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

In this paper, we present a real-time visualisation of a port simulation program. It makes use of cartoon visualisation and was created using InspectJ, our AspectJ-driven visualisation framework. AspectJ is an aspect-oriented extension to Java that allows concerns that cut across a program to be addressed explicitly in aspect components, thereby supporting a novel approach to visualisation control. InspectJ renders visualisations on a Tk canvas. The combination of using AspectJ for program monitoring and the Tk canvas made creation of the visualisation reasonably fast and fairly straightforward. We discuss interesting issues related to the visualisation of frameworks, as well as future directions for framework visualisation, such as the web-based visualisation creation systems. We also discuss cartoon animation as a means of visualisation, along with its potential applications.

A case study of cartoon visualisation using AspectJ

Beginning with BETA, a range of programming language mechanisms such as virtual classes (class-valued attributes of objects) have been developed to allow inheritance in the presence of mutually dependent classes This paper presents Tribe, a type system which generalises and simplifies other formalisms of such mechanisms, by treating issues which are inessential for soundness, such as the precise details of dispatch and field initialisation, as orthogonal to the core formalism Tribe can support path types dependent simultaneously on both classes and objects, which is useful for writing library code, and ubiquitous access to an object's family, which offers family polymorphism without the need to drag around family arguments Languages based on Tribe will be both simpler and more expressive than existing designs, while having a simpler type system, serving as a useful basis for future language designs

http://slurp.doc.ic.ac.uk/pubs/tribe-aosd07.pdf

Tribe: a simple virtual class calculus

Agile methodologies openly value customer collaboration. However, customers may not openly value the term Agile methodologies. Consequently some Agile practitioners have resorted to Agile Undercover, a process of being Agile internally while keeping the customer unaware of the project’s Agile nature. This process creates tension between the theoretical basis of the Agile method and the need to carefully evolve customer expectations of their own commitment. We explore Agile Undercover in the context of the Indian software industry, and discuss both why some practitioners don’t mention the ‘A’ word, and how these practitioners attempt to stay credibly Agile in such scenarios. Keywords-Agile methods, Agile Undercover, Grounded

Don’t mention the ‘A’ word: Agile undercover

Thinking with prototypes: OOPSLA '98 workshop on prototype-based object-oriented programming

This paper outlines our project to help beginners learn to program by showing object visualisations driven by aspect- oriented programming, and presented as part of the Eclipse development platform. The aspect-oriented programming is part of the infrastructure we use to drive the visualisations that help students learn object-oriented programming. Aspect-oriented programming explicitly supports the kind of cross-cutting concerns that allows our system to drive visualisations that emphasise principles of object interaction. Our extensions to Eclipse allow us to provide this educational scaffolding to help learners, without altering the program, the programming language or the libraries.

James Noble

Papers

A case study of cartoon visualisation using AspectJ

Tribe: a simple virtual class calculus

Don’t mention the ‘A’ word: Agile undercover

Thinking with prototypes: OOPSLA '98 workshop on prototype-based object-oriented programming

Visualisation for learning OOP, using AOP and eclipse