Este trabalho insere-se no âmbito do saneamento básico e da tendência relativamente nova de valoração da proteção e dos recursos ambientais. Destaca a atual problemática ambiental e os problemas específicos do saneamento básico, seu entendimento e providências sugeridas para sua minimização. Através de questionário, levantou-se e, com análise multivariada, investigou-se a percepção pública sobre as condições, os sentimentos e as participações públicas relativas aos serviços de água, esgotos, lixo, drenagem e arborização de Fernandópolis, SP. Como resultado, constatou-se que, a partir do serviço de água, suas situações e sentimentos decrescem, sucessivamente, para os serviços de esgotos, limpeza pública, drenagem e arborização. Em todos eles, a participação popular, assim como a ocorrência de campanhas que poderiam potencializá-la além de potencializar os demais aspectos questionados, não eram as desejáveis. Do cotejo dos resultados obtidos com princípios de sustentabilidade concluiu-se que, em diferentes níveis, todos os serviços avaliados não se mostraram sustentáveis. Finalizando, sugere-se que a valoração dos serviços de saneamento básico e recursos ambientais urbanos podem contribuir, mutuamente, para realizar seus respectivos potenciais de participação popular, melhorar suas situações e sentimentos públicos que despertam além de contribuir para a inserção socioeconômica nos problemas de saneamento urbano, de forma a torná-los, e ao ambiente urbano, sustentados. / This work encompasses basic sanitation and the relatively recent trend of valuating the environmental protection and the environmental resources. It points out current environmental issues and the specific problems of basic sanitation considering how they have been dealt with and the suggestions for minimizing them. Through a questionnaire, it was possible not only to analyze the public view on the sanitation conditions and people reactions to them, but also their participation in the as well as in the essential services such as water, sewers, garbage and drainage in the city of Fernandópolis, SP. It was founded that the respondents answered more positively to the water service and less favorably to sewer, garbage collection, drainage, and arborization, successively. It was also suggested that public participation was not a prevailing public view, nor were public service campaigns; although those could improve the essential services assessed. Concerning sustainability, it can be included that generally all the evaluated services proved not to be sustainable. Accordingly, it indicates that valuating the basic sanitation services and the environmental resources can contribute to their mutual progress with greater public participation to improve the services and consequently their opinions about them contributing for their socio-economic insertion by taking part in the plans to handle the urban sanitation matters to make them and the urban environment sustainable development.

Diversos empresários e órgãos de classe procuram identificar oportunidades no desenvolvimento potencial dos setores naval e offshore e no fornecimento de conteúdo local para essas indústrias. Também as instituições governamentais e privadas interessadas no fomento à indústria brasileira procuram formas de conferir competitividade à indústria alvo de suas políticas. Este trabalho desenvolve de forma preliminar uma ferramenta suportada pela teoria da Visão Baseada em Recursos (VBR), que visa identificar a similaridade entre os recursos necessários para produzir uma série de equipamentos e as competências detidas pela firma. Além da identificação da similaridade, que permite priorizar a escolha dos equipamentos que podem ser desenvolvidos pela firma interessada em atuar no mercado naval, a ferramenta permite a identificação de lacunas tecnológicas e traz à baila importantes discussões sobre a obtenção de competências externamente à firma. / Several entrepreneurs and unions seek to identify potential development opportunities in marine and offshore industries, aiming to provide local content for these industries. Also the government and private institutions interested in promoting the Brazilian industry endeavor ways to give competition to the shipbuilding industry. This study develops a preliminary tool supported by the theory of Resource-Based View (RBV), which aims to identify the similarity between the resources needed to produce a series of equipment and the capabilities held by the firm. Besides the identification of similarity, which helps on the choice of equipment to be developed by the firm, the tool allows the identification of technology gaps and brings up important discussions about getting capabilities outside the firm boundaries.

A presente pesquisa investiga como os elementos visuais ao dispor dos cineastas podem contribuir para a representação de estados alterados de percepção no cinema, de modo a ampliar a discussão sobre a expressividade do trabalho de direção de fotografia. Por meio da análise e interpretação de três filmes brasileiros que apresentam personagens fora de si e construções visuais contundentes - Estorvo (2000), de Ruy Guerra, Filme de Amor (2003), de Júlio Bressane e A Concepção (2005), de José Eduardo Belmonte -, a pesquisa discute de que maneira as características da imagem podem contribuir para a criação de pontos de vista, atmosferas e sentidos, que permitem a apreensão do filme para além de sua compreensão intelectual. Partindo do reconhecimento da ligação entre narrador e personagens, a análise se volta à força expressiva das imagens usadas ao longo dos filmes, tomando como referência reflexões sobre o expressionismo na pintura e no cinema. Essa discussão serve de base para a identificação de um imaginário sobre os estados alterados de percepção e suas relações com a sociedade presente na cinematografia brasileira dos anos 2000. / The present research investigates how the visual elements available to the filmmakers can contribute to the representation of altered states of perception in the cinema, in order to broaden the discussion about the expressiveness of the cinematography work. Through the analysis and interpretation of three Brazilian films that present characters out of their minds and rich visual constructions - Estorvo (2000), by Ruy Guerra, Filme de Amor (2003), by Júlio Bressane and A Concepção (2005), by José Eduardo Belmonte -, the research discusses how the characteristics of image can contribute to the creation of points of view, moods and senses, which in turn make possible the apprehension of the film beyond its intellectual understanding. Acknowledging the connection between narrator and characters, the analysis focus on the expressive force of the images used throughout the films, taking as reference reflections on Expressionism in painting and in cinema. This discussion serves as basis for the identification of a position regarding altered states of perception and their relations with society in Brazilian cinematography of the 2000s.

A presente dissertação tem como objetivo investigar a sedimentação sócio-histórica do romance de estreia de Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), a partir de seu foco narrativo. Ao atentar à fortuna crítica da obra, em especial às resenhas que seguiram a publicação do romance e às críticas materialista e feminista, distinguem-se duas tendências, dois modos de entender Jane Eyre. Por meio da análise de trechos do romance, visa-se ilustrar como essas duas vias de leitura são possíveis por conta da posição ambígua da narradora-personagem dentro da sociedade vitoriana. Expandindo o conceito de Terry Eagleton do in between, argumenta-se que, por estar sempre em uma posição entre as classes alta e baixa e por desejar inserção, Jane relata e denuncia as violências que permeiam a sociedade vitoriana e, ao mesmo tempo, incorpora o discurso dominante, mesmo quando esse vai contra ela mesma. Entende-se, assim, que o romance retrata a situação contraditória da classe média e o impacto de viver nessa posição na própria consciência do indivíduo, isto é, na sua visão de si e do mundo, como observado na voz da narradora de Jane Eyre. / The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the social and historical sedimentation of Charlotte Brontës 1847 debut novel, Jane Eyre, by exploring its point of view. Drawing from the novels literary criticism, especially from the reviews that followed its publication and from the Feminist and Marxist criticism, two different ways of understanding Jane Eyre are distinguished. The close reading of excerpts from Charlotte Brontës work aims at highlighting that these two readings are possible due to the narrators ambiguous position in the Victorian social structure. By expanding Terry Eagletons concept of the in between, it is discussed that, since Jane is from the very beginning of the novel in a position between the upper and lower classes and she longs for inclusion, she accounts on and denounces the violence that permeated the Victorian society, just as, at the same time, she incorporates the dominant discourse even when it speaks against herself. Thus, it is understood that the novel portrays the contradictory situation of the petty bourgeoisie and the impact of being in such a position on the individuals consciousness, as it is seen in Jane Eyres narrators voice.

In the last decade, the number of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activities by emerging market firms has rapidly increased to exploit growing markets at home and abroad. In order to be successful in their M&A goals, these firms need to develop a specific M&A capability and manage post-M&A processes effectively. Drawing on the dynamic capabilities view, I develop a theoretical framework for emerging market acquirers that outlines the development of the acquisition capability mechanisms. I first examine the influence of prior acquisition experience on acquisition performance. I then go on to study the integration capability of emerging market firms and examine the effect of post-M&A integration strategies on the performance of acquisitions by emerging market firms. The overall results indicate that a firm‘s focal acquisition performance positively relates to prior acquisition experience that is similar to the focal acquisition. Moreover, post-M&A integration strategies vary depending on the geographical similarity of the focal acquisition. Replacing the target‘s top manager is a particularly important determinant of acquisition performance in domestic M&A. Finally, in this research, I also extend the organisational learning view and develop a multi-level analysis that examines the role of business groups alongside firm-level learning from acquisitions. The usual focus in emerging market studies is on the big emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). I focus instead on the country case of Turkey, one of the second tier of ―biggish‖ growing economies of ―MIST‖ (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey). The empirical results are based on a unique hand-collected dataset of acquisitions in Turkey culled from publicly available data. The final dataset consists of 279 acquisitions between 1998 and 2011.

This research investigates the relationship between supplier capabilities, inter-firm governance and buyer-supplier collaboration. The research focuses on three functional capabilities (Research and Development (R&D), Production and Support services capability), two governance mechanisms (Contractual and Relational governance) and three types of buyer-supplier collaboration (Information sharing, Collaborative product/service development and Collaborative problem solving). A theoretical framework is developed which first examines the multiple mediation effect of contractual and relational governance on the relationship between capability and collaboration type, and second, explores the relative strength of the indirect effect through contractual and relational governance. Survey based research methodology is used to empirically test the hypotheses in this research. Data are collected from a total of 120 SMEs in the UK aerospace industry. Bootstrapping based techniques are used to analyse the data and to examine the proposed relationship between capability, governance and collaboration. The empirical findings indicate that although both contractual and relational governance are important in order to link the supplier capability with collaboration, the individual effect of contractual and relational governance varies in different combinations of capabilities and collaboration types. The potential contribution of this research is twofold: first, in terms of academic contribution, this study combines the arguments of Resource Based View and Transaction Cost Economics to provide a holistic view in explaining the interrelation between capability, governance and buyer-supplier collaboration; Second, in terms of practical contribution, this study improves the understanding of practitioners in both buying and supplying firm regarding the alignment of interfirm exchange processes with capabilities to achieve better performance in collaboration.

This thesis takes a corporate political strategy perspective of antidumping and countervailing duty cases to understand why some firms are more successful at the prosecution of these trade remedy measures. Trade remedy measures are long standing tools of US trade policy and their use has continued to grow globally amongst member countries of the World Trade Organisation. Between 1980 and 2007 a total of 1606 of these trade remedy cases were investigated by the Department of Commerce and International Trade Commission, an average of 41 antidumping and 17 countervailing duty cases a year, with a value of around US$ 63 billion or 0.3% of all US imports. Thirty-seven percent of the cases by number and 54% by value resulted in duties being imposed on the subject imports. This study uses archival material for five recent trade remedy investigations and forty-five semistructured interviews with business interests, trade attorneys and economic consultants that have experience of prosecuting these cases to understand why some firms may be more successful than others at achieving their preferred policy outcome. The imposition of duties is found to be only the simplest measure of success for US firms that file a case and does not capture the range of potential outcomes for foreign firms that face the duties. Successful prosecution of a trade case has been found to be firm specific, as the DOC determination of individual firm duty rates significantly affects what the outcome of case means for each firm in the US and foreign industries. The successful prosecution of US trade remedy cases is argued to be an informational corporate political strategy that is affected by statutory and administrative biases in the execution of the agency investigations, and creates the potential for indirect rent-seeking bias in the outcomes of cases. This informational corporate political strategy is based on three capabilities that firms need to develop, the capability to gather information, the capability to build and shape the administrative record at the agencies to reflect a firm’s policy preferences and the capability to align business practices with the US trade remedy institutions. These three capabilities are enabled by the bundling of corporate political expertise resources, organisational resources, financial resources and reputational resources. Some of these resources are internal to the firms, including staff, money and information, while other resources are external, such as the trade attorneys and economic consultants.

"Keeping views fresh by maintaining the consistency between materialized views and their base data in the presence of base updates is a critical problem for many applications, including data warehousing and data integration. While heavily studied for traditional databases, the maintenance of XML views remains largely unexplored. Maintaining XML views is complex due to the richness of the XML data model and the powerful capabilities of XML query languages, such as XQuery. This dissertation proposes a comprehensive solution for the general problem of maintaining materialized XQuery views. Our solution is the first to enable the maintenance of a large class of XQuery views including XPath expressions, FLWOR expressions, and Element Constructors. These views may contain arbitrary result construction and arbitrary grouping and join operations. Our solution also supports the unique order requirements of XQuery including source document order and query order. The contributions of this dissertation include: (i) an efficient solution for supporting order in XML query processing and view maintenance, (ii) an identifier-based technique for enabling incremental construction of XML views, (iii) a mechanism for modeling and validating source XML updates, (iv) a counting algorithm for supporting view maintenance on delete and modify updates, (v) an algebraic solution for propagating bulk XML updates, and (vi) an efficient mechanism for refreshing materialized XML views on propagated updates. We provide proofs of correctness of our proposed techniques for materialized XQuery maintenance. We have implemented a prototype of our view maintenance solution on top of the Rainbow XML query engine, developed at WPI. Our experiments confirm that our solution provides a practical and efficient solution for maintaining materialized XQuery views even when handling heterogeneous batches of possibly large source updates. Our solution follows the widely adopted propagate-apply framework for view maintenance common to all mainstream query engines. That is, our solution produces incremental maintenance plans in the same algebraic language used to define the views. These plans can thus be optimized and executed by standard query processing techniques. Being compatible with standard frameworks paves the way for our XML view maintenance solution to be easily adopted by existing database engines."

"Update operations over XML views are essential for applications using XML views. In this dissertation work, we provide scalable solutions to support updating through XML views defined over relational databases. Especially we focus on the update-public semantic, where updates are always public (made to the public database), and the update-local semantic, where update effects are first kept local and then made public as and when required. Towards this, we propose the clean extended-source theory for determining whether a correct view update translation exists, which then serves as a theoretical foundation for us to design practical XML view updating algorithms. Under update-public semantic, state-of-the-art view updating work focus on identifying the correct update translation purely on the data. We instead take a schema-centric solution, which utilizes the schema of the underlying source to effectively prune updates that are guaranteed to be not translatable and pass updates that are guaranteed to be translatable directly to the SQL engine. Only those updates that could not be classified using schema knowledge are finally analyzed by examining the data. This required data-level check is further optimized under schema guidance to prune the search space for finding a correct translation. As the first work addressing the update-local semantic, we propose a practical framework, called LoGo. LoGo Localizes the view update translation, while preserves the properties of views being side-effect free and updates being always updatable. LoGo also supports on-demand merging of the local database of the subject viewinto the public database (also called global database), while still guaranteeing the subject view being free of side effects. A flexible synchronization service is provided in LoGo that enables all other views defined over the same public database to be refreshed, i.e., synchronized with the publically committed changes, if so desired. Further, given that XMLis an ordered datamodel,we propose an ordersensitive solution named O-HUX to support XML view updating with order. We have implemented the algorithms, along with respective optimization techniques. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed services, and highlight its performance characteristics."

Materialized XML views are a popular technique for integrating data from possibly distributed and heterogeneous data sources. However, the problem of the incremental maintenance of such XML views poses new challenges which to date remain unaddressed. One, XML views not only filter the data, but may radically restructure it to construct new XML nested document structures. Moreover, order is inherent in the XML model, and XML views reflect both the implicit document order of the underlying sources and the order explicitly imposed in the view definition. Therefore, order also has to be preserved at view maintenance time. In this thesis we present an algebraic approach for the incremental maintenance of XQuery views, called VOX (View maintenance for Ordered XML). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution to order-preserving XML view maintenance. Our strategy correctly transforms an update to source XML data into sequences of updates that refresh the view. Our technique is based on an algebraic representation of the XQuery view expression using an XML algebra. The XML algebra has ordered bag semantics; hence most of the operators logically are order preserving. We propose an order-encoding mechanism that migrates the XML algebra to (non-ordered) bag semantics, no longer requiring most of the operators to be order-aware. Furthermore, this now allows most of the algebra operators to become distributive over update operations. This transformation brings the problem of maintaining XML views one step closer to the problem of maintaining views in other (unordered) data models. We are thus now able to adopt some of the existing (relational) maintenance techniques towards our goal of efficient order-sensitive XQuery view maintenance. In addition we develop a full set of rules for propagating updates through XML specific operations. We have proven the correctness of the VOX view maintenance approach. A full implementation of VOX on top of RAINBOW, the XML data management system developed at WPI, has been completed. Our experimental results performed using the data and queries provided by the XMark benchmark, confirm that incremental XML view maintenance indeed is significantly faster than complete recomputation in most cases. Incremental maintenance is shown to outperform recomputation even for large updates.