This paper advances newmethods for ecosystemic approaches to evolutionary music and art. We explore the biological concept of the niche and its role in evolutionary dynamics, applying it to creative computational systems. Using the process of niche construction organisms are able to change and adapt their environment, and potentially that of other species. Constructed niches may become heritabl...

Today, software is being developed and maintained not just by engineers educated formally but also by people from widely different backgrounds including children, knowledge workers among many others. However, a number of studies indicate that most of these people are not equipped with enough software engineering skills leading to low-quality software. On the other hand, an analysis of literatur...

The populations of the developed countries are becoming older while computer use is affecting increasingly wide aspects of life. Thus it is increasingly important that interface designs make software accessible to older adults. However there is almost no research on what makes an interface usable for older adults. As a stopgap measure this paper reviews the findings on the effects of age on rel...

Transparency relates to communication and information about the conduct of firms. Transparency can relate to the past, the present, and the future and it can vary in format, content, and reliability. In this paper I review experimental evidence which relates to the impact of transparency on the competitiveness of markets. * This paper was prepared for the Encore Workshop on “Experiments for Ant...

Most complex software projects are compiled using a build tool (e.g. make), which runs commands in an order satisfying userdefined dependencies. Unfortunately, most build tools require all dependencies to be specified before the build starts. This restriction makes many dependency patterns difficult to express, especially those involving files generated at build time. We show how to eliminate t...

Even though off-the-shelf software components are considered to be the technology of the future, to date their success in the market is rather low. While many attempts have been undertaken to overcome technological obstacles such as component interoperability, the business model has been given comparably fewer thoughts. This paper discusses how inter-company reuse of software components could b...

Software development for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is challenging due to characteristics of sensor nodes and the environment they are deployed in. Testing software in a real WSN testbed allows users to get reliable test results. However, real testbeds become more expensive as the number of sensor nodes in the network grows. Simulation tools are alternatives to real testbeds. They are chea...

This article is a refinement of verbal reactions to O'Toole's and Corsino's remarks at a national conference on Access to Oral Health Care held at the headquarters of the American Dental Association in August 2005. The article consists of two parts, each part an answer to specific questions. The first is a reaction to Corsino's explanation of Patthoff's concept of Universal Patient Acceptance. ...