Simulating Business Processes of Manufacturing SMEs on the Cloud

Simulating the efficiency of business processes could reveal crucial bottlenecks for manufacturing companies and could lead to significant optimizations resulting in decreased time to market, more efficient resource utilization, and larger profit. While such business optimization software is widely utilized by larger companies, SMEs typically do not have the required expertise and resources to efficiently exploit these advantages. The aim of this work is to explore how simulation software vendors and consultancies can extend their portfolio to SMEs by providing business process optimization based on a cloud computing platform. By executing simulation runs on the cloud, software vendors and associated business consultancies can get access to large computing power and data storage capacity on demand, run large simulation scenarios on behalf of their clients, analyze simulation results, and advise their clients regarding process optimization. The solution is mutually beneficial for both vendor/consultant and the end-user SME. End-user companies will only pay for the service without requiring large upfront costs for software licenses and expensive hardware. Software vendors can extend their business towards the SME market with potentially huge benefits.

You Can't Always Get What You Want: A Gewirthian Model of Rational Autonomy in Abortion

The law regulating the availability of abortion is problematic both legally and morally. It is dogmatic in its requirements of women and doctors and ignorant of would-be fathers. Practically, its usage is liberal - with s1(1)(a) Abortion Act 1967 treated as a ‘catch all’ ground - it allows abortion on demand. Yet this is not reflected in the ‘law’. Against this outdated legislation I propose a model of autonomy which seeks to tether our moral concerns with a new legal approach to abortion. I do so by maintaining that a legal conception of autonomy is derivable from the categorical imperative resulting from Gewirth’s argument to the Principle of Generic Consistency: Act in accordance with the generic rights of your recipients as well as of yourself. This model of Gewirthian Rational Autonomy, I suggest, provides a guide for both public and private notions of autonomy and how our autonomous interests can be balanced across social structures in order to legitimately empower choice. I claim, ultimately, that relevant rights in the context of abortion are derivable from this model.

Against divisiveness: Digital workers of the world unite! A rejoinder to César Bolaño and Eloy Vieira

This piece is a short rejoinder to César Bolaño’s paper The Political Economy of the Internet and related articles (e.g., Comor, Foley, Huws, Reveley, Rigi and Prey, Robinson) that center around the relevance of Marx’s labor theory of value for understanding social media. I argue that Dallas Smythe’s assessment of advertising was made to distinguish his approach from the one by Baran and Sweezy. Smythe developed the idea of capital’s exploitation of the audience at a time when both feminist and anti-imperialist Marxists challenged the orthodox idea that only white factory workers are exploited. The crucial question is how to conceptualize productive labor. This is a theoretical, normative, and political question. A mathematical example shows the importance of the “crowdsourcing” of value-production on Facebook. I also point out parallels of the contemporary debate to the Soviet question of who is a productive or unproductive worker in the Material Product System.