Narrow Results

This study examines the correlation between Competitive Intelligence (competitive intelligence) maturity levels and organisational decision-making styles in software industry firms. For this purpose, we followed the competitive intelligence maturity model established by Zuquetto and Beltrame [(2012). Modelo de maturidade em inteligência competitiva. Global Manager Acadêmica, 1(2), 1–19] and the Organisational Decision-Making Perception Scale (ODMPS) model proposed by Nascimento and Gomide Jr [(2014). Tomada de decisão organizacional. In Novas medidas do comportamento organizacional: ferramentas de diagnóstico e de gestão, M. M. M. Siqueira (ed.), pp. 298–306. Porto Alegre: Artmed] was used to assess organisational decision-making styles. A quantitative study was carried out using a closed-ended questionnaire and a Likert scale, targeting managers of software companies. It is worth noting that technical abbreviations were clarified when first used. In addition, the language used in the study was objective, value-neutral and free of ornamental or figurative language. The structure of the study was clear and concise, with logical causality between each statement. The text followed scientifical guidelines for structure, terminology and footnoting. The results show that a significant number of companies have an intermediate level of competitive intelligence maturity and that the systematic approach to decision-making is ubiquitous. Hence, the Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient (i.e. Spearman’s rho) indicates a positive correlation between competitive intelligence maturity and systematic decision-making in software companies. So, this research helps to understand the relationship between competitive intelligence and organisational decision-making in software companies. According to the findings, organisations with higher levels of competitive intelligence maturity are more likely to adopt a systematic decision-making style. This is noteworthy because systematic decision-making can lead to improved organisational outcomes. The research has implications for academics and practitioners alike. It provides new insights into the relationship between competitive intelligence and organisational decision-making. For practitioners, the findings suggest that investing in competitive intelligence and adopting a methodical approach to decision-making can improve organisational performance. The relationship between competitive intelligence maturity level and organisational decision-making styles in different industries should be explored in further research.

Whenever a disease spreads in the population, people have a tendency to alter their behavior due to the availability of knowledge concerning disease prevalence. Therefore, the incidence term of the model must be suitably changed to reflect the impact of information. Furthermore, a lack of medical resources affects the dynamics of disease. In this paper, a mathematical model of malaria of type $S_h{I}_h{R}_h-S_v{I}_v$ with media information and saturated treatment is considered. The analysis of the model is performed and it is established that when the basic reproduction number, ${{ℛ}}_0$, is less than unity, the disease may or may not die out due to saturated treatment. Furthermore, it is pointed out that if medical resources are accessible to everyone, disease elimination in this situation is achievable. The global asymptotic stability of the unique endemic equilibrium point (EEP) is established using the geometric approach under parametric restriction. The sensitivity analysis is also carried out using the normalized forward sensitivity index (NFSI). It is difficult to derive the analytical solution for the governing model due to it being a system of highly nonlinear ordinary differential equations. To overcome this challenge, a specialized numerical scheme known as the non-standard finite difference (NSFD) approach has been applied. The suggested numerical method is subjected to an elaborate theoretical analysis and it is determined that the NSFD scheme maintains the positivity and conservation principles of the solutions. It is also established that the disease-free equilibrium (DFE) point has the same local stability criteria as that of continuous model. Our proposed NSFD scheme also captures the backward bifurcation phenomena. The outcomes of the NSFD scheme are compared to two well-known standard numerical techniques, namely the fourth-order Runge–Kutta (RK4) method and the forward Euler method.

Understanding the impact of information-induced behavioral responses on the public, as well as precise forecasting of hospital bed demand, is critical during infectious disease epidemics to prevent managing healthcare facilities. Hence to study the impact of information-induced behavioral response in the public and the reinfection of diseases on the disease dynamics, we created a nonlinear SIHRZ mathematical model. We calculated the basic reproduction numbers and used mesh and contour plots to investigate the effect of various parameters on disease dynamics. It is observed that even if $\widetilde{R_0}<1$, the disease cannot be eradicated because of reinfection. The most sensitive parameters expected to affect the disease’s endemicity are found by computing the sensitivity indices. The dynamic system has an endemic equilibrium point, which is stable while $\widetilde{R_0}>1$ and unstable when $\widetilde{R_0}<1$. Using the Routh–Hurwitz criterion and the construction of the Lyapunov function, the equilibrium point’s local and global stability is examined. We have further examined the model system for the population’s time lag in immunity loss as a result of the efficacy of medicines, vaccination, self-defense, etc. Due to this delay, an oscillatory nature of the population is obtained. We determined the existence and direction of the Hopf bifurcation, as well as the stability of the equilibrium point, using the delay as a bifurcation parameter. Comprehensive numerical experiments are conducted to explore and validate qualitative results, providing valuable biological insights. This research highlights the critical role that information, treatment intensity, the overall number of hospital beds available, and the occupancy rate of those beds have in determining the behavioral reaction of susceptibles. The model also evaluated cases of fading immunity to look for epidemic peaks. By raising immunization and vaccine effectiveness rates, this peak can be lowered. Moreover, our results suggest that the oscillations that cause problems in managing disease outbreaks would make it extremely difficult to determine the real data of hospitalized and infected individuals. Hence, the WHO, governmental organizations, health policymakers, etc. cannot accurately estimate the scope of an epidemic. As a result, information provided by health authorities and the government regarding disease outbreaks must be kept up to date to limit the disease burden, which is also dependent on funding availability and policymaker decisions.

We consider an online model where an adversary constructs a set of $2^s$ instances $S$ instead of one single instance. The algorithm knows $S$ and the adversary will choose one instance from $S$ at random to present to the algorithm. We further focus on adversaries that construct sets of $k$-chromatic instances. In this setting, we provide upper and lower bounds on the competitive ratio for the online graph coloring problem as a function of the parameters in this model. Both bounds are linear in $s$ and matching upper and lower bound are given for a specific set of algorithms that we call “minimalistic online algorithms”.

It seems that what has been said by now about market and competitiveness does not fit perfectly with competences of getting the best of profit. Sometimes, the classical methods of fundamentals of management do not apply to individual companies that face irregular accommodation on the market. It is high time to replace the perfect business with the right one. New approaches and models may help in identifying new competition trends, changes for better application of purposes and proposals.

The influence of information on the pedestrian in crowd dispersion process is investigated under the open boundary condition on the square lattice by the use of the lattice gas model of biased random walkers without the back step. It is found that the jamming phenomenon occurs when the total entrance density is small in spite of influence of information. The mean velocity 〈v〉_ped of the walkers moving remains a constant via a small fluctuation for the small total entrance density, but for the large total entrance density, the 〈v〉_ped increases from 0 to 1. The mean velocity 〈v〉_inf of information spreading increases from 0 to 1, and then decreases to 0. The critical density decreases with increasing the size W of the system. When the size of the system is small, the platform appears because of asymmetry in propagation of information.

The evacuation process under emergency is studied by means of experiments and simulations, focusing on the influence of the environment information. A revised cellular automaton model in which environment information is considered as "static information" (building structure, spatial distance, etc.) and "dynamic information" (sounds of fire alarm, etc.) is introduced. Two scenarios, including evacuation with and without visibility in a classroom, are studied to investigate the different influence of the two kinds of information on human behavior. The experimental and simulation results demonstrate that:

(1) to intensify the spatial distance information can reduce the evacuation time;

(2) the spatial distance is not the only decisive factor especially in evacuation without visibility because the sound information, which is ignorable in evacuation with visibility, is playing a more important role under this condition;

(3) the intensity of static information can reflect evacuees' familiarity of the environment;

(4) the model can reproduce the experiments well, and the simulation method is useful for further study of the crowd movement simulation.

Information must take up space, must weigh, and its flux must be limited. Quantum limits on communication and information storage leading to these conclusions are described here. Quantum channel capacity theory is reviewed for both steady state and burst communication. An analytic approximation is given for the maximum signal information possible with occupation number signal states as a function of mean signal energy. A theorem guaranteeing that these states are optimal for communication is proved. A heuristic "proof" of the linear bound on communication is given, followed by rigorous proofs for signals with specified mean energy, and for signals with given energy budget. And systems of many parallel quantum channels are shown to obey the linear bound for a natural channel architecture. The time-energy uncertainty principle is reformulated in information language by means of the linear bound. The quantum bound on information storage capacity of quantum mechanical and quantum field devices is reviewed. A simplified version of the analytic proof for the bound is given for the latter case. Solitons as information caches are discussed, as is information storage in one-dimensional systems. The influence of signal self-gravitation on communication is considered. Finally, it is shown that acceleration of a receiver acts to block information transfer.

This paper presents an integrated model of household behavior, in which households derive utility not only from flow choices (of goods and leisure activities) but also from stock variables representing the status in health, psychological stress, social standing/reputation, political affiliation, religious identity, and any other status deemed relevant for their well-being. To attain the status in any of these dimensions, proper investment is necessary in accordance with a suitable mediating function that connects flow choices to the status in question. We depart from the position that statuses activate motivation, thereby affecting the efficiency of activities including working time. In particular, health not only yields utility of its own kind but also affects the productivity of households, thereby expanding their budget sets and raising the utility they attain now and in the future. Health, however, must be attained and maintained, and this has to be accomplished in accordance with a plausible health-production function defined on the space of goods and leisure activities. The same can be said about knowledge and skill acquisition, which requires investment of certain activities and goods through an appropriate mediating function. Similar relationships also hold for social, psychological, and other statuses, which can only be acquired through proper mediating functions. While the utility calculus appears complex, we demonstrate that the optimum choice of goods and leisure activities is guided by the rationality principle that requires that the composite marginal utility, defined as the total of all marginal utilities from the entire sources of utility, direct or mediated, be balanced with properly measured cost of acquiring it, which is shown to equal, the price or the wage rate on the market adjusted for a change in the efficiency of working time mediated through health enhancement and/or an increase in the productive efficiency of working hours due to knowledge and technology acquisition. Because our model includes utility arising from status-orientation in multiple dimensions, and because the extent and the range of such utility are socio-cultural-regime-specific while also being shaped by the household-specific receptivity and orientation to this regime, our model can potentially explain a diverse range of choice behavior some of which appear anomalous or even counter-intuitive to the rationality principle in the traditional sense. This added explanatory power helps close a gap between economics and other social sciences.

Geological-mining projects are usually associated with relatively high risk and uncertainty in many aspects, including geological, mining, ecologic, economic, market, legal and social conditions. A mineral deposit is an underground natural resource and hence it is difficult to unequivocally predict the actual results of its discovery. Depending on the extent of the resource, the operation of the mine can extend to a few decades. It is necessary to conduct investment actions in successive stages and to evaluate the results of the work stage by stage. This reduces the investment risk and facilitates the decision-making process. In this paper, the use of a specific kind of game, the so-called "game against Nature," is suggested before a final decision on deposit development is made. This methodology was tested on the example of one of the zinc-lead ore deposits in the Silesia-Cracow region. Apart from supporting the decision-making process, this methodology offers the means to evaluate further research and costs which may be incurred for obtaining supplementary information related to the ore deposit parameters, specifically its reserves.

Bekenstein has obtained an upper limit on the entropy S, and from that, an information number bound N is deduced. In other words, this is the information contained within a given finite region of space that includes a finite amount of energy. Similarly, this can be thought as the maximum amount of information required to perfectly describe a given physical system down to its quantum level. If the energy and the region of space are finite then the number of information N required in describing the physical system is also finite. In this short paper, two information number bounds are derived and compared for two types of universe. First, a universe without a cosmological constant Λ and second a universe with a cosmological constant Λ are investigated. This is achieved with the derivation of two different relations that connect the Hubble constant and cosmological constants to the number of information N. We find that the number of information N involved in the two universes are identical or N₂ = N_2Λ, and that the total mass of the universe scales as the square root of the information number N, containing. an information number N of the order of 10¹²². Finally, we expressed Calogero's quantization action as a function of the number of information N. We also have found that in self-gravitating systems the number of information N in nats is the ratio of the total kinetic to total thermal energy of the system.

A modification of inertia (called MiHsC or quantized inertia) has been proposed that assumes that inertia is caused by Unruh radiation, and that this radiation is made inhomogeneous in space by either Rindler horizons caused by acceleration or the distant Hubble horizon. The former predicts the standard inertial mass, and the latter predicts galaxy rotation without dark matter and cosmic acceleration without dark energy. It is proposed here that this model can be derived in an alternative way by assuming that the sum of mass (M), energy (E) and the information content of horizons (I) is conserved (EMI) so that mass–energy is released in a discrete manner when the area of a Rindler horizon reduces. This model could be tested by looking for the quantization of inertial mass and acceleration at very high accelerations, and may provide an explanation for the cosmological constant problem.

Recently, some authors showed that a classical collapse scenario ignores this richness of information in the resulting spectrum and a consistent quantum treatment of the entire collapse process might allow us to retrieve much more information from the spectrum of the final radiation. We confirm these results and show that by considering the quantum entanglement between metrics, we can uncover information of black holes. In our model, a density matrix is defined for the spaces, both inside and outside of the event horizon. These inside and outside spaces of black holes are obtained by tracing from a bigger space. An observer that lives in this big space can recover total information regarding the inside and outside of black hole.

Entropy is a key concept widely used in physics and other fields. At the same time, the meaning of entropy with different names and the relationship among them are confusing. In this paper, we discuss the relationship among the Clausius entropy, Boltzmann entropy and information entropy and further show that the three kinds of entropy are equivalent to each other to some extent. Moreover, we point out that the evolution of the universe is a process of entropy increment and life originates from the original low entropy of the universe. Finally, we discuss the evolution of the entire universe composed of the cosmological horizon and the space surrounded by it and interpret the entropy as a measure of information of all microstates corresponding to a certain macrostate. Under this explanation, the thermodynamic entropy and information entropy are unified and we can conclude that the sum of the entropy of horizon and the entropy of matter in the space surrounded by the horizon does not decrease with time if the second law of thermodynamics holds for the entire universe.

I discuss fundamental limits placed on information and information processing by gravity. Such limits arise because both information and its processing require energy, while gravitational collapse (formation of a horizon or black hole) restricts the amount of energy allowed in a finite region. Specifically, I use a criterion for gravitational collapse called the hoop conjecture. Once the hoop conjecture is assumed a number of results can be obtained directly: the existence of a fundamental uncertainty in spatial distance of order the Planck length, bounds on information (entropy) in a finite region, and a bound on the rate of information processing in a finite region. In the final section I discuss some cosmological issues, related to the total amount of information in the universe, and note that almost all detailed aspects of the late universe are determined by the randomness of quantum outcomes. This paper is based on a talk presented at a 2007 Bellairs Research Institute (McGill University) workshop on black holes and quantum information.

Probability distributions (tomograms) associated to classical and quantum optical signals are introduced. Nonlinear evolution equations are discussed in the probability representation. For spin states, entropy and information corresponding to spin tomograms are studied.

In the paper we consider a new approach for storage and cloning of quantum information by three level atomic (molecular) systems in the presence of the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) effect. For that, the various schemes of transformation into the bright and dark polaritons for quantum states of optical field in the medium are proposed. Physical conditions of realization of quantum nondemolition (QND) storage of quantum optical state are formulated for the first time. We have shown that the best storage and cloning of can be achieved with the atomic ensemble in the Bose-Einstein condensation state. We discuss stimulated Raman two-color photoassociation for experimental realization of the schemes under consideration.

In a former work, recalling what the Markoff theory is, we summarized some existing links with the group GL(2, ℤ) of 2 × 2 matrices. We also quoted the relation with conformal punctured toruses. The monodromy representation of the Poincaré group of such a torus was considered. Here we explicit the corresponding solution of the associated Riemann-Hilbert problem, and the resulting Fuchs differential equation. We precisely describe how the calculus runs. The main result is the description of a complete family of Fuchs differential equations with, as the monodromy group, the free group with two generators. We also identify a link with some eigenvalues of a Laplacian. The introduction explains the links that we see with information and computation theory (classical or quantum).

We use symbolic dynamics to investigate the transfer of information between the dissipative coupled nonidentical oscillators exhibiting the generalized synchronization. It is found that the drive information is injected into the response state and stored reversely in it. Moreover, the injection and storage give new meanings to the conditional Lyapunov exponent from the view of the information.

We propose an order index, $\varphi$, which quantifies the notion of “life at the edge of chaos” when applied to genome sequences. It maps genomes to a number from 0 (random and of infinite length) to 1 (fully ordered) and applies regardless of sequence length and base composition. The 786 complete genomic sequences in GenBank were found to have $\varphi$ values in a very narrow range, 0.037 ± 0.027. We show this implies that genomes are halfway towards being completely random, namely, at the edge of chaos. We argue that this narrow range represents the neighborhood of a fixed-point in the space of sequences, and genomes are driven there by the dynamics of a robust, predominantly neutral evolution process.