A Multiagent Platform for Developments of Accounting Intelligent Applications

AOP – Agent Oriented Programming – is a new software paradigm that brings many concepts from the artificial intelligence. This paper provides a short overview of the JADE software platform and the principal’s components constituting its distributed architecture. Furthermore, it describes how to launch the platform with the command–line options and how to experiment with the main graphical tools of this platform.JADE, multiagent system, container, message, communication,accounting.

LITERACY FOR LEARNING IN FURTHER EDUCATION IN THE UK: A SYMPOSIUM

The Literacies for Learning in Further Education (LfLFE) project, a collaboration between two universities – Stirling and Lancaster – and four further education colleges – Anniesland, Perth, Lancaster and Morecambe, and Preston, funded for three years from January 2004 as part of Phase 3 of the TLRP. The project draws on work already done on literacy practices engaged in by people in schools, higher education and the community and seeks to extend the insights gained from these studies into further education. It aims to explore the literacy practices of students and those practices developed in different parts of the curriculum and develop pedagogic interventions to support students’ learning more effectively. This project involves examining literacy across the many domains of people’s experiences, the ways in which these practices are mobilised and realised within different domains and their capacity to be mobilised and recontextualised elsewhere to support learning. A project such as this raises many theoretical, methodological and practical challenges, not least in ensuring validity across four curriculum areas in four sites drawing upon the collaboration of sixteen practitioner researchers. This symposium of four papers examines some of the challenges and findings from the first eighteen months of the project. The first paper explores some of the findings regarding students’ literacy practices in their everyday lives and those required of them in their college studies. The second focuses on one approach adopted by the project as a method through which to elicit student literacy practices. The other two papers focus on different aspects of partnership within the project, in particular the attempts to enable students and lecturers to be active researchers rather than simply respondent

Eptistomological Aspects of Knowledge-Based Decision Support Systems

Knowledge-based decision support applications differ from those typical of artificial intelligence expert systems in their open-ended, evolutionary character and need to coordinate with other systems resources, such as organizational databases and quantitative analysis routines. While knowledge representation machinery is becoming available, the corresponding formalization of managerial/administrative knowledge needed for DSS application is still lacking. This entails problems of an epistomological nature, identifying the foundational concepts of business. An abstract framework based on formal languages and denotational semantics is proposed, and ontological issues are identified

The Future of Modeling in Material Handling Systems

Today, when we talk about “modeling” in the context of material handling systems, invariably we are referring to a mathematical or computational model for analyzing some aspect of the system, such as its throughput rate, response time, cost of ownership, required storage capacity, etc. Creating these kinds of models requires considerable knowledge in at least two domains the material handling system domain, and the analysis methodology domain—and considerable skill in the “art of modeling” in order to express the former in the terms of the latter. The results can be somewhat ad hoc—e.g., two different modelers are likely to create two somewhat different simulation models of exactly the same material handling system. In the past, the situation in software development was very similar, with individual programming experts idiosyncratically driving software development. Over the past twenty years, however, computer scientists and software engineers have created a radically different approach to the process of software “modeling” called Model Driven Architecture, or MDA, that is used to create software for standard applications. The thesis of this paper is that MDA can be adapted to the kind of modeling done to support design and operational decision making in material handling systems. The paper describes MDA technologies in the context of material handling system modeling, and explains how adapting this approach to our context will transform the way we do research and the way material handling systems are analyzed and designed in practice

False friends and comparative law: the case of public goods/beni pubblici.

Il diritto e la traduzione sono due discipline che si incontrano nel diritto comparato. Il traduttore per poter svolgere al meglio il suo ruolo, in un contesto cosi specializzato, è chiamato ad avere nozioni di diritto. Il comparatista allo stesso modo è tenuto a conoscere almeno una lingua differente da quella naturale, l'inglese, ad esempio considerata oggi lingua veicolare. nel diritto comparato questa due conoscenze si fondono per poter comparare e mettere in risalto similitudini e differenze di sistemi giuridici di Paesi diversi. La mia analisi parte dalla spiegazione di un fenomeno linguistico "false friends" che in ambito legale, soprattutto quello comparato, è molto diffuso. Nello specifico mi occupo di approfondire il valore giuridico dei beni pubblici nel sistema italiano appartenente alla famiglia giuridica di Civil Law e i public goods con riferimento agli Stati Uniti d'America. L'obiettivo qui è evidenziare quali aspetti differiscono e quali sono simili comparando i due sistemi giuridici riguardo l'allocazione, la classificazione e la gestione da parte di governo ed enti pubblici per i beni pubblici. Quali sono le proposte in materia di diritto che vengono avanzate per la loro allocazione e sistematizzazione, sempre in modo comparativo

Innovation and Dynamism: Interaction between Systems and Technical Progress

Literature on post-socialist transformation usually deals with the political, economic and social sides of it, although there have also been important changes in the field of technical advance in the last 20 years. One of capitalism’s main virtues is the strong incentive it gives to dynamism, enterprise and the innovation process. Every revolutionary new product (for civilian use) has been brought about by the capitalist system. The socialist system was capable, at most, of developing new military products. The article analyzes how far the radical difference can be explained by the innate tendencies and basic attributes of the two systems. Our daily lives have been transformed by these new products (for instance, the sphere of information and communications by the computer, the mobile phone and the internet). While many people see all these as favorable changes, fewer discern the causal relation between the capitalist system and rapid technical progress. Yet the usual syllabus of microeconomics does not enlighten students on this important virtue of capitalism, which is not adequately emphasized in the statements of leading politicians either.systems, capitalist system, socialist system, innovation, technical progress, Schumpeterian entrepreneurship

Scribd case study : commercial viability of the e-book subscription business model

Modeled after media subscription giants Netflix and Spotify, Scribd is a subscription e-book service based in San Francisco, United States. Despite the highly evaluated potential of the business model, Scribd came across significant problems due to a combination of a pay-per-read payout model and all-you-can-read pricing model; these issues led to a few unpopular decisions such as reducing content selection and eventually changing the subscription terms. In presence of a powerful and prosperous competitor such as Amazon that has a direct analogue to Scribd, Amazon Kindle Unlimited, Scribd has to choose growth strategies that will allow it to add value to the product for current and potential customers. The two possible strategies discussed in this case study are an international expansion to Germany and a domestic market expansion through the premium segment. The case study provides relevant data to assess each strategy and gives background information about the company and the industry in order for students to analyze the case and decide on the most attractive strategy to follow.Modelado como os gigantes de serviço de assinatura de média como Netflix e Spotify, Scribd é um serviço de assinatura de e-book baseado em São Francisco, Estados Unidos. Apesar de o modelo de negócio ter grande potencial, Scribd encontrou problemas significativos devido a uma combinação do seu modelo de pagamento "pago por leitura" e modelo de precário "tudo o que consegue ler". Estes problemas resultaram em decisões pouco populares, como a redução do conteúdo disponível, e a eventual mudança dos termos de assinatura. Na presença de competição potente e próspera como a da Amazon, que tem um serviço equivalente em Amazon Kindle Umlimited, Scribd tem que escolher uma estratégia de crescimento que o vai possibilitar de adicionar valor ao produto para clientes existentes e potenciais. As duas estratégias possíveis que são discutidas neste caso de estudo são uma expansão international para o mercado alemão, e uma expansão no mercado doméstico através de um segmento "premium". Este caso de estudo disponibiliza dados relevantes para avaliar cada estratégia, e fornece informação de fundo a cerca da empresa e a indústria, para que os alunos possam analisar o caso e decidir qual estratégia será a mais atrativa para seguir

Different atmospheres : of Sloterdijk, China, and site

This paper begins with an appreciation and critique of the remarkable work of Peter Sloterdijk which makes it possible to open up a number of issues concerning philosophy and its relation to the social sciences and humanities, most particularly concerning the role of evidence and the pervasiveness of Eurocentrism. In particular, the paper argues that it is possible to think of different ways of raising the spectre of space which are as plausible as the account provided by Sloterdijk’s spatial philosophy/philosophy of space. Navigating by the compass of classical Chinese civilisation, I proceed to sketch out a different diagnosis from that of Sloterdijk of how space is being materialised in contemporary Euro-American cultures. Drawing on logographic traditions of writing the world, I argue that, rather than describing what is now being produced by capitalism and other actors as a warehoused world full of lost souls, it is possible to think of different means of describing how the future is being scripted