Competitive Intelligence and Internet Sources

In the Knowledge Age to maintain profitability and in some cases to remain in the market, companies must focus their actions in activities such as collecting, filtering, and disseminating information about market, about competitors and their actions. Those are part of Competitive Intelligence (CI) concept. In digital age, most of the information needed for CI projects is available on the web. This paper focuses on this field and presents a mix of directions that companies need to take into consideration in their CI projects in order to achieve the goals.competitive intelligence, web mining, information

Numerical verification of the Cohen-Lenstra-Martinet heuristics and of Greenberg's pp-rationality conjecture

In this paper we make a series of numerical experiments to support Greenberg's $p$-rationality conjecture, we present a family of $p$-rational biquadratic fields and we find new examples of $p$-rational multiquadratic fields. In the case of multiquadratic and multicubic fields we show that the conjecture is a consequence of the Cohen-Lenstra-Martinet heuristic and of the conjecture of Hofmann and Zhang on the $p$-adic regulator, and we bring new numerical data to support the extensions of these conjectures. We compare the known algorithmic tools and propose some improvements

The intersections between TRIZ and forecasting methodology

The authors’ intention is to correlate the basic knowledge in using the TRIZ methodology (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving or in Russian: Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch) as a problem solving tools meant to help the decision makers to perform more significant forecasting exercises. The idea is to identify the TRIZ features and instruments (40 inventive principles, i.e.) for putting in evidence the noise and signal problem, for trend identification (qualitative and quantitative tendencies) and support tools in technological forecasting, to make the decision-makers able to refine and to increase the level of confidence in the forecasting results. The interest in connecting TRIZ to forecasting methodology, nowadays, relates to the massive application of TRIZ methods and techniques for engineering system development world-wide and in growing application of TRIZ’s concepts and paradigms for improvements of non-engineering systems (including the business and economic applications).forecasting, TRIZ, methodology, problem solving.

The Business Intelligence and the Better Decisions in Management

The paper intends to present more reasons in the favour of promoting the business intelligence (BI) in the managerial practice. Business intelligence is an umbrella term that encompasses the processes, tools, and technologies required to turn data into information, and information into knowledge and plans that drive effective business activity. BI encompasses data warehousing technologies and processes on the back end, and query, reporting, analysis, and information delivery tools (that is, BI tools) and processes on the front end. Organizations need to increase their focus on decision-making. In particular, they need to think again about the relationship between information and decision-making. Business intelligence and its predecessor concepts decision support, executive information systems, have been circulating for several decades in business.business intelligence, decisions, management.

Understanding Algorithm Performance on an Oversubscribed Scheduling Application

The best performing algorithms for a particular oversubscribed scheduling application, Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) scheduling, appear to have little in common. Yet, through careful experimentation and modeling of performance in real problem instances, we can relate characteristics of the best algorithms to characteristics of the application. In particular, we find that plateaus dominate the search spaces (thus favoring algorithms that make larger changes to solutions) and that some randomization in exploration is critical to good performance (due to the lack of gradient information on the plateaus). Based on our explanations of algorithm performance, we develop a new algorithm that combines characteristics of the best performers; the new algorithms performance is better than the previous best. We show how hypothesis driven experimentation and search modeling can both explain algorithm performance and motivate the design of a new algorithm

A Study of the Relationship between Foreign Aid and Human Development in Africa

Why are some countries more prosperous than others? Why are some countries still poor? What can be done by the West to help the rest to overcome the poverty trap? Finding better answers to these questions still represents the research agenda for development economists and political agenda for government and international institutions. Of course, the first two questions are age‐old ones and have been asked since the beginning of our history. The economic literature has identified important factors that influence the wealth of nations and they include: openness to trade, natural resources, capital accumulation, and innovation. Recent studies have found that cultural aspects and institutional framework tend to play a major role in a nation\u27s development process. The researchers’ work also helps policy makers to find a better answer to the last question. The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate the effectiveness of aid in eradicating poverty and improving life conditions in African countries since 1980. Since we are at the beginning of a new UN development agenda, it is important for all stakeholders (recipient, donors, international agencies, etc.) to identify the conditions that enable aid to work

Finding ECM-friendly curves through a study of Galois properties

In this paper we prove some divisibility properties of the cardinality of elliptic curves modulo primes. These proofs explain the good behavior of certain parameters when using Montgomery or Edwards curves in the setting of the elliptic curve method (ECM) for integer factorization. The ideas of the proofs help us to find new families of elliptic curves with good division properties which increase the success probability of ECM