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

Customer collaboration is vital to Agile projects. Through a Grounded Theory study of New Zealand and Indian Agile teams we discovered that lack of customer involvement was causing problems in gathering and clarifying requirements, loss of productivity, and business loss. “Agile Undercover” allows development teams to practice Agile despite insufficient or ineffective customer involvement. We present the causes and consequences of lack of customer involvement on Agile projects and describe the Agile Undercover strategies used to overcome them.

Agile undercover: When customers don't collaborate

User-interface metaphor is an extremely popular technique for creating usable user-interfaces. Although there has been considerable research into its application in practical settings, there has been little investigation into the concept itself. This paper applies Peircean semiotics to user-interface metaphor in order to provide a structured model of the concept. As an end result, a far more detailed understanding of the technique and a useful vocabulary are made available to user-interface designers and researchers.

A Semiotic Model of User-Interface Metaphor

Object-oriented programs, when executed, produce a complex webs of objects and references between them, generally referred to as object graphs. These object graphs are difficult to design correctly and even more difficult to debug if incorrect. Unfortunately, very subtle bugs in object-oriented programs are directly caused by object graph topologies. Snapshot query-based debuggers let programmers examine object graph snapshots of programs in detail using a specially designed query language. This provides users with an ability to debug and examine their programs in great detail at the time when the memory snapshot is taken.

http://homepages.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~alex/files/PotaninNobleBiddleSnapshotQBDASWEC2004.pdf

Snapshot query-based debugging

Iterators are an important object oriented design pattern, providing sequential access to the state stored in other objects. Precisely because iterators need to access the state of other objects, iterators' design can be at odds with the encapsulation provided by object oriented languages. We present a range of designs for iterator objects, showing how different designs have different encapsulation properties. Studying a range of different iterators can help programmers to identify the strengths and weaknesses of particular designs, and also illustrates some of the issues in the design of encapsulation mechanisms in programming languages.

Iterators and encapsulation

Icons are used in almost every graphical user-interface to computer software. Despite this, there is a serious lack of comprehension of what they are and how they work. The application of semiotics to user-interface icons can help to solve this problem by providing a framework for understanding icons in. This paper suggests such a semiotic approach and then applies it to real-world icons to show its effectiveness. Some hypothetical guidelines are derived from the application and a strong analytic technique results.

James Noble

Papers

Agile undercover: When customers don't collaborate

A Semiotic Model of User-Interface Metaphor

Snapshot query-based debugging

Iterators and encapsulation

Icons R icons