Roadmapping for Corporate Strategy: Action Research in Convergence of Technologies

This PhD thesis deals with the strategic implications of the penetration of consumer wireless technologies in vehicles, which represents a trend of growing importance. The convergence of such markets, namely the consumer industry and the automotive connectivity and infotainment areas, generates opportunities and threats, and research possibilities. An Action Research project was carried out at a leading Tier 1 automotive firm, aiming to implement a customized Technology Roadmapping (TRM) process, able to recognize and deal with a fast changing context, and to manage implications within the organization, at various levels and very dynamically. A new “on demand” overarching TRM framework was obtained and added to the existing practices, enabling better support to strategic decision making and multi-project planning

Pesquisa, inovação e aprendizagem: a expansão da soja nos cerrados e a contribuição da Embrapa

<div align="justify">A agropecuária vem passando por diversas mudanças tecnológicas nos últimos anos, o que modificou significativamente o padrão de produtividade. Com o esgotamento de terras disponíveis para a ocupação da agropecuária nas regiões sul e sudeste, a produção foi direcionada para novas áreas de expansão agrícola como o Centro-Oeste brasileiro, onde a partir da década de 1960 iniciou-se o cultivo de soja. A expansão da ocupação das terras com soja foi possibilitada pelo desenvolvimento de sementes adaptadas ao clima e ao solo da região, o que ocorreu na década de 1970. Este artigo tem como objetivo investigar a influência da EMBRAPA (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisas Agropecuárias) e suas inovações no crescimento da produtividade e aumento da área plantada com soja na região do Cerrado, no período de 1978 a 2008. Para tanto, foi necessário uma investigação documental associada a uma análise da taxa de crescimento da produção e produtividade da cultura da soja na região. Concluiu-se que as pesquisas foram fundamentais para o crescimento da produtividade da soja no CentroOeste, sendo que a EMBRAPA tem dado grande contribuição para que isso tenha ocorrido. Também fica evidente a necessidade de um processo de aprendizagem junto ao produtor para explorar o potencial das cultivares.<br><br>Abstract In the last years, farming is undergoing several technological changes that altered the productivity patterns significantly. With the exhaustion of lands available for farming in the southeastern areas of the country, the production moved to new areas of agricultural expansion as the Brazilian center-west where the soybean cultivation began in the 60,s. The expansion of the occupation of the lands with soybean was made possible by the development of seeds adapted to the climate and the soil of the area that occurred in the 70,s. This article intends to investigate the influence of EMBRAPA (Brazilian Company of Agricultural Researches) and its innovation in the growth of the productivity and increase of the planted area of soybean in the savannah from 1978 to 2008. Therefore, it was necessary a documental investigation associated to an analysis of the growth rate of the production and productivity of the soybean in the area. It was inferred that the researches were fundamental for the growth of the productivity of the soybean in the center-west and the EMBRAPA has given great contribution to it. It is also evident the need of a learning process to the producer to explore the potential of the cultivate.</div

Enhancement of a structural optimization simulation tool using machine learning

openLa produzione additiva ha aperto possibilità inesplorate nella fabbricazione di strutture elastiche non realizzabili tramite processi tradizionali di stampaggio e lavorazione. L'obiettivo di questo progetto è esplorare i vantaggi dell'introduzione di tecniche di machine learning (ML) nelle pipeline di ottimizzazione topologica esistenti per migliorarne l'efficienza e la precisione. Particolare enfasi sarà dedicata alla valutazione della capacità degli algoritmi ML di ridurre il carico computazionale dovuto alle fasi di generazione e adattamento della mesh nell'ottimizzazione della topologia.Additive manufacturing has opened unexplored possibilities in the fabrication of elastic structures not manufacturable via traditional moulding and machining processes. The goal of this project is to explore the benefits of introducing machine learning (ML) techniques into existing topology optimisation pipelines to improve their efficiency and accuracy. Special emphasis will be devoted to assess the capability of ML algorithms to reduce the computational burden due to the mesh generation and adaptation steps in topology optimisation

Pesquisa colaborativa e prática docente: os saberes populares no processo de facilitação do ensino de química

A partir de uma proposta de ensino de Química duas questões são discutidas à luz da Teoria da Aprendizagem Significativa: 1) Podemos facilitar o ensino e a aprendizagem significativa de conceitos químicos utilizando saberes populares da comunidade na qual a escola e a universidade estão inseridas? 2) Quais aprendizagens provenientes da experiência da pesquisa colaborativa podem contribuir significativamente para as práticas dos professores? Os resultados indicam que os saberes populares influenciam positivamente na predisposição em aprender facilitando e potencializando a aprendizagem significativa, seu emprego promove a valorização da cultura local. As experiências compartilhadas na pesquisa colaborativa resultaram em aprendizagens de engrandecimento humano e profissional da equipe, reduzindo o distanciamento entre universidade, escola e comunidade.A partir de uma proposta de ensino de Química duas questões são discutidas à luz da Teoria da Aprendizagem Significativa: 1) Podemos facilitar o ensino e a aprendizagem significativa de conceitos químicos utilizando saberes populares da comunidade na qual a escola e a universidade estão inseridas? 2) Quais aprendizagens provenientes da experiência da pesquisa colaborativa podem contribuir significativamente para as práticas dos professores? Os resultados indicam que os saberes populares influenciam positivamente na predisposição em aprender facilitando e potencializando a aprendizagem significativa, seu emprego promove a valorização da cultura local. As experiências compartilhadas na pesquisa colaborativa resultaram em aprendizagens de engrandecimento humano e profissional da equipe, reduzindo o distanciamento entre universidade, escola e comunidade.A partir de uma proposta de ensino de Química duas questões são discutidas à luz da Teoria da Aprendizagem Significativa: 1) Podemos facilitar o ensino e a aprendizagem significativa de conceitos químicos utilizando saberes populares da comunidade na qual a escola e a universidade estão inseridas? 2) Quais aprendizagens provenientes da experiência da pesquisa colaborativa podem contribuir significativamente para as práticas dos professores? Os resultados indicam que os saberes populares influenciam positivamente na predisposição em aprender facilitando e potencializando a aprendizagem significativa, seu emprego promove a valorização da cultura local. As experiências compartilhadas na pesquisa colaborativa resultaram em aprendizagens de engrandecimento humano e profissional da equipe, reduzindo o distanciamento entre universidade, escola e comunidade

Show Me Yours: Developing A Faculty-Wide Interdisciplinary Initiative In Built Environment Higher Education

In the competitive market of higher education, government funding agencies consider universities accountable for ensuring a better alignment between educational processes, graduate capabilities and real world employability. Workforce leaders have developed new expectations about the capabilities of graduating students, expecting to employ graduates who have more sophisticated understandings of the complexity involved in undertaking projects and working in the field. Graduates are expected to demonstrate well developed inter-professional literacy, be able to successfully navigate across professions in workplaces, and to effectively contribute to large projects involving a diverse range of roles and responsibilities. There is growing awareness within the sector that universities should work in partnership with students to tackle local and global challenges and that often these challenges cannot be addressed adequately by a single discipline. Stone, Bollard and Harbor (2009) note that as society has become more complex, research questions have changed, and the “structures of earlier times no longer accommodate the research needed and the teaching that emanates from this research” (p.322). Increasingly, scholars are looking across traditional disciplinary boundaries in new ways to address socio-cultural concerns. The extent of scholarship into the rise and prominence of interdisciplinary collaboration in higher education, along with the external drivers that support this paradigm in education and practice, shifts discussion within faculties from the “benefits of interdisciplinary approaches to pragmatic questions of how to develop and sustain interdisciplinary programs” (Stone et at. 2009, p.323). This paper describes a framework for the introduction of common learning experiences (CLEs) in the Built Environment Faculty (BE) at the University of New South Wales to more adequately prepare students for future professional settings. The paper discusses the initiative in the context of recent research on interdisciplinary learning and teaching in the built environment and higher education more broadly, and discusses the conditions that are likely to support and sustain the initiative into the future

Infant Formulas: A Long Story

The ideal feeding for infants is the breast milk because it has a balanced nutritional composition, which includes all essential nutrients, in addition to many bioactive factors that contribute to the growth and development of the child, as well as to the maturation of the gastrointestinal tract. Among them are immunological factors, antimicrobials and anti-inflammatory components, digestive enzymes, various types of hormones, and growth factors. If human milk is not available, there is an indication of infant formulas that should follow the recommendations of the Codex Alimentarius of the Food and Agriculture Organization/World Health Organization (WHO). In a century of history, infant formulas have gone from a simple combination of cow milk (evaporated or condensed) and water to highly sophisticated products, elaborated by very refined technological processes to produce lactose-free, antiregurgitation, based on soy protein, hydrolyzed protein in various grades, and only amino acids formulas. The major milestones in the modification of infant formulas were the incorporation of nutrients/ingredients such as: iron, nucleotides, alpha lactalbumin, long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, prebiotics, probiotics, postbiotics, oligosaccharides similar to human milk, lactoferrin, and milk fat globule membrane. Many of these ingredients have shown benefits on the immunological system. Despite the technological advances, breast milk remains irreplaceable, being the gold standard for infant feeding

The Buffer Function of Wealth in Socioemotional Responses to Covid‐19 in Italy

The social stratification of material consequences of individual‐level disruptive events is a widely researched topic. Less is known about the stratification of psychological outcomes in response to contextual‐level disruptive events. We aim to fill this gap by investigating the aftermath of the Covid‐19 pandemic on individuals’ dispositional optimism and the stratification based on unequal wealth resources. The study focuses on Italy, the first European country to be strongly hit by Covid‐19, and one characterised by high levels of private savings and homeownership. Theoretically, we draw on the conventional social inequalities framework informed by insights from the literature on natural disasters, positing that wealth‐related resource disparities may have stratified the socioemotional response to the pandemic. Empirically, we leverage a combination of individual‐level longitudinal survey data (Bank of Italy’s Special Survey of Italian Households) and municipality‐level official statistics on excess mortality (Italian National Institute of Statistics), covering the first 17 months of the Covid‐19 pandemic in Italy. Results indicate overall negative consequences of severe exposure to risks associated with the pandemic on optimism. However, we found evidence in line with a post‐traumatic growth scenario, as optimism slightly increased over the course of the pandemic. The insurance function of wealth emerges in the higher optimism of individuals with more resources. Nevertheless, resource disparities are not translated into stark differences in susceptibility to risk exposure or post‐traumatic growth. Overall, our findings support a limited insurance function of wealth in the socioemotional sphere

The varieties of the psychedelic experience: A preliminary study of the association between the reported subjective effects and the binding affinity profiles of substituted phenethylamines and tryptamines

Classic psychedelics are substances of paramount cultural and neuroscientific importance. A distinctive feature of psychedelic drugs is the wide range of potential subjective effects they can elicit, known to be deeply influenced by the internal state of the user (“set”) and the surroundings (“setting”). The observation of cross-tolerance and a series of empirical studies in humans and animal models support agonism at the serotonin (5-HT)2A receptor as a common mechanism for the action of psychedelics. The diversity of subjective effects elicited by different compounds has been attributed to the variables of “set” and “setting,” to the binding affinities for other 5-HT receptor subtypes, and to the heterogeneity of transduction pathways initiated by conformational receptor states as they interact with different ligands (“functional selectivity”). Here we investigate the complementary (i.e., not mutually exclusive) possibility that such variety is also related to the binding affinity for a range of neurotransmitters and monoamine transporters including (but not limited to) 5-HT receptors. Building on two independent binding affinity datasets (compared to “in silico” estimates) in combination with natural language processing tools applied to a large repository of reports of psychedelic experiences (Erowid’s Experience Vaults), we obtained preliminary evidence supporting that the similarity between the binding affinity profiles of psychoactive substituted phenethylamines and tryptamines is correlated with the semantic similarity of the associated reports. We also showed that the highest correlation was achieved by considering the combined binding affinity for the 5-HT, dopamine (DA), glutamate, muscarinic and opioid receptors and for the Ca+ channel. Applying dimensionality reduction techniques to the reports, we linked the compounds, receptors, transporters and the Ca+ channel to distinct fingerprints of the reported subjective effects. To the extent that the existing binding affinity data is based on a low number of displacement curves that requires further replication, our analysis produced preliminary evidence consistent with the involvement of different binding sites in the reported subjective effects elicited by psychedelics. Beyond the study of this particular class of drugs, we provide a methodological framework to explore the relationship between the binding affinity profiles and the reported subjective effects of other psychoactive compounds.Fil: Zamberlan, Federico. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Sanz, Camila. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Martínez Vivot, Rocío. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Pallavicini, Carla. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Fundación para la Lucha contra las Enfermedades Neurológicas de la Infancia; ArgentinaFil: Erowid, Fire. Grass Valley; Estados UnidosFil: Erowid, Earth. Grass Valley; Estados UnidosFil: Tagliazucchi, Enzo Rodolfo. Institut du cerveau et de la moelle épinière; Francia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentin

Culture portability from origin to destination country: The gender division of domestic work among migrants in Italy

Background: The relative importance of a cultural component in the gender division of unpaid labour is still debated. Objective: Drawing on the epidemiological approach to the study of culture, we investigate the cultural component of gender inequality by examining whether gender asymmetries in housework and childcare in families with a migrant background relate to gender equity in the country of origin. Methods: Through multilevel models based on microlevel data (Istat SCIF survey), we examine the extent to which the division of household labour between immigrant partners living in Italy relates to gender equity in their origin country, proxied by the Global Gender Gap Index. We further analyse the changing importance of gender equity in the country of origin at different lengths of stay in the destination country. Conclusions: Immigrants from more (less) gender-equal countries display greater (lower) equality in the division of routine housework and childcare activities. However, gender equity in the origin country loses its importance for couples living in the destination country for a longer time. These findings point to a significant contribution of culture of origin to gender inequality in the intra-couple division of unpaid labour. Yet nonnegligible differences exist between specific housework and childcare tasks and depending on the time spent in the hosting country. Contribution: Our study contributes to the literature on gender inequalities by providing new evidence on the relationship between culture of origin and the division of specific housework and childcare tasks in families with a migrant background