Abstract
Email marketing plays a key role in business communications and is one of the most widely used applications by consumers. The literature review points to several determinants that, when applied, increase the open rate of newsletters. This research evaluates the impact of six determinants of persuasion on the opening rate of a newsletter in the hotel industry. The determinants are the day of sending, the time of sending, subject line personalization, scarcity appeal, curiosity appeal, and authority figure. The chosen methodology focused on real experiments, using a high-end luxury hotel, and the respective customer database. The newsletter was sent to the subscriber list, where one part received the control and the other part received a variant with the test version. Ten A/B tests were conducted for each determinant. The results obtained were not in line with what is indicated in the literature review. Although the literature review yielded results that showed that the application of determinants increased the open rate of newsletters, this study obtained findings to the opposite and did not confirm what was prescribed by the reviewed literature. The results of the A/B tests were conclusive and revealed that the determinants did not increase the open rate of newsletters.

Abstract
This study explores data mining techniques for predicting student dropout in higher education. The research compares different methodological approaches, including alternative algorithms and variations in model specifications. Additionally, we examine the impact of employing either a single model for all university programs or separate models per program. The performance of models with students grouped according to their position on the program study plan was also tested. The training datasets were explored with varying time series lengths (2, 4, 6, and 8 years) and the experiments use academic data from the University of Porto, spanning the academic years from 2012 to 2022. The algorithm that yielded the best results was XGBoost. The best predictions were obtained with models trained with two years of data, both with separate models for each program and with a single model. The findings highlight the potential of data mining approaches in predicting student dropout, offering valuable insights for higher education institutions aiming to improve student retention and success. © 2023 Associacao Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informacao. All rights reserved.

Abstract
BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the need to invest in nursing practice environments and health institutions were led to implement several changes. In this sense, this study aimed to analyze the impact of the changes that occurred in nursing practice environments between the first and fourth critical periods of the pandemic.MethodsQuantitative, observational study, conducted in a University Hospital, with the participation of 713 registered nurses. Data were collected through a questionnaire with sociodemographic and professional characterization and the Scale for the Environments Evaluation of Professional Nursing Practice, applied at two different points in time: from 1 to 30 June 2020 and from 15 August to 15 September 2021. Data were processed using descriptive and inferential statistics.ResultsOverall, the pandemic had a positive impact on nursing practice environments. However, the Process component remained favourable to quality of care, while the Structure and Outcome components only moderately favourable. Nurses working in Medicine Department services showed lower scores in several dimensions of the Structure, Process and Outcome components. On the other hand, nurses working in areas caring for patients with COVID-19 showed higher scores in several dimensions of the Structure, Process and Outcome components.ConclusionsThe pandemic had a positive impact on various dimensions of nursing practice environments, which denotes that regardless of the adversities and moments of crisis that may arise, investment in work environments will have positive repercussions.However, more investment is needed in Medicine Department services, which have historically been characterised by high workloads and structural conditions that make it difficult to promote positive and sustainable workplaces.

Abstract
It is well known that conditional heteroscedasticity is exhibited by many economic and financial time series such as stock prices or returns. Empirical analysis is often based on a subseries obtained through systematically sampling from an underlying time series and we analyze how that can affect testing for heteroscedasticity. The results show the distribution of the test statistics is changed by systematic sampling, causing a serious power loss that increases with the sampling interval. Consequently, the tests often fail to reject the hypothesis of no conditional heteroscedasticity, leading to the wrong decision and missing the true nature of the data-generating process.

Abstract
Electric mobility has been one of the big bets for the reduction of CO2 in the transport sector. But, the integration of electric vehicles on a large scale, especially the charging of their battery will bring some challenges in the distribution of electricity to avoid problems in their transport. In this paper, the impact of introducing electric vehicle charging stations and renewable energy sources in a 69-node IEEE network will be analysed. The integration of charging stations into the grid leads to high losses and voltage drops that harm the network. On the other hand, the installation of Photovoltaic (PV) panels, besides the advantage of energy production, improves the profile of the grid in terms of voltage drops. The choice of the best location for the charging stations, as well as the best location for the renewable sources, is made using two genetic algorithms. The results obtained show that the genetic algorithms can solve the problem efficiently. © 2023 IEEE.

Abstract
As the world's population grows, there is a need to find new sources of energy that are more sustainable. Photovoltaic (PV) energy is one of the renewable energy sources (RES) expected to have the greatest margin for growth in the near future. Given their intermittency, RES bring uncertainty and instability to the management of the power system, therefore it is essential to predict their behavior for different time frames. This paper aims to find the most effective forecasting method for PV energy production that could be applied to different time frames. PV energy production is directly dependent on solar radiation and temperature. Several forecasting approaches are proposed in this paper. A multiple linear regression (MLR) model is proposed to predict the monthly energy production based on the climatic parameters of the previous year. Different approaches are proposed based on first predicting the temperature and radiation and then applying the PV mathematical models to predict the produced energy. Three methods are proposed to predict the climatic parameters: using the average values, the additive decomposition, or the Holt-Winters method. Comparing the errors of the four proposed forecasting methods, the best model is the Holt-Winters, which presents smaller errors for radiation, temperature, and produced energy. This method is close to additive decomposition. © 2023 IEEE.