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Summary Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) automate software integration and reduce repetitive engineering work. While the use of CI/CD presents efficiency gains, in database application development, this potential has not been fully exploited. We explore the state of the art in this area, with a focus on current practices, common software tools, challenges, and preconditions that apply to database applications. The work is grounded in a synoptic literature review and contributes a novel generic CI/CD pipeline for database system application development. Our generic pipeline was tailored to three industrial development use cases in which we measured the benefits of integration and deployment automation. The measurements demonstrate clearly that introducing CI/CD had significant benefits. It reduced the number of failed deployments, improved their stability, and increased the number of deployments. Interviews with the developers before and after the implementation of the CI/CD show that the pipeline brings clear benefits to the development team (i.e., a reduced cognitive load). These findings put current database release practices driven by business expectations, such as fixed release windows, in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of things has been adopted in several sectors both influencing how people work and enhancing organizations' business processes. This resulted in the rise of relevant research topics such as IoT-aware business processes. The modeling of these processes makes it possible to better understand working scenarios and to support the adoption of model-driven development approaches for IoT-aware and process-oriented software systems. Since much research has been performed on this topic, a better awareness of the current status is needed. This paper reports a systematic literature review to develop a map on modeling notations for IoT-aware business processes. The survey mainly adopts an academic point of view, resulting in the detailed analysis of 84 research works from the leading computer science digital libraries. The output of the review is in the form of schemes and reflections. In particular, our research aims to shed light on (1) the relevant modeling views referring to different types of IoT-aware business processes; (2) the IoT requirements supported by the modeling notations; and (3) the modeling notations proposed and/or adopted to model IoT-aware business processes. Finally, our research work highlights possible future research lines needing further investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological culture has now fragmented and has lost its original vocation as a conceptually oriented science. If for the great classical authors such as Tocqueville, Durkheim, Weber and Pareto the project of sociology coincided with the attempt to identify and understand social processes, currently sociological research has assumed a mostly descriptive function, disconnecting the themes of scientific assessment from those social commitment. Will it be possible to reverse this trend and rediscover the critical basis of the sociological culture itself? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the results of the contemporary anti-religious debate, on one side the essay wants to grasp its epistemological meaning, on the other one it aims to measure the power of the trans-religious thought of René Girard that includes categories like “religion”, “violence”, “desire” which assume unexpected meanings, capable of redesign the origins of the society itself. Girard, one of the most influential thinker of the contemporary culture, provides us fundamental notions to understand our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In the last years we are observing a growing interest in verification of business process models that, despite their lack of formal characterization, are widely adopted in industry and academia. To this aim, a formalization of the execution semantics of business process modeling languages is essential. In this paper, we focus on the OMG standard BPMN 2.0. Specifically, we provide a direct formalization of its semantics in terms of Labeled Transition Systems. This approach permits to avoid possible miss-interpretations, due to the usage of the natural language in the standard specification, and to overcome issues due to the mapping of BPMN to other formal languages, which are equipped with their own semantics. Our operational semantics is given for a relevant subset of BPMN elements focusing on the capability to model collaborations among organizations via message exchange. One of its distinctive aspects is the suitability to model business processes with arbitrary topology. This allows designers to freely specify their processes according to the reality, without the limitation of defining well-structured models. The provided formalization is also implemented by exploiting the capabilities of Maude. This implementation takes a collaboration model as an input and, explores all the model executions. By relying on it, automatic verification of properties related to collaborations has been carried out via the Maude model checker. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by means of a simple, yet realistic, running example concerning a travel booking scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece is not an attempt to historically contextualise Machiavelli's thinking, except where strictly necessary, but rather an effort to focus on the "Machiavelli problem" by relating the great Florentine humanist's assertions to the present day. The aim, even briefly, is to show how all sociology, not just that pertaining to the twentieth century, is affected by the theoretical warp and by the practical and political consequences of said warp (in this sense, Machiavelli can be considered the most suited to the principle of Boudonian methodology, according to which "there is nothing more practical than a good theory"). However, Machiavelli is not limited to the beginning of an epistemological revolution that irrevocably changed the way we conceive humans and politics and that, above all, ends by substantiating the theoretical explanation of Max Weber's historical-social sciences method (indeed, very little is understood of German historicism, the sociology of conflict, secularisation and avaluativity, as well as of the theory of ideal types, unless there is an appreciation for the great Machiavellian issues). Machiavelli also provides a social and anthropological conception of the human sphere that, on the one hand, is fundamental to modern political thinking from Spinoza to Hegel, while, on the other, remains central to understanding the extraordinary drama of our time, surrounded by aporias, paradoxes and contradictions that are seemingly irresolvable. As it was at the time of Machiavelli, and not merely in relation to politics, we try to reconcile freedom and security, individualistic arrogance and social cohesion, instability and order. This attempt is not just an invitation to rethink modern and current forms of politics with renewed sociological imagination, it is also a challenge to resist the cultural impoverishment of a globalised society increasingly subject to the fascination of a self-referential identity close mindedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it possible to analyze the phenomenon of corruption with categories taken from the sociological lexicon? Certainly it is possible, let's think at the celebrated thesis of Sutherland regarding white collar criminality, or more generally speaking, regarding economic criminality. Money, permits to possess every object and as a result also money is an object, in an eminent sense. It is the meta-objects that comprends all the other objects. In this sense, man and money become exchangeable and human will becomes the object of both legal and illegal commercial transactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this text the author tries to show the actual importance of the relationship between young people and politics, in the light of the present processes of a lack of commitment and a lack of responsibility, both part of contemporary society. Thus we have a reflection that, taking into account the complex social cultural changes of the modern social reality, highlights the problematic areas as well as proposing possible solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generally speaking every sociological theory implies a critical dimension. Franco Crespi shows how the analysis and evaluation of social processes were always sustained by the perspective of an ideal society as a reference for criticising the social conditions of the time. With respect to the first most important interpretations of social reality, such as those developed by Comte, Marx and Spencer, Crespi says that a significant turn can be detected starting from Weber, Simmel and, particularly, Adorno. While the previous theories had a quite definite image of what society should be once solved its main contradictions, the second kind of theoretical models, although themselves implicitly inspired by some sort of an ideal image of society, seem progressively loosing any certainty as to the real possibility to reach the best form of society: they describe the present contradictions, but they do not perceive any ready solution for them. In this direction Crespi develops the theme of the authonomy of the individual subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]