Can We Become Better People After Things Go Wrong?

Getting it right when things go wrong.

But What if Things go Wrong?

Building large-scale distributed systems these days is facilitated by a number of distribution frameworks. However, in practice, we see that failure handling is often treated poorly in these frameworks. An exception is transactions, which are a well-known approach for handling failure, and we see that, indeed, these distribution frameworks provide for transaction management. Transactions themse...

When Things Go Wrong: Interrupting Conversations

This paper presents a true-concurrent approach to formalising integration of Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with Web services. Our approach formalises common notions in service-oriented computing such as conversations (interactions between clients and web services), multi-party conversations (interactions between multiple web services) and coordination protocols, which are central in a tran...

Offshoring: What Can Go Wrong?

tens of thousands of miles from the home base—a client in the US offshoring IT work to a vendor in India or China, for example. Can it be done well? Offshoring has recently sustained much criticism, mainly over the issue of whether shipping IT work abroad is good for the US as a whole. I have written in that context as well, but my focus here is at the company level. Does it benefit a US firm t...

Gene targeting: Things go better with Cre

New technologies are changing the way in which gene targeting experiments are being designed. It is now becoming possible to analyze gene function in defined tissues at specific times during the life of a mouse.