The importance of design as a creative process in business schools: How to fill the design/business knowledge and communication gap?

In most Business Schools (BS), Design in business education plays a minimal role. It is neither part of the core basic learning courses nor part of the electives. No courses in design, corporate identity, graphic design, communication design, environmental design, or product design were found in this study. When business students are enrolled in design principles, they learn it loosely, as part of new product development or entrepreneurship classes. Business teachers simply assume that when corporate design decision-making is needed, the managers will simply ask a designer. However, designers are not educated in business and business managers are not educated in design. Without design in the curriculum, BS is far away from the real business world. Therefore, why BS does not change the curriculum to meet the real business-world needs? The current study addresses the (i) perceptions of business education and training experts; (ii) accreditation and curriculum requirements; and (iii) scientific journal articles, books on current standards and processes in business education. The curriculum specifications for business programs are generally established by the International Association for Management Education (AACSB). Our results reveal that the AACSB demanding: the business curriculum should include "accounting, economics, mathematics, statistics and behavioural science" alongside "basic written and oral communication skills and quantitative analysis". No mention of design or quality analysis is done. Moreover, the specific content of the course does not matter for the accreditation process. Instead, the business programs evaluation is performed following their goals. Design and design management were not mentioned when comparing goals and curricula from several Portuguese business schools. In our research, when business teachers were questioned about the hypothesis of curriculum changing, one of the most cited answers was that “Someone should have a vision. If there is no leader, nothing will happen" However, to develop non-traditional curricula, it requires efforts from all, and several faculty members, particularly the teachers, are overstretched. Likewise, it is much easier to teach the same subject multiple times. We conclude that the teacher’s passion for design must be sufficiently robust to drive change. But, in another hand, the business students must demonstrate curiosity and willingness to engage. When a new course is introduced in a traditional curriculum it will be appreciated, and the first criterion is the extent of demand for it. An average of 30 students must enrol. The second is concerning the professor and the new course must be well taught. If both conditions are met, they can continue. But the new and real-world-touching courses are always introduced as electives, and students put a lower priority on electives than on core needs – the compulsory courses. As a result, what needs to be done to overcome the curriculum stalemate, the priority of the students, and the burnout of the faculty members? What could cause business schools to change? What would make possible the inclusion of design in Business curricula, despite the above-mentioned obstacles? The present work is a search for adequate answers.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Contribution of a new-design multifunctional artificial reefs to the sustainable management of coastal areas

Coastal territories are the focus of constant antagonism and conflict. The lack of integrated management of maritime and terrestrial resources causes serious tension among various sectors of activity (fisheries, agriculture and services). Consequently, the sustainable development of the coastal areas is put on hold. So, how to find a sustainable solution that balances the need to preserve the shoreline and economic development (local or regional)? Scientific knowledge about climatic changes, theoretical background in shorelines infrastructures construction, coastal engineers’ awareness, controlling, monitoring and managing of coastal related operations could not avoid a relevant impact on coastal sustainability. Coastal resources are under increasing pressure and specific management programs strive to protect coastal resources for future generations while balancing today's competing economic, cultural and environmental interests. These management programs are determined to balance all the dimensions of the coastline importance (Tourism, Resource Extraction, Wildlife Habitat, Settlements and Industry). These interventions are socially important: they are concerned with the fair allocation/use of coastal resources while sustainably managing these areas so that they can be used by future generations. Sustainable coastal management should involve all parties in the decision-making process so that resources are used fairly without permanent damage. Without sustainable coastal management, there could be a loss in a country’s economy and, even, no economic growth. The problem of coastal erosion has been sharpening in Europe. Several publications discuss pressure situations and erosion processes across the entire coastline, pointing to critical situations together with the densification of coastal urban areas partly due to successive waves of human migration towards coastal areas and estuaries. Portugal owns 2830 km of coast, islands included and is one of the European countries where the growth of coastal urban areas was faster, the growth of population along the shoreline was higher, the most agricultural area along the coast was lost to other uses, and evident loss of dunes is due to construction/exploitation. So, how to find a sustainable solution that balances the need to preserve the shoreline and economic development, either local or regional? Rock walls, breakwaters or groynes usually serve the purpose of protecting land from erosion and/or enabling safe navigation into harbours and marinas, but other commercial value and multi-purpose recreational and amenity enhancement objectives can also be incorporated into coastal protection and coastal development projects. Submerged breakwaters (also called multifunctional artificial reefs (MFARs)), made partially from sludge muds resulting from the dimensional stone cutting process, could be an interesting and efficient strategy, not only to protect a coastal system but because recycling and incorporating such wastes into building materials is a practical solution for pollution problems from stone industry. Moreover, MFARs will improve the bathing conditions of some coastal zones and cope to enlarge sea biodiversity. This research main objective is to find a sustainable solution that balances the need to preserve the shoreline in a sustainable way by enhancing the use of stone cutting sludge waste in the production of MFARs, reducing both the environmental impact and the production costs.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Indicação geográfica do pêssego: Oportunidade de negócio em tempos de crise.

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Detecting dynamical changes in vital signs using switching Kalman filter

Vital signs contain valuable information about patients' health status during their stay in general wards, when the deterioration process begins. The use of methods to predict and detect regime changes such as switching models can help to understand how vital sign dynamics are altered in disease conditions. However, time series of vital signs are remarkably non-stationary in these scenarios. The objective of this study is to quantify the potential bias of switching models in the presence of non-stationarities, when the inputs are spectral, symbolic and entropy indices. To distinguish stationary from non-stationary periods, a test was used to verify the stability of the mean and variance over short periods. Then, we compared the results from a switching Kalman filter (SKF) model trained using indices obtained over stationary periods with a model trained solely over non-stationary periods. It was observed that indices measured over stationary and non-stationary periods were significantly different. The results of switching models were highly dependent on the indices that were used as inputs. The multi-scale entropy (MSE) approach presented the highest correlation values between non-stationary and stationary switches, an average correlation coefficient of 38%

Early warnings of heart rate deterioration

Hospitals can experience difficulty in detecting and responding to early signs of patient deterioration leading to late intensive care referrals, excess mortality and morbidity, and increased hospital costs. Our study aims to explore potential indicators of physiological deterioration by the analysis of vital-signs. The dataset used comprises heart rate (HR) measurements from MIMIC II waveform database, taken from six patients admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and diagnosed with severe sepsis. Different indicators were considered: 1) generic early warning indicators used in ecosystems analysis (autocorrelation at-1-lag (ACF1), standard deviation (SD), skewness, kurtosis and heteroskedasticity) and 2) entropy analysis (kernel entropy and multi scale entropy). Our preliminary findings suggest that when a critical transition is approaching, the equilibrium state changes what is visible in the ACF1 and SD values, but also by the analysis of the entropy. Entropy allows to characterize the complexity of the time series during the hospital stay and can be used as an indicator of regime shifts in a patient's condition. One of the main problems is its dependency of the scale used. Our results demonstrate that different entropy scales should be used depending of the level of entropy verified

Chaos and a Resonance Mechanism for Structure Formation in Inflationary Models

We exhibit a resonance mechanism of amplification of density perturbations in inflationary mo-dels, using a minimal set of ingredients (an effective cosmological constant, a scalar field minimally coupled to the gravitational field and matter), common to most models in the literature of inflation. This mechanism is based on the structure of homoclinic cylinders, emanating from an unstable periodic orbit in the neighborhood of a saddle-center critical point, present in the phase space of the model. The cylindrical structure induces oscillatory motions of the scales of the universe whenever the orbit visits the neighborhood of the saddle-center, before the universe enters a period of exponential expansion. The oscillations of the scale functions produce, by a resonance mechanism, the amplification of a selected wave number spectrum of density perturbations, and can explain the hierarchy of scales observed in the actual universe. The transversal crossings of the homoclinic cylinders induce chaos in the dynamics of the model, a fact intimately connected to the resonance mechanism occuring immediately before the exit to inflation.Comment: 4 pages. This essay received an Honorable Mention from the Gravity Research Foundation, 1998-Ed. To appear in Mod. Phys. Lett.

Alternate islands of multiple isochronous chains in wave-particle interactions

We analyze the dynamics of a relativistic particle moving in a uniform magnetic field and perturbed by a standing electrostatic wave. We show that a pulsed wave produces an infinite number of perturbative terms with the same winding number, which may generate islands in the same region of phase space. As a consequence, the number of isochronous island chains varies as a function of the wave parameters. We observe that in all the resonances, the number of chains is related to the amplitude of the various resonant terms. We determine analytically the position of the periodic points and the number of island chains as a function of the wave number and wave period. Such information is very important when one is concerned with regular particle acceleration, since it is necessary to adjust the initial conditions of the particle to obtain the maximum acceleration.Comment: Submitte