A Challenging Conversation on Integral Futures: Embodied Foresight and Trialogues

Practitioner reflection is vital for knowledge frameworks such as Ken Wilber's Integral perspective. Richard Slaughter, Joseph Voros and others have combined Wilber's perspective and Futures Studies to create Integral Futures as a new stance. This paper develops Embodied Foresight as a new approach about the development of new Integral Futures methodologies (or meta-methodologies) and practitioners, with a heightened sensitivity to ethics and specific, local contexts. Three practitioners conduct a 'trialogue' - a three-way deep dialogue - to discuss issues of theory generation, practitioner development, meta-methodologies, institutional limits, knowledge systems, and archetypal pathologies. Personal experiences within the Futures Studies and Integral communities, and in other initiatory and wisdom traditions are explored

Basel II : operational risk measurement in the portuguese Banking sector and an evaluation of the quantitive impacts

The present work is aimed at understanding the general notion and origin of the New Basel Accord, which intends to attain international bank stability, emphasizing the convergence between regulatory capital and economic capital, applying its risk sensitive methodologies. This work focuses on one of the principal novelties of Basel II – operational risk and its respective methodologies for calculating minimum capital requirements. The New Capital Accord encourages financial institutions to gradually evolve from basic to sophisticated methodologies. Institutions using more sophisticated methods will be rewarded by deductions on the capital allocated for the calculation of the capital ratio. The methodologies associated to operational risk will be applied to a group of national banking institutions. These methodologies are referred to in Pillar I of the New Capital Accord: (i) basic indicator approach, (ii) the standardized approach and (iii) the alternative standardized approach. The purpose of this practical application is to evaluate and quantify the impact due to the introduction of Basel II.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

EXTREME PROGRAMMING AND RATIONAL UNIFIED PROCESS – CONTRASTS OR SYNONYMS?

The agile movement has received much attention in software engineering recently. Established methodologies try to surf on the wave and present their methodologies a being agile, among those Rational Unified Process (RUP). In order to evaluate the statements we evaluate the RUP against eXtreme Programming (XP) to find out to what extent they are similar end where they are different. We use a qualitative approach, utilizing a framework for comparison. RUP is a top-down solution and XP is a bottom-up approach. Which of the two is really best in different situations has to be investigated in new empirical studies.extreme programming

Deep Cover HCI

The growing popularity of methodologies that turn "to the wild" for real world data creates new ethical issues for the HCI community. For investigations questioning interactions in public or transient spaces, crowd interaction, or natural behaviour, uncontrolled and uninfluenced (by the experimenter) experiences represent the ideal evaluation environment. We argue that covert research can be completed rigorously and ethically to expand our knowledge of ubiquitous technologies. Our approach, which we call Deep Cover HCI, utilises technology-supported observation in public spaces to stage completely undisturbed experiences for evaluation. We complete studies without informed consent and without intervention from an experimenter in order to gain new insights into how people use technology in public settings. We argue there is clear value in this approach, reflect on the ethical issues of such investigations, and describe our ethical guidelines for completing Deep Cover HCI Research

Ranking structured documents using utility theory in the Bayesian network retrieval model

In this paper a new method based on Utility and Decision theory is presented to deal with structured documents. The aim of the application of these methodologies is to refine a first ranking of structural units, generated by means of an Information Retrieval Model based on Bayesian Networks. Units are newly arranged in the new ranking by combining their posterior probabilities, obtained in the first stage, with the expected utility of retrieving them. The experimental work has been developed using the Shakespeare structured collection and the results show an improvement of the effectiveness of this new approach

Elucidating glycosaminoglycan–protein–protein interactions using carbohydrate microarray and computational approaches

Glycosaminoglycan polysaccharides play critical roles in many cellular processes, ranging from viral invasion and angiogenesis to spinal cord injury. Their diverse biological activities are derived from an ability to regulate a remarkable number of proteins. However, few methods exist for the rapid identification of glycosaminoglycan–protein interactions and for studying the potential of glycosaminoglycans to assemble multimeric protein complexes. Here, we report a multidisciplinary approach that combines new carbohydrate microarray and computational modeling methodologies to elucidate glycosaminoglycan–protein interactions. The approach was validated through the study of known protein partners for heparan and chondroitin sulfate, including fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) and its receptor FGFR1, the malarial protein VAR2CSA, and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α). We also applied the approach to identify previously undescribed interactions between a specific sulfated epitope on chondroitin sulfate, CS-E, and the neurotrophins, a critical family of growth factors involved in the development, maintenance, and survival of the vertebrate nervous system. Our studies show for the first time that CS is capable of assembling multimeric signaling complexes and modulating neurotrophin signaling pathways. In addition, we identify a contiguous CS-E-binding site by computational modeling that suggests a potential mechanism to explain how CS may promote neurotrophin-tyrosine receptor kinase (Trk) complex formation and neurotrophin signaling. Together, our combined microarray and computational modeling methodologies provide a general, facile means to identify new glycosaminoglycan–protein–protein interactions, as well as a molecular-level understanding of those complexes