Selling packaged software: an ethical analysis

Within the IS literature there is little discussion on selling software products in general and especially from the ethical point of view. Similarly, within computer ethics, although there is much interest in professionalism and professional codes, in terms of accountability and responsibility, the spotlight tends to play on safety-critical or life-critical systems, rather than on software oriented towards the more mundane aspects of work organisation and society. With this research gap in mind, we offer a preliminary ethical investigation of packaged software selling. Through an analysis of the features of competition in the market, the global nature of the packaged software market and the nature of product development we conclude that professionalism, as usually conceived in computer ethics, does not apply particularly well to software vendors. Thus, we call for a broader definition of professionalism to include software vendors, not just software developers. Moreover, we acknowledge that with intermediaries, such as implementation consultants, involved in software selling, and the packaged software industry more generally, there are even more “hands” involved. Therefore, we contend that this is an area worthy of further study, which is likely to yield more on the question of accountability

Reasons behind ERP package adoption: a diffusion of innovations perspective

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages have been widely adopted and it is becoming clear that this is driven by multiple rationales that may be simultaneously at odds and complimentary. In this paper, we aim to develop a greater understanding of these rationales by taking ERP packages to be innovations and analysing their adoption with reference to the theory of diffusion of innovations. In particular, we consider the attributes of ERP packages that may affect their adoption such as relative advantage, compatibility, complexiblity, trialability and observability. We argue that users’ perceptions of these attributes are not always accurate and these ’misconceptions’ can further explain reasons for ERP adoption or rejection. Although our analysis aims to provide rich insights into the adoption of ERP packages, the results of the study are arguably of further interest to the more general study of packaged software and the more established literature on custom development

Bodily impositions : a phenomenological re-casting of space and architecture

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building.Bodily (Im)postitions explores the intersections between the body, space, architecture and the phenomenological ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Despite the seemingly pivotal role space plays in the understanding of architecture there is a paucity of material covering this issue. This thesis proposes that, by applying Merleau-Ponty’s particular explanation of the body to architecture, a gap in the understanding of space and architecture will be filled. Phenomenology is a philosophy that avoids systemization. Therefore, the nature of this thesis is one that, while organized into specific chapters and sections, does not preclude the material from one section bleeding into another. Indeed, the reader will find many topics are outlined initially in earlier chapters and then recapitulated in later chapters where they can be properly re-examined and infused with new information. The concept of the body is imposed onto a discourse of architecture and space that has shown an unwillingness to accept the intrinsic part the body plays in their configuration. In this way both space and architecture are recast, using the phenomenological body of Merleau-Ponty as the mould. This is, however, not a one-way or one-off rigid re-casting. It is also suggested here that the understanding of the body is re-cast by phenomenology. Hence, space and architecture are also re-cast in another way. They are ‘cast again’ as active players that in turn effect and affect the body. In this way it is demonstrated that, while the body reconfigures space and architecture, at the same time architecture and space reconfigure the body. The term casting implies another meaning, that of fishing or angling. This implication is also applicable to this thesis in terms of its casting out of a line of ideas. In this regard the body, space, architecture and phenomenology have been brought together simply to discover what implications might arise from their conjunction. It is through the body that we are orientated in space and know it to be the world. It is also thorough the body and its associations with ‘the flesh’ of Merleau-Ponty that we can communicate with others. Indeed it is argued that it is only through the movement of the body, that space can exist. Further, it is demonstrated that, far from being a supplementary part to architecture, the body is the very reason architecture exists and has meaning. It is suggested here that only by living space with our body can we understand architecture

Citizen innovation: DIY design and the Thames water turbine

“When electricity prices prevent older people from heating their homes, and the River Thames is just down the road, why are we not using it to power our city?” was a question posed by a member of the Geezers Club at an AgeUK centre in East London. The Geezers are a group of older men aged from 55 to late 80’s, who meet weekly in Tower Hamlets. For the last five years they have been working with artist Loraine Leeson, engineer Toby Borland and others to realise their dream of using the River Thames to provide energy for London’s riverside communities. The project was initiated by an art commission responding to the Democratising Technology research project being carried out by Ann Light and others at Queen Mary University of London that questioned why the extensive life experience of older people was failing to inform new developments in technology. Members of the Geezers group were able to recollect developments in tidal and wave power from years earlier, many of which were brought to a premature end in the 1980’s. Though research into energy from wind turbines did re-commence, the power of the Thames remains relatively untapped to this day. During the life of the project Active Energy has involved a practical proposal for installing tidal turbines at the Thames Barrier, renewable energy workshops at a local school, a wind-driven public light-work for the roof of an Age UK centre, prototyping workshops at University of East London and art exhibitions in both the UK and USA that have brought these issues to public attention. The most recent phase of the project has been to create an ultra low-cost turbine to produce energy from the river and prompt a debate on the use of the River Thames as a source of energy for the city. The process of creative facilitation that has driven this work and fostered citizen-led innovation by older people has gained international attention, whilst the small scale turbine that has been designed specifically for slow moving tidal rivers is thought to be the first of its kind and capable of low-cost replication for developing nations overseas

Error estimates for interpolation of rough data using the scattered shifts of a radial basis function

The error between appropriately smooth functions and their radial basis function interpolants, as the interpolation points fill out a bounded domain in R^d, is a well studied artifact. In all of these cases, the analysis takes place in a natural function space dictated by the choice of radial basis function -- the native space. The native space contains functions possessing a certain amount of smoothness. This paper establishes error estimates when the function being interpolated is conspicuously rough.Comment: 12 page

Some optimality conditions for Chebyshev expansions

AbstractIn this paper we investigate conditions under which approximation to continuous functions on [−1, 1] by series of Chebyshev polynomials is superior to approximation by other ultraspherical orthogonal expansions. In particular we derive conditions on the Chebyshev coefficients which guarantee that the Chebyshev expansion of the corresponding functions converges more rapidly than expansions in Legendre polynomials or Chebyshev polynomials of the second kind