...Modeling Culture in Trade: Uncertainty Avoidance* Gert Jan Hofstede Wageningen University gertjan.hofstede@wur.nl Catholijn M. Jonker Delft University of Technology c.m.jonker@tudelft.nl Tim Verwaart LEI Wageningen UR tim.verwaart@wur.nl Keywords: trade, culture, agents, uncertainty avoidance, negotiation Abstract A model is presented of the way that our cultural attitude towards the unknown influences the decisions we make in trade. Uncertainty avoidance is one of Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions. The paper presents a model of how this dimension affects trade. This influence has been explicated for the decisions regarding trade: partner selection, negotiation behavior, trust, and the interpretation of the trade partner’s behavior. It has been verified in simulations showing that the generic tendencies as attributed to uncertainty avoidance are reflected in the simulation results. Our approach is an example of instantiating generic knowledge on the influences of culture on decision-making in general. INTRODUCTION The international food economy is rapidly changing. Important issues are concentration and globalization, growing information intensity, consumer demands, and social responsibility [Kinsey 2001]. An important issue in current food trade research is the emergence and performance of international supply chain networks [Lazzarini et al. 2001]. Agent-based modeling extends the understanding of processes in society and economy. It enables simulation of the emergence...
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...every year http://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results Criterion You should use the 7 criteria from the course textbook to structure your profile (pg 64): 1. Type of economy: Is the nation an advanced industrial state, an emerging economy, a transition economy, or a developing nation? 2. Type of government: Is the nation ruled by a monarchy, a dictatorship, or a tyrant? Is the nation dominated by another state, or is it a democracy with a multiparty system? Is it an unstable or terrorist nation? 3. Trade and capital flows: Is the nation characterized by almost completely free trade or incomplete free trade and is it part of a trading bloc? 4. The commanding heights: (e.g. the transportation, communications and energy sectors) Are these sectors state owned and operated? Is there a mix of state and private ownership? Are they all private, with or without controlled prices? 5. Services provided by the state and funded through taxes: Are pensions health care and education provided? Do privatized systems dominate? 6. Institutions: Is the nation characterized by transparency, standards, the absence of corruption, and the presence of a free press and strong courts? Or is corruption a...
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...Running head: PROJECT PORTFOLIO Project Portfolio Project Portfolio ExxonMobil is one of the largest publicly traded petroleum and petrochemical enterprises in the world. It started out as a regional marketer of Kerosene. They have three familiar brand names which are: Exxon, Esso and Mobil. The first oil well was built in 1859 (exxonmobil.com). ExxonMobil uses different types of technology every day like surveillance, network computers, communication devices, etc. Being a big corporation like this requires an IT Department. We’ve learned these past eight weeks about the use of technology tools, Porter’s Five Forces Model, Agent based technologies, business planning, and technology in present and future. Throughout this paper I will relate the information that I have learned and talk about how these areas can help it remain a competitive business. People, Information and Information Technology play an important role when it comes to helping the company remain competitive in the industry. ExxonMobil tries to teach their employees to have the best technical and leadership capabilities. They provide their employees with formal training and a broad range of global experiences to prepare them to be the next generation of ExxonMobil leaders. Not only do they want to hire exceptional employees at the corporate headquarters, but also at all their branch locations as well. The employees throughout the organization set goals, carry out tasks, make decisions, and serve customers...
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...each having unique application in emergency management related practices. These scans are than turned into 3D images, and exported to software for manipulation by professionals. In an article entitled “Urban three-dimensional (3-D) Roads Surface Reconstruction based on a Data Assimilation Algorithm Using a Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) System” by Chen and He stated that “As scientists, engineers and planners require ever more detailed information about our urban areas the requirement for accurate three-dimensional (3D) mapping of road and city structures is likely to increase considerably in the years to come.” It is important for emergency managers to stay aware of, and apply new technologies that can improve planning and response. A 3D scanner is a device that collects three-dimensional data about a real-world object or environment including its shape and/or its appearance, including color, texture or even material type. The collected data can than be used to construct digital three-dimensional models. After a scan is complete, the information gathered is formed in to point clouds which are sets of data points, in a 3D dimensional coordinate system, these points are defined in (X, Y, Z) coordinates, and usually represent the external surface of an object. This provides a digital representation of the object, or area that was scanned. Because...
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...Project group “Learning Agents in Dynamic Environments III” Homework “Reinforcement Learning” Multiagent Reinforcement Learning Michael Baumann, Timo Klerx 06-Nov-2012 Foreword 23-Nov-2012, 11:59 PM Hand in your solutions as PDF and the source code (whole eclipse project) as zip archive via eMail. 27-Nov-2012 Presentation and discussion of your results. Scenario Consider the scenario shown in Figure Figure 1: The two agents should learn to reach their respective goal area as fast as possible. Although there are explicit start areas, the learned policy should cover all possible states. Admissible actions for the agents are moving one cell in one of the four cardinal directions. If an agent tries to leave the world or crashes into a wall, it remains on its position. The same holds for collisions between agents: on each cell at most one agent is allowed and thus, both agents remain on their positions, if they would collide. This rule implies, that only one agent can pass the small opening at a time! An episode ends either if both agents are situated on their goals region or after imax iterations. Exercises 1. Discuss the following strategies for giving reward and choose one for your model / your implementation: a) Each agent gets an individual reward, i.e. agent Aj gets reward rj when it reaches goal Aj . b) Both agents get an identical reward r if both agents are on their correct goals. 1 Goal A2 Goal A1 1 2 Start A1 Start A2 Figure 1:...
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...Emerald Publishers. An agent-based intelligent environmental monitoring system Ioannis N. Athanasiadis and Pericles A. Mitkas ABSTRACT Fairly rapid environmental changes call for continuous surveillance and on- line decision- making. Two areas where IT technologies can be valuable. In this paper we present a multi-agent system for monitoring and assessing air-quality attributes, which uses data coming from a meteorological station. A community of software agents is assigned to monitor and validate measurements coming from several sensors, to assess air-quality, and, finally, to fire alarms to appropriate recipients, when needed. Data mining techniques have been used for adding data-driven, customized intelligence into agents. The architecture of the developed system, its domain ontology, and typical agent interactions are presented. Finally, the deployment of a real-world test case is demonstrated. Keywords : Multi-Agent Systems, Intelligent Applications, Data Mining, Inductive Agents, Air-Quality Monitoring Introduction Environmental Information Systems (EIS) is a generic term that describes the class of systems that perform one or more of the following tasks: environmental monitoring, data storage and access, disaster description and response, environmental reporting, planning and simulation, modeling and decision- making. As the requirements for accurate and timely information in these systems are increasing, the need for incorporating advanced, intelligent features...
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...Artificial Intelligence 1. Explain how Intelligent Agents influence the development of applications or Software. The Intelligent Agents are used in the creation of machines (hardware / software) to display intelligent behavior. Such systems can be simply personal computers; or may be robots. To perform tasks that if a human's conduct, require hard work and a high level of concentration and intelligence. 2. Identify and explain as a model of software engineering for distributed systems using Intelligent Agents. The Software Engineering model uses the following features of an Intelligent Agent: reasoning abilities, skills, services, sensors, effectors, groups they belong and class. ABLE is an example; is a tool for building IBM Systems Intelligent Agents where its entirety, including agents, are constructed by composition AbleBeans, an extension of JavaBeans. Interest are a set of specialized systems that implement AbleBeans statistical learning (self-organizing maps, neural networks, connection maps) and symbolic control (forward chaining reasoning and predicate logic). ABLE also incorporates a visual development environment where AbleBeans interconnect. The interest of this platform is that visually solves the construction and communication of agents. 3. When does an agent is considered autonomous? The main point about the agent is that they are independent: able to act independently, exhibiting control over their internal state. 4. Analyze each of the following...
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...architectures exhibit attractive properties for a wide range of real world systems. As a result they are increasingly being applied in the design of applications ranging from highcapacity file sharing and global scale distributed computing to business team-ware. The objective of this paper is to outline a number of areas in which Agent techniques for the management of social problems such as decision making or fair trading amongst autonomous agents could be used to help structure P2P actions. In particular we focus on approaches from mechanism design, argumentation theory and norms / rules and electronic institutions. 1 Introduction Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures exhibit attractive properties for a wide range of real world systems. As a result they are increasingly being applied in the design of applications ranging from high-capacity file sharing and global scale distributed computing to business team-ware. In addition their benefits however, P2P systems also fundamentally change the networking paradigm used in an application often causing tensions with other application goals such as security, predictability, performance guarantees, billing and so forth. Some of these issues in particular arise due to the nature of control, authority and ownership typical found in peer-to-peer systems: – It is no longer possible to know exactly who is participating in the system. – Participants in the system may change over time appearing and disappearing without trace. – There are generally...
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...Science RESEARCH PAPER Available Online at www.jgrcs.info A MULTI AGENT BASED E-SHOPPING SYSTEM Sougata Khatua*1, Zhang Yuheng 2, Arijit Das 3 and N.Ch.S.N. Iyengar 4 School of Computing Science and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore-632014, Tamil Nadu, INDIA sougatakhatua@yahoo.com*1, yuer.zhang1987@gmail.com2, arijitdasmid@yahoo.com3and nchsniyengar48@gmail.com4 ------------------------------------------------- Abstract: Current e-shopping systems use the Internet as its primary medium for transactions. e-shopping has grown in popularity over the years, mainly because people find it convenient and easy to buy various items comfortably from their office or home. This paper has proposed a personalized e-shopping system, which makes use of agent technology to enhance the automation and efficiency of shopping process in Internet commerce. The agent technology is used to enhance the customer‟s needs which include availability, speedy response time, and efficiency. Agent for e-Shopping creates connectivity on an anytime-anywhereany-device-basis to provide the specific goods required by the consumers based on transaction cost optimization and scalability. The client agent connects with the controller agent which controls all the agent information. The controller agent sends the item information to the client agent and the client chooses items and puts in to the shopping cart. Finally the conclusion shows that the system performs efficiently and can help customers to save enormous...
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...operating system are classified (25) 2. Give a brief discussion on the structures of an operating system, monolithic and layered (25) (1).List and explain how operating system are classified (25) The operating system is the most important program that runs on a computer. Every general-purpose computer must have an operating system to run other programs. Operating systems perform basic tasks, such as: * recognizing input from the keyboard, * sending output to the display screen, * keeping track of files and directories on the disk, and * Controlling peripheral devices such as disk drives and printers. Operating systems can be classified as follows: Multi-user : Multi-user allows two or more users to run programs at the same time. Some operating systems permit hundreds or even thousands of concurrent users. This type of operating systems allows multiple users to use the system resources simultaneously. A multi-user operating system allows multiple users to access a computer system concurrently. Time-sharing systems can be classified as multi-user systems as they enable multiple-user access to a computer through the sharing of time. : Windows vista, Mac X tiger etc. Single-user: Single-user operating systems, as opposed to multi-user operating systems, are usable by a single user at a time. Being able to use multiple accounts on a Windows operating system does not make it a multi-user system. Rather...
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...Multi-Layered and multi-levelled? Public law architectures for the 21st century Since the 19th century the world has changed. Some aspects of life have changed more, others less. The means of communication, technology and transportation of the 21st century, for example, are light-years away from those of the 19th century. Public law concepts have not kept pace. In the words of an author of the book reviewed here, reflecting on the concept of ‘the state’ and the problem of sovereignty: in political as in constitutional legal theory, we still need to cut off the King’s head,1 as we are still entrenched in the philosophical and constitutional language of the 19th century.2 But recently, with European integration and globalisation, change has also occurred in the traditional concepts of public law such as “state” or “constitution”. The book edited by Bamforth and Leyland is about this change over the last thirty years or so.3 “Public Law in a Multi-Layered Constitution” is a significant contribution to a better understanding of how public law is transformed, in Great Britain and elsewhere. The title of the book as well as its introduction (pp. 1-26) state that its central theme is the transformation of the British constitution into a “multi-layered constitution.” This is meant to refer to a constitution that “contains multiple, but inter-connected and sometimes overlapping European and national layers”,4 where “power (both legislative and political) has been spread away from the Westminister...
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...Project Part 1: Multi-Layered Security Plan When creating a multi-layered security plan, I would look at all seven domains of the IT infrastructure and then increase the security on each of those domains because that will increase the security for the whole plan. In the user domain, this is the quickest way for the system to be compromised the users. So I would implement complex passwords including eight or more characters, both upper and lower case, and use of at least one special character. Passwords will also need to be changed every 90 days and the same password cannot be used again for three calendar years. In the workstation domain, I would make sure that each workstations, whether desktop or laptop has some security on it like antivirus and malware protection installed. Laptops can be very vulnerable for loss or theft, which would make me install an encrypted hard drive so if it is stolen the data can only be retrieved by the owner. For the LAN domain, just train all users about email scams. I would guess that most users know not to access suspicious emails when on our system but I would still implement to the users a quick training course. Then I we should add spam filters this will help get rid of most of the junk email. In the LAN-to-WAN domain, we need to shut down the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server we have running and switch it over to use secure FTP so that only users allowed on our system can access our FTP server. In the WAN domain, we...
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...ITT Technical Institute 3825 West Cheyenne Avenue, Suite 600 North Las Vegas, Nevada 89032 NT2580 Introduction to Information Security Week 1, Unit 1 – Information Systems Security Fundamentals Class Plan Time Duration: This Class Period will be approximately 4 ¾ Hours in length. It will be divided 2 ¾ hours for Theory and 2 ½ hours for Lab. Content Covered: • Textbook o Chapter 1 - Information Systems Security Objectives: After completing this unit, the student should be able to: • Explain the concepts of information systems security (ISS) as applied to an IT infrastructure. Key Concepts: ▪ Confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) concepts ▪ Layered security solutions implemented for the seven domains of a typical IT infrastructure ▪ Common threats for each of the seven domains ▪ IT security policy framework ▪ Impact of data classification standard on the seven domains Materials: Week 1 PowerPoint Presentation Assignment Overview: Refer to Assignment 1: Match Risks/Threats to Solutions in the Graded Assignment Requirements section of this instructor guide. In this assignment, the students need to match common risks or threats within the seven domains of a typical IT infrastructure with the possible solutions or preventative actions. Use the hand out worksheet NT2580.U1.WS1.doc. Refer to Assignment 2: Impact of a Data Classification Standard, you must write a brief report...
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...Project Part 1: Multi-Layered Security Plan when developing a multi-layered security plan, you must look at each of the seven domains of the IT infrastructure and increase security on each of those domains. Increasing the security on each of those seven domains will increase the overall security of the system and create a multi-layered security plan. In the user domain, one of the easiest ways for the system to be compromised is through the users. Simplicity of user’s passwords can be a major problem so we need to implement complex passwords including eight or more characters, both upper and lower case, and use of at least one special character. Passwords will need to be changed every three months and the same password cannot be used again for one calendar year. In the workstation domain, we need to make sure that each of the workstations, whether desktop or laptop, has antivirus and malware protection installed on them. Laptops are very vulnerable for loss or theft, so all company laptops should have an encrypted hard drive so that if they are stolen, the data contained on them is not recovered by anyone but the owner. For the LAN domain, we need to have training about email scams. Most users know not to access suspicious emails when on our system but a quick training course will help. Also, adding spam filters will help gets rid of most of the junk email, so there is much less risk of employees opening emails containing malware. In the LAN-to-WAN domain, we need to shut down...
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...Project Part 1 Multi-Layered Security Plan | NT2580 | | James Maus | 8/21/2015 | In the process of emerging a mulit-layered security plan, you will need to see the seven domains of the IT set-up. The security will be increased on each of the domains. Security increase on the seven domains increases complete security of the system and build a mulit-layered security plan. Only the users can negotiate the system in the user domain. Easy passwords can cause a lot of problems so we will need to use difficult passwords with eight characters and up. Passwords will include special characters with capitals and lowercase. A limit to how long you can use the password and to only a one time password use. Workstations will have antivirus and malware protection installed. Since laptops are very weak and easy to get lost or stolen, the companies will have a converted hard drive so only the owner can recover the data. On the LAN domain, you should never open any scam emails when on company systems. To reduce email malware, you should add spam filters to stop junk email and reduce employee mistakes. On the LAN to WAN domain, we should switch the FTP to secure FTP so only our suers can have access to the FTP server. On the WAN domain there should be firewalls put in place on the network to filter inbound traffic. In the case of the Richman investments, network of\ any kind of traffic that is coming in and out is not needed will be stopped by a firewall. Reference Courtesy of...
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