Marketing and marketing communication in SMEs

This paper reveals the main findings of two research studies carried out in cooperation with the University of Finance and Administration in Prague within the realization of research projects focused on the needs of businesses. The research in smalland medium- sized enterprises was looking into the application of decisive market competencies and the removal of possible contradictions in small- and medium-sized enterprises: it explored the key marketing activities in the companies with independent marketing units and in the companies where the marketing functions are managed by other business units. The research was aiming to find differences in the intensity and scope of marketing activities in these two tested segments and major obstacles to the application of marketing principles in everyday commercial life of businesses, the values of competitive advantages, etc. The analysis of the size and structure of marketing communication agencies in the Czech Republic identifies the key requirements of marketing communication practice on the system and on the structure of university preparation for marketing communication professionals.peer-reviewe

Deficiência do complexo de piruvato desidrogenase: espectro das mutações em Portugal, mecanismos moleculares subjacentes às variantes patogénicas e o potencial efeito terapêutico da Arginina

Pyruvate dehydrogenase complex (PDC) occupies an essential position in cellular energy production. The oxidative decarboxylation of pyruvate to acetyl-coenzyme A is conducted by a highly organized multienzyme system. Impaired PDC activity leads to a metabolic disorder affecting mainly the tissues with a high demand for ATP. This work is dedicated to a comprehensive study of PDC and PDC deficiency at diverse levels. We described and discussed the clinical, biochemical and genotypic findings from thirteen Portuguese PDC deficient patients, we submitted the clinically relevant variants to the detailed structural and functional analyses, and we evaluated the ability of arginine and/or thiamine to restore PDC function in patient-derived cell lines. All patients from our cohort had the clinical onset between the neonatal period and infancy, manifested different degrees of neurological involvement and, interestingly, most of them reached adulthood. The mutational spectrum revealed ten different mutations in the following genes coding for the respective subunits PDHA1 (PDC-E1α), PDHX (PDC-E3BP), and DLD (PDC-E3). The most striking evidence was a relatively high incidence of E3BP deficiency, nevertheless, PDHA1 mutations were predominant. The selected pathogenic PDC-E1α variants with amino acid substitutions in different structural regions were analyzed by biochemical and biophysical methodologies, combined with molecular dynamics simulations, revealing a limited impact of the mutations on the conformational stability and presenting a significant functional impairment in terms of reduced residual PDC-E1 enzymatic activity and lower affinity for the thiamine pyrophosphate cofactor. Applying identical methodologies, we evaluated the effect of arginine supplementation on recombinant PDC-E1 variants. Furthermore, we conducted a study assessing the impact of arginine and/or thiamine treatment in patient-derived cell lines. The rescue efficacy of these stabilizing molecules is clearly determined by the mutation per se. Remarkably, the major effect of arginine was observed in p.R253G variant, at all levels of this study. The beneficial effect of arginine upon the recombinant protein and the considerable response to arginine and thiamine supplementation in the patient´s fibroblast, confirmed previous observations demonstrating the efficacy of arginine treatment in improving the clinical phenotype of the patient carrying the p.R253G mutation

A Study of Realtime Summarization Metrics

Unexpected news events, such as natural disasters or other human tragedies, create a large volume of dynamic text data from official news media as well as less formal social media. Automatic real-time text summarization has become an important tool for quickly transforming this overabundance of text into clear, useful information for end-users including affected individuals, crisis responders, and interested third parties. Despite the importance of real-time summarization systems, their evaluation is not well understood as classic methods for text summarization are inappropriate for real-time and streaming conditions. The TREC 2013-2015 Temporal Summarization (TREC-TS) track was one of the first evaluation campaigns to tackle the challenges of real-time summarization evaluation, introducing new metrics, ground-truth generation methodology and dataset. In this paper, we present a study of TREC-TS track evaluation methodology, with the aim of documenting its design, analyzing its effectiveness, as well as identifying improvements and best practices for the evaluation of temporal summarization systems

Ab initio study of C14 laves phases in Fe-based systems

Structural properties and energetics of Fe-based C14 Laves phases at various compositions (i.e. Fe2Fe, Fe2X, X2Fe, X2X, where X stands for Si, Cr, Mo, W, Ta) were investigated using the pseudopotential VASP (Vienna Ab initio Simulation Package) code employing the PAW-PBE (Projector Augmented Wave - Perdew Burke-Ernzerhof) pseudopotentials. Full relaxation was performed for all structures studied including the reference states of elemental constituents and the equilibrium structure parameters as well as bulk moduli were found. The structure parameters of experimentally found structures were very well reproduced by our calculations. It was also found that the lattice parameters and volumes of the unit cell decrease with increasing molar fraction of iron. Thermodynamic analysis shows that the Fe2X configurations of Laves phases are more stable than the X2Fe ones. Some of the X2Fe configurations are even unstable with respect to the weighted average of the Laves phases of elemental constituents. Our calculations predict the stability of Fe2Ta. On the other hand, Fe2Mo and Fe2W are slightly unstable (3.19 and 0.68 kJ.mol-1, respectively) and hypothetical structures Fe2Cr and Fe2Si are found unstable as well

The role of Linear Pottery houses in the process of neolithisation

A Linear Pottery settlement represents on a certain scale a symbiosis of different soci-economic groups of inhabitants in one given space. The role and status of artefacts can be de- scribed according to individual types of houses. Stockbreeding is typical for large houses, while small houses manifest hunting as well as breeding. Three-part houses are the most significant buil- dings as the artefact assemblages display prestigious social roles. The assemblages in the single-part houses suggest household activities

Tools and algorithms to advance interactive intrusion analysis via Machine Learning and Information Retrieval

We consider typical tasks that arise in the intrusion analysis of log data from the perspectives of Machine Learning and Information Retrieval, and we study a number of data organization and interactive learning techniques to improve the analyst\u27s efficiency. In doing so, we attempt to translate intrusion analysis problems into the language of the abovementioned disciplines and to offer metrics to evaluate the effect of proposed techniques. The Kerf toolkit contains prototype implementations of these techniques, as well as data transformation tools that help bridge the gap between the real world log data formats and the ML and IR data models. We also describe the log representation approach that Kerf prototype tools are based on. In particular, we describe the connection between decision trees, automatic classification algorithms and log analysis techniques implemented in Kerf

Unbiased Comparative Evaluation of Ranking Functions

Eliciting relevance judgments for ranking evaluation is labor-intensive and costly, motivating careful selection of which documents to judge. Unlike traditional approaches that make this selection deterministically, probabilistic sampling has shown intriguing promise since it enables the design of estimators that are provably unbiased even when reusing data with missing judgments. In this paper, we first unify and extend these sampling approaches by viewing the evaluation problem as a Monte Carlo estimation task that applies to a large number of common IR metrics. Drawing on the theoretical clarity that this view offers, we tackle three practical evaluation scenarios: comparing two systems, comparing $k$ systems against a baseline, and ranking $k$ systems. For each scenario, we derive an estimator and a variance-optimizing sampling distribution while retaining the strengths of sampling-based evaluation, including unbiasedness, reusability despite missing data, and ease of use in practice. In addition to the theoretical contribution, we empirically evaluate our methods against previously used sampling heuristics and find that they generally cut the number of required relevance judgments at least in half.Comment: Under review; 10 page

Description of nine new centipede species from Amazonia and related matters on Neotropical geophilomorphs (Chilopoda: Geophilomorpha)

Nine new species of geophilomorph centipedes, all from Amazonian sites, are described: one species belongs to Ballophilidae (ltyphilus demoraisi n.sp.), three to Geophilidae (Ribautia (Schizoribautia) difficilis n.sp., R. (R.)ducalis n.sp., R. (R.) proxima n.sp.), and five to Schendylidae (Pectiniunguis ducalis n.sp.). The ♂ allotype of Ityphilus crabilli PEREIRA, MINELLI & BARBIERI, 1994 is designated and described. Descriptive data and/or taxonomic comments are given for several Neotropical species of the genus Ribautia: R. (Schizoribautia) montana KRAUS, 1954 is regarded as a good species and redescribed from type material. R.(S.) seydi RIBAUT, 1923, R.(S.) peruana VERHOEFF, 1941 and R.(S.) titicacae TURK, 1955 are regarded here as distinct species. Ribautia silvana KRAUS, 1954 is placed in the subgenus Ribautia (Schizoribautia) and the ♂ holotype is described