Introducing uncertainty into pattern discovery in temporal event sequences

Pattern discovery in temporal event sequences is of great importance in many application domains, such as telecommunication network fault analysis. In reality, not every type of event has an accurate timestamp. Some of them, defined as inaccurate events may only have an interval as possible time of occurrence. The existence of inaccurate events may cause uncertainty in event ordering. The traditional support model cannot deal with this uncertainty, which would cause some interesting patterns to be missing. A new concept, precise support, is introduced to evaluate the probability of a pattern contained in a sequence. Based on this new metric, we define the uncertainty model and present an algorithm to discover interesting patterns in the sequence database that has one type of inaccurate event. In our model, the number of types of inaccurate events can be extended to k readily, however, at a cost of increasing computational complexity.

O SENTIDO DO TRABALHO PARA A GERAÇÃO Y: UM ESTUDO A PARTIR DO JOVEM EXECUTIVO

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo construir conhecimentos e saberes em relação ao perfil do jovem executivo pertencente à geração Y e identificar o que esse jovem valoriza na construção de vínculos com a organização, qual o significado do trabalho para esta geração que vive num novo cenário mundial constituído a partir da globalização e do avanço da tecnologia. Para atender a este objetivo foi utilizada uma pesquisa exploratória a partir de uma amostra indicativa e intencional sendo o objeto de interesse deste estudo, jovens executivos nascidos após 1978 que ocupam posições de liderança. Utilizaram-se dois instrumentos para coleta de dados: a entrevista em profundidade e a aplicação de uma ferramenta para reconhecimento do perfil cognitivo, denominado MEP Mapa Estratégia Profissional. Às análises dos instrumentos foram acrescidas de um referencial teórico e de estudos publicados no campo da ciência da administração, da psicologia e da sociologia. O diálogo interdisciplinar entre a teoria e os dados de campo evidenciou que esta geração expressa o comportamento de forma diferente das gerações anteriores visto terem nascido e terem sido criados num contexto de mudanças constantes e aceleradas e que o trabalho, para este grupo, é só um meio para alcançar seus objetivos pessoais e não o fim. Demonstram comprometimento com as organizações desde que reconheçam nesta a presença de valores como justiça e lealdade praticados por uma liderança legitimada, que tem em sua pauta, a orientação e o acompanhamento destes jovens.(AU)

A CONSTRUÇÃO DISCURSIVA E A RECEPÇÃO DA HOMOAFETIVIDADE NA TELEDRAMATURGIA BRASILEIRA: consumo, representação e identidade homossexual

Este estudo tem como objetivo avaliar a representação e discurso dos personagens homossexuais da teledramaturgia brasileira e sua potencial relação com as demandas da comunidade homossexual na sua luta por maior tolerância e emancipação. A metodologia inclui dois enfoques analíticos: o primeiro centra-se no campo da produção, a partir dos pressupostos da Análise do Discurso e dos Estudos Queer, verificando os aspectos textuais do discurso e da representação dos personagens gays das telenovelas. O segundo enfoque centra-se no campo da circulação e consumo, mediante os pressupostos dos Estudos de Recepção, a fim de avaliar como os receptores realizam a apropriação do discurso e representação homossexual da telenovela. Esse segundo enfoque conta com um instrumento quantitativo e uma entrevista qualitativa semidirigida, aplicados a uma amostra de 402 participantes, hétero e homossexuais, a maioria jovens estudantes de graduação em Belo Horizonte, MG. Quanto às análises discursivas, os resultados demonstram uma mudança no padrão de representação dos personagens homossexuais, deslocando-se do padrão heteronormativo para uma representação mais humanizada, seguindo o momento histórico de maturidade política da sociedade e a aprovação de marcos legais favoráveis aos sujeitos homossexuais. Quanto aos estudos de recepção, os resultados confirmam o potencial pedagógico da telenovela em ampliar a discussão sobre a questão homoafetiva; auxiliar o sujeito homossexual em aceitar sua identidade sexual e encorajá-lo a assumir sua orientação sexual.

PUBLICIDADE E O POLITICAMENTE CORRETO: INTERDISCURSIVIDADES NA CONSTRUÇÃO SOCIAL DO SENTIDO

Ao que se percebe, paradigmas até então vigentes passam a ser considerados singulares e ditatoriais. Em contrapartida, estabelece-se uma nova acepção, cujo norte é o pensar politicamente correto. Entendendo a publicidade como um produto sociocultural, essa pesquisa inicialmente é bibliográfica visando à conceituação e análise de questões inerentes ao seu tema. Com este contexto devidamente apreendido, uma análise pragmática do discurso foi realizada em um corpus de anúncios publicitários veiculados entre 2009 e 2014, no meio televisivo brasileiro de formato aberto. Nossa investigação se concentrou nos modos com que os elementos postulados pelo pensamento politicamente correto vêm sendo incorporados ao gênero publicitário em construções de sentido. Pudemos observar uma tendência de repreensão de determinados grupos a conteúdos publicitários que tocam em temáticas muito específicas, com interpretações marcadas por um alto grau de subjetividade; e o que se busca muitas vezes, através de um empoderamento permitido por nosso contexto atual, é mesmo a supressão de determinadas temáticas dentro da comunicação publicitária. .

Background and foreground knowledge in dynamic ontology construction

Ontologies have become a key component in the Semantic Web and Knowledge management. One accepted goal is to construct ontologies from a domain specific set of texts. An ontology reflects the background knowledge used in writing and reading a text. However, a text is an act of knowledge maintenance, in that it re-enforces the background assumptions, alters links and associations in the ontology, and adds new concepts. This means that background knowledge is rarely expressed in a machine interpretable manner. When it is, it is usually in the conceptual boundaries of the domain, e.g. in textbooks or when ideas are borrowed into other domains. We argue that a partial solution to this lies in searching external resources such as specialized glossaries and the internet. We show that a random selection of concept pairs from the Gene Ontology do not occur in a relevant corpus of texts from the journal Nature. In contrast, a significant proportion can be found on the internet. Thus, we conclude that sources external to the domain corpus are necessary for the automatic construction of ontologies.

Meeting the challenge on the path to democracy: discursive strategies in governmental declarations

The communicative practice in the ex-GDR was complex and diverse, although public political discourse had been fairly ritualized. Text-types characteristic of the Communist Party discourse were full of general (superordinate) terms semantic specification was hardly possible (propositional reduction). Changes in the social world result in changes in the communicative practice as well. However, a systematic comparision of text-types across cultures and across ideological boundaries reveals both differences in the textual macro- and superstructures and overlapping as well as universal features, probably related to functional aspects (discourse of power). Six sample texts of the text-type `government declaration', two produced in the ex-GDR, four in the united Germany, are analysed. Special attention is paid to similarities and differences (i) in the textual superstructure (problem-solution schema), (ii) in the concepts that reflect the aims of political actions (simple worlds), (iii) in the agents who (are to) perform these actions (concrete vs abstract agents). Similarities are found mainly in the discursive strategies, e.g. legitimization text actions. Differences become obvious in the strategies used for legitimization, and also in the conceptual domains referred to by the problem-solution schema. The metaphors of construction, path and challenge are of particular interest in this respect.

The future of manufacturing

Anyone who looks at the title of this special issue will agree that the intent behind the preparation of this volume was ambitious: to predict and discuss “The Future of Manufacturing”. Will manufacturing be important in the future? Even though some sceptics might say not, and put on the table some old familiar arguments, we would strongly disagree. To bring subsidies for the argument we issued the call-for-papers for this special issue of Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, fully aware of the size of the challenge in our hands. But we strongly believed that the enterprise would be worthwhile. The point of departure is the ongoing debate concerning the meaning and content of manufacturing. The easily visualised internal activity of using tangible resources to make physical products in factories is no longer a viable way to characterise manufacturing. It is now a more loosely defined concept concerning the organisation and management of open, interdependent, systems for delivering goods and services, tangible and intangible, to diverse types of markets. Interestingly, Wickham Skinner is the most cited author in this special issue of JMTM. He provides the departure point of several articles because his vision and insights have guided and inspired researchers in production and operations management from the late 1960s until today. However, the picture that we draw after looking at the contributions in this special issue is intrinsically distinct, much more dynamic, and complex. Seven articles address the following research themes: 1.new patterns of organisation, where the boundaries of firms become blurred and the role of the firm in the production system as well as that of manufacturing within the firm become contingent; 2.new approaches to strategic decision-making in markets characterised by turbulence and weak signals at the customer interface; 3.new challenges in strategic and operational decisions due to changes in the profile of the workforce; 4.new global players, especially China, modifying the manufacturing landscape; and 5.new techniques, methods and tools that are being made feasible through progress in new technological domains. Of course, many other important dimensions could be studied, but these themes are representative of current changes and future challenges. Three articles look at the first theme: organisational evolution of production and operations in firms and networks. Karlsson's and Skold's article represent one further step in their efforts to characterise “the extraprise”. In the article, they advance the construction of a new framework, based on “the network perspective” by defining the formal elements which compose it and exploring the meaning of different types of relationships. The way in which “actors, resources and activities” are conceptualised extends the existing boundaries of analytical thinking in operations management and open new avenues for research, teaching and practice. The higher level of abstraction, an intrinsic feature of the framework, is associated to the increasing degree of complexity that characterises decisions related to strategy and implementation in the manufacturing and operations area, a feature that is expected to become more and more pervasive as time proceeds. Riis, Johansen, Englyst and Sorensen have also based their article on their previous work, which in this case is on “the interactive firm”. They advance new propositions on strategic roles of manufacturing and discuss why the configuration of strategic manufacturing roles, at the level of the network, will become a key issue and how the indirect strategic roles of manufacturing will become increasingly important. Additionally, by considering that value chains will become value webs, they predict that shifts in strategic manufacturing roles will look like a sequence of moves similar to a game of chess. Then, lastly under the first theme, Fleury and Fleury develop a conceptual framework for the study of production systems in general derived from field research in the telecommunications industry, here considered a prototype of the coming information society and knowledge economy. They propose a new typology of firms which, on certain dimensions, complements the propositions found in the other two articles. Their telecoms-based framework (TbF) comprises six types of companies characterised by distinct profiles of organisational competences, which interact according to specific patterns of relationships, thus creating distinct configurations of production networks. The second theme is addressed by Kyläheiko and SandstroÍm in their article “Strategic options based framework for management of dynamic capabilities in manufacturing firms”. They propose a new approach to strategic decision-making in markets characterised by turbulence and weak signals at the customer interface. Their framework for a manufacturing firm in the digital age leads to active asset selection (strategic investments in both tangible and intangible assets) and efficient orchestrating of the global value net in “thin” intangible asset markets. The framework consists of five steps based on Porter's five-forces model, the resources-based view, complemented by means of the concepts of strategic options and related flexibility issues. Thun, GroÍssler and Miczka's contribution to the third theme brings the human dimension to the debate regarding the future of manufacturing. Their article focuses on the challenges brought to management by the ageing of workers in Germany but, in the arguments that are raised, the future challenges associated to workers and work organisation in every production system become visible and relevant. An interesting point in the approach adopted by the authors is that not only the factual problems and solutions are taken into account but the perception of the managers is brought into the picture. China cannot be absent in the discussion of the future of manufacturing. Therefore, within the fourth theme, Vaidya, Bennett and Liu provide the evidence of the gradual improvement of Chinese companies in the medium and high-tech sectors, by using the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) analysis. The Chinese evolution is shown to be based on capabilities developed through combining international technology transfer and indigenous learning. The main implication for the Western companies is the need to take account of the accelerated rhythm of capability development in China. For other developing countries China's case provides lessons of great importance. Finally, under the fifth theme, Kuehnle's article: “Post mass production paradigm (PMPP) trajectories” provides a futuristic scenario of what is already around us and might become prevalent in the future. It takes a very intensive look at a whole set of dimensions that are affecting manufacturing now, and will influence manufacturing in the future, ranging from the application of ICT to the need for social transparency. In summary, this special issue of JMTM presents a brief, but undisputable, demonstration of the possible richness of manufacturing in the future. Indeed, we could even say that manufacturing has no future if we only stick to the past perspectives. Embracing the new is not easy. The new configurations of production systems, the distributed and complementary roles to be performed by distinct types of companies in diversified networked structures, leveraged by the new emergent technologies and associated the new challenges for managing people, are all themes that are carriers of the future. The Guest Editors of this special issue on the future of manufacturing are strongly convinced that their undertaking has been worthwhile.

Metaphor and translation:Some implications of a cognitive approach

Metaphor has been widely discussed within the discipline of Translation Studies, predominantly with respect to translatability and transfer methods. It has been argued that metaphors can become a translation problem, since transferring them from one language and culture to another one may be hampered by linguistic and cultural differences. A number of translation procedures for dealing with this problem have been suggested, e.g., substitution (metaphor into different metaphor), paraphrase (metaphor into sense), or deletion. Such procedures have been commented on both in normative models of translation (how to translate metaphors) and in descriptive models (how metaphors have been dealt with in actual translations). After a short overview of how metaphor has been dealt with in the discipline of Translation Studies, this paper discusses some implications of a cognitive approach to metaphors for translation theory and practice. Illustrations from authentic source and target texts (English and German, political discourse) show how translators handled metaphorical expressions, and what effects this had for the text itself, for text reception by the addressees, and for subsequent discursive developments. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All right reserved.

Depth propagation and surface construction in 3-D vision

Motion discontinuities can signal object boundaries where few or no other cues, such as luminance, colour, or texture, are available. Hence, motion-defined contours are an ecologically important counterpart to luminance contours. We developed a novel motion-defined Gabor stimulus to investigate the nature of neural operators analysing visual motion fields in order to draw parallels with known luminance operators. Luminance-defined Gabors have been successfully used to discern the spatial-extent and spatial-frequency specificity of possible visual contour detectors. We now extend these studies into the motion domain. We define a stimulus using limited-lifetime moving dots whose velocity is described over 2-D space by a Gabor pattern surrounded by randomly moving dots. Participants were asked to determine whether the orientation of the Gabor pattern (and hence of the motion contours) was vertical or horizontal in a 2AFC task, and the proportion of correct responses was recorded. We found that with practice participants became highly proficient at this task, able in certain cases to reach 90% accuracy with only 12 limited-lifetime dots. However, for both practised and novice participants we found that the ability to detect a single boundary saturates with the size of the Gaussian envelope of the Gabor at approximately 5 deg full-width at half-height. At this optimal size we then varied spatial frequency and found the optimum was at the lowest measured spatial frequency (0.1 cycle deg-1 ) and then steadily decreased with higher spatial frequencies, suggesting that motion contour detectors may be specifically tuned to a single, isolated edge.

The discourse of climate change: a corpus-based approach

Based on Goffman’s definition that frames are general ‘schemata of interpretation’ that people use to ‘locate, perceive, identify, and label’, other scholars have used the concept in a more specific way to analyze media coverage. Frames are used in the sense of organizing devices that allow journalists to select and emphasise topics, to decide ‘what matters’ (Gitlin 1980). Gamson and Modigliani (1989) consider frames as being embedded within ‘media packages’ that can be seen as ‘giving meaning’ to an issue. According to Entman (1993), framing comprises a combination of different activities such as: problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described. Previous research has analysed climate change with the purpose of testing Downs’s model of the issue attention cycle (Trumbo 1996), to uncover media biases in the US press (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004), to highlight differences between nations (Brossard et al. 2004; Grundmann 2007) or to analyze cultural reconstructions of scientific knowledge (Carvalho and Burgess 2005). In this paper we shall present data from a corpus linguistics-based approach. We will be drawing on results of a pilot study conducted in Spring 2008 based on the Nexis news media archive. Based on comparative data from the US, the UK, France and Germany, we aim to show how the climate change issue has been framed differently in these countries and how this framing indicates differences in national climate change policies.

Group work and cognitive style:a discursive investigation

This article investigates the relationship between work-group members’ cognitive style (as measured by Allinson and Hayes’s Cognitive Style Index), the group’s task and setting, and the way in which group members behave in the group. Behavior of a homogeneous analytic, a homogeneous intuitive, and a heterogeneous group was observed in a mechanistic setting and analyzed using discourse analysis. This study is discussed in light of a previous study in which homogeneous analytic and homogeneous intuitive groups worked in an organic setting. These two studies use different methodologies (quantitative approach versus qualitativediscursive). The benefits of methodological eclecticism are discussed.

The spatial pattern of discrete beta-amyloid deposits in Alzheimer's disease reflects synaptic disconnection

The spatial pattern of discrete beta-amyloid (A beta) deposits was studied in the superficial laminae of cortical fields of different types and in the hippocampus in 6 cases of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In 41/42 tissues examined, discrete A beta deposits were aggregated into clusters and in 34/41 tissues (25/34 of the cortical tissues), there was evidence for a regular periodicity of the A beta deposit clusters parallel to the tissue boundary. The dimensions of the clusters varied from 400 to > 12,800 microns in different tissues. Although the A beta deposit clusters were larger than predicted, the regular periodicity suggests that they develop in relation to groups of cells associated with specific projections. This would be consistent with the hypothesis that the distribution of discrete A beta deposits in AD could reflect progressive synaptic disconnection along interconnected neuronal pathways. This implies that amyloid deposition could be a response to, rather than a cause of, synaptic disconnection in AD.