Agile Methodology and War Strategies

The history of humankind offers lots of remarkable ideas and innovations in strategy and tactics. There is no area where people have shown more inventiveness than defending themselves or attacking and conquering others. On the other hand, the Agile methodology emerged from software development, where it tried to provide support for the successful organization of delivery projects, that have to fight and conquer the complexity. This article evidences similarities between the Agile methodology and attacking and war strategies, making extended references to one of the most renowned military treaties: Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Making inter-disciplinary analogies, comparing and contrasting the concepts from different disciplines are at the core of this article. We'll investigate what things as initial estimations, attack by stratagem, tactical dispositions, energy, weak points, and strong points, maneuvering, variation in tactics, the army on the march, terrain, arriving on unknown ground, concrete situations on the ground, the use of spies, or what the attack by fire may mean in software development. We'll analyze how these war strategy concepts transpose to Agile concepts like adding business value, getting to the business goals, managing complexity, conducting the work the incremental and non-incremental way.

Information Systems and Technologies in Agronomy and Business: Employers-Oriented Study

This paper describes innovative approaches to the development of an academic course in information technologies in agronomy. The results of an effective combination of teaching methods through solving crosscutting situational tasks were created by a group of teachers. The authors demonstrate efficiency of introduction of modern information systems into the educational process due to the use of discipline software provided by stakeholders with the examples of interactive tasks in the environment of the IS for real-time production process management. Program results are corresponding to standards of higher education in Ukraine, to the European framework of e-competences and were discussed with employers, which are the heads of agricultural enterprises, representatives of agribusiness and IT companies. The article shows examples of motivational measures during training and summarizes the results of cooperation between universities and business. The relevance of the work is considering in the context of Agriculture 4.0's current trends and studying the needs of employers and software developers.

Case Method in the Study of Information Technologies and IT Project Management

The paper shows the features of the application of the case method in the study of the discipline of IT project management for students majoring in the field of Information Technology. This work analyzes some of the difficulties associated with the limited use of case studies in the field of IT. An original solution to the problem of combining flexible technologies for the development of the project itself on the basis of a case study and methods of studying and applying special software for IT project management presented by authors. The conceptual scheme of the main stages of work with a case, interrelations and content from an initial acquaintance, discussion in groups and acceptance of intermediate decisions, to planning of operations, calendar planning of works and resources were shown. However, the role of special software for visualization of separate stages of project execution management in the MS Project environment at all stages of the life cycle was explained. The combination of individual analytical work of the students, acquisition of teem job skills, the study of MS Project tools, IT project management methods at different stages allows to achieve the planned learning outcomes and develop interdisciplinary competencies.

Educational Technologies for Hybrid Learning Contexts: A Grid of 12 Technological Communication Tools

The mission of the university goes beyond contributing to society with the results of its research and innovation. Its scope is prompting and supporting young people to gain new knowledge while encouraging them to consider/include forms of social engagement. Then, it is crucial for teachers to engage students in the learning process. Students use technology to communicate; thus, they are more likely and comfortable to participate in a technology-driven environment. This purpose could be pursued through the correct choice of educational technologies within the learning environments. Communication technologies have the potential to engage learners while also providing motivation and support for both teaching and learning. This paper focuses on the definition of educational technologies and on the description of a grid of 12 technologies that were chosen based on the research activities undertaken in doctoral research at the Politecnico di Milano. Subsequently, the technologies are classified through different mappings and methodologies to produce a description showing advantages, disadvantages, and contexts of use. Finally, it analyses the technologies from the point of view of 2 learning contexts, on-site and online, to help create new hybrid learning processes.

Cybernetic Sparks and Philosophical Feedback Loops

Gregory Bateson observed that cybernetics is not essentially about "exchanging information across lines of discipline, but in discovering patterns common to many disciplines" (Bateson, 1971, p. 23). This paper adopts his line of thought to join the dots between cybernetics and the philosophy of Existentialism, and then interconnect both with contemporary art. It demonstrates that while terminologies may differ, many of the three fields' primary concerns closely cohere. The world's most ground-breaking artists are found to apply and fuse cybernetic paradigms and Existentialist themes, from Robert Rauschenberg and Marina Abramović to Damien Hirst, Stelarc and Anish Kapoor. The research offers the first detailed comparison between cybernetics and Existentialism, and reveals surprising commonalities. Feedback loops, circular causality and negative entropy are not only central tenets of cybernetics, but also of Existentialism. Autonomy, autopoiesis and interactivity equally unite both fields, and each is visionary and forward looking in seeking radical change and transformations. Both explored artistic endeavours, with Existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus equally renowned for their powerful novels and plays as their philosophical works, while cybernetic art became a major phenomenon in the 1960s following the landmark exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer in the Arts (1968), and influenced artistic practices thereafter.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Technology and Education

The convergence of data, computation, and globalization in education has far-reaching consequences for educational stakeholders, institutions, and learners. Terms such as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, artificial intelligence (AI), exponential technology, deep learning, personalized competency-based learning, and distributed ledger technology networks (DLTNs) are indicators of the changing dialogue between education stakeholders, businesses, and government aspirations on a global scale. Location-independent virtual environments promise an exponential expansion that goes beyond brick-and-mortar schools, colleges, and universities. AI and intelligent systems are poised to become global change agents in education, ushering in profound changes in administrative functions, strategic planning, data aggregation, student acquisition and retention, and alternative currencies, as well as curriculum design, assessment, personal learning networks, and global competitiveness generally of both institutions and their graduates. The quality of the education a nation's schools, educational institutions, and teachers provide, along with investments in science, technology engineering, and mathematics education, directly impact economic prosperity and global competitiveness. This paper explores some of the interdependencies that arise from supercharged technological advances such as AI augmented reality digital technologies (ARDTs) and DLTNs and their possible impact on education, educators, learners, and society. In addition, it unbundles the meaning and use cases of AI, ARDTs, and DLTNs in education.

Towards a Framework for Assessing Cybersecurity Risks in Internet of Things (IOT) Devices

The term Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a broad class of devices used by business entities as well as consumers to provide or consume a broad array of services. All these devices share their need to connect to the internet to deliver their native functionality. This connection requirement exposes the devices to the cybersecurity threats found on the internet. Existing literature on IoT cybersecurity solution models has shown that different technologies, such as communication technologies, mobile-app based authorization framework, graph-theoretic approach or blockchain technologies, have been majorly proposed to solve IoT security issues. However, these studies only focus on some specific IoT security issues like data theft or security issues on some specific layer across the whole IoT architecture. Therefore, there is a lack of systematic framework to solve IoT cybersecurity issues. This paper presents a framework for assessing such risks. In the qualitative analysis results, the device threats seem more severe than data confidentiality and privacy issues. This surprising finding highlights the significances of security taxonomy because both issues are based on different technical requirements. Our study has important managerial and practical implications for users, managers, and policymakers.

"Historical Path in Mathematical Games": A Didactic Laboratory Activity Dedicated to Upper Secondary School Students

In this work we intend to share an educational path on mathematical games developed in the last classes of the high schools that participate to the research-project Mathematical High School Project, a project elaborated by the research group in mathematics education of the Department of Mathematics of the University of Salerno (Italy) and dedicated to scientific high school students. The "Historical path in mathematical games" is a didactic laboratory activity dedicated to students of the last year of scientific high schools. The researchers collaborated with the teachers of the schools and carried out an interdisciplinary path on puzzles and logic games invented or reworked by important mathematicians of the last two centuries. Through these themes that were scientific, historical, artistic, musical, literary ones, connections have been created thank to the presentation of texts, images, paintings, drawings, musical and literary pieces.

Proposal of a Model from the Perspective of Parsons Functional-Structural Theory

Taking into consideration the use of the systemic models in interdisciplinary research and education, we analyze the perception of the musical act developed by Talcott Parsons in 1959, based on his Structural-Functional Theory for the social analysis of 1951. In this article, the creative act of the develops considering the demands of his role as a composer and performer, and the conditions the society at large imposed. This relationship also involves the interpretation of the inherited musical culture and is related to the composing skills of the author, the instrumental technique of the performer, and musical intelligence. As a case study, we take the emergence of the Mexican bolero to illustrate it. From this sociological approach, we can understand the identity of the Mexican bolero as a product of an era, in which both the composition and the musical performance are adapted to their cultural environment and are part of the society and its structure. Based on Parsons' proposal, we created a conceptual systemic model through four modules: Personal, Behavioral, Social, and Cultural. This model also represents the internalization, learning and socializations processes, which were the interrelationships between the systems for Parsons. Later we began to develop it in a computational systemic model, in which it is intended to measure the different variables of the musical act system, considering different contexts and temporal spaces.

Resilience Profiles Associated with Social Support and Engagement for Overcoming Academic Obstacles in Undergraduate Education

The main objective of this work was to explore the configuration of those elements that allow students to better adapt to university environments and persist even in the presence of difficulties. The sample consisted of 371 undergraduate students (60% female), of low socioeconomic level, enrolled in public universities in the Caribbean region of Colombia. The methodological approach was based on a cluster analysis, in which, using the hierarchical agglomerative method, groups were extracted according to their similar characteristics of resilience in 12 dimensions assessed by the SV-RES scale and subsequent analyses of variance reported how each style was associated with engagement, and with a particular constitution of personal support networks, assessed respectively with the UWES-S scale, and from a square matrix of reticular data on the social networks of each participant. The results showed four profiles of students, characterized by: a) low resilience, high engagement, and strong support networks; b) resilience with low engagement, and dispersed support networks; c) resilience with high autonomy, intermediate levels of engagement, and weak support networks; and d) resilience, high engagement, and strong social support networks.