Software Engineering Timeline: major areas of interest and multidisciplinary trends

Ingeniería del software. EvolucionSociety today cannot run without software and by extension, without Software Engineering. Since this discipline emerged in 1968, practitioners have learned valuable lessons that have contributed to current practices. Some have become outdated but many are still relevant and widely used. From the personal and incomplete perspective of the authors, this paper not only reviews the major milestones and areas of interest in the Software Engineering timeline helping software engineers to appreciate the state of things, but also tries to give some insights into the trends that this complex engineering will see in the near future

Iceberg transport technologies in spatial competition. Hotelling reborn

Transport costs in address models of differentiation are usually modeled as separable of the consumption commodity and with a parametric price. However, there are many sectors in an economy where such modeling is not satisfactory either because transportation is supplied under oligopolistic conditions or because there is a difference (loss) between the amount delivered at the point of production and the amount received at the point of consumption. This paper is a first attempt to tackle these issues proposing to study competition in spatial models using an iceberg-like transport cost technology allowing for concave and convex melting functions.Spatial Competition, Iceberg transport costs

Informational efficiency in distressed markets: The case of European corporate bonds

This paper investigates the effect of the 2008 financial crisis on informational efficiency by carrying out a long-memory analysis of European corporate bond markets. We compute the Hurst exponent for fifteen sectorial indices to scrutinise the time-varying behaviour of long-range memory, applying a shuffling technique to avoid short-term correlation. We find that the financial crisis has uneven effects on the informational efficiency of all corporate bond sectors, especially those related to financial services. However, their vulnerability is not homogeneous and some nonfinancial sectors suffer only a transitory effect.Fil: Fernández, Aurelio. Universitat Rovira I Virgili; EspañaFil: Guercio, María Belén. Universidad Provincial del Sudoeste; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Economía. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur; ArgentinaFil: Martinez, Lisana Belén. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Economía. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur; Argentina. Universidad Provincial del Sudoeste; Argentin

Coaching-Based Leadership Intervention Program: A Controlled Trial Study

In spite of the potential benefits that coaching-based leadership interventions can bring to organizations, basic questions remain about their impact on developing coaching skills and increasing psychological capital (PsyCap), work engagement and in- and extra-role performance. In a controlled trial study, 41 executives and middle managers (25 in the experimental group and 16 in the waiting-list control group) from an automotive sector company in Spain received pre-assessment feedback, a coaching-based leadership group workshop, and three individual executive coaching sessions over a period of 3 months. The intervention program used a strengths-based approach and the RE-GROW model, and it was conducted by executive coaching psychologists external to the organization. Participants (N = 41) and their supervisors (N = 41) and employees (N = 180) took part in a pre-post-follow up 360-degree assessment during the research period. Quantitative data were analyzed using Analyses of Variance (ANOVA) with a 2 2 design, paired-samples t-tests, and univariate analyses between groups. Results indicated that the intervention program was successful in increasing the participants’ coaching-based leadership skills, PsyCap, work engagement, and in- and extrarole performance. Qualitative measures were also applied, and results from individual responses provided additional support for the study hypotheses. Regarding practical implications, the results suggest that the Coaching-based Leadership Intervention Program can be valuable as an applied positive intervention to help leaders develop coaching skills and enhance well-being and optimal functioning in organizations

Resilient Distributed Energy Management for Systems of Interconnected Microgrids

In this paper, distributed energy management of interconnected microgrids, which is stated as a dynamic economic dispatch problem, is studied. Since the distributed approach requires cooperation of all local controllers, when some of them do not comply with the distributed algorithm that is applied to the system, the performance of the system might be compromised. Specifically, it is considered that adversarial agents (microgrids with their controllers) might implement control inputs that are different than the ones obtained from the distributed algorithm. By performing such behavior, these agents might have better performance at the expense of deteriorating the performance of the regular agents. This paper proposes a methodology to deal with this type of adversarial agents such that we can still guarantee that the regular agents can still obtain feasible, though suboptimal, control inputs in the presence of adversarial behaviors. The methodology consists of two steps: (i) the robustification of the underlying optimization problem and (ii) the identification of adversarial agents, which uses hypothesis testing with Bayesian inference and requires to solve a local mixed-integer optimization problem. Furthermore, the proposed methodology also prevents the regular agents to be affected by the adversaries once the adversarial agents are identified. In addition, we also provide a sub-optimality certificate of the proposed methodology.Comment: 8 pages, Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 201

Banking on Foreigners: The Behaviour of International Bank Lending to Latin America, 1985-2000",

Rising international bank financing to developing countries has motivated a debate on the behavior of these claims. We analyze claims from seven home (lender) countries on ten host (borrower) countries in Latin America. We find that banks transmit shocks from their home countries and changes in their claims on other countries spill over to individual hosts. However, lending has become less “indiscriminate” and more responsive to host conditions over time. Responsiveness to the latter becomes less “pro-cyclical” as exposure increases. Finally, foreign bank lending reacts more to positive than to negative host shocks and is not significantly curtailed during crises.

Antecedents of academic performance of university students: academic engagement and psychological capital resources

Predicting academic performance is of key importance to the success, wellbeing and prosperity of students, their families, the economy, and the society at large. This study investigates the relationship between academic engagement, psychological capital (PsyCap) and academic performance. Data were collected in two different universities, one in Spain and another in Portugal. Students completed two self-report questionnaires regarding academic engagement and Psychological Capital. Academic performance was assessed through Grade Point Average, provided by the universities at the end of the exam period. The samples consisted of 389 and 243 undergraduate students, respectively. Results showed a positive relationship between academic engagement and PsyCap, on the one hand, and academic performance on the other, in both samples. Results also supported PsyCap as a full mediator in the relationship between academic engagement and academic performance. Exploration of alternative models yielded superior fit for the proposed model. Accordingly, academically engaged students were likely to experience higher levels of PsyCap, which in turn positively impacted their academic performance. The results point to the importance of considering psychological predictors, rather than the prevalent reliance on traditional predictors of academic performance

La percepción de restauración ambiental de la vivienda y el funcionamiento familiar

La Escala de Percepción de Restauración Ambiental (EPRAR; Martínez-Soto & Montero, 2007) y sus factores: Compatibilidad, Fascinación, Alcance, Coherencia y Estar Alejado y el indicador de Preferencia Ambiental fueron empleados para documentar las cualidades restauradoras de la vivienda y su influencia en la funcionalidad familiar. Se hipotetizó que la percepción de restauración ambiental de la vivienda se relacionaría positivamente con la evaluación de tranquilidad, orden y control en casa. Se efectuaron 117 entrevistas intradomiciliarias con adolescentes y adultos (edad media 45.85 años, 61 hombres y 56 mujeres) de la Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México. Los hallazgos evidenciaron que existieron relaciones positivas y significativas entre las dimensiones de la EPRAR Compatibilidad, Coherencia, Alcance y Preferencia Ambiental con el funcionamiento familiarThe Perception of Environmental Restoration Scale (PERSR; Martínez-Soto & Montero, 2007) was used to document the influence of restorative qualities of housing on family functioning through the following factors: Compatibility, Fascination, Scope, Coherence, Being Away and the Environmental Preference Indicator. It was hypothesized that the perception of environmental restoration of housing is positively related to the assessment of home peacefulness, order and control. 117 in home interviews were carried out with adolescents and adults (mean age of 45.85 years, 61 males and 56 females) from the Mexican Valley Metropolitan Area. Findings showed positive and significant relations between the PERSR dimensions of Compatibility, Coherence, Scope and Environmental Preference, and family functionin

Franco and Spanish music of resistance: the role of Spanish singers and popular songs for musical films before and after our civil war (1936-1939)

During Fracoism dictatorships (1939-1975) popular songs played diverse roles, especially the ones interpreted by popular female singers who were famous already for acting in musical films since 1929; during the three years of the civil war they continued performing as propaganda. When the war finished and Franco started his long 40 years as Generalisimo, those popular songs which were performed with different meaning, and they took another ones from new musical films which can be called songs for resistance. We think that the importance of research on musical films produced in Spain has to start not only during the beginning of the dictatorship but a decade earlier, during the Second Republic and with a emphasis in the 60, the last years of the dictatorship before the democracy in 1975. With the analysis of several musical numbers from different musical films, since 1929 to 1975, we can check three distinct realities intrinsically representing the social and cultural change, as a way of resistance: by one hand, musical films (later, musical television programs) popularize songs, where female young singers and prodigy girls had a very important role performing them. On another hand, we find the most reactionary element to any changes, a feature Spanish cultural identity, the song starring aflamencado style, the most popular Spanish musical films symbolizing the "Spanish soul”. Finally, by another hand, since the 60s, during the last decade of Francoism dictatorship we found lazarovriana aesthetics (from Valerio Lazarov) for a Spanish television moving itself toward openness and innovation, with strong rhythms and contemporary choreographers who would do the transition to democracy in 1975. After watching several examples, we can develop a general discussion of the manifold correlations and interdependencies in times of dictatorialship when cultural activities can avoid censure magically. Also, the role of those popular songs can be discusses with the context of ideologies of progress and/or innovatio

Processing Verbal Inflection in Native and Non-Native Spanish

The role of morphological complexity in visual word recognition has recently been studied in detail both with native speakers and second language (L2) learners. The present study investigates how morphologically complex words (such as walk-walked) are processed by native speakers of Spanish and English learners of Spanish as an L2. Moreover, the study examines factors such as proficiency and lexical decoding ability to see whether they can predict individual variability in the sensitivity that L2 learners show to morphological information. Subjects participated in two experiments, a lexical decision task (using a long-lag priming experiment), and a gating task, in order to assess their lexical decoding ability. Results show that native speakers of Spanish can decompose inflected verbs into their constituents, while L2 learners need to rely more on whole word storage in order to process the same forms. Furthermore, neither proficiency nor decoding ability were found to be related to individual differences in morphological processing in the learner group. These results suggest that native speakers and L2 learners rely on different mechanisms in order to process inflectional morphology