ways of conditioning action, they are also influenced by technological and economic materializations of symbolic systems, and by other conditioning structures. In Carey’s view, communication is never a disembodied force; rather, it is a set of practices in which co-exist conceptions, techniques and social relations. These practices configure reality or, alternatively, can refute, transform and celebrate it. Exhibiting sensitiveness favourable to the historical understanding of communication, media and information technologies, one of the issues Carey explored most was the history of the telegraph as an harbinger of the Internet, of its problems and contradictions. For Carey, Internet was seen as the contemporary heir of the communications revolution triggered by the prototype of transmission technologies, namely the telegraph in the 19th century. In the telegraph Carey saw the prototype of many subsequent commercial empires based on science and technology, a pioneer model for complex business management; an example of conflict of interest for the control over patents; an inducer of changes both in language and in structures of knowledge; and a promoter of a futurist and utopian thought of information technologies. After a brief approach to Carey’s communication theory, this paper focuses on his seminal essay "Technology and ideology. The case of the telegraph", bearing in mind the prospect of the communication revolution introduced by Internet. We maintain that this essay has seminal relevance for critically studying the information society. Our reading of it highlights the reach, as well as the problems, of an approach which conceives the innovation of the telegraph as a metaphor for all innovations, announcing the modern stage of history and determining to this day the major lines of development in modern communication systems.

Sustainability reporting and financial reporting: the relevance of an integrated reporting approach

In the business world, there are issues such as globalisation, environmental awareness, and the rising expectations of public opinion which have a specific role in what is required from companies as providers of information to the market. This chapter refers to the current state of corporate reporting (financial reporting and sustainability reporting) and demonstrates the need for evolution to a more integrated method of reporting which meets the stakeholders’ needs. This research offers a reflection on how this development can be achieved, which notes the ongoing efforts by international organisations in implementing the diffusion and adoption, as well as looking at the characteristics which are needed for this type of reporting. It also makes the link between an actual case of a company that is one of the world references in sustainable development and integrated reporting. Whether or not the integrated reporting is the natural evolution of the history of financial and sustainability reporting, it still cannot yet claim to be infallible. However, it may definitely be concluded that a new approach is necessary to meet the needs which are continuously developing for a network of stakeholders.

Use of negative information in positioning and tracking algorithms

To avoid additional hardware deployment, indoor localization systems have to be designed in such a way that they rely on existing infrastructure only. Besides the processing of measurements between nodes, localization procedure can include the information of all available environment information. In order to enhance the performance of Wi-Fi based localization systems, the innovative solution presented in this paper considers also the negative information. An indoor tracking method inspired by Kalman filtering is also proposed.

Access and use of european information: a comparative analysis

This paper presents some results of a survey on access to European information among a group of 234 users of 55 European Documentation Centres (EDCs), from 21 European Union (EU) Member-States. The findings of the questionnaire made to 88 EDCs' managers, from 26 EU Member-States, will also be analyse. Two different points of view regarding issues related to reasons to access European information, the valued aspects during that access and the use of European databases will be compare.

The use of information and interactive processes in growth management

Tese de doutoramento em Engenharia do Ambiente, especialidade em Sistemas Sociais

Shannon information and power law analysis of the chromosome code

This paper studies the information content of the chromosomes of twenty-three species. Several statistics considering different number of bases for alphabet character encoding are derived. Based on the resulting histograms, word delimiters and character relative frequencies are identified. The knowledge of this data allows moving along each chromosome while evaluating the flow of characters and words. The resulting flux of information is captured by means of Shannon entropy. The results are explored in the perspective of power law relationships allowing a quantitative evaluation of the DNA of the species.

Accessing complexity from genome information

This paper studies the information content of the chromosomes of 24 species. In a first phase, a scheme inspired in dynamical system state space representation is developed. For each chromosome the state space dynamical evolution is shed into a two dimensional chart. The plots are then analyzed and characterized in the perspective of fractal dimension. This information is integrated in two measures of the species’ complexity addressing its average and variability. The results are in close accordance with phylogenetics pointing quantitative aspects of the species’ genomic complexity.

Para lá dos jornalistas: influencer relations, uma nova era de Media Relations

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Gestão Estratégica das Relações Públicas.

How a cyber-physical system can efficiently obtain a snapshot of physical information even in the presence of sensor faults

We present a distributed algorithm for cyber-physical systems to obtain a snapshot of sensor data. The snapshot is an approximate representation of sensor data; it is an interpolation as a function of space coordinates. The new algorithm exploits a prioritized medium access control (MAC) protocol to efficiently transmit information of the sensor data. It scales to a very large number of sensors and it is able to operate in the presence of sensor faults.

Ubiquitous computing and natural interfaces for environmental information

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas Ambientais

Information technology service management: an experimental approach towards IT service prediction

Dissertation presented to obtain a Masters degree in Computer Science

Extensible metadata repository for information systems

Thesis submitted to Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Computer Science

Forest cover monitoring in the Bara district (Nepal) with remote sensing and geographic information systems

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies

A Web-Based geographical information system prototype on Portuguese traditional food products

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies

Bertrand model under incomplete information

We consider a Bertrand duopoly model with unknown costs. The firms' aim is to choose the price of its product according to the well-known concept of Bayesian Nash equilibrium. The chooses are made simultaneously by both firms. In this paper, we suppose that each firm has two different technologies, and uses one of them according to a certain probability distribution. The use of either one or the other technology affects the unitary production cost. We show that this game has exactly one Bayesian Nash equilibrium. We analyse the advantages, for firms and for consumers, of using the technology with highest production cost versus the one with cheapest production cost. We prove that the expected profit of each firm increases with the variance of its production costs. We also show that the expected price of each good increases with both expected production costs, being the effect of the expected production costs of the rival dominated by the effect of the own expected production costs.