Robert Barbour

Retired

This paper summarises a literature review undertaken for a project to develop information visualisation of participatory land use management (PLUM) in New Zealand. No examples were found where information visualisation and/or a participatory approach had been used in the creation of a Land Management System (LMS) for New Zealand. However, some of t...

Purpose The paper aims to describe and apply a commercially oriented method of forecast performance measurement (cost of forecast error – CFE) and to compare the results with commonly adopted statistical measures of forecast accuracy in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a quantitative m...

The continued pressure to automate business processes has lead to the adoption of increasingly sophisticated computer-based tools. Fully integrated business enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have been widely used in very large companies. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs)are also seeking the advantages of integrated business systems. Vend...

An implementation of a two bit Gray-coded temporal logic based cellular automaton created several emergent properties. A program implementing the two-dimensional four color cellular automaton using Ant Farm is demonstrated. New and previously described emergent integer sequences are also identified. Possible applications in spatial modeling, knowle...

Information Communication Technology (ICT) researchers adapt and use tools from reference and cognate disciplines. This application of existing tools outside the context of their development has implications beyond the immediate problem context. ICT researchers have access to a wide variety of data sources including newer ones, such as the Internet...

Professional doctorate candidates engage in discipline specific investigations linking practical questions with current developments and creating new knowledge in computing and information technology as an outcome. Course content and a constructivist pedagogy is described and exemplified for a professional doctorate in computing and information tec...

Projecting computing education trends forward into the near future in order to better understand the implications of present changes is a postmodern education research agenda. Such speculations are informed by present day events. Setting observed changes in computing education policy and practice against a constructivist theoretical framework based...

Automated melanoma diagnosis is a popular focus of research, with numerous papers describing techniques and results. In our study, we identified two possible problems with the current method of automated diagnosis, where systems are intended to reproduce histopathology results. We propose a new method of identifying problematic skin lesions, namely...

BACKGROUND: It has been over a decade since the first mention was made of the computer as a tool for assisting clinicians in diagnosing skin lesions. This review tabulates and summarises the major research papers, and comments on the state of the field after a decade of research. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that epiluminescent microscopy has become th...

Presently, there is little localisation of software to smaller cultures if it is not economically viable. We believe software should also be localised to the languages of small cultures in order to sustain and preserve these small cultures. As an example, we localised a spreadsheet from English to Iban. The process in which we carried out the local...

The problem of providing software across national and cultural boundaries is considered. Internationalisation, localisation and globalisation are three descriptors for recent information technology developments in this field. Current practice and advice for successfully providing software in places other than countries and cultures of origin is rep...

A survey is made of facets of the process of providing software across national and cultural boundaries. Internationalisation (i18n), localisation (1 10n) and globalisation (g11n) are identified as three descriptors for recent Information Technology developments in this field. Current practice and advice for successfully providing software in place...

Participants in western tertiary education are becoming increasingly diverse in origins and backgrounds and this has led to the claim that there is less shared understanding about what constitutes a university education than was the case as little as ten years ago. Th is increasing diversity is found in the staff and students in New Zealand univers...

Summary Information technology infrastructure is a critical element in modern day communication. Businesses, organizations, individuals, governments and other social services all rely on global IT infrastructure for reliable and timely communication. At the heart of this infrastructure are numerous hardware and software components, and the performa...

The spreadsheet is a commonly used, yet under-researched, application tool. Hendry and Green (1994) report fewer than ten entries about spreadsheets in the HCI community literature between 1984 and 1991. The 1993 Human Computer Interaction Proceedings of a Conference on Applications and Case Studies does not list the word 'spreadsheet' in the index...

As people trade and engage in commerce, an economically dominant culture tends to migrate language into other recently contacted cultures. Information technology (IT) can accelerate enculturation and promote the expansion of western hegemony in IT. Equally, IT can present a culturally appropriate interface to the user that promotes the preservation...

Many software companies today are developing software not only for local consumption but for the rest of the world. We introduce the concepts of internationalisation and localisation and discuss some techniques using these processes. An examination of postmodern critique with respect to the software industry is also reported. In addition, we also f...

Many of the popular software we use today are in English. Very few software applications are available in minority languages. Besides economic goals, we justify why software should be made available to smaller cultures. Furthermore, there is evidence that people learn and progress faster in software in their mother tongue (Griffiths et at, 1994) (K...

An exploratory study of software assessment techniques is conducted in Malaysia. Subjects in the study comprised staff members of a Malaysian university with a high Information Technology (IT) presence. The subjects assessed a spreadsheet tool with a Bahasa Melayu (Malaysia’s national language) interface. Software evaluation techniques used include...

This paper proposes a mechanism for the definition and implementation of programming languages. Culturally-dependent aspects of the definition, such as the language and character set, can be separated from the process of translating programs and from the execution of a translated program.

This paper makes suggestions for the induction and professional development of staff at the University of Waikato. The context of the University as a community of scholars and administrators is outlined. A number of possible induction strategies are put forward for consideration in text and diagrammatic form.

This paper examines the relationships between human and computing entities. It develops the biological ethical imperative towards survival into a study of the forms inherent in human beings and implied in computer systems. The theory of paradoxes is used to show that a computer system cannot in general make a self-referential decision. Based upon t...