O setor de telecomunicações tem papel essencial na vida das pessoas e na economia mundial, uma vez que este diminui as distâncias e liga qualquer parte do mundo em questão de segundos. No Brasil este mercado é dominado por poucas e grandes empresas que enfrentam o dinamismo da alta competitividade entre elas, e de outras variáveis de mercado como, por exemplo, a agência reguladora do setor, Agência Nacional de Telecomunicações - ANATEL. Este cenário faz com que as empresas do setor sejam constantemente impactadas pela emergência de estratégias, ou seja, estratégias que não foram previamente planejadas. A agilidade no alinhamento destas estratégias se faz essencial para o sucesso da execução das mesmas e instigou esta pesquisa que buscou entender como o alinhamento de estratégias emergentes é feito em uma operadora de telecomunicações. Baseado em um referencial teórico que aprofundou conceitos de estratégia, estratégia emergente e alinhamento estratégico, este estudo de caso realizado em uma operadora de telecomunicações, através da análise de entrevistas aprofundadas sobre a realidade da empresa detectou que quatro características bastante fortes são as bases para que o alinhamento estratégico aconteça nesta empresa: Ausência de processos estruturados, autonomia dos agentes, priorização da agilidade e pré-disposição ao risco. A descoberta destas características veio de encontro com os objetivos desta pesquisa, que além de investigar e analisar como o alinhamento de estratégias emergentes é feito em uma operadora de telecomunicações, considerando todas as particularidades do setor, também buscava aprofundar conhecimento sobre as práticas do mercado de telecomunicações no que tange o alinhamento de estratégias emergentes, identificar práticas deste mercado que possam contribuir com melhores práticas em outros mercados e averiguar elementos provenientes da experiência prática que possam contribuir com as teorias exploradas. Por fim, em nome do objetivo específico de apontar com base na teoria oportunidades de melhorias práticas, foram estudados quatro modelos teóricos de alinhamento estratégico, encontrando assim qual seria o que melhor para a realidade da empresa. / The telecommunications industry plays a key role in people\'s lives and in the world economy. It reduces distance and connects anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. In Brazil, this market is dominated by a few large companies that face the dynamism of high competitiveness between them, and the dynamism of other market variables as, for example, the sector\'s regulatory agency, the National Telecommunications Agency-ANATEL. This scenario ensures the companies within the telecommunications sector are constantly impacted by the emergence of strategies, i.e. strategies that were not planned in advance. The expeditious alignment of these strategies is essential to the success of their implementation and this fact encouraged this research to investigate and understand how the emerging strategies alignment is done in a telecommunications operator. Based on a theoretical framework that deepened on the concepts of strategy, emerging strategy and strategic alignment, this case study held in a telecommunications operator, through the analysis of in-depth interviews about the reality of the company, detected four strong characteristics that are the basis for strategic alignment to happen in this company: autonomy of agents, absence of structured processes, prioritization of expeditiousness, and predisposition to the risk. The discovery of these characteristics came to meet the objectives of this research. In addition to investigating and analyzing how the emerging strategies alignment is done in a telecommunications operator (considering all the particularities of the sector) this research also sought to deepen knowledge of the telecommunication market practices regarding the alignment of emerging strategies, identification of market practices that can contribute to best practices in other markets, and to find out elements from the practical experience that can contribute to the theories explored. Finally, on behalf of the specific goal that is to indicate based on theory, opportunities of practical improvement, four theoretical models of strategic alignment were studied, finding so which is the best for the company reality

O advento do sequenciamento de nova geração (NGS - Next Generation Sequencing) nos últimos anos proporcionou um aumento expressivo no número de projetos genômicos. De maneira simplificada, as máquinas sequenciadoras geram como resultado fragmentos de DNA que são utilizados por programas montadores de genoma. Esses programas tentam juntar os fragmentos de DNA de modo a obter a representação completa da sequência genômica (por exemplo um cromossomo) da espécie sendo sequenciada. Em alguns casos o processo de montagem pode ser executado com maior facilidade para organismos com genomas de tamanhos pequenos (por exemplo bactérias com genoma em torno de 5Mpb), através de pipelines que automatizam a maior parte da tarefa. Um cenário mais complicado surge quando a espécie possui genoma com grande comprimento (acima de 1Gpb) e elementos repetidos, como no caso de alguns eucariotos. Nesses casos o resultado da montagem é geralmente composto por milhares de fragmentos (chamados de contigs), uma ordem de magnitude muito superior ao número de cromossomos estimado para um organismo (comumente da ordem de dois dígitos), dando origem a uma montagem altamente fragmentada. Uma atividade comum nesses projetos é a comparação da montagem com a de outro genoma como forma de validação e também para identificação de regiões conservadas entre os organismos. Embora o problema de alinhamento par-a-par de genomas grandes seja bem contornado por abordagens existentes, o alinhamento múltiplo (AM) de genomas grandes em estado fragmentado ainda é uma tarefa de difícil resolução, por demandar alto custo computacional e grande quantidade de tempo. Este trabalho consiste em uma metologia para fazer alinhamento múltiplo de genomas grandes de eucariotos com montagens altamente fragmentadas. Nossa implementação, baseada em alinhamento estrela, se mostrou capaz de fazer AM de grupos de montagens com diversos níveis de fragmentação. O maior deles, um conjunto de 5 genomas de répteis, levou 14 horas de processamento para fornecer um mapa de regiões conservadas entre as espécies. O algoritmo foi implementado em um software que batizamos de FROG (FRagment Overlap multiple Genome alignment), de código aberto e disponível sob licença GPLv3. / The advent of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in recent years has led to an expressive increase in the number of genomic projects. In a simplified way, sequencing machines generate DNA fragments that are used by genome assembler software. These programs try to merge the DNA fragments to obtain the complete representation of the genomic sequence (for example a chromosome) of the species being sequenced. In some cases the assembling process can be performed more easily for organisms with small-sized genomes (e.g. bacteria with a genome length of approximately 5Mpb) through pipelines that automate most of the task. A trickier scenario arises when the species has a very large genome (above 1Gbp) and complex elements, as in the case of some eukaryotes. In those cases the result of the assembly is usually composed of thousands of fragments (called contigs), an order of magnitude much higher than the number of chromosomes estimated for an organism (usually in the order two digits), giving rise to a highly fragmented assembly. A common activity in these projects is the comparison of the assembly with that of another genome as a form of validation and also to identify common elements between organisms. Although the problem of pairwise alignment of large genomes is well circumvented by existing approaches, multiple alignment of large genomes with highly fragmented assemblies remains a difficult task due to its time and computational requirements. This work consists of a methodology for doing multiple alignment of large eukaryotic genomes with highly fragmented assemblies, a problem that few solutions are able to cope with. Our star alignment-based implementation, was able to accomplish a MSA of groups of assemblies with different levels of fragmentation. The largest of them, a set of 5 reptilian genomes where the B. jararaca assembly (800,000 contigs, N50 of 3.1Kbp) was used as anchor, took 14 hours of execution time to provide a map of conserved regions among the participating species. The algorithm was implemented in a software named FROG (FRagment Overlap multiple Genome alignment), available under the General Public License v3 (GPLv3) terms.

CoordenaÃÃo de AperfeiÃoamento de Pessoal de NÃvel Superior / O conceito de alinhamento vem ganhando forÃa visto o mercado competitivo em que as empresas entÃo inseridas, estas nÃo poderÃo mais desperdiÃar seus recursos com estratÃgias mal formuladas, processos que nÃo atendam Ãs necessidades dos clientes ou com pessoas que nÃo compreendam ou nÃo contribuam para a realizaÃÃo da estratÃgia da empresa. Nas empresas de construÃÃo civil esta realidade nÃo à diferente, a concorrÃncia tem se mostrado relevante. A justificativa para este trabalho se relaciona com a importÃncia da estratÃgia no contexto competitivo e com a dificuldade da sua operacionalizaÃÃo oriunda da complexidade do processo de formulaÃÃo e implementaÃÃo e à quantidade limitada de estudos sobre os temas: alinhamento estratÃgico e estratÃgia na construÃÃo civil. Este trabalho se classifica como exploratÃrio, visto que desenvolve estudos que dÃo uma visÃo geral do fato ou fenÃmeno estudado. A referida pesquisa consiste em analisar qual o alinhamento estratÃgico interno em construtoras a partir do desenvolvimento de um mÃtodo para analisar, medindo e comparando/visualizando o alinhamento estratÃgico em empresas construtoras, focando na estratÃgia competitiva e na estratÃgia de produÃÃo, destacando quais os critÃrios competitivos priorizados nas empresas. Realizaram-se estudos de casos, em trÃs construtoras da cidade de Fortaleza/CE. Analisaram-se as empresas a partir do mÃtodo desenvolvido, chegando ao grau de alinhamento em cada uma, possibilitando uma comparaÃÃo e melhor visualizaÃÃo dos resultados. Por fim, apresentam-se as principais conclusÃes do estudo, sobre o mÃtodo desenvolvido, e sugestÃes para pesquisas futuras, por exemplo, aplicar o modelo em outras empresas, com o intuito de melhorar a compreensÃo e colaborar com proposiÃÃes sobre o tema supracitado, assim como buscar explicar o porquà das diferentes visÃes entre os representantes dentro da mesma empresa e as reais possÃveis conseqÃÃncias destas distorÃÃes de prioridades e seus reflexos no desempenho da empresa.

O propósito desta pesquisa foi identificar como uma metodologia para a formulação da estratégia de presença de organizações na internet aborda os enfoques estratégicos e métodos analíticos necessários à compreensão e exploração das arquiteturas de negócios viabilizadas pela plataforma tecnológica da internet (PI). Através de revisão bibliográfica identificou-se que as principais possibilidades trazidas pela PI para as organizações estão relacionadas à facilitação da integração horizontal e vertical, propiciando a formação de redes estratégicas. Uma conseqüência direta é a oportunidade de geração de vantagem competitiva nas três funções das organizações: eficiência operacional, relacionamento com clientes e desenvolvimento de produtos. Para compreensão e exploração destas arquiteturas de negócios viabilizadas é conveniente adotar a perspectiva do modelo de negócios, subdividido nos públicos com os quais a organização mantém relacionamento. Esta unidade de análise congrega as diferentes visões presentes na literatura de estratégia a respeito da criação de valor. As quatro fontes de valor possibilitadas pela PI são: novidade, aprisionamento, complementaridade e eficiência. O estudo de caso da metodologia de Formulação de Estratégia de Presença, da Agência Click, descreveu a abordagem desta metodologia para os enfoques estratégicos e métodos analíticos identificados. / The objective of this research was to identify how a specific methodology of strategy formulation for the Internet addresses the Business Model concept. We see the Business Model concept as a basis for understanding and exploiting the value creation potential generated by the Internet technological platform (ITP). The main possibilities that the ITP offers organizations are related to the reduction of transaction and coordination costs, which facilitates the forming of strategic networks. In order to take advantage of the ITP , one should seek complementarity between the traditional activities of the organization and those based on the new platform, together with an in-depth revision of processes, searching for steps that may be optimized through the ITP. To understand and exploit the value creation potential, it is convenient to adopt the Business Model concept, analyzed from the point of view of each of the organization’s stakeholders. The Business Model as a unit of analysis integrates the different perspectives on value creation that can be found in the theory. The model suggests that the IPT value creation potential depends on four interdependent dimensions: novelty, lock-in, complementarities and efficiency. The case study of the Web Presence Strategy Formulation methodology, by AgenciaClick, an Internet development company in Brazil, describes how this methodology addresses the strategic concepts and analytical methods identified. The business model approach could cover some of the methodology’s gaps.

[pt] Presenciamos, atualmente, importantes mudanças no cenário competitivo das indústrias cimenteiras no Brasil, entre elas a falta de investimentos governamentais em infra-estrutura, o limitado poder aquisitivo da população, a crescente ameaça de novos entrantes, as preocupações e as oportunidades relacionadas às questões de meio-ambiente. Nesse contexto, utilizar sistemas de medição de desempenho adequados, que ajudem na gestão e no direcionamento da estratégia, permite estimular ações que impulsionem as transformações necessárias para um melhor desempenho da organização. O objetivo desta pesquisa é investigar se o sistema de medição de desempenho utilizado na Lafarge Brasil - empresa escolhida como foco nesta pesquisa - , mostra-se adequado à sua estratégia. As informações e os dados foram obtidos por meio de investigação documental e telematizada, levantamento de percepções com auxílio de questionários predominantemente estruturados e entrevistas, e foram tratados quantitativa e qualitativamente. As principais teorias sobre medição de desempenho e o modelo genérico integrativo de Macedo-Soares (2001b) compõem a fundamentação teórica da pesquisa, base para a análise e a interpretação dos dados coletados. A análise dos resultados mostrou que há um elevado grau de alinhamento entre o sistema de medição da empresa e a sua estratégia, ao identificar um grande número de fatores organizacionais que contribuem para a promoção deste alinhamento. Destacaremos ainda, na parte final do trabalho, as principais lições sobre a implementação e gestão de sistemas de medição que trouxe o estudo de caso na Lafarge Brasil. / [en] Currently, we have faced significant changes in the competitive arena of brazilian cement industry, from which we could highlight: lack of governmental investments on infrastructure, population economical restrictions, new entrants threats growth and concerns and opportunities related to environmental issues. In this way, the employment of suitable performance measurement systems, which can help on management and strategy focusing, can stimulate actions that will leverage the transformations needed to reach a better performance of the organization. The objective of this master´s thesis is to investigate if the performance measurement system adopted in Lafarge Brazil - company chosen for this research - is proper for its strategy. The information and the data were collected from primary and secondary sources, surveys and interviews with the company`s executives to capture their perceptions, which results were treated both by qualitative and quantitative analysis. The main theories related to performance measurement and the integrative generic model developed by Macedo-Soares (2001b) are the theoretical basis of this research, to analyze and to interpret the data collected. The results showed that there is a high alignment level between the company`s performance measurement system and its strategy as identify a large number of organizational factors that contribute to promote this alignment. We still highlight, in the final part of this work, the main lessons related to the implementation and management of the measurement systems which were brought by the case study of Lafarge Brazil.

Ontologies are a key technology for the Semantic Web. In different areas, a large number of ontologies have been developed so far by different people or organizations under the same domains and many of them contain overlapping information. In order to get more benefit from different ontologies having inter-related knowledge they have to be aligned or merged. A number of systems have been developed for aligning and merging ontologies and various alignment strategies are used in these systems. However, there is no system available which supports multiple alignment sessions for aligning large ontologies adequately. In this thesis work we propose a session-based framework for aligning and merging large ontologies. We have implemented two types of sessions, computation sessions to generate suggestions and validation sessions to validate these generated suggestions. Furthermore after categorizing suggestions into accepted and rejected ones, we generated partial reference alignment (PRA) that can be used to compute similarities between terms and to filter mapping suggestions. We have also proposed recommendation process integrated with computation and validation sessions in order to find out which matchers, and combinations are better to use for alignment process. Either computation and validation sessions may use the recommended settings or the user can select other matchers and combinations.

The ability to tackle NP-hard problems has been greatly extended by the introduction of Metaheuristics (see Blum & Roli (2003)) for a summary of most Metaheuristics, general problem-independent optimisation algorithms extending the hill-climbing local search approach to escape local minima. One of these algorithms is Iterated Local Search (ILS) (Lourenco et al., 2002; Stützle, 1999a, p. 25ff), a recent easy to implement but powerful algorithm with results comparable or superior to other state-of-the-art methods for many combinatorial optimisation problems, among them the Traveling Salesman (TSP) and Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). ILS iteratively samples local minima by modifying the current local minimum and restarting a local search porcedure on this modified solution. This thesis will show how ILS can be implemented for MSA. After that, ILS will be evaluated and compared to other MSA algorithms by BAliBASE (Thomson et al., 1999), a set of manually refined alignments used in most recent publications of algorithms and in at least two MSA algorithm surveys. The runtime-behaviour will be evaluated using runtime-distributions. The quality of alignments produced by ILS is at least as good as the best algorithms available and significantly superiour to previously published Metaheuristics for MSA, Tabu Search and Genetic Algorithm (SAGA). On the average, ILS performed best in five out of eight test cases, second for one test set and third for the remaining two. A drawback of all iterative methods for MSA is the long runtime needed to produce good alignments. ILS needs considerably less runtime than Tabu Search and SAGA, but can not compete with progressive or consistency based methods, e. g. ClustalW or T-COFFEE.

Målet med studien är att undersöka vilka konsekvenser tillväxt har på små- och mellanstora fö- retags ICT-system samt hur de bör gå till väga för att hantera de problem som uppstår. Genom en fallstudie har det framkommit att snabbt växande organisationer prioriterar vinstgi- vande processer. Allt för ofta bortprioriteras ICT-systemen och till följd av detta blir ett ineffek- tivt arbetssätt en stor kostnad. Denna fältstudie bevisar vår tes om prioritetshandlingar och ineffektivitet samt leder till en stra- tegisk plan för hur en organisation ska sammanlänka sitt aktivitetssystem med deras ICT-system med hjälp av gemensam inriktning för ICT- samt affärsstrategier.

Master of Science / Curriculum and Instruction / Lawrence C. Scharmann / In the current high-stakes assessment environment of NCLB and AYP, the type of assessment students are subject to is crucial. Good assessments make teaching to the test an effective, rather than deplorable, strategy that aligns learning objectives, classroom teaching, and student achievement. While science, this author’s content area, isn’t currently AYP mandated, it will be soon, and in the meantime, students are still required to take state and local assessments. This project seeks to effect change on a local level – specifically, with how the local CRT is written so that it can both reflect sound research-based assessment practice as well as an understanding of science as concept- and process-based rather than content- and fact-based.

Nanoscale, conductive wires fabricated from organic molecules have attracted considerable attention in recent years due to their anticipated applications in the next generation of optical and electronic devices. Such highly ordered 1D nanostructures could be made from a number of routes. One route of particular interest is to self-assemble the wires from biomolecules due to the wide range of assembly methods that can be adapted from nature. For example, biomolecules with aromatic motifs can be self-assembled so that good π-π stacking is achieved in the resultant nanostructure. An additional advantage of using biomolecules is that it enables the interface of the electronic materials with biological systems, which is important for many applications, including nerve cell communication and artificial photosynthesis. In this study, nanowires were prepared by the molecular self-assembly of oligopeptides that were coupled to aromatic components. In order to achieve charge transport though the nanowires, it was imperative that the aromatic components were arranged so that there was π-π stacking with very few structural defects. Therefore, enzymes were used to control the formation of the hydogelators which subsequently self-assembled to produce nanowire networks. Two main systems were studied in this thesis.In the first system, hydrogelators were produced from aromatic peptide amphiphiles via the enzymatic hydrolysis of the methyl ester of fluorenylmethoxycarbonyl (Fmoc)-di/tripeptides. These hydrogelators formed nanostructures due to π-π stacking between the Fmoc groups and H-bonding between the peptides. The nanostructures in turn produced macroscale gel networks. The nanostructures were analyzed by wide angle X-ray diffraction and fluorescence spectroscopy. A combination of Fourier transform infra-red (FTIR), Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Cryo-TEM, and Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) was used to characterize the networks. The charge transport properties of the dried networks were studied using impedance spectroscopy. Fmoc-L₃ was found to assemble into nanotubes whose walls consisted of 3 self-assembled layers and possessed inner and outer diameters of ~ 9 nm and ~ 18 nm, respectively. The Fmoc-L₃ networks were structurally stabile and were electronically conductive under a vacuum. The sheet resistance of the peptide networks increased with relative humidity due to the increasing ionic conductivity. The resistance of the networks was 0.1 MΩ/sq in air and 500 MΩ/sq in vacuum (pressure: 1.03 mbar) at room temperature. The networks had a band gap of between 1 to 4 eV as measured by UV-Vis spectroscopy and the temperature-impedance studies. Possible routes for aligning the Fmoc-L3 networks were studied in an attempt to improve their conductivity in one direction. In particular, the peptides were assembled under an electric field (0 to 3.75 kV/cm). Random networks were produced at low field strengths, whereas a degree of alignment was obtained at a field strength of 3.75 kV/cm. The conductivity of the aligned networks in the direction of alignment was a factor of three times higher than that of the random networks.The second system studied was Fmoc-dipeptide-OMe hydrogels produced by the enzymatic condensation of an Fmoc-amino acid and an amino acid ester. Preliminary results found that Fmoc-SF-OMe assembled into nanosheets, nanoribbons and spherulites, depending on the temperature at which self-assembly occurred. The Fmoc-XY-OMe films possessed an extremely high resistance (1012 Ω).