Ghanaian “Monument Wars”

Monument to the discoveries.

A week ago I was standing with my wife by the River Tagus in Lisbon, next to the Monument to the Discoveries. The monument is at the spot where Vasco da Gama set out to discover the southeast passage from Europe to Asia, past the Cape of Good Hope. Vasco’s discovery marked the beginning of the Portuguese maritime empire. At the furthest tip of Europe, Portugal was perfectly situated to found su...

Impoliteness: The Ghanaian Standpoint

This paper highlights the folk perception of impoliteness among Ghanaians in view of Watts’ (2003) notion of first order impoliteness. The study showed that impoliteness is not just an opposite of politeness, but the manifestation of non-cooperation, disapproval, and mutual antipathy through certain communicative behaviours that signal disrespect. These communicative behaviours include ‘interru...

Clone Wars

Code clones, the result of the ”copy&paste” programming technique, have negative impact on software quality and on the efficiency of the software maintenance process. Although copying may be the fastest way of creating a new feature, after a while it is really hard to detect and maintain the multiple instances of the same code snippets. Based on static source code analysis, clone detectors try ...

Cell wars.

Turf Wars

Turf wars in organizations commonly occur in environments where competition undermines collaboration. We develop a game theoretic model and experimental test of turf wars. The model explores how team production incentives ex post affect team formation decisions ex ante. In the game, one agent decides whether to share jurisdiction over a project with other agents. Agents with jurisdiction decide...