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

Composition and aggregation are widely used in UML analysis and design models to represent part-whole structures. Neither kind of association places any restriction on how the paths may be used from outside the whole object; this can lead to a number of problems if a part object is aliased from outside. Conglomeration realises a stronger form of encapsulation than does composition. Parts of conglomerate objects are protected from external access. By imposing instance-level consistency conditions on part-whole relationships, conglomeration can make UML models easier to build, understand, and implement correctly.

Conglomeration-realising alias protection

Domain-specific dataflow visual programming languages are now commonplace throughout the world of computing. Although not the earliest form of visual language (that honor, like so many others, of course is due to Sketchpad [27]) dataflow visual languages are now by far the most common form of visual programming language used in practice. Although they have been mostly unsuccessful as general-purpose programming languages, dataflow visual languages have excelled within specialised niche domains, including information visualisation [22], programmable logic controller programming [15,1], and business process re-engineering [14]. Even in just one domain, computer music, several dataflow visual languages have been successful as products over relatively long terms, including Max [7], Bars-n-Pipes [13], and the topic of this chapter, the visual programming language underlying the Nord Modular series of synthesizers [6].

Visual Program Visualization

Using tools aimed at promoting the reuse of existing components costs the user in the time and effort needed to install and understand the tool. These costs could counteract or subsume the benefits of reuse argued for by reuse practitioners, rendering the activity worthless. One approach to reducing these costs is to deploy the tools in an environment that the user is already familiar with, and has easy access to. We have chosen the web as just such an environment, and this choice can have a significant impact on the usability and utility of the tool. This paper discusses the difficulties that arise from our use of the web, and the manner in which we have partly overcome these difficulties.

A Web user interface for an interactive software repository

The roles of owners

A new trend in software engineering and programming language conferences is to investigate the reproducibility of research results. This trend has led to the creation of Artifact Evaluation Committees at several conferences, including OOPSLA this year. What is the motive behind these committees? How should they be structured? Do they help? Can they hurt? And should software be given more respect, at least at conferences devoted to the study of software, or should papers remain supreme? These are some of the questions that addressed in this panel. Shriram Krishanamurthi argues in favor of the new process and James Noble plays devil's advocate. The panel is moderated by Jan Vitek.

James Noble

Papers

Conglomeration-realising alias protection

Visual Program Visualization

A Web user interface for an interactive software repository

The roles of owners

Should software conferences respect software