A model for improving board performance : the case of a national sport organisation

The transition of many sport organisations from being predominantly volunteer-administered and anchored in an amateur ethos to professionally managed entities has created unique challenges for the governance of sport. This paper provides a contribution to the governance literature through the presentation of a situational case where a four-stage model, drawn from an action research approach, has been used for developing a board’s strategic capability and subsequent improvement in organisational performance.

Action research is founded on the premise that change and research are not mutually exclusive and that dual foci on improving practice and developing theory are possible (Coghlan & Brannick, 2001). Utilising a national sport organisation (NSO) in New Zealand the study developed and tested a structured model for improving board functioning and, specifically, strategic contribution.

While the case to which the model has been applied is an NSO, the model and the subsequent reflections have value for non-profit as well as commercial entities particularly with regard to a greater understanding of the mechanisms associated with balancing the performance and conformance roles of the board.

Corporate governance and information technology : findings from an exploratory survey of Australian organizations

An exploratory survey (n = 57) of the Melbourne Chapter of the Information Systems Audit and Control Association was conducted to ascertain the attitudes and practices relating to corporate governance and the corporate governance of Information Technology (CGIT) in Australia. The survey found the respondents had clear views on corporate governance but most were not engaged with it, the organizational approach to corporate governance and its expected benefits was largely conformance oriented, awareness of CGIT management frameworks and associated standards was high but implementation was not widespread, and although the CGIT standard ISOIIEC 38500 was not widely implemented IT practitioners agreed with its principles. We conclude that the value of the CGIT standard has yet to be recognised by executives in Australia.

A novel mutual authentication scheme with minimum disclosure for rfid systems

In this paper we present a novel approach to authentication and privacy in RFID systems based on the minimum disclosure property and in conformance to EPC Class-1 Gen-2 specifications. We take into account the computational constraints of EPC Class-1 Gen-2 passive RFID tags and only the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and pseudo random number generator (PRNG) functions that passive RFID tags are capable of are employed. Detailed security analysis of our scheme shows that it can offer robust security properties in terms of tag anonymity and tag untraceability while at the same time being robust to replay, tag impersonation and desynchronisation attacks. Simulations results are also presented to study the scalability of the proposed scheme and its impact on authentication delay.

Female senior managers in the Brazilian finance industry: a journey towards success

No nível global, a representação de líderes de sexo feminino nas empresas muitas vezes ainda se dá em números baixos em termos de percentagem. Particularmente em finanças, esses registros estão abaixo da média da indústria, e a forte concorrência e o ambiente de trabalho dominado pelos homens tornam difícil para as mulheres atingir o topo da pirâmide corporativa (Torres et al., 2013; OECD Better Life Index 2015). Isto pode ser devido a uma falta de equilíbrio trabalho-vida, diferentes estilos de liderança, as mulheres sendo intimidadas, ou a conformidade com estruturas familiares convencionalmente englobadas. No Brasil, os códigos de comportamento tradicionais são muito palpáveis na sociedade do país, embora esta também tenha se beneficiado de uma forte presença de movimentos feministas na segunda metade do século passado (Tate and Yang, 2015; Bowles et al. 2007; Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007). Nos últimos anos, o setor financeiro brasileiro tem crescido, oferecendo maiores oportunidades de emprego e desenvolvimento de carreira nas corporações nacionais e internacionais (Chiang et al., 2013; Bruschini, 2007). Esta dissertação aborda os desafios enfrentados por líderes de sexo feminino do mercado financeiro brasileiro e as suas trajetórias de carreira. Este objetivo será atingido por meio de uma análise de mídia social, focando nos anos de experiência de trabalho das mulheres analisadas, a posição atual delas e se elas têm filhos, bem como com 10 entrevistas semiestruturadas realizadas com executivas no setor financeiro no Brasil. Estas medidas irão abranger lacunas na literatura e consequentes recomendações para pesquisas futuras.

Planning accelerated life tests under Exponentiated-Weibull-Arrhenius model

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present designs for an accelerated life test (ALT). Design/methodology/approach - Bayesian methods and simulation Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) methods were used. Findings - In the paper a Bayesian method based on MCMC for ALT under EW distribution (for life time) and Arrhenius models (relating the stress variable and parameters) was proposed. The paper can conclude that it is a reasonable alternative to the classical statistical methods since the implementation of the proposed method is simple, not requiring advanced computational understanding and inferences on the parameters can be made easily. By the predictive density of a future observation, a procedure was developed to plan ALT and also to verify if the conformance fraction of the manufactured process reaches some desired level of quality. This procedure is useful for statistical process control in many industrial applications. Research limitations/implications - The results may be applied in a semiconductor manufacturer. Originality/value - The Exponentiated-Weibull-Arrhenius model has never before been used to plan an ALT. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Consumer interpretation of ready to drink orange juice and nectar labelling

The aim of this study was to evaluate consumers' use and interpretation of ready to drink orange juice and nectar label information and its influence on the purchase decision. One hundred and sixty-seven consumers of ready to drink orange juice and nectar were interviewed. The labels were analysed to evaluate their conformance to Brazilian legislation. The manufacturing and shelf life date were the information most often checked, followed by health related issues. Brand, price and flavour were the most important factors for purchase decision. Brand and flavour showed significant association with consumer age. For most interviewed, 'nectar', 'whole' and 'natural' or '100% natural' were not well understood; they were not in accordance with the Brazilian legislation. 'Nectar', 'whole' and 'natural' or '100% natural' received a positive interpretation, whereas 'reconstituted juice' was considered a negative expression. Nevertheless, none of the labels completely conformed to the specific nutritional labelling legislation. © 2013 Institute of Food Science and Technology.

Avaliação cinemática em cães: revisão

Kinematics is the geometry of motion, including displacement, speed and acceleration, without considering the forces acting over a body. The use of kinematics is still very limited when we are evaluating dogs because of the high cost of the equipment, but the information obtained is objective and precise, what is essential for a trustful evaluation. Taking all this into consideration, this evaluation will describe some researches that used the method, specifying the final objective for each of them. By this analysis, we can conclude that kinematic studies, according to the characteristics of dog races, are necessary to explain how body structure and conformance may affect the function. Besides that, according to normative patterns of a population it is possible to study some diseases and treatment evolution

A UML profile for the OBO relation ontology

Background: Ontologies have increasingly been used in the biomedical domain, which has prompted the emergence of different initiatives to facilitate their development and integration. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry consortium provides a repository of life-science ontologies, which are developed according to a set of shared principles. This consortium has developed an ontology called OBO Relation Ontology aiming at standardizing the different types of biological entity classes and associated relationships. Since ontologies are primarily intended to be used by humans, the use of graphical notations for ontology development facilitates the capture, comprehension and communication of knowledge between its users. However, OBO Foundry ontologies are captured and represented basically using text-based notations. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides a standard and widely-used graphical notation for modeling computer systems. UML provides a well-defined set of modeling elements, which can be extended using a built-in extension mechanism named Profile. Thus, this work aims at developing a UML profile for the OBO Relation Ontology to provide a domain-specific set of modeling elements that can be used to create standard UML-based ontologies in the biomedical domain. Results: We have studied the OBO Relation Ontology, the UML metamodel and the UML profiling mechanism. Based on these studies, we have proposed an extension to the UML metamodel in conformance with the OBO Relation Ontology and we have defined a profile that implements the extended metamodel. Finally, we have applied the proposed UML profile in the development of a number of fragments from different ontologies. Particularly, we have considered the Gene Ontology (GO), the PRotein Ontology (PRO) and the Xenopus Anatomy and Development Ontology (XAO). Conclusions: The use of an established and well-known graphical language in the development of biomedical ontologies provides a more intuitive form of capturing and representing knowledge than using only text-based notations. The use of the profile requires the domain expert to reason about the underlying semantics of the concepts and relationships being modeled, which helps preventing the introduction of inconsistencies in an ontology under development and facilitates the identification and correction of errors in an already defined ontology.

Formalizing languages for service oriented computing

Service Oriented Computing is a new programming paradigm for addressing distributed system design issues. Services are autonomous computational entities which can be dynamically discovered and composed in order to form more complex systems able to achieve different kinds of task. E-government, e-business and e-science are some examples of the IT areas where Service Oriented Computing will be exploited in the next years. At present, the most credited Service Oriented Computing technology is that of Web Services, whose specifications are enriched day by day by industrial consortia without following a precise and rigorous approach. This PhD thesis aims, on the one hand, at modelling Service Oriented Computing in a formal way in order to precisely define the main concepts it is based upon and, on the other hand, at defining a new approach, called bipolar approach, for addressing system design issues by synergically exploiting choreography and orchestration languages related by means of a mathematical relation called conformance. Choreography allows us to describe systems of services from a global view point whereas orchestration supplies a means for addressing such an issue from a local perspective. In this work we present SOCK, a process algebra based language inspired by the Web Service orchestration language WS-BPEL which catches the essentials of Service Oriented Computing. From the definition of SOCK we will able to define a general model for dealing with Service Oriented Computing where services and systems of services are related to the design of finite state automata and process algebra concurrent systems, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a formal language for dealing with choreography. Such a language is equipped with a formal semantics and it forms, together with a subset of the SOCK calculus, the bipolar framework. Finally, we present JOLIE which is a Java implentation of a subset of the SOCK calculus and it is part of the bipolar framework we intend to promote.

Specification, execution and verification of interaction protocols: an approach based on computational logic

Interaction protocols establish how different computational entities can interact with each other. The interaction can be finalized to the exchange of data, as in 'communication protocols', or can be oriented to achieve some result, as in 'application protocols'. Moreover, with the increasing complexity of modern distributed systems, protocols are used also to control such a complexity, and to ensure that the system as a whole evolves with certain features. However, the extensive use of protocols has raised some issues, from the language for specifying them to the several verification aspects. Computational Logic provides models, languages and tools that can be effectively adopted to address such issues: its declarative nature can be exploited for a protocol specification language, while its operational counterpart can be used to reason upon such specifications. In this thesis we propose a proof-theoretic framework, called SCIFF, together with its extensions. SCIFF is based on Abductive Logic Programming, and provides a formal specification language with a clear declarative semantics (based on abduction). The operational counterpart is given by a proof procedure, that allows to reason upon the specifications and to test the conformance of given interactions w.r.t. a defined protocol. Moreover, by suitably adapting the SCIFF Framework, we propose solutions for addressing (1) the protocol properties verification (g-SCIFF Framework), and (2) the a-priori conformance verification of peers w.r.t. the given protocol (AlLoWS Framework). We introduce also an agent based architecture, the SCIFF Agent Platform, where the same protocol specification can be used to program and to ease the implementation task of the interacting peers.

Elektrokinetik konzentrierter kolloidaler Suspensionen

In dieser Arbeit wurden wässrige Suspensionen ladungsstabilisierter kolloidaler Partikel bezüglich ihres Verhaltens unter dem Einfluss elektrischer Felder untersucht. Insbesondere wurde die elektrophoretische Mobilität µ über einen weiten Partikelkonzentrationsbereich studiert, um das individuelle Verhalten einzelner Partikel mit dem bisher nur wenig untersuchten kollektiven Verhalten von Partikelensembles (speziell von fluid oder kristallin geordneten Ensembles) zu vergleichen. Dazu wurde ein superheterodynes Dopplervelocimetrisches Lichtstreuexperiment mit integraler und lokaler Datenerfassung konzipiert, das es erlaubt, die Geschwindigkeit der Partikel in elektrischen Feldern zu studieren. Das Experiment wurde zunächst erfolgreich im Bereich nicht-ordnender und fluid geordneter Suspensionen getestet. Danach konnte mit diesem Gerät erstmals das elektrophoretische Verhalten von kristallin geordneten Suspensionen untersucht werden. Es wurde ein komplexes Fließverhalten beobachtet und ausführlich dokumentiert. Dabei wurden bisher in diesem Zusammenhang noch nicht beobachtete Effekte wie Blockfluss, Scherbandbildung, Scherschmelzen oder elastische Resonanzen gefunden. Andererseits machte dieses Verhalten die Entwicklung einer neuen Auswertungsroutine für µ im kristallinen Zustand notwendig, wozu die heterodyne Lichtstreutheorie auf den superheterodynen Fall mit Verscherung erweitert werden musste. Dies wurde zunächst für nicht geordnete Systeme durchgeführt. Diese genäherte Beschreibung genügte, um unter den gegebenen Versuchbedingungen auch das Lichtstreuverhalten gescherter kristalliner Systeme zu interpretieren. Damit konnte als weiteres wichtiges Resultat eine generelle Mobilitäts-Konzentrations-Kurve erhalten werden. Diese zeigt bei geringen Partikelkonzentrationen den bereits bekannten Anstieg und bei mittleren Konzentrationen ein Plateau. Bei hohen Konzentrationen sinkt die Mobilität wieder ab. Zur Interpretation dieses Verhaltens bzgl. Partikelladung stehen derzeit nur Theorien für nicht wechselwirkende Partikel zur Verfügung. Wendet man diese an, so findet man eine überraschend gute Übereinstimmung der elektrophoretisch bestimmten Partikelladung Z*µ mit numerisch bestimmten effektiven Partikelladungen Z*PBC.

Ottimizzazione delle performance del framework biolabicaocheck

I documenti cartacei vengono attualmente rimpiazzati dalle loro versioni elettroniche, che contengono anche alcune caratteristiche biometriche; questo ha permesso il controllo automatico, sia quando il documento viene rilasciato, sia quando l'identità della persona deve essere verificata. Per rendere questo possibile è necessario che la fotografia rispetti degli standard di qualità. Lo standard ISO/IEC 19794-5 fornisce alcune guide linea ed esempi di immagini di volto accettabili e non-accettabili. Negli ultimi anni, molte aziende hanno sviluppato SDK con lo scopo di implementare i test proposti dallo standard. La tesi si prefigura il compito di fornire un framework che fornisca buone prestazioni, sia per quanto riguarda i tempi sia per l'accuratezza dei risultati.

Improving Pediatric Basic Life Support Performance Through Blended Learning With Web-Based Virtual Patients: Randomized Controlled Trial

BACKGROUND E-learning and blended learning approaches gain more and more popularity in emergency medicine curricula. So far, little data is available on the impact of such approaches on procedural learning and skill acquisition and their comparison with traditional approaches. OBJECTIVE This study investigated the impact of a blended learning approach, including Web-based virtual patients (VPs) and standard pediatric basic life support (PBLS) training, on procedural knowledge, objective performance, and self-assessment. METHODS A total of 57 medical students were randomly assigned to an intervention group (n=30) and a control group (n=27). Both groups received paper handouts in preparation of simulation-based PBLS training. The intervention group additionally completed two Web-based VPs with embedded video clips. Measurements were taken at randomization (t0), after the preparation period (t1), and after hands-on training (t2). Clinical decision-making skills and procedural knowledge were assessed at t0 and t1. PBLS performance was scored regarding adherence to the correct algorithm, conformance to temporal demands, and the quality of procedural steps at t1 and t2. Participants' self-assessments were recorded in all three measurements. RESULTS Procedural knowledge of the intervention group was significantly superior to that of the control group at t1. At t2, the intervention group showed significantly better adherence to the algorithm and temporal demands, and better procedural quality of PBLS in objective measures than did the control group. These aspects differed between the groups even at t1 (after VPs, prior to practical training). Self-assessments differed significantly only at t1 in favor of the intervention group. CONCLUSIONS Training with VPs combined with hands-on training improves PBLS performance as judged by objective measures.

Interval-based resource usage verification: Formalization and prototype

In an increasing number of applications (e.g., in embedded, real-time, or mobile systems) it is important or even essential to ensure conformance with respect to a specification expressing resource usages, such as execution time, memory, energy, or user-defined resources. In previous work we have presented a novel framework for data size-aware, static resource usage verification. Specifications can include both lower and upper bound resource usage functions. In order to statically check such specifications, both upper- and lower-bound resource usage functions (on input data sizes) approximating the actual resource usage of the program which are automatically inferred and compared against the specification. The outcome of the static checking of assertions can express intervals for the input data sizes such that a given specification can be proved for some intervals but disproved for others. After an overview of the approach in this paper we provide a number of novel contributions: we present a full formalization, and we report on and provide results from an implementation within the Ciao/CiaoPP framework (which provides a general, unified platform for static and run-time verification, as well as unit testing). We also generalize the checking of assertions to allow preconditions expressing intervals within which the input data size of a program is supposed to lie (i.e., intervals for which each assertion is applicable), and we extend the class of resource usage functions that can be checked.

Constraint-based runtime prediction of SLA violations in service orchestrations

Service compositions put together loosely-coupled component services to perform more complex, higher level, or cross-organizational tasks in a platform-independent manner. Quality-of-Service (QoS) properties, such as execution time, availability, or cost, are critical for their usability, and permissible boundaries for their values are defined in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). We propose a method whereby constraints that model SLA conformance and violation are derived at any given point of the execution of a service composition. These constraints are generated using the structure of the composition and properties of the component services, which can be either known or empirically measured. Violation of these constraints means that the corresponding scenario is unfeasible, while satisfaction gives values for the constrained variables (start / end times for activities, or number of loop iterations) which make the scenario possible. These results can be used to perform optimized service matching or trigger preventive adaptation or healing.