Assessing Representative Democracy: the Need of New Mechanisms of Political Representation

Western neo-liberal Democracies are often and shortly characterized by having a representative procedure of participation in the public sphere of life, determining a self-ruled form of political regime, affirming the sovereignty of the people in a specific territory; an economic welfare system; political institutions that administrate and organize public life based on their citizen´s confidence; public security and order. Yet, the lack of political representation of local communities, or at least their sense of ineffectiveness of the representative system to respond to their needs, promotes their alienation fromnational political systems and weakens it. It is a vicious circle, i.e., the political system does not adequately represent the political communities, and these, if not represented, weakens the political system and its ability to respond to the needs of local communities. Our intent is to show that breaking this vicious circle means strengthening democracy with new mechanisms of political representation

What are the key drivers of customers loyalty in yogurts' category?: a case study of Pingo Doce

What influences customers behavior? How do they become loyal to a certain supermarket or product? One key element of understanding and managing customer experience is the ability to measure and monitor customer reactions to firm offerings, especially customer attitudes and perceptions. Nowadays customers have more expectations about what they want to. They expect experiences in which they are involve to. There is an increasing desire for multiplicity and experiences are expected to offer more. Consumers are rejecting, the idea of passive on looking, they desire now active participation. In a fast-changing world, customer buying decision-making processes become an important topic to understand. In order to be successful and "to catch" more loyal customers it is relevant to understand their experience and behavior. Customer's loyalty is one of the aims that a supermarket wants to achieve. When predicting consumer's behavior, they can use it in their own profit. If they know in advance what specific products do customers look for, they can use marketing and some other strategies to push them to purchase it. This way they can be one step ahead and act in an effective and efficient way. This research seeks to understand the main variables that influences customer loyalty in Pingo Doce yogurt's category.O que é que influencia o comportamento do consumidor? Como é que os consumidores se tornam leais a um determinado supermercado ou a um produto? Um ponto chave da compreensão e gestão da experiência do cliente é a capacidade de medir e monitorizar as reações dos clientes a ofertas de empresas, sobretudo as atitudes e as perceções dos consumidores. Hoje em dia, os consumidores têm mais expectativas acerca do que querem e da forma como o querem. Querem ter experiências nas quais se sintam envolvidos. Existe um maior desejo de multiplicidade e uma maior necessidade de que as experiências ofereçam mais do que costumavam oferecer. Para além disso, querem ter uma participação mais ativa, em vez da ideia passiva em que apenas são vistos como observadores, nas suas experiências de consumidor. Neste mundo de rápida mudança, os processos de tomada de decisão dos consumidores tornam se um tópico importante de se perceber. Para se ser bem sucedido e para se conseguir reter mais clientes leais é relevante compreender a sua experiência e o seu comportamento. A lealdade do consumidor é um dos maiores objetivos que um supermercado procura atingir. Quando se consegue prever o comportamento dos consumidores, os supermercados podem usá-lo como seu próprio lucro. Se souberem com antecedência produtos e marcas que os consumidores procuram podem através do marketing e de outras estratégias forçar a compra. Desta forma, podem estar um passo à frente e atuar de forma eficaz e eficiente. Este estudo procura compreender as principais variáveis para a fidelização de clientes na categoria de iogurtes no Pingo Doce

Multisignal 1D-compression by F-transform for wireless sensor networks applications

In wireless sensor networks a large amount of data is collected for each node. The challenge of trans-ferring these data to a sink, because of energy constraints, requires suitable techniques such as datacompression. Transform-based compression, e.g. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), are very popularin this field. These methods behave well enough if there is a correlation in data. However, especiallyfor environmental measurements, data may not be correlated. In this work, we propose two approachesbased on F-transform, a recent fuzzy approximation technique. We evaluate our approaches with Dis-crete Wavelet Transform on publicly available real-world data sets. The comparative study shows thecapabilities of our approaches, which allow a higher data compression rate with a lower distortion, evenif data are not correlated

adaptive goal selection for improving situation awareness the fleet management case study

Abstract: Lack of Situation Awareness (SA) when dealing with complex dynamic environments is recognized as one of the main causes of human errors, leading to serious and critical incidents. One of the main issues is the attentional tunneling manifested, for instance, by human operators (in Decision Support Systems) focusing their attention on a single goal and loosing the awareness of the global picture of the monitored environments. A further issue is represented by stimuli, coming from such environments, which may divert the attention of the operators from the most important aspects and cause erroneous decisions. Thus, the need to define systems helping human operators to improve SA with respect to the two aforementioned drawbacks emerges. These systems should help operators in focusing their attention on active goals and, when really needed, switching it on new goals, in a sort of continuous adaptation. In this work an adaptive goal selection approach exploiting both goal-driven and data-driven information processing is proposed. The approach has been defined and injected in an existing multi-agent framework for Situation Awareness and applied in a Fleet Management System. The approach has been evaluated by means of the SAGAT methodology

Sustainable Decommissioning of Offshore Platforms: a Proposal of Life-Cycle Cost-Benefit Analysis in ItalianOil and Gas Industry

The decommissioning of offshore Oil & Gas platforms, at the end of their life cycle, has been a very controversial topic in recent years. Moreover, the decommissioning complexity increases if we consider a shift towards a linear economy to a circular one. The latter pushes to innovate business models and re-configure the value chain activities in a sustainable way. Starting from these considerations, this work aims to identify a cost-benefit model suitable for evaluating sustainable business models of offshore platforms. After a literature review of different models for analysing maintenance and decommissioning Real Options (ROs), the Life-Cycle Cost-Benefit (LCCB) analysis has been selected as the most adequate managerial tool for evaluating and comparing the Net Present Value (NPV) of platforms compared the maintenance and decommissioning costs. The LCCB tool could aid the managers in the oil and gas industry to quantify the decommissioning and maintenance costs including capital expenditure (CapEx) and risk expenditure (RiskEx). In the future steps, to test the LCCB model, an empirical analysis could be carried out on a sample of organizations interested in the sustainable decommissioning of offshore platforms