Beyond “appropriate” technology. Mobilizing education for development

Having established that technology mediated instruction of some kind\ud has potential and a valuable role to play in education for on the move and remote\ud area learners the paper looks at practice as documented and suggests that social\ud and cultural barriers are a greater challenge than technological ones. It concludes\ud by suggesting that successful implementation may depend both on use of familiar\ud technology i.e. phones rather than internet, and establishing for users a social and\ud cultural validity for using that technology for the delivery of education

Towards run-time monitoring of web services conformance to business-level agreements

Web service behaviour is currently specified in a mixture of ways, often using methods that are only partially complete. These range from static functional specifications, based on interfaces in WSDL and preconditions in RIF, to business process simulations using executable process-based models such as BPEL, to detailed quality of service (QoS) agreements laid down in a service level agreement (SLA). This paper recognises that something similar to a SLA is required at the higher business level to govern the contract between service producers, brokers and consumers. We call this a business level agreement (BLA) and within this framework, seek to unify disparate aspects of functional specification, QoS and run-time verification. We propose that the method for validating a web service with respect to its advertised BLA should be based on run-time service monitoring. This is a position paper towards defining these goals

Initiators and Responders: A New Way to View Orchestra Audiences

Analyzes the social context surrounding arts attendance and calls for experimentation and investment in new marketing relationships. Considers how orchestras and other arts groups might capitalize on social opportunities to attract new audiences

Employment Laws: Disability and Discrimination

[Excerpt] There are five important federal laws that protect individuals with disabilities from discrimination in employment and the job application process: ■ The Americans with Disabilities Act ■ The Rehabilitation Act ■ The Workforce Investment Act ■ The Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act ■ The Civil Service Reform Act Although many employers and individuals have a basic understanding of the ADA, the nondiscrimination policies of the other laws may be less familiar. Below is a short summary of each law and information on where employers can access additional information and compliance resources

Circles of Exclusion: The Politics of Health Care in Israel

Dr. Dani Filc delves into Israel\u27s health care system and provides numerous insights on how a private health care system undermines the principle of caring for the poor. Dr. Filc stresses that blind commitment to a for-profit health care system leads to wasted money and increased social inequity

Model-driven design of context-aware applications

In many cases, in order to be effective, software applications need to allow sensitivity to context changes. This implies however additional complexity associated with the need for applications’ adaptability (being capable of capturing context, interpreting it and reacting on it). Hence, we envision 3 ‘musts’ that, in combination, are especially relevant to the design of context-aware applications. Firstly, at the business modeling level, it is considered crucial that the different possible context states can be properly captured and modeled, states that correspond to certain desirable behaviors. Secondly, it must be known what are the dependencies between the two, namely between states and behaviors. And finally, what is valid for application design in general, business needs are to be aligned to application solutions. In this work, we address the mentioned challenges, by approaching the notion of context and extending from this perspective a previously proposed business-software alignment approach. We illustrate our achieved results by means of a small example. It is expected that this research contribution will be useful as an additional result concerning the alignment between business modeling and software design

Ten Simple Rules for Searching and Organizing the Scientific Literature

The exponentially increasing number of published papers (1.4 million per year by one estimate) makes it more and more difficult for us to manage the flood of scientific information. Each of us has acquired some protocol to find and organize journal articles and other references over the course of our careers. Most of those protocols are likely to have been formed by old routines or idleness rather than a structured approach to save time and frustration over the long run. Furthermore, with the Web 2.0 revolution, new ways of handling information are emerging (O’Reilly 2005). For example, traditional standalone tools for reference management like EndNote are being supplemented by centralized resources like RefWorks and social bookmarking sites as described subsequently. This fusion of personal and public information offers the promise of efficiency through better organization, which in turn leads to better science.

How can seasoned scientists do better using these tools and those newer to the field start off in the right way? To start to answer that question, I present ten simple rules to master the search and organization of new literature. This is not meant to be comprehensive. It represents the experiences of a few and I welcome your thoughts, through comments to this article, on what you do to keep your references organized.

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The Niagara River Greenway: Fulfilling the Promise

According to the law and the settlement agreements that created it, the Niagara River Greenway was meant to be a linear system of parks, trails, and conservation areas linking Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. Progress on the Greenway has been hampered by the fact that Greenway funds are being spent on a wide variety of projects which, however worthy, bear little or no relation to a linear system of parks and trails. Only about one half of the projects funded have advanced the Greenway as originally envisioned