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

Programmers often need to initialise circular structures of objects. Ini- tialisation should be safe (so that programs can never suffer null pointer exceptions or otherwise observe uninitialised values) and modular (so that each part of the circular structure can be written and compiled separately). Unfortunately, existing languages do not support modular circular initialisation: programmers in practical languages resort to Tony Hoare's "Billion Dollar Mistake": initialising variables with nulls, and then hoping to fix them up afterward. While recent research lan- guages have offered some solutions, none fully support safe modular circular initialisation. We present placeholders, a straightforward extension to object-oriented lan- guages that describes circular structures simply, directly, and modularly. In typed languages, placeholders can be described by placeholder types that ensure place- holders are used safely. We define an operational semantics for placeholders, a type system for placeholder types, and prove soundness. Incorporating placeholders into object-oriented languages should make programs simultaneously simpler to write, and easier to write correctly.

http://homepages.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~alex/files/ServettoMackayPotaninNobleECOOP2013.pdf

The Billion-Dollar Fix Safe Modular Circular Initialisation with Placeholders and Placeholder Types

Designing concurrent object-oriented programs is hard. Correct programs must coordinate multiple threads accessing composite objects, using low-level mechanisms such as locks and read-write sets. Efficient programs must balance the complexity and overhead of the coordination mechanisms against the increased performance possible through concurrency. A method-level algebra of exclusion provides a succinct description of the conditions under which a thread must be excluded from a component of a composite object. Using the algebra, programmers can check whether their programs meet their exclusion requirements, can eliminate redundant exclusion controls, and can remove synchronisation overhead by reducing concurrency.

Exclusion for composite objects

Contemporary open systems use components developed by many different parties, linked together dynamically in unforeseen constellations. Code needs to live up to strict security specifications: it has to ensure the correct functioning of its objects when they collaborate with external objects which may be malicious.In this paper we propose specifications that model risk and trust in such open systems. We specify Miller, Van Cutsem, and Tulloh's escrow exchange example, and discuss the meaning of such a specification. We argue informally that the code satisfies its specification.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2786558.2786564

Swapsies on the Internet: First Steps towards Reasoning about Risk and Trust in an Open World

Program traces can be used to drive visualisations of reusable components, but such traces can be gigabytes in size, are very expensive to generate, and are hard to extract information from. We have developed a solution to this problem, an XML Data Storage Environment (XDSE) for storing XML based program traces in a native XML database. We use XQuery to extract information from the program traces and the results are then transformed into understandable visualisations.

XML database support for program trace visualisation

If an object oriented program is a collection of communicating objects, then the objects' protocols de ne the languages the program speaks. Unfortunately, protocols are di cult to design in isolation, so many programs' protocols are not as well designed as they could be. This paper presents six patterns which describe how objects protocols can be designed or redesigned. By using these patterns, programs and designs can be made more simple, more general, and more easy to change.

James Noble

Papers

The Billion-Dollar Fix Safe Modular Circular Initialisation with Placeholders and Placeholder Types

Exclusion for composite objects

Swapsies on the Internet: First Steps towards Reasoning about Risk and Trust in an Open World

XML database support for program trace visualisation

Arguments and Results