Search results

Explores the idea of trajectories of innovation in software development. Patterns of Innovation are analysed within social and institutional contexts, and within the context of changes in the ways computer technology is used. Three main trajectories of innvation in software development are discussed: technical change (e.g. languages, techniques, tools, methods); organizational and managerial change; and commodification (the substitution of packaged products for custom development). Sub‐trajectories are also described. Concludes that the scope and heterogeneity of software development activity has supported the formation of a number of different and competing trajectories which lead to quite different conclusions about the future of software development.

Is liberalism premised on an unrealistically individualist anthropology? In one regularly told story about modernity, the earliest liberals grounded their arguments for political liberty in a picture of human nature that centered on our moral autonomy, perhaps epitomized best in Kantian thought. However, a range of critics have now compellingly argued that such accounts of our agency are descriptively inaccurate, and that normative social projects beginning from such flawed foundations are thus unstable. While this paper accepts this criticism of individualist anthropologies, it proposes that this need not identify a problem with liberalism overall. To make this case, this paper turns to Adam Smith, who grounded his early advocacy of liberalism in an anthropology grounded in natural theology that depicts us as morally interconnected, rather than as autonomous, and as always morally impressionable. As it will explain, Smith presumed an account of character as integrally related to and influenced by the agent’s social context, for both better and worse. Furthermore, he wove his attentiveness to this complex interaction between the agent and their context into both his economic analyses and political proposals. Smith’s social vision thus illustrates how a strong regard for individual liberty is fully compatible with a sophisticated anthropology that recognizes our malleability as moral agents – and even with political proposals that capitalize upon this malleability. Smith’s thought thus offers useful resources for contemporary proponents of liberalism who wish to value the dignity of individuals without basing that valuation in unrealistic abstractions, or ignoring the responsibilities engendered by the fact of our ongoing moral formation by our social contexts.

The concept of a knowledge interface for library users is developed as an extension of intelligent knowledge‐base system (IKBS) concepts. Contemporary directions in intelligent decision support, particularly in the role of search intermediaries, are then examined to identify the significance of intelligent intermediaries as a solution to unstructured decision support requirements of library users. A DISCOURSE SCRIPT is given to illustrate one form of intelligent intermediary.

Whilst at the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, US, Michael Lebowitz, currently at the Analytical Proprietary Trading Unit of Morgan Stanley and Company, New York, researched into a variety of areas in natural language processing and machine learning. In particular his UNIMEM learning program has been applied to a wide range of domains including census data, software evaluation and congressional voting records. In a recent research contribution, “The Use of Memory in Text Processing”, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 31 No. 12, 1988, pp. 1483–1505, he describes how RESEARCHER, a program that reads, remembers and generalises from patent abstracts, makes use of its automatically generated memory to assist low‐level text processing. This, he says, involves disambiguation that could be accomplished in no other way.

Economics and political philosophy tend to lead separate existences in separate university departments. This paper argues that there are gains to be had in the understanding of the teaching of economics if the intellectual divide between these disciplines is bridged. The history of economic thought owes its evolution in part to responses at particular points in time to the enduring questions of political philosophy. A more deep‐seated understanding of economics and of HET is therefore available if considered in conscious alliance with the history of political philosophy (HPP). In short, the argument of this paper ‐ which considers five dimensions of the interdependence of HET and HPP ‐ is the reverse of Scott Gordon’s conclusion that economists have little or nothing to learn from philosophers.

THE responsibility for materials handling methods, as for all other production methods, should be made the clear responsibility of the head of Work Study. The reasoning behind that firm conclusion is very logical. Industry in general depends for its success upon the application of some process such as machining or finishing of raw materials. Every such operation adds to its value and builds up a firm's turnover. It is therefore obvious that the more time there is devoted to conversion the less will be wasted on profitless storage or unproductive transport from one part of the works to another.

The Turing Institute has created a specialist bibliographic database of literature in the field of Artificial Intelligence. This article describes the nature of the literature in the field of AI; the organisation of the database using the BRS/Search information retrieval software; the breakdown of the database according to type of material and age. Access is provided by dial‐up methods directly to end users. The standard native interface is described. Not only is the database a first in the field, but the subscription method for using the database is unusual as it is based on an annual payment which qualifies the subscriber not only to unlimited access to the database, but also to the document provison service of the Library, and the printed awareness services.

Normal calcium metabolism may be considered under six main headings, each closely related to, and dependent on one another. These divisions are: (1) The skeleton; (2) The level of calcium in the blood; (3) The intake of calcium; (4) The output of calcium; (5) The factors which regulate the absorption of calcium from gut; (6) Certain endocrine glands which have a controlling influence on the output of calcium in the urine.

CONFERENCES are like committee meetings: everyone says his piece, sits clown satisfied at his own oratory and convinced that right (by which he means what he has advocated) will prevail, and then as a general rule at least, all go home and the ripples fade and nothing is done.

An essential feature article “Introduction: The Nature of Living Systems”, published by James Grier Miller and Jessie L. Miller in Behavioral Science, Vol. 35 No. 3, 1990, pp. 157–63, was the first joint publication of the authors in 1990, the 60th year of their writing collaboration. In it they introduce living systems theory (LST) and say that it is concerned with eight levels of living systems, each of which is composed of 20 critical subsystems that carry out essential life processes. They believe that, as a result of a continuous biosocial evolution involving progressive fray‐out of components, the more recently developed levels in this hierarchy have become very complex. They provide a brief summary of LST in their article, and follow it with a detailed analysis of current knowledge about the timer, which they have recently included in their list of subsystems. Jessie L. Miller describes “The Timer” in a separate following article (pp. 164–96) in which she reviews: