There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

物件導向軟體之架構(Object-Oriented Software Construction)探討

Jigsaw puzzle programming environments manipulate programs primarily by drag-and-drop. Generally these environments are based on their own special-purpose languages, meaning students must move on to another language as their programs grow. Tiled Grace is a tile-based editor for Grace, an educational programming language with a conventional textual syntax. Using Tiled Grace, programmers can move seamlessly between visualising their programs as tiles or source code, editing their programs via tiles or text, and continue on to traditional textual environments, all within the same programming language. We conducted a user experiment with Tiled Grace, and present the results of that experiment showing that users find dual views helpful.

Combining Tiled and Textual Views of Code

Essential use cases are abstract, lightweight, technology-free dialogues of user intention and system responsibility that effectively capture requirements for user interface design. We describe how essential use cases can also drive object-oriented development directly, without any intervening translation, and allowing user interface development and object-oriented development to proceed in parallel. Working with essential use cases yields some unexpected further benefits: the crucial common vocabulary of responsibilities lets designers trace directly from the essential use cases to the objects in their design.

Essential Use Cases and Responsibility in Object-Oriented Development

Preliminary studies indicate that games can be effective vehicles for persuasion. In order to have a better chance at persuading target audiences, however, we claim that it is best to design with the background culture of the intended audience in mind. In this paper, we share our insights into the differences of perception between New Zealand (NZ) Europeans and Maori (the indigenous people of NZ), regarding smoking, smoking cessation, and social marketing. Based on our findings, we discuss how we have designed two different versions of culturallyrelevant persuasive game about smoking cessation, one aimed at a NZ European audience, the other aimed at a Maori audience.

Factoring culture into the design of a persuasive game

Object-oriented programs, when executed, produce a complex web of objects that can be thought of as a graph with objects as nodes and references as edges. In recent years interest has grown in the geometry of networks (or graphs), particularly those of human origin, many of which show a rather striking property: their structure is scale-free. In the case of the World Wide Web, for example, the number of web pages with 1 incoming link is about twice the number with 2 incoming links, and that is twice the number with 4 links, and so on all the way up to Google and other massively referenced sites [2]. The phrase ‘scale-free’ relates to the fact that if we double the number of links n, the number of pages is always halved (or other fixed ratio) regardless of what n is. Compare this to what happens if a graph is constructed by simply adding links at random [4]. Doing this leads to nearly all nodes having around the same number of links (i.e. the number of links divided by the number of nodes), and hence such random graphs have a ‘typical scale’ about them. By contrast, the web has no typical scale to its connectivity — a remarkable and somewhat counterintuitive property closely related to fractals. Other scale-free graphs include the network formed by co-authors of papers in medical journals, the physical connections forming the Internet, the network of airports connected by airline flights, networks of sexual contacts, and even the patterns of connectivity between neurons in the human brain [1]. Well before being noticed in real-world graph structures, scale-free distributions were found in other contexts, such as the relative frequencies of English words, the distribution of personal wealth, the sizes of cities, and the number of earthquakes of given strength [12]. In this article we examine the graphs formed by object-oriented programs written in a variety of languages, and show that these turn out to be scale-free networks as well. Apart from its considerable intrinsic interest, this unexpected facet of the geometry of real programs may help us optimize language runtime systems, improve the design of future object-oriented languages, and reexamine modern approaches to software design.

http://homepages.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~alex/files/PotaninNobleFreanBiddleCACM2005.pdf

Scale-free Geometry in Object-Oriented Programs

Ownership types were devised nearly 15 years ago to provide a stronger notion of protection to object-oriented programming languages. Rather than simply protecting the fields of an object from external access, ownership types protect also the objects stored in the fields, thereby enabling an object to claim (exclusive) ownership of and access to other objects. Furthermore, this notion is statically enforced by now-standard type-checking techniques. Originating as the formalisation of the core of Flexible Alias Protection, ownership types have since been extended and adapted in many ways, and the notion of protection provided has been refined into topological and encapsulation dimensions. This article surveys the various flavours of ownership types that have been developed over the years, along with the many applications and other developments. The chapter concludes by suggesting some directions for future work. Aliasing is endemic in object-oriented programming. Noble, Vitek, Potter [112].

James Noble

Papers

Combining Tiled and Textual Views of Code

Essential Use Cases and Responsibility in Object-Oriented Development

Factoring culture into the design of a persuasive game

Scale-free Geometry in Object-Oriented Programs

Aliasing in Object-Oriented Programming: types, analysis, and verification