Informal awareness and casual interaction tools are intended to help overcome some of the disadvantages that face distance separated knowledge workers by providing some of the subtle awareness cues and opportunities for casual interaction that are present in co-located settings. The design for such tools is usually bottom up, based on required feature lists. This paper takes a topdown approach....

Informal box plot identification of outliers in realworld medical data was studied. Box plots were used to detect univariate outliers directly whereas the box plotted Mahalanobis distances identified multivariate outliers. Vertigo and female urinary incontinence data were used in the tests. The removal of outliers increased the descriptive classification accuracy of discriminant analysis functi...

Formal methods have been successfully used to establish assurances for safety-critical systems with mathematical rigour. Based on our experience in developing a methodology and corresponding tools for a change management for formal methods, we have generalised this approach to a comprehensive methodology to maintain heterogeneous document collections consisting of both formal and informal docum...

Software design is a knowledge-intensive activity. Knowledge is both generated and used when making crucial design decisions, and it is important to capture and share the knowledge in order to take advantage of the valuable insights gained. A particularly challenging setting for knowledge reuse is during informal software design sessions when developers are gathered at the whiteboard working to...

Patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) visit various healthcare providers during the course of their disease. It was suggested that information and communication technology (ICT) might help to orchestrate their care provision. We have applied the USE IT-tool to get insight in the relevant problems, solutions, and constraints of the MS care both in the organizational and the information technolog...

This paper describes RARE (Reuse-Assisted Requirements Elicitation), a method enabling software requirements engineers to process informal software requirements effectively. RARE’s object is to assist analysts in transforming requirements expressed in natural language into a comprehensive collection of rigorous specifications that can be used as a starting point in software development. However...

Language is a powerful cognitive tool. For example, labeling objects or features of problems can support categorization and relational thinking. Less is known about their role in making inferences about the structure of mathematics problems. We test the impact of labeling decimals such as 0.25 using formal place value labels (“two tenths and five hundredths”) compared to informal labels (“point...

Background: Out-of-pocket and informal payments are considered as 2 most important topics for equity in health care financing. Therfore, this study was conducted to systematically review and meta-analyze the status of these payments in Iran's health care system.    Methods: Required data were collected through searching the following key terms: "Unofficial", "Informal ...

Software developers face numerous challenges in capturing and reusing knowledge during informal design sessions. While the knowledge that is brought to bear and generated during these sessions provides valuable insights that can ideally be reused, informal software design is a time when developers are gathered at the whiteboard working to solve problem and during which the developer must remain...

An increasing number of CASE tools based on object-oriented methods (OOMs) are appearing in the marketplace. Despite their good qualities, OOMs produce models that are not amenable to rigorous semantic analysis. This problem can be attributed to the lack of rm semantic basis for the modeling notations and concepts such as those found in formal methods. Formal and graphical informal analysis tec...