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

Modern programming languages have little or no support for querying objects and collections. Programmers are forced to hand code such queries using nested loops, which is both cumbersome and inefficient. We demonstrate that first-class queries over objects and collections improve program readability, provide good performance and are applicable to a large number of common programming problems. We have developed a prototype extension to Java which tracks all objects in a program using AspectJ and allows first-class queries over them in the program. Our experimental findings indicate that such queries can be significantly faster than common programming idioms and within reach of hand optimised queries.

Efficient Object Querying for Java

Reasoning about Risk and Trust in an Open World

User-interface metaphors are not well understood in terms of their relationships and qualities. They are, however, constantly used both consciously and unconsciously in most user-interface designs. This paper demonstrates a taxonomic classification and analysis of the user-interface metaphors in the Microsoft Office Project Gallery. The classification offers insight both into the nature of the metaphors in the user-interface investigated and more generally, and helps validate the use of the taxonomy as an assessment tool.

A taxonomic analysis of user-interface metaphors in the Microsoft Office Project Gallery

“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 continuing on to traditional textual environments, all within the same programming language.

A tile-based editor for a textual programming language

Tiled Grace is a block-based programming system backed by a conventional textual language that allows switching back and forth between block-based and textual editing of the same code at any time. We discuss the design choices of Tiled Grace in light of existing research and a user experiment conducted with it. We also examine the sorts of task preferred in each mode by users who had the choice of editing either as blocks or as text, and find both positive and cautionary notes for block-based programming in the results.

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James Noble

Papers

Efficient Object Querying for Java

Reasoning about Risk and Trust in an Open World

A taxonomic analysis of user-interface metaphors in the Microsoft Office Project Gallery

A tile-based editor for a textual programming language

Lessons in combining block-based and textual programming