“
... the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that servces no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what--these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.
”
Authoritative overview of End-User Development (EUD) including 4 HD video interviews filmed in Rome, Italy. EUD is really all about democratization of computing.
GROUP provides a forum for researchers and practitioners who are interested in topics related to computer-based systems that have an impact on groups, organizations and social networks. Relevant issues include design, implementation, deployment, evaluation, methodologies, and effect of these systems.
The following articles are from "Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982":
Articles
p. 1-9
Curry, Gael, Baer, Larry, Lipkie, Daniel and Lee, Bruce (1982): Traits: An Approach to Multiple-Inheritance Subclassing. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 1-9.
“This paper describes a new technique for organizing software which has been used successfully by the Xerox Star 8010 workstation. The workstation (WS) software is written in an "object-oriented" style: it can be viewed as a system of inter-communicating objects of different object types. Most of the WS software considers object types to be constructed by assembling more primitive abstractions called traits. A trait is a characteristic of an object, and is expressed as a set of operations which may be applied to objects carrying that trait. The traits model of subclassing generalizes the SIMULA-67 model by permitting multiple inheritance paths. This paper describes the relationship of WS software to the traits model and then describes the model itself.”
Purvy, Robert, Farrell, Jerry and Klose, Paul (1982): The Design of Star's Records Processing. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. p. 10.
“Xerox' Star Professional Workstation is distinguished by a graphic user interface committed to the What-you-see-is-what-you-get design philosophy. The system promotes a see / point / push-a-button style of interaction with immediate feedback, in marked contrast to more familiar programming or command-language interfaces. Star's Records Processing feature integrates traditional data processing functionality into this user model. Normal Star documents may contain fields and tables. Star record files have their structure defined by copying the field structure of a regular document. Multiple output formats are provided for a record file by giving it a document with each desired format. Such a document may format multiple records in a tabular array, or present each record's data in a new copy of the formatting document. Data is transferred between documents and records wherever fields have matching names ("field lading"); non-matching fields may be given a fill-in rule which allows summary data to be computed. Queries are expressed in an exemplary fashion, by entering desired values and ranges of values into a copy of a record (a "filter"). Common uses of the data in a record file are encapsulated in a "view", which specifies the subset of the file's records to be considered, the order in which they are to be presented, and the document to be used to format them. An arbitrary number of views may be associated with a record file; each may have its own index, but the underlying records are stored only once. Common records processing functions are provided at a high-level user interface: Moving a document, a folder of documents, or another record file to a record file adds records to the file. Moving a record file to a printer causes the current view of the record file to be printed. Benefits include an economy of concepts and effort for user and implementor alike, along with the synergy of a unified environment. The approach seems to extend easily to a number of new domains. However increased efforts are required to produce a coordinated design and implementation throughout the whole system, and acceptable performance may be harder to achieve.”
Bullen, Christine V., Bennett, John and Carlson, Eric D. (1982): A Case Study of Office Workstation Use. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 101-107.
“This paper describes the use of the Office Analysis Methodology to study a specific office environment in order to determine requirements for an advanced office workstation. The research site environment was unique in providing an opportunity to observe a natural growth pattern in the use of advanced technology. Specific workstation requirements were identified and are being implemented. Interesting observations are reported in the following areas: categories of secretarial work, use of existing workstations, influence of a community of users, access to shared services, and impacts on productivity and organization behavior.”
Srihari, Sargur N., Hull, Jonathan J. and Choudhari, Ramesh (1982): Integrating Diverse Knowledge Sources in Text Recognition. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 108-109.
“A new algorithm for text recognition that corrects character substitution errors in words of text is presented. The search for a correct word effectively integrates three knowledge sources: channel characteristics, bottom-up context and top-down context. Channel characteristics are used in the form of probabilities that observed letters are corruptions of other letters, bottom-up context is in the form of the probability of a letter when the previous letters of the word are known, and top-down context is in the form of a lexicon. A one-pass algorithm is obtained by merging a previously known dynamic programming algorithm to compute the maximum a posteriori probability string (known as the Viterbi algorithm) together with searching a lexical trie. Analysis of the computational complexity of the algorithm and results of experimentation with a Pascal implementation are presented.”
Naffah, Najah (1982): Office Information Systems Research and Development Projects in Europe. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. p. 11.
“In Europe most research projects in the area of Office Information Systems are concentrated around public communication services and transmission networks. Very few projects exists in what we call the Automated Office of the Future. In the first category, known as TELEMATIQUE, we find the videotex services, which consist of data banks connected to public networks and offering access to residential users through their color TV sets. A second service, called TELETEX, will start soon in different European countries to replace the present telex service with some kind of communicating word processors. All these projects are sponsored by the PTT and operate according to a set of standards elaborated by the CCITT. On the other hand, true Office Information Systems projects, which are tailored to the private users and organizations needs, are very rare. Some manufacturers are working on new word processors combining data processing and text processing, with voice input for command, and voice output for signalling. Local networks have been built in different research centers and have been produced by local manufacturers and distributed on national basis (e.g., Cambridge Ring in England, Danube in France, and Cobus in Switzerland). While manufacturers as ICL, Thomson, Siemens, Olivetti are announcing products with many components imported from the U.S., the research community has been very active in exploring new approach for O.I.S. Under the sponsorship of the CEC, a group of researchers from France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, U.K., are working on the Interconnection of Heterogeneous message system, where the most difficult problems reside in the naming strategy to adopt, the conversion between message format, the high level protocols to implement. Two research centers in Switzerland and in France, have been building workstations for the office. The first one has produced a portable personnel computer with text editor (Smaky - Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne), and the second has built a sophisticated workstation with many integrated services (Buroviseur of the Kayak project - INRIA, France). In addition, a complete prototype of O.I.S. is under development in this project. Other work is undertaken by different research centers on issues related to O.I.S. (Queen Mary College - London; GMC, HMI and the University of Hamburg - Germany; INRIA, IMAG, SUPELEC, UPS - France, ...). In this presentation, we will give a summary of the work that has been accomplished and the future of some of the projects.”
Tsichritzis, Dionysis and Christodoulakis, Stavros (1982): Message Files. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 110-112.
“We describe a message filing capability which allows for the retrieval of messages according to contents. Messages are organized in large general files such that frequent reorganization is avoided. The user specifies a filter which restricts the attention to a manageable subset of messages. Messages within the subset are retrieved for a final check. We discuss file organization and access method, as well as performance and implementation considerations.”
Lee, Dik Lun (1982): A Voice Response System for an Office Information System. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 113-121.
“One of the major activities in offices is communication. Communication involves information exchange in different kinds of media such as text, voice, pictures, and most likely, a mix of these. As such, a successful office information system must provide adequate facilities for handling these kinds of communication media. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a voice response system for OFS (Office Form System), a prototype office information system.”
Barron, John (1982): Dialogue and Process Design for Interactive Information Systems using Taxis. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 12-20.
“This paper deals with dialogue and process management for interactive information systems (abbrev. IISs) within the framework of Taxis , a language for IIS design. Dialogues between a user and the system are represented through a small set of primitives incorporated into Taxis while process control is accomplished by incorporating Hoare's I/O commands for communicating sequential processes . The overall organization and structure of dialogue and process control for a particular IIS is achieved using scripts, a modified version of augmented Petri nets , and the Taxis conceptual framework which stresses generalization abstraction. A journal editing procedure is used to illustrate the proposed extension.”
Jong, S. P. de, Fikes, Richard, Hewitt, Carl, Joloboss, Vania and Miller, Lance A. (1982): Views of Office Data. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. p. 122.
p. 123-130
Ferrans, James C. (1982): SEDL -- A Language for Specifying Integrity Constraints on Office Forms. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 123-130.
“ODIN is a system developed by Western Electric to automate the construction of electronic form entry, processing, and retrieval systems. An important component of ODIN is SEDL, the language used to define the logical structure of forms and the integrity constraints that each form must pass as it is entered. SEDL is a powerful, concise end-user language. Its integrity constraints are sophisticated assertions which are combined by using standard programming language constructs. Lists on forms are considered to be relations in a miniature relational database, and data manipulation language constructs are used to specify constraints involving them. SEDL's expressive power has been more than adequate for the complex office applications that have used it.”
Ellis, Clarence and Bernal, Marc (1982): OFFICETALK-D: An Experimental Office Information System. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 131-140.
“WHAT: Herein is described an experimental Office Information System designed and built at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to allow multi-computer experiments in distribution and sharing of control within an office environment. WHY: Current office systems go a long way toward aiding the individual user to transact his/her personal office work. Future office information systems need to aid tightly coupled communities of users. Thus, this investigation into communal computing systems is motivated. HOW: Using the Alto/Dorado machines, and the Cedar database and programming environment, we have devised a system which allows the flexible manipulation of electronic forms on the display screen of users and helps to coordinate and control the flow of forms between user workstations. Novel facilities implemented in the system include distributed schedulers, dispatchers, office observer workstations, alerters, a data dictionary synthesizer, change agents, and on-line office modeling, simulation and design facilities.”
Lebensold, J., Radhakrishnan, T. and Jaworski, W. M. (1982): A Modelling Tool for Office Information Systems. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 141-152.
“Application of ABL, Alternative Based Language, to modelling office information systems is described. This language is powerful for the description of parallelisms and is amenable to stepwise refinement. After studying the different OIS modelling tools, we propose eight requirements of a good modelling tool and examine how well ABL fulfills these requirements. Some capabilities of the ABL environment and user interface are demonstrated. We present the ABL description of an order processing office.”
Mulvenna, Gerald F. (1982): Development of a CBMS Message Transfer Protocol. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 153-159.
p. 160
Kummele, Karle (1982): How Much Bandwidth is Enough?. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. p. 160.
p. 21-26
Gibbs, Simon (1982): Office Information Models and the Representation of 'Office Objects'. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 21-26.
“Office information models are used to represent the operations and information structure of Office Information Systems. This paper determines requirements for these models by examining the functionality of Office Information Systems. The paper then discusses the representation of 'office objects' and their associated operations of filing, mailing and formatting. This representation is based upon concepts from the field of semantic data modelling.”
Bailey Jr, Andrew D., Gerlach, James H., McAfee, R. Preston and Whinston, Andrew B. (1982): An OIS Model for Internal Control Evaluation. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 27-28.
“This article presents a precedence model for specifying accounting office systems. Formal analysis procedures are formulated for evaluating the internal controls of the modeled system. The procedures establish precondition and postcondition relationships between select control points.”
Whiteside, John, Archer, Norman P., Wixon, Dennis and Good, Michael (1982): How Do People Really Use Text Editors?. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 29-40.
“Keystroke statistics were collected on editing systems while people performed their normal work. Knowledge workers used an experimental editor, and secretaries used a word processor. Results show a consistent picture of free use patterns in both settings. Of the total number of keystrokes, text entry accounted for approximately 1/2, cursor movement for about 1/4, deletion for about 1/8, and all other functions for the remaining 1/8. Analysis of keystroke transitions and editing states is also presented. Implications for past research, editor design, keyboard layout, and benchmark tests are discussed.”
Wilder, H. A. and Maxemchuk, N. F. (1982): Virtual Editing: II. The User Interface. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 41-46.
“This is the second half of a two-part report on Virtual Editing. In the first paper, virtual editing was defined and its implementation described. In this paper, a user interface to the editor is described and some of the problems of introducing a new form of communication which conceptually merges various media are discussed. The aim is acceptance by the office worker, or eventual end user. Possible applications for this technology are suggested. In addition, the use of a mouse in the system as a way of entering the user commands is explained.”
Malone, Thomas W. (1982): How Do People Organized Their Desks? Implications for the Design of Office Information Systems. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 47-49.
“In this paper, I described a series of case studies of how professional and clerical office workers organize the information in their desks and offices. Then I discuss a number of implications of these results for designing natural and convenient office information systems. Two principal claims are made: (1) A very important function of desk organization is to remind the user of things to do, not just to help the user find desired information. Failing to support this function can seriously impair the usefulness of electronic office systems, and explicitly facilitating it can provide an important advantage for automated office systems over their non-automated predecessors. (2) The cognitive difficulty of categorizing information is an important factor in explaining how people organize their desks. Computer-based systems can help with this difficulty by: (a) doing as much automatic classification as possible (e.g., based on access dates), and by (b) including untitled "piles" of information arranged by physical location as well as explicitly titled and logically arranged "files."”
Harless, William (1982): Evaluation of Offices. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 50-51.
“The purpose of this panel is two-fold: 1) To classify some of the social and behavioral issues in the evaluation of office information systems (OIS); and 2) to promote interaction between a few of the leading social and computer scientists in the field of OIS.”
Attardi, Giuseppe and Simi, Maria (1982): Extending the Power of Programming by Examples. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 52-66.
“Programming by Examples is one of the methodologies that has been proposed for supporting the development of office applications by non computer specialists. Programs are built by performing direct manipulations on objects visually represented on a display, simulating the execution of the program on exemplary data items. We distinguish two major approaches: a declarative approach (SBA by DeJong and Zloof) and a procedural approach (Tinker by Lieberman and Hewitt). We examine the computational power and the expressive convenience of the two systems. The procedural approach achieves full generality by allowing the user to explicitly introduce iterative or recursive control structures. The SBA system has built in control mechanisms, which avoids explicit use of such constructs, but it is correspondingly less powerful. We present an algebraic model of SBA programs which allows us to determine the expressive power of the SBA language. We discuss a more general control mechanism than the one embedded in SBA, based on homomorphic transformations, which allows to compute all primitive recursive functions. Further flexibility is obtained by coupling the PBE methodology with the knowledge representation language Omega.”
Barber, Gerald (1982): Supporting Organizational Problem Solving with a Workstation. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 79-81.
“This paper describes an approach to supporting work in the office. Using and extending ideas from the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) we describe office work as a problem solving activity. A knowledge embedding language called Omega is used to embed knowledge of the organization into an office worker's workstation in order to support the office worker in his or her problem solving. A particular approach to reasoning about change and contradiction is discussed. This approach uses Omega's viewpoint mechanism.”
Panko, Raymond and Sprague Jr, Ralph H. (1982): Toward a New Framework for Office Support. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 82-92.
“Office automation is the outgrowth of one form of corporate information technology -- the office products category. If we are really to enhance the total office function, however, we will need a much broader concept of office information systems. This paper proposes one such concept, which we call office support.”
Tucker, Jeffrey H. (1982): Implementing Office Automation: Principles and an Electronic Mail Example. In: Limb, John O. (ed.) Proceedings of the SIGOA Conference on Office Information Systems 1982 June 21-23, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. pp. 93-100.
“This paper discusses reasons for resistance to office automation and proposes a method of implementing change drawn from the literature on organizational development and on the implementation of management information systems. The general method is applied to a pilot project of an electronic mail system. Data gathered from the 36 project participants are summarized. Although the project data indicate a need for an EMS, the project failed to produce an adequate user communication volume, and it was cancelled. The paper describes the problems which prevented the effective utilization of the system.”
We have decided to give away world-class educational materials
because we believe that universal access to high quality education is key to the building
of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue.
To calculate just have much we have saved you, our wonderful readers, we compare our free encyclopedia to two
books we love:
As you are reading our encyclopedia on your iPad/tablet (and saving a few trees), we estimate that the price would be $90 if sold as an eBook.
With that number, we can calculate how much money we have saved our readers, based on calculating the number of readers.
How we calculate readership
Because of our online and tablet/iPad approach to publishing, we are able to precisely measure reading behaviour across hundreds of parameters in realtime: Anything from reading
speed, drop-off points in the text, reader demographics, and much more.
Based on our server logs and the Google Analytics API,
we calculate the number of readers as described in the calculation method below.
A reader is not the same as a simple pageview and a reader is not the same as a
website visitor (as described in our calculation method below).
We calculate readership for two types of readers:
Readers that have read our whole encyclopedia, much the same way you read a printed book
Readers that have reader an individual chapter
Calcalution method: How we define a reader
First we use the Google Analytics API to get a report of the number of unique human visitors to a chapter/page. Google runs its business on ads and thus completely relies on the ability to distinguish between a human visitor and an automated request. If not, you could earn millions on automating clicks on Google Ads.
We then compare that number to our Apache webserver logs, which report the much higher number of actual visits to a chapter/page (both human and automated). We calculate the difference in percent, which we call an "exaggeration factor", which we use in step 6 below.
With a large part of the visitors excluded, we further exclude any visitor who:
has not remained on the page for at least 3 minutes (this factor is calculated by recording visit durations of 1000 randomly selected visitors) or has not printed the page (i.e. has not visited the printerfriendly version of the chapter/page)
has not scrolled the page (this factor is calculated by recording scroll movements on 1000 randomly selected visitors)
We then further exclude "double readers", i.e. readers who read a portion of a chapter and then returns in,
say, a week or a month to read the rest.
Although this person's reading activity spans multiple server sessions, the person is only counted as a single reader.
We categorize a "double reader" as a visitor who:
visits a page, or multiple pages, across multiple server sessions
qualifies to be defined as a reader, cf step 1-3 above, in all server sessions
uses the same originating IP address
We then subtract 5% from the final number to counter-balance a last remaining factor, namely the situation where one reader reads a chapter on his/her tablet
using a WiFi connection (and counted as one reader) but then picks up his other tablet using a 3G dongle
(with another IP address) and re-reads some of the chapter. That will equal two readers, not one. We have no way
of calculating how many times this situation arises, but to be on the safe side we subtract 5%
from the final number.
We then take half of the "exaggeration factor" from step 2 and substract from the final number. We do this for no rational reason. We do it only as a further measure to be certain that our number of readers is not inflated.
To qualify as a reader who has read our whole encyclopedia - much the same way you read a printed book - that person must have qualified as a reader (cf. 1-6 above) of at least 80% of the encyclopedia chapters.
As a result, we have eliminated everything from automated requests to the more casual visitors. That leaves us with what we can safely call readers.
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“
... the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that servces no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what--these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.
”
Authoritative overview of End-User Development (EUD) including 4 HD video interviews filmed in Rome, Italy. EUD is really all about democratization of computing.
