Preventing global warming requires overall cooperation. Contributions will depend on the risk of future losses, which plays a key role in decision-making. Here, we discuss an evolutionary game theoretical model in which decisions within small groups under high risk and stringent requirements toward success significantly raise the chances of coordinating to save the planet's climate, thus escaping the tragedy of the commons. We discuss both deterministic dynamics in infinite populations, and stochastic dynamics in finite populations.

Biological collective systems have been an important source of inspiration for the design of production systems, due to their intrinsic characteristics. In this sense, several high level engineering design principles have been distilled and proposed on a wide number of reference system architectures for production systems. However, the application of bio-inspired concepts is often lost due to design and implementation choices or are simply used as heuristic approaches that solve specific hard optimization problems. This paper proposes a bio-inspired reference architecture for production systems, focused on highly dynamic environments, denominated BIO-inspired Self-Organising Architecture for Manufacturing (BIOSOARM). BIOSOARM aims to strictly adhere to bio-inspired principles. For this purpose, both shopfloor components and product parts are individualized and extended into the virtual environment as fully decoupled autonomous entities, where they interact and cooperate towards the emergence of a self-organising behaviour that leads to the emergence of the necessary production flows. BIOSOARM therefore introduces a fundamentally novel approach to production that decouples the system’s operation from eventual changes, uncertainty or even critical failures, while simultaneously ensures the performance levels and simplifies the deployment and reconfiguration procedures. BIOSOARM was tested into both flow-line and “job shop”-like scenarios to prove its applicability, robustness and performance, both under normal and highly dynamic conditions

The increase in the number of dependent individuals means that more and more families find themselves in the situation of caregivers, with all the consequences that performing this role entails. Based on this reality, we considered it to be completely relevant to systematize knowledge in this area. This study aimed to identify the information needs of the family caregiver-dependent individuals in the available scientific literature, having performed an integrative review of the literature. The main results and conclusions indicate that the information needs of family caregivers can be grouped into three main themes: 1) caregiver knowledge and skills, 2) potential resources for the caregiver and 3) caregiver coping strategies and well-being. The comprehensive nature of the integrative review as the chosen method allowed us to get a good understanding of the information needs of family caregivers of dependent individuals. The relevance of this study to clinical practice is that, although it is still necessary to expand and enhance the scope of research in this area, we consider this information essential for all health professionals seeking to provide effective support to family caregivers, as well as to serve as support for the development of intervention projects and health services.

Cronus [l-7] is an object oriented distibuted system which operates in a heterogeneous computer environment of interconnected local area networks. As a distributed system architecture, Cronus faces a number of resource management issues not present in non-distributed architectures. Stmtegies for effectively conuolling the redundancy and reconfigurability inherent in Cronus are needed to take advantage of the distributed system environment. These strategies for resource management are often conveniently separated into policies and mechanisms. A policy is a goal or guideline set by a system administrator or component designer constraining the decisions made by a resource allocator. A mechanism is an internal system structure designed to implement a class of policies.In the Cronus distributed system model, there are currently two general aspects of resource allocation mechanisms which are particular to the network environment and must be effectively managed. One of these is the binding of a client request to a pticular resource manager for those resources which are available redundantly. Redundancy comes in two forms: replicated objects, (e.g., a mu© file) and replicated managers (any manager for a type can create a new instance of that object type). For both forms the selection of an object manager to provide the given service is an important resource management policy decision. The other important aspect of resource management mechanism is the ability to reconfigure parts of the system by dynamically migrating objects. Object migration is a powerful tool &or matching system resources to tasks in a manner that attempts to maximize some measure of system performance, reliability, or survivability, Both static reconfiguration (e.g., choosing or amending the placement of object managers and their associated objects), and dynamic recontiguration (e.g., movmg an individual object in direct response to demand for its use possible in the Cronus architecture and design.Cmnus development has been suppoltcd by the Rome Air Dwelopment Center, under contracts F30602-81-C-0132 and F30602.84-C-0171,The general approach to resource management in Cronus is to individually control the management of the classes of objects which make up the system. This approach extends Cronus resource management concepts beyond system resources to the abstract resources developed by applications. Resource management for an individual abstract resource (type) and for groups of related resource types (services) in G-onus is based on combining a number of carefully planned mechanisms which are part of the system architecture. In addition to resource management by resource type, a client specific policy which considers collections of object types used in a specific context can be constructed.In Cronus we achieve system wide and easily controllable resource management by requiring the object managers to cooperate in enforcing a resource management policy for their resource type. An object manager can redirect operations to a peer manager on another ...

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This article analyses the seven largest business groups in Portugal from the 1930s to the mid-1970s, a period in which they attained an unprecedented scale and scope. The analysis involves a comprehensive reconstruction of the groups' equity participations and corporate networks, using new sets of data. A few common features are found: these groups were based on family ownership and remained inward-looking, holding large equity participations in affiliate firms and segmenting them from more inclusive partnerships with other groups. But diversity should also be stressed: they displayed enormous plasticity in their dynamics of growth, combining exogenous and endogenous explanations. It is this plasticity that explains their resilience, capacity for adaptation, and ultimately their ubiquitous nature.

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