Compulsory loyalty? Accountability, citizenship and the BBC

Este artigo localiza os debates contemporâneos sobre governança e accountability de serviços públicos de televisão e radiodifusão no contexto dos debates no Reino Unido sobre a renovação do Canal BBC. Parte-se da noção sugerida por Warnock (1974) de accountability como o fornecimento de informação e a habilidade de exercer sanções e das distinções propostas por Hirschman (1970) e Thompson (2003) entre saída, voz e lealdade e formas de governança hierárquica, de mercado e de rede. Como accountability pode ser exercida em contextos definidos por Hirschman e Thompson e qual é o papel da confiança (O’Neill, 2002)? Em oposição ao modelo “forte” da concepção normativa de consumidor (Peacock 1986, Potter 1988, Sargant 1992 e 1993) como um usuário capaz de fazer com que instituições se mantenham responsivas em um mercado em bom uncionamento, em serviços de radiodifusão o cidadão é concebido (de acordo com Marshall 1981) meramente como um objeto “fraco” da distribuição de bem-estar ao invés de um agente ativo capaz de manter os difusores responsivos. Em conseqüência, as propostas do governo britânico para um novo modelo de governança da BBC talvez sejam consideradas inadequadas para atender demandas contemporâneas para melhorar a accountability de serviços públicos

A theoretical and computational basis for CATNETS

The main content of this report is the identification and definition of market mechanisms for Application Layer Networks (ALNs). On basis of the structured Market Engineering process, the work comprises the identification of requirements which adequate market mechanisms for ALNs have to fulfill. Subsequently, two mechanisms for each, the centralized and the decentralized case are described in this document. These build the theoretical foundation for the work within the following two years of the CATNETS project. --Grid Computing

Theoretical and Computational Basis for Economical Ressource Allocation in Application Layer Networks - Annual Report Year 1

This paper identifies and defines suitable market mechanisms for Application Layer Networks (ALNs). On basis of the structured Market Engineering process, the work comprises the identification of requirements which adequate market mechanisms for ALNs have to fulfill. Subsequently, two mechanisms for each, the centralized and the decentralized case are described in this document. --Grid Computing

Evaluating the use of the web by print firms

The disruptive impact of electronic commerce on the print industry has the potential to radically transform its value proposition. The challenge for the industry is to utilise the disruptive aspects of emerging technology to offer customers greater variety in the delivery of information and communication, and take advantage of potential cost innovations to improve declining rates of return. This paper reviews these developments and reports on an exploratory study of the Australian print industry that suggests that the extent of transformation has, to date, been limited

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Defining marketing-as-practice and identifying marketing tools used by practitioners in the Algarve

With the exponential evolution of the corporate market and consequent increase in direct competition, companies increasingly pursue to use innovative and appropriate marketing approaches and tools. Given the importance of marketing in competitiveness corporate context, becomes crucial to analyse which are the practices used by practitioners in their daily company life, in order to compare results with the competition, check innovative and appropriate trends to it activity sector. When developing the literature review, was revealed a gap in this knowledge area: nonexistence of a specific approach capable of assess in a simple and organized way which are the practices and respective tools used by companies. However, it was possible identify an interesting model of the strategic area, denominated Strategy-as- Practice, whose attributes could be relevant for the construction of the new approach. It was also accomplished an analysis of the several concepts included in the approach, so that the Marketing-as-Practice approach held updated information. The present study proposes the development of a new approach that allows analyses the research problem, applying it to Algarve region companies. To justify the decisions taken along the dissertation, was solicited the opinion of two managers of the region. The survey, with 51 questions distribute over two sections, was applied via internet to the sample set. The results were postimously analysed, using therefore descriptive and non-parametrical statistics. Finally, are suggested ways to improve the approach and the survey created and evidenced the study limitations and the opportunities of research development in this area

Data storing with an external web database for e-learning activities in Second Life

Projecte realitzat mitjançant programa de mobilitat. POLITECNICO DI TORINO. III FACOLTÀ DI INGEGNERIAImplemented an external database in order to save E-Learning gathered information from Second Life, as Second Life does not provide a native way to do it. It involved: - Implementing a script in Second Life (in the SLS scripting language) which collects information and it sends to an external server. - Implementing a server that receives the information from the Second Life script, saves it to a database, and also provides a web application that allows administrators (i.e. professors) to manage information (meetings, activities and locations in which to to these activities) and users (i.e. students) to see this information

An Ontology Based Approach Towards A Universal Description Framework for Home Networks

Current home networks typically involve two or more machines sharing network resources. The vision for the home network has grown from a simple computer network, to every day appliances embedded with network capabilities. In this environment devices and services within the home can interoperate, regardless of protocol or platform. Network clients can discover required resources by performing network discovery over component descriptions. Common approaches to this discovery process involve simple matching of keywords or attribute/value pairings. Interest emerging from the Semantic Web community has led to ontology languages being applied to network domains, providing a logical and semantically rich approach to both describing and discovering network components. In much of the existing work within this domain, developers have focused on defining new description frameworks in isolation from existing protocol frameworks and vocabularies. This work proposes an ontology-based description framework which takes the ontology approach to the next step, where existing description frameworks are in- corporated into the ontology-based framework, allowing discovery mechanisms to cover multiple existing domains. In this manner, existing protocols and networking approaches can participate in semantically-rich discovery processes. This framework also includes a system architecture developed for the purpose of reconciling existing home network solutions with the ontology-based discovery process. This work also describes an implementation of the approach and is deployed within a home-network environment. This implementation involves existing home networking frameworks, protocols and components, allowing the claims of this work to be examined and evaluated from a ‘real-world’ perspective