Technological Life-Cycles

Life Cycles

Beyond Life Cycles

Human activities in outer space are producing increasing quantities of space “debris”. This well-known fact posits the question about the value and use of space technologies after their operation period has expired. Rather than calling these non-functional objects “debris”, we propose to treat them as “end-of-life allopoietic systems” with the potential of becoming autopoietic systems. In gener...

Ontology's Crossed Life Cycles

This paper presents the idea that the life cycle of an ontology is highly impacted as a result of the process of reusing it for building another ontology. One of the more important results of the experiment presented is how the different activities to be carried out during the development of a specific ontology may involve performing other types of activities on other ontologies already built o...

Emissions from Photovoltaic Life Cycles

Photovoltaic (PV) technologies have shown remarkable progress recently in terms of annual production capacity and life cycle environmental performances, which necessitate timelyupdatesofenvironmental indicators.BasedonPVproduction data of 2004–2006, this study presents the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, criteria pollutant emissions, and heavy metal emissions from four types of major comme...

The Life Cycles of Genres

The concept of genre is as old as literary theory itself, but centuries of debate haven’t produced much consensus on the topic. Part of the reason is that genre looks like a different thing at different points in the life of a text. Scholars of rhetoric tend to focus on the patterns of communicative action that produce memoranda or tragedies (Devitt 2004; Miller 1984). Sociologists are sometime...