Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) já é uma escola de pensamento em marketing?

A década de 1980 trouxe uma visão alternativa à corrente positivista predominante no campo de pesquisa do consumidor: a Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), que assume uma orientação epistemológica baseada no interpretativismo e na pesquisa qualitativa. Diante do destaque alcançado pela CCT, levantou-se a seguinte questão: a CCT já pode ser considerada uma escola de pensamento em marketing autônoma? Pautados em três critérios fundamentais para a qualificação de uma escola de pensamento (reconhecimento acadêmico, corpo de conhecimento e contribuições), foi realizada uma desk research, baseada em periódicos e artigos da área e na construção de um corpus de pesquisa construído com base nas referências contidas no texto seminal Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): twenty years of research. A conclusão é de que a CCT atende aos critérios adotados na presente pesquisa, podendo ser considerada uma escola de pensamento a utônoma dentro do campo de pesquisa do consumo.

Influence of discount price announcements on consumer's behavior

The theoretical framework that underpins this research study is based on the Prospect Theory formulated by Kahneman and Tversky, and Thaler's Mental Accounting Theory. The research aims to evaluate the consumers' behavior when different patterns of discount are offered (in percentage and absolute value and for larger and smaller discounts). Two experiments were conducted to explore these patterns of behavior and the results that were obtained supported the view that the framing effect was a common occurrence. The patterns of choice of individuals in a sample were found to be different due to changes in the ways discounts were offered. This can be explained by the various ways of presenting discount rates that had an impact on the influence of purchase intentions, recommendations and quality perception.

VISUAL ART AND REGULATORY FIT MESSAGES ON CONSUMER EVALUATIONS

ABSTRACT In this study, we demonstrate that the art infusion effect, in which the presence of visual art causes a positive impact on consumers' perceptions of products and advertising messages, might have a moderation effect on regulatory fit and non-fit messages. We investigate the impact of visual art on advertisement evaluations in regulatory (non-) fit conditions. Regulatory focus theory suggests that consumers rely on their motivational focus (prevention vs. promotion) for their evaluations and decisions. Usually, consumers prefer products that fit with their personal motivational focus. In the present study, the results of three experiments indicate that using visual art with a promotion or prevention fit message is recommended, while non-art images increase message persuasiveness when non-fit messages are presented. Therefore, not all information compatible with the consumer's motivational focus are best evaluated. When non-art images are presented, non-fit messages might be more persuasive.

A Feedback Learning and Mental Models Perspective on Strategic Decision Making

This study aims to be a contribution to a theoretical model that explains the effectiveness of the learning and decision-making processes by means of a feedback and mental models perspective. With appropriate mental models, managers should be able to improve their capacity to deal with dynamically complex contexts, in order to achieve long-term success. We present a set of hypotheses about the influence of feedback information and systems thinking facilitation on mental models and management performance. We explore, under controlled conditions, the role of mental models in terms of structure and behaviour. A test based on a simulation experiment with a system dynamics model was performed. Three out of the four hypotheses were confirmed. Causal diagramming positively influences mental model structure similarity, mental model structure similarity positively influences mental model behaviour similarity, and mental model behaviour similarity positively influences the quality of the decision.

A Feedback Learning and Mental Models Perspective on Strategic Decision Making

This study aims to be a contribution to a theoretical model that explains the effectiveness of the learning and decision-making processes by means of a feedback and mental models perspective. With appropriate mental models, managers should be able to improve their capacity to deal with dynamically complex contexts, in order to achieve long-term success. We present a set of hypotheses about the influence of feedback information and systems thinking facilitation on mental models and management performance. We explore, under controlled conditions, the role of mental models in terms of structure and behaviour. A test based on a simulation experiment with a system dynamics model was performed. Three out of the four hypotheses were confirmed. Causal diagramming positively influences mental model structure similarity, mental model structure similarity positively influences mental model behaviour similarity, and mental model behaviour similarity positively influences the quality of the decision

Feedback regarding students initial pharmaceutical internship from the University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Cluj-Napoca

Introduction/Aims: The purpose of the study is to evaluate the perception of the organization, the development and the evaluation of the initial stage in the internship of students, in order to improve these activities and to establish the adequate objectives in accordance with the changes concerning the concept of modern pharmacy. Materials and methods: An online survey was made using Google Docs ® -Create Form extension. All results were accumulated and computed using Microsoft Excel ®. The questionnaire consisted of 11 questions, structured on several levels: the objectives and how they can be achieved, internship organization, the internship training (effective participation in specific activities and integration in the pharmaceutical activity), the assessment, the profile of tutor / pharmacy. The questionnaire was completed by students from the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Medicine and Pharmacy "Iuliu Haţieganu" Cluj Napoca, Romania. Results and discussions. The study was conducted on 308 students (60% of all students from the study years II-IV. 90% of the respondents had actually participated in the internship, whilst 10% only formally participated in this activity. The main responsibilities of the students were: storage and reception of pharmaceutical products (94%, respectively 79%) and working with the receipts (57%). Most of the students appreciate that they were integrated into the work in the pharmacy, this being due largely pharmacist tutor, who expressed interest and ability in mentoring activities. They appreciated that the role of tutor requires 3-5 years of professional experience. In terms of the internship objectives, these should aim at applying the knowledge gained until the graduation year, but also familiarization with activities which might turn into applications for the coming years. 43% of students believe that only 25% of the theoretical knowledge was useful during the internship. 90 % of the total questioned considered useful to develop a practice guideline adapted to the year of study. Conclusions. The professional training of the future pharmacist’s students depends largely on experience gained by students during the internship activity. Feed-back from the students’ shows that they are aware of the usefulness of the internship, but believe the objectives must be updated and a better correlation between work in pharmacy and theoretical knowledge has to be made. A first step is to develop a practical guide adapted to each year of study. The involvement of the tutor pharmacist is also essential to the success of this activity

Workload balancing in distributed virtual reality environments

Virtual Reality (VR) has grown to become state-of-theart technology in many business- and consumer oriented E-Commerce applications. One of the major design challenges of VR environments is the placement of the rendering process. The rendering process converts the abstract description of a scene as contained in an object database to an image. This process is usually done at the client side like in VRML [1] a technology that requires the client’s computational power for smooth rendering. The vision of VR is also strongly connected to the issue of Quality of Service (QoS) as the perceived realism is subject to an interactive frame rate ranging from 10 to 30 frames-per-second (fps), real-time feedback mechanisms and realistic image quality. These requirements overwhelm traditional home computers or even high sophisticated graphical workstations over their limits. Our work therefore introduces an approach for a distributed rendering architecture that gracefully balances the workload between the client and a clusterbased server. We believe that a distributed rendering approach as described in this paper has three major benefits: It reduces the clients workload, it decreases the network traffic and it allows to re-use already rendered scenes.

A feedback-based decentralised coordination model for distributed open real-time systems

Moving towards autonomous operation and management of increasingly complex open distributed real-time systems poses very significant challenges. This is particularly true when reaction to events must be done in a timely and predictable manner while guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS) constraints imposed by users, the environment, or applications. In these scenarios, the system should be able to maintain a global feasible QoS level while allowing individual nodes to autonomously adapt under different constraints of resource availability and input quality. This paper shows how decentralised coordination of a group of autonomous interdependent nodes can emerge with little communication, based on the robust self-organising principles of feedback. Positive feedback is used to reinforce the selection of the new desired global service solution, while negative feedback discourages nodes to act in a greedy fashion as this adversely impacts on the provided service levels at neighbouring nodes. The proposed protocol is general enough to be used in a wide range of scenarios characterised by a high degree of openness and dynamism where coordination tasks need to be time dependent. As the reported results demonstrate, it requires less messages to be exchanged and it is faster to achieve a globally acceptable near-optimal solution than other available approaches.

Share GFS – Games, Films & Series: sistema de recomendação

Esta dissertação incide sobre o estudo e análise de uma solução para a criação de um sistema de recomendação para uma comunidade de consumidores de media e no consequente desenvolvimento da mesma cujo âmbito inicial engloba consumidores de jogos, filmes e/ou séries, com o intuito de lhes proporcionar a oportunidade de partilharem experiências, bem como manterem um registo das mesmas. Com a informação adquirida, o sistema reúne condições para proceder a sugestões direcionadas a cada membro da comunidade. O sistema atualiza a sua informação mediante as ações e os dados fornecidos pelos membros, bem como pelo seu feedback às sugestões. Esta aprendizagem ao longo do tempo permite que as sugestões do sistema evoluam juntamente com a mudança de preferência dos membros ou se autocorrijam. O sistema toma iniciativa de sugerir mediante determinadas ações, mas também pode ser invocada uma sugestão diretamente pelo utilizador, na medida em que este não precisa de esperar por sugestões, podendo pedir ao sistema que as forneça num determinado momento. Nos testes realizados foi possível apurar que o sistema de recomendação desenvolvido forneceu sugestões adequadas a cada utilizador específico, tomando em linha de conta as suas ações prévias. Para além deste facto, o sistema não forneceu qualquer sugestão quando o histórico destas tinha provado incomodar o utilizador.

2,4,6- Ttrichloroanisol:a consumer panel evaluation

“Cork taint” is a major problem in wine industry and is caused by contamination of wines. This contamination is usually attributed to wine cork stoppers and 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (2,4,6-TCA) is one of the compounds mostly associated to this off-flavour. In this work, a consumer panel performed “forced choice” triangular tests in order to measure Odour Detection Thresholds (ODT) and Taste Detection Thresholds (TDT) of 2,4,6-TCA in water, hydro-alcoholic solutions (11.5% and 18% ethanol) and white and red wines. A paired preference test was also performed by the panel in order to measure Odour Rejection Threshold (ORT) in white and red wine spiked with 2,4,6-TCA. Results obtained show that the ODT and the TDT for 2,4,6-TCA in water were 0.2 and 0.3 ng/L, respectively. In hydro-alcoholic solutions with 11.5% and 18% ethanol the ODT were 4 and 10 ng/L respectively. In red wine the ODT and the TDT were 0.9 and 1.7 ng/L and in white wine were 1.5 and 1.0 ng/L respectively. ORT for white was 10.4 ng/L and for red wines 16.0 ng/L. These results suggest that although this group of consumers detected very low concentrations of 2,4,6-TCA in wines, they did not reject the wine at these low concentration values.

Low-power 6-bit 1-GS/s two-channel pipeline ADC with open-loop amplification using amplifiers with local-feedback

IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, pp. 2258 – 2261, Seattle, EUA

Consumer energy management system with integration of smart meters

This paper develops an energy management system with integration of smart meters for electricity consumers in a smart grid context. The integration of two types of smart meters (SM) are developed: (i) consumer owned SM and (ii) distributor owned SM. The consumer owned SM runs over a wireless platform - ZigBee protocol and the distributor owned SM uses the wired environment - ModBus protocol. The SM are connected to a SCADA system (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) that supervises a network of Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC). The SCADA system/PLC network integrates different types of information coming from several technologies present in modern buildings. The developed control strategy implements a hierarchical cascade controller where inner loops are performed by local PLCs, and the outer loop is managed by a centralized SCADA system, which interacts with the entire local PLC network. In order to implement advanced controllers, a communication channel was developed to allow the communication between the SCADA system and the MATLAB software. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Estudo de usabilidade das aplicações mobile: caso prático o Meethub

Relatório de estágio apresentado à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Audiovisual e Multimédia.

Real-Time Simulation of energy Management in a Domestic Consumer

Recent and future changes in power systems, mainly in the smart grid operation context, are related to a high complexity of power networks operation. This leads to more complex communications and to higher network elements monitoring and control levels, both from network’s and consumers’ standpoint. The present work focuses on a real scenario of the LASIE laboratory, located at the Polytechnic of Porto. Laboratory systems are managed by the SCADA House Intelligent Management (SHIM), already developed by the authors based on a SCADA system. The SHIM capacities have been recently improved by including real-time simulation from Opal RT. This makes possible the integration of Matlab®/Simulink® real-time simulation models. The main goal of the present paper is to compare the advantages of the resulting improved system, while managing the energy consumption of a domestic consumer.