Abstract

Abstract
Globalization has created countless opportunities for the internationalization of a wide range of services. Recent technological innovations associated with the reduction or elimination of trade barriers, resulted in an exponential expansion of service firms. This paper analyzes the internal and external factors that influence the decision to operate internationally. The hypotheses are empirically examined through a survey sent to 322 firms from the design, architecture and engineering sector. Multivariate analysis is used to ascertain the main determinants of internationalization in these firms. The findings indicate that the main reasons underlying the internationalization of these service firms are the size of the firm, the competitive environment and the staff's degree of international experience. These factors, which influence the management's attitudes toward operating internationally, determine the firm's degree of internationalization. Moreover, firms that have a high number of senior managers with a graduate course and higher skills in foreign languages are more prone to internationalize. Some practical implications are presented for service firms that are in the process of internationalizing.

Abstract

Abstract
This paper addresses the impact of the penetration of Electric Vehicles, EV's, in the electricity market prices and on the load curves of the Iberian Electricity Market, established between Portugal and Spain. These impacts are evaluated taking the year of 2011 as reference. For every day of this year, the hourly market data was downloaded from the web site of the Iberian Market Operator and then the bid curves were adequately altered considering the commissioning of new stations under construction or planned till 2020, the planned increasing presence of wind parks and PV stations and the demand increase from end consumers. Then, the hourly demand was further increased to simulate the charging of EV's, admitting several scenarios for the charging periods and for the number of EV's in 2020. Using this information, the hourly selling and buying curves were altered and the hourly market price was then estimated. The paper extensively reports the results obtained for these different scenarios for the horizon of 2020. For the analysed scenarios, the results indicate that the impact of EV's on electricity prices and load curves will depend largely on the number of EV's and in a less significant way on the charging policy that is adopted. © 2013 IEEE.

Abstract
Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods exhibit a faster convergence rate than that of classic Monte Carlo methods. This feature has made QMC prevalent in image synthesis, where it is frequently used for approximating the value of spherical integrals (e.g. illumination integral). The common approach for generating QMC sampling patterns for spherical integration is to resort to unit square low-discrepancy sequences and map them to the hemisphere. However such an approach is suboptimal as these sequences do not account for the spherical topology and their discrepancy properties on the unit square are impaired by the spherical projection. In this paper we present a strategy for producing high-quality QMC sampling patterns for spherical integration by resorting to spherical Fibonacci point sets. We show that these patterns, when applied to illumination integrals, are very simple to generate and consistently outperform existing approaches, both in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) and image quality. Furthermore, only a single pattern is required to produce an image, thanks to a scrambling scheme performed directly in the spherical domain.

Abstract