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This study aims to perform a benefit segmentation and then a classification of visitors that travel to the Rocha Department in Uruguay from the capital city of Montevideo during the summer months.

A convenience sample was obtained with an online survey. A total of 290 cases were usable for subsequent data analysis. The following statistical techniques were used: hierarchical cluster analysis, K-means cluster analysis, machine learning, support vector machines, random forest and logistic regression.

Visitors that travel to the Rocha Department from Montevideo can be classified into four distinct clusters. Clusters are labelled as “entertainment seekers”, “Rocha followers”, “relax and activities seekers” and “active tourists”. The support vector machine model achieved the best classification results.

Implications for destination marketers who cater to young visitors are discussed. Destination marketers should determine an optimal level of resource allocation and destination management activities that compare both present costs and discounted potential future income of the different target markets. Surveying non-residents was not possible. Future work should sample tourists from abroad.

The combination of market segmentation of Rocha Department’s visitors from the city of Montevideo and classification of sampled individuals training various machine learning classifiers would allow Rocha’s destination marketers determine the belonging of an unsampled individual into one of the already obtained four clusters, enhancing marketing promotion for targeted offers.

This paper aims to analyse the impact of clusters on development and growth at the firm and regional level in Latin America (LA). The past 20 years have witnessed an acceleration of cluster initiatives, assuming their positive impact on firm performance and regional development. However, theoretical development and empirical meta-studies in emerging countries to validate this assumed relationship are scarce.

This paper reviews empirical evidence from a population of 123 studies and a sample of 45 empirical studies including 216 clusters in LA.

It concludes that clusters contribute to both development and growth at the firm- and regional-level contingent to factors such as cluster stage of development, collective efficiency, the pattern of governance of the value chain and the sector in which the firm operates; however, clusters are also a potential source of socio-economic divides.

Therefore, these results qualify the conclusions of studies of clusters in developed countries (Porter, 2003; Delgado et al., 2010).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the introduction of school medical inspection (SMI) in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Brazil) during the 1910s, in a process aligned with the international debate that, since the late nineteenth century, sustained the need of services that focused on the sanitary inspection of schools and their students. It analyzes the purposes guiding the creation of these services and their connections to the spheres of public health and education, highlighting the role taken by the concerns about issues such as the control of infectious diseases, particularly tuberculosis.

The study consists of a historical analysis using as sources the legislation and documents produced by the SMI. The documents are examined in correlation with the positions defended at international conferences held at the period.

The study evidences the intricacies of the introduction of SMI services in the Brazilian states that were pioneers in this area. It examines their relations to guidelines established in international forums, which certainly played an important role in the Brazilian efforts. It also allowed to highlight the relations between efforts to create medical inspections in school and those aiming at fighting infectious diseases.

The paper contributes to a better comprehension of the efforts regarding social hygiene and particularly the hygiene of schools and their students in a period in which the state takes greater responsibilities for its population.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the pathological, biochemical and redox state parameters of liver tissue in Wistar rats treated from birth to adulthood (119 days) with cafeteria diet.

During the lactation, 6 liters of Wistar rats (dam + 8 pups each) were fed one of two diets: control (CTRL; n = 3) or cafeteria (CAF; n = 3) diets and water ad libitum. After weaning, the males were placed in individual cages, receiving the same diet offered to their respective dams (CTRL or CAF; n = 18) until adulthood. The following parameters were evaluated: absolute and relative liver weight; blood, liver and feces biochemistry; liver histology; and redox state of the liver.

When assessing the relative and absolute organ weight, no significant differences were found between the groups. The Cafeteria group exhibited higher values of serum LDL-c (p = 0.008), VLDL-c (p = 0.03) and triglycerides (p = 0.01), as well as several micro and macrovacuoles of fat accumulation, higher hepatic lipid (p = 0.03) and cholesterol (p = 0.0001) levels regarding Control group. Cafeteria group showed greater expression of glutathione-s-transferase (p = 0.03) and superoxide dismutase (p = 0.005) enzymes compared to the control group. In the case of the markers of oxidative stress, there was no difference between the groups.

A simple and standardized cafeteria diet caused an accumulation of fatty acids in liver tissue, inducing a state of hepatic steatosis besides an increased expression of antioxidant enzymes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of export barriers at two different points in time, 1995 (t ₀) and 2010 (t ₁), respectively. Using “confidence” as a surrogate for affect, the study proposes an inverse relationship between affect and export barrier intensity with the influence of export barriers increasing as exporter confidence subsides.

The study draws two random probabilistic samples (1995/2010) of New Zealand’s SME exporters, from the same working population, using an identical survey instrument. Preliminary analysis combines exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis techniques. The research proposition is tested using binary logistic regression.

The results found that the influence of export barriers changes substantially across time. There was support for the proposition in that the 2010 sample of exporters were two to nine times more likely to consider export barriers influential than the 1995 group. Such evidence was particularly strong in the context of logistics and distribution factors, internal resource constraints, trade-related barriers, home market factors and currency and payments obstacles.

This research suggests managerial evaluation of the prevailing business atmosphere, as captured by exporter’s confidence, can influence perception of export barriers. Specifically, barriers tend to be evaluated as influential when there is a sense of pessimism within the export sector. Thus over time export barrier influence can be traced to the manager’s evaluation of export prospects as opposed to the frequently researched organizational and internationalization variables.

This is the first study to use theory to predict and empirically test the change in export barrier influence across time. While the majority of export barrier research adopts the cognitive or “objective-verifiable” view, the study supports the contention that export barrier influence can also be understood in the context of the emotive or “subjective-moot” perspective. Additionally, export managers should adopt long-term orientation towards exports while policymakers are encouraged (contrary to mainstream research) to move from targeted export support programs to inclusive or mass market approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to present a programming by demonstration (PbD) system based on 3D stereoscopic vision and inertial sensing that provides a cost-effective pose tracking system, even during error-prone situations, such as camera occlusions.

The proposed PbD system is based on the 6D Mimic innovative solution, whose six degrees of freedom marker hardware had to be revised and restructured to accommodate an IMU sensor. Additionally, a new software pipeline was designed to include this new sensing device, seeking the improvement of the overall system’s robustness in stereoscopic vision occlusion situations.

The IMU component and the new software pipeline allow the 6D Mimic system to successfully maintain the pose tracking when the main tracking tool, i.e. the stereoscopic vision, fails. Therefore, the system improves in terms of reliability, robustness, and accuracy which were verified by real experiments.

Based on this proposal, the 6D Mimic system reaches a reliable and low-cost PbD methodology. Therefore, the robot can accurately replicate, on an industrial scale, the artisan level performance of highly skilled shop-floor operators.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the sensor fusion between stereoscopic images and IMU applied to robot PbD is a novel approach. The system is entirely designed aiming to reduce costs and taking advantage of an offline processing step for data analysis, filtering and fusion, enhancing the reliability of the PbD system.

The purpose of the study was twofold: to investigate the correlation between a sample of personal psychological and demographic factors and resistance to phishing; and to investigate if national culture moderates the strength of these correlations.

To measure potential determinants, a survey was distributed to 2,099 employees of nine organizations in Sweden, USA and India. Then, the authors conducted unannounced phishing exercises, in which a phishing attack targeted the same sample.

Intention to resist social engineering, general information security awareness, formal IS training and computer experience were identified to have a positive significant correlation to phishing resilience. Furthermore, the results showed that the correlation between phishing determinants and employees’ observed that phishing behavior differs between Swedish, US and Indian employees in 6 out of 15 cases.

The identified determinants had, even though not strong, a significant positive correlation. This suggests that more work needs to be done to more fully understand determinants of phishing. The study assumes that culture effects apply to all individuals in a nation. However, differences based on cultures might exist based on firm characteristics within a country. The Swedish sample is dominating, while only 40 responses from Indian employees were collected. This unequal size of samples suggests that conclusions based on the results from the cultural analysis should be drawn cautiously. A natural continuation of the research is therefore to further explore the generalizability of the findings by collecting data from other nations with similar cultures as Sweden, USA and India.

Using direct observations of employees’ security behaviors has rarely been used in previous research. Furthermore, analyzing potential differences in theoretical models based on national culture is an understudied topic in the behavioral information security field. This paper addresses both these issues.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the increase in sensitivity of a single risperidone administration in relation to energy intake of Wistar rats treated with cafeteria diet from birth to adulthood (119 days).

During the lactation period, six litters of Wistar rats (dam + 8 pups each litter) were fed one of the following two diets: Control (n = 3) or Cafeteria (n = 3) diets and water ad libitum. After weaning, the males were placed in individual cages, receiving the same diet offered to their respective dams (Control = 18; or Cafeteria = 18) until adulthood (119 postnatal days). The following parameters were evaluated: food and energy intake; macronutrient intake; weight gain; adipose tissue relative weight; sucrose preference; food intake after an administration of risperidone (0.1 mg/kg body weight).

The Cafeteria group showed a higher energy intake in relation to the Control group (p < 0.001). The consumption of energy beyond the individual needs can be understood as a hyperphagic condition. Also, the Cafeteria group reported greater weight gain (p = 0.048) and accumulation of adipose tissue (p < 0.001) with respect to the Control group. These results indicate that the cafeteria diet generated obesity in animals. The Cafeteria group showed reduced sucrose preference (p = 0.031), which is associated with the development of anhedonia-like behavior. In the food intake test, risperidone showed a greater sensitivity in Cafeteria animals, promoting a decrease in their energy intake in relation to the Control group that received risperidone (p = 0.040).

The cafeteria diet promoted hyperphagia, anhedonia-like behavior and obesity in animals. Acute risperidone administration showed greater sensitivity in the Cafeteria group, with a decrease in energy intake. The reported effects may be related to a downregulation of the dopaminergic system in the NAc region.

Since proposed by Darwin, evolution is considered to be dependent on a source of genetic variability that must be constrained by environmental conditions in order to generate stable (adapted) phenotypes. Several sources and causes of this variability have been proposed so far. This paper aims to posit that ambiguity of fuzzy grammars is the main source of genetic variability on which natural selection operates.

Formal grammars (FG) were proposed as the tool to deal with human and artificial languages. Fuzzy formal grammars (FFGs) are the extension of the formalism in the Theory of Fuzzy Logic and are ambiguous grammars. Here, the ambiguity of the ordered set of chemical interactions – the so‐called signal transduction pathways (stp), linking membranes events to DNA reading and protein synthesis – is assumed as an inner source of variability that must be constrained by environmental conditions. Fuzzy formal languages (FFL) theory is used to mathematically formalize the biology concept of stp.

The genome variability is the result of the constraints imposed by the environment on the grammar intrinsic ambiguity.

The formalism of this model provides a new way to analyze and interpret the findings of the different genome sequencing projects.

The theoretical framework developed here provides a new perspective of understanding the code of life and evolution.

In smart cities pervasive systems are deployed by enterprises and stakeholders in municipalities to provide digital services to citizens. But cities are faced with the challenge of achieving system pluggability, mainly service integration due to numerous actors and systems needed for smart urban transformation. Hence, there is need to employ a comprehensive and holistic approach to help achieve service integration of pervasive platforms. Therefore, this study presents an Enterprise Architecture Framework (EAF) to support smart urban transformation.

In this study the design science research methodology is adopted based on a multi-case studies of two organizations and data is collected using semi-structured interview from an organizations and municipality in Norway to validate how service integration can be achieved by the developed EAF to address pluggability challenges faced in urban environment.

Findings suggest that the presented EAF provides the structure to manage changes and maintain urban transformation and aims to align the business with the underlying information systems from the perspective of the stakeholders. Additionally, findings from the case studies modelled in ArchiMate language depict how service integration of different pervasive platforms provide digital services for smart urban transformation.

This research only employed semi-structured interviews to validate service integration of digital platforms, other identified dimensions of pluggability were not fully addressed in this study.

Findings from the case studies provides insights on how pervasive platforms can be integrated to achieve a pluggable digital service from different stakeholders and data sources in practice. The developed EAF presented in this study provide a model that supports collection and exchange of data from different data sources in smart urban environment to enable the provision and consumption of digital services.

The developed EAF aids system pluggability of actors and systems in providing digital service such as smart urban transformation that contributes to sustainable use of electric mobility in cities.

As cities increasingly deploy pervasive platforms to support urban innovation, researchers are seeking to explore how these platforms shape urban transformation. Presently, prior studies do not offer important insights into pervasive platform management from urban perspective. Against this backdrop, this study employs the information systems perspective of digital platforms literature roots in software development and physical product development to depict how the EAF can be employed to describe specific cases that integrate different pervasive platforms deployed by different stakeholders communicating to co-create collective digital services to citizens.