Facing the Dark Side: How Leadership Destroys Organisational Innovation

Leadership is an essential element for promoting innovation. The literature has primarily focused on the effect of “constructive” leadership on innovation, although numerous studies point out that destructive leadership affects organizational performance. However, such literature pays little attention to the relationship between destructive leadership and innovation. This study uses an online survey of 210 employees from 80 Portuguese firms in different sectors, to test the effect of destructive leadership on behavioural innovation and how a caring climate influences such relationship. The analysis uses multiple linear regressions to test the hypotheses. Findings reveal that destructive leadership has a negative effect on innovation and on caring climate. The results show that a caring climate influences innovation in a positive way that mitigates the relationship between destructive leadership and innovation

Colorimetric kit for detection of methanol in ethanol fuel for monitoring the quality of fuels

A colorimetric kit for methanol detection in ethanol-containing fuels and ease of use in the field was developed and tested. The analysis can detect the presence of methanol in fuels when exceeding specification (0.5% v/v) in about 20 min and its simple instrumentation does not require a specialist. The kit method was successfully validated at gas stations located in São Paulo State and the Federal District

ROTed: Random Oblivious Transfer for embedded devices

Oblivious Transfer (OT) is a fundamental primitive in cryptography, supporting protocols such as Multi-Party Computation and Private Set Intersection (PSI), that are used in applications like contact discovery, remote diagnosis and contact tracing. Due to its fundamental nature, it is utterly important that its execution is secure even if arbitrarily composed with other instances of the same, or other protocols. This property can be guaranteed by proving its security under the Universal Composability model. Herein, a 3-round Random Oblivious Transfer (ROT) protocol is proposed, which achieves high computational efficiency, in the Random Oracle Model. The security of the protocol is based on the Ring Learning With Errors assumption (for which no quantum solver is known). ROT is the basis for OT extensions and, thus, achieves wide applicability, without the overhead of compiling ROTs from OTs. Finally, the protocol is implemented in a server-class Intel processor and four application-class ARM processors, all with different architectures. The usage of vector instructions provides on average a 40% speedup. The implementation shows that our proposal is at least one order of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art, and is suitable for a wide range of applications in embedded systems, IoT, desktop, and servers. From a memory footprint perspective, there is a small increase (16%) when compared to the state-of-the-art. This increase is marginal and should not prevent the usage of the proposed protocol in a multitude of devices. In sum, the proposal achieves up to 37k ROTs/s in an Intel server-class processor and up to 5k ROTs/s in an ARM application-class processor. A PSI application, using the proposed ROT, is up to 6.6 times faster than related art

The use of waste oils and fats to produce high value products : formulation of printing inks involving used frying oils

Óleo residual de fritura foi aquecido a 315 ºC na presença de acetato de níquel (II), sendo obtido um polímero viscoso e uma mistura de hidrocarbonetos e compostos orgânicos oxigenados. Obtiveram-se polímeros com viscosidades diversas, dependendo da agitação, fluxo de N2 e do tempo de reação. Os materiais poliméricos foram utilizados como veículo na formulação de tintas de impressão tipo offset, juntamente com carbonato de cálcio e diversos pigmentos. Foram testadas as formulações obtidas para a impressão de gravuras pela técnica de xilogravura, as quais apresentam desempenho semelhante ao de tintas comerciais. ______________________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACTUsed frying oil was heated at 315 ºC in the presence of nickel (II) acetate, leading to a viscous polymer and a mixture of hydrocarbons and oxygenated compounds. Polymers were obtained with different viscosities, depending on the stirring, nitrogen flux and reaction time. The polymeric materials were used as binders in printing ink formulations, together with calcium carbonate and adequate pigments. The prepared formulations were tested to produce gravures by xylograph process, with performance similar to commercial printing inks

Processo de sobremoldação de vedante numa tampa plástica

O objeto da presente patente é o processo de sobremoldação de uma tampa Plástica com vedante incorporado, na qual é injetado o material de maior dureza sobre o De menor dureza. Este processo de sobremoldação é aplicado somente em bi-injecção (utilização de dois materiais ou mais), em tampas plásticas rígidas para embalagens de Forma redonda ou outras. A solução adotada passou por proteger o vedante (3) do fluxo (9) do material da tampa (2) de modo a evitar que este cause deformações no vedante (3) Durante o processo de enchimento. A forma de orientação precisa do fluxo (9) do sobre o Material de menor dureza (3) evita a deformação deste ultimo recorrendo aos diferenciais De pressão conjugados com a velocidade. Desta forma é possível injetar sobre um Material de menor dureza (3), um material de maior dureza (2)