Towards a Life Sciences Code: Countering the Threats from Biological Weapons

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Zero and low carbon buildings: A driver for change in working practices and the use of computer modelling and visualization

Buildings account for significant carbon dioxide emissions, both in construction and operation. Governments around the world are setting targets and legislating to reduce the carbon emissions related to the built environment. Challenges presented by increasingly rigorous standards for construction projects will mean a paradigm shift in how new buildings are designed and managed. This will lead to the need for computational modelling and visualization of buildings and their energy performance throughout the life-cycle of the building. This paper briefly outline how the UK government is planning to reduce carbon emissions for new buildings. It discusses the challenges faced by the architectural, construction and building management professions in adjusting to the proposed requirements for low or zero carbon buildings. It then outlines how software tools, including the use of visualization tools, could develop to support the designer, contractor and user

Information Outlook, October 2003

Volume 7, Issue 10https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2003/1009/thumbnail.jp

The Role of the Practice of Excellence Strategies in Education to Achieve Sustainable Competitive Advantage to Institutions of Higher Education-Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza a Model

This study aims to look at the role of the practice of excellence strategies in education in achieving sustainable competitive advantage for the Higher educational institutions of the faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, a model, and the study considered the competitive advantage of educational institutions stems from the impact on the level of each student, employee, and the institution. The study was based on the premise that the development of strategies for excellence in education, and its implementation is a vital important prerequisite to achieve sustainable competitive advantage in higher educational institutions. The study followed a systematic exploratory descriptive methodology through review of the theoretical literature, and the adoption of the experience of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza as a model for its unique experience in the field of excellence in education. The study results showed that the most important are: There is a strong correlation between the level of exercising excellence strategies in education and the achievement of higher educational institutions to the sustainable competitive advantage. The results include a general required number of important sub results on the subject of the model - Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza as follows: - The student considered the academic focus of the operation in the development process of the workers’ skills, particularly academics at the university helps to distinguish students and increase the employment rate after graduation. - The existence of consistency in development efforts and quality improvement for all three levels (student, employee, and the university), and this contributes to the Faculty excellence. - The Faculty has been able to achieve competitive advantages by offering excellent services without harming the efficiency, and this alone is a great success because improving service properties requires great investments, which negatively affect the continued institutional development. The study also reached a set of recommendations as follows: - The need to exercise excellence strategies in education, excellence reward at the national level, and those higher educational institutions follow the criteria for measuring the competitive advantages of its institutions always. - There is a need to increase efforts to implement programs of excellence, the allocation of adequate time, reward outstanding efforts as well. There is a necessity for each faculty to achieve competitive advantage and sustainability, using the general philosophies of competitive advantage, but with a different strategically content from what is in the private commercial sector, it reflects the Faculties mission and objectives, depending on making improvements and excellence in processes that ensure the safety of its outputs. As well as the need to find a balance between the work of teaching and research work of the faculty members, this has important implications regarding the criteria used in the process of excellence evaluation. The study recommended the adoption of strategies for excellence in education on a national public policy level mainly in the processes of change in higher education institutions. The need to support the existence of a common understanding of the efforts of excellence to create a general culture that appreciates excellence in faculties and universities. This underlines the need for transparent, fair rewards systems, to encourage innovation in education. The need to conduct a comprehensive surveys on the graduates of faculties and universities including the areas of employment and skills, because that will give accurate indications of the graduates and will help to establish a link to a more precise about the relationship of excellence strategies with the competitive advantages

Professionalism In The First Year Of A Software Engineering Curriculum

Professionalism is an important part of any subject of study where graduates subsequently move into a professional career following their degree course. Most professional bodies therefore require accredited degree programmes to include this topic in the curriculum. The British Computer Society gives guidelines to institutions in the UK. These guidelines have been followed in the construction of the current Software Engineering Curriculum in the Department Of computer Science at the University of Sheffield. However it is unclear how effective the current form of presentation is. This report seeks to investigate this and look to possible ways of improving the presentation, particularly in the first year. I conclude that the most important factor in teaching professionalism; is the professionalism of the teachers. Students seem to learn these skills best by example, and therefore the greatest improvements are likely to be found by implementing common standards for teaching practice across the syllabus

Selling packaged software: an ethical analysis

Within the IS literature there is little discussion on selling software products in general and especially from the ethical point of view. Similarly, within computer ethics, although there is much interest in professionalism and professional codes, in terms of accountability and responsibility, the spotlight tends to play on safety-critical or life-critical systems, rather than on software oriented towards the more mundane aspects of work organisation and society. With this research gap in mind, we offer a preliminary ethical investigation of packaged software selling. Through an analysis of the features of competition in the market, the global nature of the packaged software market and the nature of product development we conclude that professionalism, as usually conceived in computer ethics, does not apply particularly well to software vendors. Thus, we call for a broader definition of professionalism to include software vendors, not just software developers. Moreover, we acknowledge that with intermediaries, such as implementation consultants, involved in software selling, and the packaged software industry more generally, there are even more “hands” involved. Therefore, we contend that this is an area worthy of further study, which is likely to yield more on the question of accountability

AC+erm Project. Transforming Information & Records Management through Research & Development? Proceedings of the 3rd Northumbria International Witness Seminar Conference

These proceedings capture the content of the third Witness Seminar hosted by Northumbria University’s School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences. It built on the success of our two previous witness seminars, in terms of its format and style, but was also different in some important ways. Firstly, it represented the final event of a 3-year Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project – Accelerating positive change in e-records management (AC+erm); secondly, the seminars took a series of questions, rather than articles, as their starting point; and thirdly, it was much shorter, lasting only half a day. Although it was the final AC+erm project event, and therefore show cased some of the project’s outputs, the sessions and discussions were deliberately designed to revolve around the broader context of research and development in records and information management