Nowadays, the economic and social nature of contemporary business organizations chiefly banks binds them to face with the sheer volume of data and information and the key to commercial success in this area is the proper use of data for making better, faster and flawless decisions. To achieve this goal organizations requires strong and effective tools to enable them in automating task analysis, decision-making, strategy formulation and risk prediction to prevent bankruptcy and fraud .Business Intelligence is a set of skills, (...) technologies and application systems used to collect, store, analyze and create effective access to the task to help organizations better understand the business context and make accurate decision timely and respond quickly toward inflation, rate fluctuations and the market price. In this paper we review recent literature in the search for trends in business intelligence applications for the banking industry and its challenges and finally some articles that comprise this special issue are introduced and characterized in terms of business intelligence research framework. (shrink)

One of the topics in the philosophy of mind is the discussion of "I", which philosophers have referred to in various interpretations as "The self", "personal identity", "ego", "soul" and "spirit". Philosophers' different theories about the existence and even the nature of this seemingly simple and obvious have turned it into a philosophical problem. Galen Strawson is a physicalist who has addressed this issue by interpreting “The self”. On the one hand, he believes in the existence of the "empirical self", (...) but on the other hand, he denies such qualities as Long-term persistence, personality, and agency, which seem to be essential to the meaning of the "I". The present paper tries to address, by an analythical-critical method, the question of how Strawson believed in the existence of the "I" despite the non-acceptance of these three characteristics. In this regard, first Strawson's view on the nature and existence of the "I" is analyzed, and after evaluating his view, it is concluded that the elimination of these three characteristics is due to weaknesses such as adopting a physicalist basis, a phenomenological method, and a purely mental view of the "I", confusion of the two positions of Truth and proof and his weakness in explaining the nature of unity over time. (shrink)