Universidad Tecnológica Boliviana

Purpose: In an increasingly competitive and changing world economy, organizational capacity to achieve and maintain competitive advantage is inextricably linked with the caliber of strategic leadership. This study examined the application of strategic leadership in realizing and maintaining a competitive advantage in the business environment of Zambia, based on two Lusaka-headquartered companies as case studies. The primary objective was to analyze leadership practices in selected firms and determine their role towards performance, innovation, and differentiation against a negative economic backdrop. Methodology: The study employed a qualitative multiple-case study design to offer rich explications of practical leadership practices. Two private firms were purposively selected: Firm A, manufacturing, and Firm B, services. The firms were chosen based on their market presence and strategic interest. Data were collected through intensive semi-structured interviews with 12 participants- six from each firm-including senior leaders and mid-level managers who were directly involved in strategic planning and implementation. Secondary data obtained from internal business documents, strategic plans, and performance appraisals were also utilized for finding triangulation and contextual enrichment. Data was analysed thematically. Findings: Thematic analysis of the findings revealed that there is a need for strategic leadership to achieve differentiation through vision-connected alignment, responsive planning, and continuous organizational learning. It was also noted that there were weak systems for leadership growth, regulatory uncertainty, and market volatility. These factors impede the optimal utilization of leadership potential and strategic outcomes. The study ends by making a suggestion to develop leadership capacity, implementation of flexible strategy models, and enhanced linkage between leadership vision and operational activities. These actions are required by companies eager to navigate their path through the intricate business environment of Zambia and sustaining long-term competitive advantage.

This work presents an alternative post-processing approach for optimizing mobile robot trajectories by combining vector quantization techniques with information theory. We developed an algorithm based on Vector Quantization (VQ) and Kullback-Leibler Divergence (VQKL) that maintains the original RRT*'s obstacle avoidance capabilities. When comparing VQKL and VQ with the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker (RDP) algorithm, our methods demonstrate significant superiority: VQ achieves a 13% reduction in path length (versus RDP's 10%) while VQKL achieves 14%, along with an 83% (VQ) and 84% (VQKL) reduction in node count compared to the original RRT* output. These results are obtained through an adaptive optimization process that iteratively adjusts centroids using a progressive annealing scheme. To ensure trajectory feasibility, we implemented a validation system that verifies both geometric deviation from the original path and collision-free operation with obstacles. Extensive simulations across 20 different environments with 100 trials each confirm that our method generates significantly shorter, more efficient, and safer trajectories, establishing a viable alternative for robotic path optimization.

En una época en la que cada dos días se genera más información que en toda la historia humana, se han producido nuevos retos para las ciencias sociales y su vínculo con la opinión pública, en especial, para las comunicaciones digitales. Esta investigación busca abordar tal situación para favorecer a los ciudadanos de La Paz durante el año 2024. Al tratarse de un fenómeno de la modernidad en constante evolución, este estudio se interesa en la subjetividad del ciudadano y la objetividad de las ciencias ad hoc para concluir en dos enfoques que a su vez asumen dos retos de mayor incursión a una disciplina en renacimiento: la ingeniería social.

Perger, Robert, Rubio, Gonzalo D. (2021): A new species of Myrmecotypus Pickard-Cambridge spider (Araneae: Corinnidae: Castianeirinae) from the Bolivian orocline, imitating one of the world's most aggressive ants. Insecta Mundi 2021 (860): 1-8, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5041775

This paper summarizes a search for radio wavelength counterparts to candidate gravitational wave events. The identification of an electromagnetic counterpart could provide a more complete understanding of a gravitational wave event, including such characteristics as the location and the nature of the progenitor. We used the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) to search six galaxies which were identified as potential hosts for two candidate gravitational wave events. We summarize our procedures and discuss preliminary results.

We present long-term-stable and convergent evolutions of head-on black hole collisions and extraction of gravitational waves generated during the merger and subsequent ring-down. The new ingredients in this work are the use of fixed mesh-refinement and dynamical singularity excision techniques. We are able to carry out head-on collisions with large initial separations and demonstrate that our excision infrastructure is capable of accommodating the motion of the individual black holes across the computational domain as well as their their merger. We extract gravitational waves from these simulations using the Zerilli-Moncrief formalism and find the ring-down radiation to be, as expected, dominated by the l=2, m=0 quasi-normal mode. The total radiated energy is about 0.1 % of the total ADM mass of the system.