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In reinforced concrete (RC) structures, an evidence of damage is the presence of cracking. In order to evaluate the effect of damage on cracking pattern and natural frequency in RC slabs, two of such structures with different dimensions and reinforcement ratios were tested, in which cracks were induced through application of static load, followed by modal tests using impact excitation. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The gradient of the fundamental natural frequency along the decay, the crack opening rate and also a global damage index based on changes of the fundamental natural frequency were evaluated.

The behaviour of the aforementioned gradient was distinct for both slabs, increasing monotonically with the cracking level for the slab with lowest reinforcement ratio, and increasing until 33 per cent of the collapse load and then decreasing afterwards for the slab with the highest ratio. Changes of the gradient were consistent with changes of the crack opening rate. Both results of gradient changes and cracking pattern brought evidence that the balance between open (old) and breathing (new) cracks differed between the slabs, and may be responsible for such differences.

Damage assessment in RC structures using vibration tests is mostly concentrated on beams. In this work, an advance is made by investigating slabs. The lack of a unique pattern of changes of the gradient implies that its absolute value is not generally suitable for the association with the damage level. However, the impact tests can be effectively used to detect early damage on slabs using this proposed parameter.

This teaching case aims to provide in-class discussions on the commercialization and consumption of goods in spiritual markets. This teaching case is a narrative based on facts with a fictitious plot reporting the journeys of the launch, commercialization and consumption of mineral water in bottles in the shape of Father Cícero – a religious leader in Northeast Brazil – produced by Blue Spring Mineral Water in Juazeiro do Norte’s pilgrimage spiritual market.

Primary and secondary data sources were gathered. Two focus groups with pilgrims and semi-structured interviews with Blue Spring leaders and a local Church representative were conducted as primary data. As secondary data, a dossier was created holding content from newspapers and blogs online on the focal product and data from the company’s official website and social networks.

Throughout the case, the strategies and challenges of the production and commercialization of this religiously appealing product and the consumer practices adopted by different consumer profiles are unfolded.

This case intends to be a useful pedagogical tool to discuss the creation, production, commercialization and consumption of goods in spiritual markets. The case allows students to experience Blue Spring’s managers’ point of view regarding the decisions of production and commercialization of the focal product. In a broad sense, this case intends to inform future marketers of the importance of balancing commercialization in religious contexts.

Many hotels allocate guests to specific rooms immediately after reservation. This happens because individual rooms are sold (and there is no concept of room type) or because the assignment is done by hand at reservation or because of a connection with a channel manager, which is immediately fixing the room number after a reservation request. This early allocation is suboptimal, and it causes the unnecessary rejection of some reservations when the hotel has a high occupancy level. The purpose of this paper is to investigate different room allocation algorithms, including an optimal one (called RoomTetris), aiming at higher occupancy levels and profitability.

The methodology is based on theoretical results and experimentation. The optimality or the proposed RoomTetris algorithm is demonstrated. Experiments are executed in different contexts, including realistic ones, through the adoption of a hotel simulator, to measure the improvements in the occupancy rate of the optimal and heuristic strategies with respect to random or sub-optimal assignments of rooms.

The main results are that smart allocation algorithms can greatly reduce the rejection rate (reservation requests which cannot be fit into the hotel room plan) and improve the occupancy level, the percentage of available rooms or beds sold for the various periods.

This analysis can be extended by considering cancellations and overbookings. A second possibility to add flexibility in room allocation for hotels having more than one type of rooms is that the hotel can upgrade and offer a high-price room to the customer, which given an even large flexibility to fix rooms by shifting customers to other compatible types. In addition, more complex integrations with revenue management can also be considered, for cases in which the cost of a room depends on the number of guests.

Given that the difference in occupancy rate of the optimal algorithm is particularly large in high season and high-request periods, periods which are usually associated to higher rates and higher volumes, the proposed algorithm will improve the main financial performance indicators such as revenue per available room by an even bigger multiplier, depending on the hotel pricing policy. Because the room allocation process can be completely automated, the adoption of appropriate smart allocation algorithms represents a low-hanging fruit to be picked by efficient hotel managers.

To the best of the knowledge this is the first proposal of an optimal algorithm (with proof of optimality) for the considered problem.

很多酒店, 特别是私人、家庭经营型、或者精品酒店, 在客人预定后立刻分派指定的房间给客人。这往往是因为独立房间售卖（没有特殊房型概念）或者因为客人在预定时, 工作人员手动指派房间, 亦或者是因为预订系统与渠道管理系统链接, 直接在预定后指派房间号。这种早期的分派程序是不优化的, 往往在酒店住房率高的时候, 会造成一些不必要的房间预定失败, 继而带来的利润损失。本论文旨在研究不同房间指派参数配置, 包括最优系统（RoomTetris）, 使得酒店达到更高住房率的同时产生高利润。

本论文采用理论讨论和实验等研究方法, 并展示了提出的RoomTetris参数的最优性。本论文还将其参数放在不同的情景中做实验, 以显示其提高酒店针对随机或者次优化分派的最佳启发式策略中的住房率。

研究结果表明智能型分派参数能够大大降低预定失败率（预定需求不能符合酒店房型供给）, 并且提高住房率和利润。住房时间并不是必须的参数, 极具个性化服务, 比如让客人选房间号, 可能导致利润损失（因为最优房间分派无法实现）, 房型的设计也应该参与到最优房间分派的效果中来。

预定取消和超额预定的情况也应该加入到分析中来。第二种对于拥有不止一种房型的酒店来说, 可能增加房间分派的情况在于为客人升级房型, 这样可以将客人转到其他适合房型以解决房间分派问题。此外, 更复杂系统兼容财务管理系统应该被考量, 有的时候, 房间的成本取决于客人的数量。

由于最优算法的住房率区别在于旺季和高预定时段, 也就是高房间价格和高预定量, 本论文提出的最佳算法将提高主要财务指标, 比如RevPAR（平均客房收益）。由于房间分配系统可以完全实现自动化, 那么采用智能分派系统无疑是有效酒店管理中的优质选择。

据作者所知, 此文章是首篇关于此类话题的研究优质算法（且被证实其最佳）。

This paper aims to present an overview of deep issues flanking the ideas of system and complexity, and an overview of the mentioned course as a proposal for systems thinking.

The paper provides a discursive overview of systems and philosophical concepts related to the described course.

The review offers a perspective of a super-system that includes the students, the lecturers and the context of their interaction, in which one may recognize a relational framework for social learning of a systemic sustainability.

The overview concerns only the actual intervention in the University of Trento.

The described concepts and related philosophical discussion may contribute to the integration of system thinking in the future studies.

The described intervention is a new Italian context and the integration of systems concepts with futures studies seems not to be commonly established.

This study aims to investigate the collective perception regarding the future of offshore platforms and frame the main categories of meanings associated by the community with the investigated phenomenon.

A data driven approach has been conducted. The collection of the peoples’ opinions has been realized on two specific social network communities as follows: Twitter and Instagram. The text mining processes carried out a sentiment and a cluster analysis.

The sentiment analysis of the most frequent words has been shown. The following four main homogeneous categories of words are emerged in relation to the decommissioning of offshore platforms: technological areas, green governance (GG), circular economy and socio-economic sphere.

The alternative use of the offshore platforms, including tourism initiatives, aquaculture, alternative energy generation, hydrogen storage and environmental research, could improve the resilience of communities by offering the development of new jobs and the growth of local and innovative green businesses.

The adoption of a circular model and GG initiatives aims to limit the input of resources and energy, minimize waste and losses, adopt a sustainable approach and realize new social and territorial value.

The analysis underlines the importance to adopt a systems perspective, which takes into account the social, economic and environmental system as a whole, the different phenomena that occur and the variety of categories of stakeholders, from users to local governments that participate in the territorial development.

The purpose of this paper is to offer pointers to local government executives on the qualities of leadership that drive social innovation (SI) as well as locate the roles of leadership and participation in the output and outcome of SI. Further, the findings of the study can hopefully contribute to the discourse on leadership for a sustainable future.

The purpose of the study was to highlight the forms of participation among the actors in the different stages of SI, the qualities of the leaders that drove SI and the roles of leadership and participation in the output and outcome of SI. To answer the research questions, the researcher applied the case study research design and employed the grounded theory approach for data analysis and interpretation.

The cases showed leadership that encourages, as leadership qualities of the governors. These were manifested in terms of being empowering, giving the freehand, being goal-oriented, resource mobilizer, consultative and practicing both bottom-up and top-bottom approaches to make sure that the outputs are achieved, as well as having the qualities of a supportive leader. The cases showed all three employed forms of participation, as categorized by Lowndes et al. (2001). Government can indeed foster innovation when there is close involvement and participation of the workforce in innovation. Leadership and participation play a big role in achieving output and outcome of SI.

The study is a review of the unpublished dissertation by Gallardo (2014) at the National College of Public Administration and Governance, University of the Philippines.

Due to the dominant use of the singular view of the self-categorization process in the literature, this article seeks to develop a typology, from a dyadic categorization perspective, that describes different types of prejudice and justice in the organization based on one's self-categorization and others' categorization of one's self.

The authors develop a typology by drawing upon social identity, self-categorization and self-consistency theories.

The authors propose the following findings. First, the more an individual self-categorizes as an in-group member regardless of how others categorize the individual, the more likely the individual experiences a particular form of justice. Second, the more an individual self-categorizes as an out-group member regardless of how others categorize the individual, the more likely the individual experiences a particular form of prejudice. Finally, based on the dyadic categorization approach, the authors propose four distinct types of prejudice and justice: communal prejudice, self-induced prejudice, fantasized justice and actualized justice.

The authors advance the literature by providing a dyadic categorization view that helps describe employees' experience of prejudice or justice in the organization. Additionally, this article offers some managerial recommendations that help managers actualize true justice in the organization.

Construction industry (CI) has great prominence for the world economy, and it is expected that, with the use of the innovative technologies and approaches of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), the new industrial paradigm, construction can reach higher levels of productivity. This study aims to develop a model (readiness model) to assess the level of use of I4.0 technologies by the construction sector in Brazil and its most relevant applications.

The methodology used was bibliographic research, design-science research and a survey to validate the model, carried out with 162 companies, considered among the main ones in the sector in Brazil. The literature review revealed 13 technologies of I4.0 applied to construction; hence, the views of industry experts were based on these technologies.

The Digital Advancement Within CoNstruction (DAWN) readiness model was proposed, showing that among the 13 evaluated technologies of I4.0 and their applications, the Brazilian construction companies had a low level of utilization; both high and middle-income companies presented this low level of use; some technologies with a greater number of scientific publications were less used in practice in the Brazilian construction.

The originality and theoretical contribution are to present a readiness model to assess the level of use of I4.0 technologies and their most relevant applications in the CI in countries with an economy similar to Brazil’s, making it possible to measure the level of adoption of these technologies.

This paper aims to compare the prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) on the basis of three criteria. The diagnostic criteria adopted were those of the International Diabetes Federation, the National Cholesterol Education Program – Adult Treatment Panel III and the American Heart Association/National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute..

A transversal study was undertaken with 691 university students in Fortaleza, Brazil, in 2011-2013.

The prevalence of MetS varied considerably according to the criteria used, it being 4.1 per cent for the IDF, 0.7 per cent for the NCEP ATPIII and 1.7 per cent for the revised NCEP ATPIII. The criteria of the IDF presented reasonable agreement in relation to the NCEP ATP III (0.294) and revised NCEP ATP III (0.334). Moderate agreement was found between the NCEP ATPIII/revised NCEP ATPIII.

There is a need for a universal diagnostic criterion for MetS to obtain uniform and more reliable data for the elaboration of public health policies.