Development Of An Information Technology Plan For A Virtual Enterprise Program At A Community College

This project proposed a technical solution to support the development of a Virtual Enterprise program at a community college. The college is located in a rural area that does not have large manufacturing or service-based businesses generating jobs. Consequently, many jobs are created by entrepreneurial endeavors. Traditional small start-ups are risky though. Many young people must leave the area to get better, higher-paying jobs. Individuals, especially students, need an opportunity to try out promising business ideas for practice, using a virtual global market on the Internet. A program of this type would provide valuable business experience to students from all vocational disciplines, enhancing their preparation for employment. The community might retain more of its talented people, and benefit from further economic growth. To encourage entrepreneurial endeavors in the community, the goal of this project was to develop a plan that details the technical and classroom resources as well as the activities necessary to implement a Virtual Enterprise program at the community college. The plan would discuss requirements for the facility, personnel, servers, workstations, local area network, Internet access, software, projectors, multimedia classroom equipment, fax machines, and furniture. The plan would address the various needs of the multiple stakeholders. The Virtual Enterprise facility would simulate an office environment where students have office space and equipment. According to the Marion Kauffman Foundation (Kauffman, 2001), entrepreneurial studies is one of the fastest growing fields of study in the business administration discipline with over 1500 programs currently being offered at four-year Virtual Enterprise IT Plan 6 colleges in the United States. The national trend indicating increased interest in entrepreneurial education is clearly evident in the local community as well. A recent business plan competition funded by a wealthy businessman who owns both local and national businesses was well received by the local community, with over 200 applicants attending the first kick-off meeting. The Virtual Enterprise program and facility is envisioned to support community college students, high school technical preparation programs, and the local community

Centro de madres e infancia, Corabastos

Trabajo de gradoEste escrito documenta la propuesta de anteproyecto arquitectónico del Centro de Madres e Infancia para la Unidad de Planeación Zonal 80 de Corabastos, localidad de Kennedy. Este equipamiento responde a los criterios de pertinencia del lugar, formulación de pregunta problema, Idea, Concepto, Implantación, programa arquitectónico y diferentes sistemas asociados con la edificación. Lo anterior está enmarcado bajo los lineamientos del plan de cero a siempre del departamento administrativo de la presidencia de la república, impulsado por la Primera Dama de la Nación María Clemencia de Santos y apoyado en la mecánica de plan padrino.PregradoArquitect

Cocoa Yield Development of Different Sites, Varieties, Production Systems and Years, in Alto Beni, Bolivia

One of the most essential limiting factors of cocoa (Theobroma cacao L.) productivity worldwide is pests and diseases. Each of the major production regions has its specific pests and diseases. Reported yield losses range from minor to almost 100 per cent. In Alto Beni, located in the Amazonian watershed of the department La Paz, Bolivia, the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) and its local partners are addressing several problems of cocoa producers using a participatory technology development approach. Problems were identified in a participatory way and are, in order of priority, i) to reduce the incidence of pests and diseases, mainly the cocoa mirid (Monalonion dissimulatum) and Frosty Pod Rot (Moniliophthora roreri); ii) to evaluate the productivity of different cocoa varieties (local selections, introduced clones), and iii) to document the management practices and plantation layouts of high yielding cocoa farmers. In order to develop novel biological pest control measures, both the knowledge of cocoa yield development in the course of the harvest period, as well as the dynamics of pests and diseases are of great interest. Data from three different research activities of the mentioned project are analysed for yield development, the appearance, and the incidence of pests and diseases, where available. The research data are from: a) On-farm trials in multiple locations which were established in 2004. The performance of 16 cocoa varieties has been assessed for 3 years (2010–2012). b) Four high yielding cocoa farmers’ fields (2012 only). c) A long-term field experiment assessing the sustainability of five cocoa production systems (2011 and 2012). The trial investigates the influence of monocultures and different agroforestry systems under organic and conventional management on the yield development, among other agronomic, economic and environmental parameters

QB2OLAP : enabling OLAP on statistical linked open data

Publication and sharing of multidimensional (MD) data on the Semantic Web (SW) opens new opportunities for the use of On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP). The RDF Data Cube (QB) vocabulary, the current standard for statistical data publishing, however, lacks key MD concepts such as dimension hierarchies and aggregate functions. QB4OLAP was proposed to remedy this. However, QB4OLAP requires extensive manual annotation and users must still write queries in SPARQL, the standard query language for RDF, which typical OLAP users are not familiar with. In this demo, we present QB2OLAP, a tool for enabling OLAP on existing QB data. Without requiring any RDF, QB(4OLAP), or SPARQL skills, it allows semi-automatic transformation of a QB data set into a QB4OLAP one via enrichment with QB4OLAP semantics, exploration of the enriched schema, and querying with the high-level OLAP language QL that exploits the QB4OLAP semantics and is automatically translated to SPARQL.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Dimensional enrichment of statistical linked open data

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a data analysis technique typically used for local and well-prepared data. However, initiatives like Open Data and Open Government bring new and publicly available data on the web that are to be analyzed in the same way. The use of semantic web technologies for this context is especially encouraged by the Linked Data initiative. There is already a considerable amount of statistical linked open data sets published using the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary (QB) which is designed for these purposes. However, QB lacks some essential schema constructs (e.g., dimension levels) to support OLAP. Thus, the QB4OLAP vocabulary has been proposed to extend QB with the necessary constructs and be fully compliant with OLAP. In this paper, we focus on the enrichment of an existing QB data set with QB4OLAP semantics. We first thoroughly compare the two vocabularies and outline the benefits of QB4OLAP. Then, we propose a series of steps to automate the enrichment of QB data sets with specific QB4OLAP semantics; being the most important, the definition of aggregate functions and the detection of new concepts in the dimension hierarchy construction. The proposed steps are defined to form a semi-automatic enrichment method, which is implemented in a tool that enables the enrichment in an interactive and iterative fashion. The user can enrich the QB data set with QB4OLAP concepts (e.g., full-fledged dimension hierarchies) by choosing among the candidate concepts automatically discovered with the steps proposed. Finally, we conduct experiments with 25 users and use three real-world QB data sets to evaluate our approach. The evaluation demonstrates the feasibility of our approach and shows that, in practice, our tool facilitates, speeds up, and guarantees the correct results of the enrichment process.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Higher-level Knowledge, Rational and Social Levels Constraints of the Common Model of the Mind

In his famous 1982 paper, Allen Newell [22, 23] introduced the notion of knowledge level to indicate a level of analysis, and prediction, of the rational behavior of a cognitive articial agent. This analysis concerns the investigation about the availability of the agent knowledge, in order to pursue its own goals, and is based on the so-called Rationality Principle (an assumption according to which "an agent will use the knowledge it has of its environment to achieve its goals" [22, p. 17]. By using the Newell's own words: "To treat a system at the knowledge level is to treat it as having some knowledge, some goals, and believing it will do whatever is within its power to attain its goals, in so far as its knowledge indicates" [22, p. 13]. In the last decades, the importance of the knowledge level has been historically and system- atically downsized by the research area in cognitive architectures (CAs), whose interests have been mainly focused on the analysis and the development of mechanisms and the processes governing human and (articial) cognition. The knowledge level in CAs, however, represents a crucial level of analysis for the development of such articial general systems and therefore deserves greater research attention [17]. In the following, we will discuss areas of broad agree- ment and outline the main problematic aspects that should be faced within a Common Model of Cognition [12]. Such aspects, departing from an analysis at the knowledge level, also clearly impact both lower (e.g. representational) and higher (e.g. social) levels