In this paper I argue that student software developers should be concerned not just with tersely expressed requirements (‘user stories’), but with more involved ‘use cases’. By encouraging developers to consider system behavior in some detail, the use-case approach lays the foundations for a coherent analysis of the object-based components that realize those behaviors. Though not objects in the...

'To determine orientation we occasionally used a PDP-12 computer to produce a graph of average response vs orientation, generating the slit electronically on a television screen. This method took much longer, and the usual minute-to-minute variations in responsiveness of the cell tended to make the curves broader and noisier. We concluded that for both speed and for precision it is hard to beat...

1. “LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured f...

Acknowledgement I am most grateful to my Lord and God Jesus Christ who is truly worthy of all praise. I especially praise and thank Him for all His help concerning this work. I am also very grateful to Jun. Prof. Dr. Stefan Ruzika for his help and guidance and especially for his patience. I also thank Heike Sperber for sharing her knowledge of series-parallel graphs with me.

A laboratory experiment examines the claims that (1) humans are susceptible to flattery from computers and (2) the effects of flattery from computers are the same as the effects of flattery from humans. In a cooperative task with a computer, subjects (N"41) received one of three types of feedback from a computer: ‘‘sincere praise’’, ‘‘flattery’’ (insincere praise) or ‘‘generic feedback’’. Compa...