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

We are engaged in the design of a small, simple programming language for teaching novices object-oriented programming. This turns out to be far from a small, simple task. We focus on three of the problems that we encountered, and how we believe we have solved them. The problems are (1) gracefully combining object initialization, inheritance, and immutable objects, (2) reconciling apparently irreconcilable views on type-checking, and (3) providing a family of languages, each suitable for students at different levels of mastery, while ensuring conceptual integrity of their designs. In each case our solutions are based on existing research; our contribution is, by design, consolidation rather than innovation.

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Grace: the absence of (inessential) difficulty

A fundamental feature of serious games is persuasion, an attempt to influence behaviors, feelings, or thoughts. Much of the existing research on serious games and, more generally, on persuasive technology (PT), does not address the important links between persuasion and culture. It has tended to originate from Western, individualist cultures, and has focused on how to design for these audiences. In this paper, we describe the design of one of two versions of a serious game we developed about quitting smoking titled Smoke? which is targeted at collectivist players. We show how the design was informed by persuasive strategies we identified from the cross-cultural psychology literature, intended for use in games for players of collectivist cultures: HARMONY, GROUP OPINION, MONITORING, DISESTABLISHING, and TEAM PERFORMANCE. We then discuss the results of a quantitative investigation of the effects of both game versions on both individualist and collectivist players.

Game design strategies for collectivist persuasion

Persuasive games are a relatively new phenomenon, and hold promise as effective vehicles for persuasion. As yet, however, there are few set rules guiding how to design persuasive games to be interesting, compelling, and effective. Furthermore, little theory exists that guides their development from a persuasive technology (PT) perspective. The results of a recent pilot test on Smoke?, our persuasive game about smoking cessation, highlighted several design issues related to persuasive games in general. In this paper we discuss some of those issues, contextualizing them in terms of B J Fogg's PT strategies, in order to both explain underlying forces, and point towards potential design solutions. The five issues we discuss are: managing player attention, balancing "replayability" with reality, player control vs. system control, identity issues, and target audience.

Fine tuning the persuasion in persuasive games

Modern programming languages have little or no support for querying objects and collections. Programmers are forced to hand code such queries using nested loops, which is both cumbersome and inefficient. We demonstrate that first-class queries over objects and collections improve program readability, provide good performance and are applicable to a large number of common programming problems. We have developed a prototype extension to Java which tracks all objects in a program using AspectJ and allows first-class queries over them in the program. Our experimental findings indicate that such queries can be significantly faster than common programming idioms and within reach of hand optimised queries.

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Efficient object querying for java

One of the problems facing developers is the constant evolution of components that are used to build applications This evolution is typical of any multi-person or multi-site software project How can we program in this environment? More precisely, how can language design address such evolution? In this paper we attack two significant issues that arise from constant component evolution: we propose language-level extensions that permit multiple, co-existing versions of classes and the ability to dynamically upgrade from one version of a class to another, whilst still maintaining type safety guarantees and requiring only lightweight extensions to the runtime infrastructure We show how our extensions, whilst intuitive, provide a great deal of power by giving a number of examples Given the subtlety of the problem, we formalize a core fragment of our language and prove a number of important safety properties

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James Noble

Papers

Grace: the absence of (inessential) difficulty

Game design strategies for collectivist persuasion

Fine tuning the persuasion in persuasive games

Efficient object querying for java

UpgradeJ: Incremental Typechecking for Class Upgrades