Drawing on the Innovative Moments Model during Career Construction Counseling to explain and foster client change

Career Construction Counseling (CCC) is a narrative intervention that supports individuals in the elaboration of narrative identity and career construction. The theory, research, and practice of this approach to career counseling has benefited from the Innovative Moments Model (IMM) to explain client change. Similar to CCC, the IMM is grounded on a narrative conception of human functioning, in which psychological difficulties arise from problematic self-narratives that constrain the meaning-making. Change takes place when clients challenge problematic self-narratives and construct new meanings that lead to new ways of behaving, thinking, or feeling. These novelties are termed innovative moments. The integration of IMM into the study of CCC has provided empirical evidence about the processes of client change throughout this intervention. Findings show that the transformation of a client’s self-narrative is associated with the aims of each session revealing a movement from a focus in structuring the past to an increased engagement in projecting the future. Moreover, results suggest the possibility of using IMs as process markers to guide counselors in facilitating client change during counseling sessions. The purpose of this chapter is to explain the contribution of IMM to CCC theory, research, and practice. We begin by presenting the Innovative Moments framework. Then we review CCC process research using the Innovative Moment’s framework. Finally, research implications for theory and practice of CCC are discussed

Estimation and dynamics of above ground biomass with very high resolution satellite images in Pinus pinaster stands

Biomass estimation is a tool for evaluating stands and forest dynamics. Traditional indirect methods use forest inventories and allometric functions at tree level to evaluate biomass at plot level, and an extrapolation method to assess an area. The goal of this study was the development of allometric functions for Pinus pinaster with crown horizontal projection derived from very high spatial resolution satellite images as an independent variable, as well as their application to the analysis of above ground biomass dynamics. The fitted functions show a good performance. The function used to estimate the above ground biomass per grid in 2004, 2007 and 2011 for the study area enable the evaluation of their temporal dynamics. From 2004 to 2007 it decreased in 90.5% of the study area, due to forest fires and cuts to control the pinewood nematode; from 2007 to 2011 increased in 45.6% and decreased in 51.6%, the latter corresponding to cuts to control the aforementioned disease. In 76.4% of the burnt areas, natural regeneration resulted in an increase of above ground biomass. The method's main advantages are the simultaneous evaluation of small or large areas and, when implemented in a GIS, it allows straightforward monitoring over a short period of time

System Dynamics Modeling of Humanitarian Relief Operations

Against the backdrop of over two hundred thousand people dead or missing and millions of people homeless after China’s massive earthquake and Myanmar devastating cyclone, forecasts estimate that natural and manmade disasters are likely to increase five-fold both in number and impact over the next 50 years. Hence, the need for disaster relief provided by humanitarian organizations during disasters should continue to increase. At the same time, humanitarian organizations face increased challenges scaling capacity, improving operational efficiency, reducing staff turnover, improving institutional learning, satisfying increasingly demanding donors, and operating in increasingly challenging environments, with poor or inexistent infrastructure, high demand uncertainty and little time to prepare and respond. To address such challenges, managers in humanitarian organizations must understand the complexity that characterizes humanitarian relief efforts to learn how to design and manage complex relief operations. Yet, learning in such complex and ever changing environments is difficult precisely because managers seldom confront many of the consequences of their most important decisions. Effective learning in such environments requires methods and tools that allow managers to capture important feedback processes, accumulations, delays, and nonlinear relationships, visualizing complex systems in terms of the structures and policies that create dynamics and regulate performance. The system dynamics approach provides managers with a set of tools that can help them learn in complex environments. These tools include causal mapping, which enables managers to think systemically and to represent the dynamic complexity in a system of interest, and simulation modeling, which permits managers to assess the consequences of interactions among variables, experience the long-term side effects of decisions, systematically explore new strategies, and develop understanding of complex systems

Smart city. O futuro já acontece

Águeda recebeu formalmente no passado mês de Março o Selo de SMART CITY assim como o prémio de inovação no que ao apoio á internacionalização das suas empresas diz respeito e ao empreendedorismo que sempre demostrou neste processo de desenvolvimento sustentável que já decorre no concelho á alguns anos. Mais do que uma SMART CITY, Águeda quer ser uma HUMAN SMART CITY onde a tecnologia é utilizada para servir as pessoas. Os pilares principais deste projeto assentam: • Governação • Mobilidade / Acessibilidades • Desenvolvimento Económico • Imagem de Marca • Ambiente / Sustentabilidade • Inovaçã

Elections, Fiscal Policy and Fiscal Illusion

This paper tests the joint hypotheses that policymakers engage in fiscal policy opportunism and that voters respond by rewarding that opportunism with higher vote margins. Furthermore, it investigates the impact of fiscal illusion on the previous two dimensions. Empirical results, obtained with a sample of 68 countries from 1960 to 2006, reveal that opportunistic measures of expenditures and revenues generate larger winning margins for the incumbent and that the opportunistic manipulation of fiscal policy instruments is larger when the current government is less likely to be reelected. Furthermore, fiscal illusion contributes to the entrenchment of incumbent policymakers in office and promotes opportunistic behaviour.fiscal policy, voting, opportunism, fiscal illusion

Plant Health and the Science of Pests and Diseases

The health/disease duality has developed alongside human history either as a struggle for survival or as a challenge of the human being to effectively get to know himself. To speak about pests and diseases of plants may not be as exciting as when speaking of human beings; however, entomology and phytopathology hold methodological similarities to conventional medicine, which, thus, allow for correlations among them. After all, plant protection and human medical science are based under common epistemological principles of modern scientific thought. Hence, the goal of this essay is to disclose certain disagreements of the disciplines of phytopathology and entomology with agroecological based science; yet, giving way to a discussion according to ecological principles. This is a theoretical essay, based on bibliographical research and on the direct experience of the authors with family farmers in the South of Brazil during the last 20 years

When Cost-Efficient Technologies Meet Politics: A Case Study of Radical Wireless Network Implementation

Cost efficiency has been a dominant perspective in the traditional IT literature. However, in complex technology and business environment, the widely recognized cost efficient assumption of information technology has been increasingly challenged. Drawing from a case study of wireless network implementation situated in a politically sensitive workplace, this paper provided practice insights for IT managers in today’s networked economy. More specifically, stories experienced in the case study illustrated that despite well-calculated cost efficiency of wireless network infrastructure, the radical implementation process in the case organization encountered enormous challenges and opposition due to the fact that administrators failed to consider various stakeholders’ positions and interests. Eventually, the implementation objectives and outcome were considerably undermined. Implications from this empirical case research reemphasized the significance of understanding political forces situated in any business environment where different stakeholders hold conflicting interests. Lessons learned from the case story further encouraged IT managers and policy makers to better strategize emerging information technology in general and wireless networks in particular as the whole global society and business environment are increasingly facing an emerging wireless world

Dynamic Resource Management in Clouds: A Probabilistic Approach

Dynamic resource management has become an active area of research in the Cloud Computing paradigm. Cost of resources varies significantly depending on configuration for using them. Hence efficient management of resources is of prime interest to both Cloud Providers and Cloud Users. In this work we suggest a probabilistic resource provisioning approach that can be exploited as the input of a dynamic resource management scheme. Using a Video on Demand use case to justify our claims, we propose an analytical model inspired from standard models developed for epidemiology spreading, to represent sudden and intense workload variations. We show that the resulting model verifies a Large Deviation Principle that statistically characterizes extreme rare events, such as the ones produced by "buzz/flash crowd effects" that may cause workload overflow in the VoD context. This analysis provides valuable insight on expectable abnormal behaviors of systems. We exploit the information obtained using the Large Deviation Principle for the proposed Video on Demand use-case for defining policies (Service Level Agreements). We believe these policies for elastic resource provisioning and usage may be of some interest to all stakeholders in the emerging context of cloud networkingComment: IEICE Transactions on Communications (2012). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1209.515

Behavioral analyses of retailers’ ordering decisions

The main objective I pursue in this thesis is to better understand how different factors may independently and in combination influence retailers' ordering decisions under different supply chain structures (single agent and multi agent), different demand uncertainty (deterministic and stochastic), and different interaction among retailers (no interaction, competition and cooperation). I developed three different studies where I build on different formal management model and then run multiple behavioral studies to better understand subjects’ behavior. The first study analyzes order amplification in a single-supplier single-retailer supply chain. I used a behavioral experiment to test retailers’ orders under different ordering delays and different times to build supplier’s capacity. Results provide (i) a better understanding of the endogenous dynamics leading to retailers’ ordering amplification, and (ii) a description of subjects’ biases and deviation from optimal trajectories; despite subjects have full information about the system structure. The second study analyzes how order amplification can also take place when there is fierce retailer competition and limited supplier capacity. I study how different factors (different time to build supplier capacity, different levels of competition among retailers, different magnitudes of supply shortage and different allocation mechanisms) may independently and in combination influence retailers’ order in a system with two retailers under supply competition. Results show that (i) the bullwhip effect persists even when subjects do not have incentives to deviate, (ii) subjects amplify their orders in an attempt to build an unnecessary safety stock to respond to potential deviations from the other retailers, and (iii) retailers’ underperformance varies with the allocation mechanism used by the supplier. In the last study, I analyze retailers’ orders in a system where there is uncertainty in the final customer demand. I experimentally explore the effect of transshipments among retailers in a single-supplier multi-retailer supply chain. Specifically, I explore retailers’ orders under different profit and communication conditions. In addition, I integrate analytical and behavioral models to improve supply chain performance. Results show that (i) the persistence of common biases in a newsvendor problem (pull-to-center, demand chasing, loss aversion, psychological disutility), (ii) communication could improve coordination and may reduce demand chasing behavior, (iii) supply chain performance increases with the use of behavioral strategies embedded within a traditional optimization model, and (iv) dynamic heuristics improve overall coordination, outperforming a simple Nash Equilibrium strategy