The development of scenario analysis (SA) to assist decision makers and stakeholders has been growing over the last few years through mainly exploiting qualitative information provided by experts. In this study, we present SA based on the use of qualitative data for strategy planning. We discuss the potential of SA as a decision-support tool, and provide a structured approach for the interpreta...

The paper presents the first ever demographic scenarios for the regions of Russia. Scenarios are developed for 49 ohlusts (regions), six kruys (territories), 21 republics, one autonomous oblast and two national cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg. Five scenarios are considered: two optimistic scenarios, two medium scenarios and one pessimistic scenario. The scenarios are combinations of three mor...

Computational technologies are changing rapidly due to fast and huge demand for computational power for variety of applications, societal factors and advances in science and technology. It is difficult to forecast exact nature of future computational technologies due to multiple and dynamic factors influencing technology advances. The paper focuses on computational technology trend from macro p...

Given the time, cost and risk associated with drug development, biopharmaceutical companies typically need to have a portfolio of drugs in development to be successful. Current pressures of cost and speed to market are driving the need for more effective means of assessing the value and risks of such drug portfolios. This paper presents research to generate a prototype computer tool developed t...

Ten Do It Better, Do They? An Empirical Analysis of an Old Football Myth In this paper we investigate how the expulsion of a player influences the outcome of a football match. Common sense implies a negative impact for the affected team. However, an old football myth suggests that such an expulsion might also be beneficial since it increases the team spirit as well as the efforts of the affecte...

Scenarios have proven useful to elicit, validate and document requirements but cannot be used in isolation. Our concern in this paper is to integrate scenario-based techniques in existing methods. We propose a set of operators to support such an integration. This set is classified in two sub-sets: the one dealing with the integration of the product models of the two initial methods and the one ...

Nowadays standard technologies play important roles in enhancing sharability, reusability and interoperability of learning contents. However, there is a lack of pedagogical justification of the contents implemented with the standards. This paper discusses the standard-compliance of our ontology-based modeling framework and how the framework gives theoretical justification to standardcompliant l...

Background: Extraterrestrial Encounter To date, humanity has not made any form of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). But we cannot rule out the possibility that one or more ETI exist in our galaxy, or that we could detect, communicate with, or in other ways have contact with them in the future. There have been many analyses of how contact would proceed, but these tend to focus na...