Accidental Aspects Research Articles

Distance teaching and teaching ‘as’ distance. A critical reading of online teaching instruments during and after the pandemic

This paper intends to read through a critical lens the digitalization of schooling caused by the COVID-19 epidemic. The emergency has forced European governments to close the schools and consequently, all the schooling activities have been transferred online. Referring to some works of Giorgio Agamben, Paul Virilio and Walter Benjamin the authors propose some critical remarks on the transformation of schooling space and schooling time that characterizes the practice of distance learning. This transformation pertains not only to accidental aspects of schooling but affects the very identity of the schooling experience. In a completely digitalized school, time is characterized by instantaneousness: time as duration is replaced by the “time of exposure”, as stated by Paul Virilio. In addition, the school completely dematerialized, is reduced to the two-dimensional space of the screen. The article aims to show that instantaneous time and dematerialized space make the experience of “crossing” difficult. Therefore, following some remarks by Jan Masschelein and Gert Biesta, it is maintained that the experience of “crossing” endangered by the digitalization of schooling is essential to an authentic experience of schooling. It is not intended to refuse the digital innovations as such but to “put them on the table”, in order to suspend their immediate use and analyze them critically.

Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New SensibilityThe Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy

Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New SensibilityThe Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy

The death of Steve Jobs: How the media design fortune from misfortune

This paper analyses the design of organisational storytelling by the media. Media play essential roles in the process of widespread organisation stories, as well as in the creation and re-creation of them. We specifically propose to identify the elements in media narratives that make storytelling appealing to the public and facilitate the process of the sensemaking of an organisation and its leader. For this purpose, we study the case of media discourse during the episode of the death of Steve Jobs, the leader of one of the most economically valuable companies in the world – Apple. We reach the conclusion that media narrative in this episode seemed pasteurised to preserve a discourse of rational coherence. As ‘germs’ in discourse are eliminated, ambiguous and accidental aspects are neglected, or they gain a deterministic meaning in the plot.

Combining risk assessment, life cycle assessment, and multi-criteria decision analysis to estimate environmental aspects in environmental management system

The rating of environmental aspects plays a central role in the ISO 14001 environmental management system (EMS) and EU Eco-Management and Audit Scheme because it is the basis for the identification of an organization's environmental targets. The existing methods for the assessment of environmental aspects are grouped into three categories: risk assessment-based (RA-based), life cycle assessment (LCA)-based, and criterion-based methods. The first category accurately determines abnormal, or accidental aspects, as well as the probabilistic causality of aspect–pathway–receptor–impact relationships, but when evaluating environmental impact, it cannot provide a sound theoretical basis. The second category provides a theoretical foundation for the assessment of environmental impact, due to LCA, but cannot adequately represent the probabilistic aspect–pathway–receptor–impact relationship. The third category puts emphasis on the significance criteria, but the scoring methods are too simple. To combine the benefits of these three categories of research, this study proposes an integrated framework, combining RA-, LCA-, and criterion-based methods. The integrated framework incorporates LCA techniques for the identification of the causal linkage for aspect–pathway–receptor–impact, uses fuzzy logic to assess aspects, considers fuzzy conditions, in likelihood assessment, and employs a new multi-criteria decision analysis method—multi-criteria and multi-connection comprehensive assessment (MMCA)—to estimate significant aspects in EMS. The proposed model is verified, using a real case study—a waste-recycling factory. The results show that this method successfully prioritizes the environmental aspects. Compared with criterion-based methods, the case study demonstrates that the proposed method provides a more solid theoretical basis. This study integrates RA, LCA, and MMCA, to assess environmental aspects. The method identifies the probabilistic causality of aspect–pathway–receptor–impact relationships, enhances the theoretical foundations, and strengthens decision-making.

A software support to initiate systems engineering students in service‐oriented computing

ABSTRACTAn evolutionary process that is currently taking place in the software industry is the shift from developing applications from scratch to discovering and assembling services published in the Internet. This has given birth to a new computing paradigm called service‐oriented computing (SOC). We investigated whether simplifying and automating tasks inherent to SOC‐based development, while exploiting systems engineering students' experience in earlier paradigms, namely object orientation, reduce the cognitive effort needed to learn SOC. The study involved 38 undergraduate students plus 7 postgraduate students from 4 universities, which attended a course about SOC development models and technologies. Then, they were asked to develop a real‐life service‐oriented application using two alternatives, namely existing SOC libraries and a software support of our own named EasySOC. EasySOC promotes using common object‐oriented design patterns to structure service‐oriented applications, facilitates service discovery, and hides many technological details from users. The students were surveyed about their perception on both alternatives using a Likert‐based questionnaire. Results show that the students, who had no previous experience in service‐oriented notions before the experiment, perceived that EasySOC allows focusing on essential aspects of the paradigm while concealing accidental aspects, and provides adequate support and guidance to bridge the gap. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 22:252–265, 2014; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.20551

The Role and the Future of Regulation in the Financial Crisis: The Uncertainty Perspective

This paper analyzes the last financial crisis in the perspective of financial innovation focussing on the dynamics of systemic externalities in banking. After discussing the peculiar nature of banking and its external effects to society, it shows that one major determinant of the financial crisis was the failure of regulation to address the evolution of financial intermediation under uncertainty. Differently from the standard explanations, which are variously based on unanticipated opportunism and/or irrationality of financial intermediaries, this analysis suggests that regulation has not been insufficient. On the contrary, regulation has been so overly demanding towards traditional banking to promote unregulated forms of financial intermediation, thereby exacerbating the externalities of financial innovation. In contrast to the initiatives of regulatory reform on both sides of the Atlantic, which address the accidental aspects of the last financial crisis, this paper contends that the overhaul of financial regulation should focus on the general problem of banks’ dealing with uncertainty. As uncertainty makes externalities in banking most dangerous, this approach could fare better in preventing the next crisis. Three major implications are derived from this analysis. First, regulation should avoid inducing banks to make leveraged bets on new forms of short-term funding in order to compete with unregulated intermediaries. The latter should be prevented from engaging in the functional core of banking, maturity transformation, which is the recurrent source of systemic externalities. Second, in relying upon ratings, regulation should correct the incentives it provides to rating agencies to inflate their grades by making them liable for rating intractable uncertainties instead of measurable risks. Finally, regulation should avoid tampering with the corporate governance of banks. Allowing bank managers to protect their autonomy via contractual choices is a more promising solution to short-termism in carrying out financial innovation than regulation of bankers’ pay.

An Environmental Analysis of the Impact of an Accidental Fire in Process Industries

The models to prevent accidents from occurring in process industry, or to minimize the harm if an accident does take place, always revolve around forecasting the likely accidents and their impacts. Based on the several effects of an accident on the environment, the approach used in this study involves a qualitative analysis by the Environmental Effects Analysis (EEA) combined to Quantitative Risk Assessment approach (QRA). In fact, the EEA, under its current formalism, emphasizes environmental effects in normal operations solely. It does not consider abnormal situations (accidental aspects). In order to overcome this lack, the authors propose an extension of the current formalism of the EEA through the inclusion of accidental events that may occur in each phase of the product’s life cycle, where from the EEA – Accidental Aspect method. Impacts associated with abnormal situations are identified and assessed in accordance with risk assessment practices. Risk assessment can be both qualitative and quantitative. Nevertheless, whenever possible, we adopt a Quantitative Risk Assessment approach (QRA). The evaluation criteria used in the classical EEA, i.e. Environmental Priority Number (EPN), is redefined to take into account the impacts due to accidental aspects. By doing so, we establish an effective link between methods for assessing environmental impacts and approaches to risk management. The validation of the proposed methodology is made on a storage system with a high potential of fire risk.

Essential Art: Matthew of Linköping's Fourteenth-Century Poetics

This article contributes to the study of medieval poetics and rhetoric by reassessing the Arabic-Aristotelian influence in the Poetria and Testa nucis of Matthew of Linköping (c. 1300–1350). In the Poetria Matthew applied a dichotomy between essential and accidental aspects (essencialia-accidentalia) which provided him with a historical, theoretical, and cultural perspective on conventional poetics. The appeal of the (Parisian teaching of) Arabic-Aristotelian poetics lay not merely in its theoretical ideas, but also in its novel multilingual and cultural aspects that differed from the self-conscious Latin legacy of the older medieval poetics based on Horace and Cicero.

Forging a silver bullet from the essence of software

Most improvements in software development technology have occurred by eliminating the accidental aspects of the technology. Further progress now depends on addressing the essence of software. Fred Brooks has characterized the essence of software as a complex construct of interlocking concepts. He concludes that no silver bullet will magically reduce the essential conceptual complexity of software. This paper expands on Brooks's definition to lay a foundation for forging a possible silver bullet. Discussed are the three essential attributes of software entities from which a number of consequences arise in software development: (1) conceptual content, (2) representation, and (3) multiple subdomains. Four basic approaches to develop technologies are proposed that directly address the essential attributes. Although some of these technologies require additional development or testing, they present the most promise for forging a silver bullet. Among them, design reabstraction addresses the most difficult attribute, multiple subdomains, and the most difficult consequence, enhancing existing code, making it the best prospect.

Mediaeval Aesthetic

HE present article is the first of a series in which it is intended to make more readily accessible to modern students of mediaeval art the most important sources for the corresponding aesthetic theory. The mediaeval artist is, much more than an individual, the channel through which the unanimous consciousness of an organic and international community found expression; in the material to be studied will be found the basic assumptions upon which his operation depended. Without a knowledge of these assumptions, which embrace the formal and final causes of the work itself, the student must necessarily be restricted to an investigation of the efficient and material causes, that is, of technique and material; and while a knowledge of these is indispensible for a full understanding of the work in all its accidental aspects, something more is required for judgment and criticism, judgment within the mediaeval definition depending upon comparison of the actual or accidental form of the work with its substantial or essential form as it