In a rapidly changing world, sustainability, if it can be said to exist at all, is concept that has attained mythic status, often pursued and rarely reached. In order to improve our capability to cope with environmental problems, adopting an Ecosystem Approach has been suggested. One of the major challenges in the implementation of this new paradigm relates to control of externalities. The reco...

Few areas of science have benefited more from the expansion in sequencing capability than the study of microbial communities. Can sequence data, besides providing hypotheses of the functions the members possess, detect the evolutionary and ecological processes that are occurring? For example, can we determine if a species is adapting to one niche, or if it is diversifying into multiple speciali...

www.sciencemag.org (this information is current as of February 2, 2009 ): The following resources related to this article are available online at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/323/5910/133 version of this article at: including high-resolution figures, can be found in the online Updated information and services, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/1162986/DC1 can be found at:...

Environmentally induced epigenetic change enables plants to remember past environmental interactions. If this memory capability is exploited to prepare plants for future challenges, it can provide a basis for highly sophisticated behavior, considered intelligent by some. Against the backdrop of an overview of plant intelligence, we hypothesize: (1) that the capability of plants to engage in suc...

The management of IT carve-out projects is very challenging due to the strict time frame, the severe contractual penalties, the huge number of stakeholders and the various as well as unique IT tasks that have to be conducted. Up to now, there is no instrument for evaluating the readiness of the IT for a carve-out and also not for managing such a project. In order to address this, we develop a m...

Any public administration that produces translation data can be a provider of useful reusable data to meet its own translation needs and the ones of other public organizations and private companies that work with texts of the same domain. These data can also be crucial to produce domain-tuned Machine Translation systems. The organization's management of the translation process, the characterist...

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The recent release of CMMI V1.3 incorporates a number of changes to the model and framework; one of the more interesting is the decision to do away with Capability Levels 4 and 5 in the Continuous Representation, while retaining the high levels of Organizational Maturity. This paper examines some of the issues that may have driven this decision, and explores the opportunity provided for greater...

This paper is based on the application of the People Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to the Foundation Bruno Kessler (FBK), a research centre located in Trento (Italy). People CMM is a framework to study the level of maturity of an organization in order to improve workforce's development and to help management to define people's capabilities in the organization. The project is an ongoing projec...