Piero Sraffa—Doing ‘History in Reverse’

Preface Piero

Rule-based policy and contract systems have rarely been studied in terms of their software engineering properties. This is a serious omission, because in rule-based policy or contract representation languages rules are being used as a declarative programming language to formalize realworld decision logic and create IS production systems upon. This paper adopts a successful SE methodology, namel...

Piero Gottardi

Reverse Addressing in Modern Persian

Reverse addressing is an interesting realization of kinship terms in interactive, face to face communication. This descriptive study was proposed to examine the use of family address pronouns in Iran as a function of the classical sociological parameters of age, sex, and social distance. It investigated various aspects of reverse addressing as a vernacular phenomenon. Data were reported from th...

A Logic with Reverse Modalities for History-preserving Bisimulations

We introduce event identifier logic (EIL) which extends Hennessy-Milner logic by the addition of (1) reverse as well as forward modalities, and (2) identifiers to keep track of events. We show that this logic corresponds to hereditary history-preserving (HH) bisimulation equivalence within a particular true-concurrency model, namely stable configuration structures. We furthermore show how natur...

No Future? Aging, Temporality, History, and Reverse Chronologies

THE FUTURE IS KID STUFF IN HIS INAUGURAL ADDRESS IN JANUARY 2009, President Obama alluded to an often-quoted passage from the Bible and adapted it to recast America’s idea of itself: “We remain a young nation,” he said, “but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” By articulating his exhortation through the opposition of youth and age, Obama sought to reframe...