ClassSheet-driven spreadsheet environments

Spreadsheet systems are well known and widely used in all kinds of business applications. They are used by tens of millions of people who create hundreds of millions of spreadsheets every day [1]. Spreadsheet systems are easy to use and very intuitive, allowing the aggregation of all types of data

Coupled evolution of model-driven spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are increasingly used as programming languages, in the construction of large and complex systems. The fact is that spreadsheets, being a highly flexible framework, lack important programming language features such as abstraction or encapsulation. This flexibility, however, comes with a price: spreadsheets are populated with significant amounts of errors. One of the approaches that try to overcome this problem advocates the use of model-driven spreadsheet development: a spreadsheet model is defined, from which a concrete spreadsheet is generated. Although this approach has been proved effective in other contexts, still it needs to accommodate for future evolution of both the model and its instance, so that they remain synchronized at all moments. In this paper, we propose a pair of transformation sets, one working at the model level and the other at the instance level, such that each transformation in one set is related to a transformation in the other set. With our approach, we ensure model/data compliance while allowing for model and data evolution

Model-driven spreadsheets in a multi-user environment

Spreadsheets are widely used by non-professional programmers, the so-called end-users, to perform simple calculations, but also by professional programmers in large software organizations, where spreadsheets are used to collect information from different systems, to transform data coming from one system to the format required by another, or to present data in human-friendly form.(undefined

Liability for environmental damage in Portugal - a short overview

The environmental law enshrined as a fundamental principle in article 66 of the Portuguese Constitution. The Environmental Liability Directive establishes a framework of environmental liability, based on the "polluter-pays" principle, to prevent and remedy environmental damage. The Decree-Law 147/2008, of 29th July came transpose into Portuguese law Directive 2004/35/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21st April 2004. The Law 67/2007, of 31st December, establishing in Portugal the regime for tort liability arising from losses caused by third parties, due to the acts of public management in relation to all the functions of the State, i.e. i) administrative, ii) legislative, and iii) jurisdictional.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Online-SoBA: text analysis to study social behaviors

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia InformáticaThis document reports a Master’s Project that fits in the 5th year of the Integrated Master’s in Informatics Engineering from the Universidade do Minho. This Master work, Online-SoBA (Online Social Behavior Analysis), aims at developing a semi-automatic system capable of analyzing short texts that correspond to comments written in reaction to ’posts’ in Portuguese social media (social networks or online newspapers), in order to identify behaviors that characterize social opinions about a given topic along a given period of time. To meet the challenge posed, these short texts are analyzed and the information is extracted according to schemes that describe the phenomena to be studied, that is, sentence structures in natural language that characterize the referred behaviors. In order to achieve this goal, a pipeline was implemented to process the texts contained in the NetLang Corpus, and later a web platform was developed to present the generated results to the end user, as well as to allow a fluid navigation over them. The report introduces the system architecture designed to attain the objectives, discusses the implementation decisions and the development steps, and shows the interface created for a fruitful knowledge extraction. Before closing the document with the conclusions, an experiment conducted is described and the results are analyzed to assess the SoBA from the end user perspective.A Tese de Mestrado aqui relatada enquadra-se no quinto ano do Mestrado Integrado em Engenharia informática, na Universidade do Minho. Este projecto, Online-SoBA (online Social Behavior Analysis), tem como objectivo desenvolver um sistema semi-automático capaz de analisar textos curtos correspondentes a comentários escritos em português como reacção a ’posts’ em plataformas de comunicação social (nomeadamente redes sociais ou jornais online), de modo a que seja possível identificar comportamentos que caracterizam a opinião da sociedade sobre um determinado tema ao longo de um dado período de tempo. Para enfrentar o desafio proposto, esses textos curtos (os comentários) são analisados e a informação extraída segundo esquemas que descrevem o fenómeno em causa, ou seja, estruturas de frases em linguagem natural que caracterizam os referidos comportamentos. Para que este objetivo pudesse ser atingido, foi implementada uma pipeline para fazer o processamento dos textos contidos no Corpus NetLang e posteriormente foi desenvolvida uma plataforma web para apresentar os resultados gerados ao utilizador final, assim como permitir uma navegação fluida sobre os mesmos. O relatório introduz a arquitetura do sistema concebida para atingir os objetivos, discute as decisões de implementação e as etapas de desenvolvimento, e mostra a interface criada para uma extração proveitosa do conhecimento. Antes de encerrar o documento com as conclusões, é descrita uma experiência conduzida e os resultados são analisados para avaliar o SoBA a partir da perspetiva do utilizador final

Transition from endemic behavior to eradication of malaria due to combined drug therapies: an agent-model approach

We introduce an agent-based model describing a susceptible-infectious-susceptible (SIS) system of humans and mosquitoes to predict malaria epidemiological scenarios in realistic biological conditions. Emphasis is given to the transition from endemic behavior to eradication of malaria transmission induced by combined drug therapies acting on both the gametocytemia reduction and on the selective mosquito mortality during parasite development in the mosquito. Our mathematical framework enables to uncover the critical values of the parameters characterizing the effect of each drug therapy. Moreover, our results provide quantitative evidence of what is empirically known: interventions combining gametocytemia reduction through the use of gametocidal drugs, with the selective action of ivermectin during parasite development in the mosquito, may actively promote disease eradication in the long run. In the agent model, the main properties of human-mosquito interactions are implemented as parameters and the model is validated by comparing simulations with real data of malaria incidence collected in the endemic malaria region of Chimoio in Mozambique. Finally, we discuss our findings in light of current drug administration strategies for malaria prevention, that may interfere with human-to-mosquito transmission process.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Performance, valuation and capital structure: a survey of family firms

Most countries often have public companies with large controlling owners, typically a family or a private person (La Porta et al. 1999, 2002). This empirical evidence contrasts with the classical view of the largest dispersed firm presented by Berle and Means (1932). This picture challenges the findings by Bhattacharya and Ravikumar (2001), who predict that the shares held by families will decrease if an efficient financial market is put in place. Therefore, family firms represent an important group in the stock market today and motivate a thorough investigation of the effect of the family as a controlling owner on the firms‘ performance, valuation and capital structure. The objective of this paper is three fold: first, we discuss whether family firms do really behave differently from non-family firms, and if so, how and why they are different; secondly, we review current literature related to how family (taking in account specific governance characteristics such as family ownership, family control and family management) affects the firms‘ performance and value; thirdly, we focus on how ownership/governance structure influences capital structure, as a proxy for risk aversion. The literature allows us to conclude that the founder‘s family control and professional (outside) management increase performance, whereas excess control via control enhancing mechanisms (such as dual class shares and pyramidal structures) and descendent management produce both lower valuation and performance. This evidence means that families have the incentives and the power to systematically expropriate the wealth from minority shareholders. Furthermore, the low debt level of family firms is considered as an external manifestation of a firm‘s control risk aversion