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

LittleBits (little Bits.cc) is an open-source hardware library of pre-assembled analogue components that can be easily assembled into circuits, disassembled, reassembled, and re-used. In this paper, we consider littleBits -- and the littleBits SynthKit in particular -- as a physically-embodied domain specific programming language. We describe the littleBits system, explain how littleBits "programs" are constructed as configurations of physical modules in the real world, and describe how they are typically used to control physical artefacts or constructions. We then argue that littleBits constructions essentially "visualise themselves". We describe how littleBits' liveness, embodiment, and plasticity assists both learning and debugging, and then evaluate littleBits configurations according to the cognitive dimensions of notations.

Livecoding the SynthKit: Little Bits as an Embodied Programming Language

Visualisation is a powerful method for explaining how programs work. However, while it is advantageous in theory, it is not used as frequently as it might be. Patterns may be used to describe architectures, so in this paper we present a pattern language in two parts. The first part describes a set of patterns for approaching the development of program-specific visualisations. The second focusses on actual implementation of the visualisations using the InspectJ framework, which uses AspectJ to monitor programs at run time. The patterns step through the process of building a visualisation from start to finish, featuring a running example of the development of a visualisation for a simulation program. After reading these patterns, you should be able to use InspectJ to create visualisations for your own Java programs.

/pdf/software-visualisation-of-java-programs-in-inspectj-59m5de9zl9.pdf

Software Visualisation of Java Programs in InspectJ.

Developers have long used pictures to aid design activities and there has been a lot of interest in standard notations for design. We have developed delegation diagrams, a graphical notation that provides visual support for developing object-oriented designs and that makes the relationship between the requirements and the design explicit. We describe both the notation and tool support, and evaluate delegation diagrams using the cognitive dimensions of notations framework.

Delegation diagrams: visual support for the development of object-oriented designs

Grace is a new object-oriented programming language aimed at education Here we describe patterns relating to pattern-matching in this language The design of the pattern-matching system is described in [Homer et al 2012]; this paper seeks to guide those wishing to use pattern matching in Grace or in other languages with similar facilities towards best practices for understandable and maintainable patterns

/pdf/graceful-patterns-for-patterns-in-grace-4wzl1l2f2b.pdf

Graceful patterns for patterns in grace

Operations on abstract data types can be classified as either queries or updates --- those that either query the current state, or update it. Modern object-oriented programming languages require classes/interfaces to support a predefined set of such operations. This presents a challenge for software designers, since a fixed interface can severely restrict the opportunities for optimisation. In this paper, we present two common patterns --- Specific Query Optimisation and Generalised Query Optimisation --- for optimising such operations. The first requires specific knowledge of which operation to optimise beforehand, whilst the latter provides more leeway in this regard. These patterns are commonly occurring in software, and we find numerous instances of them within the Java standard libraries.

/pdf/patterns-for-adt-optimisation-2hkjw4qqsi.pdf

James Noble

Papers

Livecoding the SynthKit: Little Bits as an Embodied Programming Language

Software Visualisation of Java Programs in InspectJ.

Delegation diagrams: visual support for the development of object-oriented designs

Graceful patterns for patterns in grace

Patterns for ADT optimisation