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Showing posts from August, 2008

5 Questions You Can Ask Yourself to Be Competitive

Some say that competition is bad, that we should just aim for cooperation. But looking at how the real world works, we could that we could gain something from competition. Look at how Apple and Windows are slugging it out. And see Linux. They get challenged to churn out better products (Ahem! for Vista) and we get choices. In my opinion, competition keeps you on your toes. It spurs you on to be better. A lot of people tend to settle with just scraping by with the bare minimum. But it’s never too late to decide that you might want to accomplish something that’s above what you’ve done so far. However, spurring yourself on shouldn’t be something that you do for the sake of doing it. Reckless abandon doesn’t often result in the best things. So before you go out launching some competition against some random bloke, go ask yourself a few things. What do I really want? Establish S.M.A.R.T. goals. Make sure that it’s specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. This doesn’t mea...

How to Be Closer to Your Boss

And we don’t mean your puckers on his/her butt. Sometimes the thin line that makes the difference between a nightmare job and a dream job is a good relationship with your boss. I’ve had one too many friends who complain about their jobs. All of them acknowledge, though, that their jobs will be a whole lot more fun if their bosses didn’t have that “I am God and you’re just a mere maggot” aura. Read on these tips on how you can get on your superior’s good side and see how it can make your life easier. The most important policy is respect. Under any circumstance - in success or failure, you should always show some form of respect to your boss. Sure, it’s pretty tough to do if the bastard’s like Dilbert’s Pointy-Haired Boss. Of course it’s more ideal if you become friends with your boss, but even though you joke around with each other, always maintain that level of respect so that you never do anything below the belt. Cope with your boss’ leadership style. It might not work for you at fir...

Strategy - SWOT analysis

Definition: SWOT is an abbreviation for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats SWOT analysis is an important tool for auditing the overall strategic position of a business and its environment. Once key strategic issues have been identified, they feed into business objectives, particularly marketing objectives. SWOT analysis can be used in conjunction with other tools for audit and analysis, such as PEST analysis and Porter's Five-Forces analysis . It is also a very popular tool with business and marketing students because it is quick and easy to learn. The Key Distinction - Internal and External Issues Strengths and weaknesses are Internal factors. For example, a strength could be your specialist marketing expertise. A weakness could be the lack of a new product. Opportunities and threats are external factors. For example, an opportunity could be a developing distribution channel such as the Internet, or changing consumer lifestyles that potentially increa...

Hyperion for battlespace communication and information services

Hyperion is a collaborative project between BT, General Dynamics, QinetiQ , Southampton University and Imperial College. It is a cluster project within the Ministry of Defence Data and Information Fusion Defence Technology Centre . Technical Objectives To create an adaptive agent-based architecture capable of significantly enhancing the functionality and resilience of Networked Enabled Capability (NEC) Information Fusion and C2 processes. In particular, by providing an adaptive reconfigurable capability for battlespace communication and information services. Science Objectives To investigate novel algorithms for self-organising network infrastructures in support of military requirements. The specific areas for research are: resilient service-oriented peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures, representation frameworks for network-centric information fusion, mixed initiative information retrieval and integration, complex policy management and control, agent negotiation protocols for NE...

A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR THE STOCK MARKET THROUGH INTEGRATION OF FUZZY NEURAL NETWORKS AND FUZZY DELPHI

Abstract The stock market, which has been investigated by various researchers, is a very complicated environment. Most past research is only concerned with the quantitative factors such as index in open and volume, rather than the qualitative factors, such as the political effect. However, the latter plays a critical role in the stock market environment. Therefore, this research proposes a decision support system for the stock market that considers the quantitative factors as well as the qualitative factors. The proposed system consists of four steps: (1)factors collection, (2) quantitative model (fuzzy neural network \[FNN]), (3) qualitative model (fuzzy Delphi), and (4) decision integration (FNN). An example based on the Taiwan stock market is utilized to evaluate the proposed intelligent system. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed system can perform more effectively than the single artificial neural network.