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

. Formal methods for software correctness are critical to the future of software engineering — and so must be an essential part of software engineering education. Unfortunately, formal methods are often resisted by students due to perceived difﬁculty, mathematicity, and practical irrelevance. We redeveloped our software correctness course by taking a programming intensive approach, using the solver-aided language Dafny to provide instant formative feedback via automated assessment. Our redeveloped course increased student retention and resulted in the best evaluation for the course for at least ten years. Abstract Formal Modelling: We also considered taking an approach based on abstract formal modelling. High-level tools, such as TLA+ [33], Alloy Alloy [27] or SPIN [26], support reasoning and mechanised checking of systems’ properties, based on abstract models of those systems, rather than actual programming and source code. It is clear that these kinds of abstract formal models can play an important role in software engineering projects, at least in project’s the early stages,

More Programming Than Programming: Teaching Formal Methods in a Software Engineering Programme

An Introduction to the Tarraingm Program Animation Environment

Concurrent and parallel programming is difficult due to the presence of memory side-effects, which may introduce data races. Type qualifiers, such as reference capabilities, can remove data races by restricting sharing of mutable data. Unfortunately, reference capability languages are an all-in or nothing game, i.e., all the types must be annotated with reference capabilities. In this work in progress, we propose to mix the ideas from the reference capability literature with gradual typing, leading to gradual reference capabilities.

Towards Gradual Checking of Reference Capabilities

One of the advantages of prototype-based languages is that they provide self-sufficient objects which do not depend on classes or other objects for their definitions. But objects can refer to other objects, and the effects of these inter-object references introduce arbitrary, uncontrolled dependencies between objects. We propose adding an explicit notion of object ownership to control dependencies and references between objects. Object ownership can also enhance object cloning and avoid the prototype corruption problem, making programs easier to write and easier to understand.

Dynamic Alias Protection in Prototype-Based Languages

The data that forms this paper was collected in a series of interviews with both KCorp and DevCorp project participants, near the completion of the project [2, 3]. BureauCorp has yet to be approached to obtain their view on this project. One of the themes uncovered during the data analysis and briefly discussed in this paper is the relationship and contract structures inter-organisational involved in the project.

James Noble

Papers

More Programming Than Programming: Teaching Formal Methods in a Software Engineering Programme

An Introduction to the Tarraingm Program Animation Environment

Towards Gradual Checking of Reference Capabilities

Dynamic Alias Protection in Prototype-Based Languages

A tale of three companies: a story about inter-organisational contract structures in agile development