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The aim of this research is to identify the characteristics that give rise to motivations to use social apps in light of behavioral concepts related to consumers’ desires and emotional values.

Netnography is used as the main methodology to analyze and categorize user profiles of online social networks. These profiles are presented through conceptual headlines, which highlight the main characteristics of each user group.

The results of the study show that many users have become dependent on the WhatsApp application, either for technological reasons or for social reasons related to fashion and status.

Few consumers actually explained the ways they use mobile social networks in the context of the procedures and level of communication performed. However, the influence of social contexts in the consumer environment is changing perceived values focusing on prestige and status to technological elements that the majority of consumers use.

Practical implications are directly related to forming business connections in a less formal and more hedonic environment, improving market results while fostering user enjoyment. In addition, the ongoing updates to WhatsApp have brought new functionalities and improvements to previously weak features.

Although other applications offer means by which to talk and send messages, WhatsApp continues to be (as of early 2021) the most used platform for conversation in Brazil. The sovereignty of WhatsApp is directly linked to its social value, which is related to the number of consumers who daily interact via the network.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of trust on adopting and implementing blockchain technology in higher education institutions (HEIs) in Brazil.

This study uses an exploratory qualitative approach to understand the construct of trust in the context of the educational sector. Data were collected through semistructured questionnaires and online interviews.

The research identified that, for most potential blockchain users, trust positively influences the HEIs, because benefits such as secure data sharing and transaction transparency could optimize the daily routine and avoid fraud in academic documents, providing a cooperative and reliable working environment. In addition, the results suggest that trust is needed to overcome challenges related to issues such as costs and privacy.

This study contributes to the advances in the emerging literature on blockchain in the educational sector as a system with the potential to generate trust, as well as the literature on the technology acceptance models.

For HEI managers and practitioners, this study highlights the need for a greater understanding of the influence of trust in the relationships between HEIs and other stakeholders.

This work shows that adopting blockchain technologies would allow users to build social relationships of trust in a cooperative work environment and develop trusted behavior by sharing data securely and transparently.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies on the adoption and implementation of blockchain in the education sector in Brazil.

This paper is based on the analysis of a few photographs published by El Heraldo de México in 1968 about the student movement. The purpose of this paper is to consider the photograph as an act in which the observer is included. From this point of view, the observer could identify a discursive line of the newspaper and build an independent interpretation. The librarian is an observer.

It is a theoretical description about the objective character of the photographs published by El Heraldo de México in 1968. Considering photography as an act, this paper proposes to empirically identify the whole context of three cases of photographs of the newspaper, as examples.

Based on the contextualized interpretation (or photograph as an act), the photograph is identified as an information object and, therefore, an epistemological object, too. There is a relation between the image and the building of knowledge, through the interpretation of the observer.

There are many studies about cataloguing and classification of images, but there is no study on the theoretical implications. The theory presented in this document comes from the work of other specialists and from other disciplines.

Learning to read visual information is as necessary as reading texts. The visual world waits to be decoded. And the twenty-first-century librarian knows how to organize, preserve and disseminate documentary collections (as photos). Value is how to find, access, decode and build knowledge over them.

In this document, the authors take a position in the library discussion about the image as an information object. Also, this paper promotes development of theoretical studies about this topic by librarians.

Accreditation is a growing phenomenon and has begun to permeate scientific studies, most of which are quantitative, since they focus on the process of accreditation and its positive or negative effects. Only a few studies have analyzed this phenomenon from the perspective of institutional theory. As there is no consensus regarding the performance of accreditation agencies, the purpose of this paper is to identify their institutional role in the global orientation of the organizational practices, values and decisions of business schools (BS).

A systematic literature review enabled us to identify scientific publications since 2002 that have used institutional theory when discussing BS accreditation agencies. An in-depth reading of these articles led us to identify the most frequent, similar and contrasting perspectives. Seven aspects were analyzed in each article: theme, research assumption, theoretical basis, method, research context, result and suggestions for future studies.

The findings suggest a certain duality in the role of these agencies. If, on the one hand, they are responsible for providing a quality seal, on the other hand, they promote legitimacy in the field by institutionalizing international rules.

By investigating the performance of these agencies as global institutional bodies, the authors extrapolated the traditional discussion on the dynamic of interaction between local actors who both influence the field and are influenced by it, a recurring theme in institutional theory.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it intends to assess the level of comparability of the fair value-based valuation criteria for biological assets of Portuguese dairy farms after the adoption of the Portuguese Accounting Standardization System. Second, it presents an innovative valuation model to assess the fair value of dairy herds.

The paper conducts a multiple case study at dairy farms in the central region of Portugal which had adopted the new Accounting Standardization System. Data were captured through interviews to assess how dairy farms were using the new valuation criteria required by this recent accounting frame of reference. A proposal for a model to measure fair value is presented.

Main findings indicate that market values for dairy production animals are inconsistent, reducing financial information comparability levels. To solve these problems, the authors propose a new model to assess fair value based on the net present value (NPV) of future cash-flows. This is a possible method to measure bovines that are in a breeding stage and it will assure the comparability of financial statements among dairy farms.

The study is confined to one case study and one country, not allowing generalization.

Results indicate the need to harmonize one possible method for measuring cattle that are in a breeding stage. In order to overcome these shortcomings, a model was designed to calculate the fair value of dairy production based on the NPV of future economic benefits.

Desktop robots are suitable for production line systems in industrial applications. Despite their capabilities to meet diverse requirements, they have to be programmed off‐line using waypoints and path information. Misalignments in the workspace location during loading cause injuries in the workpiece and tool. Further, in flexible industrial production, machinery must adapt to changing product demands, both to the simultaneous production of different types of workpieces and to product styles with short life cycles. In this paper, visual data processing concepts on the basis of fuzzy logic are applied to enable an industrial desktop robot to raise its flexibility and address these problems that limit the production rate of small industries.

In this paper, a desktop robot performing dispensing tasks is equipped with a computer vision system. Visual information is used to autonomously change previously off‐line stored robot programs for known workpieces or to call worker's attention for unknown/misclassified workpieces. A fuzzy inference classifier based on a fuzzy grammar, is used to describe/identify workpieces. Fuzzy rules are automatically generated from features extracted from the workpiece under analysis.

Different types of workpieces were tested and a good rate performance, higher than 90 per cent, was achieved. The obtained results illustrate both the flexibility and robustness of the proposed solution as well as its capabilities for good classification of workpieces.

The overall system is being implemented in an industrial environment.

The paper reports a piece of solid work which indicates clearly that the work is suitable for industrial utilization.

The purpose of this paper is to explore Portuguese academics' perceptions on higher education quality assessment objectives and purposes, in general, and on the recently implemented system for higher education quality assessment and accreditation, in particular. It aims to discuss the differences of those perceptions dependent on some academics' characteristics, such as: gender, disciplinary affiliation, type of higher education institution and experience in quality assurance activities.

An online questionnaire with Likert‐type answer scales was distributed to the Portuguese academic population (n=36,215). In total, 962 answers were collected from academics belonging to the public higher education system. Data were treated resorting to descriptive statistics, hypothesis tests and analysis of variance.

Portuguese academics tend to support the majority of goals and purposes quality assessment may have, as well as the main features of the newly designed quality assessment and accreditation system. Nevertheless they tend to support more quality assessment mechanisms privileging improvement over control. This support is slightly more evident among female academics, academics from public polytechnic institutions, from medical and health sciences and with former experience in quality assurance activities.

The study adds to the discussion on academics' perceptions on quality assurance, highlighting the influence played at this level by some of their characteristics. It is especially relevant for those working either in higher education institutions or governmental agencies, since it may contribute to the design of quality assurance systems academics are more likely to support.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a gait analysis technique that aims to identify differences and similarities in gait performance between three different assistive devices (ADs).

Two feature reduction techniques, linear principal component analysis (PCA) and nonlinear kernel-PCA (KPCA), are expanded to provide a comparison of the spatio-temporal, symmetrical indexes and postural control parameters among the three different ADs. Then, a multiclass support vector machine (MSVM) with different approaches is designed to evaluate the potential of PCA and KPCA to extract relevant gait features that can differentiate between ADs.

Results demonstrated that symmetrical indexes and postural control parameters are better suited to provide useful information about the different gait patterns that total knee arthroplasty (TKA) patients present when walking with different ADs. The combination of KPCA and MSVM with discriminant functions (MSVM DF) resulted in a noticeably improved performance. Such combination demonstrated that, with symmetric indexes and postural control parameters, it is possible to extract with high-accuracy nonlinear gait features for automatic classification of gait patterns with ADs.

The information obtained with the proposed technique could be used to identify benefits and limitations of ADs on the rehabilitation process and to evaluate the benefit of their use in TKA patients.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a set of techniques, in the domain of texture analysis, dedicated to the classification of industrial textures. One of the main purposes was to deal with a high diversity of textures, including structural and highly random patterns.

The global system includes a texture segmentation phase and a classification phase. The approach for image texture segmentation is based on features extracted from wavelets transform, fuzzy spectrum and interaction maps. The classification architecture uses a fuzzy grammar inference system.

The classifier uses the aggregation of features from the several segmentation techniques, resulting in high flexibility concerning the diversity of industrial textures. The resulted system allows on‐line learning of new textures. This approach avoids the need for a global re‐learning of the all textures each time a new texture is presented to the system.

These achievements demonstrate the practical value of the system, as it can be applied to different industrial sectors for quality control operations.

The global approach was integrated in a cork vision system, leading to an industrial prototype that has already been tested. Similarly, it was tested in a textile machine, for a specific fabric inspection, and gave results that corroborate the diversity of possible applications. The segmentation procedure reveals good performance that is indicated by high classification rates, revealing good perspectives for full industrialization.

The purpose of this paper is to understand consumer preferences concerning electric vehicles (EV) in Portugal, based on comparisons with other vehicles with different powertrains.

The analysis incorporated two survey-based approaches: choice-based conjoint analysis (CBC) and multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) based. The survey interviewed 252 respondents. The criteria characterizing each vehicle are purchase price, range, fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions. Another criterion was added to verify the potential of EV privileges to influence consumer preferences. A sensitivity analysis on the influence of purchase price and fuel price in the global utility of the vehicles was performed.

The results showed that monetary criteria are those influencing vehicle purchase decisions the most, whereas the existence of privileges for EV owners has little relevance. EV are chosen by the consumer only if their price decreases or if gasoline and diesel prices increase sharply. The position of PHEV in the rankings makes the promotion of this type of vehicle an interesting path to exploit as potential intermediates to the diffusion of EV.

The results underline the need of improving technical barriers of EV that are responsible for consumers’ relevant concerns and that a price subsidy could eventually be effective to increase EV sales at its current market price.

This study compares a wide range of vehicles (conventional, hybrid and electric), addresses the Portuguese market and proposes an MCDA-based approach to obtain preference information, which is compared with a CBC approach.