FutureBOX.TV

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and EconomicsThis project describes the business plan about the software solution FutureBOX.TV. This is a software that solution enables users to broadcast, manage and control (rich) media content globally on the web and/or over a network of digital signs. The Portuguese software company Viatecla is planning to launch this product initially in the Portuguese tourism sector with the focus on Travel agencies. This plan serves as a basis for a discussion

Niche differentiation in nitrogen metabolism among methanotrophs within an operational taxonomic unit

Background: The currently accepted thesis on nitrogenous fertilizer additions on methane oxidation activity assumes niche partitioning among methanotrophic species, with activity responses to changes in nitrogen content being dependent on the in situ methanotrophic community structure Unfortunately, widely applied tools for microbial community assessment only have a limited phylogenetic resolution mostly restricted to genus level diversity, and not to species level as often mistakenly assumed. As a consequence, intragenus or intraspecies metabolic versatility in nitrogen metabolism was never evaluated nor considered among methanotrophic bacteria as a source of differential responses of methane oxidation to nitrogen amendments. Results: We demonstrated that fourteen genotypically different Methylomonas strains, thus distinct below the level at which most techniques assign operational taxonomic units (OTU), show a versatile physiology in their nitrogen metabolism. Differential responses, even among strains with identical 16S rRNA or pmoA gene sequences, were observed for production of nitrite and nitrous oxide from nitrate or ammonium, nitrogen fixation and tolerance to high levels of ammonium, nitrate, and hydroxylamine. Overall, reduction of nitrate to nitrite, nitrogen fixation, higher tolerance to ammonium than nitrate and tolerance and assimilation of nitrite were general features. Conclusions: Differential responses among closely related methanotrophic strains to overcome inhibition and toxicity from high nitrogen loads and assimilation of various nitrogen sources yield competitive fitness advantages to individual methane-oxidizing bacteria. Our observations proved that community structure at the deepest phylogenetic resolution potentially influences in situ functioning

Social Stability and Extended Social Balance - Quantifying the Role of Inactive Links in Social Networks

Structural balance in social network theory starts from signed networks with active relationships (friendly or hostile) to establish a hierarchy between four different types of triadic relationships. The lack of an active link also provides information about the network. To exploit the information that remains uncovered by structural balance, we introduce the inactive relationship that accounts for both neutral and nonexistent ties between two agents. This addition results in ten types of triads, with the advantage that the network analysis can be done with complete networks. To each type of triadic relationship, we assign an energy that is a measure for its average occupation probability. Finite temperatures account for a persistent form of disorder in the formation of the triadic relationships. We propose a Hamiltonian with three interaction terms and a chemical potential (capturing the cost of edge activation) as an underlying model for the triadic energy levels. Our model is suitable for empirical analysis of political networks and allows to uncover generative mechanisms. It is tested on an extended data set for the standings between two classes of alliances in a massively multi-player on-line game (MMOG) and on real-world data for the relationships between countries during the Cold War era. We find emergent properties in the triadic relationships between the nodes in a political network. For example, we observe a persistent hierarchy between the ten triadic energy levels across time and networks. In addition, the analysis reveals consistency in the extracted model parameters and a universal data collapse of a derived combination of global properties of the networks. We illustrate that the model has predictive power for the transition probabilities between the different triadic states.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figure

The monetary value of informal care: obtaining pure time valuations using a Discrete Choice Experiment

Background Interventions in health care often not only have an efect on patients, but also on their informal caregivers. Caregiving can have a profound impact on the health and wellbeing of carers. Ignoring these spillovers in economic evaluations risks labelling interventions mistakenly as cost-efective, at the expense of informal caregivers. Objective This paper investigates willingness-to-accept (WTA) values for an hour of informal care, corrected for positive and negative impacts of informal care, to facilitate the inclusion of informal care hours on the cost side of economic evaluations without double-counting spillover efects. Methods A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted among a representative sample of the adult population in the Netherlands (n=552) in September 2011. An experimental design minimizing the D-error was used to construct choice sets with two unlabelled alternatives with the attributes ‘hours caregiving’, ‘monetary compensation for caregiving’ and seven impacts of caregiving. To operationalize the random utility model, we used a panel mixed multinomial logit (MMNL) parameter model. For calculation of WTA, we used both population-level parameters and individual-level parameters. Results The mean WTA for an additional hour of informal care, corrected for positive and negative impacts of informal care, was €14.57. The signs of the coefcients were all in the expected directions. Conclusions This study reports a preference-based monetary value for informal care, corrected for other impacts. This valuation facilitates the inclusion of informal care hours on the cost side in economic evaluations without double-counting any spillover efects included on the efects side

The impact of functional and social value on the price of goods

According to hedonic pricing theory (HPT) market forces operate on individual characteristics of a good, and the price of a product is the aggregate of the price across those characteristics. The relationship between price and characteristics remains poorly understood because characteristic qualities are hard to quantify, people have varying levels of information about characteristics, and people have heterogeneous preferences over characteristics. By analyzing data from a large, market-driven virtual world we are able to test HPT, while largely avoiding these pitfalls. We find that a linear model with functional characteristics predicts the prices poorly, but a log-linear model performs quite well. Adding social characteristics to this log-linear model improves the predictions substantially. This work strongly supports HPT and demonstrates a "rational" calculus including social value