In this position paper we overview ongoing research work aimed at nd-ing and formalizing laws of object-oriented programming. Rather than formal development, our main interest is to guide, justify and document informal object-oriented programming practices. In particular, we focus on laws that support software evolution practices such as introducing common analysis and design patterns. Moreover...

Institutions offer a mechanism to regulate the behaviour of agents without the need for these agents to internalise the norms of the system. Current formalisms can be divided in two groups depending on whether norms are expressed on the state of the normative structure or the events that bring about normative change. This paper argues that for complex systems both types are needed. To this exte...

Formal methods are used in a surprisingly wide variety of applications and ways throughout the world. While they may still be considered a niche market, there is growing evidence that they can be used successfully in industry if applied judiciously. This paper discusses some of the issues concerning the successful application of formal methods and surveys a number of examples of industrial usag...

Since the introduction of a commitments procedure in EU antitrust policy (Article 9 of Council Regulation 1/2003), the European Commission has extensively settled cases of alleged anticompetitive practices. In this paper, we use a formal model of law enforcement (Bebchuk, 1984; Shavell, 1988) to identify the optimal procedure to resolve cases in a context of uncertainty related to the law (L-un...

Several current debates in the epistemology of testimony are implicitly motivated by concerns about the reliability of rules for changing one’s beliefs in light of others’ claims. Call such rules testimonial norms (tns). To date, epistemologists have neither (i) characterized those features of communities that influence the reliability of tns, nor (ii) evaluated the reliability of tns as those ...

We explore in this article an institutional foundation of agricultural protectionism in Japan, a country long recognized as resisting international pressures to open up its rice market. Using our qualitative analysis of postwar politics of agricultural protectionism and a simple formal model, we argue that farmers in Japan have stronger incentives to mobilize electoral support for the governing...

This paper addresses the problem of determining tempo and timing data from a list of beat annotations. Whilst an approximation to the tempo can be calculated from the inter-beat interval, the annotations also include timing variations due to expressively timed events, phase shifts and errors in the annotation times. These deviations tend to propagate into the tempo graph and so tempo analysis m...

@INPROCEEDINGS{SBKl_FDT94, AUTHOR = {Böhmer, S. and Klafka, R.}, TITLE = {A new approach to performance evaluation of formally specified protocols}, JOURNAL = {Formal description Techniques VII}, YEAR = {1994}, VOLUME = {0}, PAGES = {452-454}, PUBLISHER = {Chapman and Hall}, ADDRESS = {Londo}, AFFILIATION = {Department of Communication Networks (ComNets), Faculty 6, RWTH Aachen University}, URL...