Using games in business education: An evaluation experiment comparing games to other selected methods in teaching sustainable development concepts

Simulation games are recognized as useful and effective learning tools in the business world, as they create conditions within micro-worlds where participants can experience results of different strategies, which they want to undertake. This use of strategies enables game participants to explore multi-party decision rules and analyse factors that stimulate or hinder the personally desired decision outcomes.Within this context the purpose of the paper is to present the outcomes of an experiment evaluating and comparing an application of a serious game with other teaching methods in the academic study of sustainable development concepts as a part of bachelor’s and master’s degree curriculum in business management. The tested hypothesis is that experiencing a designed situation during a simulation game can provide students with deeper understanding of presented complex issues and concepts more effectively than a lecture, text analysis, or discussion. A controlled experiment was conducted in the sustainable development class to test the hypothesis. The benefits from applying the designed simulation game in teaching compared to the selected methods were presented. The importance and value added of a debriefing as well as a designed evaluation of the compared teaching methods were discussed

Joint Development Feasibility Of A Greening Transport Alternative

Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies. Faculty of Economics and Business. The University of Sydne

The Fundamental Nature of Time

The nature of time is intimately bound up with the nature of energy propagation, which has a long history of its philosophical understanding. Here I propose a new post-Einsteinian view of the nature of time, conceptualized as the outcome of the pure unidimensional rate of change of a process through the infinitesimal operator of differential equations. In this view, time is a local property that is generated by every individual process in the Universe rather than a fundamental dimension in which processes operate. The rate of change has an inherent “arrow of time” that does not depend on the ensemble properties of multiple processes, such as the laws of entropy, but is inherent to the function of each process, by virtue of its genesis in the Big Bang. The conventional view of time may be approximated either by aggregating the operations of large ensembles of diverse processes, or by choosing a process (such as the Atomic Clock) that has demonstrably stable temporal properties. For processes that are sufficiently nonlinear, their iterative progression may in principle lead to solutions describable as fractals, for which the integral derivation of the time variable would fractionate into a form of fractal time

Rearing calves without milk

It is a tragic feature of Western Australian dairying that very few calves are reared by wholemilk producers. The explanation is a simple economic one. When milk is worth over 3s. per gallon, it is too valuable a product to feed to calves, particularly during the months when the dairy farmer is building up his summer quota. So, in the absence of a suitable substitute for milk, the calves are killed at birth

Masolino da Panicale: A Neglected Innovator of Renaissance Perspective

The painter Masaccio has received the lion’s share of the credit for developing the basic perspective construction that dominated the painting style of the Early-to-High Renaissance period, based on the geometric insights of the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and the mathematician Paolo Toscanelli. Close examination of the artworks of the period reveal that this misapprehension was based on a critical misattribution of many of the works supporting his claim from their true author, Masolino da Panicale. The two artists are well established as working closely together, with Masolino being the senior by 18 years. But Giorgio Vasari, whose ‘Lives of the Artists’ is the sole source for most of our knowledge of Renaissance painters, attributed the entire Brancacci Chapel works to Masaccio (with some finished by Filippino Lippi), while listing its profound influence on two dozen of the most famous painters of the Renaissance. Indeed, art historians have developed the notion that Masaccio not only taught perspective to his older collaborator, but “must have” provided the sketches for works painted by Masolino after his (Masaccio’s) early death. A review of the current attributions of several of the Brancacci and other works to Masolino, and an analysis of the accuracy and consistency of the perspective construction in them, in comparison with the relative inconsistency of the actual Masaccio examples, leads to a reversal of the canard that the younger artist played a dominant role, indicates in fact that Masolino was the true master of accurate perspective for three-dimensional compositions, and that it was his array of strikingly original spatial constructions that influenced artists for the rest of the fifteenth century. These included not only the classic central one-point construction, but extreme examples of shifted one-point and even accurate two-point perspective. This impressive analytic capability is contrasted with the demonstrably intuitive approach to perspective construction by an array of contemporaries who have variously been proposed as key figures in the introduction of geometric perspective

The Impact of American Petroleum Institute Certifications in Quality Management Systems: Analysis of API Spec Q1 and Q2 Certified Organizations

The present study aims to provide initial insight into the quality management system. More precisely, it describes whether and to what extent implementation of Quality Management System according to API Spec Q1 and/or Q2 can impact various companies in the oil and gas industry. A sample of international organizations is surveyed to understand how certifications affect organizational culture, passing through elements such as competitiveness, reputation, organizational performance, costs, and others. In addition to the certification itself, a rigorous and challenging process of implementation, review, restructuring is carried out, involving fundamental elements of the organization. During this stage, technical support becomes essential for a productive consolidation of the required requirements, and later, the improvement scenario is indispensable to maintain all the success factors in order to consolidate a quality management system within the organization. Thus, based on the findings, companies in the oil and gas segment may identify and reflect on the certification benefits to improve their approach to quality management systems, given the observations of managers and operational interviewees