Exploring Students' Views on the Teaching

The basic hypothesis to be inquired is the use of computers and the internet in the teaching of economic modules does not affect student learning and retention. The research restrictions were that research was carried out at a Department of the University of Piraeus during the 2006-2007 spring semester. 55 students took part in the research in total. The module was taught at the computer lab – there were 25 computers for the 23 students who participated in the computer-based lesson, therefore each one worked individually. The remaining 32 students were taught in a lecture hall and there was no use of technology involved. Before the start of the lessons students took a pre-test comprised of five true-false questions and five multiple-choice questions. During the final lesson students took a post-test, after the completion of the lessons students filled in a questionnaire and expressed their views on computers and the teaching that took place both at the computer lab and the lecture hall.Macroeconomics, Productivity output and employment, Money – Banks, Economics, Teaching, Education, New Technologies, Computer learning.

Referent tracking for corporate memories

For corporate memory and enterprise ontology systems to be maximally useful, they must be freed from certain barriers placed around them by traditional knowledge management paradigms. This means, above all, that they must mirror more faithfully those portions of reality which are salient to the workings of the enterprise, including the changes that occur with the passage of time. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how theories based on philosophical realism can contribute to this objective. We discuss how realism-based ontologies (capturing what is generic) combined with referent tracking (capturing what is specific) can play a key role in building the robust and useful corporate memories of the future

A Collaborative System Software Solution for Modeling Business Flows Based on Automated Semantic Web Service Composition

Nowadays, business interoperability is one of the key factors for assuring competitive advantage for the participant business partners. In order to implement business cooperation, scalable, distributed and portable collaborative systems have to be implemented. This article presents some of the mostly used technologies in this field. Furthermore, it presents a software application architecture based on Business Process Modeling Notation standard and automated semantic web service coupling for modeling business flow in a collaborative manner. The main business processes will be represented in a single, hierarchic flow diagram. Each element of the diagram will represent calls to semantic web services. The business logic (the business rules and constraints) will be structured with the help of OWL (Ontology Web Language). Moreover, OWL will also be used to create the semantic web service specifications.automated service coupling, business ontology, semantic web, BPMN, semantic web

IT&C during the Crisis

The development of the IT&C has been exceptional in the history of industrial changes and the telecommunication revolution leads to a decrease of the price of telecommunication services and equipment. The huge volume of information change the way of functioning of the markets, restructuring of economic activities and to opening of new opportunities for creating wealth by exploiting the available information. The analysis of informational society during a crisis period implies examining the specific philosophical and methodological problems that appeared while using them and especially the philosophy of the Internet, the philosophy of principally open systems.telecommunication revolution, restructuring of economic activities, exploiting the available information, functioning of the markets, a crisis period, open systems

Managing the Ethical Dimensions of Brain-Computer Interfaces in eHealth: An SDLC-based Approach

A growing range of brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies is being employed for purposes of therapy and human augmentation. While much thought has been given to the ethical implications of such technologies at the ‘macro’ level of social policy and ‘micro’ level of individual users, little attention has been given to the unique ethical issues that arise during the process of incorporating BCIs into eHealth ecosystems. In this text a conceptual framework is developed that enables the operators of eHealth ecosystems to manage the ethical components of such processes in a more comprehensive and systematic way than has previously been possible. The framework’s first axis defines five ethical dimensions that must be successfully addressed by eHealth ecosystems: 1) beneficence; 2) consent; 3) privacy; 4) equity; and 5) liability. The second axis describes five stages of the systems development life cycle (SDLC) process whereby new technology is incorporated into an eHealth ecosystem: 1) analysis and planning; 2) design, development, and acquisition; 3) integration and activation; 4) operation and maintenance; and 5) disposal. Known ethical issues relating to the deployment of BCIs are mapped onto this matrix in order to demonstrate how it can be employed by the managers of eHealth ecosystems as a tool for fulfilling ethical requirements established by regulatory standards or stakeholders’ expectations. Beyond its immediate application in the case of BCIs, we suggest that this framework may also be utilized beneficially when incorporating other innovative forms of information and communications technology (ICT) into eHealth ecosystems

Globalization: an open door for the knowledge economy

Globalization refers to an emphasized process of global integration and spreading a set of ideas related to the economical activity and goods’ production, the premises being the liberalization of international commerce and the capital flows, the speeding up of the technological progress and informational society. The cognitive society is more and more obvious and unanimously accepted, which actually proves its efficiency. If traditional, conservative communities, which are not open to change and reject from the start anything new on the horizon, still exist today, they are isolated cases that will eventually be "converted" by this wave of information that has become indispensable to any development because in its absence resources could not be used efficiently. Taking into consideration these elements, this paper wishes to give arguments to the fact that globalization can be seen as being an open door for the cognitive society.globalization, knowledge economy, multinational organizations

The Research Space: using the career paths of scholars to predict the evolution of the research output of individuals, institutions, and nations

In recent years scholars have built maps of science by connecting the academic fields that cite each other, are cited together, or that cite a similar literature. But since scholars cannot always publish in the fields they cite, or that cite them, these science maps are only rough proxies for the potential of a scholar, organization, or country, to enter a new academic field. Here we use a large dataset of scholarly publications disambiguated at the individual level to create a map of science-or research space-where links connect pairs of fields based on the probability that an individual has published in both of them. We find that the research space is a significantly more accurate predictor of the fields that individuals and organizations will enter in the future than citation based science maps. At the country level, however, the research space and citations based science maps are equally accurate. These findings show that data on career trajectories-the set of fields that individuals have previously published in-provide more accurate predictors of future research output for more focalized units-such as individuals or organizations-than citation based science maps