Cloud based collaborative software development: A review, gap analysis and future directions

Organizations who have transitioned their development environments to the Cloud have started realizing benefits such as: cost reduction in hardware; relatively accelerated development process via reduction of time and effort to set up development and testing environments; unified management; service and functionality expansion; on-demand provisioning and access to resources and development environments. These benefits represent only a fraction of the full potential that could be achieved via leveraging Cloud Computing for the collaborative software development process. Related efforts in this area have been mainly in the areas of: asynchronous collaboration; collaboration in isolated aspects of the Software Development process, such as coding activities; use of open-source tools for contributing, improving, and managing code, etcetera. Although these efforts represent valid contributions and important enablers, they are still missing important aspects which enable a more holistic process, with solid theoretical foundation. This paper reviews this research area, in order to better assess factors and gaps creating the need to enhance the collaborative software development process in the Cloud, to better meet the pressure to collaboratively create better cloud-agnostic applications. © 2017 IEEE

“Der Burschen Herrlichkeit”? Viejas y nuevas formas de examinar la historia de los estudiantes universitarios alemanes (1810-1945). Un informe de investigación

This research report attempts to show the basic lines of student history research in relation to the period from 1810 to 1945. It is thus primarily concerned with the period that is referred to in university history research as the “classical phase” (Peter Moraw). After an overview of fundamental questions about the era, it gives an overview of the history of student fraternities, whose importance cannot be overestimated. However, since student history is not limited to fraternity history, it then describes the relationship between student and fraternity history since the 19th century as a kind of elective affinity. In this context, particular attention is paid to the not always easy relationship between professional researchers and laypersons interested in student history, often members of student fraternities. The following part is devoted to the “Sonderweg theory” in student history, i.e., the thesis that student fraternities were a particularly characteristic form of expression of the “German Sonderweg”. Finally, the last part deals in detail with more recent tendencies in student historiography since the late 1990s, especially on Catholic student life, student violence, Jewish students and anti-Semitism, as well as female students and gender-historical approaches. As an important desideratum, genuine cultural aspects of student history are identified. Nonetheless, student history has nowadays developed into a flourishing branch of university history.Este informe de investigación intenta mostrar las líneas básicas de la investigación de la historia de los estudiantes en relación con el período de 1810 a 1945. Por lo tanto, se ocupa principalmente del período al que se hace referencia en la investigación de la historia universitaria como la “fase clásica” (Peter Moraw ). Después de un repaso  de las cuestiones fundamentales de la época, da un repaso a la historia de las fraternidades estudiantiles, cuya importancia no puede subestimarse. Sin embargo, dado que la historia del estudiante no se limita a la historia de la fraternidad, describe la relación entre la historia del estudiante y la fraternidad desde el  siglo XIX como una especie de afinidad electiva. En este contexto,  se presta  especial  atención a la relación no siempre fácil entre investigadores profesionales y laicos interesados en la historia estudiantil, a menudo miembros de fraternidades estudiantiles. La siguiente parte está dedicada a la “teoría del Sonderweg” en la historia estudiantil, es decir, la tesis de que las fraternidades estudiantiles fueron una forma de expresión particularmente característica del “Sonderweg alemán”.  Finalmente,  la última parte trata en detalle las tendencias más recientes en la  historiografía  estudiantil desde fines de la década de 1990, especialmente sobre la vida estudiantil católica, la violencia estudiantil, los estudiantes judíos y el anti-semitismo, así como las estudiantes y los enfoques históricos de género. Como desiderátum importante, se identifican los aspectos culturales genuinos de la historia estudiantil. No obstante, la historia estudiantil se ha convertido hoy en día en una floreciente rama de la historia universitaria

Towards an Aesthetics of the (in)formel: Time, Space and the Dialectical Image in the Music of Varèse, Feldman and Xenakis

This thesis addresses the issue of the modernist musical artwork, specifically in terms of the spatialization of musical time, in aesthetic and music-analytic terms. Firstly, it focuses on the notion of musique informelle as it was expounded in Adorno’s essay ‘Vers une musique informelle,’ (1961) and its place in Gianmario Borio’s elaboration of this in terms of an aesthetics of the informel. Secondly, it proposes a further expansion of these aesthetics via a double strategy: a comparative reading of Walter Benjamin’s critique of philosophies of time (including the work of Henri Bergson), language and objects, and furthermore a reconceptualization of both Adorno’s and Borio’s aesthetics in terms of a new theory of the object (as sound-object) in light of a new reading strategy. This reading is based on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image, which proposes a new form of philosophical interpretation. The theorizations of the sound-object and the dialectical image furnish a basis for a re-conceptalization of the (in)formel, allowing for the interpretative reading of the music of three composers in particular: Edgard Varèse, Morton Feldman and Iannis Xenakis. Particularly, the study of a number of their works, including Intégrales (Varèse), On Time and the Instrumental Factor and Words and Music (Feldman), and Duel (Xenakis), reveals what Adorno terms their (truth) content, in their mediation of rationalization and intuition. Finally, it is argued that these modernist works can in turn bring new insights into Adorno’s aesthetics of the modernist work of art

Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany

In the 1960s and 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), or West Germany, newspaper readers and television viewers were appalled by terrible images of fires burning half a world away. The Vietnam War was a decisive catalyst for the era’s wider protest movements and gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. This discourse privileged writing in many forms. Within it, poetry and poetic writing were key; and because coverage of the conflict in Vietnam often focused on spectacular, destructive conflagrations ignited by hi-tech machines of war, their dominant trope was fire. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in the FRG, yet they are almost entirely forgotten today. Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany uncovers and explores some of this rich production in order to present a new history of engaged poetic writing in the FRG in the 1960s and 1970s, and to draw out distinctive characteristics of wider protest culture. In doing so, it makes the case for attending to marginal, non-canonical or neglected literary and cultural forms, and for critical thinking about why they might, over time, have been obscured. This book offers, too, a case study for reflection on the representation of war, on ways in which German oppositional culture could imagine its others, and the ways in which other voices could speak to it in turn, and on the relationship of poetry to the historical world

Advancing the Human Self

Do technologies advance our self-identities, as they do our bodies, cognitive skills, and the next developmental stage called postpersonal? Did we already manage to be fully human, before becoming posthuman? Are we doomed to disintegration and episodic selfhood? This book examines the impact of radical technopoiesis on our selves from a multidisciplinary perspective, including the health humanities, phenomenology, the life sciences and humanoid AI (artificial intelligence) ethics. Surprisingly, our body representations show more plasticity than scholarly concepts and sociocultural narratives. Our embodied selves can withstand transplants, bionic prostheses and radical somatechnics, but to remain autonomous and authentic, our agential potentials must be strengthened – and this is not through ‘psychosurgery’ and the brain–computer interface

Facing Poetry

What is Literature? According to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Literature is perfect sensate discourse. Based on this insight Baumgarten offers the first modern theory of literature. His uniquely holistic approach encompasses a methodology, epistemology, metaphysics, narratology, and ethics