Suchergebnisse

There are now many methods for assessing the maturity and capabilities of software engineering organizations. Assessment scores are being used in making the contract award decision by the U.S. Navy and Air Force, as well as in commercial organizations. Furthermore, conformance to process standards such as ISO 9001, as determined during an audit, is a necessity for doing business in many European countries. Software process assessments are also an essential element of the self-improvement cycle for many organizations. There has been a relative dearth of empirical investigations of the core premises of most contemporary assessment methods and their underlying models. Software organizations were being required and/or pressured to conform to certain standards (e.g., to be at Level 3 on the CMM) without adequate empirical evidence supporting the assumptions made by these standards. The software community needs to be more confident that assessment results accurately reflect the capabilities of organizations being assessed, not simply the idiosyncrasies of those doing the assessments. We need a solid basis to better understand assessment methods, evaluate their basic premises, and make decisions about their use and improvement. In our review we address validity issues of software process assessments as well as reliability issues. Validity of measurement is defined as the extent to which a measurement procedure is measuring what it is purporting to measure. Reliability is defined as the extent to which the same measurement procedure will yield the same results on repeated trials. Validity: More empirical evidence already exists than is sometimes realized. And our understanding of the effectsof maturity is starting to improve. Based on the empirical evidence reviewed in this chapter, one can conclude that process maturity is generally associated with better performance in software organizations. Reliability: The studies reviewed in this chapter represent much of the published research that examines the reliability of software process assessments. The number of studies of this particular topicis not large, but the cummulative evidence thus far suggests that assessments can in fact be done reliably.

Revenue forecasting models, the taxation of sharing economy, the importance of tax literacy in tax compliance, the concept of collective investment institutions, digitalization of tax administration, subsidies granted to the private educational institutions, and taxation of artificial intelligence.

Introduction / Tracy Lightcap and James P. Pfiffner -- Torture and public opinion : the partisan dimension / Peter Miller, Paul Gronke, and Darius Rejali -- Does terror cause torture? : a comparative study of international public opinion about governmental use of coercion / Jeremy D. Mayer, Naoru Koizumi, and Ammar Anees Malik -- Strange, savage blood : defeat and torture in the war on terror / Tracy Lightcap -- U.S. torture policy and command responsibility / James P. Pfiffner -- The efficacy of coercive interrogation / James P. Pfiffner -- Unintended consequences : the effect of advocacy to end torture on empowerment rights violations / Courtenay R. Conrad and Jacqueline H. R. DeMeritt -- Torture reform in democracies : a causal interpretation / Henry F. Carey -- Index.

This anthology provides readers a portal to new and interesting research on one of the most important and disturbing aspects of repression by modern states: the use of torture.

Empirical work to date on the Freudian concept of projection is assessed. Previous reviews are considered and recent work integrated as well as material from several disciplines. This is an area with a substantial but convoluted research literature from which elements are distilled which seem essential for progress in the clarification of Projection, particularly with reference to its defensive qualities and its targeting. Of the many forms of projection that have been included in previous literature, two, Classical and Attributive (Holmes, 1868), are isolated as relevant to this paper. A "checklist" of pertinent factors for future designs is drawn up which integrates the strongest strands from work done under the rubric Social Psychology. It is concluded that despite the tenacity of the projection concept, work so far has provided a series of methodological caveats and much suggestive, but little conclusive data.