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

Spreadsheets are an extremely common form of end-user programming that have many applications, from calculating student marks to accounting for global multinationals. Ways of studying the structure of a spreadsheet itself are normally constrained to the tools provided in the spreadsheet software. This paper explores new ways to visualise spreadsheets in a manner that is independent of the program they were created in, explains the technology involved, and presents examples of the visualisations that can be produced. The techniques involved in reading the spreadsheets also facilitate larger scale analysis of spreadsheets for performing corpus analysis.

Spreadsheet visualisation to improve end-user understanding

Agile methods advocate "just enough" documentation on Agile projects. Unfortunately, there are no clear guidelines on what is "just enough" documentation. We describe a set of patterns to help Agile software development teams define "just enough" in their own contexts. Teams can also employ these documentation patterns as strategies to overcome common challenges of adopting Agile methods.

How much is just enough?: some documentation patterns on Agile projects

We recently had the opportunity to introduce object-oriented design to a number of teams, and used CRC cards as one of the key techniques. The team members had varied backgrounds, and we had the opportunity to observe many teams tackle the same design exercises. This allowed us the opportunity to observe the effectiveness of the CRC cards, and reflect on the strengths and weaknesses. This paper documents our observations and reflections, and presents our advice on the strengths of the technique, and strategies we found useful for addressing the weaknesses.

Reflections on CRC cards and OO design

Many existing UML tools are far too heavyweight for quickly producing a few simple models. These heavyweight UML tools usually contain large amounts of functionality, which can lead to usability problems and poor productivity. Lightweight web-based UML tools are designed to support quick and easy production of models. The use of the web has added benefits including portability and group collaboration. This report discusses lightweight groupware UML case tools and presents a lightweight web-based class diagram editor that requires no web browser extensions.

A lightweight web-based case tool for UML class diagrams

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 13382 "Collaboration and learning through live coding". Live coding is improvised interactive programming, typically to create electronic music and other digital media, done live with an audience. Our seminar was motivated by the phenomenon and experience of live coding. Our conviction was that those represent an important and broad, but seldom articulated, set of opportunities for computer science and the arts and humanities. The seminar participants included a broad range of scholars, researchers, and practitioners spanning fields from music
theory to software engineering. We held live coding performances, and
facilitated discussions on three main perspectives, the humanities, computing education, and software engineering. The main outcome of our seminar was better understanding of the potential of live coding for informing cross-disciplinary scholarship and practice, connecting the arts, cultural studies, and computing.

https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2014/4420/pdf/dagrep_v003_i009_p130_s13382.pdf/

James Noble

Papers

Spreadsheet visualisation to improve end-user understanding

How much is just enough?: some documentation patterns on Agile projects

Reflections on CRC cards and OO design

A lightweight web-based case tool for UML class diagrams

Collaboration and learning through live coding (Dagstuhl Seminar 13382)