Paper Session I-A - The Year 2000 Problem

It has been called the “Millennium Time Bomb, Doomsday 2000, the Double-Naught Disaster” and a multitude of other catchy titles. A quote from Harris N. Miller, President of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) states: “The Year 2000 software conversion is arguably the largest and most complex global information management challenge society has ever faced”. What exactly is the Year 2000 problem? The year 2000 problem stems from the common use of two digit year indicators in many software, hardware and firmware installations, which will cause systems to recognize the ‘00’ in 2000 as 1900 or some other random date and cause calculation errors or computer shutdowns. Many computer programs use an MM/DD/YY format for the date. Some of these programs will not accept ‘00’ as a valid year or they cannot compute that ‘00’ follows 99. Also, will the world’s computers be able to handle the three zeros in the year 2000 date

The Year 2000 Problem: An Ethical View

After years of avoidance, many organizations are struggling to make their computer systems year 2000 compliant. There is little question thatmeeting the year 2000 challenge is important from a business perspective since the survival of organizations may depend on it. However, a second, more neglected concern is whether system developers and their organizations have an ethical obligation to address the year 2000 problem. This paper examines three codes of ethics for information systems professionals to draw conclusions about this issue

Year 2000 and the Banking Industry*

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) first brought the attention of the banking industry to the Year 2000 problem in 1996 (Year 2000 Project 1), but the Year 2000 problem originated many years ago. As a result of limited space, programmers in the 1960s and 1970s began using abbrevia· tions and codes to represent longer words, phrases, and numbers (FDIC Consumer News-Fall 1998 2). This shorthand method of indicating dates continued into the computer era and has worked fine until now. On January 1, 2000, things will not be so simple. If the date is recorded in a computer simply as O 1-01-00, the 00 could be read by the computer to be 1900, not 2000. That mis· take could lead to malfunctions unless computer systems are repaired to process dates correctly in the Year 2000 (FDIC Consumer News-Fall 1998 2). The FFIEC and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) have monitored and reviewed the preparations of financial institutions for Year 2000. These two agencies have required that institutions meet key mile· stone dates and complete five phases of preparation: Awareness, Assessment, Renovation, Validation, and Implementation. Financial institutions have met this challenge successfully and are ready to face the Year 2000 with confidence

Patterns, Tables & Equations: Using Lesson Study to Improve Algebraic Connections

Middle school mathematics teachers are faced with the challenge of laying the foundation for algebra, geometry and statistics while extending student understanding of number sense and operations. Based upon feedback from the textbook analysis completed for the Third International Study of Science and Mathematics, three-year middle school math programs were developed to engage students in a standards-based, problem solving curricula (Huetinck & Mushnin, 2000). One of these standards-based programs is the Com1ected Mathematics Project (CMP) which has been adopted by Greece Central School District. In order to utilize this program to its maximum potential, a method of professional development known as Japanese lesson study was used by my colleague and me to develop and improve our students\u27 understanding of algebraic ideas at the 7th grade level

TBD(exp 3)

When asked by the Aeronautical Engineering staff to design a viable supersonic commercial transport, most of the students were well aware that Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and other aircraft companies had been studying a cadre of transports for more than 30 years and had yet to present a viable aircraft. In the spirit of aviation progress and with much creative license, the TBD design team spearheaded the problem with the full intention of presenting a marketable high speed civil transport in spring of 1992. The project commenced with various studies of future market demands. With the market expansion of American business overseas, the airline industry projects a boom of over 200 million passengers by the year 2000. This will create a much higher demand for time efficient and cost effective inter-continental travel; this is the challenge of the high speed civil transport. The TBD(exp 3), a 269 passenger, long-range civil transport was designed to cruise at Mach 3.0 utilizing technology predicted to be available in 2005. Unlike other contemporary commercial airplane designs, the TBD(exp 3) incorporates a variable geometry wing for optimum performance. This design characteristic enabled the TBD(exp 3) to be efficient in both subsonic and supersonic flight. The TBD(exp 3) was designed to be economically viable for commercial airline purchase, be comfortable for passengers, meet FAR Part 25, and the current FAR 36 Stage 3 noise requirements. The TBD(exp 3) was designed to exhibit a long service life, maximize safety, ease of maintenance, as well as be fully compatible with all current high-traffic density airport facilities

LANCE: Laccase-nanoparticle conjugates for the elimination of micropollutants (endocrine disrupting chemicals) from wastewater in bioreactors

Elimination of recalcitrant chemicals during wastewater treatment is a difficult problem for both developing and industrialized countries. The biological elimination of very persistent xenobiotics such as endocrine disrupting chemicals from municipal and industrial sewage treatment plants is an ambitious challenge as existing physico-chemical methods, such as advanced oxidation processes, are energy-intensive and consume high amounts of chemicals. Through the entry into force of strict legislative measures, such as the Water Framework Directives (EU WFD in Directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing a framework for the Community action in the field of water policy, 2000) and REACH (REACH EU in European Community Regulation on chemicals and their safe use (EC 1907/2006), 2007), the market for wastewater treatment is exploding. For instance the European market potential for the membrane bioreactor technology is estimated to 57M€ per year. Based on recent progresses in nanotechnology, new developments in catalysis and environmental applications can be foreseen for the near future. Indeed, because of high surface area-to-volume ratio in nano-systems, heterogeneous enzymatic or catalytic reactions can be greatly enhanced. In the LANCE project a nanoparticle (NP)-based technology is under development. Cheap and resistant oxidative enzymes, i.e. laccases are immobilized onto the surface of the particles in order to produce systems possessing a broad substrate spectrum for the degradation of cocktails of recalcitrant pollutants. One of the objectives is to produce NPs that are compatible with wastewater treatment and can be synthesised in a cost-effective and large-scale fashion, e.g. silica-based NPs using flame spray pyrolysis and emulsion-based techniques. The modified particles are applied in bioreactors where they are retained, i.e. membrane bioreactors or perfusion basket reactors to eliminate pollutants from the wastewater. Such reactors allow multi-cycle use of the NPs coated with active enzymes and thus contribute to decrease the treatment costs. The two-year activities of the LANCE project encompass the synthesis of various NP systems, the immobilization of selected low cost industrial laccases on the latter, and the technical and scientific proof of the "depollution” concep

From Map Projection to Semiotics

Divljenje Umberta Eca Charlesu S. Peirceu (1839−1914) zbog ... zarađivanja za život crtanjem karata ... u kombinaciji s užitkom znanja koje pruža uranjanje u povijest naše kartografske discipline, podsjetilo me na relevantan šezdeset godina star tekst o velikom znanstveniku i autentičnom misliocu − možda najvećem logičaru svojega doba. Temelji se na neobjavljenom (do tada) rukopisnom materijalu, u njegovoj istoimenoj zbirci u knjižnici Houghton na Harvardu. Šezdesetogodišnja matematičarka Carolyn Eisele (1902−2000) – predana proučavateljica Peircejeva djela – napisala je tekst ranih 1960-ih; zatim je objavljen u Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Tema njezina teksta je problem kartografske projekcije. Ali kakve veze može imati problem kartografske projekcije s logikom i njezinim praktičnim primjenama, što je bio najveći izazov Peircejeva razmišljanja?Umberto Eco’s admiration for Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) for ... earning a living by drawing maps ... combined with the pleasure of knowledge given by the diving to the history of our cartographic discipline, reminded me of a relevant sixty-year-old text about the great scientist and authentic thinker – maybe the greatest of Logic of his time. It is based on unpublished (until then) manuscript material, in his collection of the same name in the Houghton Library at Harvard. The sixty-year-old mathematician Carolyn Eisele (1902−2000) – devoted scholar of Peirce’s work – wrote the text in the early 1960s; it was then published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. The subject of her text is the problem of cartographic projection. But what can a cartographic projection problem have to do with logic and its practical applications, which is the greatest challenge to Peirce’s thinking

The integration of students with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders into northern schools : an ill-structured problem

The purpose of this study was to investigate the work of three administrators and their staffs as they attempted to solve the ill-structured problem of integrating students with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) into their schools. A further purpose of the study was to investigate the role played by schools in influencing community responses that would enhance the post-school lives of students with FASD.The study was conducted throughout one academic year and involved three schools in northern Canada. The use of Problem Based Methodology (PBM) permitted research to be conducted within the schools to generate solutions to the problem. By working with their staff, administrators were afforded opportunities to examine their theories in action and engage in double-loop learning as they searched for new theories of action and alternate constraint constructs.The data for the study were derived from interviews with participating practitioners, parents, health professionals, and District Educational Authority (DEA) members. This permitted the gathering of spontaneous comments and general opinions to be turned into systemic records and detailed statements. The use of PBM determined that data selection involved a search for behaviours in classes of interest. Potential classes of interest were identified prior to the beginning of the study. By the use of a constraint structure, parameters were established for acceptable solutions that generated a theory of action for the ill-structured problem. The four criteria of explanatory accuracy, effectiveness, coherence and improvability were used in theory adjudication (Robinson 1993). Critical dialogue was used between the researcher and participants to collectively make decisions and solve problems through the exchange of the best possible information.The study suggested implications for organizational theory that could better enable administrators and staff to address this ill-structured problem. The isolation and lack of resources oblige staff to create conditions conducive to inquiry and learning (Schon 1983). In the case of initial solutions the theories in action were similar, suggesting that assumptions surrounding the role of contextual factors caused by the heterogeneous nature of the schools are misleading. Prior to the study by Godel et al. (2000) lack of diagnosis diffused the urgency of the problem. Following the publication of the data from that study the lack of screening and diagnosis was a major challenge to stakeholders. Generation of data on the children with FASD in northern communities is essential to generate an organizational and professional focus

Translation confronted with heterolingualism: the case of postcolonial literary texts written in French.

Scritti agli incroci tra le lingue, i testi postcoloniali sono caratterizzati da quel fenomeno che Rainier Grutman ha chiamato eterolinguismo. Concentrandosi su un corpus di romanzi francofoni postcoloniali pubblicati dagli anni 2000 in poi, questa tesi si propone dapprima di analizzare l'eterolinguismo nei testi di partenza per poi analizzare le traduzioni italiane, inglesi e spagnole.Written at the intersection of languages, postcolonial texts show evidence of the phenomenon that Rainer Grutman has called “heterolingualism”, that is to say the coexistence of different languages in a literary text. Focusing on a corpus of ten postcolonial novels written in French, published in France from the year 2000 onwards, this thesis, on the one hand, deals with the inclusion of heterolingualism in source texts – its forms and the way it works – and on the other hand, analyses how it is translated in the Italian as well as the English and Spanish versions. The problem of rendering linguistic heterogeneity is the core of this research. Our analysis will allow us to demonstrate how translation can take up the challenge of heterolingualism. Far from being an insoluble problem, linguistic heterogeneity can be rendered as long as the translation overrides the principles of transparency and readability on which it is usually based